Film Freak Central

My Life as a Dog (1985) [The Criterion Collection] - Blu-ray Disc

Mitt liv som hund
**½/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras B
starring Anton Glanzelius, Tomas von Brömssen, Anki Lidén, Melinda Kinnaman
screenplay by Lasse Hallström & Reidar Jönsson & Brasse Brännström & Per Berglund, based on the novel by Reidar Jönsson
directed by Lasse Hallström

by Angelo Muredda Before Oscar powerbrokers Scott Rudin and Harvey Weinstein entrusted their yearly contenders to can't-fail Stephen Daldry, there was Lasse Hallström. A three-time Academy award nominee whose Chocolat is still roundly (and somewhat unfairly, given the company of trash like Crash) dismissed as one of the most undeserving Best Picture nominees of recent years, Hallström best encapsulates the notion, popular in Oscar-watching circles, of the "fifth nominee": the uncelebrated contender who presumably just made the cut. Consecutive star-studded nonstarters like The Shipping News and An Unfinished Life--which, lest we forget, quasi-romantically paired a maimed Morgan Freeman with the existentially-troubled bear who gored him--have dimmed his reputation considerably since then, but Hallström has nevertheless assured himself a strange place in American filmmaking (not least because he is Swedish) as simultaneously one of the most-awarded and least-loved directors of the Miramax era of upmarket indies.

Parker Lewis Can't Lose: The Complete First Season (1990-1991) - DVD

Image C Sound B Extras B-
"Pilot," "Operation Kubiac," "Power Play," "Parker Lewis Must Lose," "Close, But No Guitar," "G.A.G. Dance," "Love's a Beast," "Saving Grace," "Musso & Frank," "Deja Dudes," "Radio Free Flamingo," "Science Fair," ""Teacher, Teacher," "Rent-a-Kube," "Heather the Class," "Jerry: Portrait of a Video Junkie," "Splendor in the Class," "The Human Grace," "Citizen Kube," "Randall Without a Cause," "Jerry's First Date," "Against the Norm," "King Kube," "Teens from a Mall," "My Fair Shelly," "Parker Lewis Can't Win"

by Jefferson Robbins It's the cool uncle of "Malcolm in the Middle". It's got "Scrubs" among its progeny, and the '80s teen comedies of Savage Steve Holland somewhere back up the line of descent. It may have single-handedly established the swoosh-smash-zip school of sitcoms, festooned with sound effects, inner monologues, and discursive daydreams. If it wanted, "Parker Lewis Can't Lose" could claim "Family Guy" as a descendent, for the way it appropriates "Parker"'s absurdist jump-cuts to tangential situations.¹

Attack the Block (2011) + Super 8 (2011)|Super 8 - Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

ATTACK THE BLOCK
***/****
starring Jodie Whittaker, John Boyega, Alex Esmail, Franz Drameh
written and directed by Joe Cornish

SUPER 8
***/**** Image A+ Sound A+ Extras A-
starring Elle Fanning, Kyle Chandler, Joel Courtney, Gabriel Basso
written and directed by J.J. Abrams

by Walter Chaw Joe Cornish's low-budget creature-feature Attack the Block is a charmer, a delight, the kind of rare film--like Jack Sholder's The Hidden, Stuart Gordon's Re-Animator, or Steve De Jarnatt's Miracle Mile--that devotees will latch onto, and for good reason, with the fervour afforded genuine cult classics. It has energy to burn, a strange affinity with E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, and a super-cool monster that looks like a cross between Ira from the "Moonshadow" comic and a grizzly bear. That most of it was carried off with practical effects is a shot in the arm for practical effects and a bearer of the nostalgia banner that seems to be popular lately, what with our dreams and memories fodder again for the celluloid couch. Better still, it introduces a new star into the future pantheon in John Boyega, who has charisma to burn as gang leader-cum-saviour Moses. The movie's tale of a group of street toughs has drawn comparisons to The Warriors, but I think the better analogy is Spielberg's E.T., not just in that alchemy between the fantastic and the absolutely mundane (South England's Lambeth neighbourhood), but also in the crafting of a living youth subculture alive with its own language, ritual, and custom. It's not too much to say that, at its best, Attack the Block makes you feel the way you did when the guys took things into their own hands to deliver the flying, omniscient, omnipotent E.T. to his landing site. It taps into the irrational cool. Which doesn't happen very often.

Crazy, Stupid, Love. (2011) - Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

**½/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras C
starring Steve Carell, Ryan Gosling, Julianne Moore, Kevin Bacon
screenplay by Dan Fogelman
directed by Glenn Ficarra & John Requa

by Angelo Muredda There's a pretty good movie inside Crazy, Stupid, Love., but no one involved seems to put much trust in it. Lightly melancholic and affecting when it finds its cast at their manic lows, the film at first cavalierly launches its ensemble like discrete pinballs, to great comic effect, only to collapse in a fit of contrived set-pieces torn from the Paul Haggis playbook. It's a shame. If the third act's everyone-at-the-garden-party resolution is economical, it's also distressingly uncrazy: a geometrically tidy solution to a film that's begging for something gawkier.

Terri (2011) - Blu-ray Disc

***½/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras C+
starring Jacob Wysocki, Olivia Crocicchia, Creed Bratton, John C. Reilly
screenplay by Patrick deWitt
directed by Azazel Jacobs

by Angelo Muredda On paper, Terri looks insufferable. From its unfortunate trailer, which sells a uniform-outfitted protagonist and whimsical, quintessentially Sundance plot in which a young misfit bonds with a fortysomething man (John C. Reilly, naturally) and feels the first pangs of young love, you'd think it was assembled from the discarded organs of Wes Anderson movies past. What's most surprising about Terri, though, is its skepticism towards the calculated quirkiness of botched American indies about social rejects. When people behave strangely in this film, it isn't the result of a screenwriter groundlessly insisting on his creations' idiosyncrasy (Natalie Portman is thankfully not on hand to make a series of unique sounds when dialogue dries up), but rather a token of what Reilly, in one of many lovely moments, affectionately calls the "unknowability" of people. That curiosity about the unusual and sometimes dark impulses that decent individuals wrestle with makes director Azazel Jacobs's first feature since 2008's Momma's Man something special: a humane portrait of people who speak in fits and starts, throw inappropriate temper tantrums, and awkwardly test their sexual boundaries. Most importantly, it doesn't presume to have its young protagonists figured out. The result is an affecting twist on the coming-of-age narrative, as well as a rare film about teenagers that's in no hurry to turn the amorphousness of late adolescence into something solid and prescriptive.

Prom (2011) - Blu-ray + DVD

*½/**** Image A Sound B Extras C+
starring Aimee Teegarden, Thomas McDonnell, De'Vaughn Nixon, Danielle Campbell
screenplay by Katie Welch
directed by Joe Nussbaum

by Bill Chambers Prom--not inconsequently promoted as "Disney Prom"--is an ensemble piece I'd love to call Altman-esque, but its major influence appears to be episodic television, specifically the seriocomedies one finds on Disney- owned and operated ABC Family. Much like that weekly dose of "Greek" or "The Secret Life of the American Teenager", Prom features multifold, compartmentalized storylines, a cast that meets the minimum requirements for forming a model U.N., an unyielding soundtrack geared towards dictating emotions and/or spurring iTunes downloads, and subject matter that alternates between light comedy and light controversy. Its ending even feels like that of a season finale--enough to tide viewers over during the summer, perhaps, but hardly the soaring stuff of Chuck Workman montages. Audiences seemed to sense that Prom was just going to place a big-screen surcharge on the type of thing they'd normally watch for free, and without any larger box-office incentives (3-D, a certified heartthrob, a pre-established character), the film barely recouped its paltry $10M budget.

Mars Needs Moms (2011) - Blu-ray + DVD

*½/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras B+
screenplay by Simon Wells & Wendy Wells, based on the book by Berkeley Breathed
directed by Simon Wells

by Angelo Muredda It's hard to say who Mars Needs Moms was made for. An expensive but passionless special-effects exercise from yeoman director and co-screenwriter Simon Wells (The Time Machine) and producer Robert Zemeckis, who's put all his creative eggs since The Polar Express in the motion-capture basket, Mars Needs Moms sits uneasily with compatriots like The Pagemaster in the no man's land of children's films too dreary for most children to sit through. If it's too taxing a journey for kids, though, it's largely a bore for anyone else--a flat 80 minutes of animated bodies tumbling through metallic space chutes and neon hallways ripped from Tron: Legacy, scarcely made watchable by some of its impressive technological feats and by its surprisingly subdued tone, which at times borders on the elegiac.

American Graffiti (1973) - [Special Edition] Blu-ray Disc

****/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B+
starring Richard Dreyfuss, Ronny Howard, Paul Le Mat, Charlie Martin Smith
screenplay by George Lucas and Gloria Katz & Willard Hyuck
directed by George Lucas

by Jefferson Robbins The skeleton key to George Lucas's American Graffiti isn't in its setting--the cruising culture of exurban southern California, 1962, as witnessed by young participants with the '50s at their back and Vietnam ahead. Instead, it's disassembled and scattered throughout the text, oblique until it becomes obvious. There's the front-seat monologue recited by Laurie (Cindy Williams) for the benefit of her drifting boyfriend Steve ("Ronny" Howard): "It doesn't make sense to leave home to look for home, to give up a life to find a new life." It sounds like her own reverie, but in fact she's quoting an offscreen speech by her college-bound brother Curt (Richard Dreyfuss), who earlier in the film has a hushed alleyway talk with the "cool" teacher (Terence McGovern) who washed out of an artsy New England school and came back to shape young minds in his diesel-scented hometown. This teacher's name, as it happens, is Mr. Wolfe. It's not so much that you can't go home again as that home changes under your very feet. The instinct to cling to its first incarnation--Curt's fondling of his old school locker, John Milner's (Paul Le Mat) continued mingling with high-school kids at roughly age twenty--is really a hope that you'll find something just as valuable in the wider world you know you must face.

Once Upon a Time in America (1984) [Two-Disc Special Edition] - DVD|Blu-ray Disc

****/****
DVD - Image B+ Sound A- Extras C+
BD - Image A- Sound A- Extras C+
starring Robert De Niro, James Woods, Elizabeth McGovern, Tuesday Weld
screenplay by Leonardo Benvenuti, Piero De Bernardi, Enrico Medioli, Franco Arcalli, Franco Ferrini, Sergio Leone & Stuart Kaminsky, based on the novel The Hoods by Howard Grey
directed by Sergio Leone

by Bill Chambers Such is the level of cinematic sophistication in Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in America that all of the miserable things that happen in the picture make you giddy, filling you with the joy that is basking in an artist's command of a medium. At first, the powers-that-be didn't get it: Warner Bros. took Leone's non-linear vision and straightened it out, and the result was a picture that, though chronologically told, made no sense. This was a fascinating lesson in syntax--films are composed of "meanwhile"s, not "and then"s, perhaps none more so than Once Upon a Time in America, which is about the co-existence of past, present, and future tenses. (It's like an extrapolation of the riddle of the Sphinx: what walks on four legs in the morning, two legs in the afternoon, and three legs in the evening?) Luckily, the studio saw the error of its ways and reissued Once Upon a Time in America a year after its butchered American release in its longer, knottier international form, and to illustrate the dramatic disparity between the 139-minute domestic and 227-minute global versions, critic Sheila Benson labelled the former the worst movie of 1984 and the latter the best movie of the 1980s. Pauline Kael wrote, "I don't believe I've ever seen a worse case of mutilation."

The Color Purple (1985) [Two-Disc Special Edition] - DVD | Blu-ray Disc (DigiBook) + Eve's Bayou (1997) [Lions Gate Signature Series] - DVD

THE COLOR PURPLE
***/****
DVD - Image A- Sound A- Extras A-
BLU-RAY - Image A Sound A Extras A-
starring Whoopi Goldberg, Danny Glover, Adolph Caesar, Margaret Avery
screenplay by Menno Meyjes, based on the novel by Alice Walker
directed by Steven Spielberg

EVE'S BAYOU
**½/**** Image B Sound B Extras B+
starring Samuel L. Jackson, Lynn Whitfield, Debbi Morgan, Vondie Curtis-Hall
written and directed by Kasi Lemmons

by Bill Chambers In the prologue to Steven Spielberg's The Color Purple, black sisters Celie (Desreta Jackson) and Nettie (Akosua Busia) play patty-cake in a field of blue-pink flowers. Celie, the ugly duckling, is pregnant with her second illegitimate child, and when she has the baby, her father (Leonard Jackson) cruelly whisks it away to a new home, as he did her firstborn. Later, her father disposes of Celie, too, betrothing her to Albert, a.k.a. "Mister" (Danny Glover), a vicious stranger on horseback seeking Nettie's hand in marriage. Concerned with more than just lonely Celie (Whoopi Goldberg as an adult) summoning the confidence to defy Albert (less through her own sexual awakening, as in The Color Purple's source material, than through a cultivated sisterhood with the women in her orbit), the picture examines a generation of emancipated African-American men who, poisoned by the slave mentality, treat their women like Cinderella in a misguided salvo to independence. Shit rolls downhill, in other words.

The Kids Are All Right (2010) - Blu-ray Disc

**/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Annette Bening, Julianne Moore, Mia Wasikowska, Josh Hutcherson
screenplay by Lisa Cholodenko & Stuart Blumberg
directed by Lisa Cholodenko

by Bill Chambers Joni (Mia Wasikowska) and her younger brother Laser (Josh Hutcherson) are the offspring of lesbian couple Nic (Annette Bening) and Jules (Julianne Moore) and an anonymous sperm donor named Paul (Mark Ruffalo). Nic and Jules shared the burden of pregnancy, and though The Kids Are All Right never comes right out and says who gave birth to whom, the dispositional echoes, subtle shows of favouritism, and even just the kids' names suggest that gynecologist Nic had the overachieving Joni and hippie-dippy Jules bore impressionable, impetuous Laser. But the movie's more intriguing when the dots are harder to connect. Nic, for instance, gets off on watching a tape of two guys fornicating as Jules pleasures her. And Laser has to guilt goodie-goodie Joni into contacting their biological father, yet it's Joni who takes an immediate shine to the man, while Laser sniffs, "I think he's a little into himself"--directly mirroring Nic's subsequent assessment of Paul as "self-satisfied." A critical callback, it shows that Nic and Jules aren't two single mothers sharing a roof à la "Kate & Allie", but parents whose dynamic jointly influences their children. It's also more convincing evidence of their togetherness than their bedtime nicknames for each other ("chicken" and "pony"), which the actresses can barely utter without giving away the blooper reel.

Daria: The Complete Animated Series (1997-2002) + Party Down: Season One (2009) - DVDs

DARIA: THE COMPLETE ANIMATED SERIES
Image A- Sound B- Extras B+
"Esteemsters," "The Invitation," "College Bored," "Café Disaffecto," "Malled," "This Year's Model," "The Lab Brat," "Pinch Sitter," "Too Cute," "The Big House," "Road Worrier," "The Teachings of Don Jake," "The Misery Chick," "Arts 'N' Crass," "The Daria Hunter," "Quinn the Brain," "I Don't," "That Was Then, This Is Dumb," "Monster," "The New Kid," "Gifted," "Ill," "Fair Enough," "See Jane Run," "Pierce Me," "Write Where it Hurts," "Daria!," "Through a Lens Darkly," "The Old and the Beautiful," "Depth Takes a Holiday," "Daria Dance Party," "The Lost Girls," "It Happened One Nut," "Lane Miserables," "Jake of Hearts," "Speedtrapped," "The Lawndale File," "Just Add Water," "Jane's Addition," "Partner's Complaint," "Antisocial Climbers," "A Tree Grows in Lawndale," "Murder, She Snored," "The F Word," "I Loathe a Parade," "Of Human Bonding," "Psycho Therapy," "Mart of Darkness," "Legends of the Mall," "Groped by an Angel," "Fire!," "Dye! Dye! My Darling," "Fizz Ed," "Sappy Anniversary," "Fat Like Me," "Camp Fear," "The Story of D," "Lucky Strike," "Art Burn," "One J at a Time," "Life in the Past Lane," "Aunt Nauseam," "Prize Fighters," "My Night at Daria's," "Boxing Daria"

PARTY DOWN: SEASON ONE
Image A- Sound A- Extras B
"Willow Canyon Homeowners Annual Party," "California College Conservative Union Caucus," "Pepper McMasters Singles Seminar," "Investors Dinner," "Sin Say Shun Awards Afterparty," "Taylor Stiltskin Sweet Sixteen," "Brandix Corporate Retreat," "Celebrate Rick Sargulesh," "James Rolf High School Twentieth Reunion," "Stennheiser-Pong Wedding Reception"

by Jefferson Robbins If he hadn't helped oversee the death of the music video, Abby Terkuhle's tenure at MTV could be viewed as the network's Silver Age. "The State", "Liquid Television", "Beavis and Butt-Head"--apogees or nadirs, depending on your perspective, they defined the channel in the '90s, until "Road Rules" and "Cribs" redefined it into irrelevance. Terkuhle, the network's director of animation and overall creative chief, left MTV in 2002, but when hipsters in the decade just passed whined that such-and-such MTV show wasn't available on DVD, they were usually talking about something he'd incubated. His reign straddles the cultural shift from the Age of Irony (David Foster Wallace, "Daria") to the Age of Schadenfreude ("Mad Men", the shitty-childhood memoirs of Augusten Burroughs). We used to be able to contemplate human abasement and crack wise about it, like Daria Morgendorffer; now the abasement is our entertainment, and we sit slack-jawed before the awesome pathos of Snooki and The Situation.^*

An Education (2009) - Blu-ray Disc

**½/**** Image B Sound B+ Extras C
starring Peter Sarsgaard, Alfred Molina, Rosamund Pike, Carey Mulligan
screenplay by Nick Hornby, based on the memoir by Lynn Barber
directed by Lone Scherfig

by Walter Chaw Director Lone Scherfig is perhaps notoriously the first woman to direct a Dogme95 picture (Italian for Beginners) and preserves her effortlessness with actors and light romantic imbroglios with An Education. Yet it shows little maturation, particularly after her scabrous, delicately balanced, Hal Ashby-esque Wilbur Wants to Kill Himself, instead regressing into the ghetto of only-adequate BBC coming-of-age story. If An Education is remembered at all, it will be for raising the profile of the immensely appealing Carey Mulligan. She's Jenny, a sharp, sensitive sixteen-year-old schoolgirl with a promising future in letters and eyes on Oxford until she's distracted by the allure of a bohemian lifestyle with pretentious friends, who pretend at the civilization she would rightfully earn in time. Leader of said bohemians is creepy/suave David (Peter Sarsgaard), whose courtship of Jenny is a laudable contrast to Twilight in showing a worldly older man using all the benefits of his experience to impress, and eventually deflower, an easily-exploited high-schooler with stars in her eyes.

Hannah Montana: The Movie (2009) - Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

**/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B-
starring Miley Cyrus, Emily Osment, Jason Earles, Billy Ray Cyrus
screenplay by Dan Berendsen
directed by Peter Chelsom

by Bill Chambers Peter Chelsom may have sold his soul when he joined the ranks of Lasse Hallstrom and John Madden to become a house director for Miramax, but going to work at Disney--on a feature-film vehicle for one of the company's biggest brands, no less--is a mercenary move, pure and simple. So it's surprising, considering he probably could've treated the job as a paid vacation without incurring the wrath of "Hannah Montana" fans (who've been weaned on a particularly low-rent sitcom), to say nothing of the suits in charge (Disney favours foremen to filmmakers, after all), that Chelsom seems legitimately inspired by the material more often than not. The 'Hannah Montana' concept itself needs only gentle pushes to yield something resembling a story, but Chelsom doesn't exactly coast on it; anyone who's involuntarily endured the collected works of Kenny Ortega or Andy Fickman will notice a more idiosyncratic hand at the helm almost immediately. While I can't say I've ever thought much of Chelsom's films (they're a bit twinkly for my tastes), he appears to have found his niche. As a work of Hollywood imperialism goes, it's certainly preferable to his remake of Shall We Dance?.

I Love You, Beth Cooper (2009) - DVD

*½/**** Image N/A Sound N/A Extras C
starring Hayden Panettiere, Paul Rust, Jack T. Carpenter, Lauren London
screenplay by Larry Doyle, based on his novel
directed by Chris Columbus

by Jefferson Robbins I believe this is what it looks like when a veteran director throws in the towel. Morosely paced, edited with no ear for slapstick, perfectly mediocre in its staging, timing, scripting, and performances, I Love You, Beth Cooper (hereafter Beth Cooper) betrays benign neglect on the part of producer-director Chris Columbus. It's as if he tossed together all the ingredients for a thoughtful but teen-friendly confection--a recipe inherited from his late mentor John Hughes--and took it on faith that the cake would bake itself. There's even a weird invocation of the dead god of teen comedies: Columbus casts Alan Ruck, a.k.a. Cameron in Ferris Bueller's Day Off, as the hero's dad and supplies the sidekick with Cameron's absent, oppressive shadow of a father. That's not homage--that's the desperate rubbing of a talisman, a prayer to recapture lightning that leaked out of the bottle long ago.

Adventureland (2009) + Alien Trespass (2009)|Adventureland (2009) - Blu-ray + Digital Copy

ADVENTURELAND
***½/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B
starring Jake Eisenberg, Kristen Stewart, Martin Starr, Margarita Levieva
written and directed by Greg Mottola

ALIEN TRESPASS
***/****
starring Eric McCormack, Jenni Baird, Robert Patrick, Dan Lauria
screenplay by Steven P. Fisher
directed by R. W. Goodwin

by Ian Pugh In everyone's life there's a summer of '42, but of course it was never as wonderful as you remember. Although Greg Mottola's Adventureland is set in 1987, that's almost incidental--it really takes place in that hazy cloud known as "the past," full of fly-by-night jobs rife with fraud and deceit, fairweather friends who sock you in the crotch, and, of course, the music that brings to mind painful experiences perhaps best left forgotten. (Funny to think that this might be the ideological inverse of another great 2009 film about memory, The Uninvited: unhealthily obsessive instead of unhealthily in denial.) The key to understanding the film, I think, lies in Falco's New Wave anthem "Rock Me Amadeus," here serving as an inescapable nightmare at the titular amusement park, where it's pumped through the sound system ad nauseam ("Can you give me an ice pick that I can just jam into my ears?"). But then the romantic confusion driving the plot unravels in a series of betrayals, and that same song becomes a damning elegy. Seems strange that the director of Superbad, an instant classic of maturity-through-childishness and nostalgia-without-precedent, should deliver something so angry and contradictory for a follow-up. Perhaps it is strange--but Adventureland is also a more honest, more personal, and, most importantly, more mature film than Superbad.

The Fall (2008) - Blu-ray Disc

*½/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras C+
starring Lee Pace, Justine Waddell, Catinca Untaru
screenplay by Dan Gilroy and Nico Soultanakis & Tarsem
directed by Tarsem

by Walter Chaw Beware the film that positions itself as being told from the perspective of a child, because unless you're a child or that specific child's parent, you're eventually going to wish that someone would slap the kid in question. Tarsem's labour of love The Fall, his unlikely follow-up to his serial killer movie as shot by Salvador Dali-cum-Caspar David Friedrich The Cell, is such a film, told from a child's perspective--and rather than as an artistic decision, it plays as a plea for leniency. It's a fairytale about a little girl's emergence into maturity... No, it's a fairytale about the delicacy of life... No, it's not anything much of anything. By touching on a suicidal movie star's convalescence after an impressively-shot accident on a film set (involving a horse, Tarsem scholars take note), the picture seems to want to access some discussion concerning artificiality and its intrusion into reality--something that would make sense if The Fall positioned itself as a dyad with The Cell (which was, after all, only about film as a dream medium that acts as the brain does), but it doesn't really do that, either. All it does, in fact, is provide Tarsem an excuse to indulge his prurience and affection for elaborate set-pieces awash in saturated colours and tableaux that often border on the grotesque. Freed of the necessity to be coherent, freed of much understanding of Bruno Bettelheim or Jung or Freud, it's a fairytale without purpose and pretentious to boot, reminding more than a little of the also-pretty, also-empty Neil Gaiman/Dave McKean collaboration Mirrormask. It's too bad, really, as there are images in here genuinely affecting for their visual splendour. I wonder if it's unforgivable heresy to say The Cell is badly underestimated and due for revisionism while The Fall, despite its relative obscurity (no J-Lo anywhere in sight), is badly overestimated.

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.

Dead Like Me: The Complete Collection + Dead Like Me: Life After Death (2009) - DVDs + Pushing Daisies: The Complete First Season (2007) - Blu-ray Disc

DEAD LIKE ME (2003-2004)
Image B+ Sound B Extras D
"Pilot," "Dead Girl Walking," "Curious George," "Reapercussions," "Reaping Havoc," "My Room," "Reaper Madness," "A Cook," "Sunday Mornings," "Business Unfinished," "The Bicycle Thief," "Nighthawks," "Vacation," "Rest in Peace," "Send in the Clown," "The Ledger," "Ghost Story," "The Shallow End," "Hurry," "In Escrow," "Rites of Passage," "The Escape Artist," "Be Still My Heart," "Death Defying," "Ashes to Ashes," "Forget Me Not," "Last Call," "Always," "Haunted"

DEAD LIKE ME: LIFE AFTER DEATH
½*/**** Image C+ Sound C+ Extras D
starring Ellen Muth, Callum Blue, Sarah Wynter, Henry Ian Cusick
screenplay by John Masius and Stephen Godchaux
directed by Stephen Herek

PUSHING DAISIES: THE COMPLETE FIRST SEASON
Image A Sound B Extras D
"Pie-lette," "Dummy," "The Fun in Funeral," "Pigeon," "Girth," "Bitches," "Smell of Success," "Bitter Sweets," "Corpsicle"

by Walter Chaw Diagnosing the ills of Showtime original productions is a tricky deal, but whatever's wrong with them seems consistent across the board. Compared against HBO's output, there's nothing that can hold a candle to "The Sopranos" or "Six Feet Under" or "Big Love"; there aren't any masterpieces like "Deadwood", much less fascinating failures like "Carnivàle" or "Rome". To be brutally honest, it doesn't matter if we lower the bar, since not a single Showtime series could be called good on network TV terms, either. Flagships "Dexter" and "Weeds" are both overwritten and under-thought, jumping sharks regularly beginning somewhere around the middle of their first seasons and betraying their unsustainability faster than "Heroes". It's not for lack of star power or high concept that Showtime shows suck--not a surfeit of budgets or production values, no. I'd argue that the reason they're awful is because Showtime is incapable of hiring writers who aren't twee asswipes molding themselves to pop morality and rote, conventional character sketches and plot outcomes. Those hailing "Dexter" as an antiheroic crime thriller need to consider the storyline about the tough-talking Latina cop who has her heart softened by an Elian Gonzalez clone, or the revelation that Dexter might not be a serial killer after all, but a teddy bear with issues. And just as "Dexter" wastes the wonderful Michael C. Hall in its title role (ditto "Weeds"/Mary-Louise Parker), so, too, does another bit of Showtime dreck, "Dead Like Me", boast the excellent Ellen Muth and Mandy Patinkin in the pursuit of decidedly modest returns.

The Butcher Boy (1998) + The Brave One (2007) - DVDs

THE BUTCHER BOY
****/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B-
starring Stephen Rea, Fiona Shaw, Eammon Owens, Alan Boyle
screenplay by Neil Jordan and Patrick McCabe, based on the novel by McCabe
directed by Neil Jordan

THE BRAVE ONE
***½/**** Image B- Sound B Extras C+
starring Jodie Foster, Terrence Howard, Naveen Andrews, Nicky Katt
screenplay by Roderick Taylor & Bruce A. Taylor and Cynthia Mort
directed by Neil Jordan

THE BUTCHER BOY

by Walter Chaw Opening with a series of panels from Golden Age comics produced circa the era in which the film is set (i.e., 1962), The Butcher Boy identifies Neil Jordan as a director with a secret yen for superhero fantasies. It certainly jibes with the filmmaker's affection for protagonists who, for whatever reason, live in private worlds, in fairytale dreamscapes populated by emblems of good and emissaries of evil--worlds where the most colourful places are the interiors of churches, where the characters' fears and failings alike are assets. Jordan's films are unfailingly about transformation (though sometimes they're about the failure to transform adequately, or quickly enough) and heavy with the illness of existential introspection--the Judas strain with which the modern superhero pantheon is sick. His heroes are rendered simple by their duality, confronted by the idea that for as hollow as it is to change to fit the demands of a particular time and place, it's equally useless to try to stay the same as the world falls down. Jordan makes the movies Terry Gilliam never quite made until Tideland; far from the compassionate fare many label it, his oeuvre is comprised of harsh little ditties about the voraciousness of the social organism and the bites it takes out of individuals living perpendicular to the absolute mean. For me, all of his films, from The Crying Game to Mona Lisa, from The End of the Affair to Interview with the Vampire, are pointedly concerned with the futility of compensatory measures in the lives of deviants.

Juno (2007)

*/****
starring Ellen Page, Michael Cera, Jennifer Garner, Jason Bateman
screenplay by Diablo Cody
directed by Jason Reitman

by Walter Chaw Brutally overwritten, smug, and self-indulgent to no discernible point, Jason Reitman's disappointing Juno is an unfortunate attempt to marry Judd Apatow's sleazy morality plays with a Kevin Smith pop-cultural gabber--the result being a ventriloquism tract in which virgin screenwriter (formerly blogger) Diablo Cody crams so many unlikely gluts of verbiage into so many sterile, undeveloped characters that the whole production is the ultimate act of masturbatory puppetry. The movie would be twice as funny with half as many wisecracks--it's so stuffed that there are long moments of zero interplay as one person or another acts as mute sounding board to whomever's reeling off a Dennis Miller-ism. Red-flag time when a film acts as both main attraction and audience. Ellen Page stars as the titular Juno McGuff, a Soupy Sales-referencing sixteen-year-old who finds herself pregnant by her nebbish boyfriend, Bleeker (Michael Cera). Exactly: What 16-year-old references Soupy Sales? What 66-year-old? Look to something like Heathers for how to write absurdist dialogue--that film along with Clerks the chief antecedents for Juno, which isn't as good as either because it wears its hipster cred like a chip on its shoulder. It's also not very good because even though it's about teen pregnancy, abortion, and adoption, it's about nothing so much as quirky teen romance, revealing itself to be inclined towards mining laughter from dorkiness and thus allaying itself, too (and in the worst possible way), with Napoleon Dynamite.

The Graduate (1967) [40th Anniversary Edition] - DVD

**½/**** Image B Sound B Extras A
starring Anne Bancroft, Dustin Hoffman, Katharine Ross, William Daniels
screenplay by Calder Willingham and Buck Henry, based on the novel by Charles Webb
directed by Mike Nichols

WATCH IN iTUNES - USA|CANADA

by Walter Chaw Bonnie and Clyde's counter-cultural bridesmaid, Mike Nichols's The Graduate is the "easy" version of Arthur Penn's American nouvelle vague classic. It's too "straight," too deadpan--a safer Harold & Maude (think of it as doing for cradle-robbing what Guess Who's Coming to Dinner? did for miscegenation) with a similarly "hip" period soundtrack of previously-released hits (there Cat Stevens, here Simon & Garfunkel). 'Nuff said that the film failed to offend Bosley Crowther. Bonnie and Clyde is the blueprint for Quentin Tarantino--The Graduate is the blueprint for Wes Anderson; and while both 1967 pictures find a goodly portion of their bedrock in images mined from Truffaut, Godard, Antonioni, and the rest of the film-brat arthouse pantheon, it's only Bonnie and Clyde that speaks at all to the culture in revolt at the close of the Flower Power generation. By the climax of Penn's picture, the rebellious youth, contemplating integration into the society at large, are betrayed by The Father, gunned down in cold blood by The Law. By The Graduate's finale, there's just that old, one-second reconsideration of the wisdom of vowing to spend the rest of your life with an unbelievably beautiful, fresh-faced starlet in the full bloom of her attractiveness.

Marie Antoinette (2006) + Tideland (2006)

MARIE ANTOINETTE
**½/****
starring Kirsten Dunst, Jason Schwartzman, Judy Davis, Rip Torn
screenplay by Sofia Coppola, based on the novel Marie Antoinette: The Journey by Antonia Fraser
directed by Sofia Coppola

TIDELAND
***½/****
starring Jodelle Ferland, Jeff Bridges, Brendan Fletcher, Jennifer Tilly
screenplay by Terry Gilliam & Tony Grisoni, based on the novel by Mitch Cullin
directed by Terry Gilliam

by Walter Chaw In going from The Virgin Suicides to Lost in Translation to Marie Antoinette, Sofia Coppola appears to be charting the arc of her own soft, unstructured dive into the morass of melancholia and regret, discovering her voice along the way in the bell tones of Kirsten Dunst, who plays a fourteen-year-old in The Virgin Suicides and, at the start of Coppola's latest film, a fourteen-year-old again, the Austrian Archduchess Marie Antoinette. Coppola's "Fast Times at Palais Versailles" opens with Marie loping through her Austrian palace, just another sleepy, stupid girl with a tiny dog, one poised to have the fate of two countries riding on her ability to produce a male offspring. Betrothed to nebbish French King Louis XVI (Jason Schwartzman), she's put into a French court ruled by gossip and bloodline (in one of the film's few literal moments, Marie offers that her waking ritual attended by what seems the entire family plot is "ridiculous") and, while crowned with the mantle of governance, thrust into the role of most popular girl in school, sprung fully-grown as the captain of the football team's best girl. It's impossible for me to not see something of Coppola's own premature coronation as the emotional centre of her father's own royal court, the third Godfather film--and to see in the intense media scrutiny afforded her in the wake of that fiasco the source of all these films about lost youth and the pain of hard choices made on her behalf. Marie Antoinette isn't a historical film so much as it's a dress-up picture; and like most any work of honesty, it's autobiographical (as indicated by its selection of '80s punk-influenced pop) and intensely vulnerable--at least for most of its first hour.

TIFF '06: Citizen Duane

*/****
starring Douglas Smith, Donal Logue, Vivica A. Fox, Alberta Watson
screenplay by Jonathan Sobol and Robert DeLeskie
directed by Michael Mabbott

by Bill Chambers This Canuck Rushmore really got on my nerves. The movie makes a crucial miscalculation in the early going by introducing its puny teenaged hero, Duane Balfour (Douglas Smith), in revenge mode: Given that we already know Duane's girlfriend (Jane McGregor) is way out of his league, he would seem to have pre-emptively settled any scores he could possibly have with the Most Popular Kid in School (porcine Nicholas Carella, as miscast as Haylie Duff was as the distaff equivalent in Napoleon Dynamite), and so this retribution without an onscreen context looks petty. Hoping to redeem the family name (his father, a prophet of doom, was killed in a Ruby Ridge scenario), Duane eventually decides to run for mayor, but he's a Quixote surrounded by pragmatists; when Duane finally throws in the towel, his entire support system--family, friends, teachers--breathes a sigh of relief. (Anything less would be frankly unCanadian.) Small problem: director Michael Mabbott isn't media-savvy (while guesting on a radio show, Duane doesn't wear headphones; an asshole news reporter's microphone is never plugged into anything; etc.). Big problem: Citizen Duane is an underdog/coming-of-age comedy that's neither funny nor poignant nor ingratiating. PROGRAMME: Contemporary World Cinema

Dawson's Creek: The Complete Sixth Season (2002-2003) - DVD

Image B Sound B+ Commentary A-
"The Kids Are Alright," "The Song Remains the Same," "The Importance of Not Being Too Earnest," Instant Karma!," "The Imposters," "Living Dead Girl," "Ego Tripping at the Gates of Hell," "Spiderwebs," "Everything Put Together Falls Apart," "Merry Mayhem," "Day Out of Days," "All the Right Moves," "Rock Bottom," "Clean and Sober," "Castaways," "That Was Then," "Sex and Violence," "Love Bites," "Lovelines," "Catch-22," "Goodbye, Yellow Brick Road," "Joey Potter and the Capeside Redemption," "All Good Things... ...Must Come to an End"

by Bill Chambers It's been three years since "Dawson's Creek" left the airwaves, and a side-effect of revisiting the final, wistful season of the show--in which the characters are constantly tabulating five years' worth of individual progress (or lack thereof)--is the urge to subject its core ensemble to a mental game of "Where Are They Now?". Newly-minted Oscar nominee Michelle Williams (a.k.a. Jen Lindley), whose revisionist contempt for the series manifested itself while she was doing press for Brokeback Mountain, has carved out a niche for herself as the muse of indie filmmakers, while Katie Holmes (Joey Potter) has spent the better part of the last nine months promoting the first blockbuster of her career (Batman Begins) and living out a real-life Rosemary's Baby. As for the dudes, James Van Der Beek (Dawson Leery) and Joshua Jackson (Pacey Witter), they've had a great deal more difficulty hitting their stride--which makes a certain amount of sense, given the program's gradual transformation into a distaff version of itself. Call it "Joey's Creek".

The Squid and the Whale (2005) + The Weather Man (2005)|The Squid and the Whale [Special Edition] - DVD

THE SQUID AND THE WHALE
****/**** Image B Sound A- Extras A
starring Laura Linney, Jeff Daniels, Jesse Eisenberg, Owen Kline
written and directed by Noah Baumbach

THE WEATHER MAN
½*/****
starring Nicolas Cage, Michael Caine, Hope Davis, Michael Rispoli
screenplay by Steven Conrad
directed by Gore Verbinski

by Walter Chaw The title refers to a New York Museum of Natural History diorama called "Clash of the Titans" that proposes what a tussle between a sperm whale and a giant squid would look like--and it functions as the final, stirring tableaux of a 16mm film self-consciously shot in the manner of early Jim Jarmusch or Spike Lee joints. But The Squid and the Whale, Noah Baumbach's fourth film as writer-director, has inspired more conversation about the degree to which it does or does not tell the story of his own childhood--more specifically, the divorce of his parents, novelist Jonathan Baumbach and former VILLAGE VOICE film critic Georgia Brown--than about the self-reflexive canniness of the filmmaking itself.

The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants (2005) [Widescreen Edition] - DVD

*½/**** Image A- Sound B Extras B-
starring Amber Tamblyn, America Ferrera, Blake Lively, Alexis Bledel
screenplay by Delia Ephron and Elizebth Chandler, based on the novel by Ann Brashares
directed by Ken Kwapis

by Walter Chaw The quartet of best pals portrayed in The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants are, we're told, complementary parts of one consciousness, which goes some way towards explaining why it is that individually they seem like machine-tooled fonts of tween didacticism. They're Judy Blume-spawned pods: the fat, brassy one with speeches about the importance of being fat and brassy; the slut with mother issues and speeches about regret; the frigid one who lightens up; and the morose one who learns to set aside her barbed irony at the expense of a disease-of-the-week urchin with a message of her own. Although the whole thing's too long as it is, there's barely enough room in the picture for each of the girls to have a complete narrative arc, and so we're given preachy shorthand speechifying in lieu of character complexity. It's a TIGER BEAT quiz about puberty and it's astonishingly irritating, even if you can spot glimmers of truth in there amid the weeping and screeching.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The 40 Year Old Virgin (2005)

**½/****
starring Steve Carell, Catherine Keener, Paul Rudd, Romany Malco
screenplay by Judd Apatow & Steve Carell
directed by Judd Apatow

by Walter Chaw You should go just for the spectacle of Elizabeth Banks masturbating in a bathtub, but the real surprise of the piece is the disarming understanding that the usual Greek Chorus of man-friends giving bad advice seem to spring this time from a piquant desire to recapture something of their own lost youth. With a title like The 40 Year Old Virgin (and with a marketing campaign that borders on genius), you know that, as with other "losin' it" pictures (Losin' It, Revenge of the Nerds, Hardbodies, The Last American Virgin, and on and on), the hero's going to get laid--most often to a fireworks accompaniment (or selections from Hair, as the case may be). The only question is if he will get there via the respectable, wife/long-term girlfriend method or bust his cherry against some kind of Tara Reid-esque trollop. But what elevates The 40 Year Old Virgin beyond the same old musty sex-quest flick is the feeling that at its heart it believes there is actually something precious about chastity--even when its preservation has slipped past pathetic. The film is essentially sweet-natured and occasionally insightful about the ways that men never really grow up; small wonder it was co-written and directed by one of the co-creators of "Freaks and Geeks".

Heights (2005); Mysterious Skin (2005); It's All Gone Pete Tong (2005)

HEIGHTS
**½/****
starring Glenn Close, Elizabeth Banks, Jesse Bradford, James Marsden
screenplay by Amy Fox, based on her play
directed by Chris Terrio

MYSTERIOUS SKIN
*½/****
starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Brady Corbet, Elisabeth Shue, Michelle Trachtenberg
screenplay by Gregg Araki, based on the novel by Scott Heim
directed by Gregg Araki

IT'S ALL GONE, PETE TONG
**½/****
starring Paul Kaye, Beatriz Batarda, Kate Magowan, Mike Wilmot
written and directed by Michael Dowse

by Walter Chaw Obsessed with doors and passages, façades and captured images, Chris Terrio's Heights takes on the dour, dark, and twisted interpersonal machinations of The Scottish Play its diva Diana (Glenn Close) rehearses for some of the twenty-four hour period covered therein. Heights is a sexual film steeped in betrayals and unmaskings at its root, clothed in symbols for discovery and disguise that are almost literary in their uniform complexity. It's therefore through a cloud of signs that its insular roundelay emerges. Wedding photographer Isabel (Elizabeth Banks), daughter of Diana and fiancée of Jonathan (James Marsden), is fired from her job on the day--on the hour, almost--that a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to cover a foreign war is offered her by an ex-boyfriend. Jonathan, meanwhile, has an ex-boyfriend of his own to suppress as pretty young actor Alec (Jesse Bradford) catches Diana's eye in the hours before she discovers her husband is honouring their open marriage with her understudy. Questions of female sexual jealousy abound, hand in hand with the ruthless barbs of ambition (the price of success weighed against the cost of failure), tied into a messy bow by big ugly truths and the inescapability of our pasts.

Mac and Me (1988) - DVD

ZERO STARS/**** Image D Sound D
starring Christine Ebersole, Jonathan Ward, Katrina Caspary, Lauren Stanley
screenplay by Stewart Raffill and Steve Feke
directed by Stewart Raffill

by Walter Chaw One of the most woeful and dispiriting films ever made, Stewart Raffill's Mac and Me qualifies as a hate crime. It's a feature-length commercial for McDonald's, Coca-Cola, Skittles, and Sears masquerading as a rip-off of E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial ("MAC" = "Mysterious Alien Creature") that, what with Alan Silvestri's awful score, indicates that it's also ripping off Back to the Future during a key scene in which our wheelchair-bound hero, Eric (Jade Calegory), grabs the fender of a passing car and hitches his way to relative safety. Chips it might earn for casting an actual disabled kid in the role are cashed in when it's revealed that Eric's wrinkled-flesh puppet alien pal can only be sustained on this island earth by a combination of Coke and Skittles. It's enough to put you off not only junk food, but movies altogether. There's a place in Hell reserved for the clowns who peddle stuff like this (Ronald McDonald makes a cameo in the picture, and an even longer one in the trailer)--the movie is so venal and grasping in its conception, so astonishingly inept in its execution, that upon death, Raffill and writing partner Steve Feke should have this piece of crap projected onto their caskets to counter the pain of their passing. I'm serious. Mac and Me lowers the conversation for everyone, to the extent that it's almost a satire of greed and corporate malfeasance. Show it in a double-bill with Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room for an example of what corporations think they can get away with--and what they do.

Dawson's Creek: The Complete Fifth Season (2001-2002) - DVD

Image B Sound B+
"The Bostonians," "The Lost Weekend," "Capeside Revisited," The Long Goodbye," "Use Your Disillusion," "High Anxiety," "Text, Lies, and Videotape," "Hotel New Hampshire," "Four Scary Stories," "Appetite for Destruction," "Something Wild," "Sleeping Arrangements," "Something Wilder," "Guerilla Filmmaking," "Downtown Crossing," "In a Lonely Place," "Highway to Hell," "Cigarette Burns," "100 Light Years From Home," "Separate Ways (Worlds Apart)," "After Hours," "The Abby," "Swan Song"

by Bill Chambers SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. A little over a month ago I had all of my wisdom teeth plus their four adjacent molars extracted, and I honestly can't decide what I'd prefer: going through that ordeal again, or suffering the fifth season of "Dawson's Creek" a third time. This, friends, is where the shameless apologist who reviewed seasons one through four for this site throws up his hands in defeat--I got nothin'. Interestingly, the series predicted its own fall from grace the previous year by having Joey (Katie Holmes) deliver one of the show's trademark po-mo diatribes:

Winter Solstice (2005) + Falling Angels (2003)

WINTER SOLSTICE
*½/****
starring Anthony LaPaglia, Aaron Stanford, Mark Webber, Allison Janney
written and directed by Josh Sternfeld

FALLING ANGELS
*/****
starring Miranda Richardson, Callum Keith Rennie, Katharine Isabelle, Kristin Adams
screenplay by Esta Spalding, based on the novel by Barbara Gowdy
directed by Scott Smith

by Walter Chaw So reserved that it's almost invisible, Josh Sternfeld's Winter Solstice is an illustration of what it's like to be completely incapable of accessing one's emotions. It's a response, I can only guess, to over-scripted and maudlin independent pictures--and as a finger-wagged, consider it a point-taken. Still, if I have to sit through another family dysfunction picture (ironically what most people think of when they think of an indie "genre" film), I'd prefer to watch one that provides some kind of insight into my life or, failing that, resolution for the lives of the characters in limbo. It's not that I abhor ambiguity, understand, it's that Winter Solstice is more absent than ambiguous--almost a Warholian exercise in nothing happening whatsoever for a really long time. Maybe it's a mirror held up to our own disconnection with our emotions; and maybe that mirror would be better served held underneath the film's nose.

Lost Embrace (2004); Hard Goodbyes (2002); Walk on Water (2004)

El Abrazo partido
*/****
starring Daniel Hendler, Adriana Aizemberg, Jorge D'Elía, Sergio Boris
screenplay by Marcelo Birmajer, Daniel Burman
directed by Daniel Burman

Hard Goodbyes: My Father
Diskoli apocheretismi: O babas mou
***/****
starring Yorgos Karayannis, Stelios Mainas, Ioanna Tsirigouli, Christos Stergioglou
written and directed by Penny Panayotopoulou

WALK ON WATER
**/****
starring Lior Ashkenazi, Knut Berger, Caroline Peters, Gideon Shemer
screenplay by Gal Uchovsky
directed by Eytan Fox

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Woody Allen's been on something like a two-decade slide, so if there's a little voice in your head telling you that the last thing you need to see is an Argentine version of a Woody Allen "where's daddy" neurosis opera: listen to it. Daniel Burman's Lost Embrace (El Abrazo partido) is an interminable slog through the congested headspace of one Ariel Makaroff (Daniel Hendler), an insufferable, navel-gazing Pol expat living out his self-loathing strut and fret in the ridiculous family lingerie shop of a cut-rate shopping centre. (Yeah, it's Scenes from a Mall in Spanish.) Burman likes breaking the fourth wall, likes humourless inter-titles that separate his film into a dozen awkward sketches, and really likes dense monologues about, essentially, why no one is ever happy. The extent to which you will cotton to Lost Embrace has a lot to do with how much you enjoy wallpaper narration and old Jewish-Polish grandmothers singing homey folk songs square to the camera--how much you delight in Jewish mothers nudzhing their schlemiel sons before divesting their aggressively middle-class closets of ancient infidelities set against intra-mall flings with an Internet café bimbo. Ennui, listlessness, and gab gab gab, Lost Embrace earns the occasional moment of interest or topicality in stuff like a semi-amusing interview Ariel endures before the Polish consulate (during which he expresses admiration for the recently-deceased Polish Pope), but the film spends most of its goodwill on masturbating with a furious, chafing intensity. Oh, and it's mawkishly sentimental, too.

Undertow (2004) - DVD

**½/**** Image A Sound B- Extras A-
starring Jamie Bell, Josh Lucas, Dermot Mulroney, Devon Alan
screenplay by Joe Conway and David Gordon Green
directed by David Gordon Green

by Walter Chaw David Gordon Green's collaboration with cinematographer Tim Orr has borne George Washington and All the Real Girls--fruit from the tree of Americana, nourished at its roots by the twilit legacy of Terrence Malick. Taking its cue from another source, Malick's progenitor Charles Laughton and Laughton's only film as a director, Night of the Hunter, Green's latest, Undertow, just isn't as good as his previous work: it's too sunny at its end, too mannered in its middle, and it fails to live up to the standards both it sets for itself and the limited oeuvre of Green sets for it.

Nobody Knows (2004)

****/****
starring Yûya Yagira, Ayu Kitaura, Hiei Kimura, Momoko Shimizu
written and directed by Hirokazu Kore-eda

by Walter Chaw Hirokazu Kore-eda's Nobody Knows appears so effortless that the weight of it by its closing credits is just astonishing. It's classical, formal filmmaking of the kind in which the Japanese seem to specialize, full of silences and long takes while featuring a quartet of performances from children that are so natural they feel stolen. Filmed between autumn 2002 and summer 2003, the picture was edited as it was shot, with the structure taking on the progression and characteristics of the four seasons and Kore-eda devising the shape of the next quarter as the previous one finished. No script was written for the children, who were advised before every shot of the substance of what they were to portray. Its evolution was organic, and evidence of that fluidity in its birth is, in the greatest stroke, never betrayed by telltale awkwardness. Nobody Knows feels like the truth unadorned and it feels like poetry--it's not often that the two share a breath. Between this and Hungarian director Nimród Antal's Kontroll, I've already seen two of the best films of 2005.

Raise Your Voice (2004) - DVD

**/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras C-
starring Hilary Duff, Rita Wilson, David Keith, Jason Ritter
screenplay by Sam Schreiber
directed by Sean McNamara

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover The best one can say for Raise Your Voice is that it was made with non-toxic materials--your impressionable 'tween will not be exposed to any really reprehensible behaviour. It's not a disguised infomercial for crass capitalism, it's not leeringly inappropriate in its sexual attitudes, and, save for a somewhat-patronized struggling black character, its politics are vague and inoffensive. Granted, this doesn't preclude Raise Your Voice from positing an alternate universe where music conservatories teach scratching and rock guitar, or wrapping up huge traumatic events with the ease of turning on a light, but the film does keep you from becoming disgusted with the corruption of kids' entertainment. You may feel bored and bewildered, but never disgusted.

The Iron Giant (1999) [Special Edition] - DVD

****/**** Image A+ Sound A+ Extras A+
screenplay by Tim McCanlies, based on The Iron Man by Ted Hughes
directed by Brad Bird

by Walter Chaw Brad Bird's The Iron Giant, based on a children's book, The Iron Man, that British poet laureate (and Mr. Sylvia Plath) Ted Hughes wrote after his wife's suicide, is improbably transformed from the dark and Anglocentric source into a throughline pure and sweet to the rapturous Americana of Richard Donner's Superman. It captures an impossible period existing between the idealism of Rockwell and the lonely realist decompositions of Edward Hopper in a flurry of animated cels, telling the tale of a boy and his robot in the month or so when Sputnik was scaring the bejesus out of a suddenly-humbled, suddenly-Luddite United States. Accordingly, the Colour from Outer Space that was the monstrous bad guy in the book is transformed in the film into the paranoia of a country taught to fear an invisible (or barely visible) foe--marking The Iron Giant as something of a timeless picture particularly topical for a country embroiled in a war on foreign soil, a war with an invisible enemy, and the makings of a cold war with a country that has decided the only way to combat American aggression is with nuclear weapons. Tellingly, it's the appearance of nukes at the end of The Iron Giant that coaxes out the heart of the titular tin man--the last word that he has in the picture--"Superman"--whispered with something like awe that has never failed to bring a tear to my secretly-patriotic eye.

Mean Creek (2004) - DVD

****/**** Image A+ Sound A- Extras B-
starring Rory Culkin, Ryan Kelley, Scott Mechlowicz, Trevor Morgan
written and directed by Jacob Aaron Estes

by Walter Chaw Mean Creek is poised at the magic hour of the death of innocence. It deals in corruption like a maggot will, burrowing and gnawing its way through true fauna to take its sustenance in its blithe, indifferent way from the dying of the light. The film represents in its existence and function a transitional vehicle between the end of life and rebirth. In Mean Creek, a slug crawls across cold flesh in a quiet, crepuscular moment; a snail (similar/different) is punished an instant later by a clear-eyed little girl, completing her exile from Paradise in a stroke remarkably brutal not necessarily for the act, but for the freshness of the stain on the perpetrator. The picture's title refers not to malevolence, but to a nature metaphor that works as the centre-point--the protean "mean"--between two extremes. It is that ever-tilting line that marks childhood's end: mercurial, sure, yet as substantial and rude as a brick wall.

Dawson's Creek: The Complete Fourth Season (2000-2001) - DVD

Image B- Sound B+ Extras B-
"Coming Home," "Failing Down," "Two Gentlemen of Capeside," "Future Tense," "A Family Way," "Great Xpectations," "You Had Me at Goodbye," "The Unusual Suspects," "Kiss Kiss Bang Bang," "Self Reliance," "The Tao of Dawson," "The Te of Pacey," "Hopeless," "A Winter's Tale," "Four Stories," "Mind Games," "Admissions," "Eastern Standard Time," "Late," "Promicide," "Separation Anxiety," "The Graduate," "Coda"

by Bill Chambers SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. "Dawson's Creek" recuperated from the departure of Kevin Williamson in time to mastermind the series' shrewdest tangent yet, that which brought Joey (Katie Holmes) and Pacey (Joshua Jackson) together as boyfriend/girlfriend. Stoking the fourth and smoothest season of the show, the growing pains of that initially illicit union are deftly drawn within the parameters of entertainment for--I shan't kid myself--the young and the docile. Indeed, year four of "Dawson's Creek" is arguably the first (and, unfortunately, indisputably the last) in which all of the protagonists are recognizably human at regular intervals--even the series floaters are not their customarily boorish selves, with the exception of a snobby yacht club proprietor (Carolyn Hennesy) whom the creators just as admirably demonstrate no urge to redeem. (Of course, they can't resist a few geek-revenge moments at her expense.) Most of the season's missteps are, tellingly, not only a by-product of striking out into fairly virgin territory (literally, in some cases), but also harbingers as ominous as black cats and broken mirrors of "Dawson's Creek"'s downward spiral once the action moved from fictional Capeside to refinished sets posing as Boston.

Dawson's Creek: The Complete Third Season (1999-2000) - DVD

Image B Sound B+ Extras B
"Like a Virgin", "Homecoming", "None of the Above", "Home Movies", "Indian Summer", "Secrets & Lies", "Escape from Witch Island", "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner", "Four to Tango", "First Encounters of the Close Kind", "Barefoot at Capefest," "A Weekend in the Country", "Northern Lights", "The Valentine's Day Massacre", "Crime and Punishment", "To Green, With Love", "Cinderella Story", "Neverland", "Stolen Kisses", "The Longest Day", "Show Me Love", "The Anti-Prom", "True Love"

by Bill Chambers SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. With zeitgeist lightning-rod Kevin Williamson having jumped ship at the end of the second year, the training wheels were off for season three of "Dawson's Creek", and the show immediately drove, arms flailing, into a tree, an analogy that draws itself when a slaphappy Dawson (James Van Der Beek) crashes a speedboat in the premiere. However ironic my appreciation of the show might ultimately be, its third season starts out appreciably terrible. Falsely equating Williamson's liberal mindset with titillation, a mostly-new writing staff (there was something of an unrelated mass exodus when Williamson left, with head scribe Mike White answering the beacon of "Freaks and Geeks" and others taking similar advantage of the teen boom) resorted to Aaron Spelling licentiousness--even wallflower Joey (Katie Holmes) doffs her clothes in the season opener. It's her attempt to win back Dawson after ostracizing him at the close of the previous season, and more absurdly than that, it backfires.

The Dreamers (2004); Rhinoceros Eyes (2003); Stealing Beauty (1996) - DVD|The Dreamers (2004) [Original Uncut NC-17 Version] - DVD

THE DREAMERS
**½/**** Image A Sound A- Extras A
starring Michael Pitt, Louis Garrel, Eva Green, Robin Renucci
screenplay by Gilbert Adair
directed by Bernardo Bertolucci

RHINOCEROS EYES
***½/****
starring Michael Pitt, Paige Turco, Gale Harold, Matt Servitto
written and directed by Aaron Woodley

by Walter Chaw The danger is getting lost in fantasy, of being consumed by the lunar flame of lamplight filtered through celluloid. And the irony is that directors, the good ones, are already lost and have been for years. There have been pictures about an all-devouring cinephilia before (Cinema Paradiso, say, or 8½), and now a pair of films by two directors at opposite ends of their careers--Bernardo Bertolucci's The Dreamers and Aaron Woodley's 2003 TIFF Discovery Award-winner Rhinoceros Eyes--strive to blur the line between movies and reality in twin tales of sexual maturation, of coming of age in a movie house--of, to parse The Judybats, learning how to kiss watching James Dean movies. Fascinatingly, the two films share Michael Pitt, forging a path for himself as the archon for the modern dreamer raised on lethal doses of popular culture, and weaning himself from that luxuriant udder only with great difficulty.

Pather Panchali (1955) + The World of Apu (1959) - DVDs

PATHER PANCHALI
***½/**** Image C+ Sound C+
starring Kanu Bannerjee, Karuna Bannerjee, Subir Bannerjee, Uma Das Gupta
screenplay by Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay & Satyajit Ray, based on Bandyopadhyay's novel
directed by Satyajit Ray

Apur Sansar
***/**** Image B- Sound B
starring Soumitra Chatterjee, Sharmila Tagore, Alok Chakravarty, Swapan Mukherjee
screenplay by Satyajit Ray, based on the novel by Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay
directed by Satyajit Ray

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Through some strange executive decision, FFC was given the option of reviewing only two-thirds of Satyajit Ray's Apu Trilogy. Note that the word "trilogy" generally indicates three parts; note also that the omitted film, Aparajito, constitutes the middle of this particular trilogy, making the experience of watching movies one (Panther Panchali) and three (The World of Apu) in conjunction seem weirdly disconnected. No matter: Complete or not, revisiting even just the pair helped me to better appreciate the achievement of two of the most hallowed films ever made, each of which I had underrated when I saw them initially on VHS some years ago. And while The World of Apu seems to me to be the weakest of the lot, Pather Panchali more than justifies its position as a precious jewel in the world-cinema crown.

Overrated/Underrated: Thirteen (2003) + Intolerable Cruelty (2003) [Widescreen] - DVDs

by Bill Chambers

OVERRATED
THIRTEEN
*½/**** Image B+, Sound A, Extras B-
starring Evan Rachel Wood, Holly Hunter, Nikki Reed, Jeremy Sisto
screenplay by Catherine Hardwicke & Nikki Reed
directed by Catherine Hardwicke

I wrote my first script at around the age that 16-year-old Nikki Reed was when she collaborated with her father's ex-girlfriend Catherine Hardwicke on the screenplay for Thirteen. In an attempt to shape a thesis about the almost-unwatchable film made from this memoir of Reed's pubescence, I browsed that script (something I haven't done in over a decade) looking for examples of didacticism; by page three, a character has died from smoking, with cigarettes themselves characterized outside passages of dialogue as "cancer sticks." This was of course written in tandem with my own misadventures in smoking, but do as I say, not as I do. (Call it Harmony Korine Syndrome.) Teenagers make exceptionally bad screenwriters because all teens are Catholic, in a sense--every rebellious action has an equal and opposite guilty reaction. Manifested in confessional writing, that hypocrisy can be deliriously egotistical.

Dawson's Creek: The Complete Second Season (1998-1999) - DVD

Image B+ Sound B+ Extras B-
"The Kiss", "Crossroads", "Alternative Lifestyles", "Tamara's Return", "Full Moon Rising", "The Dance", "The All-Nighter", "The Reluctant Hero", "The Election", "High Risk Behavior", "Sex, She Wrote," "Uncharted Waters", "His Leading Lady", "To Be or Not to Be...", "...That is the Question", "Be Careful What You Wish For", "Psychic Friends", "A Perfect Wedding", "Abby Morgan, Rest in Peace", "Reunited", "Ch...Ch...Ch...Changes", "Parental Discretion Advised"

by Bill Chambers SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. In striving for an original approach to reviewing the sophomore year of a show for which there are already umpteen online episode guides at one's disposal, I've decided to take inventory of "Dawson's Creek: The Complete Second Season"'s seven major players. A series driven by personalities, if far from light on incident, "Dawson's Creek", as executive producer Paul Stupin says in his DVD commentary for the season finale (or is it the premiere?), hit pay dirt with its core ensemble, so let's examine how their roles evolved beyond the preliminary 13-episode run--and meet a couple of interlopers while we're at it.

My Brother Silk Road (2002); Swing (1993); Kairat (1992)

Altyn Kyrghol
**½/****
starring Busurman Odurakaev, Tynar Abdrazaeva, Mukanbet Toktobaev, Kabatai Kyzy Elmira
written and directed by Marat Sarulu

Sel'kincek
**½/****
starring Mirlan Abdykalykov, Bakyt Toktokozhayev
written by Ernest Abdyjaparov, Talgat Asyrankulov, Aktan Arym Kubat
directed by Aktan Arym Kubat

KAIRAT
***/****
starring Talgat Assetov, Samat Beysenbin, Baljan Bisembekova, Indira Jeksembaeva
written and directed by Darezhan Omirbayev

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover It's impossible to understand an entire national cinema--or, for that matter, several national cinemas--through the prism of exactly three films. That's all I have by which to judge the Cinematheque Ontario's massive series Films From Along the Silk Road, which brings together films from five Central Asian countries--and so I offer my opinions with trepidation: I wouldn't want to turn you off of something magnificent that might be hiding within the schedule. Nevertheless, the selections offered to the press are/were of a fair-to-middling nature--pictorially accomplished despite extremely low budgets, but lacking a finished quality in themes and narratives. They're fascinating as cultural documents from a part of the world that never makes much of an impact in North America, but as cinema only one rates a proper recommendation.

Dawson's Creek: The Series Finale (2003) - DVD

**½/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras A-
starring James Van Der Beek, Katie Holmes, Michelle Williams, Joshua Jackson
screenplay by Kevin Williamson & Maggie Friedman
directed by James Whitmore, Jr. ("All Good Things...") and Greg Prange ("...Must Come to an End")

by Bill Chambers SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. When it first aired, I was fuming. But I've not only come to terms with the series finale of "Dawson's Creek", I've grown to appreciate it, too. What I realized on a second viewing (not as superfluous as you might think: the DVD that facilitated a reassessment restores 20 minutes of footage cut from the broadcast version) was that my own tenuous identification with the main character, a movie lover and amateur filmmaker prone to befriending unattainable hotties, was getting in the way of appreciating a perfectly laudable reversal of expectations. There's no sense beating around the bush: Joey (Katie Holmes) picked suave Pacey (Joshua Jackson). The first "Dawson's Creek" scripted by series creator Kevin Williamson since the second season's "...That Is the Question" (in tandem with which he announced he was stepping down as the show's Professor Marvel), the two-part capper--aired as a movie-of-the-week--leaves Dawson (James Van Der Beek) without a fallback girl, as Joey romantically rejects Dawson on the heels of the passing of her alternate: single-mother Jen (Michelle Williams), who dies from a rare heart condition.

TIFF '03: Falling Angels

*½/****
starring Miranda Richardson, Callum Keith Rennie, Katharine Isabelle, Kristin Adams
screenplay by Esta Spalding, based on the novel by Barbara Gowdy
directed by Scott Smith

by Bill Chambers Falling Angels has accumulated a lot of buzz over the past couple of days at the TIFF, but I don't mind telling you to ignore it. Basically a Sunday-funnies version of The Virgin Suicides, the film stars an already-typecast Katharine Isabelle as the most embittered of three daughters who live under the gun of a live-wire buffoon (Callum Keith Rennie) while tending to their catatonic mother (Miranda Richardson, doing a mean Joan Allen impersonation). It's set in the early Sixties, an excuse to splash the same old anti-suburbia tropes with a fresh coat of Day-Glo; the gap between the Canadian filmmaker and his/her audience doesn't get any smaller as a newfound satiric bent revitalizes the national cinema's incuriosity. Rennie and Richardson hardly suggest husband and wife (nephew and aunt, maybe), but more problematic is the latter's role, which requires of a terrific actress to sit silent on a couch for the film's duration, a slab of Canadian misery like one of the corpses Molly Parker bangs herself with in Kissed (also, like Falling Angels, based on a Barbara Gowdy novel). Falling Angels is, ironically, more realistic (ergo, likeable) in a series of flashbacks to the girls' temporary stay in a bomb shelter that exudes the colours and compositions of old "Davy & Goliath" cartoons. Programme: Perspective Canada

TIFF '03: Monsieur Ibrahim et les fleurs du Coran

**½/****
starring Omar Sharif, Pierre Boulanger, Gilbert Melki, Isabelle Renauld
screenplay by François Dupeyron, based on the novel by Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt
directed by François Dupeyron

by Bill Chambers Set, for the most part, against the backdrop of a Paris ghetto circa the early 1960s, Monsieur Ibrahim et les fleurs du Coran ("Coran" being the French spelling of the Qur'an) is an agreeable coming-of-age fable in the Tony Gatlif vein. Moses "Momo" Schmitt (Pierre Boulanger), an artless Jewish youth accustomed to holding down the fort while his father sweats away in an office for a piddling wage, regularly purloins items from the grocery run by "the Arab," Monsieur Ibrahim (Omar Sharif, poised for a substantial comeback), who goes easy on the lad when he at last confronts him about his shoplifting: "Better you steal from me than steal somewhere else." Soon the Arab is giving Momo advice--some of it solicited, more of it part and parcel of the social contract between the old and the young, the wise and the naïve--on money and women, and if there's anyone whose advice on money and women you should probably heed, it's Omar Sharif's. Before mortality and spirtuality become opaque spectres in Momo's process of maturation, Monsieur Ibrahim et les fleurs du Coran is a transporting, pop-hued period piece brimming with "local" colour--including worldly streetwalkers, from whom Momo gets a crash course in the birds and the bees--straight out of the collective unconscious. Which is to say that the picture eventually turns parched-looking and strange-feeling, even as it remains inherently predictable. (Think of a more subversive Finding Forrester with a third act set in Turkey.) The film's conclusion is oddly disturbing in its implication not of torches passed but of bodies possessed--an extreme reading, to be sure, yet I can't think of a better way to convey the melancholy that suffuses the sticky closing shot. Programme: Special Presentations