Film Freak Central

Seattle International Film Festival '09: Cold Souls

**½/****
starring Paul Giamatti, Dina Korzun, David Strathairn, Emily Watson
written and directed by Sophie Barthes

by Jefferson Robbins We have much to praise and condemn Charlie Kaufman for, and popularizing science-fiction and meta-fictional elements to eyeball modern emotional displacement could count in both columns. In her first feature, writer-director Sophie Barthes deploys an amazing cast in an effort that will, for better or worse, be invariably compared to Kaufman's Being John Malkovich and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Paul Giamatti (Paul Giamatti) is in theatrical rehearsals for "Uncle Vanya", and all that Russian ennui is weighing on his soul. So why not have his soul removed and placed in cold storage, in a lab run by Dr. Flintstein (David Strathairn)? "If you'd rather avoid sales tax, it can be shipped to our New Jersey warehouse," Flintstein assures him. In a machine that looks like an MRI from Woody Allen's Sleeper, Giamatti as Giamatti gets his chickpea-shaped spirit (or at least 95% of it) siphoned out, complete with the sound effect of a toilet flushing. But Flintstein also deals in "transplants" and contracts with unscrupulous Russian mobsters, represented by soul-mule Nina (Dina Korzun), who hauls the raw materials in her own head through transatlantic customs...so Giamatti's valuable anima isn't in the most trustworthy hands. Korzun is moving as a woman whose heart is contaminated with the pain of others, but Giamatti is the hinge for this relatively flimsy contraption. Still, what a hinge: bored and detached after the removal of his soul, he runs on fumes from his lizard hindbrain, and his "Vanya" goes from troubled to comically inauthentic. No one wears embarrassment, frustration, or self-doubt better, and an agitated Giamatti is so twitchy he actually blurs. Without him, a bedroom confession to his wife (Emily Watson, squandered) is a worthless moment. With him, it's Chekhovian. A Russian-lit scholar could probably unearth levels in Cold Souls that are hidden to me, though the film is valuable in two unexpected ways: it contemplates the way Russian oligarchs commodify the lives of their countrymen for their own enrichment; and it makes me hungry to see Giamatti as Philip K. Dick in the much-discussed biopic The Owl in the Daylight. If we're going to talk about misplaced selves and implanted experiences, let's talk with a master, played by a masterful actor.

Resident Evil: Degeneration (2008) - Blu-ray Disc

*/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras B
animated; screenplay by Shotaro Suga
directed by Makoto Kamiya

by Bryant Frazer One of the more obnoxious trends in current filmmaking and distribution is the move towards cheapjack fansploitation movies. Masquerading as original, feature-film content, these low-budget theatrical and home-video releases are little more than expansive knock-offs of an existing, lucrative property that function as extended promos for yet another upcoming instalment of said franchise. In other words, they're commercials, bought and paid for by the very fanbase to which they're marketed. Not so long ago, we saw the theatrical bow of a decidedly sub-par feature animation, Star Wars: The Clone Wars, whose only reason for existence was its function as a come-on for the already-in-production Cartoon Network series. Then there's Resident Evil: Degeneration (henceforth Degeneration), an extended videogame cut-scene created to flog the upcoming release of AAA console title "Resident Evil 5". Taking place in the Capcom videogame's universe and filling in the narrative gap between "Resident Evil"s 4 and 5, it has nothing to do with the popular live-action film series starring Milla Jovovich.

Paul Blart: Mall Cop (2009) - Blu-ray Disc + Bedtime Stories (2008) - Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

PAUL BLART: MALL COP
*/**** Image B+ Sound B Extras C
starring Kevin James, Jayma Mays, Keir O'Donnell, Shirley Knight
screenplay by Kevin James & Nick Bakay
directed by Steve Carr

BEDTIME STORIES
ZERO STARS/**** Image A Sound A Extras D
starring Adam Sandler, Keri Russell, Guy Pearce, Russell Brand
screenplay by Matt Lopez and Tim Herlihy
directed by Adam Shankman

by Ian Pugh For Kevin James and his co-writer, the talking cat from "Sabrina the Teenage Witch", it's not enough that Paul Blart (James) is a fat moron prone to knocking things over with the sheer force of his girth--he must also be completely oblivious, fully convinced that he possesses more power and responsibilities as a mall cop than any reasonable person would believe. So what to do when Paul's newest trainee (Keir O'Donnell) turns out to be a Hans Gruber wannabe who takes over the mall with his hip young gang in a bid to clean it out? A feature-length parody of Die Hard has long stopped being an enticing prospect, given that Die Hard itself has been deconstructed to death by the fact of its enormous influence on the action genre (to the degree that the "Die Hard in an X" template actually became the dominant model for action movies in the 1990s), with the proverbial final nail driven in by a third sequel, Live Free or Die Hard, that concluded there was no point in still pretending our everyman hero was anything but invincible. As Paul Blart: Mall Cop sees it, the only way to endue the John McClane archetype with any tension is to make him fat and stupid. The first time we see Paul, he's shovelling food into his mouth, his sweater stained with perspiration from beneath his man-boobs, shortly before his hypoglycaemia kicks in and sidelines him from joining the police academy. But he's got a big heart or something, and that's what counts, right?

Seattle International Film Festival '09: Nurse.Fighter.Boy

***/****
starring Clark Johnson, Karen LeBlanc, Daniel J. Gordon
screenplay by Charles Officer and Ingrid Veninger
directed by Charles Officer

by Jefferson Robbins It's broad-strokes storytelling set in Toronto's Jamaican expatriate community, in which each character and situation is understood immediately, almost subconsciously. Night-shift nurse Jude (Karen LeBlanc) is herself a patient, suffering from a potentially fatal sickle-cell disorder. It's her son Ciel (Daniel J. Gordon) who keeps her going, both figuratively and metaphysically--he's a magical thinker, reaching back to Caribbean incantation and rootwork, crafting charms to preserve his mother's life. Then washed-up boxer Silence (Clark Johnson), a closed book, drifts into their sphere; manipulated by sharks into underground pit-fighting and treated by Jude for a head wound, he leaves behind a red kerchief, like a fairytale token. Silence is en route to redemption in a new career as a boxing coach for youth, but no one in Nurse.Fighter.Boy can make it alone. Small elements of the film suffer, as when a sexual affair is disposed of too easily--a risk in this kind of dialogue-light approach. But the way these characters fall into each other's orbit (Jude is drawn to the gorgeous reggae and R&B coming from Silence's window, without knowing who he is) illustrates how the strongest families are sometimes created by chance rather than by design. Director Charles Officer and cinematographer Steve Cosens paint in reds, blues, and golds but seem to recognize that few textures are more beautiful than a black woman's skin.

Anaconda (1997) - Blu-ray Disc

**½/**** Image B- Sound B-
starring Jennifer Lopez, Ice Cube, Jon Voight, Eric Stoltz
screenplay by Hans Bauer and Jim Cash & Jack Epps, Jr.
directed by Luis Llosa

by Walter Chaw Almost worth it just for Jon Voight's post-regurgitation wink, Luis Llosa's B-movie creature-feature Anaconda is a deadpan riff on the nature-amuck flicks of the mid-Seventies in general and Steven Spielberg's Jaws in particular. (Cinematographer Bill Butler shot both films.) It borrows the Moby Dick conceit of a mad hunter forcing a hapless crew to take a personal vision quest against an aquatic foe and post-modernizes it with a passel of genre in-references, an unusually dry script, and a supporting cast of accomplished character actors. The only real failure of the film in respect to its modest aspirations, in fact, is the snake itself, a frankly awful CGI phantom that destroys the tension with its every appearance. It's hard to be afraid of a glorified screen-saver.

Yes Man (2008) [Digital Copy Special Edition] - Blu-ray Disc

½*/**** Image A- Sound A Extras D
starring Jim Carrey, Zooey Deschanel, Bradley Cooper, Terence Stamp
screenplay by Nicholas Stoller and Jarrad Paul & Andrew Mogel, based on the novel by Danny Wallace
directed by Peyton Reed

by Walter Chaw I look at Jim Carrey nowadays with a little bit of bittersweetness, in that his attempts to go "legit" in movies like Man on the Moon and especially Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind were essentially swatted aside, dismissed as brief indulgences between talking-asshole gigs. I believe that Carrey is a serious guy, possibly a melancholy guy, certainly a smart guy--and I believe the closest anyone's come to finding the right vehicle for his elasticity is Charlie Kaufman. Maybe they'll work together again. Until then, Carrey's fate is to shoehorn into endlessly reducible slapstick romcoms like Peyton Reed's Yes Man--easy cash-grabs with an ephemeral shelf-life doomed to be referenced for its one or two scenes that make any impact before becoming ancient history. The formula for this shit is etched in tintype by now: the Lovesick Dork Protag is Carl (Carrey), the High Concept is that he pathologically rejects everything, and the object of his l'amour fou is avant-garde punk band frontwoman Allison (Zooey Deschanel™). Can this button-up, white-collar stiff (Carl's a loan officer) learn to embrace spontaneity and break free of the workaday while setting up his own quirky business and saving the world in the process? Yes, man.

Being There (1979) - Blu-ray Disc

*/**** Image C+ Sound C+ Extras D
starring Peter Sellers, Shirley MacLaine, Jack Warden, Melvyn Douglas
screenplay by Jerzy Kosinski, based on his novel
directed by Hal Ashby

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Arguably the last film of note for New American Cinema director Hal Ashby, Being There (adapted from the Jerzy Kosinski novel by Kosinski himself) is oft-cited as a withering satire of punditry when to me it appears to be more a rather winsome look at the relationship between the artist and the audience. It suggests, after all, that it's not the messenger but the message--that a piece of art is only as important as the degree to which it's raked over by historians and critics, and that if there's a fundamental emptiness, a senselessness, in the creation of that art, then so be it. So long as the conduit is a true vessel for a larger cultural movement (like that reflected by television, for instance), 'gives a shit about the vessel anyway? More, Being There implies that the only true vessels might be empty ones.

Seattle International Film Festival '09: The Hurt Locker

***½/****
starring Jeremy Renner, Anthony Mackie, Brian Geraghty, Guy Pearce
screenplay by Mark Boal
directed by Kathryn Bigelow

by Jefferson Robbins It's either a shame or a blessing for Kathryn Bigelow's tense Iraq War drama The Hurt Locker to emerge now rather than in 2004, the year of its setting. Back then, war fury was all the rage and might have doomed the movie--we had to believe that invading Iraq was the right thing to do, or why else had we buried 1,100 soldiers by the time George W. Bush won reelection? But just the same, we could have used this reminder of the casualties who were still walking and drawing breath. Seldom squeamish about sharing tight spaces with sweaty males, Bigelow climbs into the Humvee with the "Blasters" of the Bravo Company bomb squad as they defuse IEDs in occupied Baghdad. Sgt. William James (Jeremy Renner) is rotated into an existing bomb unit to replace a technician pulped by a shockwave (Guy Pearce, first unrecognizable, then dead); James keeps his captured bomb triggers in a crate under his bunk--the locker of the title, though so could Iraq as a whole be. For their part, his new teammates are sorting through guilt over their fellow's demise (Brian Geraghty's Specialist Own Eldridge) or clinging to safety measures and protocols (Anthony Mackie's Sgt. J.T. Sanborn) that James knows can't possibly save him every time. Each disabled bomb is a sexual rush, calling for a cigarette afterward. He can't not accept the challenge, even that of a bomb stitched into a child's dead body. For all three men, the homefront--where James has an estranged wife (Evangeline Lilly) and a baby--is at best an abstraction, at worst a distraction from their own hovering doom. In their life in the camp, they are in death, with practically every interior (even the auto pool) a stark, institutional white, like Heaven's crappy waiting room. Bigelow, getting claustrophobically close with her camera and working from Mark Boal's eloquent but unflashy script, maintains a grenade-pin tension in the bombwork scenes but, surprisingly, lets out too much slack as James tries to take the fight to the hidden triggermen who detonate their payloads from afar. Ralph Fiennes cameos as a British merc who gets the Blasters tangled up in a sniper duel, leading to Bigelow's most effective image: while the gunmen lie in wait for the enemy to slip from cover, flies nestle on their faces, as if these men who rushed to embrace war are already dead.

Changing Lanes (2002) [Widescreen] - DVD|Blu-ray Disc

***½/****
DVD - Image A Sound A Extras B-
BD - Image A- Sound A- Extras B-
starring Ben Affleck, Samuel L. Jackson, Toni Collette, Amanda Peet
screenplay by Chap Taylor and Michael Tolkin
directed by Roger Michell

by Walter Chaw If not for its target-audience ending, Changing Lanes is, in nearly every measure of quality, a Seventies movie about helpless protagonists adrift in the midst of an insurmountable system with which they are eternally at odds. It deals with consequences in a way that films just do not anymore and presents two actors who have perhaps never been better in roles indicated by nuance, ambiguity, and intelligence. The screenplay, by newcomer Chap Taylor and (brilliant) veteran Michael Tolkin, is wonderfully balanced and observant and matched step for step in tone and pace by Christopher Tellefson's superior editing and Roger Michell's surprisingly chill directorial eye.

Seattle International Film Festival '09: Humpday

***/****
starring Mark Duplass, Joshua Leonard, Alycia Delmore
written and directed by Lynn Shelton

by Jefferson Robbins SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. The difference in intimacy between male friendship and married companionship gets laid bare in the opening minutes of Humpday. There's the comfortable, cuddled body contact shared by young Seattle office drone Ben (Mark Duplass) and his wife, Anna (Alycia Delmore). And then there's the bellowing, clenching reunion of Ben and free-spirited old buddy Andrew (Joshua Leonard), who, not seen in a decade, arrives unannounced on the redeye from Mexico. "I respect the FUCK outta you, man!" Andrew declares, and it's both mutual and palpable--even though Ben bunks Andrew down in his storeroom, along with all his other old memories. The two chums pick up where they left off, when Ben was young and irresponsible, leaving Anna no point of entry into their fraternal duprass. Soon a mix of inebriation, macho brinkmanship, and terror of growing old with no lasting accomplishment drives the two straight friends to plan a video in which they will have sex with each other--for the sake of art. (Ben at first wants to title it "Tender Is the Butt.") They subsequently spend much of the movie papering over, debating, and justifying their pledge. Lynn Shelton's film--and the director appears in a supporting role, prodding Ben and Andrew towards commitment--is at its best in these easygoing, naturalistic, very funny scenes; she airs the discomfort of straight male friendship rituals, already heavy on grappling and the slapping of flesh, that suddenly become engorged with sexual threat or promise. A shame, then, that Humpday is heavy on foreplay but refrains, as do its lead characters, from consummation. After laughing so long at the mere discussion of straight male-on-male sex, imagine the cleansing indictment of the audience if we'd gotten beyond the second base of hotel-room rationalizations and bare-chested hugs. Shelton does offer us an extratextual happy ending, though: the sight of Joshua Leonard, terrorized on tape for The Blair Witch Project all those years ago, at last finding something to love in a camcorder's viewscreen.

Angels & Demons (2009)

*½/****
starring Tom Hanks, Ewan McGregor, Ayelet Zurer, Armin Mueller-Stahl
screenplay by David Koepp and Akiva Goldsman, based on the novel by Dan Brown
directed by Ron Howard

by Ian Pugh The preferiti are the cardinals most likely to be elected Pope following the death of the previous one. So I learned from Ron Howard's Angels & Demons--twice. It's a point that is adequately explained in a news report serving as the film's prologue, then superfluously explained in one of hero-cum-tour guide Robert Langdon's information-dense lines of dialogue. From there, it appears as if Angels & Demons will take a willing leap off the same cliff The Da Vinci Code did, annotating each excruciating historical detail for no other reason than to play WIKIPEDIA while spelling everything out in the most condescending way possible. Yet a strange thing happens around the movie's halfway mark: everyone stops defining and redefining the arcana--indeed, exposition practically ceases altogether as the characters are dragged between libraries and churches, spirited from one set-piece to the next, arriving just in the nick of time to face off against the killers or help save some poor bastard from getting burned alive. The shift in tone is sudden and dramatic--you could probably draw a fat line through the middle of Angels & Demons to delineate where the hand-holding lectures end and the linear procession of action sequences begins. How did that happen? As Opie will always be his unsubtle middlebrow self and co-screenwriter Akiva Goldsman will always be the guy who wrote Batman & Robin, I have no choice but to assume that the responsibility for this schism lies with the man whose name appears for the first time on this franchise: David Koepp.

Seattle International Film Festival '09: In the Loop

***/****
starring Peter Capaldi, Tom Hollander, Gina McKee, James Gandolfini
screenplay by Jesse Armstrong, Simon Blackwell, Armando Iannucci, Tony Roche
directed by Armando Iannucci

by Jefferson Robbins It's the Downing Street Memo actualized as comedy. Spun off from director Armando Iannucci's own 2005 BBC series "The Thick Of It", In the Loop broadens its scope from the backroom foibles of clueless, self-interested British MPs to encompass the American policy vultures, partisan hacks, and PTSD generals who devise, or are victimized by, war policy. Ported over wholesale from "The Thick Of It" is Peter Capaldi's bloodthirsty Malcolm Tucker, chief enforcer for the Prime Minister and an architect of profanity in the service of intimidation. (He builds heroic ziggurats of oaths, then bounces luckless junior officials down their jagged steps.) Tucker uses the gaffes of international development minister Simon Foster (Tom Hollander)--who publicly declares that war is "unforeseeable" on the eve of an Anglo-American military push in the Mideast--for political leverage, as do the warring forces inside the U.S. Pentagon itself. This pits the British contingent against their equally self-absorbed Beltway counterparts, including policy analyst Liza Weld (Anna Chlumsky--yes, that Anna Chlumsky), whose paper exposing the maladjusted intelligence feeding the war fever is itself being maladjusted by hawkish defense undersecretary Linton Barwick (David Rasche), and General George Miller (James Gandolfini), who fears the casualty projections for the oncoming clash. ("At the end of a war, you need some soldiers left, really," he pronounces, "or it looks like you've lost.") In the Loop works both as a Stateside showcase for Iannucci's floating-camera satire of ego-powered bureaucracy and as a marker for how British power must view itself today: a mere client state. Even the most powerful UK players are blown about by the Yank whirlwind, whether they're sexually buffaloed (Chris Addison's ministerial aide Toby, enamoured of wonkette Liza) or simply checkmated by well-applied Colonial ignorance (Tucker vs. Barwick, who molds Liza's objective pre-war analysis into a casus belli: "Take out all the conditions... Like 'might have found,' make that 'have found'"). By the time Tucker is reduced to nonverbal spluttering in the United Nations' meditation chamber, the course of Empire is clearly set--and not by its own choosing.

Never Say Never Again (1983) - Blu-ray Disc

*½/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras B+
starring Sean Connery, Klaus Maria Brandauer, Max Von Sydow, Edward Fox
screenplay by Lorenzo Semple, Jr.
directed by Irvin Kershner

by Ian Pugh After decades of legal wrangling, producer Kevin McClory had finally won the right to make an autonomous James Bond flick out of Ian Fleming's Thunderball, and 1983 seemed like the perfect time to capitalize on it, what with resident Bond Roger Moore's age catching up with him and the original series running out of steam as a consequence. A household name, the character of Bond has enough cultural heft and influence that he warrants interpretations from independent sources besides, and given that Sean Connery was lured out of a twelve-year retirement from the character--hence the title, Never Say Never Again--as well as the room for improvement left by the original Thunderball, the film had the potential to be more than just a cynical cash-in.

A Bug's Life (1998) - [2-Disc Collector's Edition] DVD + Blu-ray Disc

**/****
DVD - Image A+ Sound A+ Extras A+
BD - Image A+ Sound A+ Extras A+
screenplay by Andrew Stanton and Donald McEnery & Bob Shaw
directed by John Lasseter and Andrew Stanton

by Walter Chaw The Seven Samurai by way of ¡Three Amigos!, Pixar's A Bug's Life stands as the company's sole artistic disappointment, suffering from a weightlessness that is particularly troubling given that it is also the only Pixar production whose characters don't interact with the human world. The revelation embedded in its relative failure is that the animation studio is better at satire than it is at fantasy--not a terrible thing, for sure (after all, anime legend Hayao Miyazaki has never made a film independent of the human realm), the picture still points to the damning difficulty of creating a fantasy unto itself and based on alien quirk that is more than an exercise in Flintstones-era visual punning wrapped around a familiar underdog-uplift narrative.

On His Own Terms: FFC Interviews James Toback

TYSON **½/****

directed by James Toback

Mike Tyson isn't a difficult guy to figure out--or, at least, he doesn't think he is anymore. Given the opportunity to wax nostalgic for the entirety of James Toback's documentary Tyson, the former champ indulges in a series of anecdotes taking us through his training under Cus D'Amato, his rape conviction, and the infamous "Bite Fight," concluding that it could all be traced back to his bullied childhood. From there, it becomes easier to understand that everything in his life--from his demeanour in the ring to his hunger for sexual conquest--was dictated by a desire to push himself to the edge, something he did for the better part of twenty-five years until inevitably losing the eye of the tiger. ("Old too soon, smart too late," Tyson states in a chillingly matter-of-fact manner.) But for all his exorcised demons, he carries with him a great deal of bitterness and obliviousness. Regarding the "ten or twenty million" he won in a hundred-million dollar lawsuit against Don King as "some small amount," Tyson clearly maintains the perhaps-unavoidable, unshakeable detachment from reality attendant to living a superstar's lifestyle. As obvious as Tyson may seem, there's a fascinating conundrum to be found in its subject's recitation of the most famous lines from "The Ballad of Reading Gaol," which invites questions as to how and when he was hit by the epiphanies repeated herein--and what, precisely, he's still missing to complete that sense of self-awareness. Because this man fits so comfortably within Toback's autobiographical pantheon of poetic brutes leading double lives, one gets the distinct feeling that the filmmaker has attempted to fill in any thematic gaps with expressions of his own auteurism. Backed by a cacophony of conflicting, overlapping voices (Tyson's own), the shifting-split-screen aesthetic occasionally draws insight into how the boxer's whirlwind existence has affected his mind, yet as a drum beaten relentlessly, it more often suggests a conscious link back to Black and White (Toback's first narrative film to feature Tyson) than a visual representation Tyson's duplicitous or schizophrenic tendencies. As such, Tyson's number one problem is that it fancies itself as not so much a genuine portrait of its subject as a general dissertation on the follies of life. Make no mistake that the hour-and-a-half we spend with this man is an engaging one--particularly considering that the most stinging indictments of character come from Tyson himself, whether he realizes it or not. Ultimately, Tyson is just a little too comfortable with leaving us the simple platitude that choices are made and every decision has a consequence.-IP

May 10, 2009|I was largely oblivious of this man, who had somehow slipped beneath my radar until editor Bill kindly offered me a comprehensive crash-course in preparation for Tyson. But my reactions to the films of James Toback were perhaps easy to predict. His wonderful hyphenate debut, 1978's Fingers, knocked me on my ass with astonishing ease, and I quickly recognized the familiar tropes that have been dissected by countless critics over the course of Toback's storied career: mothers, black culture, double lives, three-way orgies... When we finally met at Boston's Liberty Hotel, Mr. Toback answered my questions in lengthy, lecturing paragraphs about how his second documentary in twenty years in some sense deals with how much of himself he sees in the ex-heavyweight champ--a point made clear long before he ever vocalized it outright. I suppose the same could be said for the rest of his work: an overwhelming percentage of what he has to say in Tyson can be traced back to the major themes of his first credited screenplay, The Gambler. From the way the conversation shifted in tone when I started talking about Tyson through the prism of his other films, I think Toback was pulling rank as a self-conscious auteur. Recognizing me as a young turk who had done his homework (and a stringent believer in the auteur theory to boot), he switched from his standardized patter to general philosophizing that, in its pre-emptive critical deflection, effectively rendered any real conversation moot. (Three-ways sadly went undiscussed.) As such, there's a palpable familiarity to the whole thing: his responses weren't canned, exactly, but they're definitely reflections of philosophies already laid bare on the silver screen for all to see.

FILM FREAK CENTRAL: So how are you doing?
JAMES TOBACK: Other than no cartilage in my knees, the movie's going great. I've been very pleasantly surprised by this almost unanimously great reaction. Usually my movies have separated people. There are a lot of devotees who gets excited and people who sort of can't wait for a movie of mine to come out so they can shoot arrows in my neck. And then in between a lot of people in who kind of feel ambivalent. And this movie, of all movies, I was sure would have that kind of split, and so far it's been almost like Shrek in the way it's come across. Which I can't explain, except that I think the surprise of the way Tyson comes across wins over most of the people in that group of potential antagonists, where they go expecting to feel anger and rage towards him, and they end up being, in a way, disarmed.

Star Trek (2009)

***½/****
starring John Cho, Ben Cross, Bruce Greenwood, Leonard Nimoy
screenplay by Roberto Orci & Alex Kurtzman
directed by J.J. Abrams

by Walter Chaw My long-held suspicion of J.J. Abrams as a no-trick pony has thawed completely now that after producing the exceptional Cloverfield, he has directed a reboot of Gene Roddenberry's beloved "Star Trek" that walks the fine line between absolute seriousness and absolute cheese and does so in about the exact same, smart, swashbuckling way as the '60s TV show, to which this movie serves not as a prequel, but as a delicious alternate possibility. Abrams's Star Trek is faithful to Roddenberry's vision in every way, including a restoration of the sexiness and spunk that's been largely lost to decades of syndication. It's easy to forget that the first interracial kiss on television belongs to the original series--not to mention all those ripped-shirt fights, tumbles with green girls, and "Bizarro-version" facial hair. The picture is faithful simultaneously to the spirit of this time, joining what looks to be a spate of films with apocalyptic visions of entire planets destroyed by unimaginable calamity. Spry and well-written, Star Trek plays up the idea of individual heroism for the collective good in high Trek fashion and, fascinatingly, works in the clay of deep-set parental issues to give its young characters the psychological framework for evolution in this new reality. If this James T. Kirk (Chris Pine) is more of a brawler and a rake than Shatner's rakish brawler, blame it on the premature loss of daddy; if this Spock (Zachary Quinto) has his humanity closer to the skin than the other Spock (Leonard Nimoy, who has a sizeable role), blame it on mommy (Winona Ryder). Yet for all its weighted subtext, it avoids the self-seriousness of Christopher Nolan's Batman films and Bryan Singer's Superman Returns, finding in its material the spirit of discovery and bonhomie that made the franchise in its heyday one of the most affecting bits of popular relational drama on television.

Sin City (2005) [Theatrical & Recut/Extended/Unrated Versions] - Blu-ray Disc

Frank Miller's Sin City
****/**** Image A Sound A Extras A
starring Jessica Alba, Benicio Del Toro, Brittany Murphy, Clive Owen
screenplay by Robert Rodriguez, based on the graphic novels by Frank Miller
directed by Frank Miller and Robert Rodriguez

by Walter Chaw Until Frank Miller's Sin City (hereafter Sin City), maverick Mexican director Robert Rodriguez frustrated the hell out of me: here's this guy with all the talent in the world--an eye, an ear, an internal metronome as unerring as a clock tick--making incoherent movies literally without finished screenplays. Falling off high wires without nets and trying to look cool doing it--it ain't smooth, man, it's arrogance and it's misplaced. I thought he'd spent himself on flotsam like the last two Spy Kids flicks, thought he'd really screwed the pooch on a fiasco like Once Upon a Time In Mexico, on which he mistook Sergio Leone's formalist genre Diaspora for a mess of ideas trailing camera flourishes. But here, right before he unleashes some 3-D thing about a shark boy, Rodriguez slides in a movie for which he resigned from the Directors' Guild of America just so he could credit comic book legend Frank Miller as his co-director. Here, in Sin City, is what Robert Rodriguez can do with brutal, draconian structure (what's harsher than the cell of a comic-book panel?); here, finally, is productive fruit from his reputation as a rebel without a crew. Here's Sin City down low, on the QT, and very, hush hush: the most anti-Hollywood Hollywood picture since Kill Bill, and a film that, likewise, feels like some kind of miracle it was ever produced, much less released.

Nanking (2007) - DVD

**½/**** Image A Sound A
directed by Bill Guttentag & Dan Sturman

by Alex Jackson Bill Guttentag and Dan Sturman's 90-minute documentary on the 1937 Nanking Massacre isn't so much reductive or simplistic as it is overachieving. The film suggests several promising avenues of discussion but stops there, at the level of overview, leaving you frustrated and hungry. As I felt similarly unsatisfied by the Ken Burns mini-series The Civil War, it occurs to me that the problem is one not of brevity but of excess ambition. With several hours at his disposal, Burns tried and failed to meet the likely-futile goal of creating the definitive document of the American Civil War. Even allowing for the decrease in scale, Guttentag and Sturman shouldn't have expected to sum up the entirety of the Nanking Massacre in a scant hour-and-a-half. By trying to tell us everything about the Nanking Massacre, Nanking ultimately tells us very little.

WarGames (1983) [25th Anniversary Edition] + Saturday Night Fever (1977)/Staying Alive (1983) [Double Feature] - DVDs|Saturday Night Fever [30th Anniversary Special Collector's Edition]- Blu-ray Disc

War Games
***½/**** Image B Sound C Extras A
starring Matthew Broderick, Dabney Coleman, John Wood, Ally Sheedy
screenplay by Lawrence Lasker & Walter F. Parkes
directed by John Badham

SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER
****/****
DVD - Image B Sound B+ Extras C
BD - Image A Sound A Extras B-
starring John Travolta, Karen Gorney, Barry Miller, Joseph Cali
screenplay by Norman Wexler
directed by John Badham

STAYING ALIVE
ZERO STARS/**** Image C+ Sound B+
starring John Travolta, Cynthia Rhodes, Finola Hughes, Steve Inwood
screenplay by Sylvester Stallone and Norman Wexler
directed by Sylvester Stallone

by Walter Chaw I hadn't realized until I watched the 25^th Anniversary Edition DVD of it how intimately WarGames is embedded in my psyche. I saw it in the theatre as a ten-year-old in 1983 and, for the rest of that decade (the prime of my excited filmgoing experience), I didn't know that movies were ever different. The first time, in fact, that I recognized that movies were human was the first time they revealed themselves as something that could fail to inspire any kind of response at all--and I wonder if that initial moment of disappointment had more to do with the development of my cynicism than any one picture's deficiency. Film is a progressive addiction, says one theory: the more sophisticated you get as a viewer, the harder it is to find the fix. WarGames presented me with the idea of eroticism through mild scatological exhibitionism. It had a young man in his room, alone with a young woman, excusing himself to urinate in the next room--an act unthinkable to me as a ten-year-old, and holding with it the thrill of taboo. The next time they meet, the world starts to explode and, better yet, the girl traps the boy between her legs when he tries to edge by.

Ghosts of Girlfriends Past (2009)

ZERO STARS/****
starring Matthew McConaughey, Jennifer Garner, Breckin Meyer, Michael Douglas
screenplay by Jon Lucas & Scott Moore
directed by Mark Waters

by Walter Chaw Watching Ghosts of Girlfriends Past, a musty relic of Eisner's reign at Disney that first dreamed Ben Affleck as its star and a decade later settled on Matthew McConaughey (opposite, in some weird nepotistic recompense, Mrs. Affleck, Jennifer Garner), is excellent justification for the crib death of cynical, Eisner-hijacked, RKO-minted philosophies like Commerce over Genius. It's a retelling, I'm embarrassed to need to articulate, of Dickens's A Christmas Carol that substitutes Scrooge with serial womanizer Connor Mead (McConaughey) and Marley with old philanderer Uncle Wayne (Michael Douglas, doing a broad lounge-lizard caricature the spitting image of a mummified hybrid of Robert Evans and Howard Hefner). On the eve of brother Paul's (Breckin Meyer) marriage to shrill harridan Sandra (Lacey Chabert), Connor is visited by Wayne and the Ghosts of Girlfriends Past/Present/Future to show him that true love exists in the world beyond one-night-stands with supermodels--that it in fact exists between oily Connor and first love Jenny (Garner). What this means for the audience gaping in slack-jawed awe at this thing is a good thirty minutes of unearned sentiment tacked onto the end of a noxious payload of open misogyny, fag jokes, and gags that fall square on their face. Very simply, it's the most appalling, hateful, reptilian, inept film I've seen since Love Actually, and I wish I could say that I'm surprised that it was directed by Mark Waters and written by the braintrust behind Four Christmases.

X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009)

*/****
starring Hugh Jackman, Liev Schrieber, Danny Huston, Ryan Reynolds
screenplay by David Benioff and Skip Woods
directed by Gavin Hood

by Walter Chaw The action sequences are bad, the plot is bad... Hugh Jackman? He's fine. Everything you might expect, in other words, from X-Men Origins: Wolverine, wherein that most popular of muties (although I always preferred Gambit, marking me as about 42% gay) receives his first official vehicle with shaky Gavin Hood at the wheel. Was it the deadening piece of shit Tsotsi or the gravid piece of shit Rendition that convinced them Hood was the right person for this gravid, deadening piece of shit? True to form, the movie is laden with misplaced gravitas, magic-hour tableaux, and awkward drivel that makes me think that of the film's two credited writers, it's Hitman/Swordfish scribe Skip Woods and not 25^th Hour scribe David Benioff who took the final run at the screenplay. ("Now I know why the moon is lonely," says our macho man of action Wolvie (Jackman) at one point--and the audience howls.) It has a Watchmen opening montage following Wolvie and brother Sabretooth (Liev Schreiber) through history's most picturesque battles (Trenches! Beaches! Paddies!) before they're finally enlisted by mysterious government stooge Stryker (Danny Huston), who has a plan for these and other genetic misfits. Think of it as "X-Men: Episode One", as dorks are encouraged to trainspot famous mutants in the background while the foreground gets cluttered with lots of bad dialogue, grammar-school sentimentality, and oodles of special effects.