Film Freak Central

Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle (2004)

***/****
starring John Cho, Kal Penn, Neil Patrick Harris, Anthony Anderson
screenplay by Jon Hurwitz & Hayden Schlossberg
directed by Danny Leiner

by Walter Chaw Danny Leiner's Dude, Where's My Car isn't as bad as you'd think and his Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle is probably a good deal better than you have any right to expect. It begins as any number of gross-out frat-boy comedies do, with a white guy picking on a quiet Asian dude--and then it makes the interesting decision to stay with the quiet Asian dude (Korean actor John Cho (Harold)) and his roommate, East Indian Kumar (Kal Penn), as they embark on a quest to kill marijuana munchies at the revered White Castle hamburger chain. It's about, as Harold says at one point, the feeling of a man getting what he really wants. A simple enough statement (certainly a simple enough basis for a picture--some would say too simple), but it speaks volumes of our culture that it's so unusual that Harold and Kumar are not only not merely racial shorthand caricatures, but also just young men.

The Manchurian Candidate (2004)

***/****
starring Denzel Washington, Meryl Streep, Liev Schreiber, Kimberly Elise
screenplay by Daniel Pyne and Dean Georgaris, based on the novel by Richard Condon
directed by Jonathan Demme

by Walter Chaw Jonathan Demme's The Manchurian Candidate is arguably more of a retelling of William Cameron Menzies's Invaders from Mars (1953) than it is of John Frankenheimer's incomparable 1962 original. Like Menzies's science-fiction B-movie classic, the premise of Demme's updating is that some alien force (Earthling mad scientist in this instance instead of Martian) has implanted a small device in certain respected members of our society in order to manipulate them into harming our surprisingly fragile good old American value system. Also like Invaders from Mars, the whole film moves with the logic of a fever dream, all intense close-ups, hallucinatory visions, and suggestions of going underground.

Riding Giants (2004) + Metallica: Some Kind of Monster (2004)

RIDING GIANTS
**/****
directed by Stacy Peralta

METALLICA: SOME KIND OF MONSTER
**/****
directed by Joe Berlinger & Bruce Sinofsky

by Walter Chaw Skateboard legend Stacy Peralta's follow-up to his highly-regarded Dogtown & Z-Boys is the big wave surfing documentary Riding Giants. Equal parts ecstatic archival sports video and hagiography of the pioneers of the deep water (a new meaning for "swells"), its strengths are the same as those for Dogtown: a great soundtrack, and a sense of kinetic energy that manages to confer, at least in fits and starts, the breathlessness of the subject to an enraptured audience. But it lacks the background sociology of Peralta's prior work, failing for the most part to explain how the surf culture came to be even as it offers a survey history of the entire pastime. The film is strong on the usual suspects and the dazzling locations--and weak on the kind of lawlessness and maniacal urge to rebel that created something like an extreme beach Woodstock almost twenty years before our collective cultural dam broke. Just mentioning the Beat Poets is not enough.

Wyatt Earp (1994) [Two-Disc Special Edition] - DVD

**½/**** Image A+ Sound A+ Extras D
starring Kevin Costner, Dennis Quaid, Gene Hackman, Jeff Fahey
screenplay by Dan Gordon and Lawrence Kasdan
directed by Lawrence Kasdan

by Walter Chaw It seemed like a good idea at the time: Kevin Costner--still a hot commodity just four years removed from Dances with Wolves, fresh from what might be the most important film of his career (A Perfect World), and not yet stigmatized by Waterworld--reteaming with his Silverado director Lawrence Kasdan, then one of the best genre writers in Hollywood, for a biopic of the famous lawman Wyatt Earp. Unfortunately, Wyatt Earp flopped like Kurt Rambis in the paint. It was too long, too prosaic, and in what appears in retrospect to be a pathological lack of pretense, too pretentious by half. It was the first real nail in Costner's career coffin--a product of his having way too much power and way too little savvy in a cynical America that had outgrown his kind of aw-shucks long about Gary Cooper. Costner's still shouting, but it's hard to hear him from all the way back there in 1940.

The Tarzan Collection - DVD + Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes (1984) - DVDs

TARZAN THE APE MAN (1932)
***/**** Image B- Sound B+
starring Johnny Weissmuller, Neil Hamilton, C. Aubrey Smith, Maureen O'Sullivan
adaptation by Cyril Hume; dialogue by Ivor Novello
based on characters created by Edgar Rice Burroughs
directed by W.S. Van Dyke

by Bill Chambers As with most "origin" Tarzan films, Tarzan himself is an off-screen promise for the first third of Tarzan the Ape Man, though his famous yodel (which the studio maintains was artificially created) portends his appearance about ten minutes before he actually materializes. Likewise, as with most origin Tarzans, this one has become something of a viewing formality: The basics of Tarzan are pop-culture fundamentals passed down through the generations as if by osmosis, and so any film that aims to tell the story from scratch is bound to seem a little sluggish. It's remarkable, then, that Tarzan the Ape Man, in addition to exhibiting a surprising immunity to the ravages of time, is also mostly spared the contempt born of familiarity. Cutie-pie Maureen O'Sullivan essays the talkies' first Jane, who joins her father James's (C. Aubrey Smith) expedition in Africa and immediately casts a spell on dad's right-hand man, Harry Holt (Neil Hamilton). Once they begin their treacherous journey across the Mutia escarpment, beyond which allegedly lies an elephant graveyard that James and co. plan to raid for its ivory, Jane meets her true intended, the monosyllabic, acrobatic Tarzan (Johnny Weissmuller). Though Tarzan more or less abducts Jane, their compatibility is such that she refutes her father's claim that Tarzan belongs to the jungle when she's reunited with the caravan. "Not now. He belongs to me," she pouts.

Garage Days (2002) - DVD

*½/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras C+
starring Kick Gurry, Maya Stange, Pia Miranda, Russell Dykstra
screenplay by Dave Warner & Alex Proyas and Michael Udesky
directed by Alex Proyas

by Walter Chaw A film done better just last year with Michael Winterbottom's 24 Hour Party People, the brilliant Alex Proyas's third film is a relatively innocuous, mostly-failed rags-to-rags garage-band opera that finds its speed in its usage of stock crowd footage from an old INXS concert. Garage Days is, as you might assume, a period piece of sorts, but period only in the sense that a Baz Luhrman film is a period film (Baz is even referenced, in the picture's best moment, in an LSD hallucination set to Rick James at his sleaziest)--ostensibly taking place on the Manchester-esque mean streets of Sydney sometime in the last twenty years, though unmistakably a product of the self-reverential school of the post-modern visual boom-factory. The style the substance, Garage Days is all cover and no book and the sort of picture that seems like a lot of fun without actually being all that much fun: Trainspotting with amplifiers.

Hail Maria: FFC Interviews Joshua Marston & Catalina Sandino Moreno

July 25, 2004|"Hi there, you're Joshua Marston?"

"Yes. I am."

Such was my introduction to indie flavour-of-the-second Joshua Marston, writer-director of Maria Full of Grace: a full head of curly hair, and an ego the size of a brick shithouse. He turned away from me in the balconied hallway of Denver's historic Brown Palace Hotel after confirming his identity--ignoring my hand outstretched--to chat with someone else he'd alienated, then realized that he had to talk to me as part of his publicity duties for his first shot at feature filmmaking. It's a tough business: you fly in, you spend the night, you fly out, and in between you talk to about two dozen faceless, mostly nameless ink-stained wretches who generally ask you the same questions. It's one thing to do it in New York and L.A., it's another altogether to muster the strength to do it in a backwater like Denver. Thing of it is that people don't always stay where they are at the moment--and that Denver isn't all that dusty a horse-town as it used to be.

The Bourne Supremacy (2004)

***½/****
starring Matt Damon, Franka Potente, Brian Cox, Julia Stiles
screenplay by Tony Gilroy, based on the novel by Robert Ludlum
directed by Paul Greengrass

by Walter Chaw The Bourne Identity was directed by Doug Liman, an unusually gifted indie punk blessed with a screenplay by Tony Gilroy that touched on a lot of the same existential hallmarks as Blade Runner. Stripped of embellishment, The Bourne Identity is almost a textbook on movement and gesture, as purely cinematic an action film as any to come down the pike since the heyday of the '70s British gangster genre. The Bourne Supremacy, taking up the story of a broken assassin two years later, has lost Liman, retained Gilroy, and gained Brit helmer Paul Greengrass, the man behind the brilliant pseudo-documentary Bloody Sunday. The picture's a different beast from its predecessor--more, like Bloody Sunday, like a chronicle of a forgotten catastrophe than a post-modern thriller. And it's delirious and whip-smart.

Agent Cody Banks 2: Destination London (2004) [Special Edition]; The Cheetah Girls (2003); Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen (2004) - DVDs

AGENT CODY BANKS 2: DESTINATION LONDON
*½/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras C-
starring Frankie Muniz, Anthony Anderson, Cynthia Stevenson, Daniel Roebuck
screenplay by Don Rhymer
directed by Kevin Allen

THE CHEETAH GIRLS
*/**** Image C Sound B Extras C-
starring Raven, Adrienne Bailon, Kiely Williams, Sabrina Bryan
screenplay by Alison Taylor, based on the series of books by Deborah Gregory
directed by Oz Scott

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Here's how it works. The entertainment machine churns out low-quality wish-fulfillment fantasies for 'tweens and teenagers, then print and web outlets assign grown men and women to review them. Yes, the logic behind this weird symbiosis is elusive, as few teenagers are savvy enough to read reviews and few adult reviewers (beyond the occasional junket flunky) are possibly going to recommend them to anyone else. But somebody somewhere must benefit from this arrangement, because I have two such discs staring me in the face right now: one is the Frankie Muniz vehicle Agent Cody Banks 2, the other is a Disney Channel TV movie called The Cheetah Girls. Both are fantasies of juvenile mastery, both are scrubbed clean and chaste, both seem to have been dashed off in an afternoon by drunken hacks, and I guarantee you that both will make anyone over the age of fifteen want to poke their eyes out with a metal spike. But that's just me. I'm 31.

No Small Affair (1984) - DVD

*½/**** Image B- Sound A-
starring Demi Moore, Jon Cryer, George Wendt, Peter Frechette
screenplay by Charles Bolt and Terence Mulcahy
directed by Jerry Schatzberg

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover It's hard to remember from the vantage point of today that Jerry Schatzberg used to be somebody. Maybe not so hard for the French (he did, after all, serve on this year's Cannes jury), but definitely for North Americans, who are wont to forget that Schatzberg won the Cannes Jury Prize for Scarecrow and gave Al Pacino a pre-Godfather role in The Panic in Needle Park. But by 1984, the same hard times that hit most other directors who came to prominence in the 1970s had apparently befallen Schatzberg as well, to the point that he was reduced to teensploitation nonsense like No Small Affair. To be fair, the film isn't the pasty aesthetic blight that was the norm for '80s teen efforts, but it is the same soup of shaggy-dog romantics and coy sexual intrigue as a million other films of its stripe. That it doesn't condescend to its material makes its failure all the more rueful, like watching Eric Rohmer attempt The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes with deluded gusto.

Dawson's Creek: The Complete Third Season (1999-2000) - DVD

Image B Sound B+ Extras B
"Like a Virgin", "Homecoming", "None of the Above", "Home Movies", "Indian Summer", "Secrets & Lies", "Escape from Witch Island", "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner", "Four to Tango", "First Encounters of the Close Kind", "Barefoot at Capefest," "A Weekend in the Country", "Northern Lights", "The Valentine's Day Massacre", "Crime and Punishment", "To Green, With Love", "Cinderella Story", "Neverland", "Stolen Kisses", "The Longest Day", "Show Me Love", "The Anti-Prom", "True Love"

by Bill Chambers SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. With zeitgeist lightning-rod Kevin Williamson having jumped ship at the end of the second year, the training wheels were off for season three of "Dawson's Creek", and the show immediately drove, arms flailing, into a tree, an analogy that draws itself when a slaphappy Dawson (James Van Der Beek) crashes a speedboat in the premiere. However ironic my appreciation of the show might ultimately be, its third season starts out appreciably terrible. Falsely equating Williamson's liberal mindset with titillation, a mostly-new writing staff (there was something of an unrelated mass exodus when Williamson left, with head scribe Mike White answering the beacon of "Freaks and Geeks" and others taking similar advantage of the teen boom) resorted to Aaron Spelling licentiousness--even wallflower Joey (Katie Holmes) doffs her clothes in the season opener. It's her attempt to win back Dawson after ostracizing him at the close of the previous season, and more absurdly than that, it backfires.

Maria Full of Grace (2004)

Maria, llena eres de gracia
***/****
starring Catalina Sandino Moreno, Guilied Lopez, Patricia Rae, Orlando Tobon
written and directed by Joshua Marston

by Walter Chaw In Maria Full of Grace (Maria, llena eres de gracia), Maria (Catalina Sandino Moreno), to prepare for swallowing the horse-choker, heroin-filled prophylactics that Colombian drug mules ingest by the dozens, practices on a few large grapes (call it "Maria full of Grapes"), and in her resolute suffering, she heralds the arrival of an actor to be reckoned with. Overflowing with subplots and burdened by at least one major character who's superfluous and distracting, Joshua Marston's hyphenate debut is as overstuffed as Maria's digestive tract, but Moreno's performance is so sure-footed and clear that it smoothes over some of the rougher patches of the piece.

De-Lovely (2004)

*/****
starring Kevin Kline, Ashley Judd, Jonathan Pryce, Kevin McNally
screenplay by Jay Cocks
directed by Irwin Winkler

by Walter Chaw Tempting to fall back on clever insults ("de-readful" or "de-reary") when summarizing genuinely bad director Irwin Winker's De-Lovely, a musical biography about the life and times of Cole Porter that's de-adening in its execution. The picture's framework sees old Cole Porter (Kevin Kline)--looking a lot like Carl Reiner--sitting in an empty theatre with some sort of angel of death (Jonathan Pryce) as the events of Porter's life unfold like a Broadway musical before them. The film will be interrupted periodically by old Porter screaming at young Porter (still Kline) that he's an idiot or that No, no, no, it didn't happen that way, just to be reminded by Death that nobody can hear him. It's as stupid as it sounds.

Disney's Teacher's Pet (2004) - DVD

Teacher's Pet
***/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras C
screenplay by Bill Steinkellner & Cheri Steinkellner
directed by Timothy Björklund

by Walter Chaw If nothing else inventive, at the very least perverse, and at moments transcendently bizarre, the feature-length version of Disney Channel's "Teacher's Pet" is the brainchild of incorrigible animator/illustrator Gary Baseman. Think of his stuff as landing somewhere between R. Crumb and John Kricfalusi, all of bulging eyeballs and serpentine necks and skeletons a touch too eager to flee their skins. As the palette for a kid's entertainment, it's a bracing presumption that kids aren't stupid and, when given the choice, are capable of appreciating something outside the pale.

The Door in the Floor (2004)

*½/****
starring Jeff Bridges, Kim Basinger, Jon Foster, Elle Fanning
screenplay by Tod Williams, based on the novel A Widow for One Year by John Irving
directed by Tod Williams

by Walter Chaw Jeff Bridges is so easy that it's criminal. He does things actors shouldn't be able to do, and he does them without breaking a sweat. He's one of our national treasures, because he never draws any attention to himself in the manner of, say, a Sean Penn or a Tom Hanks. It's not showy, what he does--it's acting. And lest you think that it isn't, compare his cocky swagger in Bad Company to his awkward shuffle in Starman to his stung braggadocio in The Fisher King to his archetypal slob in The Big Lebowski to his shell-shocked suburbanite in Fearless. Take each performance by itself and it's comfortable to think that Bridges is just being Bridges; consider them as a whole and it dawns that the man's a genius. Any movie with Bridges in it therefore has something in it to recommend--no less so than his latest, Tod Williams's The Door in the Floor, an adaptation of the first third of John Irving's novel A Widow for One Year.

Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy (2004)

½*/****
starring Will Ferrell, Christina Applegate, Paul Rudd, Steven Carell
screenplay by Will Ferrell & Adam McKay
directed by Adam McKay

by Walter Chaw The topic of 1970s television anchormen is so far out of mind that it can't possibly bear a feature-length spoofing, and sure enough, "SNL" director Adam McKay's feature-film debut Anchorman is at once overstuffed and completely lifeless. It boasts a surreal touch here and again, but it's built on a one-joke premise and only the latest in a long line of witless and dull slapstick comedies. With no anchor to the satire, what remains is a film that's really only funny to the three or four people who thought it was a good idea in the first place. The opportunity to skewer sexism in television news along with its general vacuity is squandered before the altar of quick turnaround and die-cast opening dates. If they wanted to at least salvage what they had, Anchorman needed a few more months in the oven.

Broken Wings (2002) - DVD

Knafayim Shvurot
***½/**** Image A- Sound A
starring Orly Silbersatz-Banai, Maya Maron, Nitai Gaviratz, Vladimir Friedman
written and directed by Nir Bergman

by Walter Chaw Israeli filmmaker Nir Bergman's Broken Wings (Knafayim Shvurot) is a film about the intricacies of a family implosion told in the minimal, spare, largely unsentimental fashion of a Mike Leigh picture, managing to relay its tale uncorrupted by the Israeli-Palestinian issue and, in Bergman's discretion, making a stronger statement about the mad choreography of war by personalizing the victims on its periphery. It separates itself from Leigh (and another headwater, Ken Loach) with a few scenes of carefully-constructed mise-en-scène that locate Bergman as a fan of the magical possibilities of cinema--and establish Broken Wings as a picture that challenges the post-modern idea that emotional truth can't be achieved without the trappings of handheld vérité.

The Mother (2003)

**/****
starring Anne Reid, Daniel Craig, Cathryn Bradshaw, Peter Vaughan
screenplay by Hanif Kureishi
directed by Roger Michell

by Bill Chambers The latest from Roger Michell, The Mother seems die-cut for Stephen Frears (it was scripted by Hanif Kureishi, author of Frears's My Beautiful Laundrette and Sammy and Rosie Get Laid), and one can imagine it having attracted Ken Loach or Mike Leigh with only minor tweaks. If we're not exactly stuck with Michell, he's florid in a way that Frears is not and in a way The Mother does not call for; the movie's look, though attractive in and of itself, is a syntax error. From the three Michell pictures I've seen (Titanic Town (which I barely remember), Notting Hill (which I like), and Changing Lanes (which I really like)), the director's specialty seems to be equalizing peculiar material through dynamic imagery, thus imbuing it with commercial appeal. It's a phenomenal talent, but one that betrays him on The Mother by making glib the film's subject matter. In Michell's hands, a relatively working-class set of characters becomes incongruously bourgeois through sensuous camera moves and catalogue-ready tableaux accentuated by not only walls of Kubrickian white, but also a decidedly 'upscale' piano score.

King Arthur (2004)

*/****
starring Clive Owen, Kiera Knightley, Stellan Skarsgård, Stephen Dillane
screenplay by David Franzoni
directed by Antoine Fuqua

by Walter Chaw King Arthur wants to have it both ways. It wants to be smart and it wants to be stupid, too. It wants to appeal to eggheads, so it opens with a title card that promises what follows is based on "new" archaeological evidence; then, for the alleged delight of the peanut gallery, it trots out the same period epic dog-and-pony show to which we've been repeatedly subjected since Zulu Dawn. Strangely enough, this new archaeological evidence apparently dates feminism back to the fifth century (witness the dominatrix version of Guinevere, decked out at one point like Grace Jones), in addition to facilitating a clumsy political satire of twenty-first century America's religiosity, arrogance, and imperialism. Needless to say, when something tries to please everyone, everyone is seldom pleased; King Arthur is both stupid and boring, and the revelation that, stripped of tragedy, controversy, and resonance, Arthurian legend is as banal as and similar to Tears of the Sun (director Antoine Fuqua's previous film) displeases indeed.

Young Sherlock Holmes (1985) - DVD

**/**** Image A Sound A
starring Nicholas Rowe, Alan Cox, Sophie Ward, Anthony Higgins
screenplay by Chris Columbus
directed by Barry Levinson

by Walter Chaw Fresh from The Natural and with a couple of films to go until Rain Man, Barry Levinson snuck in Young Sherlock Holmes, another adventure of a gawky idiot savant hero, which I initially saw as a lad of twelve one afternoon with my best friend before either of us had developed much discretion. Touted as the first picture to feature a completely computer-generated character and featuring a post-end credits epilogue that we found out about however it was that dorks found out about stuff like that before the Internet, the picture came to me the winter after the summer I'd spent reading the collected works of Arthur Conan Doyle, and the entire experience left me thoroughly enchanted. But in revisiting this slightly sadistic boy's tale, what emerges is less a sense of thrill and awe than a recognition of the oppressive influence that executive producer Steven Spielberg had on this and all of the projects under his pre-DreamWorks aegis, Amblin Entertainment.

The Battle of Algiers (1966)

La battaglia di Algeri
***/****
starring Brahim Haggiag, Jean Martin, Yacef Saadi, Samia Kerbash
screenplay by Gillo Pontecorvo & Franco Solinas
directed by Gillo Pontecorvo

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Questions abound during a screening of The Battle of Algiers, first and foremost: what the hell is it? It's not exactly agitprop, not quite a thriller, not really a historical epic--it's a strange bird that combines each of these forms into a one-off genre all its own. The film has a reputation as high as the ceiling (as the multiple screenings in my film-school days can attest), and given its singularity, it's not hard to see why: this is not some dowdy history lesson or humourless political screed, but a swift, shapely love letter to those who fought and died in the name of Algerian independence. As a love letter, it's so typically wrapped up in its own feelings that it can't relate the struggle to something outside of its own borders--but there's no denying the writers' commitment and depth of feeling, as well as the significant impact of The Battle of Algiers' bullet to the heart of empire.