Saving Private Ryan (1998) [D-Day 60th Anniversary Commemorative Edition] – DVD

May 24, 2004Posted in1990s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Drama, DVD, Spielberg, War

***½/**** Image A+ Sound A- Extras B
starring Tom Hanks, Edward Burns, Matt Damon, Tom Sizemore
screenplay by Robert Rodat
directed by Steven Spielberg

Savingprivateryancap

by Bill Chambers SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. One is tempted to speculate that, perhaps even more than his father's tour of duty, something that inspired the teenaged Steven Spielberg to shoot a succession of WWII docudramas on 8mm (since he had authentic props–Dad's medals–at his disposal), lingering guilt over his dismissal from the U.S. Army after a military shrink deemed him unfit for the battlefield accounts for Spielberg's frequent digressions into the war genre. As reductive, nay, Freudian as this may seem, for one thing, it has the potential to dilute the vitriol commonly reserved for the bookends of Saving Private Ryan by bringing them into autobiographical relief. Certainly ignoring the picture's prologue and epilogue altogether doesn't help: I once programmed my DVD player to do just that and the result felt surprisingly incomplete, as the context for a WWII narrative with a conspicuously anecdotal quality had all of a sudden disappeared.

Coffee and Cigarettes (2004) + The Saddest Music in the World (2004)

May 20, 2004Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, Drama, Esoterica, Music, Musical

COFFEE AND CIGARETTES
***½/****
starring Roberto Benigni, Steven Wright, Joie Lee, Cinqué Lee
written and directed by Jim Jarmusch

THE SADDEST MUSIC IN THE WORLD
***/****
starring Isabella Rossellini, Mark McKinney, Maria de Medeiros, Ross McMillan
screenplay by Guy Maddin & George Toles, based on a screenplay by Kazuo Ishiguro
directed by Guy Maddin

Saddestcoffeeby Walter Chaw Philosopher-scientist Nikola Tesla (of coil fame) once suggested that the universe winding down vibrated to a sympathetic rhythm; art, at its best, puts a tuning fork to it. The words that we use to describe tapping that fricative synergy (archetype, the sublime, the ineffable) are also the words that we use, to borrow a phrase from Frank Zappa, to dance about architecture–to describe what's indescribable about the collective experience, the existential electricity that ranks music above painting above poetry above literature (and film the twentieth century stepchild that falls somehow north and south of each). It is the unique privilege of the cinema to be all things at its best and less than nothing at its worst: to be sculpture for Matthew Barney; photography for Stanley Kubrick; ad art for Roy Andersson; poetry for Jean-Luc Godard; hymn for Abbas Kiarostami; and music for Sergio Leone. For Jim Jarmusch, it's the Romanticist sensibility distilled deliriously through the Nouvelle Vague, while for Guy Maddin, it's perhaps the critical instinct at its most self-loathing, arch, and unpleasant.

Loverboy (1989) – DVD

May 20, 2004Posted in1980s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, DVD

*/**** Image C- Sound B+
starring Patrick Dempsey, Kate Jackson, Carrie Fisher, Robert Ginty
screenplay by Robin Schiff and Tom Ropelewski & Leslie Dixon
directed by Joan Micklin Silver

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Loverboy is a brightly-lit sex comedy from the '80s; for those who lived through those dark times, this statement is criticism enough. But I know that there are vast numbers of young people who have never had the distinct displeasure of watching rich people with enamel-white houses and shoulder-pad dresses have their way with Patrick Dempsey, thus it behoves me to warn this lost generation of the perils of this film and all of its ignoble brethren. If you are watching something out of the corner of your eye late at night while channel-surfing, and you notice a lack of cuts, no discernable attempts at style, and a whole lot of ugly pastels, you are in serious danger of seeing Loverboy. Change the channel immediately, for the discomfort and nausea will be acute and irreversible. The fact that a DVD exists is mind-boggling.

Too Late the Hero (1970) – DVD

May 19, 2004Posted in1970s, Action, Drama, DVD, War

***/**** Image B+ Sound A
starring Michael Caine, Cliff Robertson, Ian Bannen, Harry Andrews
screenplay by Robert Aldrich and Lukas Heller
directed by Robert Aldrich

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Too Late the Hero is the consummate "solid flick"–sturdy, well-written, and just thoughtful enough to keep its machinations from working on autopilot. It's not a masterpiece by any stretch, but it is suffused with a dread and a tension that lift it out of the bunch-of-guys-on-a-mission ghetto and into something more sober and dignified. Whether or not it is the subterfuge Vietnam allegory of cult legend, it's a war film about people–not iron-jawed superheroes–whose selfless deeds have all the more impact when placed in context with the cowardice and stupidity of others. In the end, it does mouth certain pieties about that heroism that keep it from being too corrosive, but in this age of Black Hawk Down and Iraq prison scandals, it's refreshing for its refusal to knuckle under to the myth of the glorious warrior.

Paycheck (2003) [Special Collector’s Edition] – DVD

May 18, 2004Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Directors: John Woo, DVD, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Thriller

½*/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B
starring Ben Affleck, Uma Thurman, Aaron Eckhart, Michael C. Hall
screenplay by Dean Georgaris, based on the short story by Philip K. Dick
directed by John Woo

by Walter Chaw At the end of John Woo's latest Hollywood misstep, Ben Affleck, as brilliant "reverse engineer" Michael Jennings, hefts two bags of manure on his back and stumbles around with them for a while, effectively defusing anything cogent I could say about Paycheck. It is worth wondering, however, why people like Affleck and Keanu Reeves are so attractive in science-fiction premises (Reeves even had a turn with the memory-loss high-tech agent thing in Johnny Mnemonic)–probably something to do with the idea of robots and minds wiped clean. The problem with Paycheck isn't really that it's not well thought-out or that it's possibly the first Woo action film to be genuinely boring from start to finish, but that Woo seems to have replaced his joy of genre (and genius within the medium) with a scrabbling desperation to manufacture what used to come naturally.

Shrek 2 (2004)

May 18, 2004Posted in2000s, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Eddie Murphy, Family, Fantasy, Japan, Romance, Theatrical

*½/****
screenplay by Andrew Adamson and Joe Stillman and J. David Stem & David N. Weiss
directed by Andrew Adamson, Kelly Asbury, Conrad Vernon

Shrek2by Walter Chaw Neither better nor worse than its predecessor, think of Shrek 2 as a step sideways–it doesn’t so much earn an audience as inherit one. A DreamWorks/PDI production, Shrek 2 transplants the first picture’s bitterness towards Disney, though the characters it skewers are in the public domain (Sleeping Beauty, the three little pigs, Hansel & Gretel, Pinocchio, and so on) and happen to be among the icons that Disney, by and large, never dishonoured. Without a viable target, then, the film is the kind of satire-less satire that mistakes being a self-congratulatory trivia game designed for beginning players for being a post-modern commentary on fairytales and, more specifically, the traditional Disney animated feature. There’s no sharpness inherent in making reference to Spider-Man or Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings saga (just as there was no sharpness in referencing The Matrix in the original), and imitation has no point of view, just a brief rush of pride and bemusement for folks generally unused to catching the allusions. To say the picture functions best for the lowest common denominator (note a trio of flatulence gags) isn’t entirely fair–but it’s accurate.

Everybody’s All-American (1988) + That Championship Season (1982) – DVDs

May 16, 2004Posted in1980s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Romance, Sports

EVERYBODY’S ALL-AMERICAN
*½/**** Image B Sound B Extras C
starring Jessica Lange, Dennis Quaid, Timothy Hutton, John Goodman
screenplay by Tom Rickman, based on the book by Frank Deford
directed by Taylor Hackford

THAT CHAMPIONSHIP SEASON
**/**** Image C+ Sound C+
starring Bruce Dern, Stacy Keach, Robert Mitchum, Martin Sheen
written and directed by Jason Miller

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Taylor Hackford’s Raging Bull, the episodic pigskin melodrama Everybody’s All-American boasts a trio of fantastic performances at the service of a picture that’s all sturm and no drang, a weightless thing packed to the rafters with heaving moments over the course of a twenty-five-year span that somehow fail to add up to an affecting whole. It comes at the tail end of the prolific Dennis Quaid’s most prolific era, rounding up unqualified successes like The Big Easy and Innerspace (and unqualified miscues like D.O.A.) and serving as a handy career summary for Hackford, who hit it big with the revered cheese classic An Officer and a Gentleman, which he’s been dutifully remaking in one form or another ever since. Success is an unforgiving mistress–so is lack of range and imagination.

Troy (2004)

May 13, 2004Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Malta, Romance, Theatrical, UK

*½/****
starring Brad Pitt, Eric Bana, Orlando Bloom, Diane Kruger
screenplay by David Benioff
directed by Wolfgang Petersen

Troyby Walter Chaw There are two major problems with Wolfgang Petersen's bloated swords and sandals opera Troy. The first is that James Horner contributes another of his patented walls of non-directional trumpets and violins as the score, and the second is that first-billed Brad Pitt lacks the gravity to hold down the middle of a 165-minute epic. There's a reason that people are always surprised to learn that Pitt stands just north of six feet tall: a gifted second fiddle who consistently steals the show (12 Monkeys, Thelma and Louise, Fight Club, Se7en, Kalifornia, Legends of the Fall, Snatch) and a sometimes-leading man who consistently has the show stolen out from him (Seven Years in Tibet, Meet Joe Black, The Mexican), Pitt, as warrior Achilles in this adaptation of Homer's The Iliad, is curiously weightless, a phantom haunting the film, so that by the end it all it feels like nothing of great import has happened. Consider what the film would have been like with Russell Crowe as Achilles (or, conversely, consider what Master and Commander would have been like with Pitt)–there's a reason that Gladiator was a success, and it had very little to do with its scripting or plot.

Give My Regards to Broad Street (1984) + Paul McCartney: The Music and Animation Collection – DVDs

May 13, 2004Posted in1980s, 1990s, 2000s, Animation, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Family, Fantasy, Music, Short Films, UK

GIVE MY REGARDS TO BROAD STREET
**/**** Image B Sound B+
starring Paul McCartney, Bryan Brown, Ringo Starr, Barbara Bach
screenplay by Paul McCartney
directed by Peter Webb

PAUL McCARTNEY: THE MUSIC AND ANIMATION COLLECTION
*½/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras B+
directed by Geoff Dunbar

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Self-absorption is probably an occupational hazard at a certain level of fame: once the world lays itself at your feet, pelts its money at you, and replaces your mirrors with airbrushed portraits, it's well-nigh impossible not to be nudged a little closer to the realm of the narcissistic. Such is the case with Paul McCartney, who, having been canonized during his stint with The Beatles, apparently came to believe that anything involving his personage would be a celestial experience for all. The ego trips of 1984's Give My Regards to Broad Street and his more current forays into animation show a McCartney trapped in his own private hall of mirrors, one whose past musical triumphs are looking ever more distant from the tepid easy-listening of his present-day output.

The Grapes of Wrath (1940) [Studio Classics] – DVD

May 13, 2004Posted in****/****, 1940s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Drama, DVD, FFC Must-Own

****/**** Image A Sound A- Extras A+
starring Henry Fonda, Jane Darwell, John Carradine, Charley Grapewin
screenplay by Nunnally Johnson, based on the book by John Steinbeck
directed by John Ford

Mustownby Bill Chambers John Steinbeck wrote a, if not the, great American novel with The Grapes of Wrath, but John Ford's emotionally devastating film version, I say without a trace of anti-intellectualism, supplants Steinbeck's prose in memory. In the hands of Ford and screenwriter Nunnally Johnson (peaking early), Steinbeck's Dust Bowl evokes Nazi Germany played out on American soil. Though this was a metaphor nascent in Steinbeck's Pulitzer prize-winning book (whose publication preceded the film's release by approximately one year), with The Grapes of Wrath landing in theatres a month after Germany's deportation of Jews into occupied Poland, with those gaunt faces registering far less innocuously than Steinbeck's descriptions of them, it became a full-fledged allegory in its transition to the big screen. (That Ford was initially drawn to the project because it recalled ancestral tales of the Irish potato famine points to themes that camouflage with each new epoch. Is Steinbeck the last mythmaker?) Johnson may streamline Steinbeck to a degree that softens his guarded optimism, but his script is of tonal fidelity; Ford, revolutionizing talkies by revisiting the techniques of silent-era Expressionism with world-class cinematographer Gregg Toland, gives the picture the glaze of a thriller, as though recognizing a new urgency in old rhymes.

The Statement (2003) – DVD

May 10, 2004Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Drama, DVD, France, Thriller, UK

½*/**** Image A Sound A Extras C
starring Michael Caine, Tilda Swinton, Jeremy Northam, Alan Bates
screenplay by Ronald Harwood, based on the novel by Brian Moore
directed by Norman Jewison

by Walter Chaw A so-so director even at his best (thinking of The Cincinnati Kid) who vacillates aimlessly between soft romantic comedies and undisguised, under-informed diatribes against barn sides like big business (Rollerball, F.I.S.T., Other People's Money), American racism (In the Heat of the Night, A Soldier's Story, The Hurricane), and religious intolerance (Jesus Christ Superstar, Agnes of God, The Statement), Norman Jewison is full of activism–just not terribly ripe with ideas and perspective. His fists are of ham and his pulpit is splintered from the hammering, Jewison's political films distinctive mainly for the broadness of their focus and his romantic films distinctive for the extent to which the facile cultural stereotypes he seems so concerned about elsewhere are machined into the rom-com grist mill therein.

Sword of the Valiant (1984) – DVD

May 10, 2004Posted in1980s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD, Fantasy, Romance, UK, ZERO STARS

Sword of the Valiant: The Legend of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
ZERO STARS/**** Image D+ Sound C-
starring Miles O'Keefe, Cyrielle Claire, Leigh Lawson, Sean Connery
screenplay by Stephen Weeks and Philip M. Breen and Howard C. Pen
directed by Stephen Weeks

by Walter Chaw A film that is actually exactly bad enough to be uproariously funny, Stephen Weeks's Sword of the Valiant: The Legend of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (hereafter Sword of the Valiant)–peculiarly, Weeks's second adaptation (after 1973's Gawain and the Green Knight) of The Rose Poet's fourteenth century Arthurian epic "Gawain and the Green Knight"–is one of those Golan-Globus productions that helped redefine the bottom of the barrel in the early Eighties. It gives Miles O'Keefe of Tarzan the Ape Man fame a short-lived and wholly unjust stay of career execution (decking him out in a Prince Valiant wig that makes him look suspiciously like Mary Worth with abs), and it furthers my contention that Sean Connery is pretty much just the Scottish Burt Reynolds. I'm not sure what Weeks and company had in mind when embarking on this project, but the result is something so deeply stupid as to inspire hopefulness and hopelessness in equal draughts: anyone can do it, apparently–but is it worth doing if it turns out to be Sword of the Valiant?

We’re Not Married (1952) – DVD

May 10, 2004Posted in1950s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, DVD, Romance
We're Not Married!***/**** Image A- Sound B+starring Ginger Rogers, Fred Allen, Victor Moore, David Waynescreenplay by Nunnally Johnsondirected by Edmund Goulding by Bill Chambers With the advent of television, the movie business was suddenly floundering. While the long-term solution proved to be increasing the literal scale of motion pictures, the short-term fix found studios filching conceits tailored for the small screen. Like a number of Fox programmers from the early Fifties, We're Not Married! takes its cue from the anthology format of televised theatre; thanks to an agile Nunnally Johnson screenplay and the zesty direction of Dark Victory's Edmund Goulding,…

Millennium Actress (2002) + Tokyo Godfathers (2003)

May 9, 2004Posted in2000s, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Fantasy, Japan, Romance

MILLENNIUM ACTRESS
***½/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B
screenplay by Satoshi Kon and Sadayuki Murai
directed by Satoshi Kon

TOKYO GODFATHERS
**½/**** Image A Sound A Extras C+
screenplay by Keiko Nobumoto and Satoshi Kon
directed by Satoshi Kon and Shôgo Furuya

by Walter Chaw Four years separate Satoshi Kon's astonishing Perfect Blue and his astonishing Millennium Actress; it seems that what the intervening period brought to Kon's palette is a strong sense of visual humour and an affecting pathos to cut the existential dread of his identity crises–the year or two distancing Tokyo Godfathers from Millennium Actress further refining Kon as a humorist even as it blunted his razor's edge. Where Perfect Blue is the first film in decades to use Hitchcock correctly in a sentence, it still fails for the most part to jump from horror to hilarity on the turn of a heel, making its story of an actress being stalked by a doppelgänger brilliant, no question, but also relentlessly grim. Millennium Actress takes many of the same themes (down to the same basic structure) of performance and meta-reality, stage and screen, cradling them in a story about a man's lifetime of unrequited love for an actress, herself suffering from a lifetime's unrequited love for a mysterious revolutionary. Both threads entwine in a mutual affection for the life of the cinema, which, by film's end, serves as the ends and the means by which their respective love stories are resolved. Like Perfect Blue, Millennium Actress is about living with ghosts, but where the one is all shadow, Millennium Actress is all alight.

The Return (2003) + Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter…and Spring (2003)

May 6, 2004Posted in****/****, 2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Germany, Mystery, Romance, Russia, South Korea, Theatrical, Thriller

Vozvrashcheniye
****/****
starring Vladimir Garin, Ivan Dobronravov, Konstantin Lavronenko, Natalya Vdovina
screenplay by Vladimir Moiseyenko & Aleksandr Novototsky
directed by Andrei Zvyagintsev

SPRING, SUMMER, FALL, WINTER… AND SPRING
****/****
starring Yeong-su Oh, Ki-duk Kim, Young-min Kim, Jae-kyeong Seo
written and directed by Ki-duk Kim

by Walter Chaw Andrei Tarkovsky by way of Terrence Malick, Andrei Zvyagintsev's shockingly assured debut The Return (Vozvrashcheniye) approaches the primitive through the sublime, finding the first testament of human existence in the bland, devouring indifference of the natural and providing the moribund Russian film industry its first real voice in a generation. While it's impeccably acted and scripted with a respect for the spaces before, after, and between, what astounds about the picture is Zvyagintsev's patient, painterly eye, which fills the void in world cinema left by Takeshi Kitano since the first half of Brother and offers a voice of simple, audacious purity that fashions of the cinema something like a cold blue rapier. The Return is as good a film debut (and in almost the same way) as Malick's Badlands: an intimate character study and an archetypical road trip that fashions a crystalline portrait of a very specific time and place that, nonetheless, shines a light on the landmarks of a collective interior. Zvyagintsev talks about boys needing their father and couches it in terms poetic and mesmerizing.

Miracle (2004) [Widescreen] + Club Dread (2004) – DVDs

May 6, 2004Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Biopic, Canada, Comedy, Disney, Drama, DVD, Family, Horror, Sports, Thriller

MIRACLE
**/**** Image A Sound A Extras A-
starring Kurt Russell, Patricia Clarkson, Noah Emmerich, Eddie Cahill
screenplay by Eric Guggenheim
directed by Gavin O'Connor

Broken Lizard's Club Dread
**/**** Image A Sound A- Extras C+
starring Brittany Daniel, Kevin Heffernan, Steve Lemme, Jordan Ladd
screenplay by Broken Lizard
directed by Jay Chandrasekhar

by Bill Chambers That it's well-cast, well-shot, and well-edited leads one to conclude that Miracle is, in fact, well-directed (by Tumbleweeds' Gavin O'Connor). It's therefore invaluable, really, as proof that nothing can save a hackneyed screenplay. The film, which recreates a rink-bound pissing contest between the U.S. and Soviet hockey teams at the 1980 Olympics that retroactively came to stand for a Seabiscuit-like national uplift, is so self-critiquing that watching it is purely a formality and only an occasional joy, not for its underdog intrigue, but for its technical proficiency and the ever-dependable Kurt Russell. (If there are better actors than Russell, there certainly aren't better movie stars.) Surmounting a number of aesthetic obstacles, including a moptop that looks scalped from his character in The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes, Russell skillfully essays real-life coach Herb Brooks, a failed puck-slinger looking to live vicariously through a gold medal line-up.

The Wolf Man: The Legacy Collection – DVD

May 6, 2004Posted in1930s, 1940s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Crime, Drama, DVD, Horror, Mystery, Romance, Sci-Fi, Werewolf

THE WOLF MAN (1941)
**/**** Image B+ Sound A-
starring Lon Chaney Jr., Claude Rains, Warren William, Ralph Bellamy
screenplay by Curt Siodmak
directed by George Waggner

FRANKENSTEIN MEETS THE WOLF MAN (1943)
**½/**** Image B Sound A-
starring Lon Chaney Jr., Bela Lugosi, Ilona Massey, Patric Knowles
screenplay by Curt Siodmak
directed by Roy William Neill

SHE-WOLF OF LONDON (1946)
*/**** Image A- Sound A-
starring Don Porter, June Lockhart, Sara Haden, Jan Wiley
screenplay by George Bricker
directed by Jean Yarbrough

WEREWOLF OF LONDON (1935)
*½/**** Image B Sound B+
starring Henry Hull, Warner Oland, Valerie Hobson, Lester Matthews
screenplay by John Colton
directed by Stuart Walker

Extras A-

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Pity the poor Wolf Man. In ranking the unholy trinity of Universal monsters, he's the ugly stepchild, lacking both the popularity and iconic weight loaded onto stablemates Dracula and Frankenstein. As far as I know, no teenage outsider ever acted out by pretending to be a werewolf, nor does anyone make a metaphor of lycanthropy the way they do with Frankenstein's Monster. The Wolf Man is a beast without home or purpose, a welcome addition to monster tag teams but otherwise a second-tier entity who failed to capture the public's imagination as something to be taken beyond face value.

Envy (2004)

May 4, 2004Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Satire, Theatrical

**½/****
starring Ben Stiller, Jack Black, Rachel Weisz, Amy Poehler
screenplay by Steve Adams
directed by Barry Levinson

Envyby Walter Chaw Reminding a great deal of the masticated wonderlands of Joe Dante's The 'burbs and his own Toys, Barry Levinson's Envy operates within a carefully constructed artifice. It's a fantasy of suburbia filthy with arrested men-children and the dolls who love them, helplessly acting out music-box morality plays against a backdrop of outsized slapstick. At it's best, the film evokes the diorama lollapalooza of Tim Burton's Edward Scissorhands (indicated by its affection for the image of a snow globe), floating along on the undercurrent of meanness that defines Burton's Pee-Wee's Big Adventure like a twisted form beneath a multi-coloured blanket. Disturbingly unmoored monologues about the joy of running a pretzel stand and an invitation to catharsis as "let it tumble out like circus freaks" are made all the more peculiar by the delivery of Christopher Walken, playing a character named obliquely–after Kafka or Christ–J-Man. Redemption and oppression in one Camus parcel, Envy is the story of an everyman toiling under the yoke of the peculiarly American sickness of being completely average while nursing a sense of outrageous entitlement.

Permanent Record (1988) – DVD

May 4, 2004Posted in1980s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Music, Romance, Teen

***/**** Image C- Sound C+
starring Keanu Reeves, Jennifer Rubin, Alan Boyce, Pamela Gidley
screenplay by Jarre Fees and Alice Liddle and Larry Ketron
directed by Marisa Silver

by Walter Chaw Before Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure trapped Keanu Reeves in an amber of his own inexplicable sun-baked imbecility, he appeared in a couple of genuinely good films, nursing the mistaken impression that he was actually acting. One of these pictures is Tim Hunter's elegy to ennui River's Edge; the other is Marisa Silver's curiously affecting teenage-suicide melodrama Permanent Record. In both, Reeves demonstrates a now-unsurprising affinity for the soulful burnout character, a moral compass in the morass of the amorality of Eighties introspection and hedonism. A neo-hippie destined to become Neo for real, Reeves brought to his early work a kind of befuddled earnestness that informs his best performances (in My Own Private Idaho for instance, or even the first Matrix)–a quality causing genuine concern for "Hellblazer" fans, who probably deserve a more complex Constantine. Prior to mega-stardom, however, the most enduring image of Reeves is a scummy sleeping bag tryst in River's Edge, and his awkward take on drunkenness via Ray Bolger during the climax of Permanent Record.

The Triplets of Belleville (2003) – DVD

May 4, 2004Posted in****/****, 2000s, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Belgium, Canada, Comedy, Drama, DVD, FFC Must-Own, France, Latvia, Music, UK

****/**** Image A Sound A Extras B+
written and directed by Sylvain Chomet

Mustownby Walter Chaw An extraordinary, melancholy ode to the endless, mercurial peculiarity of life, Sylvain Chomet's The Triplets of Belleville (Les Triplettes de Belleville) finds as its existential constant the persistence of art, the familial ties that bind, and the echoing green of synchronicity. It is the finest film of its kind since Babe: Pig in the City, Gallic in the best implications of the term: self-conscious, intelligent, envelope-pushing. Its scope is immense both literally and philosophically, a series of dog dreams within providing a bit of core disquiet that work at you like the best poetry can. It's easy to forget the power of metaphor when it's bandied about like so much corrupt currency in sub-par product aching for subtext–in fact, The Triplets of Belleville is so close to poetry, something by William Carlos Williams, perhaps, that it touches something pure in art and archetype, reminding in the process of what symbolic language can do when wielded with a skilled, steady hand.