****/**** screenplay by John August and
Pamela Pettler and Caroline Thompson directed by Tim Burton & Mike Johnson
by
Walter Chaw A self-contained, melancholic, dulcet little ode to love
and sacrifice, Tim Burton's stop-motion Corpse Bride
is also a sly stab at class systems, a knowing tribute to both the
Hammer horror run and the Universal monster tradition, and another of
Burton's evocations of German Expressionism. As fairy tale, it rivals
his Edward Scissorhands, as underworld fantasia,
his Beetlejuice, and as classic studio-bound
horror, his Sleepy Hollow--in many ways, in fact,
Burton's return to the stop-motion of his breakthrough short Vincent
(and his co-produced The Nightmare Before Christmas)
feels like a figurative homecoming to the technique that suits him
best. William Blake described an "infernal method" in his theory of
creation wherein the artist touched every page of every print of his
work to infuse it, ineffably, with the hand of its creator, and so
stop-motion, with every movement manipulated painstakingly by the human
hand, is infused with a Romanticist's idea of (possibly Satanic) vigor.
It's animation that gives the term its "soul"--there's something vital
about Corpse Bride that has nothing to do with its
story, and watching it, you come to the realization that the reason so
much of Burton's work feels airless or dated (or that his stars are so
perverse) is that his way with puppets translates only uneasily to his
way with actors.
*/**** starring Matt Damon, Heath Ledger, Peter Stormare, Lena Headey screenplay by Ehren Kruger directed by Terry Gilliam
by
Walter Chaw A film with all the drama and flair of a Tuesday Morning
tchotchke shop, The Brothers Grimm is the only
Terry Gilliam film since Jabberwocky that I've
actively disliked. It's the star-crossed director's most conventional,
most compromised work, the first to betray the behind-the-scenes
strife--the desperation that has defined Gilliam's career to this
point. Already pre-emptively disowning the finished product (citing
various impasses with the Brothers Weinstein), Gilliam doesn't, this
time around, have the aegis of a subversive finished product to hide
behind. There may be a lot of people responsible for what's wrong with The
Brothers Grimm, but the bulk of the responsibility for its
failure is parked square at Gilliam's doorstep--and the rest of it
belongs to nitwit screenwriter Ehren Kruger, whose flavour-of-the-month
status might finally be souring. It's perhaps unfair to expect the
director to constantly pull his Waterloos out of the woods, but The
Brothers Grimm is finally the film that his detractors have
always accused him of making: busy, unfocused, obnoxious, and lousy.
*½/****
starring Sandra Bullock, Ryan Gosling, Michael Pitt, Agnes Bruckner
screenplay by Tony Gayton
directed by Barbet Schroeder
by Walter Chaw A shallow Leopold and Loeb riff
crossed with a
heaping helping of the kind of law-chick bullstuff made popular by the
horrible novels of Patricia Cornwell, Murder by Numbers
trudges along with its tired formula repertoire like a funeral
procession for the genre. For a spell, it feels as if the film will
transcend the unpromising irony of its title with a female protagonist
painted as unflattering and tortured, but by the time the final credits
roll after an unforgivable third act, Murder by Numbers
washes out as just another imminently forgettable movie starring Sandra
Bullock.
**/**** Image
B Sound B starring Takeshi Kitano, Kotomi Kyono, Kayoko Kishimoto, Ren Osugi
written and directed by Takeshi Kitano
by Walter Chaw
Midway between Fellini's 8½ and Bob Fosse's All
That Jazz is Japanese auteur Takeshi Kitano's Takeshis',
a film that indicates with its possessive title that it belongs to both
the director (Takeshi Kitano) and star ("Beat" Takeshi); acknowledging
that they're one and the same (Kitano is billed as the former when he
directs, the latter when he performs), they each have a function and
persona unique unto themselves. The burden of that division, which
Takeshi has taken on since midway through Violent Cop,
is illustrated in the picture as a series of fractures that meld
reality with televisual reality and filmic reality--nothing so
ostentatious as Sven Nykvist and Ingmar Bergman reflected in a mirror
in Persona, but going so far as to have "Beat"
Takeshi, dressed as a clown, refer to Takeshi Kitano as "that asshole."
The omniscience of the director is referred to often in the text as
casting directors (rather, actors playing casting directors, or casting
directors playing themselves) remark that Yakuza never look like Kitano
(who has made something of a name for himself as a Yakuza: he's a
little like the Japanese Robert De Niro)--and yet the central narrative
of the picture then involves the slow evolution of the actor who looks
like Kitano into Takeshi Kitano's Yakuza persona. Kitano is thus
marking the difference between the devices of the director and the
relatively passive objectification that is the primary definition of an
actor--between the godhead inscrutable and the subject humiliated, as
well as the eventual bleed-through between the roles actors assume and
the mold into which perception forces them.
***/**** starring Keiko Kishi, Yoshiko Sakuma, Sayuri Yoshinaga, Yuko Kotegawa screenplay by Kon Ichikawa, based on the novel by Junichiro Tanizaki directed by Kon Ichikawa
by Angelo Muredda "So
many things have happened in this house," middle child Sachiko (Yoshiko
Sakuma) tells her older sister Tsuruko (Keiko Kishi) near the end of The Makioka Sisters, an expansive period piece in miniature that could be churlishly
described as a film about the sorts of mundane things that happen in houses. In
settling down to adapt Junichiro Tanizaki's 500-page tome about prewar Japan in
a state of profound social and economic transition, glimpsed only through the
intersecting marital and financial crises of the titular siblings, writer-director Kon Ichikawa
inherited a difficult task, best appreciated by pausing to consider that there's
no English equivalent of George Eliot's Middlemarch (though Sam Mendes keeps trying). If historical
epics are hard to translate to a medium that doesn't allow for marginal notes
and flow charts to keep track of the minor players, the cloistered setting of
domestic ones are doubly tricky. Consider that Joe Wright's recent and thoroughly
rotten stab at Anna Karenina adapts the first part of the novel as a
self-reflexive essay about how difficult it is to dramatize tragedies that take
place in drawing rooms, and the rest as an utterly banal dramatization of a
tragedy set in drawing rooms. Ichikawa's solution, after his own flirtation
with hyper-theatricality in the first reel (which unveils the ensemble in a
series of spatially disconcerting close-ups, then medium shots establishing the siblings' relatives ages), is largely to mine the charismatic reserves of
his all-star cast.
***/**** starring starring Goran Slavković, Jasmin Geljo written and directed by Igor Drljaca
by Angelo Muredda 2012 was an unusually
rich year for Canadian cinema, from the strangely fruitful pairing of David
Cronenberg and Don DeLillo in Cosmopolis--though it comes from DeLillo, is there a more
Cronenbergian line about deformity than the doctor's insistence that Robert
Pattinson let his mole "express itself"?--to the near perfect genre
vehicle of Michael Dowse's Goon.
Both films are legibly Canadian in terms of content, despite Cosmopolis's faux-Manhattan setting, but one of the most
heartening developments in last year's crop was a turn to formalism that might
confound expectations about what our movies are supposed to look and sound
like. Weird
Sex and Snowshoes,
both Katherine Monk's book and Jill Sharpe's documentary adaptation of it,
sketched a history of Canadian cinema through its dourness of tone and harsh
thematic machinations--necrophilia, the malevolent north, and so on--so successfully
as to canonize that image. Yet films like Panos Cosmatos's Beyond
the Black Rainbow and now Igor Drljaca's
Krivina (which debuted at last year's TIFF) are a nice reminder that there's also a sharp
formalist strain, à la
Michael Snow, for which such thematic surveys can't quite account.
**½/**** Image A Sound A Extras A starring Ben Stiller, Owen Wilson, Will Ferrell, Christine Taylor
screenplay by Drake Sather & Ben Stiller and John Hamburg
directed by Ben Stiller
by Walter Chaw Ben Stiller has a very
particular genius for satirical imitation. When he says that he based
Derek Zoolander on "some cross between Jason Priestly and Luke Perry,"
one can be sure that the offspring is an uncomfortably dead-on
collection of insouciant pouts, long blank-takes, and dim-witted
pronouncements. We know that Stiller is good at destroying celebrity;
the bigger question is can an extended sketch featuring one of his
burlesques sustain interest and consistently inspire laughter? The
answer is "fitfully," so yes and no.
KOYAANISQATSI (1983) ***/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B+ directed by Godfrey Reggio
POWAQQATSI (1988) **/**** Image A Sound A Extras B directed by Godfrey Reggio
NAQOYQATSI (2002) ½*/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B- written and directed by Godfrey Reggio
click any image to enlarge
by Bryant Frazer There's nothing quite
like Koyaanisqatsi. Some six or seven years in the making, the mid-1980s
arthouse favourite was a genuine screen spectacle that gave audiences a taste
of the avant-garde and elevated Philip Glass to the status of popular
musician. It's the 1970s brainchild of Godfrey Reggio, a progressive activist
and community organizer who lived in New Mexico and took a dim view of
industrialization in general and the information revolution in particular.
Accordingly, it exalts the natural landscape, recoils from the computer-chip
gridwork of the modern city, and wallows piteously in the human condition.
**/****
Image A+
Sound A
Extras C+ screenplay
by John August, based on a screenplay by Lenny Ripps directed
by Tim Burton
click
any image to enlarge
by
Bill Chambers SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Back in the
early-Eighties, Tim Burton was
part of the conveyor belt at the Walt Disney Company, cranking out
artwork for
films like The Fox and the Hound and The
Black Cauldron. But
drawing cuddly animals proved as bad a fit for Burton as it did for R.
Crumb,
and the studio eventually allowed him to separate from the pack, giving
him a
chance to hone his voice that was kind of unprecedented. Under the
Disney
umbrella, Burton produced two black-and-white shorts: the animated Vincent,
a sweet and Seussian ode to his idol, Vincent Price (who narrated); and
the
live-action Frankenweenie, about a boy who uses
mad science to bring his departed canine back to life. The latter
scandalized Disney (too "scary," plus dead dogs and black-and-white
have got to be roughly equivalent anathema to kiddie fare), and plans
were
shelved to attach the film to prints of Pinocchio
in 1984. Three decades later, Disney confidently bankrolled a
feature-length remake of Frankenweenie,
stop-motion animated this time but still in black-and-white, and still
with an
undead dog at the crux of the narrative. What changed in the interim?
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