Film Freak Central

Their Eyes Were Watching God (2005) - DVD

**½/**** Image A Sound A-
starring Halle Berry, Ruben Santiago-Hudson, Michael Ealy, Terrence Howard
screenplay by Suzan-Lori Parks and Bobby Smith, Jr., based on the novel by Zora Neale Hurston
directed by Darnell Martin

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Their Eyes Were Watching God is so much better than it had to be that you wish it were better than it actually is. There's nothing slapdash or careless about its rendering of Zora Neale Hurston's famous novel--clearly, the book meant enough to executive producer Oprah Winfrey that she and her creative team tried to pull out all the stops. Alas, it's professional and pleasant but never actually hits any high notes, forming a straight-line narrative without many stylistic digressions or visual curlicues. After a while, you want a little more from it than the best that small-screen discipline can provide. Still, it's not slapped-together or careless, and it manages to hold your attention fervently enough to pass the time, if not astound you.

Neil Young: Heart of Gold (2006)

***½/****
directed by Jonathan Demme

by Walter Chaw Not long after the death of his dementia-stricken father and in the four days preceding an operation to fix a potentially fatal brain aneurysm, Young recorded "Prairie Road", then called Jonathan Demme post-operation to say that he was taking some time off and interested in making a movie. Demme's best film is still a tossup between Swimming to Cambodia and Stop Making Sense--his forays into mainstream filmmaking (The Silence of the Lambs, Philadelphia) tending towards exactly the kind of slick populism his documents of performance pieces never seem to. His latest, Neil Young: Heart of Gold, is a return to form for a filmmaker who might be our best chronicler of the glorious syncopations of rhythm and flow: a deft, evocative film that finds new poignancy in Young's voluminous back catalogue while allowing cuts from "Prairie Wind" the kind of metaphysical room its title promises.

Ryan's Daughter (1970) [Two-Disc Special Edition] + Dune (1984) [Extended Edition] - DVDs

RYAN'S DAUGHTER
***/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras A-
starring Robert Mitchum, Trevor Howard, Christopher Jones, Sarah Miles
screenplay by Robert Bolt
directed by David Lean

DUNE
***½/**** Image B Sound B+ Extras B
starring Francesca Annis, Leonardo Cimino, Brad Dourif, José Ferrer
screenplay by David Lynch, based on the novel by Frank Herbert
directed by David Lynch

---

DUNE (Extended Edition)
*½/**** Image B Sound B+ Extras B
starring Francesca Annis, Leonardo Cimino, Brad Dourif, José Ferrer
screenplay by Judas Booth, based on the novel by Frank Herbert
directed by Alan Smithee

by Bill Chambers The common charge levelled at Ryan's Daughter when it was released in 1970 was that it seemed anachronistic within contemporary film culture. Indeed, what so infuriated the New York critics, in particular, was not just that Lean had strayed from his roots (thematically, Ryan's Daughter in fact represents a throwback for the Brief Encounter director), but that he had lost all trace of humility in the bargain. One might say the English were finally getting a taste of their own medicine, as Lean had essentially become a Hollywood imperialist, intruding on cinema's evolution towards minimalism by treating a rather insular love triangle--catnip to the infidelity-obsessed British realists--like a theme-park attraction, subjecting it to both hyperbole and an incongruous perfectionism.¹ ("In general the only way for artists to work in the medium is frugality," wrote Pauline Kael, thereby consigning Lean to the realm of not-artists.) This violation of an unspoken Prime Directive resonates in the current trend of giving A-list makeovers to grindhouse fare.

Making Love (1982) - DVD

*/**** Image B+ Sound B+
starring Michael Ontkean, Kate Jackson, Harry Hamlin, Wendy Hiller
screenplay by Barry Sandler
directed by Arthur Hiller

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover It's regrettably easy to mock Arthur Hiller's Making Love from a contemporary vantage point. Made long before the queer revolution of the early '90s (but not long after Cruising, its evil opposite number), the film is at once brave and cowardly, daring to utter the word "gay" while refusing to say it in a context where it might actually mean something. So much effort has been expended to be "tasteful," "mature," and "adult" that the filmmakers take out any real threat to the status quo--Making Love is contained to the kind of dull bourgeoisies as far removed from the front lines as possible. The comedy lies in watching these sitcom creations try to enunciate ideas that are entirely beyond their ken, speaking the name of the love but not the particulars that might quicken the blood.

Dark Victory (1939) - DVD

*/**** Image B- Sound B Extras D
starring Bette Davis, George Brent, Humphrey Bogart, Geraldine Fitzgerald
screenplay by Casey Robinson
directed by Edmund Goulding

by Walter Chaw There's been almost as much written about the life of Bette Davis as there has about her work, and I must confess that, with few exceptions, I consider her life to be far more interesting than her films. The best Davis picture from start to finish is probably The Letter--and the most honoured of her superfluity of clunkers is Edmund Goulding's really quite dreadful Dark Victory, released in the annus mirabilis of 1939. Fanatics point to La Davis's performance in this one as her most stirring, but all I see is a terminal ham pretending to have a brain tumor and cinematic blindness. Nothing wrong with that in and of itself, I suppose, but then there's the vomitous condescension of the hero doctor, the woeful miscasting of Humphrey Bogart as an Irish stable hand, and the wish unfulfilled that the great Geraldine Fitzgerald, in her screen debut, would take centre stage. The picture is also horribly dated, playing today like some weird, contrived burlesque of common sense as a terminally ill patient isn't told of her condition, has to ask someone what "negative" means, and doesn't inform her husband that she has about three hours to live. It's not to say that there isn't material of interest here, just that the material of interest doesn't live organically with the narrative. Thus there exists on the one hand the possibility of appreciating the picture in an aloof way, and, on the other, a situation where respect and conventional enjoyment veers into something as ugly as camp appreciation.

Walk the Line (2005) [Widescreen] - DVD

**½/**** Image B Sound A- (DD)/A+ (DTS) Extras B
starring Joaquin Phoenix, Reese Witherspoon, Ginnifer Goodwin, Robert Patrick
screenplay by Gill Dennis & James Mangold
directed by James Mangold

by Walter Chaw I'm no longer certain what kind of currency there is in producing a biography of an iconoclast whose life is an exact simulacrum of every other iconoclast's life. Here's an entirely respectable film about Johnny Cash that begins in his childhood, proceeds into the Big Break, then segues from there into the euphoria of fame; the drug abuse and the groupies; the "Come to Jesus"; the rehabilitation; and the closing obituary. (It's like Denis Leary said about Oliver Stone's The Doors: "I'm drunk. I'm nobody. I'm drunk. I'm famous. I'm drunk. I'm fucking dead.") Though it claims not to be a hagiography, Walk the Line (like last year's Ray) featured the freshly-dead legends as advisors up until their untimely demises, a kind of personal involvement (and Cash's son John Carter is one of Walk the Line's executive producers, just as Ray Robinson Charles Jr. was for Ray) that precludes, methinks, most controversy in the telling. That's fine, I guess, this new vogue for these modern Gene Krupa Storys and Eddy Duchin Storys and Glenn Miller Storys--I mean, really, who does it hurt? But after praising the almost supernatural channelling of very public figures by talented actors, the only thing left is the drive home, a hot bath, dreamless sleep, and maybe the impulse purchase of the soundtrack at Starbucks in a couple of weeks.

Freedomland (2006)

**/****
starring Samuel L. Jackson, Julianne Moore, Edie Falco, Ron Eldard
screenplay by Richard Price, based on his novel
directed by Joe Roth

by Walter Chaw Given that Joe Roth (America's Sweethearts, Christmas with the Kranks) directed it, Freedomland's first and biggest surprise is that it's not worse than it is. Maybe that has something to do with Samuel L. Jackson delivering his best performance since Changing Lanes, or a Richard Price screenplay (adapted from his own novel) that, while overwritten throughout and unforgivably histrionic by its end, manages to present its tensions with topicality and a passing familiarity, at least, with the complexities of race relations. It's deliberately set in 1999, just a few years after South Carolina mommy Susan Smith drowned her two children in a lake and blamed a non-descript "black man" in a knit cap for their carjacking/abduction, and the similarities to the Smith story continue through to incredulity in the black community and the involvement of activist parental groups. (Freedomland meanwhile takes place a decade after another case it seems to be based on: Bostonian Charles Stuart killing his pregnant wife and blaming a black guy, stirring nearby black suburb Roxbury to outrage.) Marc Klaas to the film's Susan Smith is child-safety advocate Karen Collucci (Edie Falco), while the New Jersey barrens--and, in its narrative fulcrum, a burned-out children's asylum called "Freedomland"--stand in for the wilds of the Deep South. The picture abounds with such similes and ironies, existing in a bizarre, terrifying version of the United States where iron-willed armies of the bereaved march through the blighted wastes of urban decay with sticks and resignation, looking for lost children they know, more likely than not, to be dead and, more, victims of their own parents.

Eight Below (2006)

½*/****
starring Paul Walker, Bruce Greenwood, Moon Bloodgood, Jason Biggs
screenplay by David DeGilio
directed by Frank Marshall

by Walter Chaw There are situations and statements, questions and propositions, that are so stupid by their nature that they actually approach Zen. And then there's Frank Marshall's arctic dogs-and-dude melodrama Eight Below, which plays for all the world like not only the world's most unwelcome sequel (to Snow Dogs), but also a companion piece to March of the Penguins. It is, in simplest terms, a pandering blight--a straight line (nay, flatline) from unsurprising set-up to unsurprising resolution, every bit the equivalent of a line of footprints in the snow between two known points. Opening with one of film history's most wooden leading men, Paul Walker, and "nice Jewish boy" comic relief Jason Biggs sitting in a hundred-degree steam room before running out into a 30-below autumn day in Antarctica, Eight Below immediately teaches us that human beings heated to a toasty 110 degrees do not steam when exposed to sub-zero temperatures and, more, that if you should ever visit the South Pole, your breath will never, ever show. It's full of fun facts like that, but it saves its most fascinating revelations for the intricacies of canine interactions, including their complex gift-giving behaviours, advanced speech, abstract philosophical concepts, and eerie ability to go for at least fifteen days at a time without food or water. It even wrests an explanation from the universal loam as to what Walker was put on this earth for: to be upstaged by eight dogs, someone named Moon Bloodgood, Jason Biggs, and miles of white. It goes without saying that those scenes Walker plays against Bruce Greenwood have the queasy, guilty fascination of a baby seal getting mauled by a polar bear.

Red Eye (2005) [Widescreen] + Four Brothers (2005) [Special Collector's Edition - Widescreen] - DVDs

RED EYE
***/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
starring Rachel McAdams, Cillian Murphy, Brian Cox, Jack Scalia
screenplay by Carl Ellsworth
directed by Wes Craven

FOUR BROTHERS
*/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Mark Wahlberg, Tyrese, André 3000, Garrett Hedlund
screenplay by David Elliot & Paul Lovett
directed by John Singleton

by Walter Chaw If it barely registers at under ninety minutes, Wes Craven's high-concept thriller Red-Eye is carried along by a couple of excellent lead performances (from Cillian Murphy and Rachel McAdams) and a revenge subtext that lends surprising gravity to the lingering sensitivity of a sexual assault victim's scars. Red-Eye plays its 9/11 hand--and what else would you expect from a film about an assassination attempt on the Director of Homeland Security that takes place mostly on an airplane--as a metaphor for rape, because rape, after all, is as good a metaphor as any for a terrorist attack on native soil. Look to the glut of home invasion films (of which this is also one) in 2005 as further clarification of that connection--aliens of an inscrutable nature and purpose (and morality, it goes without saying) have come into the places we thought most sacred and taken what they wanted of our innocence: our once inviolate sense of security. Heady stuff for a film that is essentially Nick of Time on a plane, and indeed it may ultimately be too slight a framework to support the amount of topical sociology I'm tempted to ask it to bear, but there are moments now and again weighted with so much proverbial baggage that Red-Eye, with its melancholy regret, sucks the air right out of the theatre.

Separate Lies (2005) - DVD

**/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras C-
starring Emily Watson, Tom Wilkinson, Rupert Everett, John Neville
screenplay by Julian Fellowes, based on the novel A Way Through the Wood by Nigel Balchin
directed by Julian Fellowes

by Walter Chaw You could call Separate Lies either a second pass at Asylum or just another drop in the English prestige bucket that finds the stuffy upper-crust married to silly women who bring down their country estates of cards. It hinges on performances when it can no longer surprise with its domestic meltdowns, and because its stable of English actors is stocked with more thoroughbreds than the Kentucky Derby, it gains a lot of currency in doing so. But Julian Fellowes's very British symphony of "sorry"s is extraordinarily familiar--an Adrian Lyne film without slickness or sex about what happens when a desperate housewife dabbles in the dangerous and the commensurate desperation with which her stiff-upper-lip husband scrambles to keep his dignity and status intact. It'd make a bigger impression if we learned more about the class struggle in Britain, I think, but without experience in the whys and wherefores of that caste system, what we're left with is a superbly-performed melodrama with a strained premise dissected in airless, suffocating situations.

The X Files: Black Oil; The X Files: Colonization; The X Files: Super Soldiers [Four-Disc Mythology Collection] - DVDs

THE X FILES: BLACK OIL - FOUR-DISC MYTHOLOGY COLLECTION (1995-1997)
"Nisei," "731," "Piper Maru," "Apocrypha," "Talitha Cumi," "Herrenvolk," "Tunguska," "Terma," "Memento Mori," "Tempus Fugit," "Max," "Zero-Sum," "Gethsemane," "Redux," "Redux II"

THE X FILES: COLONIZATION - FOUR-DISC MYTHOLOGY COLLECTION (1998-2000)
"Patient X," "The Red and the Black," "The End," "The Beginning," "S.R. 819," "Two Fathers, One Son," "Biogenesis," "The Sixth Extinction," "The Sixth Extinction II: Amor Fati," "Sein Und Zeit," "Closure," "En Ami," "Requiem," "Within," "Without"

THE X FILES: SUPER SOLDIERS - FOUR-DISC MYTHOLOGY COLLECTION (2001-2002)
"Par Manum," "This is Not Happening," "Deadalive," "Three Words," "Vienen," "Essence," "Existence," "Nothing Important Happened Today," "Trust No 1," "Provenance," "Providence," "William," "The Truth"

Image A Sound A Extras B

by Walter Chaw Even if you're curious, you're probably not curious enough to wade through the sixteen DVDs that constitute "The X Files"' "mythology" (a.k.a. "Oh, no, not another one of these episodes"), compiled by creator Chris Carter in a quartet of four-disc collections that chronologically recap the ostensible "Truth" in the series' "The Truth is Out There" tagline. After the first set, "Abduction", comes "Black Oil", then "Colonization", then "Super Soldiers", the four of them parceling out the vital information that our government's struck a deal with aliens to turn us into human-alien hybrids; that most of the universe has been colonized by a virus that moves around in (or as) a black, oily substance; that some people are transformed by said alien entity into super-beings; and that there are other aliens out there hoping to prevent the spread of this contagion in the universe. That's it. Oh yeah, Scully and Mulder kiss--and it's dreamy. Happy?

Into Her Own: FFC Interviews Natasha Richardson

February 12, 2006|If people know Natasha Richardson at all it seems it's as the titular gun-toting, Stockholm-struck heiress in Paul Schrader's Patty Hearst--a film that came closer to making her a star than the one that was supposed to two years later, The Handmaid's Tale. I myself was vaguely aware that she hailed from a long and storied English industry family, what with her father being director Tony Richardson and mother and aunt being acclaimed actresses Vanessa and Lynn Redgrave, respectively; and I knew that she'd married Liam Neeson somewhere along the line, with whom she has two children. But it wasn't until very recently that I started becoming aware of Ms. Richardson more as an actress than as something like a faint suggestion of foreign royalty. The act of freeing herself from her past began with a move from the UK to Manhattan, a few celebrated turns on the Great White Way (most notably her Tony-winning stint as Sally Bowles in Sam Mendes's revival of Cabaret), and now a couple of films (Asylum and The White Countess) that find Richardson's screen work maturing along with her actualization. Yeah, I'm smitten.

Final Destination 3 (2006)

***/****
starring Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Ryan Merriman, Kris Lemche, Crystal Lowe
screenplay by Glen Morgan & James Wong
directed by James Wong

by Walter Chaw Jettisoning any attempt to perpetuate the ponderous lore of the first two films, Final Destination 3 docks at the arrivals gate with a full payload of wry sadism and satirical high school archetypes and nothing but grim exploitation nihilism on its mind. It's the perfect post-9/11 horror film in its way, and sure enough, 9/11 is invoked in an extraordinarily inappropriate photo of the WTC with the shadow of an airplane crossing its middle, which our dour, spoil-sport heroine presents in support of her thesis that photos taken of our soon-to-be-victims might provide clues as to their imminent demise. For the indoctrinated, the machinations of the picture are familiar: A small group of would-be teens avoids a Byzantine--and disgusting--fate, only to be hunted down by "death" (as a concept) and dismembered like flesh puppets ground in the gears of Rube Goldbergian contraptions. (Rube Goldberg with the unsavoury predilections of the Marquis de Sade, that is.) The calamity this time around is a hilariously sprung roller coaster, and the dour, virginal OCD headcase who has the premonition and survives is Wendy (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), doing her level best to warn her fellow survivors but succeeding mainly in being our front-row surrogate witness to the most gleeful assemblage of remorseless bloodletting since, well, Final Destination 2.

Wall (2004) - DVD

Mur
***/**** Image A- Sound A-
directed by Simone Bitton

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Wall's greatest strength--its serene pictorialism--is also its greatest limitation. On the one hand, the film asks us to think long and hard about the sheer presence of the massive concrete edifice designed to keep terrorists out of Israel and whether that presence is necessary. To that end, it features some skilful photography of the towering edifice in all its intrusive glory. On the other hand, Wall pushes the surrounding populace onto an abstract plane, letting the Kafkaesque spectacle drive the movie when really it ought to be providing more, pardon the pun, concrete information. It's a tough call, as the film manages to gently grip instead of blind with the alienating rage the subject understandably attracts--it gets you to listen, but at the expense of a certain kind of perspective. Still, considering the passionate hysteria this topic usually incites, perhaps it's offering a necessary stretch of distance.

Sundance '06: Punching at the Sun

*½/****
starring Misu Khan, Nina Edmonds, Hassan El-Gendi, Ferdusy Dia
written and directed by Tanuj Chopra

by Alex Jackson Punching at the Sun follows the life of South Asian Queens teenager Mameet Nayak (Misu Khan). Mameet: (1) Lives in the shadow of his older brother, who was gunned down in his family's convenience store; (2) Falls in love with the neighbourhood sneaker salesgirl, Shawni (Nina Edmonds); (3) Identifies deeply with hip-hop culture; and (4) Feels that South Asians, due to their physical similarity to Arabs, are being unfairly mistreated in the aftermath of 9/11. The chief problem with Punching at the Sun is the sheer breadth of material it tries to cover. Writer-director Tanuj Chopra hasn't narrowed down his subject or angle--he seems to want to show us as much of what it's like to be a South Asian Queens teenager as possible. Even then, I have my doubts as to the film's anthropological validity. Attacks towards South Asians mistaken for Arabs have been rather scattered, and I have to wonder if Chopra chose to highlight them because it struck a chord of truth about the South Asian-American experience, or because it makes for a juicy movie. The generational gap between the values of the old country and the new affects South Asians especially hard, but, apparently aware that other films about other ethnic groups have already mined that territory several times over, Chopra only grazes the surface of this in his scattershot attack, and in pretty much every other way, Punching at the Sun falls short. The digital photography looks cheap; the acting is stilted; and Chopra's use of fast and reverse motion is gimmicky. The film climaxes with a basketball game where Mameet has to take the final shot, but Chopra breezes through most of the sequence more or less uninterested. When Mameet's ball does a teasing revolution around the hoop and Chopra cuts to everybody staring up in suspense, you kind of can't believe that Chopra is actually going there. After the game, Mameet and his sister yell up at the sky asking where their brother is; the film has a lot of scenes like that. The pathos Chopra reaches for is unearned and crudely abrupt--he doesn't have any idea of how to build a moment. There is no polite way to say it: Punching at the Sun is a terrible movie. But the thing is, it's not exactly an arrogant one. It's not arrogant about wanting to teach us something and it's not arrogant about not teaching us something. I think Chopra was really trying to make an honest movie about the South Asian experience, then realized he just didn't have anything to say. It's a pathetic movie, there's not much fruit in taking it down a notch. It'd be like kicking a puppy, you know?

Sundance '06: Into Great Silence

Die Große Stille
****/****
directed by Philip Gröning

by Alex Jackson I actually saw director Philip Gröning's previous film at the 2001 Sundance Film Festival. It was called L'Amour, l'argent, l'amour, and it was kind of awful, I guess, very long and very pretentious. But it was kind of mesmerizing, too, and the mesmerizing and the awful become inextricable--it's the sort of "bad" movie that only a true genius could make. Gröning's Into Great Silence is in the same insane tradition. I offer no intellectual defense towards either of these two movies; I don't know if I'm complimenting the Emperor on his new clothes or not, all I know is that I watch them and something...just...clicks. Into Great Silence is a documentary filmed inside the Grande Chartreuse, the head monastery in France's Carthusian Order. Gröning passively and reverently observes the monks going through their daily routine, making little comment or inquiry as to the who, what, or why of it. Title cards containing relevant Bible verses--printed in French and translated into German, which is then translated into English--surface throughout the 164-minute running time. Gröning continuously returns to a sequence where the monks stare uncomfortably into the camera for some period of time. He repeats the image of a red light burning in otherwise utter darkness and the image of an airplane flying over the monastery. The film is repetitive and there's a question as to whether or not the repetition represents discipline or if it merely represents repetition. When we see the monks looking into the camera, it's astounding how homely and imperfect they are: one eye always looks smaller, bigger, lazier, or more out of place than the other. The monks have allowed some technology into their lives, and the visual presence of electric razors, microphones, and even laptop computers clashes uncomfortably with the medievalism of their garb and housing. They're mostly silent throughout the film, but once we hear them talk, we're struck by the lack of profundity in their statements. They chat about washbasins while out in the garden one summer, and near the end of the film an aged monk gives a hollow, greeting-card version of the meaning of Christianity. Are these men fools, or does their life of asceticism serve a purpose? Is there spiritual sustenance to be found in Gröning's film or is it a crock of shit? Providing no hints, Gröning approaches this material with 110% conviction, refusing to condescend to the material or artificially inflate it with false artistry. What you see is what you get.

In America (2003) + Big Fish (2003)|Big Fish ["Fairy Tale for a Grown-Up" Edition] - DVD

IN AMERICA
***½/****
starring Paddy Considine, Samantha Morton, Sarah Bolger, Emma Bolger
screenplay by Jim Sheridan & Naomi Sheridan
directed by Jim Sheridan

BIG FISH
***/**** Image A Sound A Extras B+
starring Ewan McGregor, Albert Finney, Billy Crudup, Jessica Lange
screenplay by John August, based on the novel by Daniel Wallace
directed by Tim Burton

by Walter Chaw Jim Sheridan's In America sees the nation's shores as the limits of a grand, dilapidated moviehouse, introduced at the border with The Lovin' Spoonful's "Do You Believe in Magic?" and sustained by the ideas that all deaths are dimpled with nobility, and that all life is instilled with the fever dream of an insomniac's carnival. Sheridan's all-night ice cream parlors are, of course, Edward Hopper paintings populated by pink-clad waitresses, while screaming men haunt his rundown tenement brownstones ("This house isn't haunted, it's a magic house"--referring to the domicile, then America), artists and mystics marooned on emotional floes by some seismic existential divorce. And his heroes are a family, aliens in America illegally who discover that their only ward against life's necessary evils is a faith in imagination and a fingernail declaration of hope.

Repo Man (1984) [Collector's Edition] - DVD

***/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B+
starring Harry Dean Stanton, Emilio Estevez, Tracey Walter, Olivia Barash
written and directed by Alex Cox

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. The question I ask after a screening of Repo Man is this: is it punk? And if it isn't punk, what is it? Those used to the anarcho-communitarian (i.e., "nice") ideals adopted by punk's intelligentsia would have no truck with the mentality of this film, whose hero, Otto Maddox (Emilio Estevez), is in it for cheap thrills and hasn't got an ideal in his head. Indeed, once he gets sucked into the more "intense" world of car repossessor Bud (Harry Dean Stanton) and thus gainful employment, he distances himself from his punk friends--as represented by the three mohawk'd chumps whose idea of "doing crimes" is "let's order sushi and not pay!" But the repo gig leads to another dead end, as Bud turns out to be a blowhard full of idiot rules and his compatriots prove more unstable than Otto's old friends. There is no future to Otto's dreaming--just the cul-de-sac of punk's dark flipside: nihilism.

Just Like Heaven (2005) - DVD

ZERO STARS/**** Image A Sound A Extras C
starring Reese Witherspoon, Mark Ruffalo, Donal Logue, Dina Waters
screenplay by Peter Tolan and Leslie Dixon, based on the novel If Only It Were True by Marc Levy
directed by Mark Waters

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. I'm reminded of another magic-realist romantic comedy named after a song: Emile Ardolino's sweet, all-but-forgotten Chances Are, starring Robert Downey Jr. as the reincarnate of a man killed en route to meeting his sweetie Cybill Shepherd. He falls in love with Shepherd's daughter Mary Stuart Masterson, then falls back in love with Shepherd. This is a circuitous, distressingly disinteresting route towards expressing that Mark Waters's Just Like Heaven is not only a movie I really hate, but also a movie that's been done so many times before that instead of needing to follow along with the rigid requirements of the picture, you have time to comb the memory banks for obscure films that are better variations on this theme. (Stuff like Ghost, natch, but even relentlessly creepy garbage like Return to Me (also titled after a song) or Heart Condition or Always--or Truly, Madly, Deeply or The Bishop's Wife. Or the pinnacles of the ghost-love genre, Laura and Rebecca.) Just the fact that it turns The Cure's titular tune into a big sloppy glob of Lilith Fair saliva is enough to turn this child of the '80s right off, sure, but Just Like Heaven is also exactly the kind of piss that uses pop songs to narrate the action.

Sundance '06: A Darkness Swallowed

***/****
directed by Betzy Bromberg

by Alex Jackson A Darkness Swallowed is an experimental film consisting entirely of extreme close-ups of fossils, skins, rocks, and water droplets. There is a brief passage of voiceover in the beginning and a full-length soundtrack, but that's it as far as narrative cues are concerned. The film is supposed to be about the "nature of cellular memory" and "the physical traces that memories leave behind on and inside our bodies, and on and inside the earth." I had a considerably more banal philosophical question on my mind while watching it: I saw things in these shots, things like faces and animals and such--do I see them because they're there and I'm meant to see them, or do I see them because I'm trying to assign order where there isn't any? You go in thinking that a film like this is going to ask you to work harder, but really it's asking you to work less. It's very much a passive experience, you just look at the screen and let it wash over you; the questions are ultimately secondary to the visceral experience. A Darkness Swallowed is wallpaper, but it's very nice wallpaper. When she introduced A Darkness Swallowed to the audience, filmmaker Betzy Bromberg mentioned that she has to hold a day job to pay the bills. I have to admit, I was a little disappointed to discover that this day job is in the movie industry (she served as an optical supervisor on such films as Lady in White, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, and Bram Stoker's Dracula) instead of in a bank or at an accounting firm or something. Part of the pleasure of A Darkness Swallowed is in its homemade quality: Bromberg shot it in Academy-ratio 16mm and you sometimes get the feeling that you're watching "In Search of... with Leonard Nimoy". I mean that lovingly. What I like most about Bromberg's aesthetic is that she doesn't try to beautify ugly things, she thinks they're beautiful enough just being ugly. That's comforting, I think, and kind of wonderful. In the interest of full disclosure, I wouldn't want to see A Darkness Swallowed every day of my life. When all's said and done, it's still not the real thing. But I feel fortunate for getting to experience it even just this once. It's really groovy, man.

Thunder and Lightning (1977) - DVD

**/**** Image B+ Sound B+
starring David Carradine, Kate Jackson, Eddie Barth, Roger C. Carmel
screenplay by William Hjortsberg
directed by Corey Allen

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover A long time ago...I saw Thunder and Lightning with my family on a drive-in double-bill with Star Wars. I remember the experience of the former being not only uncomfortable for my 6-year-old self, but in fact the polar opposite of the elaborate fantasy I was there to see (again). Yet aside from a couple of scenes that stuck, I later drew a complete blank on what it was all about. In one of those grail quests exclusive to sedentary movie nerds, the idea that I had to find out never stopped bothering me, though I now know there was a reason for my initial discomfort: it turns out that Thunder and Lightning takes entirely serviceable moonshine B-movie tropes and does as little as possible with them.

When a Stranger Calls (2006)

ZERO STARS/****
starring Camilla Belle, Tommy Flanagan, Tessa Thompson, Brian Geraghty
screenplay by Jake Wade Wall, based on the screenplay by Steve Feke and Fred Walton
directed by Simon West

by Walter Chaw There's nothing patently, obviously offensive about Simon West's abominable remake of the already awful "thriller" When a Stranger Calls: It's neither misogynistic nor racist nor really anything more than exactly what you'd expect from a project like this, dumped as it has been in the wasteland of another early-February. It's so studiedly inoffensive, in fact, that you could take an elderly nun to it and there would be nary a flutter in her rigidly tender sensibilities. It tittles no ates, manufactures no suspense, and no one in a packed audience of four-hundred folks at the preview screening rustled an inch when the cat--not once, but twice--provided the false jump before the "real" one, though I confess the reason for that might be that by the time West and company get around to actually having something happen, most anyone with any kind of sense is asleep or halfway home. I've failed to mention that it's acted by heavy-browed lead Camilla Belle (as babysitter Johnson, Jill Johnson) like a toy robot with her key only half-wound. Were she to have run out of juice negotiating a wall and leaned there motionless, I wouldn't have batted an eyelash.

Sundance '06: By the Ways, A Journey with William Eggleston

***/****
directed by Cédric Laty & Vincent Gérard

by Alex Jackson I'm certain that William Eggleston is a real photographer; I'm a little less sure that Cédric Laty and Vincent Gérard are real Frenchmen: I can't find anything about them on the Internet not directly related to this movie. You would understand my skepticism were you to see By the Ways, A Journey with William Eggleston, which plays like a particularly bizarre practical joke. The film purports to be a study of Eggleston's life and work, but it's actually more of a Parisian love letter to American cars, the American south, Elvis Presley, Los Angeles, and cigarettes. It's like a French New Wave road documentary. To be honest, I'm not sure I can make heads or tails out of this thing--I need to see it a second time. (This first time I was too busy looking at all the doodles in the margins.) Highlights include an interview with an art critic and photographer who tells us that Eggleston only takes one shot of his subject, no more than two, and that every picture is "a keeper." David Byrne gives his account of Eggleston, saying that he was on the set of Annie, a film he seems to believe was directed by Robert Altman. (Could he be thinking of Popeye from two years earlier?) Where everybody else was photographing the production, Eggleston took stills of the empty set. There is a truly haunting montage of a development lab scored to Bob Dylan's "Desolation Road." One interview takes place entirely offscreen while the camera fixates on a birdcage. The coup de grâce is the use of Patsy Cline's "Is That All There Is?" at the end of the picture. Seriously, is somebody playing a trick on me? Producers Agnès Troublé and Nadja Romain's next project is Harmony Korine's Mister Lonely, allegedly about a colony of celebrity impersonators. Truly the world would be a darker place without movies like this populating it.

Sundance '06: Awesome; I Fuckin' Shot That!

Awesome; I Shot That!
½*/****
directed by Nathanial Hörnblowér

by Alex Jackson Given that I was about halfway through a really nasty cold when I saw The Beastie Boys' Awesome; I Fuckin' Shot That!, I probably wasn't in the right frame of mind to judge its merits. With that disclaimer in place, this has to be the loudest movie I have ever seen. At the end of the ordeal, I felt as though band members Mike D, Adam Horowitz, and Adam Yauch had burrowed inside my brain and gone to work with an iron frying pan. I'll cop to preferring masochistic cinematic experiences in general and getting angry and frustrated by movies that want little more than to cheer me up--but from now on, I'm going to draw the line at Beastie Boys concert films. At their 2004 Madison Square Garden show, The Beastie Boys passed out cameras to fifty audience members with instructions to shoot anything that interested them; Awesome; I Fuckin' Shot That! was culled from their footage. It sounds like a pretty daffy idea, but the results are much better than you would expect--or, more accurately, they seem to reflect the vision of director Yauch (credited as Nathanial Hörnblowér). The visuals are every bit as aggressive as the music: they push you down, smash your skull against the pavement, and don't stop until they see the pink stuff. There are few moments where The Beastie Boys are not performing and there are few shots that don't underscore the music. It's cinematic, it's fast, and it leaves you bruised and wounded. Even outside of the headaches, based on what I've seen here I don't think I really care much for The Beastie Boys. Their pop-cultural references are broad and easy: Scarface, Star Wars, "Star Trek", Jackie Chan, high school proms, Nintendo, a viral video of boxing cats; they dedicate "Sabotage" to President Bush, and while the then-ten-year-old song does have a nice timeliness to it, it's still not particularly brilliant social commentary. I wish I could confirm this, but I think it was ex-Devo frontman Mark Mothersbaugh who said that punk rock could never take off in the States because the kids have too many toys to play with. Yeah. Hip-hop, the other half of The Beastie Boys' musical DNA, could never take off in the suburbs, either, for more or less the same reason. Awesome; I Fuckin' Shot That! is a film full of empty rage borne of a toy-drunk culture made by toy-drunk children. It's a portentous act of arrogance against good music, good filmmaking, and good taste.