**/**** starring Robert Downey Jr., Terrence Howard, Jeff Bridges, Gwyneth Paltrow screenplay by Mark Fergus & Hawk Ostby and Art Marcum & Matt Holloway directed by Jon Favreau
by Walter ChawIron
Man is garden-variety pop heroism/wish-fulfillment that,
marinated in Robert Downey Jr.'s effortless insouciant sauce, speaks
volumes about the psychology of our nation at this disgusted, exhausted
moment in our history. The plot's only casualties save its grand fiend
are nameless Afghanis: terrorists on the one side, collateral damage on
the other--few of them receiving the nobility of an individual death.
Even the chief Al-Qaeda baddie is blown-up discreetly in the wings
after a white guy first dazzles him with technology, then paralyzes him
with the same. (Call it awe and shock.) The film's politics are easy
and its racism similarly cavalier: Better dead than red (er, brown);
when historians look back at this era in popular culture, it won't be
terribly difficult to pick out that which forms the backbone of
contemporary "Why We Fight" propaganda. What recommends the picture are
sterling performances by Downey Jr., Gwyneth Paltrow as Iron Man's Girl
Friday, Jeff Bridges as the mentor-cum-baddie, and wonderful, reserved,
dignified Shaun Toub in a too-brief cameo as the sole voice of moral
"otherness." What's unfortunate about the flick is that it takes an
awful long time to get to the good stuff, and that good stuff--almost
entirely CGI-rendered--falls curiously flat. Not quite boring, Iron
Man just seems sprung. There's no forward momentum, no
impetus, no real gravity. With all that firepower at its fingertips, it
has no idea where to point itself.
Iron
Man Three
*½/**** starring
Robert Downey Jr., Gwyneth Paltrow, Don Cheadle, Ben Kingsley screenplay
by Drew Pearce & Shane Black directed
by Shane Black
by
Walter Chaw I laughed once during Shane Black's Iron
Man 3--an unfortunate milestone for me and Black's
films, which I
have found, without exception, pretty amusing. That one moment is a
reference serial post-modernist and industrialist Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.)
makes to
Michael Crichton's 1973 cult fantasia Westworld.
The Tony Stark character is not just the cocksure pop-cultural embodiment of Roland Barthes's work on semiotics and myth: he'd be Barthes's greatest subject for analysis--the object that presumes a pop-cultural universal constant. The place where Black works, in other words, is that place where everyone's seen and read and heard everything they "should have" seen and read and heard. When Stark drops the Westworld bomb, then, we understand the implication that Stark is observing an evil henchman to not only appear to be robotic and indestructible, but maybe sexy and Yul Brynner-esque as well--maybe a female fantasy, maybe a "stupid sexy Flanders" homosexual fantasy. Certainly there's a recognition that dropping a reference like this is pleasurable in a way that structuralism would appreciate, but only for the nerd bourgeoisie. It's a moment meant to create a sense of exclusionary cloister in the midst of one of the most widely-dissembled entertainments in human history, and I liked that.
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.
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