****/**** Image A Sound A Extras B+ starring Natalie Wood, Richard Beymer, Rita Moreno, George Chakiris screenplay by Ernest Lehman, based on the play by Arthur Laurents and Jerome Robbins directed by Robert Wise & Jerome Robbins
by Walter Chaw With apologies to Frank Zappa, Jerome Robbins and Robert Wise's West Side Story is dancing about the tumultuous social architecture of Manhattan's west side in the 1950s--a picture as political as it is ephemeral and, consequently, as timeless as it is exhilarating. It is one of those rare pictures that feels like the first time I've seen it every time I see it--renewing itself endlessly through its rare energy and meticulously choreographed nihilism. That it doesn't hold together particularly well as a drama, much of the emotional power of its doomed love affair sapped by Richard Beymer's amazingly bad performance as lead Tony, is secondary to the enduring effectiveness of the Leonard Bernstein score (with Sondheim's amazingly current lyrics and Saul Chapin's bright orchestration); Jerome Robbins's ebullient dance sequences; Rita Moreno and George Chakiris; and the revelatory location work and lighting design.
***/**** starring Aamir Khan, Gracy Singh, Rachel Shelley, Paul Blackthorne screenplay by Kumar Dave, Sanjay Dayma, Ashutosh Gowariker directed by Ashutosh Gowariker
by Walter Chaw With the subtitle "Once Upon a Time in India," Ashutosh Gowariker's Lagaan holds a kinship to Tsui Hark's Once Upon a Time in China in more than just appellation and an abiding dislike of the Colonial British. Other than substituting elaborate musical numbers--as is Bollywood's wont--for Hong Kong's martial arts features, Lagaan is in fact as interested in the sociology of enslavement before the rush of technology (embodied in cameras and firearms) as its farther-Eastern brethren. The rather serious-minded attack of India's own caste system and the ineffectualness of its Raj ruling structure lends additional layers to the picture's surprising depths, yet all the politicized subtext in the world does little to suppress the essential exuberance of the gaudy visceral Bollywood experience.
**/**** Image A Sound A Extras A- starring Evan Rachel Wood, Jim Sturgess, Joe Anderson, Dana Fuchs screenplay by Dick Clement & Ian La Frenais directed by Julie Taymor
by Bryant Frazer Long considered sacrosanct, in recent years the catalogue of music recorded by The Beatles has become fairer game. The success of a 2000 CD reissue of #1 singles may have greased the wheels for Beatles-related projects, including a 2006 Cirque du Soleil extravaganza based around the group's songs and mounted in Las Vegas, a comprehensive four-year-long digital remastering project involving all the original albums, and even a Beatles-only edition of the hit videogame series Rock Band. In this context, Across the Universe feels like a cog in a much bigger marketing machine. To some degree, it's impressive that director Julie Taymor managed to build a period-romance-cum-rock-musical entirely around Beatles songs, although the film never manages to answer the question of why such a project might be worth undertaking in the first place.
**/**** starring Stuart Townsend, Marguerite Moreau, Aaliyah, Vincent Perez screenplay by Scott Abbott and Michael Petroni directed by Michael Rymer
by Walter Chaw The latest big-screen adaptation of an Anne Rice Vampire Chronicle, Queen of the Damned looks great but remains the sad product of Rice's juvenilia and velvet eroticism. Its sweaty mythmaking matched by its thirty-something-decade whining, the film substitutes blood for semen in its kinky puerility (a rose-petal love scene is a classic in scarlet euphemism) and becomes boring and pat when it should've been trashy and unapologetic. The greatest problem with the film isn't as obvious as its bad writing and weak structure: it's that Queen of the Damned tries to make sense where none is to be made.
Peter Shaffer's Amadeus: Director's Cut ***/**** DVD - Image B+ Sound B Extras B+ BD - Image B Sound A Extras A starring F. Murray Abraham, Tom Hulce, Elizabeth Berridge, Simon Callow screenplay by Peter Shaffer, based on his play directed by Milos Forman
by Walter Chaw Bringing the highbrow to the status-hungry middle in the same way as those "Bach's Greatest Hits" collections and the awful faux-llies of Andrew Lloyd Webber, Milos Forman's bawdy, jittery adaptation of Peter Shaffer's fanciful play "Amadeus" is not so much about Mozart as it is about genius and its burden on the mediocre. Mozart (Tom Hulce) is an adolescent boor touched by the hand of God; Emperor Joseph's (Jeffrey Jones) court composer Salieri (F. Murray Abraham) becomes obsessed and desperately jealous of Mozart's gift, leading him to the madhouse and confessions of murder. Amadeus works because of Forman's gift for the seedy (and portraying asylums--he directed One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, after all) and because of Abraham's deeply-felt performance.
**½/**** starring Catherine Zeta-Jones, Renée Zellweger, Richard Gere, John C. Reilly screenplay by Bill Condon, based on the musical by Fred Ebb & Bob Fosse and the play by Maurine Dallas Watkins directed by Rob Marshall
by Walter Chaw As adaptations of stage musicals go, Rob Marshall's film of the Bob Fosse revue Chicago is professional and slick, if lit too darkly and oddly flaccid. Its musical set-pieces are generally excellent, with a trio of performances from Renée Zellweger, Catherine Zeta-Jones, and Richard Gere that surprise with their versatility and verve, but the unevenness of Marshall's direction lends the picture a sort of confused rhythm that threatens to stall it during every narrative stretch. Buoyed by Sam Mendes's recent Broadway revival of another Kander and Ebb classic, "Cabaret", "Chicago" suffers from a distinct slightness, its attack on the evils of media culture not so much current as battered to death by decades of same. Chicago offers no surprises, then, only really coming to life during a press-conference scene with Zellweger the dummy and lawyer Gere the ventriloquist and puppet master. It's gorgeously shot and choreographed and throws the malaise of the rest of the picture into sharp relief.
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