Film Freak Central

xXx: State of the Union (2005)

ZERO STARS/****
starring Ice Cube, Willem Dafoe, Scott Speedman, Peter Strauss
screenplay by Simon Kinberg
directed by Lee Tamahori

by Walter Chaw Just a total waste of life no matter how you slice it, xXx: State of the Union is cinema as penance. Forget the rosary--watch this colossal turdbath a couple of times and short of actually being responsible for it, you're instantly absolved of most any sin. The screenplay, by the suddenly-ubiquitous Simon Kinberg (also the scribe behind the upcoming X-Men 3, Fantastic Four, and Mr. and Mrs. Smith--let me go on record first saying that this film does not bode well), is a foul compost of flaccid catchphrases and boggle-eyed declarations, squeezed like old cheese between action sequences so poorly conceptualized and executed that not only is it impossible to ever tell for a moment what the hell's going on, but the film also actually reminded me in its over-processed way of outtakes from Tron. Ice Cube is awful, Samuel L. Jackson (who used to claim he would never work with a rapper) is awful, Scott Speedman is awful, Sunny Mabrey is awful--everyone is awful. Everything about xXx: State of the Union is awful, from its stupid prologue on some dairy farm to its stupid epilogue, in which another sequel is set up in as many words. It's possible to see the entire exercise as a postmodern smirk, but being aware that you're stupid doesn't always make you meta--sometimes it just means you're tragically self-aware and no less stupid.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (2005)

**/****
starring Sam Rockwell, Mos Def, Zooey Deschanel, Martin Freeman
screenplay by Douglas Adams and Karey Kirkpatrick, based on the novel by Douglas Adams
directed by Garth Jennings

by Walter Chaw Back in 1992, I saw Douglas Adams speak at the Boulder Bookstore. He was there to stump the fifth book in his The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy "trilogy," Mostly Harmless, and he read from it a passage involving Marvin the robot and an overzealous security droid. When the time came for him to sign things, I slid my first edition of the first book under his pen for his illegible scrawl and asked him what the status was of the (even then) long-awaited film version of one of the most beloved surrealist, deconstructionalist texts in modern science-fiction. "Soon, soon," he said. Now, a mere twenty-six years after the 1979 publication of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, video director Garth Jennings finds himself at the helm of what is, in some circles, a film more hotly anticipated than the upcoming conclusion to George Lucas' little space opera. And The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy takes elements of the late Adams' long-circulated screenplay (punched up in its third act--fatally, I think--by Karey Kirkpatrick), but coasts along for at least an hour on the irreverence, the flat brilliance, of its source material. It brings a tear to the eye and a flutter to the heart while it lasts.

Winter Solstice (2005) + Falling Angels (2003)

WINTER SOLSTICE
*½/****
starring Anthony LaPaglia, Aaron Stanford, Mark Webber, Allison Janney
written and directed by Josh Sternfeld

FALLING ANGELS
*/****
starring Miranda Richardson, Callum Keith Rennie, Katharine Isabelle, Kristin Adams
screenplay by Esta Spalding, based on the novel by Barbara Gowdy
directed by Scott Smith

by Walter Chaw So reserved that it's almost invisible, Josh Sternfeld's Winter Solstice is an illustration of what it's like to be completely incapable of accessing one's emotions. It's a response, I can only guess, to over-scripted and maudlin independent pictures--and as a finger-wagged, consider it a point-taken. Still, if I have to sit through another family dysfunction picture (ironically what most people think of when they think of an indie "genre" film), I'd prefer to watch one that provides some kind of insight into my life or, failing that, resolution for the lives of the characters in limbo. It's not that I abhor ambiguity, understand, it's that Winter Solstice is more absent than ambiguous--almost a Warholian exercise in nothing happening whatsoever for a really long time. Maybe it's a mirror held up to our own disconnection with our emotions; and maybe that mirror would be better served held underneath the film's nose.

Curb Your Enthusiasm: The Complete Second Season (2001) + The Anna Nicole Show: The First Season (2002) - DVDs

CURB YOUR ENTHUSIASM...: Image A Sound A
"The Car Salesman," "Thor," "Trick or Treat," "The Shrimp Incident," "The Thong," "The Acupuncturist," "The Doll," "Shaq," "The Baptism," "The Massage"

THE ANNA NICOLE SHOW...: Image A Sound A Extras D
"House Hunting," "The Introduction of Bobby Trendy," "The Eating Contest," "The Dentist," "Las Vegas, Pt. I," "Las Vegas, Pt. II," "Pet Psychic," "Cousin Shelly," "The Driving Test," "NYC Publicity Tour," "Paintball," "Halloween Party," "The Date"

by Walter Chaw The way that white people behave badly runs the social gamut from being impolitic to being uncouth--it can be calculated or just the product of bad breeding, but find in a pair of television series that would at first glance seem miles apart dual examples of Caucasians running amuck in their natural upper-class habitat. Larry David's HBO series "Curb Your Enthusiasm" has won critical hosannas and the "Seinfeld" demographic, while Anna Nicole Smith's "The Anna Nicole Show" has been heralded as the dawn of the apocalypse. Both, however, are vignette sitcoms based on slightly fictionalized versions of semi-celebrities positioned as the ass in various Byzantine and embarrassing situations. While David's sense of humour is self-conscious, his "Curb Your Enthusiasm" an example of the self-aware media hybrid, it would be a terrible mistake to presume that Smith is as stupid as, say, Jessica Simpson, and "The Anna Nicole Show" is so carefully calculated that with a little tweaking it could be as post-modern and oppressively-scripted as "Law & Order: Courtney Love Unit".

The Manson Family: Unrated Version (2004) [2-Disc Special Edition] + 99 Women (1969) - DVDs

THE MANSON FAMILY
***½/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras A+
starring Marcello Games, Marc Pitman, Leslie Orr, Maureen Alisse
written and directed by Jim VanBebber

Der heiße Tod
**½/**** Image A Sound B Extras B
starring Maria Schell, Mercedes McCambridge, Maria Rohm, Rosalda Neri
screenplay by Peter Welbeck
directed by Jess Franco

by Walter Chaw Attempting exactly the same thing as Mel Gibson's bloodier and no less exploitive telling of a hippie religious leader whose teachings produced immediately sanguine results (with Gibson's martyr going on to establish what is possibly the bloodiest nation in the history of the planet), Jim VanBebber's laudably disquieting The Manson Family is distinguished by its self-awareness as a document of hate rather than one of hosanna on high. Fifteen years in the making, it demonstrates a commensurate level of passion in its creation, the same obsession with recreating the period in the mode of its predominant artform (static representation for the one, drive-in cinema for the other), culminating in an orgy of violence that's gotten a bad rap precisely because there's no prurient thrill to be gained from it. Close examination reveals, in fact, that the deeds of Manson's merry men and women aren't shown in as much detail as they could have been--the chief excision being the fate of Sharon Tate and her in utero baby. The madness of King VanBebber, then, seems to have a method: not to, like Gibson's blood-soaked reverie, revel in every minute detail of flayed viscera and spilled humours, but to recreate the uncomfortable viciousness of loose ideology set free in the schizophrenic fin de siècle sandwiched between free love and its Vietnam War bloodletting counterweight. The Manson Family is about how tragic is the loss of mind and life; The Passion of the Christ is about how tragic it is, for their sake, that the Jews and the Romans didn't know what a bad motherfucker they were messing with. Context is everything.

Hoosiers (1986) [Collector's Edition] - DVD

**/**** Image A Sound B Extras A
starring Gene Hackman, Barbara Hershey, Dennis Hopper, Sheb Wooley
screenplay by Angelo Pizzo
directed by David Anspaugh

by Walter Chaw A gifted coach with a past takes over a misfit team and leads them, after some of the usual adversity, to the big game. Why fight it? There's nothing I can say about how sappy and derivative David Anspaugh's revered Hoosiers is without coming off like a scrooge incapable of elation. No demonstration of pedigree, no gesture towards the trophy shelf or war stories about the time we tipped an opposing player over in a port-a-potty just to see the bastard turn blue will make a lick of difference in the quick gauge of the level of bitterness for the nerd unwilling to surrender to the glory of such astonishingly polished underdog crap. Why fight it when what Hoosiers does--and does magnificently--is capture exactly how childish (and childishly exhilarating) sports can be--how it's an exclusive boy's club that underscores those infant verities of honour, brotherhood, and courage under fire in a ritualized environment only trumped in its bloodlust by certain communal religious ceremonies. If Hoosiers understands anything, it's that while there is, in fact, crying in baseball (and basketball, and football, hockey, lacrosse, rugby, soccer, etc.), there's no such thing as subtlety in the absolute tyranny of the interplay between muscle, sinew, and pigskin.

We Live Again (1934) - DVD

**½/**** Image A Sound B+
starring Anna Sten, Fredric March, Jane Baxter, C. Aubrey Smith
screenplay by Maxwell Anderson, Leonard Praskins and Preston Sturges, based on Leo Tolstoy's novel Resurrection
directed by Rouben Mamoulian

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover The wrong side of the tracks is a bad place to be, unless you're in Hollywood and see a way to make a buck: hence We Live Again, an adaptation of Tolstoy's Resurrection that looks past the niggling period details to go straight for the selfless-sacrifice weeper at its core. As melodrama, it has its qualities, including half a good Frederic March performance and stellar cinematography by the great Gregg Toland, but as anything other than a soaking-wet emotional sponge, it's largely ridiculous. It knows its audience wants to see rich boy/poor girl working things out, and how much you get out of the film depends on how much you can respond to that device--though anyone else will either be outraged or on the floor. Which is not to say that We Live Again is entirely without merit.

Closer (2004) [Superbit] - DVD

***/**** Image A- Sound A+
starring Natalie Portman, Jude Law, Julia Roberts, Clive Owen
screenplay by Patrick Marber, based on his play
directed by Mike Nichols

 
by Walter Chaw A girl takes off and cleans a guy's glasses on her jacket as he's talking, then gently replaces them. She asks him what a euphemism for her would be and he tells her: "Disarming." "That's not a euphemism." But he assures her that it is. A girl takes a picture of a guy, a guy talks to another guy through the anonymity of a computer screen, a guy visits a girl performing at a peepshow and offers her a large amount of money to tell him her real name. A guy meets a girl at an aquarium where she'll go to steal pictures of strangers as they look at the captive marine life in the blue glow of sharks circling. Mike Nichols's Closer is beautifully directed from Patrick Marber's adaptation of his own play, shot with an extraordinary amount of verve and resonance around the loaded themes of ways of seeing (glasses, cameras, correspondence) and their connection to voyeurism, objectification and confinement, and forms of physical and emotional abuse. A scene in the middle set at a photo exhibit crystallizes every thread: people milling about, buffeted by giant projected reproductions of 'disarmed' subjects, coming and going and talking of Michelangelo. It's overwritten but clever, too, doing a dangerous little dance along the edge of relevance and camp like a film from the 1970s (Nichols's own Carnal Knowledge, sure, but more like another film from 1971, Sam Peckinpah's Straw Dogs), only really failing in one performance and a seeming inability to follow through on its central punch. It's a courageous mainstream picture, no question, though it's mainly courageous in comparison to its contemporaries. Was a time when films like this and more toothsome were the norm and not the semi-quailing exception.

Film Freak Central does "The Art of Silent Film" series

by Walter Chaw Denver Art Museum curator Tom Delapa is a one-man production. He books the prints, rents the space, does the research, and twice annually puts on a show consisting of possibly the most historically vital revivals in the Mile High City. Past years have seen screenings of pictures as varied as The Fountainhead and It Came From Outer Space in its original 3-D form--and now, over the course of seven consecutive Tuesdays at Denver's Starz Filmcenter beginning April 5, Mr. Delapa brings us "The Art of Silent Film." It's an ambitious program consisting of lesser-known pieces or rare prints from well-regarded artists of the silent era, giving cineastes the opportunity to see King Vidor's The Crowd (as yet unreleased on DVD) in 16mm with live accompaniment from pianist Hank Troy, as well as 35mm prints of both Buster Keaton's The Navigator and Charlie Chaplin's defiant Modern Times. These share the bill with 16mm presentations of Sergei Eisenstein's Strike, F.W. Murnau's The Last Laugh, Erich von Stroheim's Foolish Wives, and G.W. Pabst's bleak, profound Diary of a Lost Girl. While the audience has grown for the Denver Art Museum film series, the truism remains that for as much lip service as is paid to the dearth of quality cinema in the heartland, if you don't get out and support essential institutions like this one, then they'll just go away.

House of Flying Daggers (2004) - DVD

****/**** Image A- Sound A+ Extras B-
starring Takeshi Kaneshiro, Andy Lau, Ziyi Zhang, Song Dandan
screenplay by Li Feng & Zhang Yimou & Wang Bin
directed by Zhang Yimou

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. For the dozen or so eye-bleedingly beautiful sequences in Zhang Yimou's new wuxia pian, the encapsulating image is that of the incandescent Ziyi Zhang prostrate beneath a would-be paramour, her delicate, ivory hand pressed against his lips in an eloquently ineffective ward. It's a tableau introduced in a more overt attempted rape in a brothel and revisited in a stream where a quartet of thugs nearly succeed in literally/metaphorically piercing Ziyi with their long spears. House of Flying Daggers (its title in Chinese the loaded "Ambush from Ten Directions"--essentially an ambush from everywhere) is at its essence an allegory for rape and the Chinese tradition of concubinage that Zhang has already explored to varying degrees in Raise the Red Lantern, Ju Dou, Shanghai Triad, and, of course, Red Sorghum, in which a young woman played by Gong Li (Ziyi's predecessor as Zhang's muse) is saved from rape by a young man with whom she later runs a winery. But the conceit of a young woman teaming with her knight in shining armour is complicated in House of Flying Daggers by the fact that she is more than capable of taking care of herself, except, fascinatingly, when the attacks against her are sexualized.

Normal Life (1996) - DVD

***½/**** Image A Sound A
starring Ashley Judd, Luke Perry, Bruce Young, Jim True
screenplay by Peg Haller & Bob Schneider
directed by John McNaughton

by Bill Chambers I might be apocryphally attributing this to Pauline Kael, but I'm fairly confident that it was she who said there's no such thing as bad acting, only bad casting. When people hear that John McNaughton's Normal Life stars Luke Perry and Ashley Judd, they tend to lose interest, but to quote another of my favourite critics, Alex Jackson, "a great performance incorporates and molds a persona. It deals with it. Their body, voice, and persona are inescapable facts [and] the greatness of a performance lies in nothing more [than] the acknowledgment of these facts." It's interesting that the contemporary actors most likely to be credited with soul-searching to find the emotional truths of a character--Johnny Depp, Sean Penn, even Mark Ruffalo--are heirs apparent to Lon Chaney, gradually transforming themselves from without. In the same piece quoted above, a review of Midnight Express published just prior to last year's Academy Awards, Jackson says he values Christina Ricci's work in Monster over that of her co-star Charlize Theron: Where Ricci plumbs the depths of her established screen persona, Theron's aesthetically-assisted turn is so anomalous in terms of her career as to register as standoffish. "I suspect that it takes more courage to be an icon than an actor," Jackson brilliantly surmises.

Incident at Loch Ness (2004) - DVD

**½/**** Image A Sound B Extras A
directed by Zak Penn

by Walter Chaw You could say that Werner Herzog has been hunting monsters for the whole of his career. (Chasing demons: even better.) Find in that the reason the satirical Incident at Loch Ness works to the extent that it does. The picture locates the mad German on the Scottish loch, where he's ostensibly shooting a documentary on Nessie under the auspices of Hollywood wunderkind Zak Penn while a film crew, led by veteran cinematographer John Bailey, shoots Herzog for a piece on the director's method called "Herzog in Wonderland." It's a fake documentary about the making of a fake documentary, in other words, commenting at several points about authenticity in a way that pings off the whimsical existentialism of Being John Malkovich at its best--and off the sudden shift into darkness of the same at its worst. Mocking the capricious ignorance of Hollywood moneymen is always sporting, I guess, and as Penn simultaneously acts the monster (he insists on the crew wearing matching jumpsuits) and surreptitiously slips a plastic monster-bot into the wake, the picture can be satisfying in a familiar way. But by this point in our progressive cynicism, anyone watching the film--and, more particularly, anyone at all familiar with Herzog--could say the same things regarding the venality of the blockbuster mentality with less effort. This doesn't mean that the film's closing shot of a sunglasses-wearing Herzog walking in front of his team in a Michael Bay heroic slow-motion is any less funny, but it does add up to a generally empty, if fitfully amusing, experience.

Lost Embrace (2004); Hard Goodbyes (2002); Walk on Water (2004)

El Abrazo partido
*/****
starring Daniel Hendler, Adriana Aizemberg, Jorge D'Elía, Sergio Boris
screenplay by Marcelo Birmajer, Daniel Burman
directed by Daniel Burman

Hard Goodbyes: My Father
Diskoli apocheretismi: O babas mou
***/****
starring Yorgos Karayannis, Stelios Mainas, Ioanna Tsirigouli, Christos Stergioglou
written and directed by Penny Panayotopoulou

WALK ON WATER
**/****
starring Lior Ashkenazi, Knut Berger, Caroline Peters, Gideon Shemer
screenplay by Gal Uchovsky
directed by Eytan Fox

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Woody Allen's been on something like a two-decade slide, so if there's a little voice in your head telling you that the last thing you need to see is an Argentine version of a Woody Allen "where's daddy" neurosis opera: listen to it. Daniel Burman's Lost Embrace (El Abrazo partido) is an interminable slog through the congested headspace of one Ariel Makaroff (Daniel Hendler), an insufferable, navel-gazing Pol expat living out his self-loathing strut and fret in the ridiculous family lingerie shop of a cut-rate shopping centre. (Yeah, it's Scenes from a Mall in Spanish.) Burman likes breaking the fourth wall, likes humourless inter-titles that separate his film into a dozen awkward sketches, and really likes dense monologues about, essentially, why no one is ever happy. The extent to which you will cotton to Lost Embrace has a lot to do with how much you enjoy wallpaper narration and old Jewish-Polish grandmothers singing homey folk songs square to the camera--how much you delight in Jewish mothers nudzhing their schlemiel sons before divesting their aggressively middle-class closets of ancient infidelities set against intra-mall flings with an Internet café bimbo. Ennui, listlessness, and gab gab gab, Lost Embrace earns the occasional moment of interest or topicality in stuff like a semi-amusing interview Ariel endures before the Polish consulate (during which he expresses admiration for the recently-deceased Polish Pope), but the film spends most of its goodwill on masturbating with a furious, chafing intensity. Oh, and it's mawkishly sentimental, too.

p.s. (2004) + Birth (2004)|Birth (2004) - DVD

p.s.
**½/****
starring Laura Linney, Topher Grace, Gabriel Byrne, Marcia Gay Harden
screenplay by Helen Schulman and Dylan Kidd, based on the novel by Helen Schulman
directed by Dylan Kidd

BIRTH
****/**** Image A Sound A
starring Nicole Kidman, Cameron Bright, Danny Huston, Lauren Bacall
screenplay by Jean-Claude Carrière, Milo Addica, Jonathan Glazer
directed by Jonathan Glazer

by Walter Chaw Second chances, erasing memories, manipulating perception--films this year like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Code 46, The Forgotten, The Manchurian Candidate, The Village, The Butterfly Effect, Before Sunset, 50 First Dates, The Final Cut, and so on suggest a collective desire to wash the slate clean, put on blinkers, and regain a little of that sweet, blithe ignorance of the day before yesterday. It's never as easy as all that, of course, since things have a tendency of coming back--and when an artifact of the past intrudes on the present it carries with it (along with all those memories of green) an aggressive payload of unexpected reactions. You can never go home again, nor can home ever return to you. Nevertheless, it tries to in a pair of films, two sophomore efforts, as it happens: Dylan Kidd's p.s. and Jonathan Glazer's Birth. Curiously, just the idea of the first film after a triumphant debut is tangled with the desire to recapture a little of the magic of the past.

Last of the Finest: FFC Interviews Stephen Chow

April 10, 2005|Between the time that John Woo and Chow Yun Fat spawned a hipster fad on this island Hong Kong with 1986's A Better Tomorrow and the moment about a decade later when poor Jackie Chan starred with Chris Tucker in Rush Hour, a picture directed by solid gold jackass Brett Ratner (who still refers to Chan as "that Jap," possibly the worst thing you can call a Chinese man--worse than "that Chinaman," something Ratner also enjoys calling Chan), the HK film industry was the most vibrant and exciting in the world. It redefined action cinema by itself, pushed the boundaries of what was acceptable in motion pictures, and valorized the "heroic bloodshed" genre by elevating old Chinese dictums of honour and brotherhood into ballets of romanticized violence. "One Cop, One Killer, 10,000 Bullets" became the byline for not only Woo's classic The Killer, but also an industry that made the Western world supple and accommodating to films like The Matrix, Reservoir Dogs, and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Unfortunately, as Hollywood's siren call lulled away talents as diverse and incandescent as Ringo Lam, Jet Li, John Woo, Chow Yun Fat, Tsui Hark, and, finally, Jackie Chan, from Hong Kong (in Chan's case, for the second time), so, too, did the handover from British colony to Communist show pony take hold, rendering a film like Full Contact (where a bite-wound subbed for a wedding ring) impossible under the stringent censorship policies of Mainland China. The Hong Kong film industry has fallen, and hard. Almost as hard as its roster of superstars, finding themselves ethnic sidekicks and starfuckers in American dreck.

Oldboy (2003) + The Ballad of Jack and Rose (2005)

OLDBOY
****/****
starring Choi Min-sik, Yu Ji-tae, Kang Hye-jeong, Ji Dae-han
screenplay by Hwang Jo-yun, Lim Chun-hyeong, Park Chan-wook
directed by Park Chan-wook

THE BALLAD OF JACK AND ROSE
**½/****
starring Daniel Day-Lewis, Catherine Keener, Camilla Belle, Paul Dano
written and directed by Rebecca Miller

by Walter Chaw

"I, the Wrath of God, will marry my own daughter, and with her I will found the purest dynasty the earth has ever seen." -Aguirre, Aguirre: The Wrath of God

A Greek tragedy, an opera, a showcase for South Korean cinema, and one exhilaratingly sick piece of cinema, Park Chan-wook's Oldboy is like the three plays of the "Oresteia" distilled into one pure, malevolent, volatile essence. It's vengeance served hot and perverse like a Medeaen stew, a story of settling scores old enough to be archetype married to sounds and images so invasively intimate that the process of working through the film is a little like getting physically violated. It's vital stuff, this Oldboy, its very title suggesting an ironic superhero alter ego--sketching anti-hero Oh Dae-Su (Choi Min-sik) as a fright-mask of arrested development, a child raging against its prematurely-aged body. We meet him one drunken night as he's bailed out of a night in the tank only to spend the next fifteen years in a solitary-confinement prison cell masquerading as a chintzy backwater motor inn room. He watches TV there, mostly cable news and its horrorshow of buildings and bridges falling, with periodic gassings allowing his anonymous captors to stitch up his wrists and gather biological mementos to leave at the scenes of crimes he didn't commit. When he's finally released, it's not clear if he's been falsely led to believe that he's free, if he's escaped by the graces of an ingenious plan involving a chopstick and a lot of time, or if he's died and this is his demented brain's oxygen-starved fantasy of what he woulda done to the lousy sons o'bitches if only he'd lived.

Melinda and Melinda (2005) + Head-On (2004)

MELINDA AND MELINDA
**/****
starring Will Ferrell, Radha Mitchell, Chloë Sevigny, Chiwetel Ejiofor
written and directed by Woody Allen

Gegen die Wand
****/****
starring Birol Ünel, Sibel Kekilli, Catrin Striebeck, Güven Kiraç
written and directed by Fatih Akin

by Walter Chaw I was pretty sure that the stultified paralysis of Anything Else would eventually cause me to do myself serious injury and felt fortunate that when the lights came up, most of the intensity of my dislike for the Woody Allen of the last several years dissipated like the details of a bad dream. It's possible to leave the diminutive auteur in the dark, it seems, and such is the fate, too (and not a bad critique), of the more palatable but no less appallingly reductive and juvenile Melinda and Melinda. It's metaphysics by way of Strindberg, of course, and only as good as Allen ever is at capering around his familiar autumnal Manhattan fantasias in his "serious filmmaker" cap. His milieu, his Yoknapatawpha County, has always been the mating rituals of "blocked" artists--often filmmakers casting or directing films within films (What's Up, Tiger Lily?, The Purple Rose of Cairo, Stardust Memories, Crimes and Misdemeanors, Hollywood Ending)--orbiting around one another in impotent, inevitably mortal, orbits. If he doesn't star in them himself, he hires someone to impersonate him--the Woodman is never far from his own lover/hand, and his casts of invariably grateful manqué dutifully take on his cadences and exhortations to debate Bartók and Bergman in airless dinner parties that would drive even Buñuel nuts.

Sahara (2005)

*½/****
starring Matthew McConaughey, Steve Zahn, Penélope Cruz, Lambert Wilson
screenplay by Thomas Dean Donnelly & Joshua Oppenheimer and John C. Richards and James V. Hart, based on the novel by Clive Cussler
directed by Breck Eisner

 

by Walter Chaw For as difficult as it is to read a Clive Cussler novel, it's no more or less difficult to read something by John Grisham, Tom Clancy, Robert James Waller, Dean Koontz, or Nicholas Sparks. A Cussler book is exactly what it is: a bestseller written specifically for people who base their reading decisions on how many other people have bought and ostensibly read a given book--bad grammar, bad sense, and ridiculous narratives be damned. So Sahara, Breck "Spawn of Michael" Eisner's feature debut (and what star Matthew McConaughey hopes is a franchise starter despite Cussler disowning the picture and threatening to sue), is an utterly faithful adaptation of the source material in that it's destined to become one of those movies people see or avoid depending on how low their expectations are going in or how irresistible the Friday night peer-pressure gets. It's a soulless picture, a wisp of a whimsy layered across what wishes it were an epic adventure, playing fast and loose with character and charisma while slathering on the boom-crash opera. The result isn't something awful so much as a spectacle without a hint of a human centre: a blockbuster played by action figures and written by children.

Venus in Furs (1969) - DVD

Paroxismus
**/**** Image A Sound A Extras A-
starring James Darren, Barbara McNair, Maria Rohm, Klaus Kinski
screenplay by Jess Franco & Malvin Wald
directed by Jess Franco

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Masterpiece is such a relative term. The keepcase for Venus in Furs (a.k.a. Paroxismus) anoints this rough jewel in Jess Franco's crown as "the one fans and critics alike call his masterpiece," but all this means is that next to some of the other films in Franco's dissipated oeuvre, Venus in Furs is comparatively competent, hangs together decently, and won't cause the intense eye-rolling of something like the same year's The Girl from Rio. But though it's slick and watchable, it's still a conceptual mess, combining a blithe pretentiousness with a total inability to suggest cause and effect--not to mention Franco's usual sophomoric sexuality. Or does being propositioned by Dean Martin while on acid count as a masterpiece?

Ocean's Twelve (2004) [Widescreen Edition] - DVD

**/**** Image A- Sound B+
starring George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Matt Damon, Catherine Zeta-Jones
screenplay by George Nolfi
directed by Steven Soderbergh

by Walter Chaw It's all so very beautiful that it's easy to be seduced by it. The people, of course, are gorgeous. The locations in Amsterdam and Lake Como, Italy are gorgeous. The soundtrack? Gorgeous. Cinematography, direction: gorgeous, gorgeous. None too pretty, though, is that sniffy feeling of crashing a party where you stick out like a sore thumb--where everybody knows everybody else and you keep asking the wrong questions. In that, at least, Steven Soderbergh's Ocean's Twelve is more faithful to the Rat Packer Ocean's Eleven than his own remake of the same--this picture's prequel--was. Ocean's Twelve amounts to a martini-and-lounge party at which everybody's having a really great time as you watch from your chair in the corner, daydreaming of looking like Julia Roberts, talking like brandy in a warm snifter, having more fame than The Beatles, and being richer than God.

Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason (2004) [Widescreen] - DVD

½*/**** Image B Sound B+ Extras C+
starring Renée Zellweger, Hugh Grant, Colin Firth, Jim Broadbent
screenplay by Andrew Davies and Helen Fielding and Richard Curtis and Adam Brooks, based on the novel by Fielding
directed by Beeban Kidron

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. The gusto with which a certain audience will guffaw at Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason (henceforth Bridget Jones 2)--will buffet each other on the back in robust bonhomie at a joke well told and a prejudice indulged in appropriate company--says all there really is to say about the class schism that the film itself broaches but stops short of actually addressing. (If you squint, you can see them rendered satiric as swine in top hats, smoking cheap cigars and playing cards in their pearls and print dresses.) We reunite with our porcine heroine (Renée Zellweger) a little more than a month after the end of the first film, at which point she's shagged her new boyfriend Darcy (Colin Firth) a lot but remains saddled with her suspicions that he's a prick. He's a lawyer, see, and clearly too good for her, so Bridget, as is her wont, proceeds to embarrass herself in polite stuffed-shirt company, scoffing at the prig who suggests that giving to charity is bad and pretending to be able to ski whilst wrapped in a dreadful pink jumper. The resulting delightfully-patronizing humiliations are the sort of thing generally installed as the engine in romance novels, the main audience for which is one that looks like Bridget, is probably ten years older, and would be surprised to see that, were a film ever actually made of their fantasy projection of themselves onto the heroine role of their little pulp bodice-rippers, would look just as preposterous as Bridget Jones 2.

Undertow (2004) - DVD

**½/**** Image A Sound B- Extras A-
starring Jamie Bell, Josh Lucas, Dermot Mulroney, Devon Alan
screenplay by Joe Conway and David Gordon Green
directed by David Gordon Green

by Walter Chaw David Gordon Green's collaboration with cinematographer Tim Orr has borne George Washington and All the Real Girls--fruit from the tree of Americana, nourished at its roots by the twilit legacy of Terrence Malick. Taking its cue from another source, Malick's progenitor Charles Laughton and Laughton's only film as a director, Night of the Hunter, Green's latest, Undertow, just isn't as good as his previous work: it's too sunny at its end, too mannered in its middle, and it fails to live up to the standards both it sets for itself and the limited oeuvre of Green sets for it.

The Thinking Man's Nimrod: FFC Interviews Nimrod Antal

April 3, 2005|I caught a late-night screening of Nimród Antal's Kontroll during the 27^th Starz Denver International Film Festival that was packed thanks to buzz that had been spreading ever since the film was honoured with the 23rd Prix de la Jeunesse in the Un certain regard category at the 2004 Cannes Film Festival. Alive with ideas and images, Kontroll combines western sensibilities and a peculiar Eastern Bloc social awareness--a little bit of surrealism and a little bit of Jungian archetype-building. It alone has the potential to rejuvenate a Hungarian film industry made moribund by the fall of the Iron Curtain, and it was written and directed by a California boy who moved to Hungary at the age of 17.