Empire Records (1995) [Remix! Special Fan Edition] – DVD

June 22, 2003Posted in1990s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Music, Romance, Teen

Empire Records: Remix!
*½/**** Image B Sound A- Extras C-
starring Liv Tyler, Anthony LaPaglia, Renee Zellweger, Maxwell Caulfield
screenplay by Carol Heikkinen
directed by Allan Moyle

by Bill Chambers Allan Moyle’s Empire Records has defenders too staunch to disregard–and because I listened to them, I’m left with the sensation that I chewed a piece of bubblegum until well after its flavour ran dry. The Canadian Moyle, whose inauspicious directorial debut was the 1977 tax-shelter crime flick The Rubber Gun, discovered teenagers three years later with his oddity of a second film Times Square and has rarely looked back since. Yet although his cinematic beginnings predate those of John Hughes, Moyle’s Pump Up the Volume and Empire Records are eclipsed by even the lesser entries in Hughes’s teen canon, such as Sixteen Candles and the Hughes-produced Pretty in Pink.

Resurface: FFC Interviews Scott McGehee & David Siegel

June 21, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Film Festivals, Interviews

McgeheesiegelinterviewtitleJune 22, 2003|Aspen's NXT lounge and nightclub has, off its main floor, a series of smaller rooms and bars decorated in various shades of dirty opulence. Serving as the base of operations for the 12th Aspen Shortsfest, there I met dark complected Scott McGehee and silver-haired David Siegel–co-hyphenates behind icy technical pictures Suture and The Deep End–in a 20' x 30', glass-walled room sporting three over-stuffed love seats and little padded ottomans with Corinthian flares that I'm sure have a name and work well as a tape-recorder stand. After a brief, bonding conversation about the sorry state of modern film criticism (fed by the sorry state of modern major-daily entertainment editors) and the lack of a critical tradition in the United States in comparison to Europe, we moved on to Suture.

Me Without You (2001) – DVD

June 20, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Coming of Age, Drama, DVD, Germany, UK

***/**** Image F Sound B-
starring Anna Friel, Michelle Williams, Oliver Milburn, Kyle MacLachlan
screenplay by Sandra Goldbacher and Laurence Coriat
directed by Sandra Goldbacher

by Walter Chaw Sandra Goldbacher’s Me Without You is feral and alive and home to two of the best performances of last year, courtesy Michelle Williams and Anna Friel. One of the more uncompromising films about the things women do to one another over the course of a long friendship, it becomes a bit repetitive by the end and a bit like a Jane Austen novel (“Emma, actually,” the film helpfully informs) transplanted to the England of the past three decades, but its conventions skate with the honesty of performances from its main trio of Williams, Friel, and Oliver Milburn as the prototypical rakish, misunderstood Austen hero.

Alex & Emma (2003)

June 20, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Romance, Theatrical

*/****
starring Luke Wilson, Kate Hudson, Rob Reiner, Sophie Marceau
screenplay by Jeremy Leven
directed by Rob Reiner

Alexandemmaby Walter Chaw We’ve been here with Rob Reiner before, the whimsical fantasy film manifesting in the pretty good (but pretty overrated) The Princess Bride (as well as the cheerfully awful North), while the romance between a prototypical thug and a difficult woman found shape in the Woody Allen film that everyone could agree on, When Harry Met Sally… (and the grotesquely unwatchable The Story of Us). Watching a Reiner film, then, at least post-’80s, is a little like playing Russian Roulette with a pair of eye-gouging forks–and, too often, playing to lose. Not so much an auteur as a bookmark and a warm body, Reiner is the Mantovani of movie directors, and the extent to which you like a tongue bath is a succinct barometer of how much you’ll appreciate his later films. With that in mind, Alex & Emma is so free of conflict and originality that watching it is actually a little like watching good avant-garde cinema: Freed from the constraints of narrative, one enters something like a fugue state, where the images flit by on screen in the simulacrum of sense, eliciting meanings in ironic counterpoint to traditional significance.

Tsui Hark’s Vampire Hunters (2003)

June 20, 2003Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Hong Kong, Horror, Japan, Netherlands, Theatrical, Vampire

The Era of Vampires
*/****
starring Chan Kwok Kwan, Ken Chang, Suet Lam, Michael Chow Man-Kin
screenplay by Tsui Hark
directed by Wellson Chin

by Walter Chaw An incomprehensible bit of garbage produced and written by legendary Hong Kong filmmaker Tsui Hark, Vampire Hunters juggles at least three plots and drops each of them repeatedly and egregiously. Its lore is confused and its heroes are unremarkable but for the unusual degree to which they’re inept and disinteresting. The promise inherent in a chop-socky wuxia opus concerning a quintet of fearless vampire hunters and a cadre of zombies is almost infinite, making the abject failure of the piece something almost awe-inspiring. Though it’s tempting to blame director Wellson Chin’s propensity to stage fight scenes in unrelieved murk, the real culprit of the piece may be a bad guy who looks and moves a lot like a mannequin on a string. William Castle, eat your heart out.

Tycoon (2002); Under the Skin of the City (2001); Stone Reader (2003)

June 19, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Documentary, Drama, France, Germany, Iran, Russia, Theatrical

Oligarkh
Tycoon: A New Russian
*½/****
starring Vladimir Mashkov, Mariya Mironova, Levani Outchaneichvili, Aleksandr Baluyev
screenplay by Aleksandr Borodyansky, Pavel Lungin, Yuli Dubov, based on Dubov’s novel Bolshaya pajka
directed by Pavel Lungin

Zir-e poost-e shahr
Under the City’s Skin
***/****
starring Golab Adineh, Mohammad Reza Forutan, Baran Kosari, Ebrahin Sheibani
screenplay by Rakhshan Bani Etemad, Farid Mostafavi
directed by Rakhshan Bani Etemad

STONE READER
*/****
directed by Mark Moskowitz

by Walter Chaw The collapse of oppressive regimes is a double-edged sword for a country’s film industry. Official censors are out of work, but they take their government’s sponsorship of the film industry with them. Entertaining a stream of strange bedfellows from the United States and France, the Russian cinema in the age of Perestroika struggled to find a balance between artistry and commerce–the same instinct that promoted the creation of underground trades in fake Levi’s spawned, too, a steadily gathering horde of cheap knock-off films designed, like their Yankee brothers, for minimal but satisfactory fiscal return. Departing quickly from the early optimism of pictures like Alexander Sokurov’s Days of Eclipse and Pavel Lungin’s Taxi Blues, the “Russian New Wave” (led like the French nouvelle vague by a cadre of critics) has expressed itself lately through cultural remakes of classics of world (including early Russian) cinema. The S. Dobrotvorsky-scripted Nicotine, an interesting take on Godard’s Breathless, is the best of the cultural doppelgängers; Lungin’s Tycoon is among the worst.

Laurel Canyon (2003) – DVD

June 18, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Music

**½/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B-
starring Frances McDormand, Christian Bale, Kate Beckinsale, Natascha McElhone
written and directed by Lisa Cholodenko

by Walter Chaw Buoyed by a fantastic performance from Frances McDormand, Lisa Cholodenko’s follow-up to her deft, well-regarded High Art is the disappointing, sprawling, somewhat overreaching Laurel Canyon. In its ambition it resembles Rose Troche’s third film, The Safety of Objects–that picture also saddled with a large, veteran cast and a problem with focus, but most importantly with the responsibility of a young filmmaker given the opportunity, with a bigger budget and well-regarded performers, to produce a piece commensurate in scale to that perceived expectation. The problem with the situation is that more times than not it leads to the type of film that Laurel Canyon is: ostentatious in structure, but in that way also a departure from the succinct character observations that brought the young artist the opportunity in the first place.

The Incredible Hulk Returns (1988)/The Trial of the Incredible Hulk (1989) [2 Disc Set]; The Death of the Incredible Hulk (1990); The Incredible Hulk (1996) – DVDs

June 17, 2003Posted in1980s, 1990s, Action, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Espionage, Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Superhero

THE INCREDIBLE HULK RETURNS
**/**** Image B- Sound B Extras A+
starring Bill Bixby, Lou Ferrigno, Lee Purcell, Jack Colvin
written by Nicholas Corea
directed by Bill Bixby & Nicholas Corea

THE TRIAL OF THE INCREDIBLE HULK
*/**** Image B- Sound B Extras A+
starring Bill Bixby, Lou Ferrigno, Rex Smith, John Rhys-Davies
written by Gerald Di Pego
directed by Bill Bixby

by Walter Chaw It all comes back in a rush, the crosshairs fixing David Banner’s (Bill Bixby) face, the breathless narration summarizing the whole of the creation story in ninety seconds, the shots of long-haired Lou Ferrigno, in full body paint, embodying the rage and frustration of the flower-power generation in all its ripped-jean glory. Punked with a horse’s dose of gamma radiation, mild-mannered Dr. Banner turns into a ball of flexing id that gets most wroth until running across a kitten or something and calming down. Jekyll and Hyde for the “me” generation; that a research scientist disinterested in the particulars of cashing in turns into a giant green ball of type-A is one avenue for discussion, though a better one is the fact that Banner represents in a real way the idea of hope and compassion in a time more interested in “Hulk smash”–making the moldy Marvel hero a potentially good match for the reflective sensibilities of Ang Lee. That Banner’s pacifist nature is always defeated by his “anger” speaks volumes about the inevitability of the metamorphosis of hippie to yuppie, as well as the death of a dream that transformation encompasses.

Don’t Say No Before You’ve Seen the Bloke: FFC Interviews Bruce Beresford

June 14, 2003Posted in2000s, Australia, Authors: Walter Chaw, Interviews

BberesfordinterviewtitleJune 15, 2003|A large man in a rumpled suit with a large clutch of papers and a VHS screener tucked underneath one arm, Bruce Beresford, the Australian director of some of the best films of the past thirty years (and some of the worst films of the last ten), is the model of expansive, self-deprecating charm. An experienced opera director and a member of the Aussie New Wave, which began filling the void in the late-’70s and into the ’80s left by the American cinema succumbing to the call of corporate-fuelled decision-making, Mr. Beresford–whose made-for-cable epic And Starring Pancho Villa as Himself is set to debut in the near future–sat down with me at the 12th Aspen Shortsfest to talk about everything from the topicality of his Breaker Morant to the inexplicability of his Double Jeopardy.  I started with the underseen Beresford gem The Fringe Dwellers.

Spider-Man (2002) [Full Screen Special Edition + Superbit] – DVDs

June 13, 2003Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: Sam Raimi, DVD, Sci-Fi, Spider-Man, Superhero

***½/****
SE – Image C Sound A- Extras B
SUPERBIT – Image A Sound A (DTS) A- (DD) Commentary B
starring Tobey Maguire, Willem Dafoe, Kirsten Dunst, James Franco
screenplay by David Koepp
directed by Sam Raimi

Spidermansbitcap1

by Walter Chaw Sam Raimi’s banana yellow, 1973 Dodge 88 Oldsmobile is Uncle Ben’s (Cliff Robertson, himself the happy–however briefly–subject of a lab experiment in 1968’s Charley) ride in Spider-Man, and it is as canny and appropriate a cameo as any since Hitchcock’s greedy quaff of a champagne flute in Notorious. The good news is, the appearance of said vehicle is as clever as the rest of Spider-Man, that rare variety of modern popular film boasting of subtext and tricky riptides tackling puberty and abrupt Oedipal splits with good humour, insight, and grace. If not for the abominable CGI (really only overused in two scenes), I would have a hard time finding fault with Spider-Man, the model comic book movie in its surprisingly dark tone, lively pace, shrewd performances, sense of humour, and sly intelligence.

Hollywood Homicide (2003)

June 13, 2003Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Theatrical, Thriller

**/****
starring Harrison Ford, Josh Hartnett, Keith David, Lena Olin
screenplay by Robert Souza & Ron Shelton
directed by Ron Shelton

by Walter Chaw The kind of movie where a cop who calls himself “Smokey” is referring to Smokey Robinson (more to the point, the kind of movie where Smokey Robinson makes a cameo), Ron Shelton’s Hollywood Homicide is a diary of decline made by aging filmmakers and aimed at an aging audience. Shelton returns to the old guy/young guy/slut dynamic of Bull Durham while Harrison Ford turns in what is possibly the first “old guy” performance of his career–one that pings poignantly off his patented “weary bemusement” shtick before a finale (a comedy of humiliation) that functions as the only part of the film that really works. Sandwiched between the standard buddy/too-convenient-crime caper formula set-up and that deliriously good conclusion is a laboured exercise in forced bonhomie and a mysterious existential melancholy that feels a great deal like a tired exhalation. Hollywood Homicide is an extraordinarily average film that has something of a distinct, dark intimation nudging at its corners. A shame the Ron Shelton of today is not the Ron Shelton of Cobb.

Basic (2003) – DVD

June 12, 2003Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, DVD, Mystery, Thriller

*½/**** Image B Sound A Extras B-
starring John Travolta, Connie Nielsen, Samuel L. Jackson, Brian Van Holt
screenplay by James Vanderbilt
directed by John McTiernan

by Walter Chaw It occurred to me about midway through Basic that director John McTiernan, having nowhere to go but up after last year’s amusingly noxious Rollerball, was taking a page from the Michael Bay book of filmmaking before realizing that Bay had the McTiernan school (the McTiernan of Die Hard and Predator) to thank for the whole of his austere career. The Hollywood shooting match is an incestual Moebius strip, it seems, and for who was once the best action director in the United States to find himself a hollow shade of not only his past glory, but also Bay, is depressing beyond words. Which is not to say that Basic doesn’t start out extremely well: For a full minute, the picture provides a brief history of the French attempt at digging a canal in Panama in the 1880s scored to Bizet’s Carmen; the problem is that by the end of Basic, the only justification for the Carmen cue is that it’s also packed to the gills with bull.

Dumb and Dumberer: When Harry Met Lloyd (2003)

June 12, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Theatrical, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Eric Christian Olsen, Derek Richardson, Luis Guzmán, Eugene Levy
screenplay by Robert Brenner & Troy Miller
directed by Troy Miller

Dumbanddumbererby Walter Chaw Harry (Derek Richardson) and Lloyd (Eric Christian Olsen) are imbecile best friends played by two young actors doing their best (which is pretty good) Jeff Daniels and Jim Carrey impersonations. Meet-cute’ing in a high school being bilked by an evil administrator (Eugene Levy) and his lunch lady squeeze (Cheri Oteri), the pair tick off the litany of Farrelly-inspired gross-out gags with neither the heart nor the timing. Asians are made great sport of in an antiquated sort of way that isn’t so much offensive as slack, scat-like material is smeared all over a bathroom, Bob Saget gets a paycheck, and Mimi Rogers makes out with Rachel Nichols in a Hef grotto. On the plus side, its entendre-laden script isn’t actually worse than Down With Love‘s.

Mad About You: The Complete Second Season (1993-1994) – DVD

June 11, 2003Posted in1990s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, DVD, Romance, Television

Image C- Sound B
"Murray's Tale", "Bing Bang Boom", "Bedfellows", "Married to the Job", "So I Married a Hair Murderer", "An Unplanned Child", "Natural History", "Surprise", "A Pair of Hearts", "It's a Wrap", "Edna Returns," "Paul Is Dead", "Same Time Next Week", "The Late Show", "Virtual Reality", "Cold Feet", "Instant Karma", "The Tape", "Love Letters", "The Last Scampi", "Disorientation", "Storms We Cannot Weather", "Up All Night", "With this Ring Parts I & II"

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Right up there with crop circles and the Bermuda Triangle, one of the great unexplained phenomena of our time is the long and storied success of the '90s sitcom "Mad About You". Somehow its cloying, sub-Woody Allen New York-isms touched a nerve with the public to make it a ratings winner, but it's a collection of fuzzy relationship humour too nice to grab the sensibilities of this viewer. Next to something like "Seinfeld" (whose namesake was constantly being compared–favourably–to "Mad About You"'s star and co-creator Paul Reiser), the show lacked the goods necessary to limp to the end of one season, let alone the seven it would eventually clock.

Film Freak Central does the Sixth Aurora Asian Film Festival

June 10, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, China, Comedy, Documentary, Drama, Film Festivals, Hong Kong, Japan, Philippines, Romance, South Korea, Thailand

Aurorafestpagelogo6thJune 11, 2003|by Walter Chaw There’s a genuine sense of community engendered by the Aurora Asian Film Festival, down on East Colfax where a great deal has been done to make an old community feel intimate and inviting. Old-growth trees dot the sidewalks and nice cobbled walks bisect the intersections. A lot of construction along Colfax reminds that this area may boom if we ever get Democratic leadership back in office, and a lot of uniformed police officers remind that until we do, economic revitalization is sort of holding its breath down here. On the last night of the festival, I moderated a Q&A with director Gil Portes after an exceedingly well-received screening of his tedious film Small Voices; just before that, my wife and I had dinner at my favourite diner (Pete’s Kitchen) and then dessert at a little Mexican bar across the way that not only had no waitresses who spoke English, but also no menus (and Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes playing in Spanish on a beat-up television (it’s better that way)). Nothing like a little cultural displacement to get the juices flowing.

Broadway Melody of 1940 (1940) – DVD

June 10, 2003Posted in1940s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, DVD, Musical

***/**** Image A- Sound A Extras C+
starring Fred Astaire, Eleanor Powell, George Murphy, Frank Morgan
screenplay by Leon Gordon and George Oppenhemer
directed by Norman Taurog

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover If you are like me, you will like Broadway Melody of 1940–that is to say, if you sing the praises of the Hollywood musical. If you thrill to pointless dance numbers and unlikely romantic pairings. If you rejoice at absurdly lavish sets and novelty numbers involving sailors and palm trees. If you have ever hated someone for "not getting" musicals, or wanted to punch someone for complaining that the numbers happen "for no reason," content that there is never a reason beyond the pleasure of the moment and the beauty of aesthetic movement. If you are not, God forbid, John Grierson.

Franchise Boogie: The Jungle Book 2; The Brady Bunch Movie; A Very Brady Sequel; Terminator 2: Judgment Day; Die Another Day; The Animatrix

June 9, 2003Posted in1990s, 2000s, Action, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Disney, DVD, Family, James Bond, Musical, Sci-Fi

THE JUNGLE BOOK 2 (2003)
*/**** Image A Sound A Extras C
screenplay by Karl Geurs
directed by Steve Trenbirth

THE BRADY BUNCH MOVIE (1995)
***/**** Image B+ Sound A-
starring Shelley Long, Gary Cole, Christine Taylor, Christopher Daniel Barnes
screenplay by Bonnie Turner & Terry Turner
directed by Betty Thomas

A VERY BRADY SEQUEL (1996)
***½/**** Image B Sound A-
starring Shelley Long, Gary Cole, Christopher Daniel Barnes, Christine Taylor
screenplay by Harry Elfont & Deborah Kaplan and James Berg & Stan Zimmerman
directed by Arlene Sanford

TERMINATOR 2: JUDGMENT DAY (1991)
***½/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras A
starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Linda Hamilton, Edward Furlong, Robert Patrick
screenplay by James Cameron & William Wisher Jr.
directed by James Cameron

DIE ANOTHER DAY (2002)
**/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras A-
starring Pierce Brosnan, Halle Berry, Toby Stephens, Rosamund Pike
screenplay by Neal Purvis & Robert Wade
directed by Lee Tamahori

THE ANIMATRIX (2003)
***/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras A
written by The Wachowski Brothers*, Yoshiaki Kawajiri, Kôji Morimoto, Shinichirô Watanabe, Peter Chung
directed by Peter Chung, Andrew R. Jones, Yoshiaki Kawajiri, Takeshi Koike, Mahiro Maeda, Kôji Morimoto, Shinichirô Watanabe

(*We defer to screen billing but recognize this is inaccurate.-Ed., 2016)

by Bill Chambers The studios apply their stratagem for summertime theatrical releases to DVD in 2003, having overcrowded video store shelves this month and last with sequels and offshoots to the degree that, a few weeks from today, you will notice that a Matrix film and a Terminator film are vying for attention both at home and at the multiplex. As Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle, Bad Boys II, and Legally Blonde 2 touch down in theatres, Die Another Day, The Jungle Book 2, and the Brady Bunch movies land on DVD, and then there are the cross-promotions: It seems like everyone wants a piece of the fallout from Universal’s big-screen Hulk, with Fox, Buena Vista, Anchor Bay, and Universal itself issuing “Hulk”-branded discs prior to the feature film’s June 20th opening. Synergy this aggressive may well erase the line separating legitimate media from its ancillaries yet; Fox takes a bold step in this direction with the upcoming From Justin to Kelly, slated to debut on disc a mere six weeks past its theatrical premiere date, thus rendering the latter a glorified trailer for the former.

This Is Alexander, He Makes Movies: FFC Interviews Alexander Payne

June 7, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Interviews

ApayneinterviewtitleJune 8, 2003|Eyes glowering under a shock of black hair, Alexander Payne, tall and angular, strikes a sort of middle-American Neil Gaiman figure, cutting through the crowds gathered for the 12th Aspen Shortsfest with authority and something like diffidence. Meeting in the lobby of the Wheeler Opera House, we go off in search of a shot of espresso; along the way he corrects that he didn't study Spanish Philosophy in college, but Spanish Philology; makes it a point to punctuate some statements with a companionable squeeze of my arm; and then says something sort of curious: "I don't know why you'd want to talk to me, Walter, I don't have anything interesting to say." I chuckled, of course, but he was deadly serious and would repeat the statement a couple of times. Judging it to be neither a strategy to avoid interviews nor a way to disarm a would-be interrogator, I took it as weariness with the entire junket/publicist/interview process.

Dark Blue (2002) [Special Edition] – DVD

June 6, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, DVD, Germany, Thriller, UK

**/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B-
starring Kurt Russell, Scott Speedman, Ving Rhames, Brendan Gleeson
screenplay by David Ayer
directed by Ron Shelton

by Walter Chaw Lost in the familiarity of critics calling films combinations of two similar films is the truism that, in all likelihood, these films were pitched exactly the same way to stuffed wallets lacking in much imagination. In this spirit, Dark Blue is Training Day meets L.A. Confidential–to that end, Training Day scribe David Ayer wrote the screenplay from a story by James Ellroy, author of L.A. Confidential the novel. In other words, Dark Blue is a chimera composed of the worst parts of a pair of better films–a green rookie/corrupt grizzled vet police thriller set in Los Angeles (Training Day) that, banking on the borrowed gravity of historical events to lend itself a measure of importance, features an evil Irish mentor/supercop responsible for the picture’s central crime (L.A. Confidential) and a tired storyline riddled with exhausted characters (a showboat role, a thankless role) and racial conveniences. It’s by now fair to wonder if director Ron Shelton will make another Blaze, let alone another Bull Durham.

Man on the Train (2002); Chaos (2001); And Now… Ladies and Gentlemen… (2002); The Son (2002)

June 5, 2003Posted in****/****, 2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Belgium, Comedy, Crime, Directors: Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, Drama, France, Germany, Japan, Mystery, Romance, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

L’Homme du train
***/****
starring Jean Rochefort, Johnny Hallyday, Jean-François Stévenin, Charlie Nelson
screenplay by Claude Klotz
directed by Patrice Leconte

CHAOS
*/****
starring Catherine Frot, Vincent Lindon, Rachida Brakni, Line Renaud
written and directed by Coline Serreau

AND NOW… LADIES AND GENTLEMEN…
***½/****
starring Jeremy Irons, Patricia Kaas, Thierry Lhermitte, Alessandra Martines
screenplay by Claude Lelouch, Pierre Leroux & Pierre Uytterhoeven
directed by Claude Lelouch

Le fils
****/****
starring Olivier Gourmet, Morgan Marinne, Isabella Soupart, Nassim Hassaïni
written and directed by Jean-Pierre Dardenne & Luc Dardenne

by Walter Chaw After a brief period where French cinema seemed exclusively interested in the ugliness and violence festering in its anti-Semitic margins, what with pictures as variegated as Baise-moi, Trouble Every Day, My Wife is an Actress, and indeed, Gasper Noé’s sensationalistic Irréversible (which demonstrates a continuing fascination with a tumultuous French cinema in extremis), the old guard begins to reassert itself with its own tales of the underbelly of life displacing the façade of the comfortable upper class. Patrice Leconte’s new film Man on the Train (L’Homme du train) is reserved and slight while Chaos by Coline Serreau (who was born the same year as Leconte, as it happens) tries to soften the cruelty of much of modern French cinema by overlaying it with a patina of feminist uplift and misplaced social satire. Films like Rohmer’s The Lady and the Duke and Godard’s In Praise of Love attempt to draw a line between the nouvelle and the digital age (and Chaos is shot in ugly DV), and pictures like Rivette’s wonderful Va Savoir and now Claude Lelouch’s And Now... Ladies and Gentlemen… act as surveys and auto-critique of the medium itself. With these three pictures, the meta-critical instinct–something of a hallmark of French culture in general and cinema in particular–finds a new voice in, ironically, its older generation of directors. Somewhat apart from all of that is the Dardenne Brothers’ The Son (Le Fils), which is on its own stylistically but looks thematically for common ground in its own tale of obsession and reconciliation.