*½/**** starring Chris Cooper, Richard Dreyfuss, Billy Zane, Danny Huston written and directed by John Sayles
by Walter Chaw The Summitville Mine Disaster in Colorado left over 20 miles of the Alamosa river "dead," so contaminated by waste materials (cyanide chief among them) that it very simply killed all the fish. A good thing, I guess, that there wasn't a sizable human population downstream. A superfund site now and fast becoming a sore election point in a Senate race between A.G. Ken Salazar and beer magnate Pete Coors as third-party interests begin a round of misleading, venomous attack ads, Summitville represents in a way a handy microcosm of the ugliness of the Kerry/Bush presidential election. There's a point when third-party interests and smear campaigns, on either side of the divide, start to demean all of us as a people, feeding on our worst instincts and treating us like dumb, mute animals. The political discourse in our country has devolved into a playground jibe match where it's easy to forget in the mud storm who's the rubber and who's the glue; no great surprise that the general death of conversation in our culture includes the whole spectrum of politics.
OUTFOXED: RUPERT MURDOCH'S WAR ON JOURNALISM *½/**** directed by Robert Greenwald
UNCOVERED: THE WAR IN IRAQ ****/**** directed by Robert Greenwald
by Walter ChawA poll was recently conducted: 20,000 people were asked what news show they rely upon for their campaign information, and then they were asked six questions about the respective campaign platforms of each candidate. The sector of the population scoring the lowest (also the sector, according to the Nielsens, least likely to have attended college) consisted of people who watch insane person Bill O'Reilly's "The O'Reilly Factor" over on Fox News, while the population scoring the highest (and most likely to have been to college--something like a 3:1 ratio compared to O'Reilly's audience) preferred Comedy Central's "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart". Tied in with that stat--the revelation of which is only surprising to the GED nation flocking to Fox, 80% of whom still believe that Iraq was directly involved in the 9/11 attacks--is an article in the sharp THE ONION that described liberals in a state of "outrage fatigue." See, satire is a difficult concept, but once grasped it's the quickest, truest way to get at the heart of any absurd situation. Without satire and irony, the issues of the day become reductive and deadening.
**½/**** starring Adam Driver, Annette Bening, Ted Levine, Jon Hamm written by Scott Z. Burns, based on the article "Rorschach and Awe" by Katherine Eban directed by Scott Z. Burns
by Walter Chaw The very definition of "nutritious cinema," The Report details the process of writing and the struggles to publish the Senate oversight report on CIA torture tactics during the Bush II administration. The directorial debut of screenwriter Scott Z. Burns, a frequent Steven Soderbergh collaborator, it's dry as a soda cracker and full of the deep shadows of an All The President's Men but without, alas, much of the kineticism. The problem with movies like this is that the key audience for them probably doesn't have a lot to learn from the revelations therein. What remains, then, is a procedural exercise with a known resolution that starts to feel repetitive at the same time it starts to feel depressing. Adam Driver is typically good as Senate analyst Daniel Jones, driven by the events of 9/11 to pursue a career in intelligence. Over the course of five years working as part of a small team for Sen. Diane Feinstein (Annette Bening), he uncovers a narrative within the CIA that torture does not produce good information, that there was precious little oversight over the agency, and that although the Obama presidency abolished "Enhanced Interrogation Techniques," it was deeply interested in keeping Jones's report out of the public eye.
by Walter Chaw Michael Moore is an often-terrible filmmaker and a repugnant human being. His films are scattershot and on the whole unhelpful. In a few meandering minutes of his new film, Fahrenheit 11/9, he notes that members of Trump's inner circle have invested in his films and that when given the opportunity to hold Trump's feet to the fire in a public forum, he played the Jimmy Fallon. He appears to be owning that he's part of this disaster, but it's not clear, ultimately, what the fuck he's on about. Moore also spends time with the teen survivors of the Parkland, FL shooting, in what seems like an attempt to borrow the glow of their youthful activism; with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, for probably the same purpose; and then he spends some time doing his stunt bullshit by spraying a tanker full of Flint water onto the governor of Flint's lawn. What works in the film is his focus in on how the DNC actively betrayed the will of the people by overriding primary results in states like West Virginia, Michigan, and Montana in throwing the presidential nomination to the legendarily unpopular Hillary Clinton. He reminds that during the heat of the Flint crisis, President Obama flew in, performed the stunt of drinking Flint water (he didn't), then told a folksy story of how he probably ate some lead when he was a little kid and, shucks, he turned out fine. These moments are vital because they show why thousands, maybe tens of thousands, of devoted Democrat voters decided their votes didn't matter and, indeed, that Democrats cared about the poor exactly as much as Republicans do. The problem isn't that Trump is who he has always obviously been, right there out in the open (and proud of his vulgarity and ugliness); the problem is that the entrenched political establishment on every side had fallen into complacency and lost interest in any class other than their own. Outside of that thread, the rest of it, including an extended comparison of Trump to Hitler, is just Moore being the Left's Rush Limbaugh. When preaching to the choir, best to turn the camera on the choir: Fahrenheit 11/9 is gold when it's shaming the Left. I wish he'd spent more time doing that. Programme: TIFF Docs
ZERO STARS/**** starring Hugh Jackman, Vera Farmiga, J.K. Simmons, Alfred Molina written by Matt Bai & Jay Carson & Jason Reitman directed by Jason Reitman
by Walter Chaw In 1988, Gary Hart, the democratic former senator from my home state of Colorado, was the front runner for the Presidency of the United States. About a week before the primary, which would have cemented his ascendancy to a post seemingly all but preordained, this guy--classically handsome, tall, masculine, progressive--did what powerful men in privileged positions sometimes do: he slept with a young woman who wanted a job with his campaign. That's a problem, but the problem is he dared the WASHINGTON POST to follow him; he touted his ethics and morals as a foundational plank to his platform, and when the MIAMI HERALD took him up on his dare, they discovered that he was maybe a serial philanderer who in those last halcyon days before the Internet, hadn't learned the voracious appetite the public has for a good, sleazy story concerning the tragic fall of kings. It's hardly ever the crime--it's almost always the cover-up. And in 1988, Jason Reitman's The Front Runner says, politicians weren't very good at the cover-up. Largely because the press was complicit in helping politicians, athletes, and other powerful men in powerful spheres keep sexual dalliances and abuses quiet. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose, after all.
EROS + MASSACRE (1969) ****/**** Director's Cut: Image B+ Sound B Extras B- Theatrical Version: Image B Sound B Extras B starring Mariko Okada, Toshiyuji Hosokawa, Yûko Kusunoki, Etsushi Takahashi written by Masahiro Yamada & Yoshishige Yoshida directed by Yoshishige Yoshida
HEROIC PURGATORY (1970) ***/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B starring Mariko Okada, Kaizo Kamoda, Naho Kimura, Yoshiaki Makita written by Masahiro Yamada directed by Yoshishige Yoshida
COUP D'ETAT (1973) ***½/**** Image B+ Sound B Extras B starring Rentarô Mikuni, Yasuo Miyake, Akiko Kurano, Tadahiko Sugano written by Minoru Betsuyaku directed by Yoshishige Yoshida
by Bryant Frazer In director Yoshishige Yoshida's restlessly erotic trio of films dealing with Japanese radicalism (aptly dubbed "Love + Anarchism" by Arrow Films), past and present merge as easily and ineluctably as the personal and the political. Released between 1969 and 1973, they were made at a politically turbulent time in Japan, when the New Left movement gained social currency and student anarchists, the Zengakuren, challenged the status quo by occupying buildings at universities and high schools around the country. In that conflict between anarchy and order, Yoshida saw reflections of Japan's past--earlier generations of radicals who challenged societal structures in the same way that new activists were pushing back against contemporary norms. Yoshida was not inspired to make anything as simple as a series of biopics or historical dramas; instead, he embarked on a series of formally elaborate films that evaluated the struggles of radicals and would-be revolutionaries from decades past in light of the then-current political moment.
JOHN ADAMS Image A Sound A+ Extras B+ "Join or Die," "Independence," "Don't Tread on Me," "Reunion," "Unite or Die," "Unnecessary War," "Peacefield" JIMMY CARTER MAN FROM PLAINS ***/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras A directed by Jonathan Demme
by Ian Pugh It's hardly anything new to explore the professional brilliance and personal failings of those upon whom history has bestowed the title of Greatness, but Tom Hooper's epic miniseries John Adams bucks genre expectations by refusing to keep us at arm's length with a standardized character archetypally flawed, deigning to present us instead with an actual human being. Certainly it forges an entry point in dismissing the sense of harmonious unity we usually attribute to those early American leaders: marvel as the opinion Adams (Paul Giamatti, a delightfully bitter pill) holds of stoic, wooden George Washington (David Morse) sours from respect to resentment; smirk as he barely hides his contempt for the hedonistic Ben Franklin (Tom Wilkinson) and his platitudinous adages; shock as he is too late in realizing the treachery orchestrated by that prick Alexander Hamilton (Rufus Sewell). But it's not enough to tear down romantic icons by having General Washington--who looks as if he's leapt out of a Stuart painting--crack one of his false teeth at breakfast. "Bed, both'a ya!" Adams shouts at his children shortly after witnessing the bloody aftermath of the Boston Massacre, and suddenly the shroud of tall tales collapses in a single powerful blast from a man who may represent the antithesis of any preconceived notions we have about the era of powdered wigs and stockings.
½*/**** starring Chris Rock, Bernie Mac, Tamala Jones, Lynn Whitfield screenplay by Chris Rock & Ali LeRoi directed by Chris Rock
by Walter Chaw Chris Rock's directorial debut Head of State is a little like Weird Al Yankovic's UHF or Dana Carvey's Opportunity Knocks: a vehicle meant to showcase a sketch comedian's strengths but functioning more as an exposé on said comedian's weaknesses. It vacillates between a potentially interesting central plot and a couple of misogynistic and boring subplots, managing by the end to come off as shrill, cynical, and disjointed as well as overly cutesy and infatuated with its own cult of bling. Its one saving grace is that it seems to occasionally know what a satire is, conceiving of a "white folks can't dance" sequence that actually scores a couple of points in letting the poor Man dance well instead of mockingly (see Bringing Down the House), and in the identification of "God Bless America" as the hypocritical exclusionary bullshit that it is.
Mays Gilliam (Rock) is an alderman picked to run for president when the frontrunners in his party (we presume Democrat, we can't be sure) are killed in a plane crash. The right candidate at the right time (he can't win, he looks good for the party in trying), Gilliam bucks his spin doctors to be true to his own self and, in the process, wins the adoration of both sides of the aisle. Like another excrescent Carvey vehicle, Master of Disguise, Gilliam's running mate and big brother Mitch (Bernie Mac) ends most of his scenes by slapping someone in the face. As comic devices go, it falls somewhere between old white people speaking ghetto jargon and Robin Givens as a psychopathic ex-girlfriend who's constantly being tackled by security or running into parked cars.
Despite the whiff of entitlement inherent in any premise wherein outrage is the equal to competency (the old guard white media is made sport of for caring whether the vice presidential candidate knows anything about NATO), Head of State is less racist than puerile, repetitive, and tiresome. It falls in line with Rock's penchant for Prince and Pauper stories rewritten along race and class distinctions (Down to Earth, Bad Company)--urban fairy tales that aren't satirical jabs at white culture so much as slapstick fantasies with racial elements. Rock the director tends toward a sort of irreverent jumble that demonstrates too much faith in Rock the actor's ability to carry romantic scenes (the token love interest played by Tamala Jones) and too little faith in Rock the writer's gift for social commentary.
In toning it down for a PG-13 rating, Head of State attacks politicians, whites, and the media, leaving only lawyers off the list of easy targets that are beneath gifted comedians. Like Richard Pryor before him, Rock has proven himself a smart social observer as a stand-up comedian and, also like Pryor, Rock has demonstrated absolutely no potential for translating that acerbic genius for film. Blunted and neutered, Rock in Head of State is the very definition of nondescript: uncertain about what this film is about and unclear as to how to get to wherever it's going. It's not sure how to walk the line between insulting and moronic and settles for being a little of both--the big presidential debate (scored, like the rest of the film, in a schizophrenic slurry of hip-hop and Monday Night Football) highlights the confusion with its dense visual jokiness and rabble-rousing broadsides.
Urging parents to "knock your children out, it's good for them" is something that was funny when Pryor was saying it in the Seventies, less so when Murphy was repeating it in the Eighties, and less so again when Sinbad dredged it up in the Nineties. Head of State is at least the fourth generation of the same old shtick--its alleged shock has worn off with its relevancy (and why a bit about child-rearing in a political satire?). Rather than raising eyebrows, Head of State is just a sickly version of Bulworth (another film written/directed/produced by/and starring its lead), a movie that wasn't much in the final analysis but at least had the anger and edge to draw a little blood. Originally published: March 28, 2003.
½*/**** starring Robert Redford, Meryl Streep, Tom Cruise, Derek Luke screenplay by Matthew Michael Carnahan directed by Robert Redford
by Walter Chaw Stilted, awkward, an Ayn Rand screed complete with straw men and pontiffs poised to burn them down, Robert Redford's smug, self-satisfied liberal weltschmerz anthem Lions for Lambs is tailor-made for festival-season standing ovations. It's the prime example of why a lot of Republicans get away with calling Hollywood--the single highest concentration of Big Business and corporate interest outside the Beltway--a lefty hotbed of pinko nonsense carried on a cloud of flatulent hot air. It's a prime example, too, of why it's so hard to vote for Democrats even when the alternative is the GOP. Put this one on the shelf between Sidney Lumet's Fail Safe and this year's deplorable Rendition--movies so earnest in their chest-pounding pontification that it's impossible to imagine on the one hand who could be converted by them and on the other who could resist changing their party affiliation out of sheer embarrassment. In this one, the call is for activism in whatever form said activism might take just for the sake of doing something, damnit. To quote a guy writing in the 1920s, "The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity."
**½/**** Image B+ Sound C Commentary C starring Naomi Watts, Sean Penn, David Andrews, Sam Shepard screenplay by Jez Butterworth & John-Henry Butterworth, based on the books The Politics of Truth by Joe Wilson and Fair Game by Valerie Plame Wilson directed by Doug Liman
by Walter Chaw I remember distinctly somewhere in year two of W.'s administration the feeling of extreme "outrage fatigue"--that burnout that occurs when you've spent so much time incredulous that you realize you're the idiot for expecting something different. Subsequently, I recall being the only one in my circle of friends to predict W.'s re-election, as well as the only one not surprised when we didn't find any WMDs. It's not that I'm particularly smart, it's that I'm dick enough to be right half the time. Why fight it? Bad movies tend to win the weekly box office, bad music dominates the charts, bad TV gets renewed; rather than declare it a new phenomenon, take cold comfort in knowing that it was always this way and it's not necessarily worse now. Sophocles wasn't selling out the Coliseum, after all. So if Fair Game, Doug Liman's adaptation of Valerie Plame's memoir of her betrayal by the Bush Administration for the sins of her big-mouthed, self-righteous husband Joe Wilson, doesn't have shock and outrage going for it, it at least has the smarts to portray Joe as a deeply ambiguous figure. He's a jackass, but he's right, and Sean Penn's portrayal of him is uncompromised, unflattering, and completely in keeping with stuff like his Into the Wild and The Assassination of Richard Nixon: liberal shots that don't offend the conversation.
***/**** Image B+ Sound A- Extras B- starring Morgan Freeman, Matt Damon, Tony Kgoroge, Patrick Mofokeng
screenplay by Anthony Peckham, based on the book Playing the
Enemy by John Carlin
directed by Clint Eastwood
by Walter Chaw During an awards season seemingly
devoted to surveying the racial divide, Clint Eastwood's Invictus
lands a glancing blow as a Reconciliation sports melodrama that avoids
the hysterical outburst even as it fails to hit one out of the park. Of
the two, I think I'd rather the former. Expecting a (more)
self-important Hoosiers, I was pleasantly surprised
by Eastwood's leisurely, cocksure, tempered-by-age stroll through the
first days post-Apartheid as Nelson Mandela (Morgan Freeman, finally
playing Abraham Lincoln) is tasked with the near-impossible job of
suturing a nation coming out from under a long Plantation nightmare
without his administration becoming exactly what the minority Afrikaner
fears. It locates sports as one quick avenue to the heart of the lowest
common denominator (just as the existence of Invictus
locates film as another), and it fires dual salvos at its audience by
first being a sports underdog uplift flick without much sports or
uplift, then in not deigning to explain the fundamentals of rugby to
its American audience, instead launching a quick jab at America's
reluctance to engage the worlds' pastimes (rugby and soccer, notably).
What it really does for the race conversation is allow Eastwood the
opportunity to at last feature Freeman in a movie designed around him
as opposed to having him--as he did in Million Dollar Baby
and Unforgiven--function as a comparative component
against which the white protagonist is memorialized and measured.
Better late than never.
FIRST BLOOD (1981)
**/**** Image B+ Sound B Extras A- starring
Sylvester Stallone, Richard Crenna, Brian Dennehy, Bill McKinney
screenplay by Michael Kozoll & William Sackheim and Sylvester
Stallone, based on the novel by David Morrell
directed by Ted Kotcheff
RAMBO: FIRST BLOOD PART II (1985)
*½/**** Image A Sound B+ Extras A- starring
Sylvester Stallone, Richard Crenna, Charles Napier, Steven Berkoff
screenplay by Sylvester Stallone and James Cameron
directed by George P. Cosmatos
RAMBO III (1988)
**½/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras B+ starring
Sylvester Stallone, Richard Crenna, Marc de Jonge, Kurtwood Smith
screenplay by Sylvester Stallone and Sheldon Lettich
directed by Peter MacDonald
by Bill Chambers
Ted Kotcheff's
melancholy First Blood opens with Vietnam vet John
Rambo looking up a fellow soldier and discovering that the man has
died. Sullen, he hits the road, only to be harassed by the town sheriff
(Brian Dennehy), who sees long-haired drifters wearing surplus jackets
and thinks: Troublemaker. Possessed of a disposition similar to that of
Bill Bixby's David Banner, Rambo 'Hulks out' after being stripped of
his dignity in the bowels of the police station, escaping his jailers'
clutches and squealing off into a mountainous region of the Pacific
Northwest on a stolen motorcycle. His mission is one of
self-preservation; Rambo doesn't start committing premeditated murder until the sequel.
(Unlike in the David Morrell source novel, where Rambo is a veritable
serial killer, however justified his rage.)
by
Angelo Muredda "Don't you think we're already fucked
anyway?" a twentysomething European reveller bathed in neon light asks
an environmentalist recruiter early on in Fuck for Forest,
Michael Marczak's gorgeously-lensed and strangely resonant nature
documentary about a very strange pack of wild animals, the titular porn
collective-cum-NGO. It's a decent question, but you don't get the sense
that the sweet young Berliners to whom it's directed have much of a
clue about how to answer. Their approach to saving the world, which
Marczak never openly laughs at but never quite endorses either, is to
turn the surprisingly good coin they make from their vaguely
nature-themed amateur pornography into angel investments towards causes
they believe in. A gently detached observer who drops in on the audio
track only for occasional Jules and Jim-inspired
backgrounders on our daffy leads, Marczak is an ideal mock-tour guide
for the group's journey to Peru, where they scope out a group of locals
who want to preserve the Amazon.
**½/**** directed
by Mike Lerner and Maxim Pozdorovkin
by
Angelo Muredda Civil disobedience is about as uncinematic
as political protests get, so credit Mike Lerner and Maxim Pozdorovkin
for making Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer a more or
less compelling paean to the troupe's fortitude against Russian
orthodoxy. The film chronicles the ongoing legal battle that ensued
from the feminist collective's 15-second guerrilla performance of a
song called "God Shit" at the altar of St. Christ Church in Moscow. The
impromptu number, captured in fuzzy cellphone video that's the
most stirring footage in the movie by a mile, got masked performers
Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, Ekaterina Samutsevich, and Mariya Alyokhina a
3-year sentence at a penal colony for simultaneously dumping on the
Orthodox Church and Putin. That such a minor demonstration could
inspire such a heavy-handed state response is just one of the hooks the
filmmakers exploit to strong effect in their look at how deeply
religious values are embedded in Putin's Russia, which turns relatively
minor acts of punk rebellion into the most vital expressions of
political dissent.
*½/**** starring Russell Crowe, Ben Affleck, Rachel McAdams, Helen Mirren screenplay by Matthew Michael Carnahan and Tony Gilroy and Billy Ray,
based on the BBC television series created by Paul Abbott directed by Kevin Macdonald
by Ian Pugh If
it were smart, Kevin Macdonald's State of Play
would stick to lamenting the ignominious death of newsprint at the
hands of Internet sensationalism and all that that implies. As a
veteran reporter and a U.S. Congressman--college roommates once known
as rabblerousing muckrakers in their respective fields--turn to each
other when their worlds collapse, you'd think that maybe the film had
in mind a meditation on the dissolution of the Old Boys' clubs. Done in
by our demystifying familiarity with the subjects under scrutiny (cops
and politicians) and an unwillingness to inject new blood into their
veins, right? Hell, even Watergate is brought up as
an incidental location, as Macdonald sends a sweeping camera across the
notorious hotel. You can't tell me there isn't something to be said
here about how a reliance on outmoded tactics and an obsession with
decades-old victories has only sped up their obsolescence.
