DIFF ’04: Rick
The Alamo (1960) – DVD
**/**** Image A- Sound A-
starring John Wayne, Richard Widmark, Laurence Harvey, Frankie Avalon
screenplay by James Edward Grant
directed by John Wayne
by Travis Mackenzie Hoover I freely admit that the prospect of a conservative historical epic directed by John Wayne initially sent a wave of panic rippling through my body. Having endured his offensive and tedious Vietnam opus The Green Berets, I was fearful of another impoverished mise-en-scène serving as the frame for Wayne's patented all-American bellicosity. (Unlike those crack commandoes, liberal critics can only stand so much.) So I was relieved to discover that The Alamo was at once more abstract and better-looking than The Green Berets and therefore more tolerable to sensitive lefty eyes–the film assumes that you're red-blooded enough to root for some American heroes, thus leaving the dubious reasons why unmentioned. Still, it lacks the articulateness to bring its jingoistic fervour to life, and it's sufficiently sluggish and monotonous to test the patience of all but the most uncritical super-patriots.
Candyman (1992) [Special Edition] – DVD
***½/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras A-
starring Virginia Madsen, Tony Todd, Xander Berkeley, Kasi Lemmons
screenplay by Bernard Rose, based on “The Forbidden” by Clive Barker
directed by Bernard Rose
by Walter Chaw Clive Barker’s fiction drips of sex, reeks of it. Squint and you can see sex rising off of it like steam from a fresh-slain carcass. His best work, stuff like the short stories “In the Hills, the Cities” and “Human Remains,” or his audacious retelling of the Christian myth Imajica, are engorged with sensuality–alight with perversity and all manner of fetishistic penetrations. When translated into film, however, Barker’s work (including that which the author has shepherded to celluloid himself) takes on a certain seediness that undermines the essential elegance of the writing. Something about Barker’s prose makes the rawest obscenity seem privileged–the pleasure/pain principle of his cenobites in print, for example, is made the grail, whereas on the silver screen, it dips dangerously towards kitsch and cult camp. Barker in writing batters defenses and leaves you prostrate before it; Barker projected feels formal, overdone, even ridiculous. The burden of fantasy for the reader is on the reader, but for the moviegoer, it’s on the filmmaker.
DIFF ’04: Monster Road
DIFF ’04: Tradition of Killing Lovers
Bride of the Woodsman: FFC Interviews Kyra Sedgwick
October 17, 2004|Taller than you'd think and luminescent on a drizzly autumn day in Denver, Kyra Sedgwick has a smile that lights up a room, even this cavernous warehouse space rented out for the 27th Starz Denver International Film Festival in LoDo. Best known for playing prettier versions of the down-to-earth romantic interests in which Amy Madigan used to specialize, Ms. Sedgwick is approachable and engaged in person, holding a cup of hot tea between her hands for warmth as she talks about the importance of hope in her films, even as her work of late has tended towards a darker hue. This is no doubt the influence of her husband Kevin Bacon's recent forays into the territory of the haunted, spotlighted by the fact that the couple have three collaborative projects out or in the works. Their latest, The Woodsman, finds Ms. Sedgwick cast opposite Mr. Bacon as the girlfriend of a recently-released child molester, a character reminiscent in her sexual liberation of the one she played in Personal Velocity. Ms. Sedgwick has never struck me as the type looking for fame–there is a quality to her work that suggests something as indefinable and inadequate as "carefree." It wasn't that much of a surprise for me to learn that Carole Lombard is one of her idols.
DIFF ’04: The Woodsman
DIFF ’04: Stage Beauty
DIFF ’04: Imaginary Crimes
DIFF ’04: À Tout de Suite
Shall We Dance (2004)
½*/****
starring Richard Gere, Jennifer Lopez, Susan Sarandon, Stanley Tucci
screenplay by Audrey Wells, based on the screenplay by Masayuki Suo
directed by Peter Chelsom
by Walter Chaw Shall We Dance sits on the screen like an unwelcome dinner guest, or a corpulent toad. It's a remake of a mediocre-but-popular Japanese film that jettisons the question mark after "Dance" on its title screen, the inflectionless phrase squatting there as this movie's moniker a curiously apt description of the dismal marionette's-waltz to follow. The only thing more inscrutable than Jennifer Lopez's self-effacing slide into the territory of Melanie Griffith's mumbling kewpie doll career is the filmmakers' concept of Richard Gere as a comic actor capable of carrying off long takes and haughty deliveries. After all, it's hard enough to believe that the glowering, pinched vision of J.Lo staring fixedly out a dance-studio picture window at Chicago's hurtling elevated train would serve as an invitation instead of a dire warning. The romance of the El has gone decidedly downhill since Tom Cruise, Rebecca DeMornay, and Tangerine Dream took a ride in Risky Business.
Highwaymen (2004) – DVD
**/**** Image C+ Sound A- (DD)/A (DTS)
starring Jim Caviezel, Rhona Mitra, Frankie Faison, Colm Feore
screenplay by Craig Mitchell & Hans Bauer
directed by Robert Harmon
by Travis Mackenzie Hoover I'll say one thing for the font of inanity that is Highwayman: it's completely uninhibited in its ridiculousness. One watches with eyebrows raised and jaw grazing the floor as the film pushes its ludicrous agenda, claiming its outlandish burlesque of the serial-killer melodrama to be just another day at the office and accepting nonsensical free-associations as hard facts. How, exactly, is one supposed to take a film whose felony of choice is a series of hit-and-run incidents with a '72 Cadillac El Dorado, driven by a disabled man who leaves artificial appendages as his calling cards? Or the picture's insistence that this is some sort of "perfect crime," as if the DMV wouldn't notice a little thing like a trail of crushed citizenry? You can hoot at the inconsistencies all you want, but director Robert (The Hitcher) Harmon won't hear you: his total commitment to the concept only deepens the camp and astounds you further. Still, wondering how the filmmakers will top the last meshugga moment is entertainment of a kind, and it goes without saying that bad-movie devotees will find themselves in hog heaven.
DIFF ’04: Kinsey
DIFF ’04: Unknown Soldier
Ray (2004)
***/****
starring Jamie Foxx, Kerry Washington, Regina King, Clifton Powell
screenplay by James L. White
directed by Taylor Hackford
by Walter Chaw Jamie Foxx is so mesmerizing as Ray Charles in Ray, Taylor Hackford's biopic of the legendary performer, that the typical Hackford-isms threatening to weigh down the piece don't seem as heavy as they usually do. At its heart, the film is really just another faux epic from Hackford: another glimpse at the rise and fall (and rise) of a uniquely American persona (Everybody's All-American, An Officer and a Gentleman), another recent-historical essay, and another picture that begins to feel a little repetitive in the hermetic rises and falls in action that comprise such things. But then there's Foxx. He's the real deal, I think, and between this and Michael Mann's Collateral, 2004 is the year that Foxx becomes a top of the line, bona fide superstar. He's going to win the Oscar in a couple of months–and as the third African-American to claim the Best Actor prize, he's going to deserve it more than Denzel Washington did for Training Day.
Unspeakable (2003) + Body Parts (1991) – DVDs
UNSPEAKABLE
*/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras C
starring Dina Meyer, Lance Henriksen, Pavan Grover, Jeff Fahey
screenplay by Pavan Grover
directed by Thomas J. Wright
BODY PARTS
***/**** Image A Sound A
starring Jeff Fahey, Kim Delaney, Lindsay Duncan, Brad Dourif
screenplay by Eric Red and Norman Snider, based on the novel Choice Cuts by Boileau-Narcejac
directed by Eric Red
by Walter Chaw Sort of a dude Meg Foster, blue-eyed B-movie actor Jeff Fahey has never quite attained the cult status of Jeffrey Combs or Bruce Campbell. I'm thinking it's because he's always had the air about him that he would rather be in something better than, say, The Serpent of Death, Serpent's Lair–anything in the general vicinity of "serpent." You get the impression that even in the midst of appearing in six or seven films a year, he's got his eye on the mainstream prize that would ferry him from the Bs to the vaunted As. I don't think Fahey is conceited so much as puzzled–but that aura of dissatisfaction detracts from the integrity of his work, no matter how admittedly flyblown the films in which his performances find themselves might be. Fahey is a sort of neo-William Shatner, or the post-Prince of the City Treat Williams: a probably-good actor who feels like he's gotten the raw end of the deal (true in Williams' case) and thus can't quite commit himself completely to camp.
Raising Helen (2004) [Widescreen] – DVD
½*/**** Image A Sound A- Extras C
starring Kate Hudson, John Corbett, Joan Cusack, Hayden Panettiere
screenplay by Jack Amiel & Michael Begler
directed by Garry Marshall
by Walter Chaw I made a promise to myself after The Other Sister to never watch another Garry Marshall film, but I guess I don't have enough self-respect. Raising Helen is repellent in the way of roadside carrion: it just sort of lies there stinking, making it hard to find the energy to attack it. (Something about beating dead horses and all that.) To endure Raising Helen is to surrender to the quintessence of that which is wrong with our culture, to the definition of a term like "disposable culture," and to the self-knowledge that what you really want from your entertainment is the comfortable affirmation of schmaltzy emotions provoked countless times before by countless identical romantic comedies. Going to this movie is the equivalent of giving up on an intellectual and emotional life. Raising Helen will only appeal to and attract people with pathologically little patience for films that challenge them in any way, that elicit genuine reactions and are thus threatening for their potential to penetrate the carefully constructed layers of numb denial that make unexamined lives liveable–films that provide anything like insight into any level of existential verity. It is the lowest rung on the escapist ladder, representative of some wholly self-contained fantasy world where the racial make-up of Queens is 99% WASP and 1% quirky East Indian, and where Kate Hudson's incandescent choppers are Leading Lady material.
Cannonball (1976) – DVD
**/**** Image A Sound A- Extras A-
starring David Carradine, Bill McKinney, Veronica Hamel, Belinda Balaski
screenplay by Paul Bartel and Donald C. Simpson
directed by Paul Bartel
by Travis Mackenzie Hoover On paper, Cannonball is a no-brainer, with the thought of re-teaming Death Race 2000 director Paul Bartel and star David Carradine looking as tantalizing as it does obvious–the gravitas of the latter having so successfully anchored the satirical jabs of the former. Alas, Roger Corman's low threshold for resisting an easy buck seems to have saddled Cannonball with the thing that interested Bartel the least, forcing him to shoehorn his attempts at spoofery into a road-race format where they don't really belong. Thus the film is constantly at cross-purposes with itself, crushing the satire under the wheels of expediency and diluting the adrenaline rush with comedic asides that now lack relevance. The result jerks forward like a beginning driver trying to pop a wheelie. A few choice bits hint at a better movie, but that's it.
Primer (2004)
*½/****
starring Shane Carruth, David Sullivan, Casey Gooden, Anand Upadhyaya
written and directed by Shane Carruth
by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. There's something of the word walls of Gertrude Stein or Eugene Ionesco about Primer, the indie Sundance sensation that would have been rode out of town on a rail if it weren't about time travel in addition to being obscure (thus garnering it nervous intellectual comparisons to La Jetée instead of a more accurate likening to David Mamet-cum-István Szabó). I suspect that a lot of people are afraid to admit they don't understand what's happening in the film, which talks too much in too stultifying a fashion, obscuring its heart of glass with blizzards of expositive candy in the faint hope that people are too dazzled by the rhetoric to ever consider the little guy behind the curtain. Whatever genre can do to fabulize lizard fears into metaphorical eurekas!, it can also lend a pre-emptive weight to flimsy pieces presented for the approval of audiences perhaps unaccustomed to science-fiction. In truth, Primer is more Theatre of the Absurd than sci-fi, with yuppie iterations of Vladimir and Estragon having an endless circular conversation while waiting for a Godot who never really comes. Taken as such, there arises the possibility of seeing the film as commentary on the essential listless, deconstructive jingo-babble of engineers and white-shirt-print-tie professions–though I suspect Primer has a lot more to do with a decision somewhere along the line to make a "what if?" time-travel flick as dense and protracted as possible.