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).
*/**** Image B+ Sound A- Extras B
starring Laurence Fishburne, Sam Neill, Kathleen Quinlan, Joely
Richardson
screenplay by Philip Eisner
directed by Paul Anderson
by Walter ChawEvent Horizon
approaches the science-fiction idea of a mysterium tremens,
hints that it will be about the inscrutability of an alien
intelligence--like Lem's and Tarkovsky's (and Soderbergh's) variations
on the theme of Solaris, for instance, or that
monolith in 2001. But with lowbrow hack Paul W.S.
Anderson (then simply Paul Anderson) at the helm, Event
Horizon washes out as just another assembly-line jump-scare
factory. A particular shame, as with this project Anderson attracted an
unusually competent cast, only to ask the likes of Laurence Fishburne,
Joely Richardson, Sam Neill, Jason Isaacs, and Kathleen Quinlan to
respond to cats-by-any-other-name jumping through allegorical windows.
It goes beyond wearisome to actually being insulting. The first hour is
spent establishing the brave crew of the Lewis & Clark, setting
off to somewhere near Neptune on the rescue and salvage of experimental
ship Event Horizon, which disappeared a few months prior. Outfitted
with a new "gravity drive" suspiciously like the fold-space/grasshopper
spice drive from Dune, the Event Horizon has not
only managed to travel beyond our Universe--it has also succeeded in
theologically blowing our minds! Weird visions ensue (bad dreams and
worse), and then there's the captain's log that our heroes spend the
bulk of the film "filtering" before finally discovering that the
warnings contained therein are in Latin for a reason. Doesn't anyone in
the future watch The Exorcist? Good thing medico
D.J. (Isaacs) speaks Latin, or they'd never know what it wouldn't help
them to know.
***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.
ZERO STARS/**** starring Michael Douglas, Kirk Douglas, Cameron Douglas, Diana Douglas screenplay by Jesse Wigutow directed by Fred Schepisi
by Walter Chaw Appalling at its best, Fred
Schepisi's It Runs in the Family is a congenital
disaster best described as an interminable episode of "Old People Say
the Darndest Things". Between this and Last Orders,
Aussie director Schepisi seems to desire cornering the market on gravid
meditations on decrepitude and death. He finds himself here a far cry
from his Seventies output (The Devil's Playground, The
Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith), which, much like countryman
Bruce Beresford's early work, announced an important filmmaker who has,
in the intervening years, become a hired hand and a coin of
considerably devalued worth. It Runs in the Family
is so relentlessly mawkish that it does give insight into the state of
mind that allows condescension to become comfortable status quo by
habitually marginalizing the elderly and demented as adorable
dispensers of quaint homilies and spunky vulgarity.
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".
**/**** starring Jennifer Garner, Mark Ruffalo, Judy Greer, Christa B. Allen screenplay by Cathy Yuspa & Josh Goldsmith and Niels Mueller directed by Gary Winick
by Walter Chaw Threatening at any moment to
veer off the populist tracks and become something legendarily,
unpleasantly subversive, the middling 13 Going on 30
is really little more than a collection of "I Love the '80s" vignettes
presided over by Jennifer Garner's peculiar, mannish mien. It's also
peculiar that the genre of body-swapping/quick-aging jibber-jabber is
making a resurgence now a couple of decades after the last spate (18
Again, Vice Versa, Big),
and peculiar again that with Mark Waters's Freaky Friday and
Gary Winick's 13 Going on 30, the genre is being
re-imagined through the prism of young women. (Perhaps not so strange
when you consider that the key demographic slavered over by studio
wonks has shifted from the pre-adolescent boys of the mid-'80s to post-Titanic
pre-adolescent girls.) It's clear that this film is meant to satisfy
some sort of wish-fulfillment fantasy for 13-year-old members of the
babysitters' club, but with Eighties references that can only be
amusing to people who've passed the third-decade mark, it manages
mostly to be a wish-fulfillment fantasy for thirtysomething men who
want emotionally immature, sexually malleable women who happen to
resemble television starlets.
**/**** 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+ 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.
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