**/**** Image
A- Sound A starring Harrison Ford, Brad Pitt, Margaret Colin, Ruben Blades
screenplay by David Aaron Cohen & Vincent Patrick and Kevin
Jarre
directed by Alan J. Pakula
by Bill Chambers
One
of the intriguing consequences of a new home-video medium is that,
whether due to a paucity of selection or, in my case, professional
obligation, you wind up revisiting some marginal titles you never
thought you'd have cause to see again. Case in point: the final film
from the mercurial Alan J. Pakula, 1997's The Devil's Own,
which docks on Blu-ray as part of Sony's suddenly-aggressive catalogue
rollout. The kind of topical widescreen melodrama Hollywood trotted out
pretty regularly in the CinemaScope era, as well as the kind of glib
commentary on another nation's failures you'd expect from Edward Zwick
or Sydney Pollack before Pakula, the picture began life as a
typically-contentious Kevin Jarre script about a vicious, coke-snorting
IRA terrorist who crosses paths with a "hair-bag"--i.e., a cop still
walking the beat long past his prime--while on the lam in New York.
**½/**** starring Michael Brodie, Teresa Lynn, Raymond Delgado, Jonathan Ortiz screenplay by Michel Gondry, Paul Proch, Jeff Grimshaw directed by Michel Gondry
by Angelo MureddaThe We and the I opens with a throwback, an image that wouldn't be out of place in
Michel Gondry's distinctive music videos from the late-1990s, which were
themselves full of backward glances to the more rough-hewn early days of MTV
and old-school hip hop. Over the credits, a boombox modified into a miniature
bus rolls along the streets of the Bronx pulsing out Young MC's "Bust A
Move," until it's crushed by what's ostensibly the real thing, a city bus
packed with urban teens who make up Gondry's boisterous, gossiping, and
privately wounded nonprofessional cast. That's an interesting start, insofar as
it suggests that Gondry's obsession with whimsical props tinged with nostalgia
are about to be traded in for something more authentic, even as it implies a
bit cheekily that the "real" bus, taking a bunch of high-schoolers
home on the last day of school, is itself a roaming set on which to stage
semi-scripted exchanges between proper teens doubling as actors
and artistic partners.
***½/****
Image B+Sound
B+
Extras B- starring
Charles Chaplin, Martha Raye, Marilyn Nash, Isobel Elsom screenplay
by Charles Chaplin, based on an idea by Orson Welles directed
by Charles Chaplin
click any image to
enlarge
by
Bryant Frazer Charles Chaplin augmented his trademark mix
of physical comedy, sweetness, and lefty politics with a dose of
suspense
(borrowed, probably, from Hitchcock) and a sardonic worldview
(informed, maybe,
by film noir) in the playful, funny, but
ultimately downbeat Monsieur
Verdoux. In a scenario that originated with Orson Welles,
who receives an
"idea" credit, Henri Verdoux is a serial killer based on Henri
Landru, a French Bluebeard who seduced, married, and then murdered a
string of
Parisian women in order to liberate their assets. Chaplin plays Verdoux
as a
charming fiend whose demeanour incorporates the barest echo of the
Little
Tramp, but whose murderous M.O. recalled the director's own reputation
as a
womanizer.
***/****
Image B Sound B screenplay by Martin Rosen, based on the novel by Richard Adams
directed by Martin Rosen
by Walter Chaw Unsentimental and terrifying and set against
lovely, John Constable-esque watercolour backgrounds, Martin Rosen's
adaptation of the Richard Adams novel Watership Down
arose in that extended lull between Disney's heyday and its
late-Eighties resurrection. (This period also saw, in addition to
Rosen's film of Adams's The Plague Dogs, Rankin
& Bass's The Last Unicorn and Ralph Bakshi's
most productive period, which included 1978's The Lord of the
Rings.) Watership Down points to the
dwindled potential for American animation to evolve into what anime
has become: a mature medium for artistic expression of serious issues.
A shame that this flawed piece is possibly the pinnacle of animation's
ambition on these shores, Richard Linklater's recent Waking
Life notwithstanding.
*/**** starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Tobey Maguire, Carey Mulligan, Joel Edgerton screenplay by Baz Luhrmann & Craig Pearce, based on the novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald directed by Baz Luhrmann
by Walter Chaw The great irony of Baz Luhrmann's
unwatchable farrago The Great Gatsby is that it's not so much an
interpretation of its titular hero's self-aggrandizing fandangos as a
literalization of one. It's all surface, all façade, and not coincidentally,
the most successful thing about it is Luhrmann's shooting of Gatsby's
legendary parties as infernal bacchanalia. But that bit of useful critique
is clearly a fluke, an accident of Luhrmann's one-trick pony kicking over the
single element in Fitzgerald's book that is remotely compatible with Luhrmann's
style. The marriage of Baz with Fitzgerald, in fact, is a little like asking
Michael Bay to adapt The Brothers Karamazov--it's Timur Bekmambetov's A Farewell
to Arms. It's showing off in the loudest, most obnoxious way possible,
without any kind of critical, nay, useful, rationale for all the bread and
circus--an asshole at play with Welles's "best train set a boy could ever
want," with the casualty only what's possibly the best American novel ever
written. It's an effrontery to taste, the sole consolation being that as
Baz Luhrmann's The Great Gatsby is something of a motherless child,
there's no one who will love it. No one could.
WARGAMES
***½/**** Image B Sound C Extras A starring Matthew Broderick, Dabney Coleman, John Wood, Ally Sheedy
screenplay by Lawrence Lasker & Walter F. Parkes
directed by John Badham SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER
****/****
DVD - Image B Sound B+ Extras C
BD - Image A Sound A Extras B- starring John Travolta, Karen Gorney, Barry Miller, Joseph Cali
screenplay by Norman Wexler
directed by John Badham STAYING ALIVE
ZERO STARS/**** Image C+ Sound B+ starring John Travolta, Cynthia Rhodes, Finola Hughes, Steve Inwood
screenplay by Sylvester Stallone and Norman Wexler
directed by Sylvester Stallone
by Walter Chaw I hadn't realized until I watched the 25th
Anniversary Edition DVD of it how intimately WarGames
is embedded in my psyche. I saw it in the theatre as a ten-year-old in
1983 and, for the rest of that decade (the prime of my excited
filmgoing experience), I didn't know that movies were ever different.
The first time, in fact, that I recognized that movies were human
was the first time they revealed themselves as something that could
fail to inspire any kind of response at all--and I wonder if that
initial moment of disappointment had more to do with the development of
my cynicism than any one picture's deficiency. Film is a progressive
addiction, says one theory: the more sophisticated you get as a viewer,
the harder it is to find the fix. WarGames
presented me with the idea of eroticism through mild scatological
exhibitionism. It had a young man in his room, alone with a young
woman, excusing himself to urinate in the next room--an act unthinkable
to me as a ten-year-old, and holding with it the thrill of taboo. The
next time they meet, the world starts to explode and, better yet, the
girl traps the boy between her legs when he tries to edge by.
**½/**** Image A- Sound C Extras C starring Robert Mitchum, Takakura Ken, Okada Eiji, Brian Keith screenplay by Paul Schrader and Robert Towne directed by Sydney Pollack
by Jefferson Robbins We'll never know
what might have been had Paul and Leonard Schrader's original
screenplay for The Yakuza gone unmolested by '70s
script king Robert Towne, or had Martin Scorsese or Brian De Palma made
good on threats to direct. Instead, the obvious gets overlaid on top of
the mysterious, and at least one partner in this marriage of the
American and Japanese gangster genres winds up shorted.
Producer-director Sydney Pollack makes the mistake his best peers in
the decade's American cinema dodged: he mistrusts the audience,
believing we can't absorb backstory through performance and suggestion.
***½/**** directed
by Jeff Reichert and Farihah Zaman
by
Angelo Muredda When he was seriously injured in the jungle
thirty years ago, broadcaster and philanthropist Stan Brock tells an
interviewer in Jeff Reichert and Farihah Zaman's powerful Remote
Area Medical, the nearest doctor was over 26 days' worth of
travel away--23 more than if he'd been on the moon, as an astronaut
once told him. You can tell that Brock has massaged that anecdote into
a homily with repetition, but rather than seeming slick, his pitch for
greater medical care for those stuck in remote areas and extreme
conditions has an air of earned righteousness about it, the sound of
human decency filtered through experience. That same spirit of
professionalism and earnestness pervades Reichert and Zaman's film,
which profiles not the volunteer pop-up clinics Brock initially founded
in faraway parts of the world but one right in his adoptive home of
Tennessee, where hundreds of uninsured working-poor citizens line up
days in advance for a fighting shot at care.
by
Angelo Muredda The ending of Taxi Driver
could well be the start of John Kastner's NCR: Not
Criminally Responsible. Where Scorsese's paranoiac dream
closes with Travis Bickle returning to his cab after his bloodbath as
either an undeserving hero or a delusional phantom, Kastner's film
opens with an admirably complex consideration of what it means--for
everyone from victim to convict to society at large--to reintegrate
into Canadian culture a violent criminal who's been found not culpable
for his actions. Kastner begins with the conditional release of Sean
Clifton, a previously undiagnosed and ostensibly nonviolent Cornwall
man who one day stabbed a young woman in a Walmart parking lot. Despite
their spiritual belief in the power of rehabilitation and the doctors'
assurances that Clifton is now medicated, the victim's family is
understandably vexed. And, despite our own best liberal intentions, so
are we.
Nasser Asphalt ZERO STARS/****
Image D+ Sound C-
starring Horst Buccholz, Martin Held, Maria
Perschv, Gert Frobe
screenplay by Will Tremper
directed by Frank Wisbar
by Walter Chaw
Unbearably padded with stock footage and stilted segues around the
alleged intrigue of newspaper ethics, Frank Wisbar's abominable Wet
Asphalt might discover contemporary relevance for the conceit
that a lie about war becomes the biggest story in the world--but
probably only if you're so blinded by rage that the picture's
shortcomings are secondary. Directed by the obscure Frank Wisbar and
starring the recalcitrant punk (Horst Buchholz) from The
Magnificent Seven and One, Two, Three,
the film follows the trials of a ghost-written young reporter who gets
his name attached to a bit of nonsense about Germans living underground
after the war. Maybe it's an offshoot of the apocryphal tales of
Japanese soldiers crawling out of the Pacific bush years after VJ-Day;
more likely, it's the product of a belief that cheapo genre horseshit
like this would earn its investment back before people got wise and
stayed away in droves. Oh, and there's also some claptrap revolving
around a perfunctory love story with wallpaper Bettina (Maria Perschy),
to say nothing of the sitting room moralizations with smarmy boss Cesar
(Martin Held).
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