Film Freak Central

Mirrormask (2005)

**/****
starring Stephanie Leonidas, Gina McKee, Rob Brydon, Jason Barry
screenplay by Neil Gaiman
directed by Dave McKean

by Walter Chaw Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean are responsible, between the two of them, for one of the seminal works of fiction from the 1990s: a run of comics called "The Sandman" (the success of which moved the World Fantasy Awards to forbid the comic medium from again winning that prize) that proposed a new mythological pantheon, "Endless," to hold sway over the vicissitudes of the world's belief systems. For as long as it lasted, it was an astonishing demonstration of post-mod pop art; with Gaiman writing the text and McKean providing the cover art, the two would collaborate on stand-alone series (like "Violent Cases" and a short run of "Miracle Man"), children's books (Mr. Punch and The Day I Swapped My Dad For Two Goldfish), and now a feature film and illustrated screenplay, Mirrormask, which finds Gaiman scripting and McKean behind the camera. I wish I could report that the results are more than murky, derivative, and hard to see. Taking place primarily in a digitally-created environment (à la Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow), it looks, unfortunately, a lot like it was shot on last-generation digital video--even the non-fantasy portions of Mirrormask deliver the kind of grimy, ugly picture that Robert Rodriguez makes with his children. With a film version of "The Sandman" languishing in near-permanent hiatus, it's a shame that this first cinematic product from two of that project's major players is such a disappointment.

Follow the Fleet (1936); Shall We Dance (1937); The Barkleys of Broadway (1949) - DVDs

FOLLOW THE FLEET
**½/**** Image B+ Sound A- Extras B+
starring Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers, Randolph Scott, Harriet Hilliard
screenplay by Dwight Taylor and Allan Scott, based on the play "Shore Leave" by Hubert Osborne
directed by Mark Sandrich

SHALL WE DANCE
***/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B+
starring Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers, Edward Everett Horton, Eric Blore
screenplay by Allan Scott and Ernest Pagano
directed by Mark Sandrich

THE BARKLEYS OF BROADWAY
**½/**** Image B+ Sound A Extras B+
starring Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers, Oscar Levant, Billie Burke
screenplay by Betty Comden and Adolph Green
directed by Charles Walters

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Every partnership has its ups and downs, as our soaring divorce rate will attest. Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers were no different, and a selection of their B-list titles--one of which is widely considered the beginning of the end and another of which trades on memories rather than on the present--bears this out: Although Follow the Fleet, Shall We Dance, and The Barkleys of Broadway are far from quintessential, they have their quintessential moments and show the pair and their creative partners colouring outside the lines. One of these, the sometimes-maligned Shall We Dance, is actually very good, and the bumpy rides of the other two are occasionally enthralling.

TIFF '05: Dear Wendy

*½/****
starring Jamie Bell, Bill Pullman, Michael Angarano, Danso Gordon
screenplay by Lars von Trier
directed by Thomas Vinterberg

by Bill Chambers It's a classic catch-22: Dear Wendy reveals that Jamie Bell was born to play Billy the Kid, but it probably also squanders his chances of doing so. As Dick, the orphaned son of a miner, Bell dons Michael J. Fox's effeminate cowboy duds from Back to the Future Part III and transforms the town's social lepers into a gang of gun fetishists known collectively as the Dandies; director Thomas Vinterberg and screenwriter Lars von Trier give us the gay burlesque version of the NRA, because nothing sticks it to the red states like calling them a bunch of queers. Other low blows: Dick has a mammy (I'm now officially dreading the forthcoming Manderlay, von Trier's slavery-themed sequel to Dogville); the token girl (Canadian dynamo Alison Pill) with the nice rack seems most attracted to the token black criminal (Canadian dynamo Denso Gordon); and Dick's girlfriend, for all intents and purposes, is a revolver--the titular Wendy. At the core of Dear Wendy is a surprisingly airtight allegory of how pacifism is by nature a fallacy in a country (the U.S., natch) saturated with firearms, but as usual, the sheer audacity of von Trier and his formalist puppet Vinterberg--both as exploitation filmmakers and as satirists basing their image of the States on assumption rather than experience--hijacks the discussion. Like the creators of "South Park", everything they make is ultimately a vanity project. PROGRAMME: Contemporary World Cinema

Clueless (1995) [Whatever Edition] + Dead & Breakfast (2005) - DVDs

CLUELESS
*/**** Image A Sound B Extras B-
starring Alicia Silverstone, Stacey Dash, Brittany Murphy, Paul Rudd
written and directed by Amy Heckerling

DEAD & BREAKFAST
**/**** Image C+ Sound B Extras B-
starring Ever Carradine, Portia de Rossi, David Carradine, Bianca Lawson
written and directed by Matthew Leutwyler

by Walter Chaw Clueless is the pinnacle of a certain kind of smarmy teensploitation/Classics Illustrated vogue that saw Shakespeare (10 Things I Hate About You) and, in this case, Jane Austen (i.e., Emma) squeezed through the sausage mill of swatch-guards and Prada bags. It's the Shrek school of satire: mythological creatures made to act out master-plots in unfunny, unimaginative ways in stock mythological landscapes. In place of literal trolls, find euphemistic trolls in Alicia Silverstone and Brittany Murphy, posed opposite one another as after/before shots of one-trick lightweights. (So light is Silverstone, in fact, that her most recent attempted comeback was essentially as this character ten years later in NBC's prophetically-named "Miss Match".) The only interest in watching this relic in its new, ten-year anniversary "Whatever Edition" (also prophetically-named) is in trainspotting current sitcom stars in what, in retrospect, is a piece of work every bit as smug and self-loathing as Pretty Persuasion or Saved!.

TIFF '05: Heading South

Vers le sud
***½/****
starring Charlotte Rampling, Karen Young, Louise Portal, Ménothy Cesar
screenplay by Laurent Cantet & Robin Campillo, based on short stories by Dany Laferrière
directed by Laurent Cantet

by Bill Chambers Heading South (Vers le sud) represents such a departure from the milieu of Laurent Cantet's previous film (2001's brilliant psychological thriller Time Out (L'Emploi du temps)) that you can't really say it rounds out a trilogy he started with Human Resources. Nevertheless, it resumes his fascination with people in transience, people who've erected complex façades to avoid the repercussions of personal or professional failure; Cantet's pictures are screwball comedies played straight, and we see ourselves reflected in them like Athene saw herself in the water. Thanks to a chilling, if red herring-laden, prologue wherein a Haitian mother tries to "give" her endangered teenage daughter to a respectable-looking islander, a black cloud looms over the piece--and it's just one of the many ways in which Cantet shrewdly exploits Haiti's mystique without falling back on Serpent and the Rainbow-isms, paving a road to doom down which three middle-aged spinsters defiantly walk. Wellesley professor Ellen (Charlotte Rampling), willowy Midwesterner Brenda (Karen Young, who gets to deliver one of the screen's finest erotic monologues since Persona), and earthy Montréaler Sue (Louise Portal) are returning guests at a kind of sex resort where they take turns patronizing Legba (Ménothy Cesar), a young gigolo who makes them feel not only beautiful but, critically, maternal, too. (When we first meet Legba, he's curled up in a foetal position on the beach, only to be 'awakened' by Brenda's touch.) Unfolding towards the end of Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier's reign of terror, the 1978-set film relies a little too much on a working knowledge of Haiti's political history to sort out its narrative ambiguities, but by the same token, this seems to stave off noble-savage syndrome--of which the characters are guilty but the filmmaker, for a change, is not. PROGRAMME: Special Presentations

TIFF '05: Wassup Rockers

**½/****
starring Jonathan Velasquez, Francisco Pedrasa, Milton Velasquez, Usvaldo Panameno
written and directed by Larry Clark

by Bill Chambers These days, when I think of Larry Clark, I think of Stephen Wiltshire, the outsider artist profiled in Oliver Sacks's An Anthropologist on Mars. Diagnosed with autism early in life, Wiltshire soon after began doing immaculately detailed sketches of animals before moving on to buses and eventually cityscapes. So advanced was Wiltshire's technique at such an early age that Sacks and co. were fascinated to learn that his talent came pre-evolved: as a child, he drew like a grown-up, but he drew like that same grown-up in adulthood. Whatever you think of Clark's directorial debut, Kids, there's no denying that he's a natural--a savant, if you will--at harnessing the prickly energy of youth. And yet, although he's since moved on from "animals" (the mindless fuck-bunnies of Kids and Bully) to "buses" (the emotionally shipwrecked fuck-bunnies of Teenage Caveman and Ken Park) to "cityscapes" (the El Salvadoran fuck-bunnies of the new film, Wassup Rockers), he hasn't--and I don't mean this in the patronizing sense--matured; you can essentially start anywhere in the Clark canon without missing a beat. It's nice to see him grapple with the "other" in Wassup Rockers, but all he's really done is turn the tint down on his usual band of utopia-seeking skater punks, and as the picture's relatively tame surface works to offset its intensely nihilistic underbelly (Clark has never had this little regard for human life--and that the victims of the film's Rube Goldberg deathtraps are by and large pedophiles isn't nearly as self-flagellating as you might presume), the cumulative effect is one of déjà vu. Treating the Latino characters' sojourn into Beverly Hills like a social experiment, Clark remains a compelling, primal anthropologist--and the mischief-making in Wassup Rockers spreads a surprisingly infectious joy. But there are only so many times you can applaud a one-trick pony. PROGRAMME: Visions

The Sting (1973) [Legacy Series] - DVD

**½/**** Image B Sound B (DD)/B+ (DTS) Extras B
starring Robert Redford, Paul Newman, Robert Shaw, Charles Durning
screenplay by David S. Ward
directed by George Roy Hill

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover The Sting has hung on tenaciously despite widespread critical neglect. Though it was rapturously received in 1973 (copping seven Oscars in the process), subsequent generations of critics haven't really had the inclination to go over it like a murder scene for clues to its brilliance. It's the Neil Simon version of vintage crime: well-written in a pejorative sense, it thinks every thought through for you instead of allowing you to participate in the experience. There's a place for this kind of movie, but a slight disappointment is almost unavoidable--all these talented people could surely have done something more with the milieu than refurbish Scott Joplin with Marvin Hamlisch arrangements.

TIFF '05: All the Invisible Children

**½/****
directed by Mehdi Charef, Emir Kusturica, Spike Lee, Jordan Scott and Ridley Scott, Kátia Lund, Stefano Veruso, John Woo

by Bill Chambers Named after an initiative of the Italian Development Cooperation's Ministry of Foreign Affairs that supports Unicef and other global charities, this omnibus project assembles seven short subjects about children from a handful of world-class directors, all of whom were instructed to locate their contributions in their home and native land. Poverty seems to be the unifying theme until Jordan and Ridley Scott's vaguely autobiographical segment, which sticks out like a sore thumb but subversively suggests that if All the Invisible Children proper has any lessons to impart, they revolve around the auteur theory. Having never seen a film by Mehdi Charef or Stefano Veneruso, I don't know how closely their episodes hew to their previous work, but I can tell you that Emir Kusturica, Spike Lee, the Scotts, Kátia Lund, and John Woo tread familiar ground in a borderline egotistical fashion.

Proof (2005) + An Unfinished Life (2005)

PROOF
*½/****
starring Gwyneth Paltrow, Anthony Hopkins, Jake Gyllenhaal, Hope Davis
screenplay by David Auburn and Rebecca Miller, based on the play by Auburn
directed by John Madden

AN UNFINISHED LIFE
*/****
starring Robert Redford, Jennifer Lopez, Morgan Freeman, Josh Lucas
screenplay by Mark Spragg & Virginia Korus Spragg
directed by Lasse Hallstrom

by Walter Chaw Gwyneth Paltrow sops through nearly every frame of John Madden's Proof with the sturdy dedication of a Method actress swallowed whole by a red-rimmed wet blanket. It's not a performance so much as a dip into her own navel, which, while not the worst fate I can imagine, is certainly not very interesting to watch. I find that contemporary American arthouse fare, thrilled to sift its way to the bottom of a mystic grain silo in a stately, lachrymose manner where the corn is alien, bears no relationship to any reality I've ever known--its sole purpose, at least to the extent that I can glean, to vet some collective desire to win the Good Will Hunting/A Beautiful Mind lottery by pretending to be really good at math (a fine excuse, after all, for being barmy).

Evil Dead II (1987) [The Book of the Dead Limited Edition] - DVD

a.k.a. Evil Dead II: Dead by Dawn
****/**** Image A+ Sound A+ Extras A+
starring Bruce Campbell, Sarah Berry, Dan Hicks, Kassie Wesley
screenplay by Sam Raimi & Scott Spiegel
directed by Sam Raimi

by Walter Chaw More a remake with yuks than a sequel, Sam Raimi's astonishing Evil Dead II is a kitchen-sink splatter flick inspired by the drive-in spam-in-a-cabin tradition and leavened by an unhealthy fascination with The Three Stooges. Leading man and crash-test dummy Bruce Campbell (Bill Chambers referred to him once as "brick-jawed," and I can't improve on that, literally or figuratively) turns in a legend-making, career-defining performance, re-imagining his shemp Ash as a man of stage-melodrama, white-hat resolve who comes of age upon discovering his knack for slaying the undead. The great unspoken peculiarity of siege classics like George Romero's Night of the Living Dead is that there is somehow always discovered a hero who's biologically hardwired for the task of staying alive in the face of great demonic hordes. The crux is that it's unspoken no longer in Raimi's "Dead" trilogy (the third instalment the out-and-out comedy Army of Darkness), which, by the end, becomes a rags-to-rags fable about a retail clerk repelling an army of Harryhausen skeletons laying siege to a medieval castle. In its way, this is as canny a satire of the consumer/clerk relationship as anything in Dawn of the Dead.

The Adventures of the American Rabbit (1986) - DVD

*½/**** Image B Sound B+
screenplay by Norm Lenzer
directed by Fred Wolf and Nobutaka Nishizawa

"And you come up with images in [Invincible] that are so remarkable, including these countless red crabs in this one, that are so frightening to me--because they are life, yet they are mindless and they just keep going on and on despite whatever we think or whatever we hope."
-Roger Ebert to Werner Herzog

"The moon is dull. Mother Nature doesn't call, doesn't speak to you, although a glacier eventually farts. And don't you listen to the Song of Life."
-Item 10 of Herzog's "Minnesota Declaration"

by Alex Jackson There are a few basics tenets I have followed during my initiation into the world of film criticism: 1. That art is made up of subject matter and a perspective; 2. Frivolousness is not a substitute for offering a perspective--rather it is a perspective in and of itself; 3. Artist intentionality is less than meaningless, as perspective is often constantly being informed by greater cultural, social, and subconsciously psychological forces; 4. In light of tenets 1,2, and 3, one should be careful of dismissing the film you are reviewing, in particular because most of those you will be tempted to dismiss are frivolous, and dismissing them only advances their mission to secularize and marginalize the cinema.

TIFF '05: The Myth

½*/****
starring Jackie Chan, Tony Leung Ka-fai, Kim Hee-seon, Mallika Sherawat
screenplay by Stanley Tong, Wang Hui-ling, Li Hai-shu
directed by Stanley Tong

by Bill Chambers The Myth, or: Crouching Tiger, Hidden Turdbath. Sabotaging a potential comeback by trying to catch a wave (not unlike the myriad has-beens in the music industry who jumped on the disco bandwagon), Jackie Chan dips a toe in the unfriendly, nay, hostile waters of the wu xia genre recently revitalized by the likes of Ang Lee and Zhang Yimou. Although The Myth is cruddy-looking (HD's fine for George Lucas excretions and Robert Rodriguez fantasias, but it has a long way to go before it'll be ready for this kind of quasi-epic) and beset by shoddy effects work, blame for its near-unwatchability falls squarely at the feet of Chan and his frequent collaborator Stanley Tong, who directed the film and co-wrote its infantile screenplay. The pitch-meeting must've sounded like kindergarten--after all, it's got meteorites! And sword-fighting! And princesses! And archaeologists! And rooms without gravity! And swamis! And ghosts! It doesn't help that Chan's face has petrified with age and distress into a single, constipated expression, making his reaction shots so opaque as to be dramatically ineffectual. There's a decent set-piece involving a conveyer belt slathered in super-glue, but just the fact that the heir apparent to Fred Astaire would rather contrive reasons to move as little as possible during an action sequence than retire is proof of the production's mid-life crisis. PROGRAMME: Viacom Galas

Tim Burton's Corpse Bride (2005)

****/****
screenplay by John August and Pamela Pettler and Caroline Thompson
directed by Tim Burton & Mike Johnson

by Walter Chaw A self-contained, melancholic, dulcet little ode to love and sacrifice, Tim Burton's stop-motion Corpse Bride is also a sly stab at class systems, a knowing tribute to both the Hammer horror run and the Universal monster tradition, and another of Burton's evocations of German Expressionism. As fairy tale, it rivals his Edward Scissorhands, as underworld fantasia, his Beetlejuice, and as classic studio-bound horror, his Sleepy Hollow--in many ways, in fact, Burton's return to the stop-motion of his breakthrough short Vincent (and his co-produced The Nightmare Before Christmas) feels like a figurative homecoming to the technique that suits him best. William Blake described an "infernal method" in his theory of creation wherein the artist touched every page of every print of his work to infuse it, ineffably, with the hand of its creator, and so stop-motion, with every movement manipulated painstakingly by the human hand, is infused with a Romanticist's idea of (possibly Satanic) vigor. It's animation that gives the term its "soul"--there's something vital about Corpse Bride that has nothing to do with its story, and watching it, you come to the realization that the reason so much of Burton's work feels airless or dated (or that his stars are so perverse) is that his way with puppets translates only uneasily to his way with actors.

TIFF '05: Romance & Cigarettes

*½/****
starring James Gandolfini, Susan Sarandon, Kate Winslet, Steve Buscemi
written and directed by John Turturro

by Bill Chambers Dennis Potter was a genre unto himself, and when he died, he took his recipe for what Heinz Antor called "humanist postmodernism" with him. It's painful to watch writer-director John Turturro, one of the great character actors of our time, invoke the writer in Romance & Cigarettes, as he reduces Potter's notion of pop music as existential catharsis to exactly what it wasn't: a gimmick--an alibi for air band. In the spellbinding film version of Potter's Pennies from Heaven, Christopher Walken comically menaces Bernadette Peters by lip-synching and doing a show-stopping striptease to Irving Aaronson and His Commanders' "Let's Misbehave"; in Romance & Cigarettes, Walken's performance of Tom Jones's "Delilah" is seemingly motivated by a weakness for musical filler. Considering the applause the film elicited from the typically unresponsive press/industry crowd, I guess the technique alone is visceral enough, but instead of illuminating the inner lives of the characters (which even a novelty ditty like "Teddy Bear Picnic" managed to do in the original The Singing Detective), Turturro's prosaic song choices superficialize the inner lives of his characters, making glorified jukeboxes of them all. Granted, once James Gandolfini's Nick Murder--a big galloot cheating on his wife (the ubiquitous Susan Sarandon, who's really starting to wear out her welcome) with an English tart (Kate Winslet, too good for this)--is diagnosed with lung cancer, the movie becomes less arbitrary, but we're left to do the heavy-lifting required by the tonal shift; suture and respite come only briefly in the form of perennial pinch-hitter Elaine Stritch (see also: Monster-in-Law). Give her an Oscar, already. PROGRAMME: Special Presentations

Into the Blue (2005)

½*/****
starring Paul Walker, Jessica Alba, Scott Caan, Ashley Scott
screenplay by Matt Johnson
directed by John Stockwell

by Walter Chaw Although it's impossible to discern the purpose of a movie like this, you find yourself ironically spending all of Into the Blue trying to do just that. Shot in a leering, dirty-old-man disgusting way by John Stockwell (a filmmaker I've liked in the past, though this one causes me to reassess what's going on in my head), the film places your subjective-camera eye upwards between the ankles of one bathing beauty after another, tracking slowly up and down their swimsuit-model bods and fixing, occasionally and briefly, on a perfunctory thriller plot that arises from nothing, goes nowhere, and makes no impact whatsoever on the parade of cakes. (Both beef and cheese.) It's an exploitation flick in the basest sense of the term, because the poor idiots onscreen most likely believe they've been hired for some sort of talent imperceptible to the rest of us (and with no evidence showing itself for the balance of their careers up to this point) as opposed to for how great they look holding their breath and having a camera positioned three feet from their stern. It's not that I'm complaining about having to stare at Jessica Alba's almost-unclad ass for two extraordinarily long hours--I'm complaining about Alba protesting that she's always cast in films for her acting prowess and not for how she looks almost-naked. I don't know if it's false modesty or willful ignorance, but either way: you gotta be kidding me.

More Two-Second TIFF Reviews

originally published September 15, 2005
Wassup Rockers (d. Larry Clark) Somehow the most humanistic film of Clark's career is also his most nihilistic. Nice to see him acknowledge the "other," but they're still skater punks. *** (out of four)

Romance & Cigarettes (d. John Turturro)
A fugue. In the words of David Lynch, "Fugues make me crazy!" Actually eager to rant about this one. *½ (out of four)

All the Invisible Children (ds. Various)
As with any omnibus film, hit-or-miss. I think I liked Kátia Lund's segment best, but John Woo does his best work since heading West. Your mileage will vary. **½ (out of four)

TIFF '05: Mary

**/****
starring Juliette Binoche, Forest Whitaker, Matthew Modine, Marion Cotillard
screenplay by Simone Lageoles, Abel Ferrara, Mario Isabella
directed by Abel Ferrara

by Bill Chambers There are really three-tiers to Abel Ferrara's output, as indicated by his choice of avatar. Arguably the most commercial, at least until New Rose Hotel, his Christopher Walken movies have also been the director's most meticulously crafted, while his Harvey Keitel movies resonate as Ferrara's most personal, with Dangerous Game probably the closest he's ever come to a roman à clef. Then there is Matthew Modine, star of The Blackout and now Mary--relatively minor films seemingly motivated by an urge to commit abstract concepts to celluloid before sobriety kicks in. Juliette Binoche toplines an eclectic cast as Marie Palesi, an actress playing Mary Magdalene in a biblical epic directed by and starring (as Christ) Tony Childress (Modine). After production has wrapped, Marie finds herself shuttled at regular intervals between the present and Magdalene's time, and she elects to embrace this Billy Pilgrim affliction by staying behind in Israel. Meanwhile, on the promotional circuit for the film back in New York (perhaps the screen's most gleamingly modernistic since the one Michael Almereyda gave us in Hamlet), Childress crosses paths with Ted Younger (Forest Whitaker), the host of a popular talk show focused on Christianity; in making an apparently Faustian bargain to publicly support the smarmy Childress, Younger, who's cheating on his pregnant wife (Heather Graham) with Marie's sister (Marion Cotillard), psychically tethers his unborn child to Marie's religious epiphanies. Because it all resolves in a lampoon of Mel Gibson's Jesus movie, Mary can't be said to have anything but honourable intentions, though as a caricature Childress doesn't land with any particular impact. As demonstrated by the nutty casting of Whitaker and Graham as marrieds, it doesn't matter how solid Ferrara's theology is if he doesn't read the trades. PROGRAMME: Visions

TIFF '05: Where the Truth Lies

*½/****
starring Kevin Bacon, Colin Firth, Alison Lohman, Rachel Blanchard
screenplay by Atom Egoyan, based on the novel by Rupert Holmes
directed by Atom Egoyan

by Bill Chambers Canadian filmmakers tend to expose their limitations when they mimic American pop (see: the oeuvres of Jerry Ciccoritti and Mary Harron), and Atom Egoyan, who adapts his signature post-modernism to the Boogie Nights/Goodfellas paradigm in Where the Truth Lies, is no exception. Part of the problem is that it's almost impossible to empathize with journo Karen O'Connor's (Alison Lohman) attraction to the world of Lanny (Kevin Bacon, in what I'm tempted to call a career-best turn) and Vince (Colin Firth), a quasi-Martin & Lewis rended asunder by a scandal years before--not only because these movies are morality tales and thus must initially offer some vicarious thrills, but also because Egoyan is such a fucking Martian that his looking glass isn't perversely seductive (like, say, Blue Velvet's), only off-putting. Indeed, at the forefront of one's mind throughout Where the Truth Lies is whether Egoyan intended it to be so ridiculous, from the inscrutable casting of Firth as a Vaudevillian entertainer to the cornball "Alice in Wonderland" imagery (he even uses Jefferson Airplane's "White Rabbit" on the soundtrack as if it's maybe not a drug song) to the '70s period markers (big moustaches for the boys, big afros for the dark-skinned extras) to, my personal favourite, Lohman playing Karen as a nine-year-old by putting shoes on her knees. That being said, perhaps more disconcerting than Egoyan's failure to either beat 'em or join 'em is that after all these years, he's still making lugubrious, young-man's art that wallows in Sartrean despair. PROGRAMME: Viacom Galas

Pom Poko (1994) + My Neighbors the Yamadas (1999) - DVDs

POM POKO
*½/**** Image A Sound B Extras D+
written and directed by Isao Takahata

MY NEIGHBORS THE YAMADAS
**/**** Image A Sound A Extras D
screenplay by Isao Takahata, based on the comic strip by Hisaichi Ishii
directed by Isao Takahata

by Walter Chaw Two films by the other guy at Studio Ghibli, Isao Takahata's Pom Poko and My Neighbors the Yamadas have the director deviating extravagantly from his masterpiece Grave of the Fireflies--one of the bona fide classics of the anime medium--by hopping from that film's heartbreaking war idyll to these films' anthropomorphic mysticism and broad slapstick. Anime gets a bad rap in the United States for being either pornographic or inscrutable (indeed, much anime pornography is inscrutable)--it's an easy way to dismiss an entire medium as foreign and/or amoral, but as a blanket condemnation it's as misguided at its essence as deriding black-and-white pictures, or talkies, or films altogether--and the truth of it is that for every memorable anime, there are probably fifty forgettable ones. As that ratio holds pretty steady for all films, though, the problem for fair-minded folks approaching the medium for the first time boils down to a picture with, crucially, a pedigree like Pom Poko.

Two-Second TIFF Reviews

originally published September 12, 2005
Mary (d. Abel Ferrara)
Third-tier Ferrara, as evidenced by his choice of star (Matthew Modine). ** (out of four)

Heading South (Vers le sud) (d. Laurent Cantet)
Cantet works in dread the way some work in oils. A much-needed antidote to the twee likes of Ladies in Lavender. *** (out of four)

Takeshis' (d. Takeshi Kitano)
A kind of career summary for Beat by way of Buñuel; heard outside the screening: "Was that a comedy?" Short answer: yes. ***½ (out of four)

TIFF '05: Capote

**/****
starring Philip Seymour Hoffman, Catherine Keener, Clifton Collins, Jr., Chris Cooper
screenplay by Dan Futterman, based on the novel by Gerald Clarke
directed by Bennett Miller

Editor's note: I was so wrong about this film it's almost funny. It probably should've won Best Picture that year.

by Bill Chambers Richard Brooks's masterful screen translation of Truman Capote's true-crime (Tru-crime?) novel In Cold Blood is full of indelible imagery that at first seems to seep into the fabric of Capote beyond director Bennett Miller's control. But as the homages--most notably, both pictures postpone the pivotal slaying of the ominously-named Clutter family until showing it will subvert our expectations most effectively--accumulate and grow increasingly distinct, this tapered biopic begins to feel like a particularly vexing déjà vu. Except for his telltale slackjaw laugh, Philip Seymour Hoffman disappears into the title role, yet the movie is fundamentally superfluous: In presuming to tell the story of In Cold Blood from Capote's point-of-view, it presumes that In Cold Blood wasn't inherently told from Capote's point-of-view. And not only did Brooks's decision to leave the author out of his film as a character not dilute Capote's spurious liberal sympathies, if anything it found them better disseminated than this Dead Man Walking redux does. An early scene of Capote-as-raconteur, which has the electricity of Faces-era Cassavetes, gets one's hopes up, but in retrospect, it only portends Miller's knack for pastiche. PROGRAMME: Special Presentations

In Es-Crowe: On "Elizabethtown"

originally published September 10, 2005
Because Cameron Crowe considers it a work-in-progress, critics at last night's TIFF screening of the interminable Elizabethtown were asked, in not so many words, to handle the film with kid gloves. (Apparently the folks at Venice saw a completely different cut.) So to avoid a flap, I won't be posting a capsule review at the mother site, but let me just say that the version I saw--which looked polished but by no means finished--makes one long for the subtlety and finesse of Garden State. (And really, how much more warning do you need?) Its epiphanies are so processed and its characters are so inorganically whimsical that the movie verges on self-parody (and it's possible that a performance of "Free Bird" by the Stillwater-esque Ruckus pushes it over the edge, albeit consciously)--the suicidal hero (Orlando Bloom, channelling Crowe surrogate Tom Cruise (Elizabethtown's producer)), for instance, plans to do the deed by rigging up his exercycle with a butcher knife to simulate a stabbing motion! While it may say more about my proclivities than about Kirsten Dunst that she still turned my knees to jelly even though I found her Claire insufferable, there is distilled in one aspect of Dunst's characterization virtually everything that is wrong with the piece as it currently stands: she does this thing where she pretends to take a picture, and the first time, it's fetchingly spontaneous; but by the third, you can smell the screenwriting. (I'm reminded of something Alex recently wrote concerning the cigarette-lighting motif in Now, Voyager.) And the presence of Susan Sarandon actually increases one's respect for the similarly-themed Moonlight Mile, which at least knew when to get the hell out of Dodge (hint: before Sarandon had a chance to embarrass herself with an impromptu stand-up routine/tap-dance number). Know that I really want to go to, er, town on this flick, but some form of chivalry is holding me back.

TIFF '05: Shopgirl

**/****
starring Steve Martin, Claire Danes, Jason Schwartzman, Bridgette Wilson-Sampras
screenplay by Steve Martin, based on his novella
directed by Anand Tucker

by Bill Chambers Believe it or not, it takes more out of you to watch Anand Tucker's Shopgirl than to read the Steve Martin novella on which it's based. As in his Hilary and Jackie, Tucker seems to be striving for something lyrical but winds up with something purple, submerging as he does nearly every scene in Barrington Pheloung's syrupy score whilst failing to consolidate redundant emotional gestures. Consequently, Shopgirl is like Lost in Translation on steroids, bloated where the other is wispy, with Martin's middle-aged lothario Ray Porter temporarily filling the void in the life of Mirabelle Buttersfield (Claire Danes), a culturally-displaced ethereal beauty several years his junior. All three leads--Jason Schwartzman plays a young bohemian, Jeremy, whose courtship of Mirabelle grinds to a halt once Ray enters the picture--do fine, idiosyncratic work (Danes hasn't been this good since her "My So-Called Life" heyday, though I could've done without the distracting, meta-feeling glimpse of that show's DVD box set), but where the stark prose of Martin's book made the most of Mirabelle's depressive state ("[Jeremy] never complicates a desire by overthinking it, unlike Mirabelle, who spins a cocoon around an idea until it is immobile," Martin writes) and rendered palatable the characters' improbable relationships, an objective interpretation of the story, particularly one as overcooked as this, throws its essential hollowness into sharp relief. Still, Tucker has a fixation with Danes's feet that at least indicates a directorial presence, something Martin vehicles have lacked for too long. PROGRAMME: Special Presentations

Lady Chatterly's Lover (1981) + Mata Hari (1985)

LADY CHATTERLEY'S LOVER
**/**** Image A Sound A-
starring Sylvia Kristel, Nicholas Clay, Shane Briant
screenplay by Marc Behm, based on the novel by D.H. Lawrence
directed by Just Jaeckin

MATA HARI
½*/**** Image A- Sound A-
starring Sylvia Kristel, Christopher Cazenove, Oliver Tobias, Gaye Brown
screenplay by Joel Ziskin
directed by Curtis Harrington

by Alex Jackson Cinematically at least, I view the 1980s as being an entirely pro-cultural period. Black became mainstream--everybody listened to music from black artists and watched films and television shows starring black actors. Gay became mainstream, blurring gender lines. Feminism likewise became mainstream, blurring gender roles. Blacks, gays, and women were not necessarily disenfranchised in the culture during the 1970s, but by the 1980s they defined the dominant culture, creating a new status quo. The '80s were not a carbon copy of the 1950s, rather they were the 1950s dragged through the '60s and '70s; it was essentially a period of multicultural homogenization. There was, then, never a proper counterculture or fringe element. Nobody was an outsider and nobody was "other." Similarly, there was no feeling of liberation, as there was nothing to be liberated from.

A Sound of Thunder (2005)

ZERO STARS/****
starring Edward Burns, Catherine McCormack, Ben Kingsley, Jemima Rooper
screenplay by Thomas Dean Donnelly & Joshua Oppenheimer and Gregory Poirier, based on the story by Ray Bradbury
directed by Peter Hyams

by Walter Chaw Dr. Travis Ryer (Edward Burns) lives in 2055 Chicago, where he conducts hunting trips back to the same moment in the Cretaceous period to hunt the same dinosaur fated to die moments later in a tar pit. Cheap thrills for the future's bluebloods, the outfit is called "Time Safari," and it's owned by an evil capitalist, Hatton (Ben Kingsley), who, in trying to appease future-Chicago's strict time-travel regulatory agency, warns his clients to stay on the path and keep their hands to themselves lest the shockwaves of fucking with prehistory change the course of evolution. It's a term that A Sound of Thunder bandies about with some confidence, "evolution," but it does so without conveying the first idea of what evolution actually is or how it works. It's the kind of film that creationists and other retarded people will like because it mounts a pretty good case for the intelligent design-/flat earth-inspired "Heck, we don't know shit, anything could be true!" school of thought.

House M.D.: Season One (2004-2005) - DVD

Image C+ Sound A- Extras C+
"Pilot," "Paternity," "Occam's Razor," "Maternity," "Damned if You Do," "The Socratic Method," "Fidelity," "Poison," "DNR," "Histories," "Detox," "Sports Medicine," "Cursed," "Control," "Mob Rules," "Heavy," "Role Model," "Babies & Bathwater," "Kids," "Love Hurts," "Three Stories," "Honeymoon"

by Bill Chambers The high-concept premise of "House M.D." is, like that of executive producer Bryan Singer's The Usual Suspects, ultimately fraudulent. After all, for us plebes, there's no way of knowing whether the "Sherlock Holmes of Medicine" lives up to his billing, save his addiction to an opiate. (I'm reminded of that inside-baseball wannabe Brown Sugar, in which the characters cringe at the alleged awfulness of a hip-hop act that sounds to the untrained ear exactly like every other hip-hop act.) As the head of "diagnostics" at the fictitious Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital, unorthodox Dr. Gregory House (Hugh Laurie) uses an informed process of elimination to cure anomalous illnesses (one per week, it's self-reflexively pointed out), but as the patients invariably go from bad to worse to healed, civilian audiences are denied the basic level of interactivity that is the raison d'être of the whodunit. "House M.D." is a "C.S.I." clone--right down to the impromptu Innerspace tours of the bloodstream--with science no longer the pretext but the text itself.

The Narrow Margin (1952) - DVD

***/**** Image B+ Sound A- Extras C
starring Charles McGraw, Marie Windsor, Jacqueline White, Don Beddoe
screenplay by Earl Felton
directed by Richard Fleischer

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover The Narrow Margin is the kind of minor classic that makes a few of the major ones look puny. Possessing a careful, Artful Dodger deviousness, the film pulls the rug out from under you before you even notice it was there--it refuses to waste time on speeches or showboating and simply gets down to the business of blowing your expectations right out of the water. It's also a strangely affirmative noir in its insistence on overturning surfaces to see the individual beneath the bluster, a testament to the cleverness and thoughtfulness of screenwriter Earl Felton. If Felton's efforts lean more towards chamber piece than grandiose masterwork, he's still clever enough to suck you in and unpretentious enough not to pat himself on the back for this triumph of art over budget.

Fever Pitch (2005) [Widescreen] - DVD

*½/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras C+
starring Drew Barrymore, Jimmy Fallon, James B. Sikking, JoBeth Williams
screenplay by Lowell Ganz & Babaloo Mandel, based on the novel by Nick Hornby
directed by Peter Farrelly & Bobby Farrelly

by Walter Chaw Ben (Jimmy Fallon), a Red Sox fanatic and middle-school math teacher, falls in love with corporate minx Lindsey (Drew Barrymore), who, as is often the case in Farrelly Brothers films, is perfect. She's beautiful, bug-eyes and all, and when she simpers in her mealy-mouthed way that she loves Ben as much as Ben loves baseball, all the men folk are supposed to melt--but I have serious doubts as to whether Barrymore is romantic lead material. Though she's fine getting hit in the face with a hard foul (her best roles are as the benighted bimbos in Adam Sandler trainwrecks), much of Barrymore's sultriness has to do with the idea of her as a naughty schoolgirl (Poison Ivy), not as a savvy woman of the world. She's no Mary, in other words, and her lack as one-half of Fever Pitch's romantic pairing is distracting--if not actually crippling, since leading man Fallon is himself a stammering vanilla doormat.

Dillinger (1945) - DVD

**/**** Image B Sound B- Commentary C+
starring Lawrence Tierney, Edmund Lowe, Anne Jeffreys, Eduardo Ciannelli
screenplay by Philip Yordan
directed by Max Nosseck

by Alex Jackson You have got to be shitting me. This is Lawrence Tierney? The guy who played Joe in Reservoir Dogs and Elaine's dad on "Seinfeld", that Lawrence Tierney? The Lawrence Tierney with whom modern audiences had come to be acquainted was a goat-munching ogre; in Reservoir Dogs Mr. Orange characterized him as the real-life Thing, and indeed the only way to describe late-period Tierney is as a superhuman being. Lawrence Tierney is to heavies as Marilyn Monroe is to bombshells and Casablanca is to the movies themselves--that is to say, a conglomerate of all that have ever existed. Like Marilyn Monroe and Casablanca, Tierney is essentially an impersonal and even rather cornball artificial construction, but along those same lines, he's also a deeply iconic one. Caricature is, after all, a kissing cousin to archetype--and archetype is one of the essential ingredients of pure cinema.

The Baxter (2005) + Pretty Persuasion (2005)

THE BAXTER
*/****
starring Michael Showalter, Elizabeth Banks, Michelle Williams, Justin Theroux
written and directed by Michael Showalter

PRETTY PERSUASION
½/****
starring Evan Rachel Wood, Ron Livingston, James Woods, Jane Krakowski
screenplay by Skander Halim
directed by Marcos Siega

by Walter Chaw Writer-director Michael Showalter swings for the rafters with his anti-romcom The Baxter and ends up hitting into a double play: it's less a satire of romcom conventions than a meek kowtow before their awesome ubiquity. Showalter (also starring as CPA Elliot Sherman) plays the titular schlub, the "Baxter" being a creature of extreme nerdy social incompetence most often glimpsed in frown and tux in the retreating background of Dustin Hoffman rescuing Katharine Ross from the altar. Not a terrible idea (i.e., making the boring, button-down dork the centre of a satirical romance) for a movie as self-serving, self-pitying, neo-Woody Allen ideas go, but as The Baxter unfolds with a suspiciously-familiar series of contrived situations, gentle misunderstandings involving homosexuality and a strange woman in your bed, and a parade of women so far out of Elliot's league as to render his eventual abandonment as inevitable as his ultimate match (with Cecil (Michelle Williams), likewise far out of his league) is unlikely, it becomes clear that the flick is just as stupid as that which it purports to lampoon. The Baxter is actually harder to stomach than its traditional romcom brethren because in place of a leading man locked in its pre-destined narrative, there's barely a supporting character.

Transporter 2 (2005)

*/****
starring Jason Statham, Alessandro Gassman, Amber Valletta, Kate Nauta
screenplay by Luc Besson & Robert Mark Kamen
directed by Louis Leterrier

by Walter Chaw After the unqualified triumph of Unleashed, the other Luc Besson/Louis Leterrier flick from 2005, my expectations were sky high for Transporter 2, the sequel to Cory Yuen's fitfully-entertaining, unapologetically puerile throwback to the delirious Hong Kong cinema of John Woo and Ringo Lam. (Yuen returns as choreographer.) What a disappointment, then, that this picture's even weaker than its predecessor in terms of character development and plotting, content as it is to be a Jackie Chan ripper with Man on Fire's plot. What so intoxicated about Jackie Chan was this gathering cult of personality born of the man's reckless disregard for his own well-being in the pursuit of fashioning a body of work (individual scenes, not films--the films mostly suck) that for a while resurrected Buster Keaton in every movie theatre outside American soil. Without that sense of Chan's legacy (no one is "collecting" Jason Statham's groovy but inorganic fight scenes), all that's left is a vacuous, utterly-disposable chop-socky flick that pervs on girls with the same kind of childishness with which it pervs on cars. Telling that the MacGuffin of the piece is a hyper-phallic syringe and that the chief henchman is Lola (Katie Nauta), an Aryan Grace Jones with a fondness for lingerie and submachine guns.

Nick Frost's Danger! 50,000 Volts! (2002) - DVD

Danger! 50,000 Volts!
Image C Sound C Extras A
"Alligator Attack!", "Thugs with Baseball Bats!", "High Speed Chases!", "Minefields!", "Fires!", "Being Impaled!", "Lightning Strikes!", "Tidal Waves!", "Hostage Situations!"

by Walter Chaw Locating itself somewhere between "Jackass", "Insomniac with Dave Attell", and "MythBusters", "Danger! 50000 Volts!" is a series of semi-improvisational interviews with people in bad jobs, interspersed with the jocular, rotund Frost putting himself in situations of peril for the bemusement of a bemused audience. More British than terrible, "Danger! 50000 Volts!" reminds of a "World's Greatest Chases" hidden-camera show where Scotland Yard chased down a felon at speeds approaching upwards of ten, eleven miles an hour. So the pacing isn't exactly pulse-pounding, but there's an affability to Frost and his willingness to insert himself into dangerous situations that makes the show an agreeable time-passer. Its apocalyptic tone (shades of "Worst Case Scenario")--the idea that you'll eventually find yourself in a minefield after having fallen through ice and been impaled on a pole the very same day you were attacked by a gorilla and hooligans with baseball bats--is ludicrous, of course (in fact, there's very little about the show that's real-world applicable), but watching a chubby comedic actor endure indignity has sort of an archetypal feel to it. It's the Oliver Hardy school of vaudeville, I think.