Film Freak Central

Top Gun: Maverick (2022)

***½/****
starring Tom Cruise, Miles Teller, Jennifer Connelly, Val Kilmer
screenplay by Ehren Kruger and Eric Warren Singer and Christopher McQuarrie
directed by Joseph Kosinski

by Walter Chaw Joseph Kosinski's Top Gun: Maverick (hereafter Maverick) does everything the Tony Scott original did well a little bit better and doesn't bother with the rest. What drives this legacy sequel is the sobriety with which it addresses the passage of time--the existential horror of being the oldest person at the bar, of all those pictures that look like what you think you still look like, of the toll of watching your children outgrow you while every anchor you have to this world withers and dies. It is, in other words, a spectacular action film and a mature character drama whose closest analogue might be Danny Boyle's T2 Trainspotting--a film that, likewise, took its cue from a showy and popular first film and forged from it a work of real substance and surprising pathos. What's most impressive is how balanced Maverick feels. Its action component is plotted out like an elaborate, aerial heist flick with the stakes obvious and the steps delineated cleanly and simply, so that when it finally comes time to set the dominos in motion and things inevitably go wrong, it's clear how they went wrong. The picture's dramatic component is as carefully metered: the love interest and her expectations; the lost father/orphaned son dynamic and how to salvage it; the old rivals-turned-friends and what they owe each other at the end. Maverick is a clockwork, a model of efficiency and effective storytelling; there are multiple avenues to appreciating this movie. I was afraid a sequel to a macho, homoerotic recruitment video bankrolled by the United States military would have no sense of its silliness. I'm happy to be wrong.

Moonfall (2022)

***/****
starring Halle Berry, Patrick Wilson, John Bradley, Donald Sutherland
screenplay by Roland Emmerich & Harald Kloser & Spenser Cohen
directed by Roland Emmerich

by Walter Chaw Between The Day After Tomorrow and the new Moonfall, Roland Emmerich has become our unlikely climate disaster Tierisius: Oedipus's blind seer, dispensing fair warning to a population not paying any attention. In the earlier film, global warming causes a new Ice Age and an exodus of American refugees looking for sanctuary in Mexico, while Moonfall sees the entire west coast flooded and essentially everyone at sea level in the United States trying to get to Colorado. Both ideas are ripe with satiric irony, animated with a sense of gallows humour about how extraordinarily shortsighted American leadership is in the face of obvious signs and portents. Oh, and science, of course, which should have been enough once the evidence of our own eyes somehow proved inadequate. Even Moonfall's ultimate revelation--something about AI and space arks and a running gag about Elon Musk--speaks brilliantly, however intentionally, to our primate desire to conflate the hoarding of generational wealth with genius, when all the wealthy really want to do is escape the rapidly-changing planet they've strip-mined for its resources. All that, plus a broad redux of H.G. Wells's The First Men In the Moon, and, kids, we got ourselves the smart and unpretentious version of Don't Look Up.

The 355 (2022)

½*/****
starring Diane Kruger, Penélope Cruz, Jessica Chastain, Lupita Nyong'o
screenplay by Theresa Rebeck and Simon Kinberg
directed by Simon Kinberg

by Walter Chaw There's a moment early on in Simon Kinberg's execrable The 355 where Lupita Nyong'o, playing cyber-security expert Khadijah, is walking on a pier swarming with commercial fishermen, tailing a bad guy by holding her phone up like she's looking at her phone camera while it's recording him. After the third or fourth time they've locked eyes, she declares, with total seriousness, that she's been "made." No fucking shit you were made. If Lupita Nyong'o were walking along holding up a phone and staring at me from six feet away, I like to think I'd notice. Later, the reason given for Colombian psychologist Graciela (Penélope Cruz) tagging along on a very dangerous mission is that some dead guy's phone has been locked with her fingerprint. Because I'm able to remember that Khadijah is a cyber-security expert, and given that Graciela's fingerprint-bearing finger is sitting right there, I'm wondering why someone else's fingerprint couldn't be assigned to the phone. I'm also wondering where Sebastian Stan's CIA agent Nick found a crisp white T-shirt that doesn't stain when you spill coffee on it. That's some NASA shit, probably the technology everyone should actually be fighting over. Then there's the conversation where Graciela's son, over the phone, asks for "Duvalins," and Graciela responds, "Yes, I will bring you your favourite candy," which...okay, level with me--which one of them needed to know that Duvalins is candy? The first thing is a problem with direction; the next a script issue; the next, direction again; and the last another script issue. Meaning that while there might be enough blame to go around, I'm gonna put the bulk of it on co-writer/director Kinberg.

Malignant (2021) - Blu-ray + Digital Code

***½/**** Image A Sound A Extras C
starring Annabelle Wallis, Maddie Hasson, George Young, Michole Briana White
screenplay by Akela Cooper
directed by James Wan

by Walter Chaw James Wan's Malignant is spectacularly, unabashedly fucking nuts. Not nuts in a random way, nuts in the way Oliver Stone's The Hand is--or, more to the point, Brian De Palma's Sisters. It's what the Dario Argento The Phantom of the Opera should have been: not entirely giallo, not without elements of high opera; a classic "madwoman" picture as well as a possession movie. Also, that voice on the phone from Black Christmas, and also a loving homage to Stuart Gordon, and also... Malignant is a joyful mishmash that plays like a NOW That's What I Call Music compilation for horror fans. It's the North by Northwest of delirious genre fare: Bava if you want it, the most gothic Hammer if it pleases you, complete with a Universal Monsters monster I kind of can't believe someone hasn't done before. I'm not giving anything away by saying the cosplay is going to be lit.

TIFF '21: Wrap-up

by Bill Chambers I've been covering TIFF for, gulp, 25 years now. If I didn't expect to mark this silver anniversary in the confines of my living room, I have no complaints. Some of the show ponies were geoblocked for Canadian press or offline altogether, but although I'm fully vaccinated, I wasn't about to risk transmission or stew for hours in a mask to see the May-December romance Dear Evan Hansen, or another remake of Dune, or a Secret Steven Soderbergh Screening that turned out to be, lol, Kafka, which is almost as good a prank as moving Best Actor to the end of the Academy Awards ceremony. I did at least get to stream my white whale, Jane Campion's The Power of the Dog, so no regrets. No regrets, no complaints.

Malignant (2021)

***½/****
starring Annabelle Wallis, Maddie Hasson, George Young, Michole Briana White
screenplay by Akela Cooper
directed by James Wan

by Walter Chaw James Wan's Malignant is spectacularly, unabashedly fucking nuts. Not nuts in a random way, nuts in the way Oliver Stone's The Hand is--or, more to the point, Brian De Palma's Sisters. It's what the Dario Argento The Phantom of the Opera should have been: not entirely giallo, not without elements of high opera; a classic "madwoman" picture as well as a possession movie. Also, that voice on the phone from Black Christmas, and also a loving homage to Stuart Gordon, and also... Malignant is a joyful mishmash that plays like a NOW That's What I Call Music compilation for horror fans. It's the North by Northwest of delirious genre fare: Bava if you want it, the most gothic Hammer if it pleases you, complete with a Universal Monsters monster I kind of can't believe someone hasn't done before. I'm not giving anything away by saying the cosplay is going to be lit.

Ad Astra (2019)

**/****
starring Brad Pitt, Liv Tyler, Ruth Negga, Tommy Lee Jones
written by James Gray & Ethan Gross
directed by James Gray

by Walter Chaw James Gray's Ad Astra is the sort of movie people who don't like Terrence Malick think Terrence Malick movies are like. It's overwritten to the point of self-parody in some places (consider a scene aboard a Mars-bound shuttle where our hero's patrilineage is mentioned, reacted to, discussed at length, and then brought up again), with a voiceover that doesn't invite introspection so much as comparisons to Harrison Ford's reluctant Blade Runner exposition. Imagine the version of this film with about a quarter of the lengthy chit-chat--or even one that doesn't mistrust its lead's performance so much that a scene where he's acting out his betrayal isn't underscored with narration: "Goddamnit, they're using me!" It's such a handsome film, with cinematography by Interstellar's Hoyte van Hoytema, that one is inclined to forgive this second consecutive attempt by Gray to make Apocalypse Now, except that it plays unforgivably like a "For Dummies" version of an ecstatic picture. Imagine the Carlos Reygadas version, or the Peter Strickland one (Ad Astra most resembles a super-chatty Berberian Sound Studio). Or just watch the Claire Denis version, High Life, which asks many of the same big questions as Ad Astra without asking them explicitly. Nor trying to answer them.

Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood (2019)

****/****
starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Brad Pitt, Margot Robbie, Al Pacino
written and directed by Quentin Tarantino

by Walter Chaw It was a late summer night, humid and low, in the "hill" area of downtown Seattle, outside a coffee shop called "Coffee Messiah" festooned wall-to-wall with tacky tchotchkes featuring our Lord and saviour. I spent a couple of college summers there and in the San Juans with my friend, Keith. I'd met him at a Primus concert where an entire gymnasium had been converted into a mosh pit. We locked onto each other and agreed that if one of us went down, the other would pick him up. We've been friends now for almost thirty years. So we were standing outside Coffee Jesus sometime in the early Nineties with two other friends I'd made through Keith: Sam and Dan. Dan, tall, white, and awkward, was playing around with being a DJ; Sam was a squat Jewish kid with a chip on his shoulder and a lot of hours spent in a gym. A guy walked up to us swinging nunchucks, shirtless and raving. Sam smiled, put his hand out and talked to him until he put his sticks away. The guy clapped us on the shoulder as though we were old chums he'd run into on the street, and left. Sam was our peacemaker and our enforcer. I noticed after it all went down that we'd automatically moved a step behind Sam when trouble came. Sam would go on to law enforcement and a sad, sickening stint as a 9-1-1 operator that haunted him for years after. A groomsman at my wedding and one of the best friends I'll ever have in this life, Sam killed himself last week, and I'll never be alright again. I'll never feel as safe. Not in the same way.

Bumblebee (2019) - Blu-ray + DVD + Digital

***½/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras C
starring Hailee Steinfeld, John Cena, Jorge Lendeborg Jr., John Ortiz
written by Christina Hodson
directed by Travis Knight

by Walter Chaw Travis Knight's Bumblebee is a tone-perfect amalgamation of The Love Bug and The Iron Giant. It is, in other words, both a throwback summer programmer (perhaps mistakenly released during the Christmas season) and a sophisticated parable about coming of age in a divided America. It casts Hailee Steinfeld as Charlie, a gearhead who loves her car more than she's interested in fielding the advances of the awkward neighbour kid pining after her. And then it has her dealing with the loss of a parent as she finds her way through an already-difficult period in a young person's development. It wisely hires Knight, who at Laika Studios produced the unexpectedly sensitive and introspective ParaNorman and Kubo and the Two Strings (the latter of which he directed), and screenwriter Christina Hodson (the woman entrusted with upcoming films about Harley Quinn and Batgirl), with uncredited contributions from Kelly Fremon Craig, writer-director of the sensitive The Edge of Seventeen, which also starred Steinfeld. In placing gifted, effortlessly diverse people before and behind the camera and then watching as the lingering hostility around the misogynistic, racist, xenophobic Michael Bay cock operas that have made the Transformers franchise to this point disgusting and toxic just melt away, Bumblebee becomes a prototype for the modern reboot. It's amazing how the right choices among topline talent make all the work of not only avoiding offense, but also providing uplift, seem a magical side-effect rather than some laborious and arcane undertaking. (It's the difference, for instance, between Wonder Woman and Captain Marvel.) Knight's Bumblebee is the Transformers franchise as it should have been from the start: on the one hand a nostalgic, sometimes exciting, often hilarious story about the coming to earth of sentient machines engaged in perpetual war who can camouflage themselves as terrestrial vehicles and appliances--and on the other, a clever parable about how the toys (and cars) we grow up with sometimes provide the guardrails for how we view accountability as we get older. By the end of Bumblebee, the girl and her 'bot arrive at the mature--and, more importantly, healthy--decision to move on from each other. Another franchise after The Last Jedi making the daring suggestion that living in the past is death.

TIFF '18: Transit + Shadow

TRANSIT
*½/****
starring Franz Rogowski, Paula Beer, Godehard Giese, Lilien Batman
screenplay by Christian Petzold, based on the novel by Anna Seghers
directed by Christian Petzold

Ying
**/****
starring Deng Chao, Sun Li, Zheng Kai, Wang Qianyuan
screenplay by Li Wei & Zhang Yimou
directed by Zhang Yimou

by Bill Chambers If Christian Petzold's previous film, Phoenix, felt like a joke reverse-engineered with the slightest of pretexts to get us to a killer payoff, Transit feels more like his version of "The Aristocrats!", a shaggy-dog story intoxicated with its own brutal rambling--here almost literalized by third-person narration from a bartender (Matthias Brandt), who paraphrases conversations he had with our hero that are comically steeped in minutiae--on its way to a glib punchline. In Paris during the Occupation, Georg (Franz Rogowski, a downmarket Joaquin Phoenix) is entrusted with delivering two pieces of mail to a renowned novelist squirrelled away in a hotel: a letter from the man's estranged wife, and papers that will help him escape to freedom. The writer, alas, is but a stain when Georg gets there, and soon after he agrees to smuggle a dying man (Grégoire Monsaingeon) into Marseilles, where he can kill two birds with one stone by taking care of the author's unfinished business. Transit generates a moment of real frisson when Georg hops off the train in Marseilles: everything is modern, or at least postwar, including the melting-pot citizenry. I'm sure there's a definitive answer as to whether this is WWII as modern-dress Shakespeare, but for the rest of the movie, whenever something as benign as a contemporary bus advertisement appears, the film briefly and instantly becomes a "Man in the High Castle"-esque work of speculative fiction that curdles the blood, given how frighteningly close we are to resurrecting Hitler with the rise of nationalism on the world stage. One might ask why the characters are still dealing with "letters of transit" like they're in Casablanca (i.e., where are the computers?), but I took that as commentary on the dinosaur ideals of fascism itself. If fascism does one thing well, it's "rolling back" progress, currently the Republican party's favourite pastime.

The Foreigner (2017) - Blu-ray + DVD Combo

**½/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
starring Jackie Chan, Pierce Brosnan
screenplay by David Marconi, based on the novel The Chinaman by Stephen Leather
directed by Martin Campbell

by Walter Chaw Martin Campbell's The Foreigner, based on Stephen Leather's novel The Chinaman, showcases the great, the incomparable, Jackie Chan as a grief-stricken man with a Special Forces past, galvanized into action when an IRA bomb kills his only, and last, daughter in a chichi London retail block. Having failed in his attempts to bribe London officials for names, Chan's Quan, restaurateur/owner of The Happy Peacock, focuses his attentions on former IRA/Sinn Fein leader Hennessy (Pierce Brosnan). Quan terrorizes the terrorists, stakes them out at Hennessy's farmhouse/fortress, and generally makes life miserable for everyone until he finds the people responsible for his daughter's death. It's a role that Liam Neeson would have played had there not been a recent hue and cry over yellowface and whitewashing, and so Chan, in the twilight of his action career, is forced into somewhat thankless service in a film that wants to be more like The Fourth Protocol than like Police Story. The Foreigner isn't a great film, but it's an interesting one for all its mediocrity.

The Foreigner (2017)

**½/****
starring Jackie Chan, Pierce Brosnan
screenplay by David Marconi, based on the novel The Chinaman by Stephen Leather
directed by Martin Campbell

by Walter Chaw Martin Campbell's The Foreigner, based on Stephen Leather's novel The Chinaman, showcases the great, the incomparable, Jackie Chan as a grief-stricken man with a Special Forces past, galvanized into action when an IRA bomb kills his only, and last, daughter in a chichi London retail block. Having failed in his attempts to bribe London officials for names, Chan's Quan, restaurateur/owner of The Happy Peacock, focuses his attentions on former IRA/Sinn Fein leader Hennessy (Pierce Brosnan). Quan terrorizes the terrorists, stakes them out at Hennessy's farmhouse/fortress, and generally makes life miserable for everyone until he finds the people responsible for his daughter's death. It's a role that Liam Neeson would have played had there not been a recent hue and cry over yellowface and whitewashing, and so Chan, in the twilight of his action career, is forced into somewhat thankless service in a film that wants to be more like The Fourth Protocol than like Police Story. The Foreigner isn't a great film, but it's an interesting one for all its mediocrity.

TIFF '17: Man Hunt + Happy End

ManHunt
**/****
starring Zhang Hanyu, Masaharu Fukuyama, Qi Wei, Ha Jiwon
screenplay by Nip Wan Fung, Gordon Chan, James Yuen, Itaru Era, Ku Zoi Lam, Maria Wong, Sophia Yeh, based on the novel Kimiyo funnu no kawa wo watare by Juko Nishimura
directed by John Woo

HAPPY END
**/****
starring Isabelle Huppert, Jean-Louis Trintignant, Mathieu Kassovitz, Toby Jones
written and directed by Michael Haneke

by Bill Chambers About five seconds into John Woo's Man Hunt (no relation to that Fritz Lang movie with George Sanders in a cave), there's a freeze-frame. Followed shortly by another. It's glorious. Digital filmmaking has no doubt made it easier for Woo to be himself, as has being back in Asia: Hollywood never did warm to his Peckinpah flourishes, nor his melodramatic flair. But something is off in Man Hunt, which finds Woo returning, a touch desperately, to the Heroic Bloodshed genre in the form of a gloss on The Fugitive. (Officially, it's a remake of a Ken Takakura vehicle variously known as Manhunt and Hot Pursuit.) Chinese Du Qiu (Zhang Hanyu) is a hotshot lawyer for a pharmaceutical company that frames him for the murder of an alleged lover (Tao Okamoto, bestowing her iconic look on a role that doesn't thank her in return) to protect its secrets; Japanese Yamura (Masaharu Fukuyama) is the hotshot Inspector sent after Du when he escapes custody. Du repeatedly eludes Yamura's clutches, but over the course of the chase they build a rapport that transcends lawful and cultural barriers and, à la Hard-Boiled, unite against a common enemy, corrupt CEO Yoshihiro Sakai (Jun Kunimura). I should mention the two female super-assassins hot on Du's trail, since Woo's daughter Angeles plays one of them. For better or worse, this is personal filmmaking.

Ghost in the Shell (2017) - Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

**½/**** Image B+ Sound A- Extras C+
starring Scarlett Johansson, 'Beat' Takeshi Kitano, Michael Carmen Pitt, Juliette Binoche
screenplay by Jamie Moss and William Wheeler and Ehren Kruger, based on the comic "The Ghost in the Shell" by Shirow Masamune
directed by Rupert Sanders

by Walter Chaw Emily Yoshida, in an article for THE VERGE addressing the outcry over the casting of Scarlett Johansson in Ghost in the Shell, has the last word on the topic as it pertains to anime in general and Mamoru Oshii's seminal original in particular (an adaptation of a popular manga to which most casual fans in the West won't have been exposed). She provides a stunning, succinct historical context for Japanese self-denial and the country's post-bellum relationship with technology, then writes a review of this film in which she systematically destroys it for its essential misunderstanding of the source material. I agree with every word. I learned a lot. And I still like the new film, anyway. I think Ghost in the Shell is probably fascinating in spite of itself and because the environment has made it dangerous for pretty much anyone to discuss what its critics (not Yoshida, per se) wish it did. I like it because its production design is beautiful and I like it even though it's basically a RoboCop port that takes the American attitude of being horrified by technology rather than the Japanese one of being largely defined by it. It's puritanical. It was interpreted, after all, by a country founded by Pilgrims. Ghost in the Shell often doesn't know what to do with the images it's appropriating, and when push comes to shove, the dialogue falls somewhere between noodling and empty exposition. Still, there's something worth excavating here.

The Great Wall (2016)

*½/****
starring Matt Damon, Jing Tian, Pedro Pascal, Andy Lau
screenplay by Carlo Bernard & Doug Miro and Tony Gilroy
directed by Zhang Yimou

by Walter Chaw Gloriously, fantastically stupid from beginning to end, Fifth Generation legend Zhang Yimou's The Great Wall is also, you know, not terrible on the grand scale of terrible things. The popular narrative around this picture is the casting of Matt Damon as some sort of "white savior" in a film about China's most notable architectural achievement--except that it's not really about the Wall and Damon doesn't really save anything, though he does put to rest any sort of debate about whether or not he's a credible action star...or even star star. He tries on an Irish accent here that consists mainly of his trying to talk around a marble. That is, when he remembers he's supposed to be doing an accent. It's Kevin Costner-as-Robin Hood levels of comically-horrific, and, just like Costner's Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, The Great Wall is an attempt to grit-up and culturally contextualize some ridiculous rural folktale. The folktale in this instance is Zhang's own classic Red Sorghum, which earned him some trouble upon release because of its depiction of the old men running the Chinese government as senile, corrupt, and perverse. Indeed, The Great Wall depicts Chinese leadership as tradition-bound in a bad way, its "emperor" figure a child hiding behind his throne. It wouldn't be much of a stretch to see the monstrous child in Red Sorghum grown into this pathetic figure of a leader. If the film weren't so stupid, in other words, it would probably have gotten Zhang in trouble again.

Warcraft (2016)

**/****
starring Travis Fimmel, Paula Patton, Ben Foster, Dominic Cooper
written by Charles Leavitt and Duncan Jones
directed by Duncan Jones

by Walter Chaw A lot of it's a mess, and I'm well and truly disinterested at this point in huge-scale battles betwixt CGI armies, but enough of Duncan Jones's Warcraft is like Apocalypto to make it at least a fascinating misfire. It shares with Alex Proyas's instantly-derided Gods of Egypt this sense that but for the grace of God these are the exact kind of Ladyhawke/Clash of the Titans/Krull movies I used to love when I was a kid home from school with a fever. They're thick with invention and the sort of risk-taking that comes with not really having much shame. Their barometer for cheese and corn is broken, too. Warcraft is a picture without a sense that it shouldn't take itself seriously and so it takes itself very seriously, and there's one moment where the heroine of the piece talks about the strength she's gained from surviving repeated, and brutal, sexual assaults that actually cuts through the bullshit to the heart of some really troubling conversations. Particularly, pointedly, as it occurs in the middle of a narrative adaptation of a videogame whose culture is infamous for its intolerance of, and ideological violence towards, women. Warcraft earns points, too, for not being sentimental about its characters--for being another 2016 blockbuster that's unafraid of dealing with the consequences of forever wars on families and other non-combatants. Also, it occurs to me that if the humans had more gryffins, the war--and the movie--would be a lot shorter.

Fantastic Fest '14: Dwarves Kingdom

***/****
directed by Matthew Salton

by Walter Chaw Here's the thing, and I say this after years of being tortured by Chinese people: Chinese people are pretty awful. At least culturally, it should be said, there's an extreme disconnect in terms of social mores. There's a certain directness that's difficult to assimilate as an American, along with a certain disapproval that maybe I'm just more sensitive to because of my privileged status as neither fish nor fowl. I used to say the Chinese perfected racism because they had to learn how to be racist towards people who didn't look substantially different from themselves. I became a case study in a graduate anthropology course once concerning the evolution of human sexuality. Asked about my object-choice apparatus (was I triggered more by distinct facial features than by hair colour, for instance, or body type?), I wasn't offended. It's a good question.

A Touch of Sin (2013)

***/****
starring Jiang Wu, Zhao Tao, Wang Baoqiang, Luo Lanshan
written and directed by Jia Zhangke

by Angelo Muredda The blood doesn't flow so much as it spurts in A Touch of Sin, Jia Zhangke's invigorated if uneven return to straight fiction following an extended sojourn in hybridized documentaries about modern Chinese cities. More than the formal homecoming, however, it's the nature of the storytelling that surprises in his newest--the leap from the elegiac tone of films like 24 City into the more primal stuff of pulp. A wuxia anthology with revenge-thriller overtones, A Touch of Sin is an unusually direct genre exercise for a master filmmaker, in the sense that, unlike Steven Spielberg's Munich and other comparably shame-faced prestige films that dip a single toe in the waters of genre, it doesn't condescend to the populist trappings of the material. Jia isn't slumming so much as tapping into the righteous indignation of a popular tradition of stories about wronged knights and ruined innocents, sincerely transposed here to the working-class fringe of a nation state in the throes of late capitalism. If Jia's violence comes fast and leaves a mess, then, it's a testament to his willingness to get his hands dirty where others might have kept a safer distance.

CJ7 (2008) - Blu-ray Disc

**½/**** Image A Sound A- Extras C+
starring Stephen Chow, Xu Jiao, Huang Lei, Kitty Zhang
screenplay by Vincent Kok, Tsang Kan Cheong, Sandy Shaw Lai King, Fung Chih Chiang, Lam Fung
directed by Stephen Chow

by Bryant Frazer Lord knows we need inspired lunatics like Stephen Chow. Chow is a genial, graceful physical comic in the mode of Jackie Chan, yet even sillier, if you can imagine that. Like Chan, he makes movies that feel conspicuously alien in a Hollywood context, in large part because he's expert in a discipline that Hollywood has lately devalued. In the U.S., the dominant style of comedy is verbally oriented, with quips, awkward characters, and contrived situations driving the gags. For Stephen Chow, comedy is largely body-oriented. It's not that he doesn't script situation comedy--a movie like God of Cookery, with its parody of celebrity-chef competitions (and John Woo movies!), is built on an elaborate sitcom frame--but that he's more obsessed with performance. Chow is preoccupied with people's faces, their body types, the way they approach one another, and how they stand in conversation or confrontation. By the time he did Shaolin Soccer and Kung Fu Hustle, it was easy to see how he found the newly-affordable field of digital VFX work to be an avenue for extending the reach of a physical gag, using digital doubles to subject characters to the kind of strain and abuse that wouldn't fly with real actors.

The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor (2008) [2-Disc Deluxe Edition]; Wanted (2008) [2-Disc Special Edition]; Mamma Mia! [2-Disc Special Edition] - DVDs

THE MUMMY: TOMB OF THE DRAGON EMPEROR
ZERO STARS/**** Image A Sound A Extras D
starring Brendan Fraser, Jet Li, Maria Bello, Michelle Yeoh
screenplay by Alfred Gough & Miles Millar
directed by Rob Cohen

WANTED
*/**** Image A Sound A Extras D
starring James McAvoy, Morgan Freeman, Terence Stamp, Angelina Jolie
screenplay by Michael Brandt & Derek Haas and Chris Morgan, based on the comic books by Mark Millar and J.G. Jones
directed by Timur Bekmambetov

MAMMA MIA!
ZERO STARS Image B Sound A Extras C-
starring Meryl Streep, Pierce Brosnan, Colin Firth, Stellan Stellan Skarsgård
screenplay by Catherine Johnson, based on the songs of ABBA
directed by Phyllida Lloyd

by Walter Chaw Fast becoming the post-Welles RKO without a commensurate Val Lewton to grease the transition from art to filthy lucre, today's Universal Pictures finds itself a long, long way from Psycho with a bumper crop of genuinely bad movies reverse-engineered from past box-office champions. Each of them--The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor, Wanted, and Mamma Mia!--broke the golden 100-million dollar mark, since they were made with just the Benjamins in mind; sadly, only the criticism of flaccid attendance was likely to curb an endless march of identical pictures this year. For the simpleminded, the success of these films despite the near-universal condemnation of them by anyone with a working prefrontal lobe is proof positive that critics are out of touch with the common man. On the contrary, I'd offer that, asked whether he thought the atrocious The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor (hereafter The Mummy 3) would be financially successful, the average critic would have said he'd be surprised if it didn't do a hundred-mil in its first three weeks of release. Out of touch is believing that something is good because it makes a lot of money.

Kung Fu Panda (2008) - Blu-ray Disc

½* Image A+ Sound A+ Extras B-
screenplay by Jonathan Aibel & Glenn Berger
directed by Mark Osborne & John Stevenson

VIEW IN iTUNES - USA|CANADA

by Ian Pugh The generic mediocrity known as DreamWorks' animation department is about eight steps behind the multilayered brilliance of Pixar, and with Kung Fu Panda I think they finally reveal how sore they are about it. Their latest cinematic effort seems like a particularly barbed response to Brad Bird's The Incredibles and Ratatouille: we are told that the way to make something special is simply by believing that it's special. Which, as Bird taught us, means you can apply that label to everything and everyone until nothing and no one is really special. In considering something so blatantly knee-jerk contradictory to his valid points, you have to wonder where, exactly, the belief in an egalitarian society ends and a genuinely destructive jealousy begins. The entirety of Kung Fu Panda strokes the middlebrow ego: the comedy is painfully broad and predictable, while the action sequences are edited into a wild, incomprehensible mess (although I must admit, watching a limbless viper perform complicated martial arts techniques is unexpectedly lovely), and at its core, it's outright insulted by the apparently galling insinuation that talent has an impact on results in any field of endeavour. In an insane attempt to refute that, Kung Fu Panda concludes that it's still better to be fat and lazy than talented and educated.

W. (2008) + Trouble the Water (2008)

W.
**½/****
starring Josh Brolin, James Cromwell, Elizabeth Banks, Ellen Burstyn
screenplay by Stanley Weiser
directed by Oliver Stone

TROUBLE THE WATER
**½/****
directed by Carl Deal & Tia Lessin

by Walter Chaw John Powers once called Nixon-era Oliver Stone our most Nixonian director: smart, driven, divisive, unlikeable. So the neatest trick of Stone's latest biopic, W., is to make George W. Bush--arguably the most reviled, detached, ideologically arrogant president since James Buchanan--a figure of genuine pathos. Never mind that this incurious, adolescent, fundamentalist fanatic is our proverbial Nero, fiddling while every foundational tenet of Lincoln's party is fed to anti-intellectualism and evangelical Christianity. George Orwell said something once about how the end of democracy is heralded by millionaires leading dishwashers; what's unexpected for me is the extent to which the Republican party in the new millennium has not only convinced the blue-collar to vote against its own self-interests by waging class warfare against liberals, but also begun to turn against the intellectuals in its own party. "Georgetown cocktail party" conservatives are now painted with the same broad brushstroke as "Latte-sipping" lefties--and this idea of abandoning the middle class takes on the onus of not just money and privilege, but education and eloquence as well. The logical end-point of wanting a President as ill-read, venal, and feckless as your alcoholic born-again Uncle Festus is a figure like Governor Sarah Palin, whose chief qualification appears to be her ability to blend into your local chapter of Oprah's Fan Club without a ripple. Hate, division, ugly innuendo, and racism: sowing fear and reaping the political benefits until the house falls down.

Sundance '08: Yasukuni

***½/****
directed by Li Ying

by Alex Jackson Yasukuni is a Shinto shrine in Tokyo dedicated to the spirits of soldiers who died serving the Emperor of Japan. Included within the 2,466,532 names are 27,863 Taiwanese, 21,181 Koreans, and, most significantly, 1,068 convicted war criminals. The shrine is a centre of controversy for many Asians, some of whom feel their ancestors were forced to serve the Emperor and thus wouldn't want to be listed. Others could never endorse a shrine that features, for example, the names of Mukai Toshiaki and Noda Takeshi, the two officers who participated in a beheading contest during the massacre at Nanking. Still, the shrine is held in high regard among many Japanese. Former Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi visited it annually, a move that severely damaged Japanese relations with China and Korea. This constant opposition has inspired many hardcore Japanese fundamentalists, such as a group of Nanking deniers, to congregate at the shrine, where they throw their own counter-protests. Director Li Ying, born in China and living in Japan, regards Yasukuni with a curious ambivalence. He's not objective, per se--he's subjective but cold. It seems that his joint identification with both the Chinese and Japanese keeps him from wanting to take sides. The centrepiece of Yasukuni the documentary is Ying's extensive interview with an elderly sword-maker, who made the very swords Toshiaki and Takeshi used in their beheading contest. Treating this craftsman with a great deal of warmth, Ying gently teases out how the sword-maker feels about Koizumi visiting the Yasukuni shrine. His nervous response is that Koizumi was merely honouring the dead soldiers and praying there will never be another war--and strangely enough, I found myself unable to come up with a lucid counterpoint to this. Reflect that war criminals constitute less than 0.1% of the names and you can see how the Yasukuni shrine might be regarded admirably. Yasukuni is a dull film, slow-paced and with a rather muted colour palette. This has the curious effect of giving everything a certain pall of death. Ying doesn't regard the fundamentalists with anger as much as a slight sense of pity. The Japan they're trying to resurrect appears to be dead; I think they're trying to reclaim a piece of the Japanese identity that is gone forever. The very last shot is of the Tokyo cityscape (the first time we've really seen it in the film), and it provides a fascinating context for everything that preceded it. In the face of increasing urbanization, the Japan of the past--militarism and all--has essentially become obsolete.

Atonement (2007) + The Kite Runner (2007)

ATONEMENT
*½/****
starring James McAvoy, Keira Knightley, Romola Garai, Vanessa Redgrave
screenplay by Christopher Hampton, based on the novel by Ian McEwan
directed by Joe Wright

THE KITE RUNNER
½*/****
starring Khalid Abdalla, Homayoun Ershadi, Shaun Toub, Saïd Taghmaoui
screenplay by David Benioff, based on the novel by Khaled Hosseini
directed by Marc Forster

by Walter Chaw No end-of-year sweepstakes would be complete without the requisite bushel of awards-baiting pabulum, rich with a nice, thick vein of glossy pandering. They're movies you're supposed to love: can't-miss, sure-fire formula flicks that bank on their sparkly casts and borrowed prestige the way blockbuster action flicks rely on special effects and the promise of mayhem. Reduce it down enough and the dreg at the bottom of the stew pot is still just making money--you don't reinvent the wheel by following a recipe, and indeed, a good 99% of movies in any given year don't boast of anything new. To say that you like something like August Rush is to say that you hate to be challenged by a film--that escapism is the first and last reason you go to the movies. Where something like Transformers wants to inspire a car- or girl-related boner, something like Atonement wants to ennoble the cineplex arthouse crowd into paroxysms of self-congratulation. It's the same feeling that compels awards bodies to vote for this stuff: mainstream passing as estimable while the real deal flies for the most part under the radar. The more assembly line chunder like Atonement and The Kite Runner gets chosen for Academy recognition, the fewer slots there are available for big studio pics that actually deliver the goods, like No Country for Old Men, The Darjeeling Limited, There Will Be Blood, and Sweeney Todd (presuming, of course, that an impressive number of remarkable studio flicks released earlier this calendar year are already lost causes).

TIFF '07: Lust, Caution

***/****
starring Tony Leung Chiu Wai, Tang Wei, Joan Chen, Wang Leehom
screenplay by Wang Hui Ling and James Schamus, based on a short story by Eileen Chang
directed by Ang Lee

by Bill Chambers Blessed with an achingly beautiful score by Alexandre Desplat, Ang Lee's Lust, Caution is a more tasteful Blackbook, which is odd considering how much more graphic it is in its depiction of not just sexuality but, thanks to a darkly-comic homage to Torn Curtain, violence as well. Where Blackbook director Paul Verhoeven is a vulgarian, though, Lee projects civility and cultivation. That's how he so often manages to shank you. The affair between secret-service man Mr. Yee (Tony Leung Chiu Wai, never viler) and a young freedom fighter masquerading as a Mahjong-playing housewife (the incandescent Tang Wei) in pre-revolutionary Shanghai plays out in an interminable series of rape scenarios from which Lee never flinches, fostering an impression of artistic integrity that Lee has been only too happy to perpetuate by blithely accepting the MPAA's ruling of an NC-17 rating for the film. Alas, post-Brokeback Mountain, the intensity of the In the Realm of the Senses-style sex scenes is too conspicuous for its own good, prompting extratextual questions about Lee's motives. Friend and colleague Norman Wilner said something in passing that really got me thinking: that he would feel like Lee is rhetorically asking us, "Is this what you wanted from Brokeback?" had he more faith in Lee's intellect. At any rate, in light of the sheepishness of Brokeback Mountain's same-sex encounters, the gratuitousness of Lust, Caution's hetero liaisons does strike a note of methinks the lady doth protest too much. Yet the picture gets around to honouring its pretensions towards truthfulness in a climax that exposes the sham of Blackbook's romantic sacrifices and narrow escapes (Mata Hari will always face down a firing squad), even if it's only later, at home in the dark, that the full weight of Lust, Caution's misanthropy comes crashing down on you. If Lee is ultimately too prosaic to ever be anything but a great middlebrow filmmaker, consider what an oxymoron that is; we're lucky to have him. PROGRAMME: Special Presentations

Curse of the Golden Flower (2006) - DVD

**½/**** Image B Sound A Extras D
starring Chow Yun Fat, Gong Li, Jay Chou, Liu Ye
screenplay by Zhang Yimou, Wu Nan, Bian Zhihong
directed by Zhang Yimou

by Walter Chaw I recently had the opportunity to see for the first time the cut of Zhang Yimou's virtuoso Hero prepared for Yankee viewers, complete with the subtitles and framing cards slapped on by American distributors. Before now, the only contact I'd had with the film was through a region-free DVD from Hong Kong that preceded the U.S. theatrical release by a couple of years. (After buying the rights to it, Miramax, you'll recall, decided to sit on it until such time as its unleashing wouldn't somehow interfere with timeless masterpieces of misguided schlock like Cold Mountain.) Anyway, I was appalled. The extent to which Hero has been dumbed-down--the insertion of "our country" for a term that means, in Mandarin, "beneath the sky" drums up this weird nationalistic gumbo at the end where, before, it was sober and idealistic--manages to paint Zhang as the worst kind of toad. There's an animated map at the beginning now, I guess to show the great unwashed American moron that there is land outside the range of purple mountains majesty, while much mystical bullshit about "over two thousand years ago" mainly obscures the fact that Hero takes place well over two thousand years ago. I feel a lot of anger towards what's been done to one of the best films ever to come out of the Mainland to make it more suited for white consumption, both because of the sacrilege and because whoever's responsible has a lot of answering to do for how far they've undersold the intelligence of Western audiences. I finally understand why a lot of people in the United States didn't think much of Hero: the version I saw was a Zhang Yimou picture, whereas the version most in this country saw was a Miramax picture.

The Painted Veil (2006) - DVD; The Good Shepherd (2006); The Good German (2006) - DVD

THE PAINTED VEIL
***/**** Image B- Sound A-
starring Naomi Watts, Edward Norton, Liev Schreiber, Diana Rigg
screenplay by Ron Nyswaner, based on the novel by W. Somerset Maugham
directed by John Curran

THE GOOD SHEPHERD
**/****
starring Matt Damon, Angelina Jolie, Robert De Niro, Alec Baldwin
screenplay by Eric Roth
directed by Robert De Niro

THE GOOD GERMAN
*½/**** Image A Sound A-
starring George Clooney, Cate Blanchett, Tobey Maguire, Jack Thompson
screenplay by Paul Attanasio, based on the novel by Joseph Kanon
directed by Steven Soderbergh

by Walter Chaw One of seemingly dozens of pretentious, self-produced vanity pieces from the Edward Norton grist mill, The Painted Veil, John Curran's adaptation of Somerset Maugham's story of colonial malaise, is a pleasant surprise. Naomi Watts and Toby Jones are fabulous (and Norton is steady); it's not terribly paternalistically racist despite being another Western film in which white people exert their magical influence in foreign lands; and even though it's all about prestige and hedonism, it manages now and again to actually be about prestige and hedonism. But like the simultaneously-opening Soderbergh noir The Good German, it's mostly interesting in the meta. What keeps this updating of the old Greta Garbo weeper from being literally better is the lack of immediacy in its tale of emotionally distant scientists and their flapper wives, adrift in the boiler pot of 1920s Shanghai. Not timeless in its remove but instead ineffably dated by it, it's an Old Hollywood production in both epic scale and lack of subtext, making the picture a lovely trifle not unlike other well-done bits of instantly-forgotten prestige (see: Philip Noyce's The Quiet American).

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.

The Science of Sleep (2006) + Jet Li's Fearless (2006)

THE SCIENCE OF SLEEP
*½/****
starring Gael García Bernal, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Alain Chabat, Miou-Miou
written and directed by Michel Gondry

Fearless
**/****
starring Jet Li, Nakamura Shidou, Sun Li, Dong Yong
screenplay by Chris Chow, Christine To
directed by Ronny Yu

by Walter Chaw A cacophony of cascading whimsy, Michel Gondry's exercise in Freudian bric-a-brac The Science of Sleep plays like a movie based on a thrift store specializing in Harlequin novels--French Harlequin novels. It adheres to the music-video director's maxim of maximum images per second, and it casts Gael García Bernal as Stéphane, a useless lug endlessly working on a calendar of calamitous events and pining after his across-hall neighbour Stéphanie (Charlotte Gainsbourg), with whom he is too smitten to confess that his mother is her landlord. His dreams take the form of a one-man variety show, while Gondry revels in scenes where he inflates his hero's hands and has him ride an animated patchwork horse. But The Science of Sleep is more exhausting than illuminating--more a loud masturbation than any kind of intercourse with the audience. The difference between the Gondry of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and the Gondry of The Science of Sleep, it seems obvious to say, is the difference between a film scripted by Charlie Kaufman and one not, though it's more complicated than that in that the Kaufman of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is an artist who finally struck a balance between affectation and a much finer connective tissue. Gondry is still just engaged in the twist.

Mission: Impossible III (2006)

*/****
starring Tom Cruise, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Ving Rhames, Billy Crudup
screenplay by Alex Kurtzman & Roberto Orci & J.J. Abrams
directed by J.J. Abrams

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. That classic combination of a film that doesn't make any sense with one that doesn't inspire anyone to invest an iota of emotion in giving a crap, J.J. Abrams's Mission: Impossible III (hereafter M:i:III) isn't convoluted like the first two instalments so much as it's just incoherent and loud. It's the camera-in-a blender-school of action filmmaking: There's so little understanding of spatial relationships that the whole thing plays like that Naked Gun gag where the gunfight is taking place between two people within arm's reach of one another. An extended heist sequence set in Vatican City, for instance, features the four members of IMF ("Impossible Mission Force") hotshot Ethan Hunt's (Tom Cruise) team (Ving Rhames, Jonathan Rhys Meyers, and the requisite hot Asian chick (Maggie Q)) running around in completely anonymous locations, sticking doodads to walls, and confirming to one another that they're "ready" and "in place." But without knowledge of their plan, their location (respective to one another and their goal, whatever that might be), their peril, or the stakes, you're left with four people doing something for some reason, necessitating our willingness to play along with the charade that we know who these people are, what their goal is, and why we should care. Consider a helicopter chase through a wind farm, too, and the many lovely visuals that such an enticing premise suggests--then look to the end-product, which is a lot of tight shots of helicopters in the middle of the night, parts of giant windmills, a bad soundtrack, and multiple decibel screaming about "incoming" and "they've got a lock on us." Who does? And where are they going on that wind farm? And why does the promise of an instrument-factory explosion induce yawns?

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

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

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

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

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

DIFF '05: The White Countess

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

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

TIFF '05: The Myth

½*/****
starring Jackie Chan, Tony Leung Ka-fai, Kim Hee-seon, Mallika Sherawat
screenplay by Stanley Tong, Wang Hui-ling, Li Hai-shu
directed by Stanley Tong

by Bill Chambers The Myth, or: Crouching Tiger, Hidden Turdbath. Sabotaging a potential comeback by trying to catch a wave (not unlike the myriad has-beens in the music industry who jumped on the disco bandwagon), Jackie Chan dips a toe in the unfriendly, nay, hostile waters of the wu xia genre recently revitalized by the likes of Ang Lee and Zhang Yimou. Although The Myth is cruddy-looking (HD's fine for George Lucas excretions and Robert Rodriguez fantasias, but it has a long way to go before it'll be ready for this kind of quasi-epic) and beset by shoddy effects work, blame for its near-unwatchability falls squarely at the feet of Chan and his frequent collaborator Stanley Tong, who directed the film and co-wrote its infantile screenplay. The pitch-meeting must've sounded like kindergarten--after all, it's got meteorites! And sword-fighting! And princesses! And archaeologists! And rooms without gravity! And swamis! And ghosts! It doesn't help that Chan's face has petrified with age and distress into a single, constipated expression, making his reaction shots so opaque as to be dramatically ineffectual. There's a decent set-piece involving a conveyer belt slathered in super-glue, but just the fact that the heir apparent to Fred Astaire would rather contrive reasons to move as little as possible during an action sequence than retire is proof of the production's mid-life crisis. PROGRAMME: Viacom Galas

Kung Fu Hustle (2004) [Widescreen] - DVD

***/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras B-
starring Stephen Chow, Yuen Wah, Yuen Qiu, Lam Tze Chung
screenplay by Stephen Chow, Tsang Kan Cheong, Lola Huo, Chan Man Keung
directed by Stephen Chow

by Walter Chaw There's a moment near the beginning of Stephen Chow's Shaolin Soccer where a reverie about sweet buns turns into a spontaneous, slightly Asian-fied street recreation of the zombie shuffle from Michael Jackson's "Thriller" video. If Chow is going to break through into the American mainstream with more success than fellow Hong Kong émigrés Jackie Chan, Chow Yun Fat, John Woo, Jet Li, Ringo Lam, and Sammo Hung, it'll be because of his savvy and respect for Western pop archetypes. Evidence of this has surfaced with some regularity in all of his pictures to date, no less so in Kung Fu Hustle, a delirious-verging-on-surreal send-up of Kung Fu attitudes and traditions mutated with a Tex Avery cartoon. It's the film Joe Dante has been trying to make for the whole of his career: a multi-cultural pop explosion cross-pollinated to produce a fevered hybrid of the post-industrial standard of Asian innovation of Western invention. Chow is Asia's answer to hip-hop: fugitive poetry primed to gratify the Yankee ruling culture while laying out a subtext of Chinese pride that would feel like a threat if it didn't get your hips shaking and your fingers snapping.

House of Flying Daggers (2004) - DVD

****/**** Image A- Sound A+ Extras B-
starring Takeshi Kaneshiro, Andy Lau, Ziyi Zhang, Song Dandan
screenplay by Li Feng & Zhang Yimou & Wang Bin
directed by Zhang Yimou

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. For the dozen or so eye-bleedingly beautiful sequences in Zhang Yimou's new wuxia pian, the encapsulating image is that of the incandescent Ziyi Zhang prostrate beneath a would-be paramour, her delicate, ivory hand pressed against his lips in an eloquently ineffective ward. It's a tableau introduced in a more overt attempted rape in a brothel and revisited in a stream where a quartet of thugs nearly succeed in literally/metaphorically piercing Ziyi with their long spears. House of Flying Daggers (its title in Chinese the loaded "Ambush from Ten Directions"--essentially an ambush from everywhere) is at its essence an allegory for rape and the Chinese tradition of concubinage that Zhang has already explored to varying degrees in Raise the Red Lantern, Ju Dou, Shanghai Triad, and, of course, Red Sorghum, in which a young woman played by Gong Li (Ziyi's predecessor as Zhang's muse) is saved from rape by a young man with whom she later runs a winery. But the conceit of a young woman teaming with her knight in shining armour is complicated in House of Flying Daggers by the fact that she is more than capable of taking care of herself, except, fascinatingly, when the attacks against her are sexualized.

Mulan (1998) [Special Edition] - DVD

**/**** Image B+ Sound A Extras B-
screenplay by Rita Hsiao, Christopher Sanders, Philip LaZebnik, Raymond Singer & Eugenia Bostwick-Singer
directed by Barry Cook and Tony Bancroft

by Bill Chambers If Disney's animated features can be reduced to a stable of alternating boy movies and girl movies, then the studio's decision to make the cross-dressing fable Mulan at a juncture when they really needed mass approval (that is, after striking out post-Katzenberg with Pocahontas, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and Hercules) comes across as conspicuously non-partisan--and the hero's androgyny isn't the only bet-hedging the filmmakers practice. A meticulous recreation of Imperialist China, for instance, is compromised by anachronisms cultural and temporal (the eponymous Mulan (voice of Ming-Na Wen), a pre-Tang Dynasty Chinese maiden, is introduced to us wearing a tank top and what resemble capri pants; later, she is served bacon and eggs for breakfast), while musical numbers, subversive humour, and Spielbergian spectacle perpetually collide like bumper cars. The end-product is neither fish nor fowl, though it certainly leans towards foul.

DIFF '04: Green Hat

*/****
starring Liao Fan, Li Haibin, Dong Lifan, Li Congxi
written and directed by Liu Fendou

by Walter Chaw Liu Fendou's Green Hat opens with a jab: a man on a beach muses about the difference between an art film and a popular film, and he does so by pondering the place of masturbation in polite conversation. In a nutshell, Fendou provides the madness and the method for his directorial debut, an onanistic roundelay concerning the nature of love that begins with another bank robber (sigh) who finds out he's been doing it all for a love he's been cuckolded to, proceeds with the impotent cop who bears witness to the last moments of the robber's life, and finishes with the audience's dawning understanding that Fendou is probably attacking the hypocrisy of the myth of masculinity. Guns and intimidation rule the first portion, castration and humiliation rule the second, and, armed with the knowledge that Fendou originally envisioned a trilogy of short films instead of this schizophrenic vehicle, Green Hat's maddening emptiness swims into focus. The whole thing is a self-satisfied exercise in militant cinema (militant in the face of repressive regime--and not our repressive regime) loaded down with the worst of independent film (talkiness, quirkiness for quirk's sake) and the worst of mainstream, too (gunplay, sexplay). Green Hat is a bad, disjointed film, but sadly just another example of the direction that Chinese cinema has taken, with few exceptions, since Hong Kong slid back under the Mainland's control.

Hero (2002)

****/****
starring Jet Li, Tony Leung Chiu Wai, Maggie Cheung, Ziyi Zhang
screenplay by Li Feng, Zhang Yimou, Wang Bin
directed by Zhang Yimou

by Walter Chaw Zhang Yimou's Hero is perhaps the most ravishing, most seductively alien fantasy since a pair of 1964 releases: Michelangelo Antonioni's Red Desert and Hiroshi Teshigahara's Woman of the Dunes. It is a telling of the oft-told (in Chinese cinema) story of how the first emperor of China, Qin (an imperious Daoming Chen), was targeted by an assassin on the eve of uniting all the warring city-states of China into a kingdom, the centre of the world that calls itself to this day the "Middle Kingdom." To bridge the prescribed physical gap between commoner and emperor, X (Jet Li) tells the story of how he vanquished three of the realm's greatest killers in the function of a low-ranking magistrate--earning proximity as a result of his service to Qin with each tall tale. The body of Hero is the stories told by X, with Qin the rapt, but skeptical audience, taking his sense of manifest purpose as aegis against any attacker.

Film Freak Central does the Sixth Aurora Asian Film Festival

June 11, 2003|by Walter Chaw There's a genuine sense of community engendered by the Aurora Asian Film Festival, down on East Colfax where a great deal has been done to make an old community feel intimate and inviting. Old-growth trees dot the sidewalks and nice cobbled walks bisect the intersections. A lot of construction along Colfax reminds that this area may boom if we ever get Democratic leadership back in office, and a lot of uniformed police officers remind that until we do, economic revitalization is sort of holding its breath down here. On the last night of the festival, I moderated a Q&A with director Gil Portes after an exceedingly well-received screening of his tedious film Small Voices; just before that, my wife and I had dinner at my favourite diner (Pete's Kitchen) and then dessert at a little Mexican bar across the way that not only had no waitresses who spoke English, but also no menus (and Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes playing in Spanish on a beat-up television (it's better that way)). Nothing like a little cultural displacement to get the juices flowing.

The Orphan of Anyang (2001)

**½/****
starring Liu Tianhao, Miao Fuwen, Sun Guilin, Yue Sengyi
written and directed by Wang Chao

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover I feel pain when I have to pan movies like Wang Chao's The Orphan of Anyang. It's a film that has absolutely no bad faith on the part of the filmmaker--he wanted to show a slice of Chinese life the censors wouldn't normally show, and that's exactly what he does. But his conception is so sparse and so dour that it winds up capsizing these good intentions, resulting in an underwritten and acquiescent film in which we can't identify the characters beyond their functions in the narrative. It's not a film that makes you angry at having been cheated, it just makes you numb with anomie and disconnected from the action onscreen--surely not what was intended.

Queen of Swords: FFC Interviews Cheng Pei-pei

October 26, 2002|I confided in the amazingly beautiful Hong Kong action legend Cheng Pei-pei--recently seen as the villainous Jade Fox in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon--that a screening of her classic Shaw Brothers film Come Drink with Me on a grainy bootleg copy as a small child gifted me with both a lifelong love of martial arts films and my first crush. Still lovely and distinguished almost forty years later, Ms. Cheng met me at the Daily Grind coffee shop in the Old Tivoli Brewery, where the Denver Film Society was running the 25^th Denver International Film Festival and featuring a new print of Come Drink with Me that was originally struck for this year's Venice Film Festival. She was soft-spoken, polite, and exceedingly gracious; I was stricken by her humility and friendliness--old crushes die hard, I guess. I began by asking Ms. Cheng about her training as a dancer.

DIFF '02: Together

Together with You
He ni zai yi qi
**/****
starring Tang Yun, Chen Hong, Chen Kaige, Liu Peiqi
screenplay by Xue Lu Xiao, Chen Kaige
directed by Chen Kaige

by Walter Chaw Sentimental and overlong if beautifully shot and carefully structured, Chen Kaige's latest film Together is, in most respects, very much like his other films despite a contemporary setting. Focusing on music as a metaphor for transcendence and release in a way that has become a recurring hallmark of his career (Life on a String, Farewell My Concubine), Together follows a gifted young violinist, Xiaochen (Tang Yun), who finds that music is his only means of expression. His blue-collar dad, Liu (Liu Peiqi), sacrifices everything to get Xiaochen the best violin teacher in Beijing, Jiang (Wang Zhiwen), while lovely chanteuse Lili (Kaige's real-life wife, Chen Hong) fills in for the semi-troubled boy's missing mother. A broad story told in bold strokes, Together's problem isn't its relatively low aspirations, narrow scope, and melodrama, but rather the way that it proceeds on a stuttering, serpentine course towards an ending that most of the audience will have already predicted as soon as the premise is firmly established. The performances are fine though unaided by laggard pacing and a screenplay loaded with non-sequiturs, cliché, and the subtle underpinnings of a traditional misogyny that sees all women as some variation of dingbat, whore, or mother. Still, Together is light and pocket enjoyable--all the more so in that respect for its comfortable predictability--and held together by an immensely likable performance from Peiqi as the long-suffering father. It doesn't have very much to say, but doesn't offend in its inconsequence. Together is airy as an Italian concerto, and almost as insubstantial.

DIFF '02: Springtime in a Small Town

Xiao cheng zhi chun
****/****
starring Wu Jun, Bai Qing Xin, Hu Jingfan, Lu Si Si
screenplay by Ah Cheng
directed by Tian Zhuangzhuang

by Walter Chaw Something like a Renoir film or a Brontë novel, Tian Zhuangzhuang's first feature film in nearly a decade Springtime in a Small Town ("Xiao Cheng Zhi Chun"), a remake of the Fei Mu's 1948 classic, is painterly and patient--a map of the inner rhythms of love and jealousy and sacrifice drawn with a master's steady stroke. The film introduces its three main characters in the same gently swooping style: the sickly scholar in the antebellum ruins of his family's home; the long-suffering wife reduced to duty and malaise; and the handsome doctor debarking at a South China train station. Springtime in a Small Town pulses with sensuality and submerged anxieties--that the scholar's ruined household hangs in the entropic vicissitude of ritual is a matter of fact; that the handsome doctor disturbs that delicate equilibrium is also never in question. What amazes about the picture is the way that silence is allowed to tell the tale and swell the meaning of every sigh and each glancing touch. An extraordinary film of manners and meticulous compositions, Springtime in a Small Town unfolds at the pace of a simmer: inevitable, inexorable, and possessed of that unmistakable air of Prufrock-ian half-life spent measuring out time in meaningless units until mermaids calling each to each lull frustrated lovers to action at last.

A Get-Together with Chen Kaige: FFC Interviews Chen Kaige

October 19, 2002|Stentorian in voice and a little dreamy in mien, Chen Kaige ("Tzen KI-guh"), one of the primary members of China's Fifth Generation of filmmakers, is a tribute guest at the 25^th Denver International Film Festival. A group that included Zhang Yimou (a cameraman on Kaige's Yellow Earth prior to becoming a director), the Fifth Generation introduced more intimate stories told on a larger scale than the Chinese cinema that came before. It is a movement also marked by remarkably vivid colour schemes, interest in period pieces, and epic tableaux.

DIFF '02: The Marriage Certificate

Shui shuo wo bu zai hu
*/****
starring Gong Feng, Liping Lu
written and directed by JianXin Huang

by Walter Chaw A miserable, over-directed bit of heated allegorical melodrama, JianXin Huang's The Marriage Certificate seeks to monumentalize the loss of the titular document and its disastrous effect on the marriage between a goofy shrink and his grasping wife into a jab at the rigidity of the communist Chinese bureaucracy. It succeeds in being cutesy in an Amélie sort of way (told from the point-of-view of an insipid little girl complete with bad voiceovers, double ponytail flips, and rough animated skits) while being a disaster in terms of satire and the basic precepts of mature entertainment. Shifting tone discordantly from scene to scene with a restless camera zoomed and shaken to no good end, The Marriage Certificate makes unfocused stops in a mental institution populated with a collection of Cuckoo's Nest stereotypes and punctuated by visits to various government offices that make the gentlest of fun of the Chinese government (and women). Though appreciative of the difficulties of working within a restrictive system to create works of political resonance, The Marriage Certificate is so broad and winking that it's hard to believe that this thing wasn't setting off klaxons and clarions every step along the way. Perversely light-hearted even as it strays into the bizarre and grating, the picture is blissfully forgettable though, admittedly, the unforgivable winsomeness of its conclusion proves difficult to exorcise.

Happy Times (2000)

Happy Time
*½/****
starring Benshan Zhao, Jie Dong, Biao Fu, Xuejian Li
directed by Zhang Yimou

by Walter Chaw Titled in the same serio-ironic vein as Giuseppe Tornatore's Everybody's Fine, Zhang Yimou's Happy Times aspires for the piquant but only really achieves a sort of ridiculous sourness. It's a misunderstanding of irony taken to an Alanis Morrisetteian extreme; far from the eventuality being the opposite of the expected, the outcome of Happy Times is the worst kind of cliché, and its execution is so blunt compared to the sharp satirical barb of Yimou's own Ju Dou that I wonder if Gong Li wasn't the brains in that long lamented relationship. Still, what works in Happy Times is what has worked in this director's best work (Shanghai Triad, Raise the Red Lantern, Red Sorghum): mordant social critique so far removed from realism that its status as political allegory is as subtle as a neon sign and a crack to the noggin.

Platform (2000)

***/****
starring Hong Wei Wang, Tao Zhao, Jing Dong Liang, Tian Yi Yang
written and directed by Jia Zhang-Ke

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover To recommend or not to recommend Jia Zhang-ke's Platform? The question depends on who you are. For those with even a passing interest in Chinese cinema and culture, it's virtually mandatory viewing: the film is one of the most dense and nuanced portraits of a society in transition from any nation I can think of, and for Westerners it puts a face to events that we normally hear mentioned only in passing. Those seeking narrative thrills, however, had better look elsewhere, because Platform's glacial pace and oppressive mise-en-scène are calculated to test the patience of even the most sympathetic viewer. But even though the film is tough slogging at times (a circumstance I attribute to its having been re-edited for export), those with intellectual priorities are advised to get on this Platform and ride the train to the last stop.

Beijing Bicycle (2001)

***/****
starring Lin Cui, Xun Zhou, Yuanyuan Gao, Shuang Li
screenplay by Peggy Chiao, Hsiao-ming Hsu, Danian Tang, Xiaoshuai Wang
directed by Xiaoshuai Wang

by Walter Chaw The pivotal scene in Wang Xiaoshuai's Beijing Bicycle comes near the end: a gang of young toughs is chasing a country boy and a city boy through a sprawling labyrinth of houses in a questionable section of Beijing; one says to the other, "What are you doing? This doesn't concern you." The other replies, "I don't know my way out." Beijing Bicycle is a sparsely-written allegory of political oppression that has the visual style of an early Beat Takeshi film and the poetic reticence of the Chinese people. It is more about looks than speeches, pauses than action--and the degree to which each character finds its voice speaks volumes as to the level of self-sufficiency and freedom that each character possesses.

Time and Tide (2000) - DVD

***/**** Image B+ Sound A- Extras B-
starring Nicholas Tse, Wu Bai, Anthony Wong, Joventino Couto Remotigue
written by Koan Hui & Tsui Hark
directed by Tsui Hark

by Bill Chambers Director Tsui Hark stands apart from his Chinese contemporaries by committing to a tone and relative congruity. Having made a couple of English-language pictures starring a Belgian (the Jean-Claude Van Damme vehicles Double Team and Knock-Off) and been schooled at a Southern Methodist university in Dallas, Hark is formally acquainted with the American mainstream, thankyouverymuch. His (post-Van Damme) Hong Kong import Time and Tide, while still a reminder of why it's easy for us westerners to become a fan of HK cinema yet a bit of a chore to stay one, seems a learned genre concentrate. Although its plot is by and large in the Asia pulp tradition--that is, of an elusive logic--the film wins us over with phenomenal artistry and energy, and its breathers from the mayhem don't feel like conceptual U-turns.

Not One Less (1999) - DVD

一個都不能少
Yi ge dou bu neng shao
***/**** Image A Sound B-
starring Wei Minzhi, Zhang Huike, Tian Zhenda, Enman Gao
screenplay by Shi Xiangsheng
directed by Zhang Yimou

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Zhang Yimou's Not One Less, while suffering from a disease of nonspecificity, nevertheless manages to make its points with style and grace. It's not an especially deep film, railing as it does against a poverty that has no known source and, thus, no possible remedy. But even as nonspecific as it tries to keep itself, the film does sink you deep into the problem of poverty in China. The film is at least a cri de cœur for the lost futures of China's rural children, trapped as many are between education and supporting their families. And the cry is voiced beautifully by Hou Yong's cinematography, giving even an impoverished village and dirty city the visual élan that is the hallmark of Zhang's craft. If some subtler analysis gets lost in the interim, you can't have everything.