**** 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.
*½/**** Image
A Sound A- Extras C starring Rebecca Romijn-Stamos, Antonio Banderas, Peter Coyote, Eriq
Ebouaney
written and directed by Brian De Palma
by Walter Chaw The first script written solely by Brian De Palma since
his 1992 film Raising Cain, Femme Fatale,
like that film, rips off the famous murderer-reveal of Dario Argento's Tenebre.
Come to think of it, the picture is essentially a rehash in one way or
another of every film De Palma's ever written
(the voyeurism and body switch of Body Double, the
phallic film equipment of Blow Out, the steamy
stall-sex of Dressed to Kill, the evil twin thing
and split-screen of Sisters, the voyeurism again of
Hi, Mom!, and so on)--and
because De Palma's best films and screenplays were iterations of
Hitchcock (and sometimes Argento, the Italian Hitchcock), Femme
Fatale is as stale and detached as the third-generation copy
that it is.
***½/**** Image
B-
Sound B
Extras D starring
Kirk Douglas, John Cassavetes, Carrie Snodgress, Charles Durning screenplay
by John Farris, based on his novel directed
by Brian DePalma
click any image to
enlarge
by
Bill Chambers SPOILER WARNING IN
EFFECT. While Brian DePalma is nothing if not a leitmotif
filmmaker,
it's curious that he chose to directThe
Fury right after Carrie.
Imagine Spielberg following up Jaws
with Orca--it's
like
De Palma was begging to be pigeonholed. And it's not surprising that The
Fury wasn't as zeitgeisty: it lacks the classical simplicity
and youth
appeal of Carrie, with almost no one in the cast
under 30 save for
future softcore legend Andrew Stevens and Carrie
holdover Amy Irving, a
good actress who just doesn't have that X factor. But The
Fury's echo
can still be heard, because its ending is indeed that impactful. Nearly
every
review mentions it, and the terms in which Pauline Kael and her
acolytes
described it gave it a kind of porny rep that's
since
inspired generations of young film buffs to seek the movie out. (Armond White called it an "orgasm.") It is
a great
ending, but a revisit makes clear that The Fury is worth
reading for the articles.
*½/**** starring Russell Crowe, Ben Affleck, Rachel McAdams, Helen Mirren screenplay by Matthew Michael Carnahan and Tony Gilroy and Billy Ray,
based on the BBC television series created by Paul Abbott directed by Kevin Macdonald
by Ian Pugh If
it were smart, Kevin Macdonald's State of Play
would stick to lamenting the ignominious death of newsprint at the
hands of Internet sensationalism and all that that implies. As a
veteran reporter and a U.S. Congressman--college roommates once known
as rabblerousing muckrakers in their respective fields--turn to each
other when their worlds collapse, you'd think that maybe the film had
in mind a meditation on the dissolution of the Old Boys' clubs. Done in
by our demystifying familiarity with the subjects under scrutiny (cops
and politicians) and an unwillingness to inject new blood into their
veins, right? Hell, even Watergate is brought up as
an incidental location, as Macdonald sends a sweeping camera across the
notorious hotel. You can't tell me there isn't something to be said
here about how a reliance on outmoded tactics and an obsession with
decades-old victories has only sped up their obsolescence.
THE PELICAN
BRIEF
½/**** Image C+ Sound C+ starring Julia Roberts, Denzel Washington, Sam Shepard, John Heard
screenplay by Alan J. Pakula, based on the novel by John Grisham
directed by Alan J. Pakula A TIME TO KILL
½*/**** Image B+ Sound B+ starring Sandra Bullock, Samuel L. Jackson, Matthew McConaughey, Donald
Sutherland
screenplay by Akiva Goldsman, based on the novel by John Grisham
directed by Joel Schumacher PRIMAL FEAR
***/**** Image B Sound B+ Extras B starring Richard Gere, Laura Linney, John Mahoney, Edward Norton
screenplay by Steve Shagan and Ann Biderman, based on the novel by
William Diehl
directed by Gregory Hoblit
by Walter Chaw Hand-in-hand with the digital revolution of the 1990s is
this backlash against the same as technical paranoia pictures like The
Net and Hackers cohabit multiplexes with
an epidemic of John Grisham adaptations. Starting with The
Firm in 1993 and running through to The Client (1994),
The Pelican Brief (1995), A
Time to Kill and The Chamber (1996), The
Rainmaker (1997), and The Gingerbread Man
(1998), these pictures share a deep interest in not just the low-grade
hackery of Grisham's declarative-prose style, but also super-secret
societies in the halls of power. Thus was limply resurrected the
paranoid New American Cinema. It was different this time around because
the ways our realities were being manipulated by the popular culture
and mass media were no longer a product of a governmental conspiracy,
but of a perceptual mutation.* It's not about not trusting the
government (nobody has trusted the government since 1972)--it's about
not trusting the medium of film itself. Not surprisingly, directors who
carved out their reputations in the Seventies--like Francis Ford
Coppola, Robert Altman, and Alan J. Pakula--jumped on board the Grisham
train, finding familiar ground in his gallery of paper-based heroes
(lawyers, judges, newspapermen) and perhaps thinking they'd bought a
ticket back to relevance when in fact they were working in an odd
parallel phenomenon that would fail almost entirely to have any kind of
relevance or longevity. Instead of producing classics, these legends
were excavating mines they'd already exhausted three administrations
ago.
***½/**** starring Donald Pleasence, Gary Bond, Chips Rafferty, Jack Thompson screenplay by Evan Jones, based on the novel by Kenneth Cook directed by Ted Kotcheff
by Angelo Muredda As exploitation-movie titles go, Wake in Fright suggests a high-concept
reversal of A Nightmare on Elm Street, where the only way to fall
prey to bogeymen is to stay awake. It's a bit of an odd sell, given the more
abstract horror mined by Toronto-born filmmaker Ted Kotcheff, of both The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz and First Blood fame. Far from Kravitz
country in its Australian setting but still working in the same territory of
young, ambling men who want to be somebody, Kotcheff's earlier film--first
screened in 1971 to both wild acclaim and great distaste from animal-rights
activists, and somewhat forgotten until its resurrection in the
"Ozploitation" documentary Not Quite Hollywood--is more
interested in the terror of duration without purpose, of waking up when you
have no good reason, than in anything so prosaic as a slasher. Elm Street it
isn't, then, but Kotcheff burrows into his haughty lead's descent into himself--a
stand-in for every thirtysomething man's realization that his coming-of-age has
already happened, to no discernible effect--with a nihilist precision that's
tough to shake off.
***½/**** Image A- Sound A+ Extras C starring Jessica Chastain, Jennifer Ehle, Jason Clarke, Kyle Chandler screenplay by Mark Boal directed by Kathryn Bigelow
click any image to enlarge
by Angelo Muredda As of this writing, the latest wannabe tastemaker to
thumb his nose at Zero Dark Thirty is novelist and
professional blowhard Bret Easton Ellis, who
tweeted that critics
lauding the film "need to admit that they're admiring a morally
indefensible movie." With that, Ellis joins an army of self-deputized film
writers who've taken issue on moral grounds with Kathryn Bigelow and Mark
Boal's treatment of the CIA's decade-spanning manhunt for Osama bin Laden. While Ellis's tasteless tweets about Bigelow's appearance a few weeks back
make his word suspect, it's harder to dismiss Glenn Greenwald, the liberal
firebrand whose initial survey of early praise for the film (then unseen by him) slammed Bigelow and Boal for glorifying torture. Incensed by the suggestion that crowd-sourcing knowledge about Zero Dark Thirty's representation of torture from the
likes of David Edelstein constituted poor form, Greenwald soon saw the picture for
himself and insisted that the viewing
only confirmed his initial impressions: "[T]o depict X as valuable in enabling the killing
of bin Laden is - by definition - to glorify X," he observed, where X
meant torture; woe to the "huge numbers of American viewers" about to
be "led" down the filmmakers' dim alleyways.
THE BUTCHER BOY ****/****
Image A Sound A- Extras B- starring Stephen Rea, Fiona Shaw, Eammon Owens, Alan Boyle
screenplay by Neil Jordan and Patrick McCabe, based on the novel by
McCabe
directed by Neil Jordan
THE BRAVE ONE ***½/**** Image B- Sound B Extras C+ starring Jodie Foster, Terrence Howard, Naveen Andrews, Nicky Katt
screenplay by Roderick Taylor & Bruce A. Taylor and Cynthia Mort
directed by Neil Jordan
THE
BUTCHER BOY
by Walter Chaw Opening with a series of panels from Golden Age comics
produced circa the era in which the film is set (i.e., 1962), The
Butcher Boy identifies Neil Jordan as a director with a
secret yen for superhero fantasies. It certainly jibes with the
filmmaker's affection for protagonists who, for whatever reason, live
in private worlds, in fairytale dreamscapes populated by emblems of
good and emissaries of evil--worlds where the most colourful places are
the interiors of churches, where the characters' fears and failings
alike are assets. Jordan's films are unfailingly about transformation
(though sometimes they're about the failure to transform adequately, or
quickly enough) and heavy with the illness of existential
introspection--the Judas strain with which the modern superhero
pantheon is sick. His heroes are rendered simple by their duality,
confronted by the idea that for as hollow as it is to change to fit the
demands of a particular time and place, it's equally useless to try to
stay the same as the world falls down. Jordan makes the movies Terry
Gilliam never quite made until Tideland; far from
the compassionate fare many label it, his oeuvre is comprised of harsh
little ditties about the voraciousness of the social organism and the
bites it takes out of individuals living perpendicular to the absolute
mean. For me, all of his films, from The Crying Game
to Mona Lisa, from The End of the Affair
to
Interview with the Vampire, are
pointedly concerned with the futility of compensatory measures in the
lives of deviants.
**/**** Image
B+ Sound B+ starring Gene Hackman, Danny DeVito, Delroy Lindo, Rebecca Pidgeon
written and directed by David Mamet
by Walter
Chaw David Mamet
the writer repeats himself in tight blobs of verbal noise, awkward
turns of phrase, and staccato blasts. Mamet directs movies, I
suspect, to preserve every beat of his favourite screenwriter's (Mamet)
careful, layered scripts. How he continues to lure big-name actors and
producers to play in his exclusive little quicksand boxes of narrative
dysfunction is a mystery. For as distinct as the celebrated
playwright's dialogue is, almost more so is the lamentable instinct to
cast his largely-talentless wives in pivotal roles (first Lindsay
Crouse, now the consistently abominable Rebecca Pidgeon), not
neglecting Mamet's inability to transcend the mannered and
under-populated staginess of the theatre in which he belongs.
*/**** Image
A- Sound B+ Extras B starring Lane Carroll, W.G. McMillan, Harold Wayne Jones, Lloyd Hollar
screenplay by Paul McCollough & George A. Romero
directed by George A. Romero
by Walter Chaw It's
tough for a dyed-in-the-wool George Romero apologist to observe that a
film of Romero's in good repute is an amateurish, exploitative piece of
shit that banks heavily on the afterglow of his seminal Night
of the Living Dead. The Crazies, his
third movie in the wake of that masterpiece, finds itself ripping off
the last half-hour of Don Siegel's Invasion of the Body
Snatchers--in lurid colour with a cast of atrocious actors in
high-'70s, porn-ugly wardrobe and appearance--in its tale of how you
shouldn't trust anyone over 30, so keep on truckin', man, steal this
book, and if it feels good, do it. Its tragedy is airless and
ineffectual, played as it is as this instantly (and hopelessly) dated
relic of the flower-power generation that already had its epitaph with
Dennis Hopper's Easy Rider four years prior. While
its philosophy is tired and childish (a product of reading HIGH TIMES rather than an actual newspaper), it's also dreadfully
paced, with the lion's share of time given over to exhausted harangues
about how the government doesn't really care about the little guy and
how absolute power corrupts absolutely. Never mind the greater good
here, as The Crazies is so fervently
incomprehensible in its hippie politic that the threat of real
contamination for the rest of the country/world should one of our
erstwhile heroes escape into the general population forces the audience
to ally its sympathies with the jack-booted thugs. Besides, there's
already a problem of identification in the film when its ostensible
villains, dressed in contamination suits to save on the extras budget,
are clearly just underpaid civil servants who most definitely do not
deserve to be slaughtered by the yokel populace--crazy or not.
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