In the Line of Duty 4 (1989) – DVD

January 8, 2004Posted in1980s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Crime, DVD, Hong Kong, Martial Arts

In the Line of Duty IV
皇家師姐Ⅳ直擊證人
Wong ga si je IV: Jik gik jing yan
**½/****
starring Donnie Yen, Cynthia Khan, Yat Chor Yuen, Michael Wong
screenplay by Cheung Chi Shing & Wang Wing Fa
directed by Yuen Woo Ping

by Bill Chambers Generally regarded as the best chapter in the series (and released in America prior to any of the others), Yuen Woo Ping’s In the Line of Duty 4 is an effective action spectacle and a mediocre cop drama; intense though it may be, the film is simply not of a calibre that leaves you remembering it as such. I know there are people who swear by its star, Donnie Yen, but I’ve seen him in about six pictures now (most recently, Zhang Yimou’s awesome Hero), and I don’t find his screen presence all that enthralling. If he’s eschewed the peacocking that has catapulted his contemporaries in HK cinema to international stardom, he’s also lacking in the animal magnetism that keeps your eyes on one blur as opposed to another blur during a martial-arts brawl. Good fighter, of course. Yen is probably the biggest name in In the Line of Duty 4‘s bargain cast, a fact only emphasized by the wishful misprinting of Ping’s name above the title (implying that he’s Yen’s co-star rather than his director) on the front of Fox’s new R1 DVD release.

The Red Pony (1949) – DVD

January 7, 2004Posted in1940s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Drama, DVD, Family, Western

**½/**** Image C+ Sound B
starring Myrna Loy, Robert Mitchum, Shepperd Strudwick, Peter Miles
screenplay by John Steinbeck, based on his short story collection Red Pony
directed by Lewis Milestone

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover In the simplest possible terms, The Red Pony is a Disney true-life adventure with a literary pedigree. As far as Disney true-life adventures go, it’s a superior one, thanks largely to competent direction by Lewis Milestone and a screenplay by John Steinbeck. But even the reasonably A-list personnel on hand can’t lift it above the lowliness of the genre–largely because what you see is what you get. There’s nothing to read between the lines of its tale of a boy and his pony, and despite some peripheral interest involving the boy’s parents and a stableman, the film fails completely to evoke the spaces between their words and the tension in their relationships, making it come and go with little rhyme or reason.

The Outer Limits: The Original Series – The Entire First Season (1963-1964) – DVD

January 6, 2004Posted in****/****, 1960s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Horror, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Television, Thriller, ZERO STARS

Outerlimitstuesdayby Walter Chaw In the hour or so past my bedtime in the endless dusk of UHF syndication, I used to watch Rod Serling’s “The Twilight Zone” and Joseph Stefano’s “The Outer Limits” with my father. The previous fed the nightmares of my youth, the latter fed my fondest desires and deepest faith in the eternal verity, and nobility, of asking questions, of ambition, of being courageous enough to fail to change the world. “The Outer Limits”, I realize in these first months after my father’s death, represented the best things about him–and about me: that line pure that stretches between where we are and where we hope to go. “The Outer Limits” is, more so than “The Twilight Zone”, about how we never feel as though we are the men we ought to be because our fathers have set too difficult an example. Where Serling dazzled with O. Henry-like twists, “The Outer Limits” sobered with existential frustrations: one is the dove resolution, the other the hat forever emptying.

I Remember Mama (1948) + George Stevens: A Filmmaker’s Journey (1984) – DVDs

January 3, 2004Posted in1940s, 1980s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Documentary, Drama, DVD, Family

I REMEMBER MAMA
***/**** Image B+ Sound A-
starring Irene Dunne, Barbara Bel Geddes, Oscar Homolka, Philip Dorn
screenplay by Dewitt Bodeen, based on the play by John Van Drutten
directed by George Stevens

GEORGE STEVENS: A FILMMAKER'S JOURNEY
**/**** Image A- Sound A-
directed by George Stevens, Jr.

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Andrew Sarris once remarked that George Stevens was "a minor director with major virtues" who became "a major director with minor virtues." He was referring to the point at which Stevens cast screwball frivolity aside in favour of the lugubrious, but there's more complexity to the A Place in the Sun helmer than that: he was simultaneously light and heavy, keeping details in focus as he blew small stuff way out of proportion. His dramatic talent is the kind that gets overestimated by Oscar-watchers but underestimated by intellectuals, falling in some distorted medium that is major and minor at the same time.

Johnny English (2003) [Widescreen] – DVD

January 3, 2004Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, DVD, Espionage, France, UK

*/**** Image B+ Sound B Extras C+
starring Rowan Atkinson, Natalie Imbruglia, Ben Miller, John Malkovich
screenplay by Neal Purvis & Robert Wade and William Davies
directed by Peter Howitt

by Bill Chambers The only thing mustier than James Bond movies are parodies of them, and as if we needed proof, along comes the excruciatingly predictable 007 send-up Johnny English, in which Rowan Atkinson soars to the lows of Leslie Nielsen at his most contemptibly greedy (see: Spy Hard). (I like both comedians, Atkinson and Nielsen, but only when they're leashed to masters Richard Curtis and David Zucker, respectively.) If it's true that Atkinson was recently motivated by the stateside failure of this very film to check himself into an Arizona rehab centre for depressed celebrities (and frankly, don't blame audiences–distributor Universal didn't exactly tax themselves advertising Johnny English to domestic moviegoers), I hope his caretakers remind him in haste that none of Monty Python's features grossed an enviable sum abroad, that the James Bond franchise has already satirized itself into the ground (it's no casual point that Johnny English was co-scripted by the same writing team behind The World Is Not Enough and Die Another Day), and that his first problem is trying to please a country that opens rehab centres for depressed celebrities.

Film Freak Central’s Top 10 of 2003

January 1, 2004Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Best-of Lists, Blog

Top102003Stained by the twin horrors of school shootings and 9/11, the films of 2003 (many of the best of which are actually 2002 films that didn't find a release slot until this year) are interested in listlessness and languor, in addressing what appears to be a national ennui where the worst are filled with passionate intensity and the rest of us are spectators. Declared the worst year in memory at the Cannes Film Festival by any number of wags, 2003 was instead, I'd offer, deadened by a sort of fatalistic nihilism that bleaches our entertainments with a grey wash, making it difficult to muster much in the way of enthusiasm on the one hand and comfort on the other. The splashiest of the year's best films, in fact, are about revenge and noble sacrifice, while a trio of strong pictures (Dogville, The True Meaning of Pictures, Rhinoceros Eyes) have been pushed back to 2004, transforming this year's wrap-up into something of a patchwork creature. Stepping back, it seems only right that it be that way.–Walter Chaw

21 Grams (2003)

December 31, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Drama, Esoterica, Theatrical

**/****
starring Sean Penn, Naomi Watts, Benicio Del Toro, Charlotte Gainsbourg
screenplay by Guillermo Arriaga
directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu

21gramsby Bill Chambers Alejandro González Iñárritu's Amores Perros was the first film in the wake of Pulp Fiction to wallow in criminal behaviour and monkey with chronology that still managed to stake its own cinematic claim (not the least of which, inaugurating the Mexican New Wave) far removed from the squatters in Tarantinoland, and if I found its fatalism terribly endearing, I realize now that I also derived a lot of pleasure from its trip-hop vibe, which served a function as the film's levity. To its great detriment, 21 Grams has no sense of humour: Iñárritu seeks to depress you with his English-language sophomore effort by weaving a tapestry of dejection and sorrow, but unless the sun breaks through the clouds once in a while, how can we lament it? That Iñárritu dismisses the human process of adaptation in examining the aftermath of a fatal car accident is only half the problem: he underestimates the swiftness with which an audience grows acclimated and eventually impervious to suffering, too.

The Long, Hot Summer (1958) + Hud (1963) – DVD

December 31, 2003Posted in****/****, 1950s, 1960s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Romance, Western

THE LONG, HOT SUMMER
***/**** Image A Sound A Extras B+
starring Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward, Anthony Franciosa, Orson Welles
screenplay by Irving Ravetch and Harriet Frank, Jr., based on the William Faulkner stories "Barn Burning" and "The Spotted Horses"
directed by Martin Ritt

by Walter Chaw The Long, Hot Summer is a classic example of Hollywood trying to have it both ways: it combines the seriousness of a literary property and some young Method talent with the lurid garishness of a dime-store novel. Seizing upon the exploitable elements–all that decadent behaviour and sexual dysfunction–of William Faulkner's work, the film pushes them to the fore, giving the cast the opportunity to sex things up in bare-shirted, post-Brando fashion. As a result, the film resembles soapy melodrama much more than Faulkner ("NOT SINCE PEYTON PLACE!" screams the trailer), but it's melodrama with the strength of its fetid convictions that makes for lively entertainment, whatever its shortcomings.

S.W.A.T. (2003) [Widescreen Special Edition] – DVD

December 30, 2003Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Crime, DVD, Thriller

*/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras B
starring Samuel L. Jackson, Colin Farrell, Jeremy Renner, Michelle Rodriguez
screenplay by David Ayer and David McKenna
directed by Clark Johnson

by Walter Chaw The promise of the premise is a return to John Carpenter's Escape from L.A., or his Rio Bravo redux Assault on Precinct 13, an idea of a seething urban cess erupting at the promise of notoriety and filthy lucre, but S.W.A.T. washes out as a flaccid, almost wholly uninteresting bit of macho formula. The potential of the film to be Aliens with rampaging hordes of West Coast gangsters seems, at the least, acknowledged in the United Colors of Benetton casting, down to the tough-talking, one-named Latina, but like everything else in the film, the only thing that S.W.A.T. genuinely achieves is a feeling of squandered opportunities and a lot of quiet time to think about them. More, the picture has that distinctive feeling of something that never started by the time it ends–a laggardly-paced two hours of limp set-up that hobbles across the finish line, sputtering on fumes and bluster, boasting mainly of the questionable achievement that it is the exact simulacrum of any episode of the dated '70s television series on which it is based.

So Close (2002) – DVD

December 30, 2003Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Drama, Hong Kong, Romance, Thriller

*/**** Image A Sound A-
starring Shu Qi, Vicki Zhao, Karen Mok, Song Seung Hun
screenplay by Jeff Lau
directed by Corey Yuen

by Walter Chaw Frankly, So Close could suck a tennis ball through a keyhole. Directed by action choreographer Corey Yuen (whose The Transporter I actually sort of liked), the film, a head-scratching mix of elaborate camera angles and stultifying “Dragnet” editing, is so dedicated to trundling from one rigorously disinteresting action set-piece to the next that it’s fair to wonder why the filmmakers even bothered to provide exposition of any sort.

Assassination Tango (2003) – DVD

December 29, 2003Posted in2000s, Argentina, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, DVD, Romance, Thriller

***/**** Image B Sound B Extras C
starring Robert Duvall, Ruben Blades, Kathy Baker, Luciana Pedraza
written and directed by Robert Duvall

by Walter Chaw In one of a series of largely-improvised exchanges about the mystical hold of the tango on the spirit of Argentines, a crusty veteran confides in enigmatic Yankee hitman John J. (Robert Duvall, also writer-director) that the tango, among absolutes such as love and hate, is life. In Assassination Tango, the titular dance is also the metaphor for the desire to find balance between the brutish and the sublime or, failing that, to provide a strict framework within which the brute can prowl. (A visit to a caged panther in a Buenos Aires zoo becomes the visual manifestation of the idea as well as oblique reference to Kafka's "The Hunger Artist," the hero of which searches, like J., for sustenance.) The tango is the urgent pull of ritual that binds animal sexuality into the meticulous structure of dance, working on the literal level as doppelgänger to John J.'s carefully-controlled, gradually encroaching chaos and on another level as metaphor for a filmmaker seeking equilibrium between personal crisis and professional ambition at the end of his career. It's rationale enough for a picture so often interested in frustrating narrative to the benefit of the richness of its palimpsest; if ever there were a film that lives entirely in its subtext, Assassination Tango (even its title a semantic conundrum) is it.

28 Movies Later…: FFC Interviews Brendan Gleeson

December 28, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Interviews, Ireland

BgleesoninterviewtitleDecember 28, 2003|On the telephone from the Cold Mountain junket in San Diego, on the afternoon of the announcement that the film had garnered an extravagant eight Golden Globe nominations, I was honoured to speak with the marvellous Brendan Gleeson–the best thing about Cold Mountain, as it happens, and the best thing about a great many films. The star of John Boorman's criminally underestimated The General, Gleeson has found himself of late cast in the role of patriarch or mentor and, more fascinatingly, providing both the moral and metaphorical centre of his films, often in just a supporting role. For Gleeson to be routinely overlooked come awards season says a great deal about awards season and the extent to which showy performances–performances that the layperson swiftly identifies as performances–overshadow the sort of bedrock naturalism and presence of a character actor like Gleeson.

Peter Pan (2003)

December 25, 2003Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Australia, Authors: Walter Chaw, Family, Fantasy, New Zealand, Romance, Theatrical, UK

***½/****
starring Jason Isaacs, Jeremy Sumpter, Rachel Hurd-Wood, Lynn Redgrave
screenplay by P.J. Hogan and Michael Goldenberg, based on the play by James M. Barrie
directed by P.J. Hogan

by Walter Chaw A perverse lollapalooza of loaded images and disquieting implications, P.J. Hogan’s live-action Peter Pan is this year’s most intriguing Freudian shipwreck, resurrecting the darkness and poetic pessimism of J.M. Barrie’s play–and Peter and Wendy, Barrie’s own novelization–that has been all but forgotten since Disney’s well-regarded 1953 treatment. (While nowhere near as saccharine as something as mendacious as Brother Bear, that animated version is still of a Disney tradition that washes dangerous source material mostly clean of credible malice.) At its heart, consider that the Pan story is about child seduction/abduction in the Yeatsian “Stolen Child” tradition and a colony of “lost boys” that have forgotten their parents and, crucially, been forgotten in turn. The mirror of a parent’s love discarded in this way renders the film’s heart-warming conclusion a touch bitter, with the spectre of the question “But what about their parents?” hanging over it.

Cold Mountain (2003)

December 25, 2003Posted in2000s, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Italy, Road Movie, Romance, Romania, Theatrical, UK, War

*½/****
starring Jude Law, Nicole Kidman, Renée Zellweger, Donald Sutherland
screenplay by Anthony Minghella, based on the novel by Charles Frazier
directed by Anthony Minghella

Coldmountainby Walter Chaw Existing in an awards-season netherworld where the ugliest girl is Renée Zellweger (or Jena Malone), dad is Donald Sutherland, and Odysseus is Jude Law, Anthony Minghella's Cold Mountain is a tarted-up march to the awards-night podium starring Nicole Kidman, possibly the most over-exposed actor of the last five years. Everything about the film is careful artifice, from its casting to its grandiloquent direction to its half-baked dialogue ("Small moments like a bag of diamonds," indeed), with only Law, Philip Seymour Hoffman, and the magnificent Brendan Gleeson emerging unscathed from the golden wreckage. What Minghella seems best at is recasting edged, emotionally tumultuous novels into sun-kissed temples to the cinematographer's craft, the more dappled sunlight in the eye with which to bedazzle awards-season voters. The strength of Charles Frazier's National Book Award-winning source material lies in its socio-political details of America's Civil War period, but Minghella has focused his picture unerringly on the overrated novel's weaknesses instead: its dialogue, its clumsy Homeric riff (for better country-fried Odyssey, stick to O Brother Where Art Thou?), and its sweeping gothic romance, which finds its characters, at one point, reading the real deal in Wuthering Heights. The result is, like Minghella's previous literary adaptations (The Talented Mr. Ripley and The English Patient), lavish, lugubrious, and off-target.

Teknolust (2003); In July (2000); Taking Sides (2002); Monster (2003)

December 25, 2003Posted in2000s, Adventure, Austria, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Comedy, Crime, Drama, France, Germany, Music, Romance, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller, UK, War

TEKNOLUST
**/****
starring Tilda Swinton, Jeremy Davies, James Urbaniak, Karen Black
written and directed by Lynn Hershman-Leeson

Im Juli.
***/****
starring Moritz Bleibtreu, Christiane Paul, Mehmet Kurtulus, Idil Üner
written and directed by Fatih Akin

TAKING SIDES
**/****
starring Harvey Keitel, Stellan Skarsgård, Moritz Bleibtreu, Birgit Minichmayr
screenplay by Ronald Harwood
directed by István Szabó

MONSTER
**½/****
starring Charlize Theron, Christina Ricci, Bruce Dern, Scott Wilson
written and directed by Patty Jenkins

Teknoby Walter Chaw As the year winds down and distributors great and small try to cram their films into rotation for possible awards consideration, the truism that there are just as many mediocre foreign and independent films as mainstream ones proves sage for a quartet of minor releases. Lynn Hershman-Leeson chimes in with Teknolust, another of her riffs on Derek Jarman, this one obsessed with Tilda Swinton and eternity through technology. Fatih Akin’s second film In July (Im Juli.) is essentially a German The Sure Thing with elements of After Hours, obsessed with eternity through an immortal beloved lit by the nimbus of various suns. One-time Oscar-winner István Szabó offers Taking Sides, a morality tale plucked half-formed from the stage, questioning the eternity of art against the requirements of morality. And Patty Jenkins weighs in with Monster, this year’s Boys Don’t Cry; it’s vérité as lower-class urban ugly, with Charlize Theron seeking eternity through a performance that breaks her out of her starlet mold, Halle Berry-style. Only time will tell if any of it keeps.

Journey to the Center of the Earth (1959) – DVD

December 24, 2003Posted in1950s, Adventure, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, DVD, Family, Fantasy, Romance, Sci-Fi

***/**** Image A Sound A
starring Pat Boone, James Mason, Arlene Dahl, Diane Baker
screenplay by Walter Reisch and Charles Brackett
directed by Henry Levin

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover By any rational standards, the 1959 version of Jules Verne's Journey to the Center of the Earth is swill, an all-pro hackjob that marshalls a vast array of technicians and designers in the hopes that the money and effort expended will mask the total artistic void at its, um, centre. There's no sense of cinema to its mechanical vision of life beneath the surface–and yet somehow, despite Henry Levin's non-direction and the bizarre casting of James Mason alongside Pat Boone, the film works like gangbusters. Watching it is like being a kid at Christmas and getting a thoroughly useless but fun piece of plastic to play with. It won't do you any good in the long run, but as a mass-produced waste of 129 minutes, it has the steel-and-chrome charm of a bloated '50s gas-guzzler.

Destry Rides Again (1939) + The Flight of the Phoenix (1965) – DVDs

December 23, 2003Posted in1930s, 1960s, Adventure, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Western

DESTRY RIDES AGAIN
***/**** Image B+ Sound A
starring Marlene Dietrich, James Stewart, Brian Donlevy, Charles Winninger
screenplay by Felix Jackson, Gertrude Purcell and Henry Mayers, based on the novel by Max Brand
directed by George Marshall

THE FLIGHT OF THE PHOENIX
***/**** Image A- Sound A
starring James Stewart, Richard Attenborough, Peter Finch, Hardy Kruger
screenplay by Lukas Heller, from the novel by Elleston Trevor
directed by Robert Aldrich

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover The word "clever" can be used as a compliment or an insult–it's either a means of saying how ingenious you are, or a way of showing how far you are from being "intelligent." The same goes for the star rating, which can be used to mark a sleeper that shows some real talent or to warn you that something is "only entertainment"–when is three stars just right, and when is it not enough? This is the conundrum that faces me in reviewing Destry Rides Again and The Flight of the Phoenix, two films completely separate in time and subject matter, but which both rate about the same in terms of their achievement. But despite their equal entertainment value, I have a better feeling about Phoenix than I do about Destry: it's more creative and resourceful, even if it doesn't come off perfectly. That doesn't mean you shouldn't see Destry, though it is an indication that you shouldn't raise your hopes too high for it–and that you might be surprised by the lesser-known Phoenix.

Jeepers Creepers II (2003) [Special Edition] – DVD

December 22, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD, Horror

Jeepers Creepers 2
*½/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B+
starring Ray Wise, Jonathan Breck, Travis Schiffner, Nicki Lynn Aycox
written and directed by Victor Salva

by Walter Chaw Beyond the pretty fair rhetorical question of what convicted child molester Victor Salva is doing making another film about children in peril, in showers, and pissing en masse in a field, Jeepers Creepers II is a surprisingly run-of-the-mill action/adventure film with horror elements that reminds mostly that Jaws is still the high-water mark for stuff like this. Promising to be a Spam-in-a-bus sort of picture, it washes out eventually as a rip-off that’s only missing someone deadpanning “We’re gonna need a bigger bus” when the creature from the deep starts pounding on their stranded conveyance. Credit is due Salva, however, for employing some sharp non-CGI creature effects, even if the premise this time around (and its showcase special effects set-piece) is starting to more resemble John McNaughton’s The Borrower and less an original concept of a demon that, for twenty-three days every twenty-three years (not insignificantly, the description of high holy Jewish feasts is set out in Leviticus: 23), gets to feed.

Real Perelman: FFC Interviews Vadim Perelman

December 21, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Interviews

VperelmaninterviewtitleDecember 21, 2003|Long story short, a few years ago as I was applying for a life insurance policy, I got to know an ex-paramedic who told me that he once answered a call to Denver’s beautiful Brown Palace Hotel. One of its maids had just been let go after working there for decades, whereupon she proceeded to take the elevator to the top floor and jump to her death several stories into the central dining area. “Her face was perfectly preserved, perfectly peaceful,” he said. “When I got there it looked as though she were standing in a hole in the floor, looking up with something like wonder at the ceiling.” I think about this story a lot, it sticks with me for some reason; it has elements of betrayal, death with symbolic meaning, the grotesque–the sort of high human drama at extremis that leaves an indelible imprint on my imagination.

House of Sand and Fog (2003)

December 19, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Theatrical, Thriller

*½/****
starring Jennifer Connelly, Ben Kingsley, Ron Eldard, Frances Fisher
screenplay by Vadim Perelman and Shawn Lawrence Otto
directed by Vadim Perelman

Houseofsandandfogby Walter Chaw Based on an award-winning novel by Andres Dubus III, son of Canadian novelist and short-story writer Andre Dubus, Vadim Perelman's hyphenate debut House of Sand and Fog is difficult to gauge on its own merits, given that the typically invasive grandiosity of another abominable James Horner score sinks the picture almost by itself. With no moment uncommented-upon by Horner's bank of weeping violins and no lovely Roger Deakins tableau unmarred by Horner's insatiable taste for schmaltz, the picture is a prime example of two things: the prestige picture/Oscar grab; and the film of grand emotions that decides to trust its composer over its cast and screenplay. The similarities between House of Sand and Fog and In the Bedroom (a film based on Dubus Sr.'s short story "Killings") are obvious, but where the latter allows its cast to breathe, House of Sand and Fog smothers Ben Kingsley and Jennifer Connelly in a fatal dose of Horner's saccharine ministrations. In Horner's defense, however, the extended climax during which a vein-popping Kingsley is allowed too much rein is awful without help.