All the Real Girls (2003) – DVD

July 27, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Romance

***½/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras B+
starring Paul Schneider, Zooey Deschanel, Patricia Clarkson, Benjamin Mouton
written and directed by David Gordon Green

by Walter Chaw David Gordon Green’s sophomore picture All the Real Girls has the quality of a Faulknerian myth, with rural North Carolina subbing for his Yoknapatawpha County. It reminds of (and refers to) Terrence Malick’s dreamlike naturalism more than in the stylistic similarity of Tim Orr’s meticulous compositions–there is in Green’s work an understanding of those delicate moments that carve indelibly into the collective sublime. Marking the unbearable tragedy of being human, in his second film Green observes the madness of love in a temporary world, his gift in charting the native poetry of place and imperfection. When he allows that inarticulate frustration to fester against the backdrop of a stained paradise (George Washington), he creates an American masterpiece; when that furious inability to communicate comments on first love (All the Real Girls), he creates something no less elegant though considerably less able to sustain the gravity of its treatment.

Cliff Notes: FFC Interviews Cliff Curtis

July 26, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Interviews, New Zealand

CcurtisinterviewtitleJuly 27, 2003|The lower level of Denver's Magnolia Hotel features as its twin centrepieces a fountain and a wet bar, an idea of water in a grotto that appropriately found me meeting Maori actor Cliff Curtis, who was in town to promote the opening of Niki Caro's Whale Rider. Dressed casually in jeans, loose shirt, and sandals, Curtis is an extremely warm, curious sort of fellow at once unfazed by his rising status in Hollywood (having appeared in numerous high-profile pictures playing a variety of ethnicities) and possessed of that particular airy disconnection of folks reared in the theatre. He's at the cusp of stardom, essentially, with leading-man good looks and an ineffable quality of fearless integrity that allows him to back away from the big-budget blockbusters in which he has found himself of late to take a small role in a small film, just because it's important to him. Simplicity itself, it seems, the call of Hollywood too often turns idealism into avarice, making a man doing the right thing for himself and his culture an anomaly–and a welcome one. With a heavy Kiwi accent and a relaxed attitude imported from the poetically-named Pacific, Curtis spoke to FILM FREAK CENTRAL, against the soft clatter of that fountain, about all manner of things in the middle of another murderous Colorado summer.

Final Destination 2 (2003) [infinifilm] – DVD

July 25, 2003Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, DVD, Horror, Thriller

**/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B+
starring Ali Larter, A.J. Cook, Michael Landes, Terrence ‘T.C.’ Carson
screenplay by J. Mackye Gruber & Eric Bress
directed by David Richard Ellis 

by Walter Chaw Earning some marks for a gratuitous tit shot and a few graphic kills, the mystical gorefest Final Destination 2 is an unusually mordant excuse to knock off a few good-looking caricatures. Philosophically speaking, it develops its mythology with a series of rules so Byzantine that rather than spend a surplus of time trying to unravel what’s going on, it’s best just to settle comfortably into the realization that the ones we’ve marked for death are, in fact, marked by Death in the film. The most interesting thing about the picture, in fact, is that it is self-reflexive for genre fans, who’ve made it something of a matter of course to pick out the heroine and the meat bags from the rest of the cattle. In our way, we become the avatars of the Grim Reaper, laying our bony fingers on each inevitable victim in turn. The audience, in a very direct way, becomes that invisible cold wind that announces the arrival of doom–Final Destination 2 is almost interactive.

Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over (2003)

July 25, 2003Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Family, Sci-Fi, Stallone

Spy Kids 3: Game Over
½*/****
starring Antonio Banderas, Carla Gugino, Alexa Vega, Daryl Sabara
written and directed by Robert Rodriguez

Spykids3dby Walter Chaw Robert Rodriguez’s deeply unpleasant conclusion to his Spy Kids trilogy lacks the smarts and inventiveness of the first two films in the series, putting all of its eggs in a 3-D basket that is so certain to cause headache that bottles of aspirin should be passed out alongside the flimsy red/blue glasses. All the weaknesses of the previous Spy Kids entries, unbolstered in Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over (hereafter Spy Kids 3) by a sense of joy and innovation, are unforgivable in this film: the genuinely awful child actors, the cheesy special effects, and that certain air of imported moral superiority that seems a late-hour attempt to justify the emptiness of the exercise. Out of nowhere, the lessons of family and respect for disability find themselves grafted to this flimsiest of low-tech frameworks–special effects that are so amateurish and poorly implemented they don’t so much remind of Tron as replicate Tron bit-for-bit twenty-one years after the fact. The narrative of the film, such as it is, reveals itself to be a life-support system for hyperactive incompetence, and for a series of stupid cameos that are at least preferable to Sylvester Stallone as something called The Toymaker.

Masked and Anonymous (2003)

July 24, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Esoterica, Music, Theatrical, UK, Western

*/****
starring Bob Dylan, John Goodman, Jessica Lange, Luke Wilson
screenplay by Bob Dylan & Larry Charles, writing under very dumb pseudonyms
directed by Larry Charles

Maskedanonymousby Walter Chaw The three or four times that Larry Charles's Masked and Anonymous features musical performances by its star Bob Dylan (particularly a rousing rendition of "Dixie"), the picture manages to be something just north of unbearable. The rest of the time, it's an interminable ego trip through Dylan's towering sense of self-importance, his almost total inability to relate with reality, and that curious phenomena of popular artists who are at once imperiously patronizing and desperate to be seen as common men. When failed concert promoter Uncle Sweetheart (John Goodman) asks down-on-his-luck folk singer Jack Fate (Dylan) about the importance of Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin to American rock-and-lore, the inanity of the answer (and the evasiveness of Dylan's demeanour–"Well, it matters to someone, I guess") isn't mysterious so much as inane and disingenuous; even the evocation of social phenomena as important and galvanizing to roots rock and the inner city as the myth of Stagger Lee is tossed off with a wry flick of the hand. Pretending that he doesn't know himself to be an icon in American music (and, arguably, even of American letters) is the worst kind of arrogance: the sin of false modesty, which Dylan doesn't wear particularly well and is frightfully unbecoming besides.

Copacabana (1947) – DVD

July 24, 2003Posted in1940s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, DVD, Musical, Mystery, Romance

*½/**** Image B Sound B
starring Groucho Marx, Carmen Miranda, Steve Cochran, Andy Russell
screenplay by Alan Boretz, Howard Harris, Laslo Vadnay, Sydney R. Zelinka
directed by Alfred E. Green

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Like many great comedians, Groucho Marx was punished for being too good. One can't actually make movies like Horse Feathers, Animal Crackers and the great Duck Soup and not expect to pay a price, so the studio, in its infinite wisdom, decided to impose normalcy onto The Marx Brothers' films in an attempt to restore public order. This, of course, marked the beginning of his team's decline, so that by 1947 he was reduced to making unsalted soda crackers like Copacabana just to pay the rent. And what a reduction it is: Groucho and hapless co-star Carmen Miranda are the only things worth watching in this limp backstage musical, and while they work all the wonders they can with limited material, it's not enough to keep it from seeming more than a woeful desecration of a great comic's talent.

Brigham Young (1940) – DVD

July 23, 2003Posted in1940s, Adventure, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Biopic, Drama, DVD, Romance, Western

**/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B+
starring Tyrone Power, Linda Darnell, Brian Donlevy, Dean Jagger
screenplay by Lamar Trotti, based on a story by Louis Bromfield
directed by Henry Hathaway

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover I was hoping, prior to watching Brigham Young, that the film would be a twisted smash-up of subject matter and Hollywood convention. I was sure that the touchy matter of Mormon ritual would send the movie in all directions at once, trying to salvage a normal film but twisting itself through ever more bizarre hoops. But while it does indeed get the production team scrambling to deal with that pesky polygamy issue, Brigham Young is mostly just a dull problem-picture crossed with a boring western, with no real surprises to offer anyone who was born a little before yesterday.

Irma la Douce (1963) – DVD

July 23, 2003Posted in1960s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Directors: Billy Wilder, DVD, Romance

***½/**** Image A Sound B
starring Jack Lemmon, Shirley MacLaine, Lou Jacobi, Bruce Yarnell
screenplay by Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond
directed by Billy Wilder

by Walter Chaw Until Irma la Douce (1963), movie prostitutes were of the touch-me-not variety, the Holly Golightly breed who invariably paid the (sometimes ultimate) price for the oldest profession–they were never happy, bright, and chirpily philosophical. The casting of Shirley MacLaine as the titular poule makes sense in that just three years after Billy Wilder's The Apartment, it brought her and Jack Lemmon back together as lovers divided by sordid circumstance (and cohabiting an apartment again, as it happens), but Wilder's wish to cast Marilyn Monroe instead would have been the better choice. She is, after all, far less burdened by the weight of intelligence and melancholy than MacLaine (or, at least, her screen persona is)–qualities that serve MacLaine extremely well in the darkly-hued The Apartment, and much less so in what is literally a gauzy Technicolor slapstick musical sans song-and-dance numbers. Still, what works about Irma la Douce is the sprightliness of the interplay between the elfin Irma and her arguably more elfin beau/benefactor Nestor (Lemmon), both finding in Wilder the sort of director who understood the quality of the "attractive goons, winsome losers, and sympathetic heels" Ethan Mordden described as comprising the prototypical Wilder hero. And it is that marriage of paradoxes, particularly the one which finds MacLaine cast as the bimbo, that gives Irma la Douce the kind of dark, self-reflexive undercurrent that defined the unrest of '60s cinema.

Dracula II: Ascension (2003) – DVD

July 22, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD, Horror, Romania, Vampire, Wes Craven

*½/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras B
starring Jason Scott Lee, Jason London, Craig Sheffer, Stephen Billington
screenplay by Joel Soisson & Patrick Lussier
directed by Patrick Lussier

by Walter Chaw As far as direct-to-video sequels to awful franchise films go, Patrick Lussier’s ponderously dubbed Wes Craven Presents Dracula II: Ascension (hereafter Dracula II) is better than Hellraiser 3 and Children of the Corn V, but really just a vampire knock-off of Suicide Kings, of all things. After tackling the mummy mythos in Russell Mulcahy’s dreadful Tale of the Mummy, poor Jason Scott Lee takes on the vampire canon, assuming the Van Helsing role of self-flagellating holy vamp hunter Uffizi, all decked-out in priestly black and doing his Bruce Lee berserker song-and-dance, this time armed to the nines with obscure weaponry. A shame that the film spends so much of its time watching a suddenly Aryan Dracula (Stephen Billington, Gerard Butler apparently not available) tied to a table between banks of ultraviolet lights while mumbling dreamy phrases in a Count Chocula accent, as the potential is there for a campy cheap-o action/gore piece.

Felicity: Season Two Six-Disc Set [Sophomore Year DVD Collection] (1999-2000) – DVD

July 20, 2003Posted in1990s, 2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Coming of Age, Drama, DVD, Romance, Television

Image A- Sound B Extras A-
“Sophomoric”, “The List”, “Ancient History”, “The Depths”, “Crash”, “The Love Bug”, “Getting Lucky”, “Family Affairs”, “Portraits”, “Great Expectations”, “Help for the Lovelorn”, “The Slump”, “Truth or Consequences,” “True Colors”, “Things Change”, “Revolutions”, “Docuventary II”, “Party Lines”, “Running Mates”, “Ben Was Here”, “The Aretha Theory”, “Final Answer”, “The Biggest Deal There Is”

by Bill Chambers

FelicityseasontwohaircapWhat is a haircut?

According to Merriam-Webster, it is “the act, process, or result of cutting and shaping the hair.” Maybe the definition should be expanded to account for the transmogrifying impact a haircut can have on public perception of the vehicle for a fictional character. I encountered my own follicular prejudices when I went to see Lethal Weapon 4 and found myself even more put off by the absence of Martin Riggs’s signature mullet than by the film’s idiotic script, abject racism, and incongruous delivery-room hijinks–none of which were quite so indicative of Richard Donner’s undisciplined direction as his electing to leave Mel Gibson’s ‘do as short as it always is outside the Lethal Weapon franchise. Perhaps we can trace this back to the Sunday funnies: imagine how disconcerting it would be if Ziggy or Charlie Brown suddenly had hair. With the ingratiation of comic books, motion pictures, and television in the latter half of the twentieth century, our escapist figures got deported from the realm of imagination; transmuted into visual icons, they consequently became far less malleable.

May (2003) – DVD

July 19, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Horror, Thriller

***/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B-
starring Angela Bettis, Jeremy Sisto, Anna Faris, James Duval
written and directed by Lucky McKee

by Walter Chaw Lucky McKee takes a look at the end of the world and it comes half-blinded before a student version of Claire Denis’s Trouble Every Day and a poster-shrine to Dario Argento’s Opera. The apocalypse in May is the end of cinema, a self-consuming contemplation of itself as the product of genre, and so its touchstones are films that consider the horror of unnatural progeny, inappropriate consumption, and, of course, the literariness of “Frankenstein”‘s exhumation and reconstitution tropes. When May (Angela Bettis) pleads at the picture’s conclusion to be seen, more than the plaintive cry of a child molded by fear into something strange, it’s an understanding that the life of cinema is like the span of any beast: naivety into optimism into cynicism into contemplation into, finally, a breed of facile irony fed by the mordancy of existence at its extremity.

I Capture the Castle (2003)

July 18, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Romance, Theatrical, UK

**/****
starring Romola Garai, Rose Byrne, Henry Thomas, Marc Blucas
screenplay by Heidi Thomas, based on the novel by Dodie Smith
directed by Tim Fywell

by Walter Chaw A breezy light romantic caste-comedy in the vein of Cold Comfort Farm or any of a number of Jane Austens, Tim Fywell’s mannered comedy of manners I Capture the Castle is marked by some fine performances and hampered by a blueprint so threadbare that it has, by now, taken on something of its own unnatural half-life. Boasting one of the less revolting endlessly reproducible master-plots that needs only a new cast and crew to bring it shambling to Frankenstein-ian life, the heavy-booted I Capture the Castle lumbers from meet-cute to early-hate-into-blossoming-love to the idea of ‘marrying poetically’ that has been a staple of roundelay romance since Shakespeare and before. It’s a crowd-pleaser, then, in the sense that the word describes a film with no surprises, no controversy, a charming location, and a dangerous level of sweetness. Perhaps ‘crowd pacifier’ is a better term.

Blood, Guts, Bullets & Octane (1998) – DVD

July 18, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, Crime, DVD, Thriller

Blood, Guts, Bullets and Octane
*/**** Image B+ Sound A-
starring Joe Carnahan, Dan Leis, Ken Rudolph, Dan Harlan
written and directed by Joe Carnahan

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover It’s not the band I hate, it’s their fans. The celebrated (if overrated) efforts of both David Mamet and Quentin Tarantino spawned a lot of half-baked imitators in their heyday in the ’90s, people who didn’t understand the masters’ cruel ironies or obsessive cinephilia, respectively, but sure thought that it was cool wear a suit while pointing a gun and saying “fuck.” Few of them, however, made films as dire and unpleasant as Joe Carnahan’s Blood, Guts, Bullets & Octane (hereafter Octane), which takes the male territorial-pissing formula of scores of Mamet-tino flicks and pushes it to an astonishingly crude extreme. There’s no wit to the dialogue, no style to the imagery and no grace in the performances–just eff this and eff that and oh-God-I’m-shot. If you needed a reason for the Nineties to end, here it is; the passing of this kind of cinema is ample incentive to enter the new century.

How to Deal (2003)

July 17, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Coming of Age, Drama, Romance, Teen, Theatrical, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Mandy Moore, Allison Janney, Alexandra Holden, Peter Gallagher
screenplay by Neena Beber, based on the novels Someone Like You and That Summer by Sarah Dessen
directed by Clare Kilner

Howtodealby Walter Chaw Based on a pair of Sarah Dessen novels that apparently deal with the tribulations of a particularly sour adolescent girl, Clare Kilner’s How to Deal is a disastrously twee Judy Blume knock-off that compacts every ill of growing up female into a hysterical parcel of over-reaching and hollow sanctimony. It’s the kind of movie that has its maudlin protagonist reading Madame Bovary to parse, I guess, some portion of romantic martyrdom when the irony of the reference is that at the root of Emma Bovary’s problems arguably lies her infatuation with mealy romance novels into which she might substitute herself for the heroines (not forgetting the role of Dessen’s books in the first place). Irony and incompetence being the two rules of the day as Kilner and her cinematographer Eric Alan Edwards (once Gus Van Sant’s DP, now relegated to stuff like this and Britney Spears’s Crossroads) make unforgivable decisions in lighting and camera placement that cast How to Deal as an unintentional horror film with at least three scenes loaded with tension and free-floating anxiety for no good reason save that the filmmakers don’t seem to know what the hell they’re doing.

Miranda (2002) – DVD

July 17, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, DVD, Germany, Romance, Thriller, UK

**/**** Image B Sound A- Extras D+
starring Christina Ricci, John Simm, Kyle MacLachlan, John Hurt
screenplay by Rob Young
directed by Marc Munden

Mirandadvdcapby Travis Mackenzie Hoover There was a time (from the late-'70s to the late-'80s) when the UK cranked out tart, intelligent films that put their American counterparts to shame. People like Stephen Frears, Hanif Kureshi, Alan Clarke, Mike Leigh, Terence Davies, Neil Jordan, Derek Jarman, and Sally Potter could be counted on to raise hell in the name of motion pictures; whatever their relative merits, they were interested in cinema and not career opportunities, and their commitment to a reality outside of their aesthetics gave them soul and punch. (Even when they made a thriller, like John Mackenzie's The Long Good Friday, it was an anti-Thatcher thriller.) Then the '90s happened, and what was called "the multiplex generation" sprang up: suddenly we were doomed to the likes of Danny Boyle and Guy Ritchie, who made films with flashy visuals that failed to obscure their essential vacuity. And so it is with Marc Munden's Miranda, a well-shot, smartly-designed film with an empty space where its brain should be, leaving us with something that looks good, goes down easy, and is instantly forgotten.

Bad Boys II (2003)

July 16, 2003Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Directors: Michael Bay, Theatrical, Will Smith

½*/****
starring Will Smith, Martin Lawrence, Gabrielle Union, Joe Pantoliano
screenplay by Ron Shelton and Jerry Stahl
directed by Michael Bay

by Walter Chaw The very curious thing about Michael Bay/Jerry Bruckheimer’s latest dip into the shallow end is that for as vile as it is, for as putrid and unforgivable as it is, Bad Boys II may be the first Bay/Bruckheimer collaboration that marks a clear debt to a filmmaking tradition other than that blazed by John McTiernan. Sure, it’s got the slick surfaces and the ear-shattering explosions, the impossible sets (a cop can afford a few acres of prime beachfront property in Florida only in this breed of American mainstream twaddle) and class hatred (complete with fetishistic worship of guns and cars and all other things associated with diminutive penis size), but what Bad Boys II also has is a child’s working knowledge of the incendiary Hong Kong “heroic bloodshed” cinema of the 1980s. What it lacks is that genre’s sense of gravity, interest in the balance between good and evil, and the mysterious bonds between men–it’s missing finesse in its choreography, purpose in its relentless bloodletting, even a basic understanding of decency and honour. Without any recognizable human qualities, then, what Bad Boys II presents to the world is something genuinely sinister and twisted: nothing more than a reptilian collage of seething and hatred that stands as possibly the most misanthropic, nihilistic, exploitative, hopeless film ever released as a major studio’s mainstream blockbuster. It is easily the most expensive exploitation film I’ve ever seen–and besides, not nearly so funny or interesting as the similarly-themed Joe Piscopo/Treat Williams shoestring vehicle Dead Heat of many moons ago.

Reel Conversations: Candid Interviews with Film’s Foremost Directors and Critics – Books

July 15, 2003Posted in1990s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Books About Movies

written by George Hickenlooper
FFC rating: 9/10

BUY @ AMAZON

by Walter Chaw Finding himself at the cusp of the supplementary-material revolution, filmmaker George Hickenlooper was afforded the rare opportunity to speak with a wide panoply of cinematic luminaries in the early-Nineties as LaserDisc changed the way that film historians could appreciate–and filmmakers could preserve–film. It’s possible to find in the dialogues collected in Reel Conversations: Candid Interviews With Film’s Foremost Directors and Critics (a book that seems at least partly inspired by a FILM COMMENT debate between Richard Schickel, Roger Ebert, and Andrew Sarris concerning the decay of popular film criticism in the United States) an ironclad justification for the very process of serious film criticism and authoritative discussion. I mentioned to Mr. Hickenlooper a few months ago that I thought it was something of a shame he was a filmmaker instead of a critic: People who understand movies are in short supply on both halves of the thin celluloid line between critics and directors. Speaking selfishly, I wanted one more good thinker on our side.

Loving (1970) – DVD

July 14, 2003Posted in1970s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Drama, DVD

***½/**** Image B+ Sound B-
starring George Segal, Eva Marie Saint, Sterling Hayden, Keenan Wynn
screenplay by Don Devlin, based on a novel by J.M. Ryan
directed by Irvin Kershner

by Bill Chambers The top ten winners in TOTAL FILM’s recent poll on the cinema’s greatest “bastards” (that would be in front of the camera, not behind it) were a fairly stock bunch: old faithfuls like The Sweet Smell of Success‘ JJ Hunsecker (Burt Lancaster) and Get Carter‘s Carter (Michael Caine)–who placed first–joined such choices that pander to currency while feigning esoterica as Internal Affairs‘ Dennis Peck (Richard Gere) and As Good As It Gets‘ Melvin Udall (Jack Nicholson). But you will find few bigger bastards than the overlooked protagonist of Irvin Kershner’s Loving, Brooks Wilson (George Segal), a lousy husband and father who has to be among the most self-absorbed suburbanites ever to despoil the screen. In our introduction to him, he decides to have a smoke instead of watching his daughter perform in the school Christmas pageant–an event for which he was made late by a fight with his mistress. One of them, anyway.

Continental Divide (1981) – DVD

July 13, 2003Posted in1980s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, DVD, Romance, Spielberg

**½/**** Image B+ Sound B
starring John Belushi, Blair Brown, Allen Gorwitz
screenplay by Lawrence Kasdan
directed by Michael Apted

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover The broad outline for Continental Divide is so suggestive, at least by Hollywood standards, that I wish I liked the movie more than I did. As the story of a city-slicker misogynist transformed by love for a bush-roughing woman, it's surprisingly progressive: when the annoying city mouse/country mouse gimmick falls away, we have a story of two lovers trying to reconcile their disparate lifestyles without costing one or the other their independence. As this topic seldom comes up in serious movies, it's doubly refreshing to see it in a cheesy romantic comedy, and had the production team been up to the challenge this could have been one for the genre-studies books. Unfortunately, the film is so lacking in nuance and conviction that one never quite believes what is going on; the dialogue is so tin-eared and the direction so listless that they trivialize the story's implications and squander a golden opportunity.

Witchy Woman: FFC Interviews Heather Donahue

July 12, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Interviews

HdonahueinterviewtitleActress Heather Donahue on the curse of BLAIR WITCH

July 13, 2003|Castle Marne B&B, a literal house-sized castle, broods at the end of a tree-lined street in a marginal Denver neighbourhood, just a hop-skip-jump away from what used to be the red-light district. Out-of-place to say the least, the edifice rises in large grey blocks like a medieval vision, albeit one equipped with cozies, throws, knick-knacks, and Jacuzzis in every room. The funny thing about it is that of all the weird places to meet Heather Donahue, Castle Marne doesn't seem the weirdest: like the actress, it's theatrical, expansive, and, for the most part, out of sight. More's the pity for Ms. Donahue, as since her career-making role in The Blair Witch Project, she's been subjected to the same virulent backlash as the film, making her persona non grata in Hollywood even though her minimal work since then has been far and away the best part of marginal films–and indicative, besides, of genuine talent. What Ms. Donahue still has trouble with, and it's hard to blame her for not having critical distance on something so ambiguous in her life, is the importance of The Blair Witch Project in shaping modern film trends and the rarity of a picture that buggers sexual objectification. Although I've seen her in a few non-Blair Witch roles, just how attractive Ms. Donahue is remains something of a shock. It isn't that she's unattractive in her most famous role, it's that her attractiveness never enters into the equation–there's a thesis paper in there all by itself. In town to conduct a Q&A after a screening of Seven and a Match (released as part of Madstone's "Film Forward" series), on a beautiful early-summer morning a little less than four years after The Blair Witch Project opened in Denver, the animated Ms. Donahue sat down with me on the patio of Castle Marne.