Film Freak Central

War Gods of the Deep (1965)/At the Earth's Core (1976) [Double Feature] - DVD

War-Gods of the Deep
The City Under the Sea
½*/**** Image A Sound B
starring Vincent Price, Tab Hunter, Susan Hart, David Tomlinson
screenplay by Charles Bennett and Louis M. Heyward
directed by Jacques Tourneur

AT THE EARTH'S CORE
½*/**** Image A Sound B
starring Doug McClure, Peter Cushing, Caroline Munro, Cy Grant
screenplay by Milton Subotsky, based on the novel by Edgar Rice Burroughs
directed by Kevin Connor

by Walter Chaw Jacques Tourneur kicks all kinds of ass. He shone in the Forties with his Val Lewton collaborations and his magnificent, atmosphere-laden pictures Night of the Demon and Out of the Past. Having turned his attention primarily to moody Joel McCrea westerns and adventure pulpers in the Fifties, Tourneur, by the time the Sixties rolled around, unfortunately found himself outside his black-and-white comfort zone (his last great work is probably an episode of the original "The Twilight Zone", "Night Call") and at the helm of productions starring people like Steve Reeves and Vincent Price. One of his last pictures--1965's abominable War-Gods of the Deep--finds its way onto DVD via MGM's admirable "Midnite Movies" line as the front end of a double feature. It's a flat, fish-eyed stinker that positions itself as a ripper of both the Price-anchored Roger Corman/Edgar Allan Poe films and the bona fide cycle of Jules Verne spectacles that began with Disney's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954), continued through From the Earth to the Moon (1958) and Journey to the Center of the Earth (1959), and culminated in 1964's still-creepy First Men in the Moon, to which this film might owe its greatest debt. Ostensibly based on a Poe poem called "The City in the Sea," War-Gods of the Deep grafts its gothic settings (complete with another voiceover intro of Price reading a poem) to a Verne-like tale of a mysterious egomaniac (named "The Captain," of course, and played by Price) living in a giant, velvet-lined mansion beneath the sea, just off the coast of Cornwall.

Sky High (2005) + Stealth (2005)|Sky High [Widescreen] - DVD

SKY HIGH
½*/****  Image A Sound B+ Extras C+
starring Michael Angarano, Danielle Panabaker, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Kurt Russell
screenplay by Paul Hernandez and Robert Schooley & Mark McCorkle
directed by Mike Mitchell

STEALTH
**/****
starring Josh Lucas, Jessica Biel, Jamie Foxx, Sam Shepard
screenplay by W.D. Richter
directed by Rob Cohen

by Walter Chaw A kids movie for the stupid ones and a guys movie for the stupid ones of those, Sky High and Stealth are lowest-common-denominator entertainments that throw sense out the window in favour of clumsy one-liners, bad special effects, and an eye focused keen on demographics and the bottom line, which those demographics promise to fork over on opening weekend. It doesn't matter if they're good, just that they rake in enough moolah before people get a whiff of the noisome rot and ennui wafting on air-conditioned currents out of the friendly neighbourhood cineplex and start staying home again in droves. The dreadfulness of Sky High and Stealth can be measured by the extent to which this nation's timid, gaffed, untrained, dispassionate film critics equivocate in their reviews that it's for kids, that it's an enjoyable film if you check your brain at the door, and/or that it's "finally" the family/action/blockbuster you've been waiting for all summer long.

Keen, Shaven: FFC Interviews Lodge Kerrigan

November 27, 2005|I got off on the wrong foot with Lodge Kerrigan almost immediately (the kind of thing I can usually avoid until at least ten or twelve minutes into an interview). It was an unexpected turn of events because I'm a fan and was dying to talk to him after getting poleaxed by his first three films: Clean, Shaven, Claire Dolan, and now Keane. It was my fault; I asked him if his films were a means by which to address his prejudices when, upon consideration, his films actually force me to address my own prejudices: prejudices about mental illness, prostitution, and the general desperation of the disenfranchised. I wouldn't call it a misunderstanding so much as a bad presumption on my part--this belief that the things that made me uncomfortable and/or crazy brought out the same feelings in Kerrigan. It's a presumption so deeply ingrained in me that I never stopped to think that the things I'm a prick about aren't the same things everyone else is a prick about, making the interview almost as interesting a prod for self-examination as are Kerrigan's films.

DIFF '05: Love, Ludlow

**/****
starring Alicia Goranson, David Eigenberg, Brendan Sexton III, Andrea Maulella
screenplay by David Paterson
directed by Adrienne J. Weiss

by Walter Chaw Utterly stagebound and seldom anything but a small Sundance indie version of Dominick & Eugene, Adrienne Weiss's Love, Ludlow, against all odds, kicks free of its quirk crutches at around the halfway mark--long enough for it to modestly divert, if not especially edify. "Roseanne"'s Alicia "Lecy" Goranson is a tough-talking Queens girl, Myra, charged with the care of her bi-polar, Shakespeare-quoting brother Ludlow (Brendan Sexton III). That she gives the most self-conscious performance in a film about some sort of animalistic social misfit/typical painter speaks ill--but all is salved by David Eigenberg as mild-mannered suit Reggie, who is, for whatever reason, interested in the crass, brassy Myra and so suffers all manner of abuse from her and Ludlow in order to engage in whimsical date-centric misadventures, the inevitable break-up, and the inevitable reunion. Eigenberg has the quality of "Kids in the Hall" vet Kevin McDonald--a fetching blend of innocence and resourcefulness--and his struggle to reconcile his own feelings of inadequacy with those engendered by Myra (and what must be some kind of metaphor in the impossible Ludlow) is well-wrought. In her feature debut, director Weiss too often mistakes revolving around two characters having a dialogue for expanding the boundaries of a play--she demonstrates by her indecision a more general cluelessness about how, exactly, to free Love, Ludlow from its roots. But the writing, however thickly mannered, is at least dense enough with nice turns of phrase (and gifted with Eigenberg's excellent turn) to make the exercise an earnest try rather than a misguided disaster.

Cheaper by the Dozen (2003) [Baker's Dozen Edition] - DVD

½*/**** Image A- Sound B Extras C
starring Steve Martin, Bonnie Hunt, Piper Perabo, Tom Welling
screenplay by Craig Titley, based on the book by Frank B. Gilbreth Jr. and Ernestine Gilbreth Carey
directed by Shawn Levy

by Walter Chaw Walter Lang's 1950 version of Frank B. Gilbreth and Ernestine Gilbreth Carey's semi-autobiographical Cheaper by the Dozen ends with patriarch Frank (Clifton Webb) kicking the bucket, and seat-warmer Shawn Levy's (fresh off the triumph Just Married) 2003 adaptation of the same ends with patriarch Tom (Steve Martin) capitulating to his simpering children. Such is the decline of courage in western popular culture that even sickening cultural artifacts like Lang's Cheaper by the Dozen out-balls an updated version fifty-three years hence. Infantile regression the rule of the day in a climate increasingly desperate to shoehorn its post-modern anti-narratives into comfortable family fare, it's interesting to consider that the original was already seen as something of a throwback to Depression-era family values at the time of its release. In conflict with the popular wag that people are stupider now than they've ever been, the excrescent original was also defended as good old-fashioned escapist fare. People are exactly as stupid as they've always been, it seems, but the lords of our popular entertainment have been noticeably castrated.

The Beautiful Country (2004); Me and You and Everyone We Know (2005); The World (2005)|The Beautiful Country - DVD

THE BEAUTIFUL COUNTRY
**½/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
starring Nick Nolte, Tim Roth, Bai Ling, Temeura Morisson
screenplay by Sabina Murray
directed by Hans Petter Moland

ME AND YOU AND EVERYONE WE KNOW
*½/****
starring John Hawkes, Miranda July, Miles Thompson, Brandon Ratcliff
written and directed by Miranda July

Shijie
****/****
starring Zhao Tao, Chen Taisheng, Jing Jue, Jiang Zhong-wei
written and directed by Jia Zhang-ke

by Walter Chaw Norwegian director Hans Petter Moland makes films about isolated individuals trapped in simulacra of motion, and his best work is savage and melancholic: a trip taken by broken people to the bedside of a dying mother in Aberdeen; a pilgrimage made by a poet to locate his masculinity in the company of a maniac in Zero Kelvin. Even his first film, the quiet Secondløitnanten, touches on men oppressed by the caprice of nature--of other men driven to their natural state and the situations that melt away the lies that keep our lives liveable. Moland's films are beautifully framed (picaresque, it's not too much to say), capturing in their sprawling, austere landscapes the plight of individuals dwarfed by the mad, engulfing entropy of existence. He's a good fit with American auteur Terrence Malick, in other words--so it's without much surprise that Malick approached Moland to direct The Beautiful Country, a project he'd worked on, on and off, for a period of years before deciding that the producer's role would better suit him in this instance. The result is a picture that looks, sounds, often feels like a Malick film--even more so, it goes without saying, than Moland's early output does, leaving the project something that feels uncomfortably like ventriloquism. And though I'm a fan of both puppet and master, I find that I prefer the one drawing a line to the other rather than pulled around by the master's strings.

Rent (2005)

½*/****
starring Rosario Dawson, Taye Diggs, Wilson Jermaine Heredia, Jesse L. Martin
screenplay by Steve Chbosky, based on the play by Jonathan Larson
directed by Chris Columbus

by Walter Chaw On the list of painful experiences, the modern Broadway musical ranks fairly high, so it's fair to wonder how an adaptation of Rent--by Chris Columbus, of all people--could have struck anyone as a bright idea. In all honesty, though, pretending not to understand the reasoning behind a project like this is disingenuous snobbery, because when something this terrible has proven to be that popularly galvanizing, it's only a matter of time, really, before Hollywood moneymen come calling with dollar signs in their eyes and memories of Chicago dancing in their heads. (I can only assume that that's also the reason the legendarily awful Phantom of the Opera got a greenlight with Joel Schumacher at the helm--and that Matthew Broderick and Nathan Lane's stupendously popular (and similarly awful--film and play both) The Producers is set to bow this Christmas.) But with Rent, in place of a name like Webber or Mel Brooks to drive its inexplicable success, you find a genuine middlebrow cause célèbre, loaded well beyond safe with Message carried on the backs of a thundering stable of Alphabet City freaks and caricatures of freaks, each of them wilting from a romantic wasting disease (AIDS, naturally, or 'disenchantment' in place of source La Boheme's 'consumption')--the same one, not-so-incidentally, that claimed creator Jonathan Larson a few tragic months before Rent's triumphant debut on the Great White Way.

Leave It To Beaver: The Complete First Season (1957-1958) - DVD

Image A- Sound B+ Extras C
"Beaver Gets 'Spelled'," "Captain Jack," "The Black Eye," "The Haircut," "New Neighbors," "Brotherly Love," "Water, Anyone?," "Beaver's Crush," "The Clubhouse," "Wally's Girl Trouble," "Beaver's Short Pants," "The Perfume Salesmen," "Voodoo Magic," "Part-Time Genius," "Party Invitation," "Lumpy Rutherford," "The Paper Route," "Child Care," "The Bank Account," "Lonesome Beaver," "Cleaning Up Beaver," "The Perfect Father," "Beaver and Poncho," "The State vs. Beaver," "The Broken Window," "Train Trip," "My Brother's Girl," "Next-Door Indians," "Tenting Tonight," "Music Lesson," "New Doctor," "Beaver's Old Friend," "Wally's Job," "Beaver's Bad Day," "Boarding School," "Beaver and Henry," "Beaver Runs Away," "Beaver's Guest," "It's a Small World"

by Bill Chambers "Leave It To Beaver" was the first TV series to show a toilet. That sort of illustrates a point I want to make that while it may be an idealized portrait of the nuclear family, it's not a lie. Indeed, there's a touch of neo-realism in the show's emphasis on the bathroom, on laundry, on haircuts and making the bed. It's the only series I can think of where the characters are seen grooming themselves on a regular basis, and this almost blithe disregard for fourth-wall etiquette extends to not only frank discussions of hygiene, money, faith, and morality, but also an aesthetic that eventually supports 360º blocking. You won't, in other words, see the standard set-up of four people all sitting on the same side of the dinner table, except in the earliest episodes.

DIFF '05: The President's Last Bang

****/****
starring Song Jae-ho, Han Suk-kyu, Baek Yun-shik, Jeong Won-jung
written and directed by Im Sang-soo

by Walter Chaw Im Sang-soo's transcendently good political satire The President's Last Bang is so far the smartest, chanciest flick of the year--an alchemical brew of balls and technical brilliance that produces tremors of recognition and aftershocks of import. Whether it's DP Kim Woo-heong's rapturous tracking shots or Kim Hong-jib's tango soundtrack, there is something ineffable embedded in the fabric of the piece, making of the assassination of South Korean president Park Chung-hee something like the boxing sequences of Scorsese's Raging Bull. It's appropriate, with Park a puppet of big business (it's rumoured that Samsung launched a campaign to discredit the picture prior to release, in part through the censoring of documentary footage owned by Samsung's sister-company CJ Entertainment) and an officer of the Japanese army occupying Manchuria during WWII, hunting down members of the Korean Independent Army arm-in-arm with Hirohito's wolves. (Park's assassin calls him by his Japanese name before he kills him--not a popular decision.) Im frames his action in short segments, little dances of torture and madness, kidnapping and other florid abuses of power, having at one point a military man deliver his frothing soliloquy in his underwear. With the sly thought that maybe the butler did it, Im encompasses a nation's class, politics, military/industrial infrastructure, and skeletons in the closet with the same elegant outrage. It's one of the best films of the year--more so for how it turns up the heat, ever so slightly, on our own turbid waters. This, not well-intentioned fluff like Good Night, and Good Luck., is how to do righteous indignation.

DIFF '05: Duane Hopwood

*½/****
starring David Schwimmer, Janeane Garofalo, Judah Friedlander, Susan Lynch
written and directed by Matt Mulhern

by Walter Chaw David Schwimmer goes the grimy indie route for actor-turned-director Matt Mulhern's sophomore feature Duane Hopwood, finding himself an alcoholic pit boss in Atlantic City about to lose custody of his two daughters to ex-wife Linda (Janeane Garofalo). Duane (Schwimmer) takes in aspiring stand-up comedian Anthony (Judah Friedlander) as a roommate/sidekick in the mold of Friedlander's previous role as a lovable spaz in American Splendor, their travails building to an unlikely custody hearing and an even unlikelier climax at one of Anthony's gigs as Duane, hopped-up on scotch and mescaline, goes blithely off the edge. Salvaging the rudimentary motions of this broken family drama, however, is a surprising turn by Schwimmer, who blunts his trademark whinging nebbish persona to turn in a human performance, if not necessarily an assured one. His Duane approaches three dimensions (likewise Garofalo, shoehorned into the thankless role of inconstant ex), struggling against the constraints of what's essentially a formula picture. He's fine, but Duane Hopwood is flat and uninvolving for long stretches, hurt by jokes that fall flat and the over-familiarity of this story, as well as by a strange kind of desperation/pretension (a shopping cart overturned in the dreary New Jersey surf; a poignant bike escort to punctuate a sad goodbye). It doesn't help that the film culminates in two Thanksgiving dinner tableaux that seem, obliquely, to reward Duane for driving drunk with his daughter in the backseat and threatening mom's new boyfriend with a baseball bat while punishing Linda's reasonable desire to support her spawn with a McDinner in her newly-displaced life with her kids and knucklehead beau (John Krasinski).

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2005)

**/****
starring Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint, Emma Watson, Robbie Coltrane
screenplay by Steven Kloves, based on the novel by J.K. Rowling
directed by Mike Newell

by Walter Chaw Just as Harry and the other arms of his archetypal triangle stumbled into adolescence with aplomb and poetry under the guidance of Alfonso Cuarón in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, they awkward-and-gangly their way into a holding pattern in Mike Newell's puttering Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (hereafter Harry Potter 4). It looks grungy and it lacks grace: the moments meant to inspire are tired and the moments meant to edify are portentous and unbearably drawn-out. There's not a lot here for the non-fanatic, with screenwriter Steve Kloves failing the material for the first time and Newell showing himself to be exactly the kind of director who would make slick, protracted nothings like Mona Lisa Smile and Pushing Tin. The Newell film Harry Potter 4 most resembles, however, is Four Weddings and a Funeral (his conduit to the big time and, consequently, the one he's most likely to cannibalize when handed the golden ticket), in that this third sequel tries to worry itself about the trials of youngsters falling in puppy love, going to their first formals, and learning that there are such things in the world as death and taxes. A noble pursuit, chasing characters as they grow from chapter to chapter, from innocence to churlishness to experience (we presume)--but for me, at least, Harry Potter 4 is the first wholly dispensable instalment, repeating the best parts of Cuarón's film and adding to the conversation only the disturbing resurrection of archenemy Voldemort.

DIFF '05: Brick

**½/****
starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Lukas Haas, Nora Zehetner, Laura Dannon
written and directed by Rian Johnson

by Walter Chaw Brick is a cult classic-in-the-making and one for which I harbour a goodly amount of affection. (I should say I admire its chutzpah, if not its ultimate success.) It's an experiment in screenwriting and matching shots, a gimmick stretched to feature-length by first-time hyphenate Rian Johnson that puts Raymond Chandler's hardboiled lexicon into the mouths of disconsolate teens seething at a high school somewhere in the twenty-first century. It would've been a fantastic noir except for that displacement, as its coolness decomposes every time the film contorts into an unnatural posture to honour its trick, nifty as it is. Consider femme fatale Laura (neo-Winnie Cooper Nora Zehetner): When she finally, inevitably, seduces our gumshoe, Frye (the always-marvy Joseph Gordon-Levitt), for instance, it's hard to know whether they've slept together or just made out on someone's parents' bed. It matters. There's an inevitable infantilizing that goes hand-in-hand with the premise, which can be used to either its benefit (as when Kingpin's (Lukas Haas) mother fusses about like Scorsese's mom has a tendency to do in her son's pictures), or, as is more usual, its detriment (see: a ridiculously awkward meeting with the school's Vice Principal (Richard Roundtree)). As straight noir, Brick would be an easy project to get behind, as it's post-modern and rejuvenating in the most respectful sense (more Sin City than Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid). But to set it in a high-school milieu, no matter the accomplishments of its cast (uniformly excellent), makes the whole production seem smug and, ultimately, just a little bit silly. A shame I didn't catch this about 15 years ago.

DIFF '05: The Matador

**½/****
starring Pierce Brosnan, Greg Kinnear, Hope Davis, Philip Baker Hall
written and directed by Richard Shepard

by Walter Chaw Wearing a sleazebag moustache and an ugly print shirt, Pierce Brosnan watches a bartender shake his drink instead of stirring it and the film slows down and blurs accordingly. It's post-modernism as gauzy, lazy hallucination--a swoon that suggests a minor, nearly-imperceptible tremor in reality and the only moment in which hyphenate Richard Shepard acknowledges the irony of the former 007's presence in another licensed-to-kill role as assassin-for-hire Julian Noble. Fond of bottomless tequila and "sucky-fucky" instead of "blushy-blushy," Noble is an unctuous, pathetic character. In any other film, he'd be selling office-furniture and drowning his sorrows in booze and floozies, wondering why nobody's calling on his birthday. On a fateful trip to Mexico, Julian intersects with Danny (Greg Kinnear), a suit-and-tie salesman trying desperately to secure an all-important contract so that his mousy wife (Hope Davis, cast against type as a kind person) doesn't droop into the wallpaper. A lightning-felled tree crashes through Danny's kitchen, no less a harbinger of calamitous change than Julian turning up on his doorstep months later with an offer Danny can't refuse. It's a comedy of murderous Freudian manners in the vogue of Grosse Point Blank or "The Sopranos": there's nothing particularly original about an odd-couple in a thriller nor, even, a thug having an existential crisis while involving Ward Cleaver in his maleficent deeds. The Matador, then, would do well to bring something new to the conversation, but instead, it functions as a workmanlike bit of easy entertainment. Neither challenging nor incompetent, the picture isn't courageous enough to fail and thus not courageous enough to be a masterpiece. It's a studiously inoffensive diversion for an audience of a certain age; for a shot of the real stuff, try Ripley's Game.

DIFF '05: The White Countess

**/****
starring Ralph Fiennes, Natasha Richardson, Vanessa Redgrave, Lynn Redgrave
screenplay by Kazuo Ishiguro
directed by James Ivory

by Walter Chaw Even without recently-deceased partner-in-crime Ismail Merchant, stalwart period-costume-drama codger James Ivory delivers the slavishly middlebrow, meandering, Anglo-centric goods with The White Countess, the tale of a sightless American ex-diplomat, Jackson (Ralph Fiennes), who falls for refugee Russian countess Sophia (Natasha Richardson) in Shanghai on the eve of Japanese occupation. Packed to the rafters with Redgraves (Lynn and Vanessa also appear) and meticulously airless accents, the picture represents a certain ossified breed of prestige picture of the A Room with a View and Howards End variety, complete with novelist-turned-screenwriter Kazuo Ishiguro (he of The Remains of the Day) contributing another story of reticence and romance with a lead character who's actually blind this time, rather than just metaphorically so. Jackson dreams of insulating himself from the ugliness of the world within the velvet walls of a "perfect nightclub" he constructs with his savings, with Sophia--exuding that delicate balance between the erotic and the tragic--enlisted as the perfect hostess to minister to his guests. But it all feels dusty--the romantic dreams of old men, tired-out and beaten-up by life and enacted by stuffy actors so great at what they do that it's terrifically boring to watch them do it. It's tempting to hold a mirror under the film's nose for long, tasteful stretches, that sense of un-offended apathy not even quenched by my honest-to-goodness crush on the gracefully-aging Richardson. At the end of it all, The White Countess is as deluded and retreating as its hero, looking to duck the uglier aspects of its tale (prostitution and genocide never looked this chic) without even the early Merchant-Ivory inclination to offer at least a bittersweet ending to counteract the requisite 140 minutes of sickly chamber-room ethic.

Monster High (1989) - DVD

ZERO STARS/**** Image D Sound D
starring Dean Iandoli, Diana Frank, David Marriott, D.J. Kerzner
screenplay by Roy Langsdon and John Platt
directed by Rudiger Poe

by Alex Jackson I do not use this analogy lightly: Watching Monster High is sort of like watching your wife get raped. I felt actual fear as it unspooled, and there were several times I had to hold back from melting into a crying fit. These were not tears of incredulity or even pain, but tears born of anger, existential despair, and finally an acknowledgment of one's own innate inadequacy. There is this feeling that the whole thing will go unpunished and unacknowledged. Director Rudiger Poe and screenwriters Roy Langsdon and John Platt have taken something vital from me, something I don't think I can ever get back. And they have done it for no reason. There is no sin I could have committed to prompt this atrocity, it's something that just happened, as random and as meaningless as life itself.

DIFF '05: Casanova

*/****
starring Heath Ledger, Sienna Miller, Jeremy Irons, Oliver Platt
screenplay by Jeffrey Hatcher and Kimberly Simi
directed by Lasse Hallström

by Walter Chaw Casanova is a perfectly dreadful Lasse Hallström/Miramax picture that can be claimed, appropriately enough, by Buena Vista now that the Weinsteins have moved on to produce this kind of stuff for their new company. It's "The Merchant of Venice" stripped of any whiff of controversy, going through the motions of its shrivelled little romantic-comedy checklist with the miserable meticulousness of the truly unimaginative. For a change, why don't you tell me how it works? Two people meet and hate each other, right, and then the one has a secret that the other discovers just as things are finally going well, yes? And so he has to make some sort of grand gesture to win her back (preferably in a public place)--but don't forget the bit about how no matter the era in which the film is set, she's a progressive thinker, if not a proto-feminist, and he's the tamer and the tamed in turn. See? You've seen it already. Heath Ledger is the boy, Casanova literally this time; Sienna Miller is Venetian Francesca, the girl who needs the love of a suddenly-reformed Casanova to get her panties out of a bunch. The Inquisition (embodied by a vamping Jeremy Irons) and the arrival of a disgusting fat slob of a lard merchant (Oliver Platt, the object of derision--the man deserves better than a role that has his stomach emit "squishy" noises when touched) provide the conflict. There's also a lovely American Pie tribute where Casanova receives a blowjob under the table (from a virgin who orgasms whenever she looks at the guy--feminism, hurray!) while talking to his future in-laws. Toss in a dash of totally unearned sentimentality and a ridiculous action sequence wherein everybody knows how to fence but no one knows how to win and you have Casanova. Enjoy!

The Stooge (1952) - DVD

*½/**** Image A- Sound B+
starring Dean Martin, Jerry Lewis, Polly Bergen, Marion Marshall
screenplay by Fred F. Finklehoffe and Martin Rackin
directed by Norman Taurog

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover It must be said that Jerry Lewis was never an inept performer--he merely colluded in the sentimentalizing of his capricious talent, dulling its edge and demeaning himself into a cross-eyed punching bag for the "straight" cast. His irrefutable craft is, frankly, the sole explanation for The Stooge being vaguely tolerable. Paired with the insincere sincerity of obnoxious Dean Martin and framed by the sincerely mediocre Norman Taurog, Lewis is the only aesthetic thing going on in the picture--you find yourself wondering why he didn't dissolve the useless partnership with Martin sooner than he did. Punishing Lewis with this movie is like forcing Groucho Marx and Carmen Miranda to submit to the witless Copacabana.

DIFF '05: Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story

***/****
starring Steve Coogan, Rob Brydon, Gillian Anderson, Keeley Hawes
screenplay by Martin Hardy, based on the novel The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Esq. by Laurence Sterne
directed by Michael Winterbottom

by Walter Chaw This whole idea of post-modern meta-movies just doesn't thrill me the way it used to. Nonetheless, Brit maverick Michael Winterbottom's once around on the Adaptation. wheel is buoyed by a game cast and an actual purpose: rather than the impossibility of a blocked writer trying to adapt a bad novel, find here a post-modern film about a novel that predicted, in a way, post-modernism itself. Winterbottom addresses the difficulty of translating an 18^th century novel concerning the vast chaos of interiority (and writing a novel within a novel); instead of turning it into a film school exercise (like Marc Forster's Stay, for instance), he allows it to become a manifestation of that insular chaos. It's the story of a tornado told as a tornado. The eye of the storm is Steve Coogan, who plays an actor named Steve Coogan (who is much like Coogan, but different) cast in the title role of Laurence Stern's The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Esq., which is directed in the film by an actor (Jeremy Northam) playing a director, with Kelly Macdonald playing his girlfriend. Or is she actually his girlfriend (and is that their kid?), or is the fact of her and their alleged child together merely a pointed echo of the action of the film-within-a-film of Walter Shandy (also Coogan) on the day of the birth of his son, Tristram? Doesn't matter. What does matter is that the conundrum is right there at the front of your head--and that the doubt is deposited with the sense of embarrassed, absurd propriety that's the hallmark of great British humor. Not so much a mindfuck as a mindlovemaking, Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story is delighted, like the novel, by the incapacity of art to encompass the vast incomprehensibility of life, and so it makes a piece of art that gently reminds us that there's more in heaven and earth than is dreamt of in any philosophy.

Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (2005)

***½/****
starring Robert Downey Jr., Val Kilmer, Michelle Monaghan, Corbin Bernsen
written and directed by Shane Black

by Walter Chaw The same kind of movie as Doug Liman's Mr. and Mrs. Smith but more so, Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang marks the hyphenate debut of star screenwriter Shane Black, and it's the kind of movie his Last Action Hero would have been had they aimed it at adults (and cast actors). A meta-exercise taken to plucky, insouciant excess, Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang is nihilistic, misanthropic, and it just might hate its audience a little, but damn if it doesn't wash out as something as exhilaratingly lawless as Sin City and recklessly experimental as Rian Johnson's Brick (two other examples of noir's recent extreme makeover). Though it's not shy in its one agonizing scene of gore, the picture seems more concerned about the way we assimilate--and anticipate--sex and violence at the movies.

DIFF '05: The World's Fastest Indian

*/****
starring Anthony Hopkins, Christopher Kennedy Lawford, Chris Williams, Annie Whittle
written and directed by Roger Donaldson

by Walter Chaw Kiwi filmmaker Roger Donaldson follows up his intensely impersonal The Recruit with the intensely personal The World's Fastest Indian, a fictionalization of a documentary he shot some thirty years ago about dotty old coot Burt Munro, who in 1967 set a land speed record for motorcycles under 1000ccs on Utah's Bonneville Salt Flats. Funny how the results of both are sanded down almost beyond recognition: so baptized are they in the scouring attentions of high-grade clichés that they're inhumanly frictionless. See Burt (Anthony Hopkins) dodder around his shack in Invercargill, deliver long, rambling monologues and homey homilies like "if you don't follow through on your dreams, you might as well be a vegetable" to whoever will listen, and rebuke that he's no "POME" to repeated Yankee inquiries as to whether or not he's British. (Here I am thinking that "POME" (Prisoners of Mother England) referred to Australians--the one thing I learned over the course of the picture's interminable, 127-minute runtime.) It's the kind of movie where a lovable--maybe even magical--old imp lightens the life of every lost soul he meets, including a transvestite, a crotchety sea captain, a beatific little boy (think "Finding Geezerland"), and a pair of randy old birds. His charm knows no boundaries--and the universal adoration lavished upon him within the film is bound to dupe certain segments of the audience like a spit-soaked laugh-track that can only "awww." The World's Fastest Indian aims to make old people huggable and mythological while Hopkins drones on incessantly to extras trying to look interested, to inanimate objects, and most of all to himself. No mystery why Hopkins climbed on board, the only mystery is why anyone else did. Originally published: November 10, 2005.

DIFF '05: Duck

ZERO STARS/****
starring Philip Baker Hall, Bill Brochtrup, Amy Hill, Noel Gugliemi
written and directed by Nicole Bettauer

by Walter Chaw In Duck, hale character actor Philip Baker Hall finds himself delivering long, rambling, and likely improvised monologues to a duck that has imprinted itself on him in Los Angeles, 2009. Though it's probably more interesting to talk about why so many science-fiction films are set in Los Angeles, it's more fascinating to try to reconcile all the car-wreck non-sequiturs that comprise the mismatched, miasmic whole of this piece. Hall plays Arthur, freshly widowed and ready to pill himself into oblivion when a duckling fort/da gives him a new lease on life. Soon, though, the last pond in L.A. is drained, and simultaneously--allegorically!--Arthur is evicted, leading our "Boy and His Dog" futuristic odd couple on a whimsical "Travels with Charley" trudge through the social ills of a crazy, neo-conservative, caste-obsessed world to the rejuvenating bosom of the ocean. A scene where the body-of-water-starved fowl finds refuge in an open toilet doesn't carry the tragic weight I think it's meant to (taking a cue from the very sad score for the scene, it's intended to carry a really, really heavy tragic weight), giving Duck the distinction of being at once one of the worst, most insipid "message" films ever made and, on the bright side, one of the most unintentionally hilarious.

Frankenstein (2004) - DVD

½*/**** Image A Sound B Extras B
starring Parker Posey, Vincent Perez, Thomas Kretschmann, Adam Goldberg
screenplay by John Shiban
directed by Marcus Nispel

by Walter Chaw Marcus Nispel's Frankenstein, conceived by schlock-meister general Dean Koontz as the pilot for a stillborn USA Network series, is the very model of style over substance. Would that the style even belonged to Nispel: all of muted greens and bleached yellows, memories of Se7en swim, bidden, to the mind of the genre enthusiast. It's one thing to frame the American backcountry in shades of monumentalized sepia (as Nispel did in his Texas Chain Saw Massacre redux), another altogether to throw a haze of music-video mute over the Big Easy. If the cinematography weren't enough, the title sequence and faux-Nine Inch Nails score take it the rest of the way, establishing the picture as a police procedural of a certain kind while the (misleading) title announces a supernatural bent. The real bogeys haunting the piece, though, are the careers of Parker Posey and Michael Madsen, together rattling chains disinterestedly as the former slides into her third decade as someone who's not very good but has managed to continue working based on some misconception of early indie-queen dividends, the latter too comfortable being both cast the crooked cop and mistaken for Tom Sizemore.

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005) - DVD

**½/**** Image A Sound A Extras C
starring Johnny Depp, Freddie Highmore, David Kelly, Helena Bonham Carter
screenplay by John August, based on the novel by Roald Dahl
directed by Tim Burton

by Walter Chaw The first hour is so obsessively faithful to the Roald Dahl source material that I was lulled into believing that Tim Burton's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was going to be a classic, a magnificent return to form for the dark fantasist who, once upon a time, denied Edward Scissorhands a happy ending, and let the Headless Horseman come back for the little kid under the floorboards. The set design of little Charlie's hovel on the edge of an industrial town is stunning--a throwback to the German Expressionism of Burton's Vincent and, in its canted walls, the best of its kind since The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Thus the tragedy and the irony of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory's return to earth is that its ultimate mediocrity has a lot to do with the addition of a worthless backstory that draws it closer to Burton's auteur tendencies and away from Dahl's cruel, austere master plots. Burton's loner-punk heroes (Edward Scissorhands, Bruce Wayne, Pee-Wee, Ichabod Crane, Ed Wood), see, live alone or in a metaphor for isolation, divorced from their horror-legend father figures (Vincent Price, Martin Landau as Bela Lugosi, now Christopher Lee) and largely failing to hide their disfigurements while struggling to achieve a semblance of "ordinariness" in their familial relationships. (Even the demon Beetlejuice has a moment where he throws his arms around his victims and yells, "C'mon, we're simpatico here!") At their core, Burton's films are by and large hopeful--bittersweet or piquant, they're consistently portraits of misfits with dreams. But until Big Fish and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, they hadn't been trite or, perish the thought, fearful.

Breakfast on Pluto (2005)

**½/****
starring Cillian Murphy, Stephen Rea, Brendan Gleeson, Liam Neeson
screenplay by Neil Jordan and Patrick McCabe, based on McCabe's novel
directed by Neil Jordan

by Walter Chaw It would seem impossible that Neil Jordan could maintain the ebullient energy of Breakfast on Pluto, and sure enough, it peters out somewhere in the film's second hour. But for as long as it lasts, the picture stands as Jordan's most cheerful, mining joy from the resilience of an Irish transvestite in London as he squeezes all of the Irish experience through his insouciant prism. It mixes magic realism with a certain fairytale sensibility that has been the hallmark of Jordan's career (his hero even wakes in a castle at one point), used here as something like a Miltonic homily along the lines of "The mind is its own place, and in itself, can make heaven of Hell, and a hell of Heaven." A film about the influences of religion, fanaticism, politics, friendship, and love on identity, it's also a survey history of the Irish/English conflict from the trippy, mod '60s into the '70s, and, by the end, an actors' workshop on how to build a performance based on quirks into a character based in emotion.

A Farewell to Arms (1957) + Francis of Assisi (1961) - DVDs

A FAREWELL TO ARMS
½*/**** Image B Sound B- Extras D
starring Rock Hudson, Jennifer Jones, Vittorio De Sica, Mercedes McCambridge
screenplay by Ben Hecht, based on the novel by Ernest Hemingway
directed by Charles Vidor

FRANCIS OF ASSISI
*/**** Image B Sound B- Extras D
starring Bradford Dillman, Dolores Hart, Stuart Whitman, Pedro Armendariz
screenplay by Eugene Vale, James Forsyth and Jack Thomas
directed by Michael Curtiz

by Walter Chaw One of David O. Selznick's many attempts to shape the largely immutable mug of lady-love Jennifer Jones into the face that launched a thousand cinematic ships, the badly-fumbled Hemingway adaptation A Farewell to Arms finds Jones, about two decades past the age of her Red Cross nightingale Catherine, paired opposite the not-quite-long-in-the-tooth-but-almost Rock Hudson as her doomed love Lt. Henry. The setting is Italy during The Great War; playboy Lt. Henry falls for mad "Cat," who, as written by the legendary Ben Hecht (himself a decade removed from his best work and well on his way to becoming king of cheese epics), comes off as an entirely inappropriate nod to Blanche Dubois. Selznick served John Huston--the right man for this picture--his walking papers early on for correctly identifying the love story in Hemingway's novel as just a metaphor for the tragedy and irony of WWI's carnage, subbing Huston with second-stringer Charles Vidor, who meekly agreed to amplify the alleged love between Lt. Henry and Cat while pushing all manner of hysterical spectacle to the wings of the proscenium.

Mr. & Mrs. Smith (2005) [Widescreen] - DVD

***/**** Image N/A Sound A Extras B-
starring Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie, Adam Brody, Kerry Washington
screenplay by Simon Kinberg
directed by Doug Liman

by Walter Chaw Having more to do with Alfred Hitchcock's screwball comedy of the same name than would initially appear, Doug Liman's Mr. and Mrs. Smith affects the sexy, light-hearted, insouciant derring-do of the BBC's "The Avengers" and, paced as it is by Liman's trip-hammer way with an action scene, makes as strong a case for a franchise as any. (At the least, between Go, The Bourne Identity, and now Mr. and Mrs. Smith, Liman should become the first choice of anyone looking for an action helmer.) If the early going is often awkward, blame the complexity of the premise and its requirement that it stay absolutely airtight while setting up its preposterous premise: two of the world's top assassins living in holy matrimony without knowing that the other is a killing machine.

Noah's Arc: FFC Interviews Noah Baumbach

November 6, 2005|The son of author Jonathan Baumbach and former VILLAGE VOICE film critic Georgia Brown, Noah Baumbach is married to Jennifer Jason Leigh and counts among his friends long-time husband and wife Kevin Kline and Phoebe Cates (whose son, Owen, has a pivotal role in Baumbach's new film The Squid and the Whale). I know he wrote and directed a 1995 film called Kicking and Screaming that I liked a great deal, that he co-wrote The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou with Wes Anderson and that Anderson produced The Squid and the Whale, and that he made another flick (the underestimated Mr. Jealousy) and still another (Highball) he had taken away from him and will no longer discuss. I believed that was all I really needed to know about Mr. Baumbach's personal life--and maybe too much already, besides.

The War Within (2005) + Paradise Now (2005)

THE WAR WITHIN
**/****
starring Ayad Akhtar, Firdous Bamji, Nandana Sen, Sarita Choudhury
screenplay by Ayad Akhtar, Joseph Castelo, Tom Glynn
directed by Joseph Castelo

PARADISE NOW
***/****
starring Kais Nashef, Ali Suliman, Lubna Azabal, Amer Hlehel
screenplay by Hany Abu-Assad, Bero Beyer, Pierre Hodgson
directed by Hany Abu-Assad

by Walter Chaw Two films, one by New Jersey filmmaker Joseph Castelo, the other by Palestinian lenser Hany Abu-Assad, begin to make inroads into what is perhaps the most inscrutable phenomenon of the so-called War on Terror: suicide bombing. They're important films, I think, mostly because suicide bombers, like the Japanese Kamikaze pilots of WWII, make it easier to generalize and dehumanize/demonize the enemy as faceless zealots. Every manned car-bomb, every explosives-strapped martyr, creates ideological schisms on either side--more so and deeper, I'd offer, than conventional missiles or rifle shells do, because here we're striking at the very heart of the way we perceive life and the afterlife: holiness and sin, valour and cowardice. If there's ever to be some sort of olive branch in this millennia-old conflict, it has to start with an agreement not only to recognize the humanity beneath the atrocities committed by both sides in the name of defending home and hearth, but also to admit that centuries-old texts about the supernatural are piss-poor signposts pointing the light of right reason.

Save the Green Planet! (2003) - DVD

Jigureul jikyeora!
***½/**** Image A Sound A Extras A
starring Shin Ha-gyun, Baik Yun-shik, Hwang Jung-min
written and directed by Jang Joon-hwan

by Walter Chaw The first third of hyphenate Jeong Joon-hwan's cinematic debut Save the Green Planet! (Jigureul jikyeora!) is sort of like Fargo if David Fincher had directed it, the second third like Sleuth if Terry Gilliam had directed it, and the final third like a mescaline hallucination, complete with a portly/heroic high-wire artist (Sooni (Hwang Jeong-min) and a swarm of murderous bees thrown into action by a jar of royal jelly. There's a crucifixion, entirely unspeakable and lawless references to 2001 and Blade Runner, and, without warning, a flashback to the unhappy childhood of our hero, Lee (Shin Ha-Kyun), composed with a lyrical sadness that brings a wholly-unexpected tear to the eye. Save the Green Planet! has been shot with scary confidence in a style long on provocative evocation and clarity and short on pyrotechnics for their own sake--something astonishing given that the plot revolves around alien invasion, gruesome torture, serial murder, corporate malfeasance, and Korea's tumultuous recent history. It's indescribable, is what I'm trying to say, but I do know that I was rapt through two screenings, seduced by its sprung logic and affected during its wordless epilogue of a child at play with his parents in a past unrecoverable full of light and love.

The Cabinet of Caligari (1962) - DVD

**/**** Image B+ Sound B
starring Glynis Johns, Dan O'Herlihy, Dick Davalos, Lawrence Dobkin
screenplay by Robert Bloch
directed by Roger Kay

by Alex Jackson SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. The first thing we gotta do is get past the title. Contrary to popular belief (as exhibited in Pauline Kael's tome 5001 Nights at the Movies), The Cabinet of Caligari does not share its title with the classic 1920 Robert Wiene film. You're thinking of The Cabinet of DR. Caligari--emphasis my own. That being said, I have no right to be a prick about this, as every time I've typed "The Cabinet of Caligari" I've found myself instinctively inserting "Dr.".

Millions (2005) - DVD

**/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras C+
starring James Nesbitt, Daisy Donovan, Alex Etel, Lewis McGibbon
screenplay by Frank Cottrell Boyce, based on his novel
directed by Danny Boyle

by Walter Chaw Unbelievably sentimental and, finally, corrupt with a hideous paternalism (how a flick like this ends first at a child's Nativity pageant à la Love Actually, then in Africa, where a well is being dug for dying Africans, is one of those all-timers), Millions finds director Danny Boyle, after last year's brief return to some semblance of Shallow Grave/Trainspotting form with 28 Days Later..., returning to his A Life Less Ordinary/The Beach form in all its excrescent glory. It's the tale of two adorable, buck-toothed British urchins (the rage after Finding Neverland) who stumble upon pilfered millions in the form of the soon-to-be-Euros British Pounds Sterling and, Shallow Grave-like, ultimately hide the money in an attic with cunningly-placed slats in the floorboards for panicked eyeballs. It's Pay It Forward, with younger Damien (Alex Etel) obsessed with the lives and messy deaths of saints and dedicated to giving the wealth to the poor (even Mormons, whom the film portrays as evil little twats), and it's Luis Buñuel's Viridiana in the poor's reaction to getting rich, sporting its own version of the beggar's banquet Last Supper from Buñuel's picture in a scene set in a pizza parlour. And it's Pay It Forward again in its subversion of that film's "teach the world to sing" finale: a genuinely disturbing mob scene starring the superstars of organizations asking for your money to save the world from itself. But finally, it's just another Danny Boyle film--a little meat and a lot of showing off with CGI pyrotechnics and confused editing.