Metal and Melancholy (1994) + Crazy (1999)

Posted in1990s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Documentary, Netherlands, Theatrical

Metaal en melancholie
***½/****
directed by Heddy Honigmann

CRAZY
***½/****
directed by Heddy Honigmann

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Where has Heddy Honigmann been all my life? Hidden amongst the well-intentioned sheep and voyeuristic wolves that usually crowd my stays at the Hot Docs documentary festival is her ferocious intelligence and shattering compassion–which, when combined, results in wrenching, haunting films that stand alone and put most other documentarians to shame. Like no other filmmaker, she shows people caught in the crossfire of forces beyond their control, and like no other filmmaker, she captures the creative ways in which people adapt to the environment created by those forces. Furthermore, there isn't a shred of liberal self-congratulation anywhere to be found–there is no distance from the pain of her subjects, and there is no escaping the surge of confusion at the situations in which they find themselves. Her films are direct, unpretentious, and highly articulate in their evocation of the people and places they describe.

Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (2003)

Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Theatrical, War

***½/****
starring Russell Crowe, Paul Bettany, James D’Arcy, Edward Woodall
screenplay by Peter Weir & John Collee, based on the novel by Patrick O’Brian
directed by Peter Weir

by Walter Chaw By turns brutal and majestic, Peter Weir’s Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (hereafter Master and Commander) reunites the antipodean director with Russell Boyd, the cinematographer with whom he shot The Last Wave, Gallipoli, and The Year of Living Dangerously, and the two have produced a picture on par with those films: historically aware, but more notable for its epic beauty and scope. The effect of Master and Commander is rapture–it engulfs with its detail, finding time to flirt with the secrets of the Galapagos as parallel to the unfolding mystery of technology that finds the HMS Surprise outclassed by the French Acheron, stealthy and peerless enough to inspire speculations of supernatural origin. Issues of the old at war with the new (superstition vs. science, instinct vs. calculation) are nothing new for Weir, who is, after all, at his best when examining the dangers of individuals at odds with tradition, and the rewards for modern men able to assimilate the ancient into the new.

Dragonslayer (1981) – DVD

Posted in1980s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD, Fantasy

***½/**** Image A- Sound A-
starring Peter MacNicol, Caitlin Clarke, Ralph Richardson, Chloe Salaman
screenplay by Hal Barwood & Matthew Robbins
directed by Matthew Robbins

WATCH IN iTUNES – USA|CANADA

by Walter Chaw Dragonslayer is epoch-slaying, a final salvo for the courageously nihilistic films of the Seventies that is surprisingly literal about the changing of the guard from the filmmaker-driven individualism of the American new wave to the banality of the big-budget formula mentality. Its tale is best taken in the context of the idea that an individual artist–a practitioner of arcane magics that have fallen out of favour in a contemporary environment–can still affect change even if credit of the work will ultimately be hijacked by monolithic organizations. The thread of melancholy that runs through the picture springs from the idea that what we witness is an end to dragons and wizards, the battle between apprentice and beast unfolding with a doomed resignation (something like the wild stallion wrangling in The Misfits) as compared against the neutering of the individual voice within the studio system. (Dragons and warriors, the death of Robert Evans and Francis Ford Coppola alike.) With The Empire Strikes Back and Raging Bull, Dragonslayer completes a troika of early-Eighties tales of unimaginable losses and swiftly tilting identities–pictures poised tremulously at the moment of decline and, as it happens, horribly self-aware.

Mimic: Sentinel (2003) – DVD

Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD, Horror, Sci-Fi, Thriller

***/**** Image B+ Sound A Extras A
starring Karl Geary, Amanda Plummer, Alexis Dziena, Rebecca Mader
written and directed by J.T. Petty

by Walter Chaw Written and directed by wunderkind J.T. Petty, the second sequel to Guillermo Del Toro's underestimated and, admittedly, somewhat botched Mimic is a self-confessed "Rear Window with giant man-eating cockroaches" marked by a strong sense of camp and a visual style humming with a cohesive, kinetic logic that indicates, possibly, the emergence of a major genre talent. Between Mimic 3: Sentinel ("Mimic: Sentinel" on its title card and hereafter "Sentinel") and his remarkable feature debut, the mostly silent NYU student film Soft for Digging, Petty betrays a genuine gift for cinematic storytelling, stripping down dialogue to a skeletal structure and relying on the force of his images for the bulk of the exposition. Accordingly, the parts of Sentinel that bog down are the parts that rely too much on the cast to provide backstory and motivation when the best, most poetic bits of the picture are the first ten minutes (including its credit sequence) that tells all one needs to know without a word of dialogue.

Battlestar Galactica (1978) [Widescreen] – DVD

Posted in1970s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, DVD, Sci-Fi

**/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras D
starring Richard Hatch, Dirk Benedict, Lorne Greene
screenplay by Glen A. Larson
directed by Richard A. Colla

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover I find it supremely ironic that George Lucas had the nerve to sue the Battlestar Galactica team for the crime of plagiarism–this, after plundering Kurosawa and Ford and Leni Riefenstahl (and God knows who else) to create the po-mo patchwork quilt known as Star Wars. It doesn't really reflect well on your case when the thieves in question have actually ripped off fewer movies (and cultures, and archetypes) than the alleged textual victim; accordingly, Lucas lost the argument and the case. And yet, on some spiritual level, the bigger theft has more integrity than the smaller one. At the very least, Star Wars gives the impression that somebody wanted to make it: it's in awe of its sources, and that respect surges through every purloined frame. The Galactica crew only respected money and career opportunities, making the irritant of this would-be cash cow's maiden voyage seem like a mosquito the size of a Cessna.

The Christopher Lee Collection – DVD

Posted in1960s, 1970s, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blue Underground, Crime, DVD, Germany, Horror, Italy, Liechtenstein, Mystery, Spain, Thriller, UK

CIRCUS OF FEAR (1966)
*½/**** Image B+ Sound B Extras B
starring Christopher Lee, Leo Genn, Anthony Newlands, Heinz Drache
screenplay by Peter Welbeck
directed by John Moxey

THE BLOOD OF FU MANCHU (1968)
*/**** Image B Sound B Extras A
starring Christopher Lee, Tsai Chin, Maria Rohm, Howard Marion Crawford
screenplay by Peter Welbeck
directed by Jess Franco

THE CASTLE OF FU MANCHU (1969)
*½/**** Image B Sound B Extras A
starring Christopher Lee, Tsai Chin, Maria Perschy, Richard Greene
screenplay by Peter Welbeck
directed by Jess Franco

THE BLOODY JUDGE
Il trono di fuoco (1970)
**/**** Image A Sound B Extras A
starring Christopher Lee, Maria Schell, Leo Genn, Maria Rohm
screenplay by Anthony Scott Veitch
directed by Jess Franco

by Walter Chaw The sort of box set that horror fans and film historians slaver over (though Sino-Western ambassadors probably aren't too pleased about), Blue Underground's exceptionally, reverently remastered four-disc "Christopher Lee Collection" gathers four obscure Lee pictures–The Blood of Fu Manchu, The Castle of Fu Manchu, Circus of Fear, and The Bloody Judge–in presentations so vibrant and beautiful that they're almost enough to distract from the uniform tediousness of the films themselves. A little like avant-garde cinema, these pictures–all but one (Circus of Fear) directed by the notoriously, appallingly untalented Jess Franco–function better as theory than fact, unfolding on staid soundstage environments with single camera set-ups, stock footage, and jump cuts, and squandering, for the most part, the magisterial presence and delivery of Lee. (For the record, a lethal drinking game could probably be devised around the number of times Franco zooms to different parts of the same shot to avoid the inconvenience of relighting or moving the camera around.)

Once Upon a Time in the West (1968) [Special Collector’s Edition] – DVD

Posted in****/****, 1960s, Authors: Bill Chambers, DVD, FFC Must-Own, Italy, Western

****/**** Image A Sound A- Extras A-
starring Claudia Cardinale, Henry Fonda, Jason Robards, Charles Bronson
screenplay by Sergio Donati and Sergio Leone and Mickey Knox
directed by Sergio Leone

Mustownby Bill Chambers Ennio Morricone's score for Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West is responsive and we're conditioned to expect dictatorial. For the first time in the enduring Morricone-Leone collaboration, a kind of pantomime pervades the music, with notes and actions so closely coordinated that the Charles Bronson character's theme becomes diegetic: Every time Bronson, called Harmonica because the instrument is practically his first language, blows into his harp, the resulting noise is incongruously omnipresent. (It seems to come from everywhere but his instrument.) The film has been likened–and regarded as a precursor–to rock videos for how inextricable its sound and image are, a by-product of Leone playing Morricone's ready-made compositions on set. Leone later applied this pre-synch technique to Once Upon a Time in America, but there, it was used more as a mood-enhancer than as a cue card.

The Piece Maker: FFC Interviews Peter Hedges

Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Interviews

PhedgesinterviewtitleNovember 9, 2003|It's one of the horrible ironies of the profession that often the people I like the most during the interview process are the ones who have made the films I find significantly problematic. By writing a review before interviewing someone for the first time, I can safeguard against the tendency to reward, or punish, the film for my relationship with my subjects; if I had my druthers, after meeting Peter Hedges, writer-director of Pieces of April, I would have declined to comment on his film. See, with my wife going into false labour, I stood Mr. Hedges up, but he agreed to reschedule, greeting me with words of encouragement about my impending fatherhood and then, as we were packing up, commiserating with me about the pain of losing a parent. In between, I broached the topic of race in his film, the element of Pieces of April that causes me the most pause, knowing as I did so that Mr. Hedges was probably mistaking our affinity for one another for affection for his film. It's a hard job sometimes, and while I'm under no illusions that I'm friends with, or run in the same circles as, the people with whom I occasionally rub elbows, it still pains me to think that I might wound someone I genuinely like with a review that's more criticism than congratulation.

Hulk (2003) [2-Disc Special Edition] – DVD

Hulk (2003) [2-Disc Special Edition] – DVD

Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD, Sci-Fi, Superhero

**/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B-
starring Eric Bana, Jennifer Connelly, Sam Elliott, Josh Lucas
screenplay by John Turman and Michael France and James Schamus, based on the Marvel comic
directed by Ang Lee

by Walter Chaw The first in a troika of films to focus on rage as the catalyst for physiological change (the others being Danny Boyle’s brilliant 28 Days Later… and Stephen Norrington’s The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, which counts Mr. Hyde among its gentlemen) this past summer, Ang Lee’s Hulk is a plodding dirge about the sins of the fathers that struggles mightily between the requirement to awe and the desire to mean something. Its story of repressed memories of abuse and reconciliation amounts to not-much when the tortured protagonist seems supremely capable of suppressing his rage, only losing control when jolted with a cattle prod or when his girlfriend is menaced by a trio of mutant hounds. An oh-so-subtle suggestion–embedded in a dream within a flashback–that emotionally distant Bruce Banner (Eric Bana in full zombie mode) may have abused his ex-girlfriend Betty Ross (Jennifer Connelly) speaks to a canny chronicler of dysfunction in Lee (The Ice Storm) struggling with the demands of a film with a ridiculous budget and a level of expectation in the same stratosphere. When Betty nonsensically offers, “It must be a combination of the nanomeds and the gamma radiation,” Bruce responds: “No, it’s something deeper.” Alas, it’s not.

My Brother Silk Road (2002); Swing (1993); Kairat (1992)

Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Coming of Age, Drama, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Romance, Theatrical

Altyn Kyrghol
**½/****
starring Busurman Odurakaev, Tynar Abdrazaeva, Mukanbet Toktobaev, Kabatai Kyzy Elmira
written and directed by Marat Sarulu

Sel'kincek
**½/****
starring Mirlan Abdykalykov, Bakyt Toktokozhayev
written by Ernest Abdyjaparov, Talgat Asyrankulov, Aktan Arym Kubat
directed by Aktan Arym Kubat

KAIRAT
***/****
starring Talgat Assetov, Samat Beysenbin, Baljan Bisembekova, Indira Jeksembaeva
written and directed by Darezhan Omirbayev

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover It's impossible to understand an entire national cinema–or, for that matter, several national cinemas–through the prism of exactly three films. That's all I have by which to judge the Cinematheque Ontario's massive series Films From Along the Silk Road, which brings together films from five Central Asian countries–and so I offer my opinions with trepidation: I wouldn't want to turn you off of something magnificent that might be hiding within the schedule. Nevertheless, the selections offered to the press are/were of a fair-to-middling nature–pictorially accomplished despite extremely low budgets, but lacking a finished quality in themes and narratives. They're fascinating as cultural documents from a part of the world that never makes much of an impact in North America, but as cinema only one rates a proper recommendation.

The Matrix Revolutions (2003)

Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Esoterica, Martial Arts, Sci-Fi, Theatrical

**½/****
starring Keanu Reeves, Carrie-Anne Moss, Laurence Fishburne, Hugo Weaving
written and directed by Lana Wachowski & Lilly Wachowski

by Walter Chaw Where The Matrix Reloaded works best as a kitschy send-up of West Side Story, The Matrix Revolutions is the funniest, most overblown re-telling of The Old Testament since The Ten Commandments. It should have been called "Revelations," truth be told, and indeed a sly wink to covenants and the Apocalypse comprises its final scenes. The film comes complete with martyred saints, crucified saviours, and enough murder and fireworks to keep Philistines attentive during the extended lore sequences, less boring here than in the last instalment, though those looking for mortal doses of faux philosophical pretension will find their goblets full to brimming. What saves this chapter, as it did the previous, is the idea that the arrogance required to pull off something this ponderous, this glowering and self-important, is in fact a valuable thing in a mainstream movie climate more interested in the comfortable affirmation of formula. Though it's likely that box office history will interpret the last two parts of The Matrix unkindly, it's all too possible that the trilogy may come to be seen as something like a classic of ambitious, hysterical overreaching. And why not? That's exactly what it is.

Film Freak Central Does the 2003 New York City Horror Film Festival

Posted in****/****, 2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, Crime, Drama, Fantasy, Film Festivals, Horror, Short Films, Thriller, UK, Zombie

Nychorrorlogo November 5, 2003|Held at the Tribeca Theater for the second year in a row, the New York City Horror Film Festival (NYCHFF) is a collection of low-budget feature and short genre films that, like the San Francisco Film Society's lamented Dark Wave festival (after two amazing years, there is no third instalment pending), gives weight to a much-deserved critical re-evaluation of horror film as an important artistic, sociological, academic endeavour. With special awards this year honouring Troma's Lloyd Kaufman, underestimated horror director Stuart Gordon, drive-in movie critic Joe Bob Briggs, my favourite independent horror director Larry Fessenden, and special effects legend Tom Savini, the 2nd NYCHFF is an emerging niche festival run by folks who care about the genre and, better, have an idea about how to present the material in a way as enthusiastic as it is savvy.

Dark Angel: The Complete First Season (2000-2001) – DVD

Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Television

Image B+ Sound A Extras C
“Pilot,” “Heat,” “Flushed,” “C.R.E.A.M.,” “411 on the DL,” “Prodigy,” “Cold Comfort,” “Blah Blah Woof Woof,” “Out,” “Red,” “Art Attack,” “Rising,” “The Kidz Are Aiight,” “Female Trouble,” “Haven,” “Shorties in Love,” “Pollo Loco,” “I and I Am a Camera,” “Hit a Sista Back,” “Meow,” “…And Jesus Brought a Casserole”

by Walter Chaw Ah, the Apocalypse. Terrorists set off a nuclear bomb in orbit, and the resultant electromagnetic pulse cripples the mighty United States’ information highway, plunging Seattle 2019 into what the morose voiceover introduction proclaims is the Third World. The mean streets of the Emerald City are teeming with grungy, coffee-addled youth culture, aggressive panhandlers, and Russian gangsters milling beneath a constant drizzle while bike messengers zip around with insouciant wet flying off their natty dreadlocks–and then the catastrophic energy pulse, after which we meet Max (Jessica Alba). With a beauty-mark bespecked-chin, a pouting leer, and a penchant for delivering every line with a head wobbling “oh no you did-ent” undead inner-city spunk (which not only gets tired, but also dates the piece almost instantly–recall the airless jingo-ese of “What’s Happenin'”), Alba struts into and out of her fifteen minutes as lead terminator in the James Cameron-conceived (and occasionally scripted) series “Dark Angel”.

Finding Nemo (2003) [2-Disc Collector’s Edition] – DVD

Posted in****/****, 2000s, Adventure, Animation, Australia, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Disability, DVD, Family, FFC Must-Own, Pixar

****/**** Image A+ Sound A+ Extras A-
screenplay by Andrew Stanton & Bob Peterson & David Reynolds
directed by Andrew Stanton

Findingnemohirescap

Mustownby Walter Chaw The perfect American parable for an anxious new millennium, Andrew Stanton's Finding Nemo is riddled with nightmares and weighted by the existential smallness of its heroic pair, finding a certain immutable gravity in the fear and hope represented by children, rekindled, both, by the spate of child-on-child violence ending our last thousand years. Following hot on horror films that, like the horror films of the late-'60s/early-'70s, focus on unapologetically evil children (then: Night of the Living Dead, Rosemary's Baby, Don't Look Now, The Exorcist, now: The Ring, Identity, Soft for Digging), what Finding Nemo does is present generational paranoia from a parent's point of view, opening as it does with an act of senseless, heartbreaking violence in the middle of an idyllic suburbia. It's not the horror (at this point) of a child facing social ostracism in the school environment, but the horror of making a choice to escape a bad environment only to find oneself in the middle of an upper middle-class tinder pile about to light.

The Cat in the Hat (1971) + The Lorax (1972) – DVDs

Posted in1970s, 1980s, Animation, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, DVD, Family, Television

THE CAT IN THE HAT
**½/**** Image B Sound A- Extras C
directed by Hawley Pratt

THE LORAX
***/**** Image B+ Sound A- Extras C
directed by Hawley Pratt

PONTOFFEL AND HIS MAGIC PIANO (1980)
Pontoffel Pock, Where Are You?
**/**** Image B- Sound B+ Extras C
directed by Gerard Baldwin

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Adapting for the screen a sensibility as singular as that of Dr. Seuss is a desperately tricky thing. It simply won't do to faithfully transpose the narrative, because narrative is hardly the point: Seuss is about nonsense wit both visual and verbal, and to fit it into a standard teleplay box is to destroy everything that makes his books special and unique. Nevertheless, the urge to bring the madness of Dr. Seuss to life is an understandable one, and so it should come as no surprise that in the Sixties and Seventies, CBS commissioned a series of animated specials designed to do just that.

Miller’s Crossing: FFC Interviews Wentworth Miller

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

WmillerinterviewtitleNovember 2, 2003|Over a thousand people packed into The Rise nightclub for the 26th Starz Denver International Film Festival's opening-night gala reception. A cavernous space with booming music, the venue was a drastic departure from last year's sedate to-do at the DCPA's Temple Buell Theater, and it was in one of the upstairs rooms that I first met Wentworth Miller, the tall, handsome, calm, and extremely courteous young star of–and, lucky for me, the best thing about–Robert Benton's pretty awful The Human Stain. I met him again the next morning for official purposes at Denver's also surprisingly tall Mag Hotel, plopped in the middle of the busy intersection of 19th and Stout along Banker's Row in lower downtown Denver. Best known for his guest appearances on television shows like "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and "Popular" (and as an athlete with a literal bleeding heart in the seventh season premiere of "ER") as well as for the "Luke Skywalker" role in the unfortunate Dinotopia, Miller is receiving what could potentially be his big break, stealing the show from Anthony Hopkins, Nicole Kidman, and Gary Sinise playing a role that's surprisingly close to home.

The House That Dripped Blood (1972) – DVD

Posted in1970s, Authors: Bill Chambers, DVD, Mystery

**½/**** Image B Sound B Extras D+
starring Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing, Nyree Dawn Porter, Denholm Elliot
screenplay by Robert Bloch
directed by Peter Duffell

by Bill Chambers Anthology films are by their very nature self-defeating–especially, it seems, when the individual stories are linked by a framing device rather than by a thematic spine. (The majority of Hammer also-ran Amicus' output vs. Pulp Fiction, for example.) As the Amicus production The House That Dripped Blood draws to a close, you can't contain the urge to crown a favourite chapter; the rest of the picture becomes a useless husk. Based on the works of Psycho author Robert Bloch, The House That Dripped Blood stars genre stalwarts Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing, John Pertwee, and still others (including an unrecognizably young Joss "Diplomatic Immunity!" Ackland) in separate tales all set inside a gothic manse that, we determine from interstitial vignettes, is unloaded on some steel-nerved rich dude roughly once a week by shifty real estate agent A.J. Stoker (John Bryans).

The Human Stain (2003)

Posted inDrama, Germany, Ireland, Romance, Theatrical, Thriller

½*/****
starring Anthony Hopkins, Nicole Kidman, Ed Harris, Gary Sinise
screenplay by Nicholas Meyer, based on the novel by Philip Roth
directed by Robert Benton

Humanstainby Walter Chaw A gravid piece of Oscar-baiting garbage, Robert Benton's dead-on-arrival The Human Stain plods along with the dedication of the dangerously bloated and the pathologically self-important. It's so woefully miscast that its awards-season intentions become transparent, honouring pedigree to mortify the material, and no matter how eternally topical issues of race in the United States might be, the whole production feels airless and badly dated–something like an Arthur Miller parable, lead balloons and rhetorical minefields and all. In fact, the picture is just on this side of camp classic as venerable whore Anthony Hopkins cuts a rug with Gary Sinise to a few Irving Berlin classics and game Nicole Kidman, going the Frankie and Johnny route with an entirely unsuccessful blue-collar turn indicated by a fake tattoo and cigarette, is outmatched by a Nicholas Meyer screenplay packed with head-slappers and incongruities. The sort of movie I tend to dismiss offhand, The Human Stain proves trickier to exorcise for its populist attack on the populist phenomena of political correctness. That doesn't mean the picture's interesting, it means that the picture's thumbing of a hot-button topic buys it a little analysis.

Watchers/Watchers II [Double Feature] – DVD

Posted in1980s, 2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, DVD, Horror, Sci-Fi, Thriller, ZERO STARS

WATCHERS (1988)
*/**** Image C- Sound C
starring Corey Haim, Barbara Williams, Michael Ironside
screenplay by Bill Freed and Damian Lee, based on Watchers by Dean R. Koontz
directed by Jon Hess

WATCHERS II (2002)
ZERO STARS/**** Image C Sound C
starring Marc Singer, Tracy Scoggins, Jonathan Farwell, Irene Miracle
screenplay by Henry Dominic
directed by Thierry Notz

by Walter Chaw Lassie vs. Link in what amounts to one of the stupidest films ever made: an adaptation of a Dean Koontz (one of the stupidest novelists ever made) novel, Watchers looks cheap, plays cheap, and stars Corey Haim as a Lita Ford-looking, ambiguously gay teen who’s upstaged by a dog yet again (see: The Lost Boys and, in a way, Silver Bullet). At least he’s not upstaged by Corey Feldman this time around, which, frankly, can’t be good for anyone’s career or self-respect. A tale of a genetically engineered orangutan warring with a genetically engineered golden retriever in the upscale suburbs of Anywhere, America that looks like Vancouver and boasts of the entire Mayberry police force, Watchers is aided now and again by a trademark ridiculous performance from Michael Ironside, the poor man’s Jack Nicholson, but is generally an unredeemable tale of military paranoia and dog love. As the mutt gazes intently off-screen at the commands of his invisible handler (and Haim the same), the film has as its only vaguely interesting moment one where a fat kid named “Piggy” and Jason Priestly try to out-bike the killer monkey, restaging The Lord of the Flies as a BMX downhill derby. Oh, the humanity.

In the Cut (2003) + Sylvia (2003)

Posted in****/****, 2000s, Australia, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Drama, Horror, Mystery, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

IN THE CUT
****/****
starring Meg Ryan, Mark Ruffalo, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Nick Damici
screenplay by Jane Campion & Susanna Moore, based on the novel by Moore
directed by Jane Campion

SYLVIA
*½/****
starring Gwyneth Paltrow, Daniel Craig, Jared Harris, Blythe Danner
screenplay by John Brownlow
directed by Christine Jeffs

"Come at last to this point
I look back on my passion
And realize that I
Have been like a blind man
Who is unafraid of the dark"
-Yosana Akiko

Inthecut

by Walter Chaw Frances Avery (Meg Ryan) is in love with words. She moves through life obscuring herself in a nimbus of them, passing through the world with poetry as her guiding principle. Director Jane Campion is no stranger to a life lived in thrall to poesy–her films An Angel at My Table and The Piano detailed the life of poet Janet Frame and the life of the mind, respectively, and In the Cut finds its meaning and rhythm in the words that Frannie collects, fragments of poems cut from books and collected from subway walls. The New York through which Frannie walks is festooned with ghosts of American flags, tattered and blown after two years of constant display, losing their meaning along with their colours fading up to the sky. Likewise, Frannie sees herself a phantom of unmentioned tragedies, haunting her own life, retreating to the comfort of words when a half-sister, Pauline (Jennifer Jason Leigh), pillories her chaste existence, or when Detective Malloy (Mark Ruffalo) interrogates her about a string of serial murders he's investigating. A scholar of words, Frannie is involved as the film opens in a project analyzing inner-city slang: language as organic and in transition.