Film Freak Central

Saw (2004)

*/****
starring Leigh Whannell, Cary Elwes, Danny Glover, Monica Potter
screenplay by Leigh Whannell
directed by James Wan

by Walter Chaw Pushed along by an inexplicable tide of buzz, James Wan's Saw is flat-out terrible. It features a career-worst performance from Cary Elwes--remarkable given that Elwes had already reached unwatchability in everything from Liar, Liar to Twister to Kiss the Girls to Ella Enchanted. (You can only ride the Princess Bride wave for so long before it falls out from under you in a crash of "it wasn't that great in the first place.") Between its hyperactive direction and hysterical script and performances, Saw locates itself as somewhere south of Rob Zombie's House of 1000 Corpses and, yep, even the much-maligned FearDotCom. The film isn't scary in the slightest, thinking that epileptic camerawork is a canny replacement for actual anxiety, and though there's some John Dickson Carr pleasure in the locked-room conundrum that opens the piece, by the end the film has become something like a wilting hothouse melodrama about the importance of family. Saw is outrageously stupid and, in its heart of hearts, more than a little desperate. Your slip is showing, boys.

Mulan (1998) [Special Edition] - DVD

**/**** Image B+ Sound A Extras B-
screenplay by Rita Hsiao, Christopher Sanders, Philip LaZebnik, Raymond Singer & Eugenia Bostwick-Singer
directed by Barry Cook and Tony Bancroft

by Bill Chambers If Disney's animated features can be reduced to a stable of alternating boy movies and girl movies, then the studio's decision to make the cross-dressing fable Mulan at a juncture when they really needed mass approval (that is, after striking out post-Katzenberg with Pocahontas, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and Hercules) comes across as conspicuously non-partisan--and the hero's androgyny isn't the only bet-hedging the filmmakers practice. A meticulous recreation of Imperialist China, for instance, is compromised by anachronisms cultural and temporal (the eponymous Mulan (voice of Ming-Na Wen), a pre-Tang Dynasty Chinese maiden, is introduced to us wearing a tank top and what resemble capri pants; later, she is served bacon and eggs for breakfast), while musical numbers, subversive humour, and Spielbergian spectacle perpetually collide like bumper cars. The end-product is neither fish nor fowl, though it certainly leans towards foul.

DIFF '04: Tomorrow's Weather

Pogoda na jutro
**/****
starring Jerzy Stuhr, Malgorzata Zajaczkowska, Roma Gasiorowska, Barbara Kaluzna
screenplay by Mieczyslaw Herba & Jerzy Stuhr
directed by Jerzy Stuhr

by Walter Chaw Polish institution Jerzy Stuhr fashions a peculiarly self-serving morality opera starring himself as a man who drops out for seventeen years to serve in a monastery, only to be "outed" one day by his jilted wife, two daughters, and son. Each child represents some newly-contracted ill that his beloved homeland has acquired since his auto-sequester: youngest Kilga (Roma Gasiorowska) is a dreadlocked hophead pushing dope to thirteen-year-olds; middle Ola (Barbara Kaluzna) is the star of a smutty reality television show that features her doing every imaginable thing in a glass apartment; and oldest Marcin (Maciej Stuhr, son of Jerzy) is the Karl Rove to a seedy Polish politician. Heavy-handed in its sociology, Tomorrow's Weather (Pogoda na jutro) seeks to be an indictment of the dark side of Solidarity (poor papa Lech Walesa--sort of a ringer for Stuhr, come to think of it--never saw this coming), but more resembles a bit of self-aggrandizement, martyr-style. Stuhr's rotund everyman carries the weight of the world in the creases of his bloodhound kisser, resolving as a pale imitation of mentor Krzysztof Kieslowski's mini-parables: too leaden, too obvious, and, as it happens, too unpleasant. Kilga gets maimed, Ola gets a horror movie gash on her arm...and maimed, Marcin shoots himself in the arm and lacerates his scalp (maimed), and long-suffering wife Renata (Malgorzata Zajaczkowska) has a heart attack (not maimed)--all this Sturm und Drang at the service of a joke epilogue and a self-pitying conclusion. Bad form to roll the old peepers, but the temptation to do so is nearly irresistible.

DIFF '04: Python

Pitons
The Python
***/****
starring Juris Grave, Januss Johansons, Mara Kimele
written and directed by Laila Pakalnina

by Walter Chaw Latvian filmmaker Laila Pakalnina delivers Python (Pitons) somewhere in the netherland between Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Roman Polanski. Her first film in colour, it's a locked-room drama about a boarding school presided over by insane Nurse Ratched acolyte Mara Kimele, doggedly trying to match feces found in her school's attic to samples collected from the students in empty matchstick boxes. Favouring long, isolating tracking shots of children being children as madness and inanity erupt around them in a quiet fog, Python reduces to a series of vignettes that range from the sublime to the interesting to the banal. The best of the bunch include a wonderful sequence where the school photographer comes in to take class pictures armed with a camera, a monkey in a cotton candy-pink dress, and the titular python ("Do you want to pose with the monkey or the snake?"--predictably, there are no takers for the snake), and the intrusion of a beaver hunter on the trail of a rabid beaver. Grounding the absurdities of the piece are the children, who to a one absorb the strangeness of the piece like the demented little aliens that kids are. It all reminds a little of that Harlan Ellison story where reality begins to adapt itself to the ways that television mutates a child's imagination. Python concerns the malleability of perception: it's almost expressionist--and as experiments in world cinema go, it's a little like a breath of bent air.

The Dust Factory (2004)

ZERO STARS/****
starring Armin Mueller-Stahl, Hayden Panettiere, Ryan Kelley, Michael Angarano
written and directed by Eric Small

by Walter Chaw Stunning in its incompetence, Eric Small's The Dust Factory highlights by its existence the unpopular truisms that there are as many awesomely bad independent films as there are mainstream ones; that the terms non-genre and non-traditional usually indicate a directionless mess; and that working with kid actors is not now, nor has it ever been, anything other than a plugger's bet. It raises the question of why there aren't more mimes acting as Greek Choruses in movies before it answers it, and most damnably, it seems to ascribe some sort of moral failing to seniors afflicted with Alzheimer's. See, in Small's fantasy world of The Dust Factory, souls in limbo can choose to "take the leap" off a trapeze tower into the arms of some faceless metaphor: miss and they're returned to the "dust" of their lives; catch and they're thrown to "the next level," which is Heaven or a video game, though stupid either way. The sticky part about it (aside from the stupid part, which is all of it, really) is that it requires courage to take that leap. The suggestion then becomes that if you have Alzheimer's disease, in some part of your brain you're a coward for not dying or "returning"--that you have in fact chosen to remain in a state of declining capacity. It's one thing to pose an Afterschool Special about how kids in comas need a will to power, another thing altogether to suggest that grandpa's a coward for contracting a degenerative brain condition.

Around the Bend (2004)

*/****
starring Michael Caine, Jonah Bobo, Josh Lucas, Glenne Headly
written and directed by Jordan Roberts

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. There's nothing alive in Around the Bend, a story of three generations of men healing one another during a road trip. It's just as bad as it sounds: one contrivance piled upon another while Kentucky Fried Chicken looms large in nearly every scene and, by narrative necessity, figures in every critical plot point. The central metaphor for the film is a series of KFC bags, crumpled up and stuffed inside each other like Russian dolls--each entrusted with a couple of post-it notes containing cryptic messages that send our cardboard boys on a scavenger hunt across the Four Corners area of the western United States. It's the manner in which grand patriarch Henry (Michael Caine) decides he'll reveal to his grandson Jason (Josh Lucas) why and how his leg doesn't work right anymore. Jason has been raised by Henry ever since Jason's father, Turner (Christopher Walken), ran out on them when Jason was just a crippled tot; now Jason has a moppet of his own, saucer-eyed Zach (Jonah Bobo). Zach, regrettably, is saddled with the task of being the precious/precocious font of the film's alleged humour and the lion's share of its bittersweetness as well. Bad enough that Caine and Walken agreed to be in this mess; they consented to playing second fiddle to Tiny Tim, too.

The Rose Tattoo (1955) - DVD

**½/**** Image A- Sound A-
starring Burt Lancaster, Anna Magnani, Marisa Pavan, Ben Cooper
screenplay by Tennessee Williams, based on his play
directed by Daniel Mann

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Anna Magnani is the kind of actress people describe using all the wrong superlatives. Everybody talks about her "big" presence, about how she's a "powerhouse" and a "force of nature," as though she were the Italian Shelley Winters. This kind of blather hardly approximates the scope of Magnani's talent. She's big all right, but she's more than the pyrotechnic scenery-chewer that "big" normally designates: she's that rare combination of big and nuanced, a crushing blend of uninhibited physicality and the willingness to take every line, word, and punctuation mark personally. Technically, even a luminary like her has her work cut out for her in something like The Rose Tattoo, what with its middling Louisiana Peyton Place scenario by Tennessee Williams, the dry, emotionless direction of Daniel Mann, and a supporting cast of Hollywood phoneys conspiring to waste her talent. But Magnani never betrays the thought that her part might be less than worth her time, and in so doing, she makes it worth her time. Ours, too, more often than not.

DIFF '04: Tu

Here
***/****
starring Jasmin Telalovic, Marija Tadic, Zlatko Crnkovic, Ivo Gregurevic
screenplay by Josip Mlakic & Zrinko Ogresta
directed by Zrinko Ogresta

by Walter Chaw Six loosely-connected vignettes form the body of Zrinko Ogresta's Croatian film Tu, a study in six parts of the difficulty of communication in a modern age (Hopper's eternal verities of nature and technology askew) and the scars left by the Balkan War on the lives of the collateral chaff. It opens with a simpleton at the mortar-torn front finding hope in the life of a bird that he saves, and ends with an old veteran unable to sleep because of his memories of conflict. Ogresta's strength isn't subtlety, clearly, but a sort of Kieslowski-esque interest in morality plays illustrated in brief and painted with a pleasantly textured cinematic eye. Tu suggests timelessness in the inevitable progression of its hermetic capsules--moving into the lives of an addict rejected by her family, a television personality driven to drink, and a loner looking for anything to call family. Devastation is the most obvious side-effect of war, the film suggests, but the long half-life of societal disintegration is the lasting fallout. The picture is rhymed by its opening pull-outs and push-ins through long tunnels--the first leaving the light at the end of the tunnel, the last rushing towards it in a suggestion of a sentiment that must be optimism, courageous and flagging, in the midst of all that decay.

DIFF '04: King of the Corner

**½/****
starring Peter Riegert, Isabella Rossellini, Jennifer Albano, Eric Bogosian
screenplay by Peter Riegert & Gerald Shapiro
directed by Peter Riegert

by Walter Chaw Peter Riegert, Animal House's Boon, makes his directorial debut with King of the Corner, a Jewish mid-life crisis of a film that casts Isabella Rossellini in the long-suffering wife role she played so well in Fearless and Riegert himself as a travelling salesman on the verge. Eli Wallach is the father, Rita Moreno is the mother ("He started calling me a 'wetback'"), and Eric Bogosian has a splendid cameo as Rabbi Fink, a man without much patience for mincing words. A eulogy he delivers late-film ("What did he have to offer? Not much") is something like a minor classic--no surprise that the confessional monologue is the man's stock in trade. (With Spalding Gray tragically out of the picture, it's just Bogosian and David Sedaris keeping the home fires glowing.) The film grinds down, though, in its contrivances--a lot happens to this schlemiel Job, and it doesn't take long for the constant keen to get a little Woody Allen-cum-Seinfeld wearisome. A daughter (Ashley Johnson) is underwritten, while an almost unrecognizable Beverly D'Angelo deserves more screen-time as an old high school flame passed along the way. With all the problems in its pocket concerning first-time directors and trying to adapt books of short stories (if your name isn't Robert Altman, don't do it), King of the Corner does have a nice, familiar warmth to it. It's not going to set anything on fire, but it's not a bad way to cleanse the palate between more challenging, piquant fare.

The Go-To Guy: FFC Interviews Bill Pullman

October 24, 2004|Wearing a baseball cap and red jacket, Bill Pullman seems like any other sturdy middle-aged guy. He does, that is, until he talks. Like his screen persona, Mr. Pullman chews over his words with careful, delighted concentration--his speech is laced with just a hint of savoury, not the least because of his affection for "hmmm" as a lead-in to his laconic delivery. There's something about this vital sense of Mr. Pullman always being in the process of discovery (of evolving, if you will) that I suspect draws directors as creepily revolutionary as David Lynch, Wim Wenders, Wes Craven, and Thomas Vinterberg into his orbit. Mr. Pullman fights battles with himself in his performances, a sense of tension that's made palpable when he's matched with artists similarly engaged in refereeing the wrestling match between the intimate and the profane. In town for an experimental theatre project with which he's involved at the National Theater Conservatory, Mr. Pullman was joined for a few days at the 27^th Starz Denver International Film Festival by Curtiss Clayton, who directed him in the filmed re-telling of Verdi's Rigoletto, Rick.

Head in the Clouds (2004); Bright Young Things (2003); Vera Drake (2004)

HEAD IN THE CLOUDS
*/****
starring Charlize Theron, Penélope Cruz, Stuart Townsend, Thomas Kretschmann
written and directed by John Duigan

BRIGHT YOUNG THINGS
**½/****
starring Emily Mortimer, Stephen Campbell Moore, James McAvoy, Michael Sheen
screenplay by Stephen Fry, based on the novel by Evelyn Waugh
directed by Stephen Fry

VERA DRAKE
***½/****
starring Imelda Staunton, Richard Graham, Eddie Marsan, Anna Keaveney
written and directed by Mike Leigh

by Walter Chaw There's a certain fascination embedded in our images of wartime England. When a film comes birthing across the pond this time of year, dripping with prestige and a whiff of stuffiness, what can it be but awards fodder laden with lovely sets, sepia-stained cinematography, handsome wool and silk costumes, and largely European casts that remind of how venal American mainstream casts tend to be by comparison? Something about the Blitz still intoxicates--perhaps England's steadfast refusal to surrender their island sanctuary to the barbarians at the gate tickles at our national self-delusion, trading on the belief, once ironclad, that our borders were as sacrosanct, or that our intentions in establishing a New World Order were ever that noble. Now, without the comfort of our own inviolate island sanctuary (what was Manhattan pre-9/11 than that--and what was it after but the biggest metaphor for the irony of capitalist arrogance since The Titanic?), there's just that much more reason for moth-balled middlebrow arthouse audiences to snuffle up great pinches of mid-twentieth century British pluck and remember from the cloistered perspective of a cloth chair a when that never existed--at least never for them.

The Alamo (2004) [Widescreen] - DVD

ZERO STARS/**** Image B- Sound A Extras C+
starring Dennis Quaid, Billy Bob Thornton, Jason Patric, Patrick Wilson
screenplay by Leslie Bohem and Stephen Gaghan and John Lee Hancock
directed by John Lee Hancock

by Walter Chaw There's an old joke from "Hee Haw" about crossing a potato with a sponge: "It didn't taste too good, but boy did it soak up the gravy!" In John Lee Hancock's appalling and sidesplitting The Alamo, Billy Bob Thornton as Davy Crockett tells a gruesome variation on that punchline, only as an actor's moment (and with the "grease" off of slaughtered and incinerating Indians substituted for gravy). "Now, when someone passes me the potatoes, I just pass them right on." An interesting lesson taught about genocide and cannibalism: it's not the commission of atrocity to be mourned, it's the loss for a taste for French fries that's really the tragedy. The Alamo is essentially how "Hee Haw" saved the world--every time Davy pops his head above the titular fort's ramparts, visions of Roy Clark and Buck Owens popping out of a cornfield dance in your head. There are moments when, I kid you not, I looked to see if there was a price tag dangling, Minnie Pearl-style, from Jim Bowie's (Jason Patric) hat.

DIFF '04: Green Hat

*/****
starring Liao Fan, Li Haibin, Dong Lifan, Li Congxi
written and directed by Liu Fendou

by Walter Chaw Liu Fendou's Green Hat opens with a jab: a man on a beach muses about the difference between an art film and a popular film, and he does so by pondering the place of masturbation in polite conversation. In a nutshell, Fendou provides the madness and the method for his directorial debut, an onanistic roundelay concerning the nature of love that begins with another bank robber (sigh) who finds out he's been doing it all for a love he's been cuckolded to, proceeds with the impotent cop who bears witness to the last moments of the robber's life, and finishes with the audience's dawning understanding that Fendou is probably attacking the hypocrisy of the myth of masculinity. Guns and intimidation rule the first portion, castration and humiliation rule the second, and, armed with the knowledge that Fendou originally envisioned a trilogy of short films instead of this schizophrenic vehicle, Green Hat's maddening emptiness swims into focus. The whole thing is a self-satisfied exercise in militant cinema (militant in the face of repressive regime--and not our repressive regime) loaded down with the worst of independent film (talkiness, quirkiness for quirk's sake) and the worst of mainstream, too (gunplay, sexplay). Green Hat is a bad, disjointed film, but sadly just another example of the direction that Chinese cinema has taken, with few exceptions, since Hong Kong slid back under the Mainland's control.

The Final Cut (2004)

*/****
starring Robin Williams, Mira Sorvino, James Caviezel, Mimi Kuzyk
written and directed by Omar Naim

by Walter Chaw It's interesting to me in an esoteric way that Robin Williams consistently seeks out projects that position him as some sort of levitating guru detached from the travails of the common man, floating above the madding crowd with a beatific smile on his god's-eye mug. Think of, among the many shrinks, ex-shrinks, serial killers, and genies Williams has played, his "Wizard of Oz"-ian Dr. Know from A.I., his demented developer Sy from One Hour Photo, or his sainted Dr. Chris from What Dreams May Come. By all accounts, Williams is a nice fellow--a little manic and arrested, perhaps, but pleasant and even philanthropic. So what is it about the camera that turns him into an auto-consumptive egoist with a bizarre saviour complex, into this sad clown, velvet or otherwise, who finds humour in tragedy (so the theory goes) but lately has worked pretty hard at just being gloweringly melancholic in "psychological thrillers" long on sterile atmosphere and short on any sort of resonance? Williams has this air of feeling sorry for humanity that doesn't seem pious as much as it seems self-satisfied and superior. I'm not sure what the holy land for his crusade is, but I hope that he and Kevin Spacey conquer it soon so they can get back to not being irritating pricks with delusions of Christ.

DIFF '04: Kontroll

Control
****/****
starring Sándor Csányi, Zoltán Mucsi, Csaba Pindroch, Sándor Badár
screenplay by Jim Adler & Nimród Antal
directed by Nimród Antal

by Walter Chaw A cross between Chris Noth and Clancy Brown's The Kurgan from Highlander, Bulcsú (Sándor Csányi) is the Oedipal anti-hero at the heart of Hungarian director Nimród Antal's drop-dead brilliant Kontroll. A ticket-taker and a rent-a-cop, he's assigned to a misfit crew at odds with every other misfit crew in their Orwellian transit agency. The film, a surprisingly violent and kinetic slapstick comedy reminiscent of Clive Barker's "Midnight Meat Train," begins with one character aping Harpo Marx's blowtorch lighter bit from Duck Soup and ends with scenes that recall Vincent Ward's visionary The Navigator. Bulcsú is a Hal Hartley protagonist, too smart and too damaged for the world, set adrift in the film on the heels of a hooded figure pushing commuters into the path of onrushing trains. He tries to find love with a young woman (Eszter Balla) who rides the subway dressed in a bear suit while seeking his own identity in the motivations of the killer haunting his adopted, infernal home. Vilmos Zsigmond apprentice Gyula Pados's fulsome cinematography makes of the subterranean sets the kind of textured iconographic landscape of Wim Wenders's late American films. (The picture was shot entirely in the labyrinthine subway warren beneath Budapest.) A Jungian dream (paced by electronica group Neo's rowdy, fantastic score), in which Bulcsú finds himself crawling through something like an endless vaginal tunnel, is the moment when Kontroll comes fully alive: it's the juncture between metaphor, craft, and narrative--and for almost all of its final hour, the picture maintains an unbelievably high level of invention and insight. This is a great science-fiction piece, a razor-sharp satire, and an impressive calling card for an emerging Hungarian cinema.

DIFF '04: Sonny Boy

***/****
directed by Soleil Moon Frye

by Walter Chaw At times deeply affecting, erstwhile "Punky Brewster" Soleil Moon Frye's second film is a personal memoir of a two-week trip taken by Soleil and her father, actor Virgil Frye, across the physical landmarks of the latter's life, with Virgil's Alzheimer's-afflicted mind disintegrating in chunks of recollection as the film progresses. At its best, Sonny Boy captures the troubled emptiness of the rural United States' back roads, expanding its personal story into an almost metaphysical statement about being lost in America; as it happens, Virgil even worked on the production of friend and confidante Dennis Hopper's Easy Rider, which shares curious parallels with Sonny Boy in its road trip and unmasking. (Aiding its extra-textual fascination, the picture fits comfortably in 2004's abundance of films dealing with memory.) But moments that begin as revelatory at times become uncomfortably intimate. It's not that we're too close, it's that looking at someone else's photograph album--flipping through a stranger's diary--is at once a violation and an example of trying to decode signs without a key to the signifier. We feel sympathy because we're human and we feel moved for the same reason, but with a project this personal, there is almost always the moment where you realize, during a passage too extended or a reference too opaque, that the scissors were put away prematurely. Soleil at least demonstrates a supple eye and a canny use of images, an ability to blend different film stocks to good effect, and a knack for soundmixing, while the farewell at Virgil's supervised care facility lands with the weight of an Emily Dickinson poem--and all the cruel disassociative irony of one, too.

Team America: World Police (2004)

*½/****
screenplay by Trey Parker & Matt Stone & Pam Brady
directed by Trey Parker

by Walter Chaw The comedy bits that work in Matt Stone and Trey Parker's Team America: World Police are the most vile, the most puerile. The now-notorious puppet sex scene is uproarious--the consumption of Hans Blix by a catfish and the attempts at having marionettes fight one another in hand-to-hand combat are pretty funny, too, and though it's a little oblique, I appreciated our intrepid band's endeavour to disguise one of their own as a gentle-puppet of Middle Eastern decent. But we reach a point during this experiment in neo-"Thunderbirds" cinema where it becomes clear that the satirical sharpness that defines the duo's at-times incandescently brilliant "South Park" has been shunted aside in favour of vomit gags and screaming homophobia. It's faint praise to say that Team America is sometimes as funny as Steve Oedekerk's "thumb" movies, but more often it's just protracted and uninspired.

A Home at the End of the World (2004) - DVD

*/**** Image A Sound A- Extras D
starring Colin Farrell, Dallas Roberts, Robin Wright Penn, Sissy Spacek
screenplay by Michael Cunningham, based on his novel
directed by Michael Mayer

by Walter Chaw Glib, facile, essentially misguided, and exhibiting a kind of misunderstanding about film craft that sends exactly the opposite of the intended message in every scene, Michael Mayer's directorial debut A Home at the End of the World is a trial from start to finish. It makes appalling soundtrack choices first in establishing period, then in demolishing mood, and finally in screwing up the chronology enough so that the viewer is left completely unmoored. If you're using a jovial Seventies soundtrack to place your film in the Seventies, it's a really bad idea to start using a classic Motown soundtrack when your picture actually moves forward in time. (Not even mentioning what a perverse boner it is to accompany the discovery of a dead father with "Me and Julio Down By the Schoolyard.") Add to that a screenplay by The Hours scribe Michael Cunningham that displays the same kind of top-heavy, more or less off-base pretension and disdain for such outmoded values as loyalty and generosity, and what you have is a recipe for a very particular kind of disaster.

Van Helsing (2004) [Widescreen] - DVD

½*/**** Image B+ Sound A Extras C+
starring Hugh Jackman, Kate Beckinsale, Richard Roxburgh, David Wenham
written and directed by Stephen Sommers

by Walter Chaw There are times now and again over the course of Stephen Sommers's unspeakable Van Helsing when the film is so brazenly bad that it threatens to be satirical--so bad that one is left to scramble to pull some sort of gestalt sense from the carnage. But it's just a mess, a cesspool of half-formed ideas and images ripped off whole from The Empire Strikes Back, Return of the Jedi, and Raiders of the Lost Ark, with Hugh Jackman reprising Wolverine from X-Men and Kate Beckinsale essentially reprising her role from Underworld. All of it's wrapped up in a cacophonous jumble of dour mattes, really (really) bad CGI, and an Alan Silvestri score that is itself a rip-off of everything that made John Williams famous (that is, Holst's "The Planets"). Way too long at just over two hours with no story to speak of justifying its length, the piece is stolen by David Wenham as a deadpan 19^th century Q, Friar Carl, and grinds to a dead standstill whenever Jackman delivers one of his twenty lines, Beckinsale chimes in with a jarring non sequitur ("There's a bright side to death in Transylvania"), Shuler Hensley as Frankenstein's monster threatens to cry out "Puttin' on the Riiiitz," or Richard Roxburgh as Count Dracula vamps around like a diva in a John Waters film. If only Van Helsing were campy.

DIFF '04: Being Julia

*½/****
starring Annette Bening, Catherine Charlton, Jeremy Irons, Michael Gambon
screenplay by Ronald Harwood, based on the novel Theatre by W. Somerset Maugham
directed by István Szabó

by Walter Chaw Shrill and unlikeable, Being Julia is reasonably assessed as an at least thematically faithful adaptation of W. Somerset Maugham's soulless novel Theatre, just as it's fair to compare it to the acclaimed Mephisto, director István Szabó's other condemnation of the stage. But that doesn't mean it's any good. Annette Bening plays Julia Lambert, a grand dame of London's West End accurately labelled a cold, evil bitch by her emotionally-unavailable actor husband, Michael (Jeremy Irons). Julia beds down with young Tom (Shaun Evans), who in turn beds down with ingénue Avice (Lucy Punch); in a fit of pique, Julia sets out to destroy Avice. The idea is that poor monster Julia is incapable of separating reality from the stage--setting the stage, as it were, for a film that addresses layers of sign and signifier through a climactic play-within-a-play-within-a-film. But it's all done with so much spite and so little self-awareness that Julia is actually made the hero in some kind of klutzy, pre-Blitz version of The First Wives Club. Older women deserve to be humiliated for sleeping with younger men and young women deserve to be humiliated by older women. Only the men win, an important thing to remember when this male-dominated production is brought up in conversation as an example of a woman's film. Lesbian and gay subplots abound, mainly for the purposes of giggling at their whimsical perversity (there's more giggling in Being Julia than there is at a Japanese schoolgirl convention), and no other middlebrow peeve goes unpunished either when writers and the expressionist theatre are mocked for the bemusement of what the picture refers to as the jackassery of the unwashed, anti-intellectual public.

DIFF '04: Rick

***½/****
starring Bill Pullman, Aaron Stanford, Agnes Bruckner, Sandra Oh
screenplay by Daniel Handler
directed by Curtiss Clayton

by Walter Chaw Priestly black in its absolute stentorian corruption, Curtiss Clayton's brilliantly twisted Rick is an essay on the cancerous progression of machismo, on the dehumanizing influence of power structures--on the ultimate, ironic strength and futility of family bonds. Written by Daniel Handler, better known for his Lemony Snicket novels, the film's veneer of misanthropy and nihilism hides a strong sense of moral certitude in decay: the affirmation--even if it offers neither succour nor shield--that despite the pervasive rot of the day-to-day, there remains one true place in the space between a father and his daughter. Rick (Bill Pullman, brilliant) is a middle-management prick as imagined by Kafka, running through mazes and crawling around the floor of his boss's (Aaron Stanford) office as part of his daily ritual and spending his bottled bile on a hapless applicant (Sandra Oh) for an executive assistant position. It's Secretary, Interrupted, if you will, a celluloid update of Verdi's Rigoletto incorporating Internet sex, murder for hire, and social satire elevated to piquant grand comedy and, in fact, high opera. A holiday-themed film, Rick is an attack on venality (think It's a Wonderful Life set entirely in Pottersville and written by Neil Labute) that charts the topography of the cratered new-millennial language of cinema. A scene of revelation, happening late in the game and following a virtuoso sequence where Rick walks through a labyrinth to emerge in the barred-shadows underneath (Clayton cut his teeth as ace editor on the films of Gus Van Sant and Vincent Gallo's Buffalo '66), is shot, in a stroke of genius, as a literal shadow play. And so Rick finds its central motif and intention: commentary on the act of filmmaking and the experience of film-watching, as well as the creation of new mythologies with new morals for a rough, uncertain age.

Candyman (1992) [Special Edition] - DVD

***½/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras A-
starring Virginia Madsen, Tony Todd, Xander Berkeley, Kasi Lemmons
screenplay by Bernard Rose, based on "The Forbidden" by Clive Barker
directed by Bernard Rose

by Walter Chaw Clive Barker's fiction drips of sex, reeks of it. Squint and you can see sex rising off of it like steam from a fresh-slain carcass. His best work, stuff like the short stories "In the Hills, the Cities" and "Human Remains," or his audacious retelling of the Christian myth Imajica, are engorged with sensuality--alight with perversity and all manner of fetishistic penetrations. When translated into film, however, Barker's work (including that which the author has shepherded to celluloid himself) takes on a certain seediness that undermines the essential elegance of the writing. Something about Barker's prose makes the rawest obscenity seem privileged--the pleasure/pain principle of his cenobites in print, for example, is made the grail, whereas on the silver screen it dips dangerously towards kitsch and cult camp. Barker in writing batters defenses and leaves you prostrate before it; Barker projected feels formal, overdone, even ridiculous. The burden of fantasy for the reader is on the reader, but for the moviegoer, it's on the filmmaker.

DIFF '04: Monster Road

**½/****
directed by Brett Ingram

by Walter Chaw Monster Road details the life and process of underground claymation hero Bruce Bickford, best known for a pair of collaborations with underground music hero Frank Zappa. Knowing that the work itself is the best entrée into the mind of the artist, director Brett Ingram uses a great deal of invaluable footage from Bickford's archives to lend balance to his subject's obsessive, somewhat dismal existence in his cramped basement studios. The tragic fate of Bickford's brother and the failing capacities of his father (who lives in an even more obsessive-compulsive environment than Bruce's, if such a thing is possible), whom Bruce visits often throughout the piece, find subtle life in the animator's miniature epics of consummation and cleavage. His is a process of desiring absorption and requiring separation--instincts at odds with one another, creating in the art this sense of tense, anxious, constantly-redistributed energy. Ingram's picture doesn't break any new ground in the documentary field, but it does what it does with clear, workmanlike precision. Monster Road shines a light into a corner unexamined with no little poignancy besides, and if by the end we're a little edified if essentially unchanged, there must be a place for that, too.

DIFF '04: Tradition of Killing Lovers

Rasm-e ashegh-koshi
Tradition of Lover Killing
***/****
starring Hossein Mahjoub, Hossein Abedini, Gohar Kheir-Andish, Arman Nikzad
written and directed by Khosro Masumi

by Walter Chaw An Iranian film of surpassing simplicity and beauty, Khosro Masumi's debut Tradition of Killing Lovers involves a man sent to prison for smuggling lumber. While interred, his young son Jallal tries to pay off the family's debts by running the remote region's lone chainsaw to scattered smuggling camps. Shots of Jallal, impossibly dwarfed by the chainsaw blade poking straight up from a knapsack on his back, framed against a bleak Iranian winter, conjure innumerable visual references from as varied of visionaries as Satyajit Ray and the Akira Kurosawa of Dersu Uzala. Moments where Masumi shows civilization as a series of close-set houses, thick as mushrooms, sprouting corpse white from the blighted earth, hint at the corruption just beneath the surface of what seems a sunny fable. (Not otherwise a supernatural thriller, Tradition of Killing Lovers boasts of one of the most chilling reveals of any film this year.) And though the performances veer from the excellent (Salar, the father, and Jallal) to the Bollywood (sister Majan and her Dudley Do-Right constable/suitor, Latif), with a courtship subplot and kvetching mother threatening at every moment to disrupt the quiet poetry of the central story, it doesn't really matter, as the stars of the show are the Iranian outback and the young boy bravely travelling across his desolate reality. Think of it as an Iranian The Swimmer (the Burt Lancaster film about a man getting home by loping across the backyard pools of his suburban neighbours): at its best a sad, existential journey through the emptiness of the self, interested in something so simple and complex as honouring the father and being to his own self true.

Bride of the Woodsman: FFC Interviews Kyra Sedgwick

October 17, 2004|Taller than you'd think and luminescent on a drizzly autumn day in Denver, Kyra Sedgwick has a smile that lights up a room, even this cavernous warehouse space rented out for the 27^th Starz Denver International Film Festival in LoDo. Best known for playing prettier versions of the down-to-earth romantic interests in which Amy Madigan used to specialize, Ms. Sedgwick is approachable and engaged in person, holding a cup of hot tea between her hands for warmth as she talks about the importance of hope in her films, even as her work of late has tended towards a darker hue. This is no doubt the influence of her husband Kevin Bacon's recent forays into the territory of the haunted, spotlighted by the fact that the couple have three collaborative projects out or in the works. Their latest, The Woodsman, finds Ms. Sedgwick cast opposite Mr. Bacon as the girlfriend of a recently-released child molester, a character reminiscent in her sexual liberation of the one she played in Personal Velocity. Ms. Sedgwick has never struck me as the type looking for fame--there is a quality to her work that suggests something as indefinable and inadequate as "carefree." It wasn't that much of a surprise for me to learn that Carole Lombard is one of her idols.

DIFF '04: The Woodsman

**/****
starring Kevin Bacon, Kyra Sedgwick, Eve, Mos Def
screenplay by Steven Fechter and Nicole Kassell
directed by Nicole Kassell

by Walter Chaw An impossibly-conflicted film about the impossibly complicated issue of child sex offenders (that is, their recovery, recidivism, and release), Nicole Kassell's The Woodsman retreats, perhaps understandably, into the refuge of allegory. Before it does, though, Kevin Bacon's hollowed-out, haunted performance as a man released from prison with an indelible human stain moors the picture in a strong, melancholy reality. He moves in across the street from an elementary school, gets a job in a lumber yard, and befriends a woman (Kyra Sedgwick) who, a little too conveniently, suffered at the hands of molesters somewhere back down the road. Things start to fall apart as a new pederast begins to circle and a suspicious detective (Mos Def, mos def) starts making surprise visits. The Woodsman's vision, courtesy that all-too-rarity of a female writer-director, is beautifully shot and, as it should be, bleak: the world is an ugly, dangerous place--especially for little girls, Kassell suggests. It's a hard message told in an uncompromising way, at least it is until the film's final act, where a reference to the "Little Red Riding Hood" story, already signified by the title, is dragged kicking and screaming into the text, dispelling the starkness of its reality in favour of an ending that suggests big closets and the kind of rosy optimism the rest of the film's done such a masterful job of shaking. It's a problem--and not a small one--that the lingering last shots of The Woodsman include temptation in the rearview and the monster turned, however briefly, into the woodsman hero of a fairy tale that doesn't entirely deserve its happy ending. Originally published: October 16, 2004.

DIFF '04: Stage Beauty

**/****
starring Billy Crudup, Claire Danes, Tom Wilkinson, Rupert Everett
screenplay by Jeffrey Hatcher, based on his play "Compleat Female Stage Beauty"
directed by Richard Eyre

by Walter Chaw A Samuel Pepys quotation opens Stage Beauty, something about how in the seventeenth century, Ned Kynaston was the most beautiful woman on a stage that forbade women from strutting and fretting their hours. Playing Desdemona in a mannered production of "Othello", Kynaston (Billy Crudup) is king of the roost, oblivious to the crush of his ahistorical assistant, Mrs. Margaret "Maria" Hughes (a sort of well-cast Claire Danes), the first lady of the theatre, who fulfills her destiny when bawdy King Charlie II (Rupert Everett in fine form--why not a film about him?) turns the gender tables and declares it illegal for women's parts in the theatre to not be played by women. The one comparison that sticks is a somehow more dewy Shakespeare in Love, where delighted trills of "ribaldry" threaten to roll ironically off the tongue in the voice of Jon Lovitz's late, lamented English dandy theatre critic from "SNL". Playful but not fun, teasing but not sexy, Stage Beauty is an airless exercise in Method that, when the time comes for the film to finally reach its apogee, suggests that Stanislavsky/Strasberg was born on a stage in 1660. Intended as piquant, the ending is just shades of that episode of "Cheers" where nobody notices that someone is actually killing Diane in a bar-bound production of, you guessed it, "Othello". It was better--and shorter--the first time.

DIFF '04: Imaginary Crimes

**/****
starring Sigourney Weaver, Emile Hirsch, Jeff Daniels, Michelle Williams
written and directed by Dan Harris

by Walter Chaw Another installment in the ongoing Ice Storm chronicles, screenwriter-turned-hyphenate Dan Harris's Imaginary Heroes also incorporates elements of stuff like A Home at the End of the World and Moonlight Mile. The picture shows its hand early and often, with a star swimmer (Kip Pardue) killing himself before the main titles have finished, thus leaving his already-dysfunctional family to pick up the suburban, Ordinary People pieces. Mom is Sigourney Weaver, sis is Michelle Williams, Pa is Jeff Daniels, and the star of the show is likeable Emile Hirsch; the early scenes where Hirsch goes back to school to a slo-mo parade of kids doing their best to be sympathetic (see: Donnie Darko) demonstrate a sort of comfortable indie familiarity with the material. Dad drinks too much and doesn't go to work anymore, Mom discovers the joys of joints and the humiliation of being arrested (a reaction extreme that doesn't ring true), sis falls in love with an emotionally shattered but affable young lad (Jay Paulson), and the "other" son decides to kiss his best friend (Suzanne Santo) one night whilst standing under a plastic snake that acts as an ersatz Freudian mistletoe. (To its credit, the picture resists the Judd Hirsch-ian (no relation) shrink, though given the situation, one does wonder why none of these people are in therapy.) So, if you're sick of this master plot and these stock characters, rest easy that you know all there is to know without needing to suffer through it. But if you miss Sigourney Weaver and wouldn't mind seeing her transfer over to the Joan Allen role in another white-collar blues bit, hell, Imaginary Heroes is just the ticket.

DIFF '04: À Tout de Suite

**/****
starring Isild Le Besco, Ouassini Embarek, Nicolas Duvauchelle, Laurence Cordier
written and directed by Benoît Jacquot

by Walter Chaw Benoît Jacquot's homage to the Nouvelle Vague has a weird, emotionally-detached feeling to it, something to do with the fact that paying tribute to the French New Wave is, at its essence, paying tribute to a tribute. (Something to do, too, with the nihilism that has infected world cinema in the new millennium.) The story proper concerns a young girl in the Anna Karina mold (Isild Le Besco) who, fashioning herself a bohemian, rebels against her bourgeois parents, beds down with a bank robber, and gets abandoned in a foreign country before coming home to France to face the music. It's dreary when it should be, er, breathless, and obscure when it should be incandescent--enough so that the freedom our heroine tastes (sexually, parentally, financially) feels like a gathering storm without the surcease of sorrow that a good, clean cloudburst brings. A tout de suite is heavy without being weighty. Besides, the bank robber melodrama is hardly a genre in need of revitalization in the public mind (what is au currant in American cinema? The comic book film, perhaps? The Charlie Kaufman?), nor is, more to the point, the New Wave in need of a breath of fresh air. À tout de suite (which translates somewhat ironically as Right Now), then, is a film of a style and an inclination that fulfills no need, and ultimately does nothing to nourish the soul of the now.

Shall We Dance (2004)

½*/****
starring Richard Gere, Jennifer Lopez, Susan Sarandon, Stanley Tucci
screenplay by Audrey Wells, based on the screenplay by Masayuki Suo
directed by Peter Chelsom

by Walter Chaw Shall We Dance sits on the screen like an unwelcome dinner guest, or a corpulent toad. It's a remake of a mediocre-but-popular Japanese film that jettisons the question mark after "Dance" on its title screen, the inflectionless phrase squatting there as this movie's moniker a curiously apt description of the dismal marionette's-waltz to follow. The only thing more inscrutable than Jennifer Lopez's self-effacing slide into the territory of Melanie Griffith's mumbling kewpie doll career is the filmmakers' concept of Richard Gere as a comic actor capable of carrying off long takes and haughty deliveries. After all, it's hard enough to believe that the glowering, pinched vision of J.Lo staring fixedly out a dance-studio picture window at Chicago's hurtling elevated train would serve as an invitation instead of a dire warning. The romance of the El has gone decidedly downhill since Tom Cruise, Rebecca DeMornay, and Tangerine Dream took a ride in Risky Business.

DIFF '04: Kinsey

***/****
starring Liam Neeson, Laura Linney, Chris O'Donnell, Peter Sarsgaard
written and directed by Bill Condon

by Walter Chaw Liam Neeson plays the venerable zoologist-turned-sex scientist Alfred Kinsey, who, buoyed by a supportive Indiana University Bloomington dean (Oliver Platt) and a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, single-handedly drew back the curtains on the human libido in the rigid 1950s (1948-1953). The picture (written/directed by Gods and Monsters' Bill Condon) covers Kinsey's contentious relationship with his stentorian father (John Lithgow, reprising his evil preacher performance from Footloose), his open relationship with wife Clara "Mac" Kinsey (Laura Linney), and his stewardship of young Clyde Martin (Peter Sarsgaard). The importance of Kinsey, a typical biopic in a lot of ways, is ultimately identical to the importance of Kinsey himself: it opens the conversation again on the infinite varieties of human sexuality. Kinsey says at one point that he's examined hundreds of thousands of gall wasps and found not a one to be the same; when he turns his obsessive eye on humans, he muses that he just found a more complicated insect. Neeson, Linney, and Sarsgaard are all excellent, though special credit is due for the casting of Tim Curry as a prudish faculty member. Condon, you cad.

DIFF '04: Unknown Soldier

*½/****
starring Carl Louis, Postell Pringle, Carl Garrison, Layla Edwards
written and directed by Ferenc Tóth

by Walter Chaw With Unknown Soldier, a film that militarizes the terminology for the plight of inner-city youth, debuting writer-director Ferenc Tóth demonstrates a nice touch behind the camera but an anvil's touch at the typewriter. The story of a young man (Ellison (Carl Louis)) who loses his father--then his mooring, then his home, then his girl--before being shamed back into respectability takes on all the tedious trappings of the new urban template for coming-of-age dramas. The digital video looks a touch over-sharp, even as the rest of the morality play washes out as a series of rote conflict-resolution scenarios delivered without much spark or surprise. Yet it's the perfect film for the festival audience, which tends towards self-congratulation on issues of social consciousness. There is a pervasive desire at these events to not only be seen, but also to be seen as sensitive to the people who can't afford to attend, and so easy-to-understand pictures like Unknown Soldier that have their hearts in the right place (i.e., right there on their sleeves) attract a lot of attention within--and almost no attention without. I'll be interested in what Tóth does next; I'm just not all that interested in what he's doing now.

Ray (2004)

***/****
starring Jamie Foxx, Kerry Washington, Regina King, Clifton Powell
screenplay by James L. White
directed by Taylor Hackford

by Walter Chaw Jamie Foxx is so mesmerizing as Ray Charles in Ray, Taylor Hackford's biopic of the legendary performer, that the typical Hackford-isms threatening to weigh down the piece don't seem as heavy as they usually do. At its heart, the film is really just another faux epic from Hackford: another glimpse at the rise and fall (and rise) of a uniquely American persona (Everybody's All-American, An Officer and a Gentleman), another recent-historical essay, and another picture that begins to feel a little repetitive in the hermetic rises and falls in action that comprise such things. But then there's Foxx. He's the real deal, I think, and between this and Michael Mann's Collateral, 2004 is the year that Foxx becomes a top of the line, bona fide superstar. He's going to win the Oscar in a couple of months--and as the third African-American to claim the Best Actor prize, he's going to deserve it more than Denzel Washington did for Training Day.

Unspeakable (2003) + Body Parts (1991) - DVDs

UNSPEAKABLE
*/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras C
starring Dina Meyer, Lance Henriksen, Pavan Grover, Jeff Fahey
screenplay by Pavan Grover
directed by Thomas J. Wright

BODY PARTS
***/**** Image A Sound A
starring Jeff Fahey, Kim Delaney, Lindsay Duncan, Brad Dourif
screenplay by Eric Red and Norman Snider, based on the novel Choice Cuts by Boileau-Narcejac
directed by Eric Red

by Walter Chaw Sort of a dude Meg Foster, blue-eyed B-movie actor Jeff Fahey has never quite attained the cult status of Jeffrey Combs or Bruce Campbell. I'm thinking it's because he's always had the air about him that he would rather be in something better than, say, The Serpent of Death, Serpent's Lair--anything in the general vicinity of "serpent." You get the impression that even in the midst of appearing in six or seven films a year, he's got his eye on the mainstream prize that would ferry him from the Bs to the vaunted As. I don't think Fahey is conceited so much as puzzled--but that aura of dissatisfaction detracts from the integrity of his work, no matter how admittedly flyblown the films in which his performances find themselves might be. Fahey is a sort of neo-William Shatner, or the post-Prince of the City Treat Williams: a probably-good actor who feels like he's gotten the raw end of the deal (true in Williams' case) and thus can't quite commit himself completely to camp.

Raising Helen (2004) [Widescreen] - DVD

½*/**** Image A Sound A- Extras C
starring Kate Hudson, John Corbett, Joan Cusack, Hayden Panettiere
screenplay by Jack Amiel & Michael Begler
directed by Garry Marshall

by Walter Chaw I made a promise to myself after The Other Sister to never watch another Garry Marshall film, but I guess I don't have enough self-respect. Raising Helen is repellent in the way of roadside carrion: it just sort of lies there stinking, making it hard to find the energy to attack it. (Something about beating dead horses and all that.) To endure Raising Helen is to surrender to the quintessence of that which is wrong with our culture, to the definition of a term like "disposable culture," and to the self-knowledge that what you really want from your entertainment is the comfortable affirmation of schmaltzy emotions provoked countless times before by countless identical romantic comedies. Going to this movie is the equivalent of giving up on an intellectual and emotional life. Raising Helen will only appeal to and attract people with pathologically little patience for films that challenge them in any way, that elicit genuine reactions and are thus threatening for their potential to penetrate the carefully constructed layers of numb denial that make unexamined lives liveable--films that provide anything like insight into any level of existential verity. It is the lowest rung on the escapist ladder, representative of some wholly self-contained fantasy world where the racial make-up of Queens is 99% WASP and 1% quirky East Indian, and where Kate Hudson's incandescent choppers are Leading Lady material.

Primer (2004)

*½/****
starring Shane Carruth, David Sullivan, Casey Gooden, Anand Upadhyaya
written and directed by Shane Carruth

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. There's something of the word walls of Gertrude Stein or Eugene Ionesco about Primer, the indie Sundance sensation that would have been rode out of town on a rail if it weren't about time travel in addition to being obscure (thus garnering it nervous intellectual comparisons to La Jetée instead of a more accurate likening to David Mamet-cum-István Szabó). I suspect that a lot of people are afraid to admit they don't understand what's happening in the film, which talks too much in too stultifying a fashion, obscuring its heart of glass with blizzards of expositive candy in the faint hope that people are too dazzled by the rhetoric to ever consider the little guy behind the curtain. Whatever genre can do to fabulize lizard fears into metaphorical eurekas!, it can also lend a pre-emptive weight to flimsy pieces presented for the approval of audiences perhaps unaccustomed to science-fiction. In truth, Primer is more Theatre of the Absurd than sci-fi, with yuppie iterations of Vladimir and Estragon having an endless circular conversation while waiting for a Godot who never really comes. Taken as such, there arises the possibility of seeing the film as commentary on the essential listless, deconstructive jingo-babble of engineers and white-shirt-print-tie professions--though I suspect Primer has a lot more to do with a decision somewhere along the line to make a "what if?" time-travel flick as dense and protracted as possible.

Zachariah (1971) - DVD

**½/**** Image A- Sound A-
starring John Rubinstein, Pat Quinn, Don Johnson, Country Joe and the Fish
screenplay by Joe Massot and Philip Austin and Peter Bergman, David Ossman, Philip Proctor (known as Firesign Theatre)
directed by George Englund

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Think back with me, for a moment, to a bygone era when rock was strange: a hippie-descending, proto-glam period when the buzz was off the love generation but a bumbling mystic energy remained--when record producers were getting into bed with the likes of Alejandro Jodorowsky and Mick Jagger could be seen in the gender-bending gangster drama Performance. It was a self-aggrandizing, frequently ridiculous time, but it had a tolerance for eccentricity that's impossible to find in our Britneyfied MTV age and for which I can only be wistfully nostalgic. Lacking both the money and the conceptual force to fully realize its acid-western ambitions, Zachariah isn't even close to being the quintessential flashback to those days (it may in fact simply be cashing in on a trend), but its half-flubbed attempts at pop-surrealism seem a tonic now that the mainstream pop landscape is largely imagined by accountants.

Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism (2004) + Uncovered: The War on Iraq (2004)

OUTFOXED: RUPERT MURDOCH'S WAR ON JOURNALISM
*½/****
directed by Robert Greenwald

UNCOVERED: THE WAR IN IRAQ
****/****
directed by Robert Greenwald

by Walter Chaw A poll was recently conducted: 20,000 people were asked what news show they rely upon for their campaign information, and then they were asked six questions about the respective campaign platforms of each candidate. The sector of the population scoring the lowest (also the sector, according to the Nielsens, least likely to have attended college) consisted of people who watch insane person Bill O'Reilly's "The O'Reilly Factor" over on Fox News, while the population scoring the highest (and most likely to have been to college--something like a 3:1 ratio compared to O'Reilly's audience) preferred Comedy Central's "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart". Tied in with that stat--the revelation of which is only surprising to the GED nation flocking to Fox, 80% of whom still believe that Iraq was directly involved in the 9/11 attacks--is an article in the sharp THE ONION that described liberals in a state of "outrage fatigue." See, satire is a difficult concept, but once grasped it's the quickest, truest way to get at the heart of any absurd situation. Without satire and irony, the issues of the day become reductive and deadening.

Aladdin (1992) [Platinum Edition] - DVD

***½/**** Image A+ Sound A+ Extras A+
screenplay by John Musker & Ron Clements and Ted Elliott & Terry Rossio
directed by John Musker & Ron Clements

by Bill Chambers Jeffrey Katzenberg may have revived the American animated feature while he was at Disney, but only one of the hits his reign yielded is worth a second viewing. Where 1989's The Little Mermaid and especially 1991's nauseating Beauty and the Beast tried to pass themselves off as Golden Age Disney (1937 (Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs)-1950 (Cinderella), for argument's sake), before a certain stateliness loosened its grip on the house style, 1992's Aladdin took its cue from Uncle Walt's twilight years, the Sixties, when he was interested in telling--as he geared up to pass the torch, perhaps--mentor stories (The Sword in the Stone and The Jungle Book) and pop culture had finally caught up with his incongruous predilections for psychedelia and bohemianism. It's a risk to emulate the period considered the birth of the studio's Dark Ages, and Aladdin is the least spurious movie of Disney's renaissance because of it.

Night of the Living Dead (1968) - (Off Color Films) DVD

****/**** Image F (colorized)/C- (b&w) Sound C Extras F
starring Judith O'Dea, Duane Jones, Marilyn Eastman, Karl Hardman
screenplay by John A. Russo
directed by George A. Romero

by Walter Chaw George A. Romero's drive-in shocker is not only one of the most important independent and genre films of all-time, but also a dead brilliant civil rights metaphor featuring an unfortunately enduring rarity: a strong, virile, uncommented-upon African-American lead. The casting of Duane Jones came about, according to legend, mainly because Jones was the best actor any of the filmmakers knew. Say what you will of Night of the Living Dead, if you see no other ways that this seminal picture casts a long shadow, it casts a long one by just this merit-based example. The culmination of a lot of themes and trends in the American cinema at that time, the film features neighbour-suspicion, fear of children, fear of provincial National Guardsmen, and the creeping dread that the world may be ending because our government is run by assclowns and nepotists. It's a testament to the undertow of this text (or a testament to how short-sighted we are as a nation) that it still works in the same way over thirty-five years later. But Night of the Living Dead is more than just a devastating metaphor for the class struggle, for the rising tide of suspicion and corruption that tore a chasm through the middle of the United States: it's a tightly-edited, claustrophobically-framed horror film that retains, along with its relevance, its ability to startle and appall.

Eddie Murphy Raw (1987) - DVD

**/**** Image B Sound B+
directed by Robert Townsend

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Late one night when I was 15, I sat in my parents' basement and enjoyed every vulgar minute of Eddie Murphy Raw on Pay-TV. At the time, I was only marginally more sexually aware than a garden hose--all I knew was that Eddie was saying naughty things and that it was a priori true that naughty things were funny. Alas, some youthful pleasures don't bear revisiting. It's now sixteen years later and I must confess that my second viewing of the film didn't go so well: in the cold light of maturity, it seems like the record of a brilliant performer spouting the worst sort of misogynist drivel and calling it the truth. And while the lightning-fast delivery and easy charm of the man soften the blow somewhat, it's still a depressing waste of his talent that seals Murphy's pact with the devil, which would eventually cast him into family-comedy hell.

Sky's Not the Limit: FFC Interviews Kerry Conran

October 3, 2004|The restaurant area of Denver's Hotel Teatro is split into two levels: a half-mezzanine sporting a bar that overlooks the street level, which in turn has its own bar and windows. In the late afternoon after the business lunch crowd has siphoned itself back into the buildings in and around lower downtown, the mezzanine is empty, brown, and swathed in shadow--making it an interesting place to meet the mastermind behind the somewhat baroque Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, Kerry Conran, who would seem to be at home here in this art deco oasis in the middle a liminal mountain metropolis.

Ladder 49 (2004)

½*/****
starring Joaquin Phoenix, John Travolta, Jacinda Barrett, Morris Chestnut
screenplay by Lewis Colick
directed by Jay Russell

by Walter Chaw I hate this film. It's shameless treacle with the maudlin dialled at near-lethal levels. It's Backdraft II: Post 9/11, a soap opera hagiography of firefighters that's as soft and sentimental as any sweeps-week episode of Oprah--and just as unforgivably self-aggrandizing and smug. Ladder 49 is a convention of Midwestern middle-school teachers' idea of a good time, a collection of fatigued contrivances and squeaky clean, buttermilk-scrubbed cardboard characters posed carefully for maximum schmaltz. It's a big plate of nachos: lots of corn, lots of cheese, easy to swallow, hard to digest. I have a lot of contempt for this film because it has a lot of contempt for its audience: Call it the self-defense school of taking aim at a piece of crap, or a losing battle to save the folks sobbing loudly into their hankies when the lights come up. In its insidious way, Ladder 49 is as dangerous as other middlebrow epics like Radio and The Other Sister, pictures in which edgeless noble savages teach us through their selfless examples about life and about what it means to avoid real responsibility and community involvement. Weeping in a back-patting sort of way over a film like Ladder 49 is, for many, the equivalent of giving at the office.

Shark Tale (2004)

*½/****
screenplay by Michael J. Wilson and Rob Letterman
directed by Vicky Jenson, Bibo Bergeron, Rob Letterman

by Walter Chaw Shark Tale is a soulless platform for the Will Smith persona, here voicing a duplicitous social climber called Oscar who disdains his legacy as a car wash (make that "whale wash") employee in favour of a feckless dreamlife of bling and adulation. His wishes come true when a series of unfortunate events constructs the impression that little Oscar has slain Frankie (Michael Imperioli), favoured son of Godfather Don Lino (Robert De Niro), with Lino's "other" son, Lenny (Jack Black), still missing. Dubbed "Shark Slayer" by all of a submerged fish-tropolis, Oscar finds himself a celebrity spokesman, complete with a posse composed of agent Sykes (Martin Scorsese), grouper groupie Lola (Angelina Jolie), and the girl-Friday-next-door with the heart of gold, Angie (Renée Zellweger).