*½/**** Image B- Sound B Extras A+
starring Matt McCoy, Glenn Plummer, Corbin Bernsen, Dartanyan Edmonds
screenplay by Steve Latshaw
directed by Jay Andrews
by Walter Chaw I was torn, when trying to choose the definitive quote from Jay “Beastmaster 2” Andrews’s Rangers, between:
***½/**** Image B+ Sound A Extras A-
starring Damon Wayans, Savion Glover, Jada Pinkett-Smith, Tommy Davidson
written and directed by Spike Lee
by Travis Mackenzie Hoover I can see from the negative press surrounding Bamboozled that Spike Lee has supposedly overshot the mark. Nobody, they say, really likes the racist imagery of the minstrel show anymore, and they say that Lee’s insistence that people might pretty much disqualifies his film from serious attention. But I wonder. I remember being in a college-dorm common room watching a horribly racist production number in the Marx Brothers’ A Day at the Races, to hear one viewer shrug it off simply because the participants “looked happy,” and I remember having a roommate who owned a publicity knick-knack of a black baby bursting out of an orange who had no idea how it could be construed as offensive.
**/**** Image A+ Sound A
starring Glenn Close, Frances McDormand, Pauline Collins, Cate Blanchett
written and directed by Bruce Beresford
by Walter Chaw In 1976, Polish composer Henryk Gorecki composed his stunning orchestral and choral piece Symphony No.3 Op.36 “Symfonia pie¶ni ¿a³osnych” (“Symphony for Sorrowful Souls”), a collection of smaller movements comprising, much like Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana, varied texts both sacred and found. Among those sources used by Gorecki are a 15th-century lamentation of the Holy Cross Monastery; a folk song from the Opole region; and, most specifically, a young prisoner’s inscription on the wall of her cell in Zakopane’s Gestapo prison.
FFC rating: 8/10
by André Bazin
by Walter Chaw André Bazin is one of the most influential figures in cinema, not for his actions behind a camera, but for his actions as an active spectator–as that most loathsome and vital of creatures, the critic. A founder of the legendary arts magazine Cahiers du Cinéma, Bazin became the de facto father of the French Nouvelle Vague movement and a nearly literal father to director François Truffaut, whom he saved more than once from imprisonment and impoverishment. Writers employed by Cahiers du Cinéma include the “big five” French New Wave directors: Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol, Jacques Rivette and Eric Rohmer. Each began his career in cinema among its staunchest critics, and each would later endeavour to redefine film as a more “novelistic” and “authentic” method of expression.
*/**** Image A+ Sound B+ Extras D
starring Ryan Phillipe, Rachael Leigh Cook, Claire Forlani, Tim Robbins
screenplay by Howard Franklin
directed by Peter Howitt
by Walter Chaw A fitfully entertaining throwback to the Pakula paranoia thrillers of the Seventies, Peter Howitt’s Antitrust is a cross between the techno-geekery of Wargames, the ‘gifted youngster getting a crash course in Machiavellian corruption’ of The Firm, the steal-the-air adolescent angst anthem of Pump Up the Volume, and the ‘rebel teen-geniuses unite’ malarkey of the simply-abominable Hackers. The great shame and irony of Antitrust is that after all the high concept–the creative use of sesame seeds, the Citizen Kane-esque skewering of a media tycoon, the constant reiterations of the hero’s intelligence–the film remains a conventional addition to the thriller genre that is slightly better than it should be because of its audacious goofiness, but far worse than it could have been because of its failure to be goofier. Antitrust, in other words, suffers from what I call the Wizard of Oz malady: no heart, no brain, no courage.
*½/**** Image A Sound B
starring Piper Perabo, Jessica Pare, Mischa Barton, Jackie Burroughs
screenplay by Judith Thompson, based on the novel The Wives of Bath by Susan Swan
directed by Léa Pool
by Walter Chaw A teen-lesbian Phenomenon without the maggots and psychotic chimp, Lost and Delirious is gawky, breathy, and self-important–just like a teenage girl, I guess, which makes the film difficult to criticize in a conventional way. It does such a good job with the portentousness of that mawkish Shakespeare-quoting period in a young woman's life that some will and have mistaken its gaucherie for a portrayal of gaucherie. But mostly what Lost and Delirious succeeds in doing is helping The Virgin Suicides and its portrait of the dulcet, ephemeral cult of childhood impress even more by comparison.
**/**** Image A- Sound B+ Commentary B-
starring Lara Flynn Boyle, Stephen Baldwin, Josh Charles, Alexis Arquette
written and directed by Andrew Fleming
by Bill Chambers I first saw Threesome during its theatrical run, which coincided with the end of my freshman year at university. I liked the film enough back then, for what it didn't reflect of my experiences it evoked, and its characters suggested people I had met at school, maybe myself at that point, in the exaggerated, nay, grotesque manner of political cartoons. Which is a scary thought seeing Threesome again some seven years later: maturity (mine?) recasts its protagonists in a dark, contemptible light.
if I die before I wake
***/**** Image C+ Sound C
starring Stephanie Jones, Muse Watson, Michael McCleery, Coryanne Sennett
written and directed by Brian Katkin
by Bill Chambers If I Die Before I Wake is not a guilty pleasure (and definitely not a pleasure, period), but it did provoke a very guilty reaction from me: one of admiration. Other critics have dismissed it outright, calling it cheap, classist, exploitative, even sick. Guess what? It is all of those things, yet I found the film to be an efficient button-pusher with impressively acute access to our emotions, and there is combustible tension in our heroine's plight that had me practically praying aloud for her safety. If I Die Before I Wake, unlike so much of modern schlock (believe me, I've seen my quota), is panic-inducing, which isn't nothing.
**½/**** Image A+ Sound A
starring Matt Damon, Henry Thomas, Lucas Black, Penélope Cruz
screenplay by Ted Tally, based on the novel by Cormac McCarthy
directed by Billy Bob Thornton
by Travis Mackenzie Hoover The difference between Cormac McCarthy's novel All the Pretty Horses and its current, honourable film adaptation is a matter of weighting. There's nothing in the movie that doesn't happen in the novel, and the film's golden, sun-burnished look is gentle and humane. The film loves its wayward characters and sympathizes with their plight, but when it's over, it turns out to have merely been a story–a series of events with a dramatic payoff. The body is always imperilled, but the soul is never touched; it never puts together the motives the characters have in protecting their honour and desires, and it never suggests that there are powers beyond their control that force them to make decisions. While All the Pretty Horses is always friendly and never dull, there is a certain letdown in its refusal to make connections to larger forces and its clumsiness with the novel's very powerful symbolism–which, however questionable it might be, has a lesser dramatic force than its literary namesake.
Image A Sound A- Extras B+
"The Blessing Way," "Paper Clip," "D.P.O.," "Clyde Bruckman's Final Repose," "The List," "2Shy," "The Walk," "Oubliette," "Nisei," "731," "Revelations," "War of the Coprophages," "Syzygy," "Grotesque," "Piper Maru," "Apocrypha," "Pusher," "Teso Dos Bichos," "Hell Money," "Jose Chung's 'From Outer Space'," "Avatar," "Quagmire," "Wetwired," "Talitha Cumi"
by Bill Chambers They're folded compactly in a box, similar to those gift packages of Life Savers I used to find in my stocking on Christmas morning. Likewise, they inspire trial-and-error taste tests (I never ate the butterscotch ones), the names often betraying little about the flavours. I'm talking about the seven-disc/24-episode collection of "The X Files"' third season, which bows on DVD a year after Season One did and arguably improves upon the high standards set by it. It helps that this is the series in top form.
****/**** Image A Sound A Extras A
starring Richard Dreyfuss, Teri Garr, Melinda Dillon, Francois Truffaut
written and directed by Steven Spielberg
by Bill Chambers If his Jaws was about the Fourth of July, then Steven Spielberg followed it up with something like the holiday itself. Close Encounters of the Third Kind, a soft-touched yet uncompromising hypothesis of benevolent flying saucers, seems structurally patterned after that day: domestic chaos, then military parades, then fireworks. It’s a film now in its third incarnation; Columbia TriStar’s DVD version, like their recent-vintage LaserDisc that preceded it, contains a Spielberg-sanctioned melding of the 1977 and 1980 theatrical releases, the latter the controversial “Special Edition” that effectively ransacked the imagination of fans. The latest rendition, which appears to have adopted the label “The Collector’s Edition,” is nothing short of masterful.
The Substitute: Failure Is Not an Option
*½/**** Image C Sound B Extras B-
starring Treat Williams, Angie Everhart, Patrick Kilpatrick, Bill Nunn
screenplay by Dan Gurskis
directed by Robert Radler
by Walter Chaw Since being robbed of an Oscar for his performance in Sidney Lumet’s underestimated Prince of the City, Treat Williams has been engaged in a terrifying and vengeful rampage of direct-to-video schlock and woeful cinema (The Deep End of the Ocean). Taking over the decidedly unimposing titular role of “the substitute” after Tom Berenger’s surprise cult favourite inversion of the tired Blackboard Jungle/Dangerous Minds mold–fish-out-of-water teachers beating the tar out of inner-city youths–Treat Williams makes his third appearance as the teacher we’d love to torment…but better not.
**/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras D+
starring Sean Connery, F. Murray Abraham, Anna Paquin, Busta Rhymes
screenplay by Mike Rich
directed by Gus Van Sant
by Walter Chaw Not content to play Salieri on film just once, F. Murray Abraham, after years of toiling away in decidedly lowbrow productions subsequent to Amadeus, has returned to the role that made him fitfully famous. It’s interesting to me that an actor who found fleeting celebrity (as a composer who borrowed fame very briefly) would choose to make a ‘comeback’ portraying a once almost-famous writer/now frustrated teacher of English at a snotty prep school. Still, given the level of relative originality in Finding Forrester, it’s not entirely unexpected that a secondary character played by a rather limited character actor is transplanted whole cloth from another film. On the other hand, something of a surprise is that Sean Connery would reprise his performance as an antisocial genius (who opens his heart to a creature of the Bronx) from Medicine Man, and that Gus Van Sant would try to resuscitate the flyblown carcass of Good Will Hunting by cleverly splicing it together with The Paper Chase.
***/**** Image A Sound A Extras B+
starring Adam Sandler, Patricia Arquette, Harvey Keitel, Rhys Ifans
screenplay by Tim Herlihy & Adam Sandler & Steven Brill
directed by Steven Brill
PLEASE NOTE: Little Nicky is unofficially the first title in New Line’s Infinifilm DVD line; we have not reviewed the Infinifilm-specific features of this disc.
by Bill Chambers Here’s a movie in which Heaven is ingeniously conceived as the inside of a birthday cake, and critics everywhere defaulted to the post-chic anti-Adam Sandler stance. And audiences proved unusually compliant with the faultfinders, given Sandler’s vast fanbase, flocking instead to Dr. Seuss’ How the Grinch Stole Christmas, whose proprietary endorsement is likely the result of funnelling millions in hush money directly into The Widow Geisel’s pocket. I’d be a hypocrite indeed if I didn’t disclose that I, too, turned the other cheek on Little Nicky when it opened in multiplexes last November, thus ignoring the holiday excursion with its own imagination, handsome cinematography (courtesy of Theo Van De Sande), palpable warmth, and a funny, estimable ensemble, led by Sandler as the titular son of Satan.
Dragons Forever
飛龍猛將
Fei lung mang jeung
***/**** Image C Sound A –
starring Jackie Chan, Samo Hung, Yuen Biao, Corey Yuen Kwai
screenplay by Szeto Cheuk Hon
directed by Sammo Hung & Corey Yuen
by Bill Chambers To my mind, the formation of “the three kung-fu-teers”–Sammo Hung, Jackie Chan, and Yuen Biao–was more of a shock than their eventual break-up. The latter two are portrayed as the former’s punching bags in Chan’s autobiography, I Am Jackie Chan, whose early chapters recount the Dickensian power structure at the China Drama Academy, known colloquially as the Peking Opera School. The school’s unforgiving master sanctioned his older pupils (collectively, “Big Brothers”) to administer swift, cruel punishments to the younger students; the wrath of Hung, the biggest Brother of them all (in body mass as well as reputation), seemed measureless and reserved explicitly for Chan and Biao. At least in Jackie’s memory.
**½/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Ewen Bremner, Chloe Sevigny, Werner Herzog, Evan Neumann
written and directed by Harmony Korine
by Walter Chaw Julien Bishop (Ewen Bremner, of Trainspotting) is schizophrenic, a stream-of-consciousness construct biding his time shambling along city streets, riding public transportation, and volunteering at a school for the blind. Aggressively disoriented and a sower of discomfort, Julien is not only a twisted Christ figure at the center of this most religious of Harmony Korine’s pictures, but a clear manifestation of Korine’s filmmaking philosophy.
***/**** Image A- Sound A Extras C
starring Linda Manz, Max Perlich, Jacob Reynolds, Chloe Sevigny
written and directed by Harmony Korine
by Walter Chaw Xenia, Ohio, America's middle-of-nowhere, is imagined by Harmony Korine (Kids) as the quintessence of Grant Wood's slightly canted take on the gothic at the heart of the mundane. It's a town out of step, recovering from a tornado which, an opening narration tells us, left people dead, cats and dogs dead, and houses ripped apart. In Gummo, his directorial debut, one of the tasks Korine sets for himself is detailing the psychological damage wrought on Xenia by two different forces of nature: the lingering emotional fallout from the almost-forgotten tornado; and the tragedy of being born with no advantageous DNA in an ever-diminishing gene pool.
****/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Michael Douglas, Tobey Maguire, Frances McDormand, Katie Holmes
screenplay by Steve Kloves, based on the novel by Michael Chabon
directed by Curtis Hanson
by Walter Chaw While safely cocooned in the lushly-padded walls of academia, I had as my advisor a Grady Tripp–a man I respected as a professor and as a friend. We exchanged books often, we talked a great deal about the obscure minutiae of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s life, and we argued over whether William and Dorothy Wordsworth were engaged in a seedy incestual entanglement. (Yes, Brad, they were.) I even suspect that there was a tattered, coffee-stained manuscript tucked in the top drawer of his desk. If you’ve ever had a professor who shaped your opinions and a good portion of your intellectual life, and if you were additionally lucky enough to call him a friend as well as a mentor, then you’re predisposed to liking Curtis Hanson’s Wonder Boys.
***/**** Image A Sound A
starring Marisa Tomei, Alfred Molina, Chazz Palminteri, Anjelica Huston
screenplay by Robin Swicord
directed by Mira Nair
by Walter Chaw Sensuous and lush with a hint of Isabel Allende’s magical realism in the bleeding of a man’s broken heart and a string of rose petals trailing a line along the belly of a new lover, Mira Nair’s lovely The Perez Family is all ripe colours, song, sex, honour, and dance. A long-lost father asks his wife upon their decades-long separation if their grown daughter remembers him: “She says she remembers dancing with you.” In The Perez Family, that’s only as it should be.
*½/**** Image B+ Sound A Extras B-
starring Jeffrey Donovan, Kim Director, Erica Leerhsen, Tristine Skyler
screenplay by Dick Beebe and Joe Berlinger
directed by Joe Berlinger
by Bill Chambers Despite the brainy posturing of director/co-writer Joe Berlinger, Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 will probably never be canonized in a sequel debate, that lunchtime activity of film freaks everywhere which has brought a nerdish ascendancy to, among the handful, The Godfather Part II and The Empire Strikes Back. Why? Well, for starters, it’s pretentious as hell; when the DVD liner notes–written by no less than Berlinger himself–for a fast-tracked cash-grab include such descriptive phrases as “mollify the cynics” and “post-modern approach,” you know you’re in for everything but a good time.