Film Freak Central’s Top 10 of 2004

January 1, 2005Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Authors: Walter Chaw, Best-of Lists, Blog

Top102004There's a wonderful, haunted Dan Simmons short story called "The River Styx Runs Upstream" in which technology has made the resurrection of beloved family members possible, though the resurrected are barely recognizable as human. It's an iteration of the W.W. Jacobs story "The Monkey's Paw", of course, a fictionalized platitude of watching what you wish for, and the tale's melancholic tone–its themes of surfacing and being unable to let go of the past–colour the best films of 2004.

A Love Song for Bobby Long (2004)

December 31, 2004Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Scarlett Johansson, Theatrical

*/****
starring John Travolta, Scarlett Johansson, Gabriel Macht, Deborah Kara Unger
screenplay by Shainee Gabel, based on the novel Off Magazine Street by Ronald Everett Capps
directed by Shainee Gabel

by Walter Chaw Scarlett Johansson’s character in Shainee Gabel’s Faulknerian idiot man-child of a Southern Gothic A Love Song for Bobby Long is named “Pursey,” which strikes me as the least lascivious but still accurate way to describe the suddenly-gorgeous starlet. Though she’s adequately attired in her country-fried accent and long, hot summer finery, truth be told, she’s already too good for this kind of material–a compliment that sheds light on her co-stars (John Travolta, Gabriel Macht), who are, to a one, not up to the film’s desperate pretensions. In A Love Song for Bobby Long, see, every other line of dialogue is either a George Sand quote or a drawling, laconic narrative voiceover. (If it weren’t overlit and lousy with drowsy exteriors, I would have mistaken it for another Clint Eastwood film.) And if you don’t have a strong sense of self-awareness, you have no place in the sort of turgid julep this post-Tennessee Williams potboiler serves up as refreshment.

First Daughter (2004) – DVD

December 30, 2004Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Romance

**/**** Image A Sound A Extras C
starring Katie Holmes, Marc Blucas, Amerie, Michael Keaton
screenplay by Jessica Bendinger and Kate Kondell
directed by Forest Whitaker

by Walter Chaw Forest Whitaker's First Daughter is so much better than the other two films this year dealing with the distaff fruit of the loins of the most powerful man in the free world (i.e., David Mamet's Spartan and Andy Cadiff's Chasing Liberty) that it's easy to make the mistake that the film is worth much of a damn. The sad fact of it is, there's nothing much at the centre of this babysitter's-club artifact. Saving it from the dustbin of total inconsequence, if only just, is its essential sense of decency and, of course, star Katie Holmes. She's not so much gifted, I think, as genuine-seeming–despite one's better judgment, you find yourself wishing her well. Holmes is able to batter defenses; the stratosphere isn't for her, but Anne Baxter had a pretty nice career, all things considered.

Beyond the Sea (2004)

December 29, 2004Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Drama, Germany, Music, Musical, Theatrical, UK

*/****
starring Kevin Spacey, Kate Bosworth, John Goodman, Bob Hoskins
screenplay by Lewis Colick and Kevin Spacey
directed by Kevin Spacey

Beyondtheseaby Walter Chaw In Beyond the Sea, Kevin Spacey as Bobby Darin talks to the ghost of his kid self, a pint-sized Virgil leading Spacey's decrepit Dante into the hell of vanity projects. It's a flick that apes All that Jazz the way De-Lovely aped All that Jazz (that is: sickly, with a bad limp), with an aged Darin looking back on his life as though it were all a giant movie set. "Ain't he too old to play Bobby Darin?" a reporter in the film asks while Bobby Darin directs his own fictional auto-biopic. "He was born to play Bobby Darin!" responds an angry Bob Hoskins as Bobby Darin's father, who, one part Brooklyn hood and one part Russian bear, acts as the artist surrogate trying to pre-empt the chief criticism most will have of this creepy exercise in flaccid masturbation. Truth is, Beyond the Sea is the Kevin Spacey story without as much closeted homosexuality and just the same amount of delusions of grandeur and aspirations towards artistic martyrdom. It lacks passion and joy, replacing them both with something that smells a lot like mid-life crisis.

Species III (2004) [Unrated Edition] + Resident Evil: Apocalypse (2004) [Special Edition] – DVDs

December 27, 2004Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, DVD, France, Germany, Horror, Japan, Sci-Fi, Thriller, UK, Zombie

SPECIES III
*/**** Image B Sound B Extras C
starring Robin Dunne, Robert Knepper, Amelia Cooke, J.P. Pitoc
screenplay by Ben Ripley
directed by Brad Turner

RESIDENT EVIL: APOCALYPSE
½*/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Milla Jovovich, Sienna Guillory, Oded Fehr, Thomas Kretschmann
screenplay by Paul W.S. Anderson
directed by Alexander Witt

by Walter Chaw There used to be only two avenues for women in the modern, post-Black Christmas horror genre: they could be the bimbo at the end of the machete, or the virgin wielding one at the end of the movie. After rape/revenge stuff like I Spit on Your Grave and Ms. 45 (and, ultimately, Aliens), though, it became possible for women to be men from the first frame of their ordeals instead of incurring steady masculinization throughout the course of some torturous, highly structured pursuit. What made Roger Donaldson's Species (1995) so interesting is that it transformed the woman's biological urge into the sui generis of the premise: The bad guy in Species was a bad girl named Sil, and Sil wanted to mate really bad (and really badly). But just like her brothers in slasherdom (Jason Vorhees, Michael Myers, Freddy Krueger), that will-to-fuck is largely unrealized–enough so that most academic reads of this horror subgenre involve the acting out of priapic males unable to reach climax through a variety of phallic substitutes. This is acknowledged in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 as Leatherface's titular dick runs out of gas between a girl's legs–and the would-be victim knowing the score strokes it anyway, soothing his bruised male ego.

Red Lights (2004)

December 24, 2004Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Crime, Drama, France, Mystery, Theatrical, Thriller

Feux rouges
**/****
starring Jean-Pierre Darroussin, Carole Bouquet, Vincent Deniard, Carline Paul
screenplay by Cédric Khan and Laurence Ferreira-Barbosa, based on the novel by Georges Simenon
directed by Cédric Khan

Redlightsby Bill Chambers SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Red Lights (Feux rouges), the latest from the increasingly venerable Cédric Khan, joins this year's growing crop of ephemeral auteur flicks. Takeshi Kitano's Zatoichi, Michael Mann's Collateral, Alexander Payne's Sideways–there's a prosaic quality that undermines the resonance of these pictures, even though each is uniquely a product of its director. Red Lights, about a marriage spiralling down the drain, about a guy chasing his tail, about the symmetry that always seems to assert itself in chaotic situations, opens with a montage of roundabouts and other circle-based imagery. Hell, it's called Red Lights, and there probably isn't another film from 2004 that so compels you to yell, "Stop!" at its unheeding protagonist. Khan is the masticating mama bird to our tractable hatchlings, and the only reason that Red Lights hasn't caught on like the similarly pre-chewed Million Dollar Baby is because it's not awash in sentiment. At least not until the problematic finale.

The Sea Inside (2004) + Hotel Rwanda (2004)

December 24, 2004Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Drama, Spain, Theatrical, War

Mar adentro
*½/****
starring Javier Bardem, Belén Rueda, Lola Dueñas, Mabel Rivera
screenplay by Alejandro Amenábar, Mateo Gil
directed by Alejandro Amenábar

HOTEL RWANDA
**½/****
starring Don Cheadle, Sophie Okonedo, Nick Nolte, Joaquin Phoenix
screenplay by Keir Pearson & Terry George
directed by Terry George

Seainsiderwandaby Walter Chaw Marking the second euthanasia melodrama of the 2004 awards season after Clint Eastwood's Million Dollar Baby, Alejandro Amenábar's peculiar follow-up to The Others is another ghost story of sorts documenting the last, sad days of Ramón Sampedro (Javier Bardem), made a quadriplegic by a distracted dive into a shallow tide pool. "Shallow pool" could also describe the film, a miserable little gimp-of-the-week exercise awash with clichés and platitudes that the real Sampedro would probably have found condescending and insulting. The Sea Inside (Mar adentro) is the very equivalent of an elementary school teacher taking your hand and helping you find a seat on the short ride to made-for-TV-dom. If not for its unromantic central performance from Bardem, the best actor in the world at this moment, this appallingly sentimental work would be a candidate for the most misguided movie of the year.

The Office Special (2003) – DVD

December 23, 2004Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Pseudo-Documentary, Television, UK

Image A- Sound A Extras B+

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover I suppose the hot streak had to end sometime: "The Office" was so meticulously detailed, so vividly characterized, and so totally uncompromising in making you feel the agony of workaday life, that it can perhaps be forgiven for wanting to give back to the characters it had so spectacularly abused and humiliated. Thus we have "The Office Special", which is smart enough to know that the ride on the gravy train is over but can't bear to leave our heroes in limbo and thus forces a closure that violates everything the series stood for. It's still "The Office" and it's still worth watching, but its movement towards climactic release is incongruous after the two years of droning sameness that went on–hilariously–with no end in sight.

Meet the Fockers (2004)

December 22, 2004Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Robert De Niro, Romance, Theatrical
½*/****
starring Robert De Niro, Ben Stiller, Dustin Hoffman, Barbra Streisand
screenplay by Jim Herzfeld and John Hamburg
directed by Jay Roach
 
Meetthefockersby Walter Chaw There's a scene towards the end of Jay Roach's pathologically unfunny Meet the Fockers where Dustin Hoffman and Robert De Niro sit across from each other in a front-yard bower and prepare to exchange dialogue. Thirty years ago, such a tableau would have been cause for held breath and tingles up and down; today, it's just two miserable old has-beens cashing a paycheck borrowed against their dimming reputations and acting like clowns for the bemusement of the very same audience of folks who used to demand something from their entertainment. Something like energy, for instance, or invention, or–perish the notion–insight into the world of thought. Meet the Fockers throws itself onto the growing pyre of disposable gag reels built entirely on humiliation and scatology. Urine, feces, vasectomies, foreskins, senior citizens dry-humping to the nasal exhortations of a muumuu-clad Barbra Streisand while somewhere else a cat is flushing a little dog down a toilet. A toddler (Spencer and Bradley Pickren) signals for milk every time he sees a woman with large breasts, says "asshole" a lot, and, as if that's insufficient, makes lewd sucking faces, sticks out his tongue, and appears to mime cunnilingus. He's almost as adorable as Ben Stiller, sliding comfortably now into the role of eternal jackass and requisite redheaded stepchild.

The Princess Diaries 2: Royal Engagement (2004) [Widescreen] – DVD

December 21, 2004Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, Disney, DVD, Family, Romance

*/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras C-
starring Anne Hathaway, Heather Matarazzo, John Rhys-Davies, Julie Andrews
screenplay by Shonda Rhimes
directed by Garry Marshall

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover I had rather hoped that my previous DVD tussle with Garry Marshall, on the subject of his The Princess Diaries, would be my last. But here it is five months later, and I'm stuck with the unenviable task of a) watching and b) working up the enthusiasm to write about The Princess Diaries 2: Royal Engagement, which is, if anything, worse than the not-so-original original. Again we have a hypocritical be-yourself message for people whose self is largely determined by what they see on the Disney channel, a horrible white-on-tan colour scheme, graceless design, and shallow characterizations–in other words, everything that made the first film such a chore to sit through. But where The Princess Diaries felt complete in its cornball wish-fulfillment, The Princess Diaries 2 is clearly an afterthought made to wring more cash out of impressionable tweens. You and I are smarter than that; one of us should flee in terror.

Open Water (2004) [Widescreen] – DVD

December 20, 2004Posted in2000s, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Horror, Thriller

**/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B
starring Blanchard Ryan, Daniel Travis, Saul Stein, Estelle Lau
written and directed by Chris Kentis

Openwaterdvdcapby Walter Chaw The idea is that we've grown arrogant in our luxury, that we're a generation fattened on cell phones, the Internet, and the double-edged sword of 24-hour convenience. 1999's
has become sort of a favoured whipping boy of this spoiled culture (nothing breeds contempt like success), but what's missing in the backlash is the idea that the picture, besides being a seminal indie cross-marketing exercise, predicted the new wave of aggressively nihilistic horror films in our post-millennial/post-9/11 canvas. More literally, The Blair Witch Project dealt with our status off the proverbial reservation, counting the layers of technology with which we insulate ourselves from the capricious vagaries of reality and nature like rings on a felled tree. "There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your science," indeed–things like witches.

A Taste of Freeman: FFC Interviews Morgan Freeman

December 19, 2004Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, DIFF/SDFF, Film Festivals, Interviews

MfreemaninterviewtitleDecember 19, 2004|A man who needs little introduction in American cinema, Morgan Freeman is taller in person than you'd expect (slimmer, too) and gracious to the point of delaying his lunch so that we could finish our conversation. In town to receive a lifetime achievement award at the 27th Starz Denver International Film Festival, Mr. Freeman granted interviews with no specific movie to hump, his long-awaited reunion with director Clint Eastwood, Million Dollar Baby, still flying low on the radar at that point. He was there sans agenda, in other words, a rare place to find an interview subject and an invitation–a daunting one–to go over some ground that has already been trampled flat. The challenge of chatting with someone as well-known as Mr. Freeman is always going to be finding something new to discuss: even if you come up with a fresh question, after all, like anyone polished in the apple of the public eye, the super-famous and the oft-dissected have developed a skill for reverting to stock answers and widely-published responses. (As the saying goes, they answer the question they wish they were asked.) It's not affectedness, exactly–it's training. And after a while, that training becomes as helpless a reflex as blinking.

Spanglish (2004)

December 17, 2004Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Romance, Theatrical

*/****
starring Adam Sandler, Téa Leoni, Paz Vega, Cloris Leachman
written and directed by James L. Brooks

Spanglishby Walter Chaw Take a real close look at the two fertile women in James L. Brooks’s Spanglish: one, Deborah (Téa Leoni), is a fright-masked, screeching harridan who resurrects all by herself the offense once implied by the term “hysterical,” and the other, a fiery Latina clothed in soft browns named Flor (Paz Vega), is nurturing, reasonable, and maternal to the point of smothering her daughter. Which is the worse stereotype would be an interesting conversation to have; how the both of them torment John (Adam Sandler), the decent white guy hero (Deborah with outbursts, Flor with forbidden fruit), is a conversation not worth having. You expect a lot of things from a Brooks film: lethal levels of schmaltz, diarrheic streams of introspective dialogue, precocious tots–but you generally don’t anticipate a lot of underdeveloped characters, a disquieting undercurrent of paternalistic racism, and one central personality apparently constructed for the sole purpose of being the lightning rod for the audience’s every aggression. (Deborah is the most hellish–and consequently the most memorable–affront to rich white women I’ve seen since Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?.) The only two interesting characters in the piece are Deborah’s alcoholic mother Evelyn (Cloris Leachman) and chubby daughter Bernice (Sarah Steele)–not coincidentally, the two characters least like convenient pastiches. Frankly, the film should have been about them.

Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events (2004)

December 17, 2004Posted in2000s, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Family, Fantasy, Germany, Theatrical

A Series of Unfortunate Events
**½/****
starring Jim Carrey, Jude Law, Liam Aiken, Emily Browning
screenplay by Robert Gordon, based on the books The Bad Beginning, The Reptile Room, and The Wide Window by "Lemony Snicket"
directed by Brad Silberling

Lemonysnicketby Walter Chaw The best children's entertainments accentuate a child's strengths, encouraging the pursuit of aptitude and bliss instead of impossible pipe dreams. It's the lesson of The Incredibles, one of the bravest, most subversive films the year–and it seems to be the lesson of Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events as well until the picture caves in to kid-flick conventions and worse. But while it's humming along with the freshly-orphaned Baudelaires–Violet (Emily Browning), Klaus (Liam Aiken), and little Sunny (Kara and Shelby Hoffman)–doing what they do best (Violet the engineer, Klaus the reader, Sunny the biter), Lemony Snicket, with its gothic sets and grotesque gallery of rogues, offers up a brilliant antidote to the saccharine blather of traditional holiday fare. Fleetingly effective or no, it's a shot of insulin in a season that generally offers up bloated prestige items for the grown-ups and freakishly genial, accidentally perverse fare for the kiddies.

Grande école (2004) – DVD

December 16, 2004Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Drama, DVD, France, Romance

**/**** Image B+ Sound B Extras A-
starring Gregori Baquet, Jocelyn Quivrin, Arthur Jugnot, Alice Taglioni
screenplay by Robert Salis, based on the play "Editions Actes Sud Papiers" by Jean-Marie Besset
directed by Robert Salis

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover It's often interesting to watch people try to justify their actions–especially when they themselves know that what they're doing is wrong. Such is the case with Robert Salis's Grande école, a film that shortchanges class in its attempts to address sexual identity. Its saga of an upper-middle-class snob and his love for, among others, an Arab labourer, wants desperately to do the right thing as far as social levelling is concerned, but it's too impressed with its own benevolence to really serve much purpose. The main event is always its hero's conflicts, in particular his desire to remove the shackles of his upbringing–his illicit love is more a prod to his essential goodness than it is a genuine challenge to privilege. But if Grande école fails as a critique, it succeeds as a weird conflicted thing making excuses for itself.

Ginger Snaps Back: The Beginning (2004) – DVD

December 14, 2004Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Drama, DVD, Horror, Werewolf

**/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Katharine Isabelle, Emily Perkins, JR Bourne, Tom McCamus
screenplay by Christina Ray and Stephen Massicotte
directed by Grant Harvey

by Walter Chaw Ravenous but not funny, the clumsily-titled Ginger Snaps Back: The Beginning takes the venerable Canadian she-wolf franchise and, in Canuck fashion, de-sexualizes it by suggesting that the appearance of two relatively nubile lasses at an isolated fort populated entirely by men rouses no passions beyond a metaphorical anxiety of invasion from without. The females in horror films tend to be the consumptive dank underground–in slashers specifically, they're the avatar for teen-boy fantasies of revenge. But in Ginger Snaps Back, they're neither avatar nor holy object, really, just catalysts for the interpersonal dramas of male settlers. The implications are many, most strident among them the unavoidable one that in Canadian cinema, sex is either perfunctory, ugly, forced, or involves a dead person. We've come a long way from the budding sexuality of the first Ginger Snaps film–all the way to an almost complete evasion of both the Orientalism in a medium-hot near-tryst wet dream with a Native American warrior and subsumed homosexual buddy lust. This despite the menstrual implications so cannily established by the franchise.

The Beverly Hillbillies (1993) – DVD

December 13, 2004Posted in1990s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, DVD, Family

*/**** Image B+ Sound B-
starring Diedrich Bader, Dabney Coleman, Erika Eleniak, Cloris Leachman
screenplay by Lawrence Konner & Mark Rosenthal and Jim Fisher & Jim Staahl
directed by Penelope Spheeris

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover I could tell you plenty of things about The Beverly Hillbillies. That it's based on the beloved Buddy Ebsen sitcom (a fact which pretty much thins the ranks of those who will tolerate it), for instance. That it features Jim Varney in Ebsen's place as Jebediah Clampett, a farmer who heads out to California with his family in tow after striking the mother lode of oil. That once the Clampetts arrive in the land of "swimming pools [and] movie stars," the mission is to a) find a fiancée for widowed Jeb, and b) domesticate the tomboyish Ellie May (Erika Eleniak). Or that these bits of information are used by a couple of schemers (Rob Schneider and Lea Thompson) to bilk the Clampetts–including Jeb's strapping son Jethro (Diedrich Bader, looking appropriately dim)–out of their newly-acquired millions. But ultimately, the only piece of information you require is that The Beverly Hillbillies is about as funny as a mugging, or an armed robbery, or "The Family Circus"–everything else is irrelevant.

The Marx Brothers: Silver Screen Collection – DVD

December 13, 2004Posted in****/****, 1920s, 1930s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD, Musical

THE COCOANUTS (1929)
**½/**** Image C- Sound C-
with Oscar Shaw and Mary Eaton
screenplay by Morrie Riskind, based on the play by George S. Kaufman
directed by Robert Florey and Joseph Santley

ANIMAL CRACKERS (1930)
***/**** Image C Sound C
with Lillian Roth and Margaret Dumont
screenplay by Morrie Ryskind
directed by Victor Heerman

MONKEY BUSINESS (1931)
***½/**** Image B+ Sound C+
with Rockliffe Fellowes and Harry Woods
screenplay by S.J. Perelman and Will B. Johnstone
directed by Norman McLeod

HORSE FEATHERS (1932)
****/**** Image C+ Sound B
with Thelma Todd and David Landau
screenplay by Bert Kalmar and Harry Ruby and S.J. Perelman and Will B. Johnstone
directed by Norman McLeod

DUCK SOUP (1933)
****/**** Image B+ Sound B
with Margaret Dumont and Raquel Torres
screenplay by Bert Kalmar and Harry Ruby and Arthur Sheekman and Nat Perrin
directed by Leo McCarey

by Walter Chaw Popular wisdom holds that the Marx Brothers were best at Paramount, before the public disapproval of their satirical masterpiece Duck Soup sent them fleeing with proverbial tails between their legs to MGM and an ignoble end in a series of progressively worse, studio-sterilized soft-shoe routines. But the truth is that the Marxes didn’t hit their stride until at least their third picture for Paramount, Monkey Business: the first couple of flicks (The Cocoanuts and Animal Crackers) are laden by the team’s dependence on played-out stage productions and the “oh my god” quality of the early talkie, in which actors played to microphones hidden in flower pots, extras stared straight at the camera, and the florid gestures of the theatre were adhered to with pathological devotion.

I Confess (1953) – DVD

December 12, 2004Posted in****/****, 1950s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Crime, Directors: Alfred Hitchcock, Drama, DVD, Thriller

****/**** Image B Sound B Extras B
starring Montgomery Clift, Anne Baxter, Karl Malden, Brian Aherne
screenplay by George Tabori and William Archibald
directed by Alfred Hitchcock

by Walter Chaw Just the visual beauty of Alfred Hitchcock's I Confess speaks volumes for its inclusion on the short list of the master's masterpieces. This is one of the most astonishing-looking films in all of black-and-white cinematography, its palette of greys a veritable vice press on the already-quailing Montgomery Clift. A late, breathtaking montage wherein Clift, walking the streets of Quebec (filmed on location by the great Robert Burks), crosses a silhouette of a statue of Christ on His last walk to Calvary defines by itself character and theme: Hitchcock's wrong-man obsession clarified as Catholic guilt transference. The power of Hitchcock's best films is a potent mixture of audacious cinematic genius and the suspicion that original sin makes mistaken identity merely the intrusion of cosmic judgment. (It's inevitable and you must have done something at some point to deserve it, besides.) There's something greater at work in Hitchcock's films, the presence of the director asserting itself always–and a connection is struck in I Confess between that directorial control and a sort of implacable karmic omnipresence. For Hitch, filmmaking is Old Testament stuff, and I Confess is a little of that old-time religion.

Blade: Trinity (2004)

December 8, 2004Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Horror, Sci-Fi, Superhero, Theatrical, Vampire

*/****
starring Wesley Snipes, Kris Kristofferson, Jessica Biel, Ryan Reynolds
written and directed by David S. Goyer

Bladetrinityby Walter Chaw A genuinely bad film, Blade: Trinity gains a little currency by banking on some of the hot topics in our cultural diaspora (blacks vs. whites, rich vs. poor, privileged vs. ghettoized) as well as sporting a pretty heady fascination with progeny and parentage. But it’s not nearly enough to forgive the film’s excrescent dialogue, tepid action scenes, or asinine performances. It finds David S. Goyer, writer of all three Blade films in addition to Alex Proyas’s modern classic Dark City, at the helm of a feature for the second time having learned nothing from Proyas and Blade II‘s Guillermo Del Toro. When the director of an action film takes pains to turn off the lights right before each action scene is set to begin, begin to worry. If Goyer does anything, he confirms the idea that if you’re not a brilliant writer (like Wes Anderson, say), then you probably shouldn’t be directing the mediocre scripts you’ve written (like George Lucas, say), because writers who usher their own scripts to the screen tend to think of their word as law instead of as a good place to start. For the first time in this series, I was bored, disinterested, and didn’t get any kind of blaxploitation charge out of Wesley Snipes cool-mutha-shut-yo-mouf method-spawned half-vampire avenger. If Blade: Trinity is the end of the cycle, it came one movie too late.