Film Freak Central

Forbidden Planet (1956) [50th Anniversary Two-Disc Special Edition] - DVD|Blu-ray Disc

FORBIDDEN PLANET
***/****
DVD - Image A- Sound B Extras B
BD - Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Walter Pidgeon, Anne Francis, Leslie Nielsen, Warren Stevens
screenplay by Cyril Hume
directed by Fred McLeod Wilcox

THE INVISIBLE BOY (1957)
ZERO STARS/****
Image B- Sound C+
starring Richard Eyer, Philip Abbott, Diane Brewster, Harold J. Stone
screenplay by Cyril Hume, based on the story by Edmund Cooper
directed by Herman Hoffman

by Walter Chaw Outrageously influential and utterly unlike its contemporaries, Fred Wilcox's Forbidden Planet today suffers from prosaic pacing and long stretches where its groundbreaking special effects take centre-stage as the cast gapes in slack-jawed, dim-witted appreciation. I suppose it's not altogether antithetical to the themes of the picture, one that finds its heroes pontificating on their primitiveness in the face of an awesome (and extinct) alien culture--but this open love of its own coolness ultimately represents Forbidden Planet's broadest, most negative impact. The worst of our mainstream spectaculars, after all, are buried under reaction shots as the characters who should be the least mesmerized by their surroundings are impelled to be audience surrogates. What still works about Forbidden Planet is its high-mindedness: those moments where mad scientist Morbius (Walter Pidgeon) declares that the knowledge gleaned from the new technologies he discovers by reverse-engineering a cache of alien artifacts will be jealously rationed by him alone. The dangerous idea that one entity would take on the moral and intellectual superiority to judge who should and should not be allowed to educate themselves was germane here in the middle of the Cold War and remains applicable to our current state of foreign affairs, where just the threat of knowledge acts simultaneously as a spur to aggression and as a deterrent for invasion. Considered by many to be the best of the '50s science-fiction cycle, Forbidden Planet, at once Luddite and in love with the potential for technological expansion, is at least unique for its unabashed indulgence in its subtext--though mining subtext tends to have the obvious effect of leaving the subtext barren.

Dispatch from the 2010 WWSFF: Midnight Mania - Freaky

Click here to visit the Worldwide Short Film Festival's official website.

 

by Bill Chambers It's tempting to say that pop already ate itself, leaving a vast wasteland of remakes and reboots that can't possibly be fertile enough to cultivate imaginations; I sometimes lie awake worrying that one day all we'll be left with is the vultures and their Jane Austen mashups, their homemade Lord of the Rings prequels and Sweded Rambo movies. Should such a Doomsday scenario come to pass, let's hope it occasionally yields something as whimsical and obviously heartfelt as France's The Little Dragon (Le petit dragon) (animated; d. Bruno Collet; 8 mins.; ***/****), in which a magical force brings a Bruce Lee action figure to life, seemingly with the legend's identity, if not his soul, intact, as it is his impulse upon encountering a Chuck Norris cut-out to kick it down. (He also recognizes his name and image on other collectibles.) Decked out in his yellow Game of Death jumpsuit, he navigates a maze of cobweb-strewn movie memorabilia that appears to be some Harry Knowles type's bedroom; in a moment of quintessentially French cinephilia, Bruce, having been passed the torch (the Statue of Liberty torch from a Planet of the Apes model kit, that is), stumbles on a makeshift crypt lined with dolls of Rita Hayworth, Humphrey Bogart, Errol Flynn, Clark Gable, Louise Brooks, Robert Mitchum, and, erm, Robert Taylor. The stop-motion animation is charming--this scrappy little guy may actually be the ne plus ultra of Lee imitators, who are of course legion--and the tone is deceptively irreverent. This is fan art, executed with gusto--but does it have a function? Collet could be the next Nick Park--but is he hurting for inspiration?

The Yakuza (1975) - DVD

**½/**** Image A- Sound C Extras C
starring Robert Mitchum, Takakura Ken, Okada Eiji, Brian Keith
screenplay by Paul Schrader and Robert Towne
directed by Sydney Pollack

by Jefferson Robbins We'll never know what might have been had Paul and Leonard Schrader's original screenplay for The Yakuza gone unmolested by '70s script king Robert Towne, or had Martin Scorsese or Brian De Palma made good on threats to direct. Instead, the obvious gets overlaid on top of the mysterious, and at least one partner in this marriage of the American and Japanese gangster genres winds up shorted. Producer-director Sydney Pollack makes the mistake his best peers in the decade's American cinema dodged: he mistrusts the audience, believing we can't absorb backstory through performance and suggestion.

Bram Stoker's Dracula/Mary Shelley's Frankenstein [Collector's Box Set] - DVD|Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992) + Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1994) - Blu-ray Discs

BRAM STOKER'S DRACULA
Dracula
**/****
DVD - Image B Sound B+
BD - Image C Sound A Extras A+
starring Gary Oldman, Winona Ryder, Anthony Hopkins, Keanu Reeves
screenplay by James V. Hart
directed by Francis Ford Coppola

MARY SHELLEY'S FRANKENSTEIN
**½/****
DVD - Image D Sound B+
BD - Image B+ Sound B
starring Robert De Niro, Kenneth Branagh, Tom Hulce, Helena Bonham Carter
screenplay by Steph Lady and Frank Darabont
directed by Kenneth Branagh

by Walter Chaw The first thirty minutes of Francis Ford Coppola's retelling of the Dracula legend are dazzling and assured: a self-consciously cinematic, fulsome display of technique and loud emotions--expressionism writ large against lurid backdrops and red, backlit shadow plays. It seems impossible that Coppola could keep this up for the duration of the picture, could see to fruition the kind of viable update/continuation of Wiene's The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari that the Akira Kurosawa film he helped produce, Kagemusha, with its sanguineous, medieval battlegrounds painted with heavy brushes, aspired to be. And sure enough, what begins as a clarion call settles into a somewhat familiar period costume drama spiced up now and again with racy sequences nonetheless sobered by the memory of the delirious hedonism of that opening, wherein we get Dracula's backstory as a hero of a holy war, repulsing Muslim invaders in Romania, turning to blasphemy when the vengeful Turks fool his wife Elisabeta (Winona Ryder) into believing that her beloved has died on the battlefield, and gleefully chewing artificial scenery with toothy relish.

Valkyrie (2008) - DVD

***/**** Image N/A Sound B Extras A
starring Tom Cruise, Kenneth Branagh, Bill Nighy, Terence Stamp
screenplay by Christopher McQuarrie & Nathan Alexander
directed by Bryan Singer

by Walter Chaw Tight as a drum, deadly serious, and a mild corrective to not the enduring misconception that there were no men of conscience in Hitler's Germany, but rather to sickly, condescending awards-season bullshit like Defiance, The Reader, and The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, Bryan Singer's Valkyrie swoops down like its titular winged avatar to deliver the Holocaust melodrama to a minor kind of Valhalla. It's sober-minded and fact-based, with another handsome-destroying performance by Tom Cruise (though he only loses one eye here after losing both in Minority Report) that places him in uneasy orbit alongside Warren Beatty as another pretty boy aspiring for seriousness through mutilation of the self. It's a sober thriller, and because the outcome is never in doubt in a historically-based plot to assassinate Hitler, it lives and dies by its ability to sound smart and cast well.

Public Enemies (2009)

**/****
starring Johnny Depp, Christian Bale, Marion Cotillard, Billy Crudup
screenplay by Ronan Bennett and Michael Mann & Ann Biderman
directed by Michael Mann

by Walter Chaw It's possible that Johnny Depp in a zoot suit, firing a Tommy gun from the running board of a vintage Ford, is so distractingly perfect an image that all other considerations are shunted to the soft shoulder--possible for the audience to only realize afterwards that there was nothing much of substance revealed about John Dillinger in Michael Mann's gorgeous Public Enemies. (Possible for Mann, too, who in the process of creating another of his odes to masculinity and bloodshed, accidentally crafted this pedestal upon which to worship the cult of iconic stardom.) Maybe no accident at all, as the movie closest to this one is Terrence Malick's Badlands--right down to a scene amongst law-enforcement officials in which our Johnny is treated like a Hollywood demiurge of a street-thug bank robber. And if Mann is trying to craft a film along similarly fetishistic, Americana-informed lines, then the media is the massage as they say. Aside from that, somewhere down the road from today, we may look back and wonder about the sudden proliferation late in this decade of films centred on Robin Hoods literal and allegorical, robbing from a broken system of fiscal governance to give to (or, at least, not directly take from) the common guy. From our current vantage, though, what we see is the biggest movie star on the planet playing the most famous and admired "public enemy" of the outlaw era, 1931-1935 edition. While there are intimations now and again of darker contextual rumblings, they don't feel convicted; and in the end, there's left just a collection of beautiful pictures as inert as a coffee-table book.

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

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

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

Sugar (2009) + Tokyo Sonata (2008)

SUGAR
***½/****
starring Algenis Perez Soto, Rayniel Rufino, Andre Holland, Ann Whitney
written and directed by Anna Boden & Ryan Fleck

TOKYO SONATA
****/****
starring Teruyuki Kagawa, Kyôko Koizumi, Yû Koyanagi, Kai Inowaki
screenplay by Max Mannix, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Sachiko Tanaka
directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa

by Walter Chaw In case you haven't noticed, there's a cinematic trend afoot that looks to the fringes for stories of survival in a world where it's suddenly chic to shop at the thrift store. I credit Harmony Korine and David Gordon Green with first finding the poetry in destitution in this new American cycle, with maybe Gus Van Sant (with his Drugstore Cowboy and My Own Private Idaho) acting as the accidental primogenitor. If it's not Frozen River's trailer-park heroine and her dalliance with human trafficking, it's Wendy & Lucy's despair from the bottom of the capitalist food chain. In the mainstream, there's Sean Penn's fantastic Into the Wild and the reboot of 3:10 to Yuma, which at its heart is a drama about the toll of being the breadwinner. Even Hancock, a movie that keeps improving in the rearview, can be read with profit as a document of how tough it is for the everyday Joe to eke out a living in a culture designed for the affluent, the physically gifted, the innately well-spoken. Like any social movement in film, however, a lot of the stuff is minimally affecting, message-oriented garbage that seems very pleased with itself as it, like the exec pushing a broken cart through Goodwill, wears its limitations as if dragging a cross uphill. There appears to be a race to the bottom: the first to total, Warholian inertia wins the booby prize. Most of it's destined to be remembered as symptoms of the affliction and not as the illness itself; the runny nose, not the Plague.

Blindness (2008) + Eagle Eye (2008)

BLINDNESS
*/****
starring Julianne Moore, Mark Ruffalo, Alice Braga, Gael García Bernal
screenplay by Don McKellar, based on the novel by José Saramago
directed by Fernando Meirelles

EAGLE EYE
½*/****
starring Shia LaBeouf, Michelle Monaghan, Rosario Dawson, Billy Bob Thornton
screenplay by John Glenn & Travis Adam Wright and Hillary Seitz and Dan McDermott
directed by D.J. Caruso

by Walter Chaw Brazilian wunderkind Fernando Meirelles has the one-trick pony and he's beaten its corpse for all the slickefied, electrified, vaguely exploitive prestige pieces he's made his calling card since City of God exploded into the loving arms of the arthouse. His latest, Blindness, feels like just another stroll down the same moralizing path as the residents of some generic city go blind, with only the bleary, red-rimmed eyes of Julianne Moore left as the moral barometer and literal/spiritual guide. And like his stable of reliable steeds, Blindness reveals itself at the end as having nothing much to say beyond the Lord of the Flies truism that men left to their own devices are no better than animals. Moore's an unnamed dingbat housewife fond of drinking a little too much wine and tittering around the limited orbit of her optometrist husband (Mark Ruffalo). When The Doctor (none of the characters have names, because the movie is profound) encounters a Patient (Yusuke Iseya) who has gone spontaneously blind, it's not long before the typical end-of-times plague starts the high-concept hullabaloo in earnest. Soon, The Doctor and The Wife find themselves in the Spooky Deserted Hospital that The City uses as The Quarantine Ward, though more literary-minded viewers will choose to refer to it as The Microcosm.

Speed Racer (2008)

*/****
starring Emile Hirsch, Christina Ricci, John Goodman, Matthew Fox
written and directed by The Wachowski Brothers

by Walter Chaw This generation's Tron lands with unsurprisingly little fanfare early in the 2008 blockbuster sweepstakes, the victim of niche nostalgia and bottomless kitsch as well as the theory that total indulgence from all involved will prevent The Wachowski Brothers' Speed Racer from turning out to be their Spruce Goose. I've seen just enough "Speed Racer" cartoons to recognize when people like John Goodman are impersonating badly-drawn '60s television anime (as opposed to Goodman impersonating badly-drawn '60s Hanna-Barbera)--and just enough, too, to futilely hope against hope that there wouldn't be a chimp and a chubby tyke who stow away in a racecar's trunk now and again. But I haven't seen nearly enough of the TV series to want to see more of it, and after enduring the Cool World live-action version of "Speed Racer", I confess I've sort of lost the will to live. In other words, I was never a fan of the cartoon and was mainly interested in this trainwreck on the strength of Bound and The Matrix. Still, I'd be a hypocrite if I didn't take a moment to laud the brothers on their audacity--the very quality I appreciated in the two Matrix sequels, which were, by most analysis, disasters. It seems like sour grapes to knock the picture besides--or at least it seems futile, because the Wachowskis don't appear to care what people think of them along their road to wearing Kleenex boxes on their feet and saving their pee in mason jars. Speed Racer is exhibit one in the case that the Wachowskis aren't in it for praise (they're not going to get any credible praise here) or money (they're already loaded), but rather to luxuriate in the contents of their den's shelves: first Alan Moore comics with V for Vendetta, now this excruciatingly faithful reproduction of an inexplicable camp artifact. Perhaps we should count our blessings that they weren't huge fans of "Voltron."

Time (2006) - DVD

Shi gan
****/**** Image B- Sound A Extras D
starring Sung Hyan-ah, Ha Jung-woo, Park Ji-Yeon
written and directed by Kim Ki-duk

by Walter Chaw Horror is the product of Kim Ki-duk's Time, the South Korean auteur's unbelievably unpleasant treatise on misogyny and objectification: the twin crosses he bears in the crucible of his own country's harshest criticism of him. To see it as the director's response to his detractors is simplistic, to be sure, and given that other filmmakers' marches to rhetorical cavalries (Todd Solondz's Storytelling, Neil LaBute's The Shape of Things) are so obviously band-aids applied to sucking chest wounds, it's not a flattering analysis, either. But Time is the species of rebuttal that functions as a prime example of the artist's essential concerns applied to what are perceived to be his essential blind spots. It's a Kim picture that clarifies other Kim pictures--a treatise on misogyny that is not in itself misogynistic. It's self-aware in a way that Kim's films haven't been so far, enough on point throughout that common charges of Kim's wandering attention span are difficult to levy. What elevates Hitchcock into the pantheon has more than a little to do with the fact that his masterpieces are consistently and mainly about his blind spots. You don't so much dissect Vertigo as Vertigo, with every year and every subsequent viewing, dissects you. Time isn't Vertigo, but it lives behind the same door in our collective, Jungian cellar. It tackles the big existential question of personal identity by concerning itself topically with the current plastic-surgery fad run amuck in South Korea. Peel back its surface to find an underneath writhing with a universal horror of temporariness and mortality.

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.

The Twilight Samurai (2002) - DVD

****/**** Image D Sound D Extras B
starring Hiroyuki Sanada, Rie Miyazawa, Nenji Kobayashi, Ren Osugi
screenplay by Yôji Yamada, Yoshitaka Asama, based on the story of Shuuhei Fujisawa
directed by Yôji Yamada

by Walter Chaw Unforgiven for veteran director Yôji Yamada and the jidai-geki genre of samurai pictures, The Twilight Samurai is quiet, assured, a masterpiece of contemplative understatement. Its connection to Eastwood's film is more than just cosmetic, though, more than just another "Old West" film about an aging, widowed warrior called into action for something so quaint as the honour of a woman. No, The Twilight Samurai seems an apologia for the romanticization of violence and, moreover, for the elevation of the cult of masculinity out of the mud of bestial muck--where it at least in some measure belongs--and into realms of ritualistic divinity. There's a scene in The Twilight Samurai more powerful than its commensurate moment in Unforgiven that emphasizes this point as unassuming hero Seibei (Hiroyuki Sanada), without comment, steps over the flyblown corpse of a rival assassin in silent pursuit of his own quarry. The romance of end-of-era pictures like this (and literature as well; The Twilight Samurai and Unforgiven heavily remind of Cormac McCarthy's The Crossing) is that they can be pulled into a discussion of the passing away of youth as a man goes from early manhood's heady intoxication with the concept of chivalry to the more sober appreciation that true grit comes with providing constancy for your children in a world forever tilting towards alien territory. Though Seibei's nickname, "Tasogare" ("Twilight"), is a jab at his rushing home after clerk-work to tend to his demented mother and two young daughters, there's poetry in it as a description of a liminal magic hour where change looks not only more possible, but weighted with a lovely, gilded melancholy besides.

Shrek the Third (2007)

½*/****
screenplay by Jeffrey Price & Peter S. Seaman and Chris Miller & Aron Warner
directed by Chris Miller

by Walter Chaw A bad franchise reaches its nadir as DreamWorks Animation's flat-awful Shrek the Third (hereafter Shrek 3) tackles the King Arthur mythos in eighty unwatchable minutes of thunderously boring and occasionally moralizing shit, puke, and hitting gags. The only thing mildly entertaining in the whole mess is a prolonged death scene for a frog followed by a chorus of the things singing a Wings song--entertaining, though not in any way inspired or satirical. As calling the movie dumb would constitute a recommendation for people actually interested in seeing it, better to call it the kind of life-suck where you can feel the irretrievable minutes siphoning out your eyes. To say that children would enjoy it is a smokescreen for the mentally-underdeveloped and emotionally immature to indulge in lowest-common-denominator slapstick and the type of hollow banter that passes for wit in great swaths of greater primate societies. All else fails and toss in a cover of Heart's "Barracuda" by that champion of women's rights and humps Fergie--paired in facile shorthand with a throwaway gag featuring one of the pantheon of fairy tale princesses burning her bra. (Describing it is already more funny and clever than the action itself is in the film.) Prescribing medieval Ever After revisionist feminism to something as essentially useless and inert as Shrek 3 is jarring to the point of total incoherence. If anything, this film is the prime example of what happens when the aim of crafting something for the express purpose of entertaining dullards, mental defectives, and toddlers results in something so middlebrow that it tends toward a vacuum. In its "defense," it's more likely to cause naps than to cause hyperactivity.

Shogun Assassin 2: Lightning Swords of Death (1972) - DVD

***½/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B
starring Tomisaburo Wakayama, Go Kato, Yuko Hama, Isao Yamagata
screenplay by Kazuo Koike
directed by Kenji Misumi

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover "What is a samurai?" asks a disillusioned ronin in the blood-soaked nightmare of Shogun Assassin 2^*. It's a good question in context. The feudal Japan of the film--actually the third entry in the Lone Wolf and Cub series, renamed to capitalize on the famed English-language consolidation of the first two--is a lost world of corruption and brutality that makes the idea of a noble samurai seem outdated, if not ridiculous. This lends its swords-and-shooting saga an unexpected gravitas. The film is exploitation all the way, with some pleasingly ludicrous fight scenes and a leering tone that's hard to shake off, but it's also involved in its story on the script level and shot with immaculate care. It's proof that even a glorified serial can leap from the screen when the people involved invest in what's going on.

Takeshis' (2005) - DVD

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

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

DIFF '06: Starfish Hotel

*½/****
starring Kôichi Satô, Kiki, Tae Kimura, Akira Emoto
written and directed by John Williams

by Walter Chaw Stylishly shot, enough so that the neophyte might mistake it for a sparkling example of J-horror, Starfish Hotel addresses that old saw of a character wondering if he's a "character" as mysterious events unfold around him. Handled with more care and intelligence by the first 4/5ths of Marc Forster's Stranger Than Fiction, Starfish Hotel acts as a survey of other pictures (most notably the mascot motifs of Donnie Darko and Kontroll) as it goes on its merry non-horror, In the Mouth of Madness way. In this one, workaday Tokyo stiff Arisu (Koichi Sato) begins to believe he's a construct in his favourite novelist's latest when his wife disappears and he becomes unable to stop reliving his brief encounter with seductress Kayoko (the smoking-hot Kiki). Aided by a mysterious pamphleteer in a grey bunny suit, Arisu traces his wife to a high-class brothel that matches a recurring dream in addition to conveniently evoking a Kubrickian set-piece that is likewise unerotic and tainted this time around by the feeling inescapable that not only have we been down this velvet-rimmed, cigar-tainted alley before, but that each time the returns have diminished. Starfish Hotel is beautiful to look at, but for all its desperation for surreality and mystery (it ends with a series of oblique nothings), it resolves itself as not much more than a reminder that guys like Takashi Miike are doing it better half a dozen times a year without breaking this kind of sweat.

Babel (2006)

*½/****
starring Brad Pitt, Cate Blanchett, Gael García Bernal, Kôji Yakusho
screenplay by Guillermo Arriaga
directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover By this late date, the Magnolia-esque interconnected-lost-souls genre ought to have burned out. The films never meant anything, and when they did move us, it was in such an arbitrary, unfocused way that nothing intelligent could be gleaned from our self-interested pity. But here it is 2006 and I find myself reviewing Babel, which fills the tired bill to a chronologically-fractured T. I'd say that it isn't the worst of the genre, yet figuring out which one is suggests an academic exercise from which I'd rather be excused; suffice it to say that this globalized spin on the old saws is predictably pointless, with the added extra of none of its characters' actions resembling human behaviour even once. Instead of a powerful statement on the loneliness of individuals, we encounter a cavalier attitude towards the non-white and a prurient interest in the damaged sexuality of a teenage girl that destroys whatever patience we might have left.

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.

Shogun Assassin (1980) - DVD

**½/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B
starring Tomisaburo Wakayama, Masahiro Tomikawa, Kayo Matsuo, Minoru Ohki
screenplay by Kazuo Koike, Robert Houston & David Weisman
directed by Robert Houston and Kenji Misumi

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Timing is everything when it comes to certain movies. Had I been one of the many who paid to see Shogun Assassin in 1980 or thrilled to it on video for years afterward, I might, too, have a cult attachment to its slick camerawork and delightfully bloodthirsty nature. But as it turns out, I saw the films from which it was culled--the Lone Wolf and Cub epics Sword of Vengeance and Baby Cart at the River Styx--first: no matter how expertly distilled is Robert Houston's scratch remix version, it was never going to match the elegance of construction of those Kenji Misumi classics. If you find yourself in a hurry and can only squeeze in one film with a pudgy ronin and his small, indestructible son, then Shogun Assassin is the one you want; and it immediately gains half a star if you aren't familiar with the originals. But for those with time, patience, and a love of arterial spray, the main event is probably the better bet. Which is not to say that Shogun Assassin is without its virtues.

Three... Extremes (2005) + Hellbent (2005) - DVDs

THREE... EXTREMES
***/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras C+
DUMPLINGS-The Hong Kong Extreme: starring Miriam Yeung, Bai Ling
screenplay by Lilian Lee
directed by Fruit Chan
CUT-The Korean Extreme: starring Lee Byung-Hun, Lim Won-Hee
written and directed by Park Chanwook
BOX-The Japan Extreme: starring Kyoko Hasegawa,Atsuro Watabe
screenplay by Haruko Fukushima
directed by Takashi Miike

HELLBENT
***½/**** Image C- Sound B+ Extras C
starring Dylan Fergus, Bryan Kirkwood, Hank Harris, Andrew Levitas
written and directed by Paul Etheredge-Ouzts

by Walter Chaw My favourite working cinematographer is Harris Savides. His collaborations with Gus Van Sant and his contribution to Jonathan Glazer's Birth demonstrate to me an agility with aspect ratio and rhythm that's particularly pleasing to my own ways of seeing. A close second, though, is Christopher Doyle, the great Australian cinematographer who teams almost exclusively with Asian directors (most notably on the bulk of Wong Kar Wai's visually arresting filmography, Zhang Yimou's Hero, and Pen-Ek Ratanaruang's Last Life in the Universe)--his stuff indicative of a kind of lyrical, ritualistic devouring that matches the best of the Asian sensibility in pace and narrative. Doyle joins an elite crowd (Greg Toland, James Wong Howe, Raoul Coutard, Sven Nykvist, Vilmos Zsigmond, Conrad Hall, and a select few others) of cinematographers worthy of the auteur label: a certain mood, a certain style, haunts every frame on which he works with a distinct, unmistakable bouquet. He's an interesting choice, then, as the only constant of an anthology film, Three... Extremes, a sequel in structure to an Asian portmanteau from a couple years back, featuring, again, three different frontline Asian directors, each enlisted to provide a horror-based short film.

Drawing Restraint 9 (2006)

**½/****
starring Matthew Barney, Björk, Shigeru Akahori, Koji Maki
written and directed by Matthew Barney

by Walter Chaw Where Matthew Barney's Drawing Restraint 9 falls short of his brilliant, seminal Cremaster series is in its decision to focus on the exploitation of natural resources from whaling through to oil--as filtered through the prism of Japanese industry (using Shinto as the primary test)--rather than on, as in Cremaster, the process and scope of myth-making from the Celts to the Masons to Gary Gilmore. The focus is too discrete for the far-reaching archetypes Barney's disquieting, biomechanical surrealism suggests (he's somewhere at the fulcrum between Salvador Dali and David Cronenberg)--the attempt to articulate the perversity of man's exploitation of their natural resources seems a little like what it is: an artist too good and too provocative to waste his time on something that sells so trite.

Howl's Moving Castle (2005) - DVD

*½/**** Image B Sound A- Extras B
screenplay by Hayao Miyazaki (American adaptation by Cindy Davis Hewitt & Donald H. Hewitt), based on the novel by Diana Wynne Jones
directed by Hayao Miyazaki

by Walter Chaw I've never liked it much when the Japanese are drawn to Victoriana, finding parallels as they sometimes seem to between that reserved, sexually-repressive culture and their own, because it most often results in garbage like Katsuhiro Ôtomo's exhausting Steamboy and now master Hayao Miyazaki's disappointing Howl's Moving Castle. Slow, not terribly interested in lore or internal logic, and fatally hamstrung by the choice of actors like Billy Crystal and a zombified Emily Mortimer to voice its American dub, it's a regression for Miyazaki from his last two films (Princess Mononoke and Spirited Away) in almost every sense, starting with his decision to have a lonely young woman as the central character in place of the prepubescent little girls front and centre in most of his masterpieces (the last two films, Kiki's Delivery Service, Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, and My Neighbor Totoro) and ending with a gross simplification of his usually complex themes of confidence and actualization into a colourless, flavourless drone about the hard-to-dispute badness of war.

Whisper of the Heart (1995) - DVD

***/**** Image B Sound B- Extras D
screenplay by Hayao Miyazaki
directed by Yoshifumi Kondo

by Walter Chaw Three years after directing Studio Ghibli's Hayao Miyazaki-scripted Whisper of the Heart, and before he was able to complete a second picture for the venerable Japanese institution, ace animator and Miyazaki protégé Yoshifumi Kondo passed away of an aneurysm at the age of 47. Knowledge of Kondo's fate colours the already wistful Whisper of the Heart with another layer of blue (especially if you're a fan of Kondo's behind-the-scenes work on landmark anime like Grave of the Fireflies and Princess Mononoke), but it doesn't completely rescue its remarkable humanity from frequent descents into culturally-alien specificity. The obsession with reworking John Denver's hilljack schmaltz classic "Country Road" into an un-ironic ode to the "concrete roads" of the picture's Tokyo-bound little girl protagonist (Shizuku (Youko Honna)), for instance, almost by itself renders Whisper of the Heart a Hello Kitty! for that particular brand of Japanese, Yank-ophile, cross-eyed badger shit. It's a better film if you're Japanese--kind of an amazing thing to say, I know, but the moments that don't reconstitute American "popular" culture through a Nipponese filter manage a fair-to-amazing job of evoking the overwhelming rush of first love. Shame, then, that John Denver appears at regular intervals to remind us of how peculiar a beast cultural diffusion can be.

Good Night, and Good Luck. (2005) + Domino (2005) [New Line Platinum Series|Widescreen] - DVD

GOOD NIGHT, AND GOOD LUCK.
**½/****
starring David Strathairn, Patricia Clarkson, George Clooney, Jeff Daniels
screenplay by George Clooney & Grant Heslov
directed by George Clooney

DOMINO
ZERO STARS/**** Image A Sound A Extras B+
starring Keira Knightley, Mickey Rourke, Edgar Ramirez, Delroy Lindo
screenplay by Richard Kelly
directed by Tony Scott

by Walter Chaw Rigorous and principled, George Clooney's Good Night, and Good Luck. is a curiously slight film for more reasons than the fact that almost a third of it is comprised of archival footage integrated semi-successfully into the story. It's a recreation of a very specific battle in a very specific war that resonates with our Patriot Act/Guantanamo Bay situation, and indeed, that's the target Clooney seems most interested in striking. But without a larger context (the sort that would have weakened its allegorical usefulness), the picture sets itself up as something as obvious as it is minor and feather-light. It's a professional, high-minded, and staid biopic is what I'm saying, a film that says what it says with the stark B&W cinematography of a Dr. Strangelove, but in its icy, humourless way, it's the same stark B&W cinematography of a Fail-Safe, too. It's close and under-populated--and even with so insular and finely-focused a spotlight, it contains at least two completely superfluous characters.

Memoirs of a Geisha (2005)

*/****
starring Ziyi Zhang, Ken Watanabe, Michelle Yeoh, Kôji Yakusho
screenplay by Robin Swicord and Doug Wright, based on the novel by Arthur Golden
directed by Rob Marshall

by Walter Chaw The wounds that WWII opened between the Chinese and the Japanese are still fresh. Over the course of a twelve-year occupation of Manchuria by the Japanese regular army, at least nine million Chinese civilians were butchered--and though the Chinese, lacking a unified defense, bear the burden of poor organization, petty in-fighting, and a fair share of mortal Pollyannaism, the Japanese refuse to this day to apologize for what they have officially dismissed as the standard toll collected in conventional warfare. I believe it's this--as opposed to the centuries of racial hatred--that has called down the normally quiescent Chinese activist contingent on the suddenly-thorned head of the Steven Spielberg-produced Memoirs of a Geisha, a film written, directed, and produced by Caucasians based on a book by a white author who was promptly sued by the geisha, Mineko Iwasaki, he interviewed for the book on the grounds that he not only betrayed their confidentiality agreement, but also fabricated the fate of her virginity, which she claims was never never auctioned off in the way that the Arthur Golden novel describes. True or not, it's the sort of thing that would be particularly attractive to a western mind transfixed by the sexy Mystery of the Geisha.

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 World's Fastest Indian

*/****
starring Anthony Hopkins, Christopher Kennedy Lawford, Chris Williams, Annie Whittle
written and directed by Roger Donaldson

by Walter Chaw Kiwi filmmaker Roger Donaldson follows up his intensely impersonal The Recruit with the intensely personal The World's Fastest Indian, a fictionalization of a documentary he shot some thirty years ago about dotty old coot Burt Munro, who in 1967 set a land speed record for motorcycles under 1000ccs on Utah's Bonneville Salt Flats. Funny how the results of both are sanded down almost beyond recognition: so baptized are they in the scouring attentions of high-grade clichés that they're inhumanly frictionless. See Burt (Anthony Hopkins) dodder around his shack in Invercargill, deliver long, rambling monologues and homey homilies like "if you don't follow through on your dreams, you might as well be a vegetable" to whoever will listen, and rebuke that he's no "POME" to repeated Yankee inquiries as to whether or not he's British. (Here I am thinking that "POME" (Prisoners of Mother England) referred to Australians--the one thing I learned over the course of the picture's interminable, 127-minute runtime.) It's the kind of movie where a lovable--maybe even magical--old imp lightens the life of every lost soul he meets, including a transvestite, a crotchety sea captain, a beatific little boy (think "Finding Geezerland"), and a pair of randy old birds. His charm knows no boundaries--and the universal adoration lavished upon him within the film is bound to dupe certain segments of the audience like a spit-soaked laugh-track that can only "awww." The World's Fastest Indian aims to make old people huggable and mythological while Hopkins drones on incessantly to extras trying to look interested, to inanimate objects, and most of all to himself. No mystery why Hopkins climbed on board, the only mystery is why anyone else did. Originally published: November 10, 2005.

The Adventures of the American Rabbit (1986) - DVD

*½/**** Image B Sound B+
screenplay by Norm Lenzer
directed by Fred Wolf and Nobutaka Nishizawa

"And you come up with images in [Invincible] that are so remarkable, including these countless red crabs in this one, that are so frightening to me--because they are life, yet they are mindless and they just keep going on and on despite whatever we think or whatever we hope."
-Roger Ebert to Werner Herzog

"The moon is dull. Mother Nature doesn't call, doesn't speak to you, although a glacier eventually farts. And don't you listen to the Song of Life."
-Item 10 of Herzog's "Minnesota Declaration"

by Alex Jackson There are a few basics tenets I have followed during my initiation into the world of film criticism: 1. That art is made up of subject matter and a perspective; 2. Frivolousness is not a substitute for offering a perspective--rather it is a perspective in and of itself; 3. Artist intentionality is less than meaningless, as perspective is often constantly being informed by greater cultural, social, and subconsciously psychological forces; 4. In light of tenets 1,2, and 3, one should be careful of dismissing the film you are reviewing, in particular because most of those you will be tempted to dismiss are frivolous, and dismissing them only advances their mission to secularize and marginalize the cinema.

Pom Poko (1994) + My Neighbors the Yamadas (1999) - DVDs

POM POKO
*½/**** Image A Sound B Extras D+
written and directed by Isao Takahata

MY NEIGHBORS THE YAMADAS
**/**** Image A Sound A Extras D
screenplay by Isao Takahata, based on the comic strip by Hisaichi Ishii
directed by Isao Takahata

by Walter Chaw Two films by the other guy at Studio Ghibli, Isao Takahata's Pom Poko and My Neighbors the Yamadas have the director deviating extravagantly from his masterpiece Grave of the Fireflies--one of the bona fide classics of the anime medium--by hopping from that film's heartbreaking war idyll to these films' anthropomorphic mysticism and broad slapstick. Anime gets a bad rap in the United States for being either pornographic or inscrutable (indeed, much anime pornography is inscrutable)--it's an easy way to dismiss an entire medium as foreign and/or amoral, but as a blanket condemnation it's as misguided at its essence as deriding black-and-white pictures, or talkies, or films altogether--and the truth of it is that for every memorable anime, there are probably fifty forgettable ones. As that ratio holds pretty steady for all films, though, the problem for fair-minded folks approaching the medium for the first time boils down to a picture with, crucially, a pedigree like Pom Poko.

The Brown Bunny (2004) [Superbit] - DVD

***/**** Image A+ Sound B+
starring Vincent Gallo, Chloe Sevigny
written and directed by Vincent Gallo

by Walter Chaw Its final cut a full thirty minutes shorter than the one that was shown to widespread derision at last year's Cannes Film Festival, Vincent Gallo's The Brown Bunny is laced with melancholy and a crushing sense of loneliness. Every shot is either a claustrophobic interior contemplation of Gallo at the wheel of his van, a highway unrolling endlessly before him, or a long shot of Gallo standing in the open and at a distance: isolated and diminished. For all of its excesses, the picture is excruciatingly modest--almost meticulous--in its slow unfolding, culminating with a now-notorious fellatio scene that runs ten minutes and presents sex at its most insectile and threatening.

Premonition (2004) - DVD

Yogen
*½/**** Image B Sound A- Extras C-
starring Hiroshi Mikami, Noriko Sakai, Maki Horikita, Mayumi Ono
screenplay by Noboru Takagi, Norio Tsuruta, based on the comic by Jiro Tsunoda
directed by Norio Tsuruta

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover I could spin many a yarn about the kernel of goodness trapped inside Premonition. As the tale of a teacher named Hideki Satomi (Hiroshi Mikami) who finds supernatural newspapers that predict horrible events, it's poised to say plenty about the information age, the anxiety of which is manifested in the fact that Hideki is either helpless to stop the events or winds up physically wasted as a result of trying. But the point of mentioning that is scotched by the production team's total obliviousness to thematics, which makes any exegesis purely symptomatic. There's a swell sociology paper somewhere in Premonition's context within the rest of the J-Horror canon, but its pleasures are largely as an artifact rather than as something to be enjoyed on its own terms.

Steamboy (2004) [Collector's Gift Set] - DVD

*/**** Image C+ Sound A Extras B+
screenplay by Sadayuki Murai and Katsuhiro Otomo
directed by Katsuhiro Otomo

by Walter Chaw Katsuhiro Otomo's Akira is both the best and the worst thing ever to happen to anime in the United States. For the believer, its Blade Runner cyberpunk ultra-cool was an eye-opener, but to hold the film up as the standard for the medium means that a lot of people looking to it as their introduction believe that anime is a little excitement cordoned off by long stretches of confused, gravid exposition. It tries to condense hundreds of pages of metaphysical text into scientist characters delivering what seem like endless exchanges in high-minded gobbledygook. Akira's popularity obscures the finest examples of the medium, films that manage to balance serious metaphysical musing with actual forward momentum (the two Ghost in the Shell films, for instance); to tell adult tales in affecting ways (Grave of the Fireflies); to redefine genre thriller (Perfect Blue), action (Ninja Scroll), and fantasy (Princess Mononoke); and to present children's fables as artifacts that are as useful for adults as they are for kids (Spirited Away, My Neighbor Totoro). Akira isn't the greatest anime film, just the most well-known, and it's worth speculating how its notoriety may have retarded the maturation of American animation.

My Mother (2004) + Exiles (2004)

Ma mère
*½/****
starring Isabelle Huppert, Louis Garrel, Emma de Caunes, Joana Preis
screenplay by Christopher Honoré, based on the novel by Georges Bataille
directed by Christopher Honoré

Exils
***/****
starring Romain Duris, Lubna Azabal, Leila Makhlouf, Habib Cheik
written and directed by Tony Gatlif

by Bill Chambers Even after the Hays Office lost its stranglehold on the screen trade, mainstream American erotica remained a largely intellectual affair. Rather than try to get you off, films like Paul Mazursky's Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice and Mike Nichols's Carnal Knowledge were interested in examining the fallout from sex. Meanwhile, France was cranking out Sylvia Kristel movies, and the raincoat crowd could enjoy even such highbrow fare as Last Tango in Paris for long stretches. If the legit French sex cinema ultimately bore a closer resemblance to red-blooded American filth in the '70s (and not just ethically: the 'X aesthetic' was like dumbed-down nouvelle vague), it makes sense that it would chart a course parallel with stateside porno's gradual descent into the penetration abyss. But while the (d)evolution itself is an organic one born of desensitization, things have progressed along a more self-conscious path in recent years, with the incendiary work of Catherine Breillat, Gaspar Noé, and Michael Haneke helping to foster the impression of contemporary Gallic life as a veritable Sodom and Gomorrah.

Layer Cake (2004); 3-Iron (2004); Palindromes (2005)

LAYER CAKE
***/****
starring Daniel Craig, Colm Meaney, Kenneth Cranham, Michael Gambon
screenplay by J.J. Connolly, based on his novel
directed by Matthew Vaughn

3-IRON
****/****
starring Lee Seung-yeon, Jae Hee
written and directed by Kim Ki-duk

PALINDROMES
***½/****
starring Ellen Barkin, Stephen Adly Guirgis, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Richard Masur
written and directed by Todd Solondz

by Walter Chaw Producer Matthew Vaughn makes his directorial debut with the Brit underground gangster flick Layer Cake, and he does it with a sexy, cool savoir-faire that runs slick and smooth. It's softer than Jonathan Glazer's fabulously decadent Sexy Beast (most of that due, no doubt, to there being no baddie the equivalent of Ben Kingsley's Don Logan in Vaughn's film) and more coherent than Paul McGuigan's Gangster No. 1, but it slips snug into the same conversation. Now that Guy Ritchie's been gobbled whole by his very own vagina dentate, it stands to reason that Vaughn, Ritchie's producer on Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch, would seek to fill the void left in the only U.K. pop genre with any sort of international currency all by his own self. Yet the product of Vaughn's hand isn't so much an imitation as it is a refinement: not better necessarily, but calmer--closer to the lounge lizard James Bond of the 1960s than to the feisty punk Michael Caine heisters from roughly the same period, though Layer Cake is infused, of course, with a healthy dose of nastiness and post-modern irony.

The Cat Returns (2002) - DVD

***/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
screenplay by Reiko Yoshida
directed by Hiroyuki Morita

by Walter Chaw With the frantic, infernal energy (and cats) and even a little of the barbed social satire of Mikhail Bulgakov's Master and Margarita, Hayao Miyazaki protégé Hiroyuki Morita's directorial debut The Cat Returns is undone a little by its hysteria but salvaged by its artistry and smarts. A familiar tale for fans of Studio Ghibli, the film follows plucky schoolgirl Haru (Chizuru Ikewaki in the Japanese track, Anne Hathaway in the English dub) as she saves a mysterious grey cat from certain flattening, thus earning her the dubious boon of eternal gratitude from the Cat King (Tetsuro Tamba & Tim Curry). After being cursed with a yard-full of cattails, a pocketful of catnip, and a locker-full of gift-wrapped mice, Haru receives the ultimate prize of betrothal to the Cat Prince (Takayuki Yamada & Andrew Bevis)--a fate she seeks to avoid with the help of portly kitty Muta (Tetsu Watanabe & Peter Boyle) and the stately Baron (Yoshihiko Hakamada & Cary Elwes). Haru's journey is essentially one of perspective as she evolves from a silly sort of girl into a person who's learned to trust that her instincts are good and that her courage is, indeed, up to snuff.

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.

The Grudge (2004) - DVD

*/**** Image B Sound A- Extras A-
starring Sarah Michelle Gellar, Jason Behr, KaDee Strickland, Clea DuVall
screenplay by Stephen Susco, based on a screenplay by Takashi Shimizu
directed by Takashi Shimizu

by Walter Chaw Fans of Takashi Shimizu's Japanese horror franchise Ju-On, rest assured that his English-language but still Tokyo-set version of The Grudge is laudably faithful to the source material. So faithful, in fact, that The Grudge is completely free of those tedious drags character development, tension, scenario, narrative, plot, intelligence, point, sociological relevance, technical aptitude, and scares, really, since it leaves "pacing" somewhere back where the rest of that stuff was jettisoned. What The Grudge has a lot of, though, are "jump scares," the cats-through-windows thing where somebody crawls around in an attic with a lighter because they've heard an ominous knocking and then a face appears in the gloom accompanied by a sting note on the soundtrack.

Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence (2004); Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (2004); Time of the Wolf (2003)|Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (2004) [Special Collector's Edition - Widescreen] - DVD

Innocence
Inosensu: Innocence
****/****
written and directed by Mamoru Oshii

SKY CAPTAIN AND THE WORLD OF TOMORROW
**½/**** Image A Sound A Extras A
starring Jude Law, Gwyneth Paltrow, Angelina Jolie, Giovanni Ribisi
written and directed by Kerry Conran

Le Temps du loup
****/****
starring Isabelle Huppert, Béatrice Dalle, Patrice Chéreau, Rona Hartner
written and directed by Michael Haneke

by Walter Chaw For me, the most intoxicating visions of the future are those in which we're drowning in an ocean of our past--garbage, wreckage, Romes burned to a cinder and heaped against the new Meccas of our collective tomorrows. Star Wars proffered a kind of aesthetic of dirt that appealed: a wonderland where the spaceships looked like they'd been flown and there were places like Mos Eisley that reeked of stale liquor, sawdust, and cigarettes. (The distance that George Lucas has gone to disinfect his grubby vision of the future is the same distance that esteem for the franchise has fallen amongst all but the most die-hard chattel.) Among the spearhead of a group of artists who redefined the science-fiction genre in film the same way that Sergio Leone and Sam Peckinpah scuffed-up the western in the Sixties, Ridley Scott evolved the idea of a functional future, with his Alien and Blade Runner serving as visual echoes of T.S. Eliot's broken stones and fragments shored against our ruins. Terry Gilliam defined the aesthetic when describing his rationale for the look of Brazil (1985): he wanted it to seem as though the whole century had been compacted into a single moment. The timeless "someday soon" that is always just around a corner that never comes.

Species III (2004) [Unrated Edition] + Resident Evil: Apocalypse (2004) [Special Edition] - DVDs

SPECIES III
*/**** Image B Sound B Extras C
starring Robin Dunne, Robert Knepper, Amelia Cooke, J.P. Pitoc
screenplay by Ben Ripley
directed by Brad Turner

RESIDENT EVIL: APOCALYPSE
½*/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Milla Jovovich, Sienna Guillory, Oded Fehr, Thomas Kretschmann
screenplay by Paul W.S. Anderson
directed by Alexander Witt

by Walter Chaw There used to be only two avenues for women in the modern, post-Black Christmas horror genre: they could be the bimbo at the end of the machete, or the virgin wielding one at the end of the movie. After rape/revenge stuff like I Spit on Your Grave and Ms. 45 (and, ultimately, Aliens), though, it became possible for women to be men from the first frame of their ordeals instead of incurring steady masculinization throughout the course of some torturous, highly structured pursuit. What made Roger Donaldson's Species (1995) so interesting is that it transformed the woman's biological urge into the sui generis of the premise: The bad guy in Species was a bad girl named Sil, and Sil wanted to mate really bad (and really badly). But just like her brothers in slasherdom (Jason Vorhees, Michael Myers, Freddy Krueger), that will-to-fuck is largely unrealized--enough so that most academic reads of this horror subgenre involve the acting out of priapic males unable to reach climax through a variety of phallic substitutes. This is acknowledged in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 as Leatherface's titular dick runs out of gas between a girl's legs--and the would-be victim knowing the score strokes it anyway, soothing his bruised male ego.

Dolls (2002) - DVD

***/**** Image B+ Sound B
starring Miho Kanno, Hidetoshi Nishijima, Tatsuya Mihashi, Chieko Matsubara
written and directed by Takeshi Kitano

by Walter Chaw Dolls is beautiful--that much can be expected from Japanese director Takeshi Kitano. It's meticulously-framed, interested in theatre, obsessed with the ocean, and stately in a way that re-establishes Kitano as a bridge of sorts between the formalism of Japanese cinema's past and the lawlessness of its present. But the film, the rare Kitano-directed piece in which he does not also appear, dispenses with hinting around at his absurdist auteur tendencies and sublimates his subtext into the text. To that end, it opens with an extended Bunraku performance--shot with a devouring fascination that hints at the ningyo (doll worship) suggested by the title and set to follow--concerning two doomed lovers that parallels the three barely-intersecting couples whose stories comprise the body of this anthology. The decision to make a film that is all subtext, however, is seldom successful: such pictures tend towards the pretentious, for one; and in emptying the basement, logic follows, they leave the basement empty. So it is with Dolls, which says everything it has to say, leaving only the speculation upon a repeat viewing (if one is necessary or desired) for how personal a project this might have been for Kitano and ultimately what this film tells us about the rest of Kitano's films. Then again, there's something that nags about Dolls, opening the possibility for another possible eventuality for this kind of piece.

Ju-On: The Grudge (2003)

*½/****
starring Megumi Okina, Misaki Ito, Misa Uehara, Yui Ichikawa
written and directed by Takashi Shimizu

by Walter Chaw There are a couple of startling moments in Takashi Shimizu's Ju-On: The Grudge buried in a mountain of mendacity. It looks cheap and it feels cheap--something like Takashi Miike's Visitor Q without the barrier-breaking, society-challenging audacity, or a television drama with low production values and a hilariously inept cast. It's kids playing at spooky: It'll work a time or two, but mostly it'll be clumsy and stilted. Mainly, it seems as though Ju-On: The Grudge hopes that you haven't seen the movies of Hideo Nakata and Kiyoshi Kurosawa, because suddenly we're not even talking the same ballpark anymore.

Burden of Dreams: FFC Interviews Tadanobu Asano

Tadanobu Asano, the pride of Japanese cult cinema, on his latest performances

August 8, 2004|A lot of people are calling Tadanobu Asano Japan's Brad Pitt; I'm more comfortable comparing him to Johnny Depp. He's a beautiful guy, no question, but he's also fond of quirky film choices that work against his matinee-idol good looks. If he couldn't act, it'd be career suicide, but in the course of a little over ten years, Asano has fashioned a body of work that alternates between disturbed and disturbing. It says a lot about the Japanese audience that he has found fame and fortune playing sociopathic murderers and suicidal urban manqué.

Shrek 2 (2004)

*½/****
screenplay by Andrew Adamson and Joe Stillman and J. David Stem & David N. Weiss
directed by Andrew Adamson, Kelly Asbury, Conrad Vernon

by Walter Chaw Neither better nor worse than its predecessor, think of Shrek 2 as a step sideways--it doesn't so much earn an audience as inherit one. A DreamWorks/PDI production, Shrek 2 transplants the first picture's bitterness towards Disney, though the characters it skewers are in the public domain (Sleeping Beauty, the three little pigs, Hansel & Gretel, Pinocchio, and so on) and happen to be among the icons that Disney, by and large, never dishonoured. Without a viable target, then, the film is the kind of satire-less satire that mistakes being a self-congratulatory trivia game designed for beginning players for being a post-modern commentary on fairytales and, more specifically, the traditional Disney animated feature. There's no sharpness inherent in making reference to Spider-Man or Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings saga (just as there was no sharpness in referencing The Matrix in the original), and imitation has no point of view, just a brief rush of pride and bemusement for folks generally unused to catching the allusions. To say the picture functions best for the lowest common denominator (note a trio of flatulence gags) isn't entirely fair--but it's accurate.

Millennium Actress (2002) + Tokyo Godfathers (2003)

MILLENNIUM ACTRESS
***½/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B
screenplay by Satoshi Kon and Sadayuki Murai
directed by Satoshi Kon

TOKYO GODFATHERS
**½/**** Image A Sound A Extras C+
screenplay by Keiko Nobumoto and Satoshi Kon
directed by Satoshi Kon and Shôgo Furuya

by Walter Chaw Four years separate Satoshi Kon's astonishing Perfect Blue and his astonishing Millennium Actress; it seems that what the intervening period brought to Kon's palette is a strong sense of visual humour and an affecting pathos to cut the existential dread of his identity crises--the year or two distancing Tokyo Godfathers from Millennium Actress further refining Kon as a humorist even as it blunted his razor's edge. Where Perfect Blue is the first film in decades to use Hitchcock correctly in a sentence, it still fails for the most part to jump from horror to hilarity on the turn of a heel, making its story of an actress being stalked by a doppelgänger brilliant, no question, but also relentlessly grim. Millennium Actress takes many of the same themes (down to the same basic structure) of performance and meta-reality, stage and screen, cradling them in a story about a man's lifetime of unrequited love for an actress, herself suffering from a lifetime's unrequited love for a mysterious revolutionary. Both threads entwine in a mutual affection for the life of the cinema, which, by film's end, serves as the ends and the means by which their respective love stories are resolved. Like Perfect Blue, Millennium Actress is about living with ghosts, but where the one is all shadow, Millennium Actress is all alight.

The Last Unicorn (1982) - DVD

*/**** Image D Sound D
screenplay by Peter S. Beagle, based on his novel
directed by Arthur Rankin, Jr. and Jules Bass

by Walter Chaw Rankin & Bass' typically sloppy adaptation of Peter S. Beagle's classic The Last Unicorn (adapted for the screen by Beagle himself) is terribly voiced and animated, even by the '70s Bakshi/flash-frozen/Saturday-morning conveyor belt standard. The melancholy poetry of Beagle's novel, rife with dread and the vertiginous feeling of falling into chaos, is notable for its similarity to the big eye, little mouth of traditional anime but falls short of that gold standard in terms of performance and detail. Mouths don't move, backgrounds are static and recycled, and it doesn't help that the colours on the print making it to the DVD format look as though they'd been left in the front window for too long.

Dawn of the Dead (2004)

***/****
starring Sarah Polley, Ving Rhames, Jake Weber, Mekhi Phifer
screenplay by James Gunn
directed by Zack Snyder

by Walter Chaw Heretical to even suggest it, I'm sure, Zack Snyder's remake of George A. Romero's Dawn of the Dead surpasses the original in any number of ways. It gives the idea of consumerism run wild the short shrift that it deserves (and the cynicism that an intervening quarter-century demands), touching on the original's explanation of the zombies' affinity for the shopping mall and the human heroes' delight at their newfound material wealth before becoming a bracing action film that, like Marcus Nispel's reworking of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (the source of which didn't need updating as much as Dawn arguably did), is more firmly entrenched in the James Cameron Aliens tradition than the Seventies institution of disconcerting personal horror film. There's nothing like fat on the bone of this picture (something the original can't claim), providing a canny demonstration of how comedy and satire can work without descending into slapstick (no pies in zombie faces this time around), and of how great performances and smart direction can craft a piece that honours its origins while significantly upping the effectiveness of its themes and premise.

The Last Samurai (2003) + The Girl from Paris (2003)

THE LAST SAMURAI
**½/****
starring Tom Cruise, Billy Connolly, Tony Goldwyn, Shin Koyamada
screenplay by John Logan and Marshall Herskovitz & Edward Zwick
directed by Edward Zwick

Une hirondelle a fait le printemps
***/****
starring Michel Serrault, Mathilde Seigner, Jean-Paul Roussillon, Frédéric Pierrot
screenplay by Christian Carion and Eric Assous
directed by Christian Carion

by Walter Chaw Concerned with the encroachment of technology, spawned by the humanism of the French Revolution, Romanticism as a movement in poetry is involved in nostalgia for an idealized Natural history. On film, it occasionally manifests itself in period pieces that focus on the encroachment and proliferation of the railroad: its engines (as in King Vidor's Duel in the Sun and Beyond the Forest, or the Hughes Brothers' From Hell) the manifestation of the industrial revolution in terms of hellmouths and serpents--William Blake's "Tyger" burning bright in the forests of a primordial night, all-consuming and inexorable. That loss of ritual to the march of time, tradition and heritage falling before the metal chimera of technology finds itself articulated in two very different films: Edward Zwick's curious, derivative, workmanlike The Last Samurai, and Christian Carion's bleak and affecting The Girl from Paris (Une hirondelle a fait le printemps).

Bride of Re-Animator (1990) - DVD

**½/**** Image C Sound C
starring Bruce Abbott, Claude Larl Jones, Fabiana Odento, David Gale
screenplay by Woody Keith and Rick Fry
directed by Brian Yuzna

by Walter Chaw Screaming Mad George is a genius. Make-up artist extraordinaire, his legacy is born of Stan Winston and Tom Savini, but his touch is more witty than the former and more perverse than the latter, resulting in a body of work that, by itself, makes the third Children of the Corn film a winner, the climax of Brian Yuzna's Society unspeakably sticky, and this, Yuzna's sequel to Stuart Gordon's classic splatter flick Re-Animator, a gore flick of unusual visual wit and energy. A continuation of the sad events at H.P. Lovecraft's doomed Miskatonic University, the tale of mad Herbert West (B-movie legend Jeffrey Combs) and his experiments in reanimating living tissue (undaunted, apparently, by his run-in with an over-eager intestinal tract in the first film) with hapless assistant Dan (Bruce Abbott), Bride of Re-Animator captures a lot of the gleeful lack of boundaries of the first film without, predictably, the attendant surprise and freshness. Still, what emerges is a genre picture that, for all of its lack of psychosexual subtext and subtlety, gains for its jubilant indulgence in the wetworks.

DIFF '03: Bright Future

Akarui mirai
***½/****
written and directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa

by Walter Chaw Like many of Kiyoshi Kurosawa's pictures, Bright Future is about the virulence of apathy, the way that malaise seeps into the cracks of character, infecting ambition into inaction or inspiring sudden, malevolent acts inspired not so much by violence, but by a lack of prevention of violence. The Yin to Takashi Miike's Yang, Kurosawa increasingly finds himself at the fringe of narrative, making this film a remarkable companion piece to Gus Van Sant's similarly haunted, lyrical, and allegorical Elephant. Yuji (Joh Odagiri) is a shiftless youth working in a towel factory; his friend Mamaro (Tadanobu Asano) functions like Masato Hagiwara's drifter in Kurosawa's amazing Cure, an enigmatic catalyst for an almost existential refusal first to act, then to take responsibility for any action, no matter its significance. Kurosawa's worlds are contaminated with Bartleby's--sick with them, the way that Yuji and Mamaro eventually manage to infect Japan's waterways with a meticulously engineered freshwater jellyfish, an entity as malignant in its feckless, mindless drift as Kurosawa's disaffected, isolated antiheroes. The bright future of the title isn't ironic in a traditional sense because it's genuinely hopeful in the way of the New Testament's Revelations, understanding that for Yuji and Mamaro the completion of the quest is predictably apocalyptic and, like Camus's Sisyphus, finding joy in the reassuring inevitability of a never-deviating eternity. A closing shot of a canal packed with diaphanous death touches on the Christian (and T.S. Eliot-ian) image of Christ the river, divider and unifier (note the split-screen device that frames Yuji's conversations with his father)--understanding that the return of that particular catalyst is also certain death for a mythology that, like post-modernism, proselytizes salvation of sorts in the life of a sheep.