***½/****
Image B+ Sound C Extras C starring James Fox, Mick Jagger, Anita Pallenberg, Michele Breton
screenplay by Donald Cammell
directed by Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg
by Walter Chaw Emerging in the
middle of one of the most experimental, challenging periods in
cinematic history, Performance--completed in 1968
but shelved until 1970--is a product at once ahead of its time and two
years too late. Had its trippy-dippy, anachronistic cross-cutting and
madly-inappropriate scoring appeared in 1968 (the year of Rosemary's
Baby, Night of the Living Dead, If...,
2001: A Space Odyssey, and the
film to which it perhaps owes its greatest allegiance, Once
Upon a Time in the West), Performance
would've found traction and good company as a foundational film for the
American New Wave instead of as a picture that, for all its foment and
formal revolution, seemed hysterical against a maturing, more sedate(d)
mainstream avant-garde parade of stuff like El
Topo, Zabriskie Point, MASH,
and Five Easy Pieces.
ZERO STARS/**** Image A Sound B+ Extras B- starring Rob Schneider, Rachel McAdams, Anna Faris,
Andrew Keegan
screenplay by Tom Brady & Rob Schneider
directed by Tom Brady
by Walter Chaw What to think of a
variation on Teen Wolf wherein the victim of the
lycanthropic puberty metaphor is a young girl who turns into Rob
Schneider? What to make of a film that wrests its central conceit of
enchanted jewellery from the long-putrefied grasp of Mannequin
2? And what to make of a film released in the year 2002 that
is this misogynistic, homophobic, racist, and cruel to the obese?
Rather than postulate that our culture has regressed to the hale
cultural morass of the mid-1980s, it's doubtless more fruitful to
examine the ways in which film is becoming as self-reflexive,
meta-critical, and free of irony as television.
*½/**** Image B Sound A- Extras B screenplay by
Hayao Miyazaki (American adaptation by Cindy Davis Hewitt &
Donald
H. Hewitt), based on the novel by Diana Wynne Jones directed by Hayao Miyazaki
by Walter Chaw I've never liked it much when the
Japanese are drawn to Victoriana, finding parallels as they sometimes
seem to between that reserved, sexually-repressive culture and their
own, because it most often results in garbage like Katsuhiro Ôtomo's
exhausting Steamboy and now master Hayao Miyazaki's
disappointing Howl's Moving Castle. Slow, not
terribly interested in lore or internal logic, and fatally hamstrung by
the choice of actors like Billy Crystal and a zombified Emily Mortimer
to voice its American dub, it's a regression for Miyazaki from his last
two films (Princess Mononokeand
Spirited Away) in almost
every sense, starting with his decision to have a lonely young woman as
the central character in place of the prepubescent little girls front
and centre in most of his masterpieces (the last two films, Kiki's
Delivery Service, Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind,
and My Neighbor Totoro) and ending with a gross
simplification of his usually complex themes of confidence and
actualization into a colourless, flavourless drone about the
hard-to-dispute badness of war.
CURB YOUR ENTHUSIASM...: Image A Sound A "The Car
Salesman,"
"Thor," "Trick or Treat," "The Shrimp Incident," "The Thong," "The
Acupuncturist," "The Doll," "Shaq," "The Baptism," "The Massage" THE ANNA NICOLE SHOW...: Image A Sound A Extras D "House
Hunting," "The Introduction of Bobby Trendy," "The Eating Contest,"
"The Dentist," "Las Vegas, Pt. I," "Las Vegas, Pt. II," "Pet Psychic,"
"Cousin Shelly," "The Driving Test," "NYC Publicity Tour," "Paintball,"
"Halloween Party," "The Date"
by Walter Chaw The way that white people behave badly runs the social gamut from being
impolitic to being uncouth--it can be calculated or just the product of
bad breeding, but find in a pair of television series that would at
first glance seem miles apart dual examples of Caucasians running amuck
in their natural upper-class habitat. Larry David's HBO series "Curb
Your Enthusiasm" has won critical hosannas and the "Seinfeld"
demographic, while Anna Nicole Smith's "The Anna Nicole Show" has been
heralded as the dawn of the apocalypse. Both, however, are vignette sitcoms based on slightly fictionalized versions of
semi-celebrities positioned as the ass in various Byzantine and
embarrassing situations. While David's sense of humour is
self-conscious, his "Curb Your Enthusiasm" an example of the self-aware
media hybrid, it would be a terrible mistake to presume that Smith is
as stupid as, say, Jessica Simpson, and "The Anna Nicole Show" is so
carefully calculated that with a little tweaking it could be as
post-modern and oppressively-scripted as "Law & Order: Courtney
Love Unit".
*½/****
(60-minute version) **/**** (90-minute version) Image A Sound
A Extras B- directed by James Cameron
by Bill Chambers
Not often given enough credit for his speedy learning curve (how many
filmmakers, metaphorically speaking, have gone straight from Piranha
2 to The Terminator?), it stands to
reason that James Cameron's next documentary will be a gem. But for the
time being there is only Ghosts of the Abyss to
deal with, and it's a washout. A few minutes into the film, Bill Paxton
finds out that the battery powering the MIR submersible in which he's
exploring the wreckage of "R.M.S. Titanic" is worth $250,000; it was
then that I realized I'm vastly more interested in expensive batteries
than in the famously-drowned luxury liner, exhumed on film almost as
many times now as Dracula. Maybe it's an issue of the arcane vs. the
mundane: Ghosts of the Abyss dutifully oohs and
aahs over every inch of the ship's rusticled décor, but it stops short
of edifying the secondary observer, who suspects a show is being put on
for the grumpy Russians piloting the hi-tech underwater explorers. I
was that way every time my parents took me to the zoo.
**/**** Image
A Sound B Extras A starring Gene Hackman, Barbara Hershey, Dennis Hopper, Sheb Wooley
screenplay by Angelo Pizzo
directed by David Anspaugh
by Walter Chaw A
gifted coach with a past takes over a misfit team and leads them, after
some of the usual adversity, to the big game. Why fight it? There's
nothing I can say about how sappy and derivative David Anspaugh's
revered Hoosiers is without coming off like a
scrooge incapable of elation. No demonstration of pedigree, no gesture
towards the trophy shelf or war stories about the time we tipped an
opposing player over in a port-a-potty just to see the bastard turn
blue will make a lick of difference in the quick gauge of the level of
bitterness for the nerd unwilling to surrender to the glory of such
astonishingly polished underdog crap. Why fight it when what Hoosiers
does--and does magnificently--is capture exactly how childish (and
childishly exhilarating) sports can be--how it's an exclusive boy's
club that underscores those infant verities of honour, brotherhood, and
courage under fire in a ritualized environment only trumped in its
bloodlust by certain communal religious ceremonies. If Hoosiers
understands anything, it's that while there is, in fact, crying in
baseball (and basketball, and football, hockey, lacrosse, rugby,
soccer, etc.), there's no such thing as subtlety in the absolute
tyranny of the interplay between muscle, sinew, and pigskin.
****/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras B+ starring Keir Dullea, Gary Lockwood, William Sylvester, Daniel Richter
screenplay by Arthur C. Clarke & Stanley Kubrick, based on
Clarke's short story "The Sentinel"
directed by Stanley Kubrick
by Alex Jackson Seeing 2001: A Space Odyssey
as a film about evolution is natural but ultimately inaccurate, I
think. The Darwinist views evolution as an external response to the
world--a survival mechanism--while the Nietzschian views it as an
internal, ethical one. Both are touched on in 2001
and both are misleading in that they fail to acknowledge that Man's
evolution in this film is born out of destiny. Out
of fate. More appropriate to view evolution here in
terms of the lifespan of the butterfly or moth. Guided by a supreme
alien intelligence, the species of 2001 evolves
from the larva (ape) to the pupa (human) to the butterfly (star child).
THEM! (1954)
***/**** Image B Sound B Extras B- starring James Whitmore, Edmund Gwenn, Joan Weldon, James Arness
screenplay by Ted Sherdeman
directed by Gordon Douglas
THE BEAST
FROM 20,000 FATHOMS (1953)
***/**** Image B+ Sound B Extras A- starring Paul Christian, Paula Raymond, Cecil Kellaway, Kenneth Tobey
screenplay by Lou Morheim and Fred Freiberger, suggested by the story
"The Fog Horn" by Ray Bradbury
directed by Eugène Lourié
WORLD WITHOUT
END (1956)
**½/**** Image A Sound B- starring Hugh Marlowe, Nancy Gates, Rod Taylor
written and directed by Edwards Bernds
SATELLITE IN
THE SKY (1956)
*/**** Image C Sound B starring Kieron Moore, Lois Maxwell, Donald Wolfit
screenplay by John Mather, J.T. McIntosh and Edith Dell
directed by Paul Dickson
by Jefferson Robbins
We're all mutants
now. Those of us who weren't literally
irradiated by the Atomic Age still carry its glowing cultural
DNA. As we've built better ways to destroy ourselves, we've also
spurred the creators of our science-fiction to imagine life in newer
Waste Lands. Their work assumes that no matter how we survive each new
apocalypse, our circumstances will be quite changed. The upshot of our
atom-splitting folly would be not sloughed skin or violent cancer, but
marvels and wonders, which would then seek our destruction on their own
terms.
***/****
Image A- Sound A+ starring Natalie Portman, Jude Law, Julia Roberts, Clive Owen
screenplay by Patrick Marber, based on his play
directed by Mike Nichols
by Walter Chaw A girl takes off and cleans a guy's glasses on her
jacket as he's talking, then gently replaces them. She asks him what a
euphemism for her would be and he tells her: "Disarming." "That's not a
euphemism." But he assures her that it is. A girl takes a picture of a
guy, a guy talks to another guy through the anonymity of a computer
screen, a guy visits a girl performing at a peepshow and offers her a
large amount of money to tell him her real name. A guy meets a girl at
an aquarium where she'll go to steal pictures of strangers as they look
at the captive marine life in the blue glow of sharks circling. Mike
Nichols's Closer is beautifully directed from
Patrick Marber's adaptation of his own play, shot with an extraordinary
amount of verve and resonance around the loaded themes of ways of
seeing (glasses, cameras, correspondence) and their connection to
voyeurism, objectification and confinement, and forms of physical and
emotional abuse. A scene in the middle set at a photo exhibit
crystallizes every thread: people milling about, buffeted by giant
projected reproductions of 'disarmed' subjects, coming and going and
talking of Michelangelo. It's overwritten but clever, too, doing a
dangerous little dance along the edge of relevance and camp like a film
from the 1970s (Nichols's own Carnal Knowledge,
sure, but more like another film from 1971, Sam Peckinpah's Straw
Dogs), only really failing in one performance and a seeming
inability to follow through on its central punch. It's a courageous
mainstream picture, no question, though it's mainly courageous in
comparison to its contemporaries. Was a time when films like this and
more toothsome were the norm and not the semi-quailing exception.
**** Image A Sound A starring John Malkovich, Dougray Scott, Ray Winstone, Lena Headey screenplay by Charles McKeown and Liliana Cavani, based on the novel by Patricia Highsmith directed by Liliana Cavani
by Walter Chaw When
I heard that The Night Porter auteur Liliana Cavani
was adapting one of Patricia Highsmith's Mr. Ripley novels, I knew to
expect something more in line with René Clément's brilliant Purple
Noon than Anthony Minghella's lavishly simpering The
Talented Mr. Ripley. What I didn't anticipate was that this
film, which never received any sort of domestic theatrical distribution
before being summarily dropped, supplement-free, onto the home video
market, would be one of the best of its year--indeed, of its kind. Ripley's
Game is doomed to the "direct-to-video" label and an
ignominious eternity buried in the Blockbuster shelves for the
occasional stunned bemusement of the well traveled and the John
Malkovich fetishist--it languishes there while over-masticated tripe
like The Alamo finds its way to thousands of
screens, its lingering impact to remind again that the slippery slope
in Hollywood's distribution game just got steeper. Ripley's
Game would have looked great on the big screen--and some
genius robbed us of the opportunity to see it that way, thinking we'd
prefer American Splendor or Along Came
Polly.
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