Film Freak Central

Blind Spot: Hitler's Secretary (2002)

Im Toten Winkel - Hitlers Sekretärin
Blind Spot. Hitler's Secretary
***½/****
directed by André Heller & Othmar Schmiderer

by Bill Chambers A significant source of Blind Spot. Hitler's Secretary's power is the au naturel form it takes. There are no re-enactments, there are no such visual cues as photographs or stock footage; there isn't even any underscore--only the talking head of Traudl Junge, who, with her rotating cluster of sweaters and ascots, is the film's aesthetic. Directors André Heller and Othmar Schmiderer (Heller interviewed, Schmiderer shot) either believe Junge to be so compelling a presence as to challenge the need for newsreel aids, or fundamentally appreciate that they risked depersonalizing Junge's fresh, intimate perspective by going the History Channel route. I only skimmed the press notes (which are rather regrettably written: "Like Adolf Hitler, [Heller and Schmiderer] were also born and raised in Austria," begins an introduction to the filmmakers) to keep from cheapening Blind Spot's enigmatic approach--that ambivalence--for myself: The film casts a spell as fragile as that of an ILM spectacle.

Open Hearts (2002)

Elsker dig for evigt
***½/****
starring Sonja Richter, Mads Mikkelsen, Paprika Steen, Nikolaj Lie Kaas
screenplay by Susanne Bier & Anders Thomas Jensen
directed by Susanne Bier

by Walter Chaw Susanne Bier's first Dogme 95 film Open Hearts (Elsker dig for evigt) is the Danish movement's twenty-eighth and the second by a female director after last year's Italian for Beginners. It reveals the austere, half-snooty/half-tongue-in-cheek manifesto as a surprisingly effective platform for a reinvention of the woman's picture--a resurrection of the estrogen melodramas circa Mildred Pierce, the legitimizing of the soap opera genre fallen on disrepute since the invention of soaring violins and Julia Roberts. The limiting constraints of Dogme 95, most of them aimed at stripping filmmaking of all artifice, seems to purify the emotionalism latent in stories of paralyzed lovers and star-crossed priests--perhaps the least expected offshoot of a movement that is not only extremely distracting, but probably began life as something of a joke.

The Beach Boys: An American Band (1985)/Brian Wilson: "I just wasn't made for these times" (1995) [Double Feature] - DVD

THE BEACH BOYS: AN AMERICAN BAND
****/**** Image C+ Sound B+
directed by Malcolm Leo

BRIAN WILSON: "I JUST WASN'T MADE FOR THESE TIMES"
***½/**** Image B Sound B+
directed by Don Was

by Walter Chaw There are a handful of albums indispensable to a comprehensive understanding of the roots of modern music, and The Beach Boys' "Pet Sounds"--a sort of Apocalypse Now for band-leader Brian Wilson, a mad compendium of musical fragments (Bach's progressions, The Four Horsemen's harmonies) that cohered into a Spector-esque Wall of Sound sparcity/harmony--is irrefutably among them. Intent on making definitive, album-length statements, spurred on by his obsessive competitiveness with The Beatles ("Rubber Soul" predates "Pet Sounds", and though Paul McCartney cited "Pet Sounds" as a primary influence on "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band", the release of that album is often blamed for Brian Wilson's nervous breakdown), and sensing the opportunity in 1966 of being at the vanguard of the psychedelic movement with a follow-up album (the never-completed "Smile"), the story of The Beach Boys and Brian Wilson is as operatic and tinged with ironic destiny as an Aeschylean tragedy.

The First $20 Million (2002) - DVD

The First $20 Million Is Always the Hardest
ZERO STARS/**** Image C Sound B-
starring Adam Garcia, Rosario Dawson, Jake Busey, Enrico Colantoni
screenplay by Jon Favreau and Gary Tieche, based on the novel by Po Bronson
directed by Mick Jackson

by Walter Chaw Food-obsessed Japanese girl band Cibo Matto plays quietly behind a weird commercial of pastel San Diego Chickens sky-diving within the first five minutes of The First $20 Million Is Always the Hardest, offering a benighted hope that the film won't suck that is so ephemeral that its inevitable death is less cruel than perverse. Playing like a version of Real Genius that's somehow worse, the idea of a hard-partying geek fraternity involved in changing the world one byte at a time is so disinteresting and bankrupt that its resounding failure isn't nearly as surprising as the twin revelations that the otherwise bright-seeming Jon Favreau co-wrote the screenplay (and appears in a cameo with crap in his mouth), and that this dog pile of a script (based on a novel by Po Bronson) actually found suitors.

Frank McClusky, C.I. (2002) - DVD

**/**** Image A Sound A-
starring Dave Sheridan, Randy Quaid, Enrico Colantoni, Dolly Parton
screenplay by Mark Perez
directed by Arlene Sanford

by Walter Chaw There's a freshness to the staleness of Frank McKlusky, C.I. that charms initially before it grates for its dedicated cuteness and innocuous incorrectness. With an amazing supporting cast of the lower echelon of B-list comedy performers (Dolly Parton, Randy Quaid, Orson Bean (reprising his Being John Malkovich character), Andy Richter, Kevin Pollack, Adam Corolla, and Chris Farley's also-fat brother), the picture is clearly a rip-off of Jim Carrey's Ace Ventura films, complete with a mugging Dave Sheridan (so good in Bubble Boy, now channelling Carrey), a pooch sidekick, and a blonde love interest in the emetic Cameron Diaz (of Carrey's The Mask) mold played, strangely enough, by Cameron Richardson.

Ordinary Decent Criminal (2000) - DVD

*/**** Image A- Sound B+
starring Kevin Spacey, Linda Fiorentino, Peter Mullan, Stephen Dillane
screenplay by Gerard Stembridge
directed by Thaddeus O'Sullivan

by Walter Chaw Completed about a year after John Boorman's infinitely superior The General, Thaddeus O'Sullivan's Ordinary Decent Criminal is a sporadic "fictionalizing" of the life of Irish crime boss Martin Cahill that dresses up Cahill's exploits with slick visuals while attempting the unsavory task of doing exactly what The General was accused of doing: making urban terrorism and torture whimsical caper fare. Recasting Cahill as a Keyser Soze with a sense of oily humor and renaming him Michael Lynch (Kevin Spacey), Ordinary Decent Criminal is extraordinarily lightweight blather free entirely of the sense of scale and place of Boorman's film. The General is fantastic, Ordinary Decent Criminal: just fatuous.

The Money Pit (1986) [Widescreen] - DVD

**/**** Image A- Sound B+
starring Tom Hanks, Shelley Long, Alexander Godunov, Maureen Stapleton
screenplay by David Giler
directed by Richard Benjamin

by Bill Chambers Many comedies are padded by slapstick--here's slapstick padded by jokes, every single one of which bears the tang of a warm-up act. There is dialogue that advances a scene and there is dialogue that fills a page count, and David Giler's screenplay for The Money Pit toils almost exclusively in the latter. On the one hand, that's exactly the right approach, as it relegates stars Tom Hanks and Shelley Long to the status of Chachi and Joanie whilst elevating the titular house to starring role. But "the money pit" can only fall down and go boom so many times, thus making The Money Pit a stop-and-go feature that would kill as a short. I've often toyed with doing my own edit of the film.

Sports Night: The Complete Series Plus Pilot Episode (1992-1993) - DVD

Image B Sound B
SEASON 1 - "Pilot," "The Apology," "The Hungry and the Hunted," "Intellectual Property," "Mary Pat Shelby," "*The Head Coach, Dinner and the Morning Mail," "Dear Louise," "Thespis," "The Quality of Mercury at 29K," "Shoe Money Tonight," "The Six Southern Gentlemen of Tennessee," "Smoky," "Small Town," "Rebecca," "Dana and the Deep Blue Sea," "Sally," "How Are Things in Gloca Morra?," "The Sword of Orion," "Eli's Coming," "Ordnance Tactics," "Ten Wickets," "Napoleon's Battle Plan," "What Kind of Day Has it Been"
SEASON 2 - "Special Powers," "When Something Wicked This Way Comes," "Cliff Gardner," "Louise Revisited," "Kafelnikov," "Shane," "Kyle Whitaker's Got Two Sacks," "The Reunion," "A Girl Named Pixley," "The Giants Win the Pennant, the Giants Win the Pennant," "The Cut Man Cometh," "The Sweet Smell of Air," "Dana Get Your Gun," "And the Crowd Goes Wild," "Celebrities," "The Local Weather," "Draft Day: Part I - It Can't Rain at Indian Wells," "Draft Day: Part II - The Fall of Ryan O'Brian," "April is the Cruelest Month," "Bells And A Siren," "La Forza Del Destino," "Quo Vadimus"

by Walter Chaw Taken as a whole, and a box set from Buena Vista allows one to do just that, Aaron Sorkin's "Sports Night" takes on the character of an extended experiment that starts tentatively and ends as one of the genuinely valuable moments of television in the year before HBO and flagship show "The Sopranos" became the benchmark for quality boob-tubery in the post-post-modern age. Detailing the behind-the-scenes drama of producing an "ESPN SportsCenter"-esque news program, it draws inevitable comparison to James L. Brooks's Broadcast News (and accordingly, during the first season, episode five, Felicity Huffman gets to knock over a production assistant à la Holly Hunter's character in that film), but distinguishes itself with an understanding that in many ways, sports is an effective locus for the hot-button issues of modern society: misogyny, race, addiction, violence.

Russian Ark (2003)

****/****
starring Sergei Dontsov, Mariya Kuznetsova, Leonid Mozgovoy, David Giorgobiani
screenplay by Boris Khaimsky & Anatoli Nikiforov & Svetlana Proskurina & Alexander Sokurov
directed by Alexander Sokurov

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Russian Ark is a film that hoists its middle finger high against the cultural practices of nearly a hundred years. Implicitly appalled by the twin forgettings of communist and free-market logic, director Alexander Sokurov retaliates by erecting a monument to the proceeding three centuries of image-making--one that marks the entrance to a crypt perhaps, as Sokurov knows that time is running out on its preservation. Surely there's a heaping dose of snobbery in his approach, and a whole lot of wilful obscurity as well, but his expression of his thesis is so passionate and his technical execution is so seamless and beautiful that I could have forgiven him almost anything.

Old School (2003)

*½/****
starring Luke Wilson, Will Ferrell, Vince Vaughn, Ellen Pompeo
screenplay by Todd Phillips & Scot Armstrong
directed by Todd Phillips

by Walter Chaw Following in the tepid footsteps of National Lampoon's Van Wilder's attempt to update Animal House for the new millennium, Todd Phillips's Old School is better than it should be for a surprisingly funny Will Ferrell and another one of those laconic performances by a Wilson brother (Luke, this time) that just begs for a better vehicle. Less than John Landis's landmark ode to anarchy, however, Old School most resembles Hart Bochner's PCU--a film to which it pays unsubtle homage in the "ironic" casting of Jeremy Piven as that hale genre archetype: the button-down dean. (And PCU ultimately finds itself the superior campus clone comedy... For whatever that's worth.) As diaries of arrested development go, Old School at least has the wit to tell a story of thirtysomethings seeking to recapture the halcyon days of binge-drinking and the joys of sexual objectification, making it something of a middle class/mid-life crisis tragedy and fitfully engaging in a distracted way as a result.

The Lady Killer of Rome (1961) + The Working Class Goes to Heaven (1971)

L'Assassino
The Assassin
**½/****
starring Marcello Mastroianni, Micheline Presle, Cristina Gaioni, Salvo Randone
screenplay by Pasquale Festa Campanile & Massimo Franciosa & Tonino Guerra & Elio Petri
directed by Elio Petri

La Classe operaia va in paradiso
Lulu the Tool
***½/****
starring Mietta Albertini, Giovanni Bignamini, Flavio Bucci, Donato Castellaneta
screenplay by Elio Petri & Ugo Pirro
directed by Elio Petri

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover What a difference a decade makes: watching Elio Petri's first film (1961's The Lady Killer of Rome (L'Assassino)) and one of his most honoured (1971's The Working Class Goes to Heaven (La Classe operaia va in paradiso)) reveals just how the march of history can change a director from distinguished craftsman to agent provocateur. One marvels at how the Left-inflected debut, made before the upheavals of the late-Sixties shook up film aesthetics, goes down easy and comfortably, while the Left-committed later film, made in the miasma after those upheavals failed, grabs the viewer by the lapels and shakes him or her until he or she cries uncle. And one is grateful that that sea change happened: it's The Working Class Goes to Heaven which looks best from the present vantage point, because it makes its points with a desperate urgency that the earlier film, however pointed it might seem, can't hope to match.

The Life of David Gale (2003)

ZERO STARS/****
starring Kevin Spacey, Kate Winslet, Laura Linney, Gabriel Mann
screenplay by Charles Randolph
directed by Alan Parker

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. One wonders if there isn't, after all, a subtle right-wing conspiracy at work in the entertainment industry, where ultra-liberal stumps are turned into the sort of ostensibly pro-leftist propaganda reel that does serious harm to the pro-leftist agenda. If it's not the reprehensible The Contender, with its Ayn Rand-ian hypothetical, it's I Am Sam and its bizarre vilification of the child welfare system--or worse, John Q, with its curiously misdirected lament against our obviously broken health-care state. Trumping them all in terms of muddle and melodrama, however, is The Life of David Gale, an anti-death penalty tirade that, by the end, feels like a life sentence the audience wishes hadn't been commuted. The only way to make any sense of the film is to suspect it of darker motives: Its ultimate message, and it's not a bad one, seems to be that the criminal justice system the film so actively vilifies is, in fact, the only honest (though imperfect) force in the entire mess.

Gods and Generals (2003)

*/****
starring Chris Conner, Jeff Daniels, Stephen Lang, Robert Duvall
screenplay by Ronald F. Maxwell, based on the book by Jeffrey M. Shaara
directed by Ronald F. Maxwell

by Walter Chaw Somewhere in the translation from Jeff Shaara's only so-so novel Gods and Generals to Ronald F. Maxwell's magnificently bad film Gods and Generals lies the mystery of why the younger Shaaras and the Maxwells of the world see fit to take a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel like Jeff Shaara's The Killer Angels and make a country-fried trilogy out of it. Perhaps most of the blame should be laid at the ten-gallon feet of Ted Turner, Fortune 500's Yosemite Sam/Ross Perot amalgam who seeks, it appears, to finally get the South to rise again, single-handedly, after about 150 years of threats. It seems odd, however, that The Ted would seek to get the bayonets a-rattlin' again with almost four hours of awkward period speechifying punctuated occasionally by random recreations of random early Civil War battles (Manassas, Fredericksburg, and Chancellorsville), each of which lead to the events of Maxwell's 1993 adaptation of The Killer Angels, Gettysburg.

Swimfan (2002) - DVD

½*/**** Image A Sound B Extras B-
starring Jesse Bradford, Erika Christensen, Shiri Appleby, Kate Burton
screenplay by Charles Bohl & Phillip Schneider
directed by John Polson

by Walter Chaw It's one thing to say that Swimfan is a boldly unoriginal rip-off of such gems as The Crush, Deadly Friend, Wicked, and Poison Ivy, but it's another, far more disturbing thing altogether to note that Swimfan travels the same inexplicable path of the moon-faced pork-pie Lolita so purposefully trundled by the likes of Alicia Silverstone, Kristy Swanson, Julia Stiles, and Drew Barrymore. Erika Christensen--memorably spacey as the troubled daughter in Soderbergh's Traffic--reveals herself in Swimfan as just the next completely interchangeable cherubic baby-fat starlet to try (or continue) to sully her ephemeral image in a role day-trippers might mistake for "edgy." Make no mistake, Swimfan may be many things, but it's about as edgy as Christensen's Romanesque elbow.

From Here to Eternity (1953) [Superbit] - DVD

***/**** Image B+ Sound B+
starring Burt Lancaster, Montgomery Clift, Deborah Kerr, Donna Reed
screenplay by Daniel Taradash, based on the novel by James Jones
directed by Fred Zinnemann

by Bill Chambers Lovelorn soldiers stationed in Hawaii have their romantic lives torn asunder when the Japanese bomb Pearl Harbor: You can add remaking Fred Zinnemann's Oscar-winning From Here to Eternity without due credit to the tally of Pearl Harbor's sins, although a picture as cool and sensitive--the two qualities exactly lacking from Pearl Harbor--as From Here to Eternity would hardly want the acknowledgment. Based on the novel by James Jones, a veteran wounded at Guadalcanal who also wrote the book on which Terrence Malick's The Thin Red Line is based, the film finds the director of High Noon following his didactic muse into an allegory that is considerably less paint-by-numbers, even arcane. From Here to Eternity is a sudser, ultimately, albeit one that may be of more significance to those who've served. That's a step up from Pearl Harbor, at least, which will most directly appeal to chimpanzees.

More Mulatto Than Chocolate: FFC Interviews David Gordon Green & Paul Schneider

Walter Chaw 'exfoliates' the stuff that matters with the gifted minds behind ALL THE REAL GIRLS

February 16, 2003|I met David Gordon Green and Paul Schneider in the lounge mezzanine of Denver's historic Mayan Landmark Theater; they met each other while attending the North Carolina School of the Arts. Green: "I wrote the script for All the Real Girls before George Washington, while Paul and I were still in college. I wanted to make a movie that captured the genuine feeling of being young and in love." Schneider: "We both got dumped by girls that we were madly in love with. We were completely depressed and we just sat in my room listening to the most melancholy music we could find."

Mala Noche (1988) + Gus Van Sant shorts

***/****
starring Tim Streeter, Doug Cooeyate, Nyla McCarthy, Ray Monge
written and directed by Gus Van Sant

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover The most amazing thing about Gus Van Sant's debut feature Mala Noche is that it was made in the midst of the '80s. While mainstream cinema was building cruelly childish whirligigs and the arthouses were smugly preoccupied with the pastel nightmare of suburban life, Van Sant was in the skids, training his camera on the outcasts of society and judging no one. His hero, despite engaging in a one-sided amour fou with a Latino migrant worker that would normally raise some cultural hackles, is an understandable creature of misunderstood desire--the film refuses to denounce him even as it avoids backing up his obsession in toto. Like Van Sant's Drugstore Cowboy and My Own Private Idaho, Mala Noche sets up shop in the space between the director's camera and his subjects--a halfway-meeting that would never otherwise have made it in the distanced and vindictive climate of the '80s.

Daredevil (2003)

**/****
starring Ben Affleck, Jennifer Garner, Michael Clarke Duncan, Colin Farrell
written and directed by Mark Steven Johnson

by Walter Chaw There's a real grittiness to Mark Steven Johnson's Daredevil--most of it attributable to Frank Miller's "Daredevil: Born Again" comic-book series (penned just prior to the author's seminal "The Dark Knight Returns"), from which the film borrows tone, religious iconography, and a certain washed-out colour scheme as reflected in Ericson Core's moody cinematography (which is closer to his work on Payback than on The Fast and the Furious). The problem is that the film's tenor and Catholic fetishism are moored to the light redemption of the titular hero, the bizarre stigmata and martyrdom of one villain (and forced genuflection of another), and perhaps the suggested rebirth of a femme fatale. Daredevil, then, is interesting for its borrowed elements, but it doesn't have any real weight to justify the treatment.

O (2001) [Signature Series] - DVD

**½/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras B
starring Mekhi Phifer, Josh Hartnett, Julia Stiles, Elden Henson
screenplay by Brad Kaaya, based on the play "Othello" by William Shakespeare
directed by Tim Blake Nelson

by Walter Chaw Tim Blake Nelson's updating of Shakespeare's "Othello" is hamstrung by a deficient script that hastily neglects motivation and character depth in favour of a dependence on our familiarity with the source material to lend O its tragic gravity. It overuses animalism and the specious equation of high school basketball with military conquests and prowess, and unforgivably consigns the Desdemona character to a haughty afterthought and a series of shrill, shallow pronouncements. Another fatal misjudgment of the hackneyed and over-complicated plot (which actually seems to contradict itself right at its conclusion) reduces Iago's wickedness to his need to earn daddy's approval. Admittedly though, O's transplanting of "Othello"'s insular Venetian political setting to an exclusive upper class prep school is a wry and excellent decision, offering any number of opportunities for satirizing the glowering atmosphere and claustrophobic in-fighting of high school at its most advantaged.

Ultimate X: The Movie (2002) - DVD

ESPN's Ultimate X
**/**** Image B- Sound B Extras B
written and directed by Bruce Hendricks

by Bill Chambers Notoriously anti-sports (or at the very least sports-agnostic), I thought maybe the X-Games would win me over--so much colour, so much thunder, like Hal Needham's rushes out of context. Alas, they're yet another not-for-me athletics event. I was made painfully aware of this fact while watching ESPN's Ultimate X, an IMAX production: In a sight fertile with joy, a man mounts a plastic shovel not much bigger than the one that comes with children's sandpails and slides down a snowy hilltop; but then you find out that "Super Modified-Shovel Racing" besmirched the X-Games in the eyes of its organizers and has since been gonged. With it went a new sport's sense of humour, and I am definitely the genre of film buff more entertained by the dancing mascots at half-time than by the repetitive "thrill" of competition.

Little Secrets (2002) - DVD

**/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras B
starring Evan Rachel Wood, Michael Angarano, David Gallagher, Vivica A. Fox
screenplay by Jessica Barondes
directed by Blair Treu

by Bill Chambers Little Secrets, a movie about the fear of honesty we have when we're children, begins in the vein of a Joe Dante suburban satire but ends, oh so detrimentally, like a nightmare of Chris Columbus pap. Directed with genuine zest by Blair Treu, a man whose resume includes a film with the title "Just Like Dad" and episodes of the quickly-jettisoned television adaptation of Chicken Soup for the Soul, Little Secrets grows so self-involved that the dial of its own moral compass comes off its hinge: Treu (ironic spelling, don't you think, for the director of a film dealing with the subject of lying?) and screenwriter Jessica Barondes steer their picture irreversibly south in the final minutes in what amounts to an act of belligerence--the filmmakers are too proud to admit they've made a gross miscalculation of plot, leading not only to the most aggravating closing smooch in a kids' flick since Columbus's own Adventures in Babysitting, but also Little Secrets' misogynistic aftertaste.

Stargate (1994) [Ultimate Edition - Director's Cut] - DVD

**/**** Image B Sound A Extras B-
starring Kurt Russell, James Spader, Jaye Davidson, Viveca Lindfors
screenplay by Dean Devlin & Roland Emmerich
directed by Roland Emmerich

by Bill Chambers Spawning a television show and solidifying the Hollywood career of German director Roland Emmerich, 1994's Stargate was the last movie to get the memo that Abyss-ian water walls and morphing technology no longer evoked World's Fair awe. These special effects are merely the epitome of Stargate's second-hand wonder; part of the film's value as a curiosity piece is its New York street-merchant vibe: like peddlers of the Rolux watch or Parda handbag, Emmerich and co-producer/co-writer Dean Devlin are selling us an approximation of a blockbuster by a licensed hitmaker, and we excuse them the same way we allow for the smudgy print of carbon copies or the colour bleed on VHS dubs. It must be a human impulse to absolve a facsimile of its absence of novelty.

Punch (2003)

***/****
starring Michael Riley, Sonja Bennett, Marcia Laskowski, Meredith McGeachie
written and directed by Guy Bennett

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover It may be a mess of an uncommon magnitude, but I walked out of Guy Bennett's Punch swelling with national pride. Here is a Canadian film that tosses both Hollywood dramaturgy and home-grown obsequiousness out the window and ricochets madly off the walls; its astoundingly painful psychodrama flings caution to the wind and makes bizarre crossed-wire connections that only someone outside of the Californian system could possibly be allowed to make. Though far from perfect, it's never boring, and if nothing else will change the way you view topless female boxing for all time.

How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days (2003)

*½/****
starring Kate Hudson, Matthew McConaughey, Adam Goldberg, Michael Michele
screenplay by Kristen Buckley & Brian Regan and Burr Steers, based on the book by Michele Alexander and Jeannie Long
directed by Donald Petrie

by Walter Chaw In the rush to anoint Gore Vidal blood relation Burr Steers the next Dylan Kidd (writer-director of Roger Dodger), I wonder how many people suspected that Steers's follow-up act to Igby Goes Down would be the conceptual lollapalooza of habitual bad director Donald Petrie's How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days. Only one of three scribes to blame for this mess, Steers seems to have contributed a certain smug misanthropy to the picture of the variety that fuelled the overpraised Salinger ape Igby, with Brian Regan and Kristen Buckley, the brain trust behind 102 Dalmatians, apparently responsible for the sentimental slapstick garbage that comprises the rest of the piece. What emerges is a shrunken chimera of a movie, hobbled by a pair of competing mainstream romantic movie contrivances ("One of them is lying. So is the other," assures the tagline), a self-knowledge of its own crapulence coupled with an inability to do anything about it, and a middle that, surprisingly, doesn't totally stink.

blind date: UNCENSORED (2002) - DVD

**½/**** Image B+ Sound B+

by Bill Chambers The only reality-TV (whatever that oxymoron means) series I watch, "blind date" has a crack writing staff, photogenic--and certifiable--'contestants,' and editing that's breezy without feeling clipped. For the uninitiated: Cameras follow a couple apparently arbitrarily but more often, one imagines, cruelly matched on their first date and, in the vein of pop-up video, word balloons and subtitles provide patronizing though often uproarious and surreal commentary on the proceedings. My personal favourite moment of the show to date is the oblivious bodybuilder who is asked what he is thinking by his companion: a thought-bubble appears above his head containing a chicken smoking a cigarette. Mostly these asides are, as Homer Simpson would say, funny 'cause they're true.

Monster's Ball (2001) - DVD|Monster's Ball [Lions Gate Signature Series] - DVD

***½/****
DVD - Image A+ Sound A Extras A-
DVD (SIGNATURE SERIES) - Image A+ Sound A Extras A-
starring Billy Bob Thornton, Halle Berry, Peter Boyle, Heath Ledger
screenplay by Milo Addica & Will Rokos
directed by Marc Forster

by Walter Chaw Two men tell poor Leticia Musgrove (Halle Berry) that she's beautiful during the course of Marc Forster's pitch-black Monster's Ball. The first is her condemned husband Lawrence (Sean Combs), and the second is Hank (Billy Bob Thornton), the head of the death-row guard team responsible for bringing Lawrence to the electric chair. The circumstances and timing of their compliments, separated by almost the entire body of the film, says a great deal about where Monster's Ball has gone in the interim. Lawrence says it as his last words to his wife during their last time together on the last day of his life. Hank says it over a pint of ice cream, just after an important revelation has been claimed without his knowledge. In both instances, there is a simple, fated truth to the words: the first utterance represents the realization that there's nothing left to say, the second the recognition that some things are best left unspoken.

Q&A (1990) + I'll Do Anything (1994) - DVDs

Q&A
***/**** Image A- Sound B
starring Nick Nolte, Timothy Hutton, Armand Assante, Luis Guzman
written and directed by Sidney Lumet, based on the novel by Edwin Torres

I'LL DO ANYTHING
***/**** Image A- Sound A-
starring Nick Nolte, Albert Brooks, Julie Kavner, Joely Richardson
written and directed by James L. Brooks

by Bill Chambers When news of Nick Nolte's arrest for driving under the influence of the date-rape drug hit the Toronto International Film Festival last year, just days after he'd made a strong showing there with Neil Jordan's The Good Thief, I immediately flashed back to the time I met Nolte--"met," alas, a figure of speech in this case: We crossed paths in the lobby of the Park Hyatt Hotel. His beanstalk frame sheathed in an emasculating banana-yellow housecoat, Nolte wore a pair of bookish specs that offset his craggy mug, and his snow-coloured hair stood unnaturally on end, as though he'd just seen a ghost. On his way to record interviews for Breakfast of Champions (and looking a lot more like that film's Kilgore Trout than like the erstwhile Tom Wingo), Nolte growled this to a gawping me in passing: