Film Freak Central

Into the Blue: FFC Interviews Ira Sachs

October 30, 2005|He has the potential to sound pretentious and he's nervous about it--but there is wrapped up in this self-awareness the Catch-22, as they say, that if he knows he sounds a certain way, he probably isn't that way. It's a hard thing and you see it a lot these days, that if you're qualified, you downplay it--if you're knowledgeable, you pretend not to be--because there is no bigger social crime in these United States than to know more than the next guy. I had a chance to talk to Ira Sachs, co-writer and director of the fantastic Forty Shades of Blue, about cracking the hard skin that's formed over the pudding of the indie dysfunctional-family genre. Set in his hometown Memphis, where Mr. Sachs grew up "gay and Jewish," the picture--like Sachs himself, he's quick to affirm--is about compressing multiple lives into one journey.

Forty Shades of Blue (2005)

****/****
starring Rip Torn, Dina Korzun, Darren Burrows, Paprika Steen
screenplay by Michael Rohatyn and Ira Sachs
directed by Ira Sachs

by Walter Chaw Muscovite Laura (Dina Korzun) lives with her boyfriend, legendary music producer Alan James (Rip Torn), in Memphis. He's twice her age, they have a young son together, and when Alan's grown son Michael (Darren E. Burrows) comes home to visit, Laura begins to realize that although she's living her dream of prosperity, she's a stranger in a strange land, divorced from her ambitions and beginning to cramp from the positions her little deceptions demand of her. She's defined almost entirely by her sometime- lover and keeper--at restaurants, people ask her if Mr. James will be showing up later, and when an impulse has her shopping for Michael, she's asked if she's picking something up for Mr. James. Most films that share a set-up with Forty Shades of Blue are about how it is that the Alans of the world can have everything but be incapable of maintaining a marriage, muddying the relationships with their children with the same brusque inconsiderateness. Just as likely is the film about the vagabond son trying to build a bridge back to his larger-than-life father--the chiseller trophy wife as background decoration and occasional plot lubricant.

Desperate Housewives: The Complete First Season (2004-2005) - DVD

Image A+ Sound A Extras B+
"Pilot," "Ah, But Underneath," "Pretty Little Picture," "Who's That Woman?," "Running to Stand Still," "Anything You Can Do," "Guilty," "Suspicious Minds," "Come Back to Me," "Move On," "Every Day a Little Death," "Your Fault," "Love Is in the Air," "Impossible," "If It's Brown, Flush It Down," "There Won't Be Trumpets," "Children Will Listen," "Live Alone and Like It," "Fear No More," "Sunday in the Park with George," "Goodbye for Now," "One Wonderful Day"

by Walter Chaw The writing on Marc Cherry's "Desperate Housewives" is astringent and bright for the first dozen episodes or so. For more than half the first season, the show works as an effervescent satire of evening potboilers like "Dallas" or "Falcon Crest": It understands the attraction/repulsion dynamic of venerable bodice-ripping soapers and boils them down to their base elements of women, houses, relationships, and desperation. Eventually, though, the series falls off the tightrope all satires walk between commentary and indulgence--it starts having too good a time pretending to be that which it disdains and, in so doing, reveals its true colours as a drag revue played by women, ultimately freeing it of irony. Just look to the reports of on-set strife and photo-shoot jealousy to see that the tabloid has overtaken the snark, with intelligence and purpose quick to follow.

Capote (2005)

**/****
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

by Walter Chaw You hear him before you see him: Truman Capote (Philip Seymour Hoffman), raconteur, socialite, showman, standing at the centre of the kind of swinging party immortalized in the glossy, offensive film version of his Breakfast at Tiffany's. He's telling a story in a claustrophobic storm of admirers, his reedy, almost-falsetto voice broken now and again by his wheezing, self-conscious laugh. He's flirting with his own persona, I think (Hoffman, not Capote), and the tiny moments I'm able to see through the barrage of misdirection thrown up by screenwriter Dan Futterman and director Bennett Miller (all three old friends--the film plays smug like an exclusive reunion) to strike at the heart of Hoffman's own situation as a sensitive soul trapped in the body of a second fiddle (Kevin Smith syndrome--or, more flatteringly, Charles Laughton), are the moments Capote means something to me beyond another exhumation of the Clutter Family murders already chronicled (and exploited twice already by Capote's In Cold Blood and Richard Brooks's magnificent film treatment of the same) and mythologized. It's as Americana as Grant Wood, marking this tiny Kansas landscape with the same brush as Ed Gein's Wisconsin--and making Capote sexy in a ghoulish way when it fails to be sexy in a revelatory way.

North Country (2005)

*/****
starring Charlize Theron, Frances McDormand, Sissy Spacek, Woody Harrelson
screenplay by Michael Seitzman
directed by Niki Caro

by Walter Chaw North Country is a sensationalistic, pandering film that crafts from a landmark legal case a cinematic martyrdom the equivalent of Christ's and Joan of Arc's rolled up into the noble, trembling lips of Charlize Theron (who once had the temerity to chastise the press for focusing on her appearance in Monster whilst wearing a see-through, painted-on size-4 gold dress). I'm not decrying the stunt-casting of a statuesque blond in the role of the tiny Minnesotan mine worker the life upon which this film is ever-so-loosely based, nor am I begrudging, per se, the natural instinct of Roger Ebert and the Academy to foam over turns like this from starlets undergoing extreme make-unders. No, what I really don't like are movies like North Country that fudge humanity in all its ugliness and imperfection so tragically that the real issues of the picture end up looking like one of those glossy fashion mag covers Theron will grace as she embarks on her promotional turn. According to the world of North Country, it's not terrible enough that awful things happen to a real live person--no, awful things have to happen to Mother-freakin'-Teresa.

Doom (2005) + Stay (2005)

DOOM
½*/****
starring The Rock, Karl Urban, Rosamund Pike, DeObia Oparei
screenplay by David Callaham and Wesley Strick
directed by Andrzej Bartkowiak

STAY
*½/****
starring Ewan McGregor, Naomi Watts, Ryan Gosling, Janeane Garofalo
screenplay by David Benioff
directed by Marc Forster

by Walter Chaw For a split second, the clouds part and I think I've kenned a glimmer of an idea in Andrzej Bartkowiak's video game adaptation Doom that doesn't involve homoerotic gun worship or ripping off everything from Aliens save its humanity. Semper Fi, gung ho, muscle-bound jarhead Sarge (Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson) takes it upon himself to order his own mini-Mai Lai because he's a stickler for details, and his stock marines balk to varying degrees of morality-inspired mutiny. Suddenly, and just for that split second, Doom of all things becomes Casualties of War (and, in fact, literalizes that film's tagline of "In war, innocence is the first casualty"), and although what's leading up to the moment isn't that great, I was ready to roll with this totally unexpected, thought-provoking tickle. Alas--it flees like hope so often does, leaving fifteen minutes of semi-gory first-person perspective to simulate the first-person perspective of the video game (marking this as the first--and probably last--time someone thought that ripping off Uwe Boll was a good idea), ending with the sort of mano-a-mano showdown between its warring alpha males that everyone's seen enough of by now.

Hellraiser: Hellworld (2005); The Boogeyman (1980)/Return of the Boogeyman (1984); The Fallen Ones (2005) - DVDs

HELLRAISER: HELLWORLD
*/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Lance Henriksen, Katheryn Winnick, Christopher Jacot, Doug Bradley
screenplay by Carl Dupre
directed by Rick Bota

The Boogey Man
½*/**** Image B Sound B
starring Suzanna Love, Ron James, John Carradine
written and directed by Ulli Lommel

RETURN OF THE BOOGEYMAN
ZERO STARS Image D Sound D
starring Suzanna Love, Kelly Galinda, Richard Quick
directed by Deland Nuse

THE FALLEN ONES
** Image A Sound A Extras B+
starring Casper Van Dien, Kristen Miller, Geoffrey Lewis, Navid Negahban
written and directed by Kevin VanHook

by Walter Chaw The only genre that boasts more direct-to-video fare than horror is porn, and since we haven't quite reached the point of quiet desperation needed to begin reviewing porn, find here a smelted cheddar of four dtv horror features (actually, The Boogeyman got a theatrical release in 1980, though I can't understand why): the eighth film in Clive Barker's venerable horror octology, Hellraiser: Hellworld; The Boogeyman and its second sequel, the legitimately straight-to-video Return of the Boogeyman; and Kevin VanHook's The Fallen Ones. The only thing that binds them together, of course, is the general disrepute of their genre, doubled by their status as never having secured "legitimate" distribution--but, what with us teetering on the eve of the major studios embarking on a grand experiment in franchising their licenses for direct-to-video treatment, now seems as good a time as any to give these films a look. First we had a couple of Wild Things sequels, then The Sandlot 2 and a Carlito's Way prequel, and soon Single White Female will follow in the Disney footsteps of producing DVD cheap product for fast returns and an eternity gathering dust and puzzled glances in drugstore dollar bins. It's the equivalent of turning Idahoan runaways into crack whores before discarding them for the next small-town beauty led astray.

Oliver! (1968) [Special DVD & CD Gift Set!] - DVD

***/**** Image A- Sound A-
starring Ron Moody, Oliver Reed, Harry Secombe, Mark Lester
screenplay by Vernon Harris, based on the novel by Charles Dickens and the play by Lionel Bart
directed by Carol Reed

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover There's an exception to every rule, and Oliver! bucks one of the most depressing: that every bloated, twilight-of-old-Hollywood musical is crass and overblown. To be sure, Carol Reed was far from his The Third Man/Outcast of the Islands heyday when he directed this Oscar-winning roadshow, and one can sense a sigh of resignation as he puts on the mega-musical feedbag. But unlike the once-great craftsmen who started turning in horrors like Hello, Dolly!, the movie has style and credibility--Reed is genuinely interested in the narrative and the mood, as opposed to what other declining directors would highlight: the production design and the money. Oliver! is still sealed in an expensive cocoon, but what's inside is a world worth watching and enjoying.

Trauma (1993) + The Card Player (2004) - DVDs

Dario Argento's Trauma
**/**** Image A Sound B+ Extras B-
starring Christopher Rydell, Asia Argento, Laura Johnson, Piper Laurie
screenplay by Dario Argento & T.E.D. Klein
directed by Dario Argento

Il cartaio
**½/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras A
starring Stefania Rocca, Liam Cunningham, Silvio Muccino, Claudio Santamaria
screenplay by Dario Argento, Franco Ferrini
directed by Dario Argento

by Walter Chaw Listening to Dario Argento himself call Trauma "classic Argento" shakes the validity of author intentionality. The man's a legend, but he has no idea about the qualities that used to shine in his own work, and what comes clear for a fan of the "Italian Hitchcock" after a screening of Trauma is that the thrill is gone. It's one of those George Lucas situations where if it were anyone else shitting all over the legacy, there'd be a violent hue and cry instead of this collective embarrassed averting of gaze--a cheap ripper that steals scenes whole from better Argento flicks without a commensurate level of understanding of how to use them. Was a time that Argento redefined the slasher flick in the same way that countryman Sergio Leone redefined the Western; that Argento (like American rival and doppelgänger Brian DePalma) was appropriating bits and pieces from Alfred Hitchcock and rejuvenating them in films exhilarating for their willingness to do absolutely anything to anyone at any moment. Once lawless, Argento's pictures feel inconsequential now. Light and aimless.

Crash (2005) [Widescreen] - DVD

*/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B-
starring Sandra Bullock, Don Cheadle, Matt Dillon, Jennifer Esposito
screenplay by Paul Haggis & Bobby Moresco
directed by Paul Haggis

by Walter Chaw In peeking under the satin-slick bedclothes of the latest crop of high-falutin' liberal diatribes tarted-up with matinee idols and compromised ideals, one finds that whatever the trappings of sophistication, we're still making Stanley Kramer movies, all of grand speeches and peachy endings. Seems to me the common denominator among the Interpreters and Constant Gardeners and Lord of Wars is a good unhealthy dollop of white man's guilt, that could-be beneficial malady that afflicts the affluent and socially well-established once in a while so they'll pay lip service to Africa, and race, and class. (Just as long as it has nothing to do with actual activism.) They're issues considered phantom offices at which to give and then leave with a sense of closure at best or, at the least, a feeling that all the tempests in the world are fit for a teacup you can put away somewhere in a mental cupboard. Race as a fable, Africa as a fantasy--and the last reel interested in beautiful, rich white people falling in love; I think about Preston Sturges's Sullivan's Travels and a couple of challenges presented therein to white, privileged, "morbid rich" filmmaker Sully, played by Joel McCrea: "What do you know about trouble?" and, later, "I have never been sympathetic to the caricaturing of the poor and needy, sir." To which Sully responds: "Who's caricaturing?"

It's All in the Thumbs: FFC Interviews Mike Mills & Lou Taylor Pucci

October 9, 2005|With wistful "it" boy Lou Pucci turning cartwheels on the berber carpet and his Thumbsucker director Mike Mills horsing around in a way more fraternal than paternal, I suddenly found myself in a conference room with a couple of guys who have no use for "cool." What I vetted from these unaffected souls not caring in the slightest what I thought of their rumpus room acrobatics was this sense, undeniable, that they couldn't care less that I was even there--and less still what species of banal question I had ratting around in my proverbial pet carrier. But it wasn't arrogance (I've been around that a lot--been the arrogant one, too, if tales told out of school are to be heeded): it was something more like fatigue driven to the grist of blithe indifference--that feeling you get during finals week when you realize that after a semester's worth of fear and tension, you just don't give a good crap anymore.

The Legend of Zorro (2005)

½*/****
starring Antonio Banderas, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Rufus Sewell, Nick Chinlund
screenplay by Roberto Orci & Alex Kurtzman
directed by Martin Campbell

by Walter Chaw It's Amblin Entertainment's version of Once Upon a Time in the West, which only serves as a reminder that it's been too long since the last time you saw Once Upon a Time in the West. Martin Campbell's dedicatedly underwhelming The Legend of Zorro goes through the motions of knock-off action sequels like this with a tired fidelity and--until a semi-sadistic conclusion--a squeamishness about enemy casualties that smacks of that peculiar morality for which there's ever an acceptable way to portray mindless carnage to the kiddie set. I'm not saying your moppets should be shielded from the ugliness of the world, I'm saying that should they witness someone getting pushed off a thirty-foot tower into a cactus patch with the tip of a sword, they ought not be shielded from the consequences. By the umpteenth time Campbell uses the classic "A-Team" tactic of showing the bad guys crawling away from a scene of mayhem in a slow-motion, "Hey, no harm done" shot, you don't feel comforted by the innocuousness of the thing so much as coddled for being a ninny who doesn't understand that more harm's done in assuring your kids that frenetic swordplay never results in somebody getting hurt.

Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (2005)

***/****
screenplay by Steve Box & Nick Park, Mark Burton and Bob Baker
directed by Nick Park and Steve Box

by Walter Chaw Perfectly innocuous even though it's (very) occasionally mildly naughty (a pair of melon jokes, a makeshift fig leaf labelled "contains nuts"), Aardman's Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (hereafter Were-Rabbit) doesn't break a lot of new ground in the claymated pair's misadventures in serving up a workmanlike tale of love, loyalty, gardening, gadgets, and misguided medical experimentation. It takes an unusually long time to get started, for one, re-establishing the best-pals relationship between cheese-loving, jug-eared inventor Wallace and his faithful mutt Gromit (theirs is an Inspector Gadget/Brain sort of dynamic) with the kind of leisurely pace that feels more like a valedictory procession than something born of necessity. "Wallace & Gromit" cartoons have, after all, become a standby on the festival circuit, functioning as buffers between films and the palette-cleanser in all-shorts programs. But it's that very function, as the whimsical interstitial, that makes a feature-length presentation just a charming diversion that outstays its welcome ever so slightly. Unlike its feature-length predecessor Chicken Run, there isn't the bite of satire in Were-Rabbit--no light shed on the British social caste system and, likewise, few inroads made in the traditional love vs. status romance. What coalesces is an appreciation for the craft involved in realizing the picture and a suspicion that you're going to be hungry again in about an hour.

Oliver Twist (2005) + Kings & Queen (2004)

OLIVER TWIST
**/****
starring Ben Kingsley, Barney Clark, Leanne Rowe, Mark Strong
screenplay by Ronald Harwood, based on the novel by Charles Dickens
directed by Roman Polanski

Rois et reine
***½/****
starring Emmanuelle Devos, Mathieu Amalric, Catherine Deneuve, Maurice Garrel
screenplay by Roger Bohbot, Arnaud Desplechin
directed by Arnaud Desplechin

by Walter Chaw Roman Polanski is an architectural director. By that I mean he moves his camera in careful, constructed motions, and the characters he places within these movements are best when they seem restrained by them, oppressed by the presence of the director in a way similar to Hitchcock's protagonists. Indeed, Polanski at his best (Repulsion, Knife in the Water, The Tenant, Rosemary's Baby, Macbeth, Chinatown) makes films that Hitchcock might have made: alight with social revulsion, weighted by claustrophobic set-pieces, and thick with subtext. But Polanski at his worst (Bitter Moon, The Ninth Gate, Frantic, Pirates, Tess) betrays a tendency towards the frenetic--an unbecoming manic energy that leans towards the childish instead of what I think is the intended demoniacal. Polanski close to the vest is Polanski at his best, and when midway through something tending towards mediocre like The Pianist, he erected a literal wall within which to restrain his antihero (tellingly, the best Polanski protagonists are acted-upon)--that architectural boundary allowing the director to regain his footing, if only for the last part of the film.

Red Cockroaches (2003) - DVD

**/**** Image B Sound A- Extras B
starring Adam Plotch, Talia Rubel, Diane Spodarek, Jeff Pucillo
written and directed by Miguel Coyula

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover You have to give Red Cockroaches full props: it takes a no-budget budget, some half-understood ideas, and a whole lot of ingenuity and almost pulls off a movie. Alas, "almost" is as far as I'm willing to go, because the film never really understands what the hell it's trying to say. Though it manages to make you forget its neophyte director's sex fantasies and complaints, it's more suggestive than articulate and gets your hopes up only to dash them with noncommittal execution. I have no idea where its combination of Blade Runner dystopia, Polanski perversity, and Sundance relationship drama was supposed to go, and it's to writer-director Miguel Coyula's credit that he can keep you praying that he isn't going to take any sophomoric turns. Alas, he does, and Red Cockroaches does, and your rental night is done for.

The Breakin' DVD Collection (1984) - DVD

BREAKIN'
**½/**** Image C- Sound D+
starring Lucinda Dickey, Shabba-Doo, Boogaloo Shrimp, Ben Lokey
screenplay by Charles Parker & Allen DeBevoise and Gerald Scaife
directed by Joel Silberg

BREAKIN' 2: ELECTRIC BOOGALOO
***/**** Image B Sound B+
starring Lucinda Dickey, Adolfo "Shabba-Doo" Quinones, Michael "Boogaloo Shrimp" Chambers, Susie Bono
screenplay by Jan Venture & Julie Reichart
directed by Sam Firstenberg

BEAT STREET
**/**** Image C+ Sound B
starring Rae Dawn Chong, Guy Davis, Jon Chardiet, Leon W. Grant
screenplay by Andy Davis & David Gilbert & Paul Golding
directed by Stan Lathan

by Alex Jackson Ebony and ivory are living in perfect harmony in 1984's Breakin'. This is hardly a "white" movie, but it's not really a "black" one, either. It actually seems that Breakin' is genuinely multicultural: The film doesn't neutralize or marginalize blackness--in fact, it quite certainly celebrates it. But it's not black at the expense of excluding white faces. Instead of aligning itself with one particular racial identity, Breakin' aligns itself with a conglomerate of all of them. This is a party to which everyone is invited.