Film Freak Central

Sundance '07: Hounddog

*/****
starring Dakota Fanning, Robin Wright Penn, David Morse, Piper Laurie
written and directed by Deborah Kampmeier

by Alex Jackson Deborah Kampmeier's Hounddog is even worse than its pre-emptive objectors assume it is. The film is offensive in precisely the way you think it's going to be but surprises you by becoming offensive on a whole new level. Everything in the film revolves around a scene where Dakota Fanning is raped, which, far from "gratuitous," is the film's entire raison d'être. Before The Rape, Hounddog plays like one big striptease leading up to it: in the very first scene, Fanning promises her playmate a kiss if he shows her his penis, and throughout the picture, Kampmeier has her prancing around in her panties, gyrating in her rendition of Elvis Presley's "Hounddog," and going swimming in an undershirt. Naysayers are calling the picture "a pedophile's dream," and though I maintain that you would have to be a pedophile of particularly low self-esteem to whack off to this, they do have a point. Up until The Rape, the film is just plain exploitive and cynical. It starts to seem like Kampmeier knows why we're here and is going to draw out our dread/anticipation past the breaking point before delivering "the goods." Then little Dakota gets popped. The scene is simultaneously cowardly, leering, and utterly tasteless: we see close-ups of her limbs flailing and her playmate staring on, fascinated and horrified. Her demonic rapist, who had been hiding in the shadows, grunts a couple of times, comes inside her, and very audibly zips up as she lies on the ground, bawling and defeated. The pre-rape portion of the film was sweating with sex, but all that heat dissipates out during and after the rape.

The Addams Family: Volume One (1964-1965) + Bones: Season One (2005-2006) - DVDs

THE ADDAMS FAMILY: VOLUME ONE
Image B Sound B- Extras B+
"The Addams Family Goes to School," "Morticia and the Psychiatrist," "Fester's Punctured Romance," "Gomez, the Politician," "The Addams Family Tree," "Morticia Joins the Ladies League," "Halloween with the Addams Family," "Green-Eyed Gomez," "New Neighbors Meet the Addams Family," "The Addams Family Meets the V.I.P.s," "Morticia, the Matchmaker," "Lurch Learns to Dance," "Art and the Addams Family," "The Addams Family Meets a Beatnik," "The Addams Family Meets the Undercover Man," "Mother Lurch Visits the Addams Family," "Uncle Fester's Illness," "The Addams Family Splurges," "Cousin Itt Visits the Addams Family," "The Addams Family in Court," "Amnesia in the Addams Family"

BONES: SEASON ONE
Image A Sound A+ Extras C-
"Pilot," "The Man in the S.U.V.," "A Boy in a Tree," "The Man in the Bear," "A Boy in a Bush," "The Man in the Wall," "The Man on Death Row," "The Girl in the Fridge," "The Man in the Fallout Shelter," "The Woman in the Airport," "The Woman in the Car," "The Superhero in the Alley," "The Woman in the Garden," "The Man on the Fairway," "Two Bodies in the Lab," "The Woman in the Tunnel," "The Skull in the Desert," "The Man with the Bone," "The Man in the Morgue," "The Graft in the Girl," "The Soldier in the Grave," "The Woman in Limbo"

by Ian Pugh Charles Addams's darkest cartoons for THE NEW YORKER were routinely hilarious, not just for their brazen denial of the nuclear family unit, but also because, unlike so many of the publication's other strips, they take their one-panel restrictions to heart without coming off as smarmy. Moreover, Addams's scenarios were simple without being stupid, e.g., family of ghouls about to dump boiling oil on Christmas carollers. The problem in turning these characters into a half-hour sitcom, namely "The Addams Family", should be self-evident: it bloats the brisk silliness into a particularly tiresome game of "Opposite Day"--thirty minutes of a family that cheerfully approves of the macabre and homicidal while despising normalcy and respectability.

Elizabeth Taylor-Richard Burton: The Film Collection - DVD

THE V.I.P.S (1963)
½*/**** Image C+ Sound B
starring Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, Elsa Martinelli, Margaret Rutheford
screenplay by Terence Rattigan
directed by Anthony Asquith

THE SANDPIPER (1965)
½*/**** Image B Sound B- Extras C-
starring Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, Eva Marie Saint, Morgan Mason
screenplay by Dalton Trumbo and Michael Wilson
directed by Vincente Minnelli

WHO'S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF? (1966)
****/**** Image A+ Sound A- Extras B
starring Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, George Segal, Sandy Dennis
screenplay by Ernest Lehman, based on the play by Edward Albee
directed by Mike Nichols

THE COMEDIANS (1967)
*½/**** Image B Sound B- Extras C-
starring Richard Burton, Elizabeth Taylor, Alec Guinness, Peter Ustinov
screenplay by Graham Greene, based on his novel
directed by Peter Glenville

by Walter Chaw Also called International Hotel, The V.I.P.s--the first chronologically-released vehicle for Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor following the initiation of their legendary infidelities on the set of Cleopatra--is unwatchable dreck of the Old Hollywood variety. When people say "They don't make 'em like they used to," it's a good corrective to start listing off dusty artifacts like this one. As it was something of a financial windfall at the time (though not enough of one to offset the impending disaster of Cleopatra), one assumes that audiences flocked to theatres to sniff the musky odour of Burton/Taylor's forbidden l'amour that had dominated the world's lascivious imagination as production on an epic failure (or failed epic) dragged on for months and years. For me, the curiosity about The V.I.P.s, currently available in Warner's freshly-minted box set of Burton/Taylor pictures made during the height of their notoriety, has a lot more to do with Richard Burton, who was, to my mind, his generation's Russell Crowe. Like Crowe, Burton is thick with virility and gravitas and the ability, by himself, to carry a picture on his broad shoulders; I wonder if his seduction by a relic of Old Hollywood glamour hasn't tainted his legacy irrevocably. My voyeuristic impulse ultimately isn't so different from that of contemporary viewers, in fact, though I do offer the slight caveat that I'm in it to see how touching a match to Burton's already-boundless explosiveness would infect, for good or for ill, what are essentially vanity pieces for a couple drunk on the cult of themselves.

Sundance '07: We Are the Strange

½*/****
starring David Choe, Stuart Mahoney, Halleh Seddighzadeh, M dot Strange
written and directed by M dot Strange

by Alex Jackson

"Yeah, but your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should."
-Dr. Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum) in Jurassic Park

While it is perfectly normal for a student filmmaker to be preoccupied with the "could" questions over the "should," the "should" questions need be asked and answered to at least some extent before one attempts to make something for display to a general audience. I suppose I could say that We Are the Strange is an exercise in style over substance, or that it breaks away from traditional forms of narrative, but that would imply that writer/producer/director/animator/composer M dot Strange had actually made choices with regards to substance, narrative, and the lack thereof. The film is an artistic failure on the most rudimentary level; it seems that Strange never got past the idea that it would be cool to make an animated feature. We Are the Strange has something to do with a beautiful woman named Blue who is kicked out of a brothel by her pimp for being "ugly." She then meets the living Buddy doll Emmm, who asks her out for ice cream. Soon they discover that the ice cream shop has been taken over by "evil forces." All of this is set in a video game or an alternate universe composed of video game graphics or something.

Sundance '07: Joe Strummer: The Future is Unwritten

***/****
directed by Julien Temple

by Alex Jackson I worry that this film was wasted on me. I usually walk out of the Q&A sessions after festival screenings because I can't bear to hear the stupid questions the audience asks or, as in the case of M dot Strange, the filmmaker's stupid answers. This time, however, the questions were intelligent and thoughtful, and, it almost goes without saying, so were the replies. Watching Joe Strummer: The Future is Unwritten, I was reminded a bit of those critics who said that The Passion of the Christ was made for hardcore Christians and that nobody else is going to have any idea what's happening. I know fuck-all about Joe Strummer or The Clash, so I watched this film expecting to learn a little something. Good god, man, it was exhausting. Director Julien Temple never stops to let a point sink in and never organizes the material into actual scenes--it's just one thing after another. He folds in clips from Animal Farm and the out-of-print fifties version of 1984, tons of archival footage of The Clash, and fireside interviews with people who knew Strummer and celebrities who admired him (I admit I laughed when Johnny Depp showed up to sombrely reflect on Strummer's legacy in his Captain Jack costume). Punk music, some Strummer's and some not, is weaved in and out of the soundtrack, oftentimes at ear-splitting volumes. (When a segment of Israel Kamakiwo'ole's lyrical "Over the Rainbow" appears, it's a sweet relief.) There is a sense in which the film falls victim to a cardinal sin of documentaries: it doesn't want to say something about its subject or place it in a context in which it can be better understood, it simply wants to be its subject. That hardly matters, though, because Temple may have actually succeeded in finding a union between subject and form--Joe Strummer: The Future is Unwritten might very well be Joe Strummer. Indeed, it doesn't seem to be about the music; the music is one more element in the entire tapestry. Joe Strummer: The Future is Unwritten is two hours of pure energy, and perhaps it's possible to appreciate it on a purely experiential level if you already know virtually all there is to know about The Clash. I'm not sure I can say that it was a particularly enjoyable experience, but I think I can detect brilliance when I see it. There is something magical and otherworldly about the editing: not a frame is wasted and, combined with the narration and music, an image as innocuous as somebody looking directly into the camera or walking into a Baskin-Robbins inexplicably accrues an enormous visceral wallop. I'm not 100% sold on it, but I gotta confess: this is a film with momentum.

Smokin' Aces (2007) + Seraphim Falls (2007)

SMOKIN' ACES
½*/****
starring Ben Affleck, Jason Bateman, Common, Andy Garcia
written and directed by Joe Carnahan

SERAPHIM FALLS
*/****
starring Liam Neeson, Pierce Brosnan, Angie Harmon, Anjelica Huston
screenplay by Abby Everett Jaques & David Von Ancken
directed by David Von Ancken

by Walter Chaw Director Joe Carnahan replicates a heart attack in the prologue of Narc, and David Von Ancken, in the action-packed opening to his feature debut Seraphim Falls, simulates a mildly hysterical bout of narcolepsy--but more on that later. Carnahan's third film, Smokin' Aces, is drawing a lot of unfavourable comparisons to Guy Ritchie's gangster sagas, but the real lineage can be traced to whatever strain of viral ADD infected Tony Scott. The film is so like Scott's Domino in its visual affectations and uniform incompetence that the two pictures could exchange scenes willy-nilly without losing a step. (Compare it to Wayne Kramer's similarly canted Running Scared for a mini-primer on when lawless misanthropy and the coked-up editor aesthetic can be wielded with delighted, visceral purpose as opposed to simply wielded.) Ultimately, Smokin' Aces is little more than a parade of sad "didn't you used to be..." stunt cameos installed for the missing "edge" that buckets of blood, rains of bullets, and a few power tools seem incapable of manifesting. With Narc, Carnahan showed real growth from his directorial debut (Blood, Guts, Bullets & Octane, which is actually not unlike the new one at all). Now he's just showing off.

Sundance '07: Crazy Love

***½/****
directed by Dan Klores and Fisher Stevens

by Alex Jackson Dan Klores's Crazy Love is essentially just another talking-head documentary, but my goodness what talking heads they are! At first, it seems that Klores--to echo that oft-repeated charge against pop-doc filmmakers like Errol Morris, Michael Moore, and Chris Smith--is condescending to his subjects by laying their distinctly Jewish tackiness out to be skewered. But as the picture soldiers on, any emotional detachment dissolves away: these people aren't tactless so much as they're simply candid. They have absolutely nothing to hide and that openness makes it extremely difficult to categorize anybody in the film as a monster or a victim. Burt Pugach was a prominent negligence lawyer in the East Bronx; in the fall of 1957, he spotted secretary Linda Riss, fell in love with her, and successfully seduced her. When he couldn't divorce his wife, Riss left him and got engaged to somebody else. Enraged and deeply depressed, Pugach hired some goons to rough her up. They threw acid in her face, eventually blinding her. Pugach served a stint in prison, and when he got out he proposed to Riss. She accepted--the way she figures it, she's blind and nobody wants her or is willing to be with her except Pugach, who was the one who blinded her in the first place explicitly so that nobody else would want her. He "wins." The picture fruitfully questions your attitudes towards domestic abuse--the "right" choice isn't always the most pragmatic one: if Riss were to reject Pugach, she would still have her self-respect but would probably live out the rest of her days in solitude. Is that really preferable? I actually found it difficult to not feel bad for Pugach, precisely because he doesn't ask for or much expect our pity. He mentions that he was abused as a child by his overbearing mother and had extramarital affairs to rebuild his self-esteem, and I dunno, perhaps I'm a bleeding heart as far as these things go, but it comes off as more of an explanation than a justification. The guy just doesn't apologize. He's basically saying this is what it is. Klores is a very good filmmaker and one of the exciting things about Crazy Love is how he uses period music to reflect the mindset of his subjects; I don't think I will ever again hear Smokey Robinson's "You Really Got a Hold on Me," with its lines like "I don't like you/but I love you" and "I don't want you/but I need you," without thinking of Burt and Linda.

Sundance '07: Fido

*/****
starring Carrie-Anne Moss, Billy Connolly, Dylan Baker, Tim Blake Nelson
screenplay by Dennis Heaton, Robert Chomiak, Andrew Currie
directed by Andrew Currie

by Alex Jackson The first five or ten minutes of Fido are pretty terrific. Therein, an educational film depicts the "zombie wars," a time during the Forties in which space-dust turned our dead into zombies. The living won the ensuing conflict; and with the invention of the domestication collar by mega-corporation Zomcom, the zombies could be made to serve man. This movie-within-the-movie is in Academy ratio and grainy black-and-white, and when it finishes a grade-school teacher turns on the lights and the image expands to a 'scope tableau of a classroom glowing with bright candy colours. The film is a triumph of cinematography and set design--every detail feels just right. But then another ten minutes go by and we realize that all that is supporting the film is a thin one-joke premise. Fido seems to be a satire of 1950s suburbia, but what is it saying? Are the zombies supposed to be Communists (they are taken as the spoils of war and the film gets a lot of mileage out of Cold War paranoia)? Blacks in a system of pseudo-slavery in the segregation-era South (the zombies are all menial labourers)? Dogs (the titular Fido is a zombie our hero, young Timmy Robinson, befriends, setting the stage for a lot of cheap and easy "Lassie" jokes)? The three things appear to have something in common, but Fido doesn't quite connect the dots to offer one clear satirical perspective. The film also lacks much in the way of internal logic. For instance, the zombies are very bad at their jobs; they stumble and shuffle, are easily distracted, and have difficulty figuring out simple tasks. Why would the nation be so adamant about keeping them alive to work in jobs they can barely perform? And how does it enjoy the affluence of the 1950s if most blue-collar positions are filled by unpaid zombie labourers? A great deal of the humour comes from the juxtaposition of suburban bliss with a blithe acceptance of death: most of the kids have had to kill their zombefied parents and their recess is for target practice. The gag never moves towards making a statement about America's love affair with firearms and violence, though, instead staying on the superficial level of light absurdity. Fido isn't a bad film, exactly--it's just excruciatingly vapid.

Sundance '07: Teeth

*½/****
starring Jess Weixler, John Hensley, Josh Pais, Hale Appleman
written and directed by Mitchell Lichtenstein

by Alex Jackson I was very excited when I first stumbled upon the notion of the vagina dentata, as it provides for a distinctly female version of sexual aggression: Unlike the male rape drive, it's not about power, it's about taking power away from men--cannibalism and castration. I should have known that Mitchell Lichtenstein's Teeth would not be the film to really explore this notion as soon as I learned that it's literally about a teenage girl who discovers she has teeth in her vaginal cavity. Lichtenstein isn't particularly interested in exploring the possibilities of this material as a horror film, instead using it as a comeuppance fantasy against male chauvinistic pigs, gaining easy points through cheap femi-Nazi misandry. (The credits actually joke that "No men were harmed during the making of this film.") The film underlines the symbolism, match-cutting a celibacy promise ring with a state-mandated sticker concealing a diagram of the female genitalia. At one point, the heroine even reads a description of the vagina dentata mythology on a website. This is condescending to the audience while glibly derisive of the mythology itself, which we learn represents the mysteries of femininity the male hero must inevitably conquer and destroy. Fine--except Lichtenstein never adequately thinks how this must work from the woman's point of view. He has her "conquer and destroy" the male hero and preserve the mystery of femininity. This isn't enough, as it only defines the sex act in male terms. You see, it doesn't bother me that every man she meets tries to rape her--but it bothers me that Lichtenstein has her castrate her rapists purely out of revenge and not out of her own selfish pleasure. She doesn't get off on cutting their dicks off; they're simply getting their just desserts. Already using very dangerous material for his very first feature, the openly gay Lichtenstein digs himself in further by refusing to show the female genitalia, teeth or not, outside of the aforementioned textbook--a move that confines the vagina to the unknown and prevents the character from ever developing her own sexual identity. Call me prejudiced, but this isn't a universal human story, it's a story that explicitly revolves around straight sex. Having a gay director tell it is kind of like having Spike Lee direct Ordinary People.

Running with Scissors (2006) - DVD

**/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Annette Bening, Joseph Cross, Brian Cox, Evan Rachel Wood
screenplay by Ryan Murphy, based on the novel by Augusten Burroughs
directed by Ryan Murphy

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover It would be hard to not be a little moved by the traumatic goings-on of Running with Scissors. The film is based on Augusten Burroughs's best-selling memoir, and the author has plenty to forget: not merely the failure of his real family, consisting of a distant alcoholic father and a self-righteous failed-poet mother, but also the nightmare of moving out of that home and into that of Mommy's quack psychiatrist. Yet as the horrors pile up, one wonders what's being learned in the midst of all this unburdening. I haven't read Burroughs's book, but Ryan Murphy's screen translation fails completely to draw conclusions from the facts--we're simply dropped in the midst of some seriously unhappy people and left to fend for ourselves. Perhaps the memoirist felt the same way, but without any generalizations drawn it seems rather like that money-grubbing head-shrinker, making hay with other people's depression.

The Promise (2005) - DVD (U.S. version)

*/**** Image A Sound A- Extras C
starring Hiroyuki Sanada, Jang Dong Gun, Cecilia Cheung, Nicholas Tse
screenplay by Chen Kaige and Zhang Tan
directed by Chen Kaige

by Walter Chaw Any fad reaches its nadir in due time and the Western wuxia infatuation, which started somewhere around Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and more or less peaked with Zhang Yimou's exceptional Hero, has found its basement in the truncated version of Chen Kaige's already-pretty-embarrassing The Promise. Somewhere, King Hu is spinning in his grave. An abomination just about any way you slice it, this ultra-expensive, CGI'd-to-exhaustion wire-fu epic--especially as sanitized for North America's consumption--suggests the world's saddest public display of penis envy. Chen, hailing from the same Fifth Generation school as Zhang, produces a show-offy, self-indulgent bit of flamboyant one-upsmanship destined to become a queer camp classic. When the Crimson General (Hiroyuki Sanada) trades in his fabulous duds for a lavender muumuu in which to trade barbs with archenemy Wuhuan (Nicholas Tse, suspended somewhere between pretty girl and Japanese anime hero), a bad guy garbed in white feathers who wields a gold staff topped with a bronze hand, index finger extended in proctological menace, the homoeroticism of the piece--already distracting in the subtext--suddenly becomes the main event. It's probably this unfathomable cut of the film's Rosetta Stone, in fact, pared down to some half-assed companion piece to Chen's own Farewell My Concubine. Without much strain you can see The Promise being transformed, in all its kitsch excess, into a Broadway pop-opera: Memoirs of a Geisha: The Musical.

7 Men from Now (1956) [Special Collector's Edition] - DVD

Seven Men from Now
***½/**** Image B+ Sound A Extras A-
starring Randolph Scott, Gail Russell, Lee Marvin, Walter Reed
screenplay by Burt Kennedy
directed by Budd Boetticher

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Like most Budd Boetticher movies, Seven Men from Now is supremely modest. Despite my high star rating, I fear overselling its virtues--it's not a searing, world-shattering masterpiece that leaves you devastated. But for a sort of chamber western, it's lovely and uncommonly sensitive. The film doesn't dig on the adventure and violence that are the major selling points of the genre: it's about an ex-lawman's guilty torment; a failed husband's obliviousness to the trials of his wife; and a kind-of outlaw who's sort of a friend but also sort of not. There is of course a revenge plot and the occasional incursion of marauding Indians, but you barely notice them over the nuances of the characters and their various sadnesses. It's less than genius but somehow more than the action oater you know the studio wanted.

The Girls Next Door: Season One (2005) + Stacked: The Complete Series (2005-2006) - DVDs

THE GIRLS NEXT DOOR: SEASON ONE
Image A Sound A Extras D+
"Meet the Girls," "New Girls in Town," "Happy Birthday, Kendra," "What Happens in Vegas," "Fight Night," "Operation Playmate," "Just Shoot Me," "Midsummer Night's Dream," "Under the Covers," "Ghostbusted," "Grape Expectations," "I'll Take Manhattan," "My Kind of Town," "Clue-Less," "It's Vegas Baby!"

STACKED: THE COMPLETE SERIES
Image B+ Sound C Extras D
"Pilot," "Beat the Candidate," "A Fan for All Seasons," "Gavin's Pipe Dream," "The Ex-Appeal," "Nobody Says I Love You," "Two Faces of Eve," "Darling Nikki," "Crazy Ray," "iPod," "Heavy Meddle," "Goodwizzle Hunting," "After Party," "Romancing the Stones," "You're Getting Sleepy," "The Third Date," "The Day the Music Died," "Poker," "The Headmaster"

by Ian Pugh I'm pretty sure it was Jon Stewart who described "lad mags" like MAXIM and STUFF as "porn for people too timid to buy porn," and under that category we could probably also file PLAYBOY reality series "The Girls Next Door" and the Pamela Anderson sitcom "Stacked": softcore pap for those too afraid to have God's honest filth appear on their rental history or cable bill. I'm inclined to believe those same people are apt to use the phrase "turn your brain off" while justifying their love of these silicone parades--which in this case means, what, "shut up and masturbate"? PLAYBOY and Anderson are both cultural artifacts and thus demand scrutiny; protest, however, and you'll just be dismissed as a double-plus-bad thought cop bringing intelligence to a discussion where it isn't wanted. You know, the brainiac killjoy who has to say, "Why are you watching this garbage?" The programs themselves shout you down, in fact, before you have a chance to complain: each invokes Shakespeare on a whim ("Girls" in a party and episode named for "A Midsummer Night's Dream", "Stacked" in one of its sarcastic faux-intellectual quotations)--not for any genuine comparison, but as a surrogate for intelligence, introduced for the sole purpose of deriding it as impertinent. You're the idiot, apparently, for harbouring the desire for something substantial out of one of the most widespread and influential media of the last century.

See No Evil (2006) - DVD

*/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B
starring Kane, Christina Vidal, Luke Pegler, Samantha Noble
screenplay by Dan Madigan
directed by Gregory Dark

by Alex Jackson SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Gregory Dark started out directing adult films--I've been told that his award-winning Let Me Tell Ya 'Bout White Chicks is a classic of the miscegenation genre--and had moved up to music videos when he was offered See No Evil, his first feature film (as well as the first film produced under the WWE banner). The idea that Dark sees this movie as his ticket to the big leagues is as good an explanation as any for its smarmy tone. Still embarrassed about making a slasher picture (and, by extension, his stigmatic beginnings), he distances himself from the material by condescending to it: If he's better than B-movie claptrap, then that means he's an A-list filmmaker, right? I have no idea where Dark wants to be near the end of his career, but the attitude he brings to See No Evil is that of a climber and not of a serious artist who happens to be relegated to the periphery of the mainstream.

Takeshis' (2005) - DVD

**/**** Image B Sound B
starring Takeshi Kitano, Kotomi Kyono, Kayoko Kishimoto, Ren Osugi
written and directed by Takeshi Kitano

by Walter Chaw Midway between Fellini's 8½ and Bob Fosse's All That Jazz is Japanese auteur Takeshi Kitano's Takeshis', a film that indicates with its possessive title that it belongs to both the director (Takeshi Kitano) and star ("Beat" Takeshi); acknowledging that they're one and the same (Kitano is billed as the former when he directs, the latter when he performs), they each have a function and persona unique unto themselves. The burden of that division, which Takeshi has taken on since midway through Violent Cop, is illustrated in the picture as a series of fractures that meld reality with televisual reality and filmic reality--nothing so ostentatious as Sven Nykvist and Ingmar Bergman reflected in a mirror in Persona, but going so far as to have "Beat" Takeshi, dressed as a clown, refer to Takeshi Kitano as "that asshole." The omniscience of the director is referred to often in the text as casting directors (rather, actors playing casting directors, or casting directors playing themselves) remark that Yakuza never look like Kitano (who has made something of a name for himself as a Yakuza: he's a little like the Japanese Robert De Niro)--and yet the central narrative of the picture then involves the slow evolution of the actor who looks like Kitano into Takeshi Kitano's Yakuza persona. Kitano is thus marking the difference between the devices of the director and the relatively passive objectification that is the primary definition of an actor--between the godhead inscrutable and the subject humiliated, as well as the eventual bleed-through between the roles actors assume and the mold into which perception forces them.

Children of Men (2006) + Letters from Iwo Jima (2006)

CHILDREN OF MEN
****/****
starring Clive Owen, Julianne Moore, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Charlie Hunnam
screenplay by Alfonso Cuarón & Timothy J. Sexton and David Arata and Mark Fergus & Hawk Ostby, based on the novel by P.D. James
directed by Alfonso Cuarón

LETTERS FROM IWO JIMA
***½/****
starring Ken Watanabe, Kazunari Ninomiya, Tsuyoshi Ihara, Ryo Kase
screenplay by Iris Yamashita, based on the book Picture Letters from Commander in Chief by Tadamichi Kuribayashi and Tsuyoko Yoshido
directed by Clint Eastwood

by Walter Chaw Stop on any single frame of Alfonso Cuarón's remarkable war idyll Children of Men--a film that's rarely in repose, sometimes seeming composed of one long, frantic shot--and I suspect the sharp-eyed, educated viewer would be able to cull a reference to modern art, most likely one about men reduced to their base animal nature. For me, the two visual landmarks come in the form of a cue to the cover design for Pink Floyd's 1977 "Animals" when hero Theo (Clive Owen) goes to see his industrialist cousin Nigel (Danny Huston) for help and a re-creation of Richard Misrach's remarkable series of 1987 photographs documenting, among other things, a dead-animal pit in Nevada purportedly used to dispose of victims of a plutonium "hot spot." Both share a space with surrealism in the positioning of animals (artificial or deceased) in industrial spaces (London's Battersea Power Station is the iconic backdrop of the "Animals" cover) as mute commentary, perhaps, on man's destructive relationship with his environment--a read that jibes comfortably with the thrust of Children of Men, in which we're told that one day in the not-too-distant future, humans suddenly stop reproducing. (Fertile ground for science-fiction, this obsession with progeny (see: everything from Frankenstein to I Am Legend).) The picture opens with a Fleet Street terrorist bombing, a little like Terry Gilliam's dystopic Brazil--though rather than take the easier route of satirizing our current state of instability and free-floating paranoia, Children of Men makes a serious attempt to allegorize it.

Dane Cook's Tourgasm (2006) - DVD

Image A Sound A- Extras D
"The First Laugh," "Working It Out," "The United States of Insanity," "It Was The Best of Times...," "Determined and Injured," "Competitively Speaking," "Beginning of the End," "Back in the Day," "The Curtain Call"

by Ian Pugh It's not that I don't get Dane Cook. In fact, it's difficult not to occasionally chuckle when looking over his repertoire, as in ruminating on the general inconvenience of having the Kool-Aid Man burst through your wall and the fact that no one can ever finish a game of Monopoly, or wondering who would write racial epithets while sitting on the toilet, he represents a strict literalization of that old sarcastic summation of stand-up comedy: "He's sayin' what we're all thinkin'!" It's not that funny, but we all laugh, anyway, partially for Cook's enthusiasm, partially because he's a reflection of us at our most vulnerable (that is, at our stalest creative moments), proudly transcribing the idle thoughts and half-attempts at wit that pass through our minds on a daily basis. We laugh, painfully, because we've all contemplated what Cook has to say.

A Star is Born (1976) - DVD

**/**** Image B+ Sound A- Extras B+
starring Barbra Streisand, Kris Kristofferson, Gary Busey, Oliver Clark
screenplay by John Gregory Dunne & Joan Didion and Frank Pierson
directed by Frank Pierson

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover It was no doubt celestially preordained that Barbra Streisand would unleash herself on some cherished Old Hollywood warhorse. But while the Janet Gaynor/Judy Garland hand-me-downs that ultimately felt her musical wrath were nobody's idea of untouchable masterpieces, they at least played their cards right in terms of credulity towards celebrity and damaged spouses. The Streisand/Kristofferson A Star is Born lacks genuine investment in its central relationship between alcoholic rock star John Norman Howard (Kris Kristofferson) and his protégé/lover Esther Hoffmann (Streisand). We're supposed to take their epic love on faith, to say nothing of the burned-out cynicism of the descendant rocker; there's a lot of talk about disaffection and anguish, but Frank Pierson's camera never catches it and the actors never quite express it.

Film Freak Central's Top 10 of 2006

I think the start of 2006 held so much promise mainly because it heralded the end of 2005. Not a doomsayer by any stretch, I find myself, at least in my own head, defending the state of film against facile diagnoses. "Books are always better than the movies based on them" and "They don't make good movies anymore" are the common phrases trotted out to simulate critical thought--better yet is the carrying around of the cross of "You just don't like anything." The truth is that books are only superior to the movies made from them about half the time (consider that almost all of Hitchcock's films are based on shitty literature); that good movies are no rarer than usual; and that disliking Blood Diamond, Dreamgirls, and The Holiday doesn't mean I don't like anything. Still, I admit to taking short rides with those facile phrases over the years, trying them on for size, seeing if and how far they will fly.

That's My Bush! [The Definitive Collection] - DVD

Image B+ Sound B+ Extras B-
"An Aborted Dinner Date," "A Poorly Executed Plan," "Eenie Meenie Miney MURDER!," "S.D.I.-AYE-AYE!," "The First Lady's Persqueeter," "Mom 'E' D.E.A. Arrest," "Trapped in a Small Environment," "Fare Thee Welfare"

"What we're sick of--and it's getting even worse--is: You either like Michael Moore or you wanna fuckin' go overseas and shoot Iraqis. There can't be a middle ground. Basically, if you think Michael Moore's full of shit, then you are a super-Christian right-wing whatever. And we're both just pretty middle-ground guys. We find just as many things to rip on on the left as we do on the right. People on the far left and the far right are the same exact person to us."
-- Trey Parker, "Interview of the Meanest"; IN FOCUS, October 2004

by Ian Pugh I think "South Park" boasts the occasional flash of brilliance, but I resent that its more flagrantly political messages, particularly in the past few seasons, essentially boil down to 'both sides are fucking crazy: here's how it really is.' Trey Parker and Matt Stone strike me less as philosophers than as contrarians who force their perceived sensible alternatives down our throats as the infallible Solution. It's a shame, too, because Parker and Stone remain two of the most talented satirists of our generation, if not in terms of hot-button topics: The ending of the recent "South Park" episode "Stanley's Cup," for instance, attacked sports movies by reminding us that every game involves two teams with similar aspirations, and, of course, Team America: World Police's caustic parody of "Rent" is as concise and shocking a criticism of that musical as one will find. I'm not taking the stupidly dismissive "I like you better when you're funny" position that Tucker Carlson had towards Jon Stewart on CNN's "Crossfire", but in the world of "South Park", there are only three options when it comes to world events: left, right, and middle, the latter being invariably correct. Compared to the innumerable increments in the political spectrum of reality, three extremes are no better than two.