Film Freak Central

Saboteur (1942) - 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital Code

Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

*/**** Image A Sound B Extras C
starring Priscilla Lane, Robert Cummings, Norman Lloyd, Otto Kruger
screenplay by Peter Viertel, Joan Harrison, Dorothy Parker
directed by Alfred Hitchcock

by Walter Chaw When I think of Saboteur, which isn't often, it's as the first American project Hitchcock developed largely without his beloved assistant Joan Harrison, who left after co-writing the first draft (seeing in the opportunity to produce The Phantom Lady her chance to wriggle out from under Hitch's shadow), and, maybe more significantly, without his most essential collaborator, wife Alma Reville, then away in New York with their daughter Pat, who had just won the lead role in a play. They left creative absences Hitch tried to fill--disastrously, I think--with Algonquin Roundtable alumni Peter Viertel and Dorothy Parker. (If there's a case to be made about the importance of Alma to Hitchcock's career, it may be useful to examine those films where we know she was absent.) I also think of Saboteur, when I do, as an attempt at an "all-American" film of the kind Hitchcock, fearing he'd left Britain trailing with him too much of the old country, was desperate to make. The desire to embrace his adopted culture is so conspicuous it becomes uncomfortably obvious in multiple instances (stops at the Statue of Liberty, Rockefeller Center, and even the Hoover Dam) that setting has fatally superseded narrative. His follow-up, the Thornton Wilder-penned Shadow of a Doubt, is the all-American Hitchcock that works, locating the country's heart in the introduction of a human stain into a small town and a wholesome family.

Fantasia Fest '21: Giving Birth to a Butterfly

*/****
starring Gus Birney, Annie Parisse, Paul Sparks, Judith Roberts
written by Patrick Lawler & Theodore Schaefer
directed by Theodor Schaefer

Fantasia Festival runs from August 5 to August 25, 2021. For more details, visit their website.

by Walter Chaw Theodore Schaefer's Giving Birth to a Butterfly is in love with doubling and other broad metaphors deployed to speak, Kieslowski-like, to the winsome possibilities of unlived lives. Trapped in a loveless marriage with oaf Daryl (Paul Sparks), Diane (Annie Parisse) is mother to wry Danielle (Rachel Resheff) and a dreamer of a boy (Owen Campbell) who has just brought home a girlfriend, Marlene (Gus Birney), pregnant by another. Marlene needs a place to stay, and against Diane's wishes, everyone's planning to impose Marlene upon Diane's household. It's weird, you know, because Marlene doesn't even seem to want to be there. That's the essential premise of Giving Birth to a Butterfly: that women aren't in charge of their own fate--ever, but particularly when they're in the process of expressing their biology. That is, when they're mothers. The best part of this film is the first part establishing a tense family dynamic, with Diane maybe the only adult in the room. The men and the pre-motherhood teen girl are silly and unmoored to the cold realities of existence.

Detour (1945) [The Criterion Collection] - Blu-ray Disc

****/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B
starring Tom Neal, Ann Savage, Claudia Drake, Edmund MacDonald
screenplay by Martin Goldsmith, based on his novel
directed by Edgar G. Ulmer

by Bryant Frazer Among legitimate Hollywood classics, Detour is about as threadbare as they come: a small film, shot on a shoestring over a handful of days (between six and 14, depending on whose accounting you believe) at a Poverty Row film studio. And yet, the finished product is uniquely compelling. As a crime thriller, it's notable for the absence of gunfights, chase scenes, double-crosses, and back-stabbings. What it's lacking in film noir's usual narrative detail or expressionistic flourishes is compensated for by its overarching preoccupation with determinism and a healthy contempt for fate. Amplifying and accompanying the slow-building sense of despair and helplessness is an internal-monologue-in-voiceover that's unrelentingly dreary and self-pitying, even for noir. Detour isn't remotely sexy or exciting, though it is amply dour and uncomfortably personal--disturbing, even, in its spare vision.

The 39 Steps (1935) [The Criterion Collection] - Blu-ray Disc

****/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras A
starring Robert Donat, Madeleine Carroll, Lucie Manheim, Godfrey Tearle
adaptation by Charles Bennett, dialogue by Ian Hay, based on the novel The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan
directed by Alfred Hitchcock

by Walter Chaw Following the success of 1934's The Man Who Knew Too Much, Alfred Hitchcock and his once-inseparable screenwriter Charles Bennett took to adapting John Buchan's 1915 novel The Thirty-Nine Steps as a breathless, sometimes-madcap chase flick employing a MacGuffin of many possibilities. The picture opens at the vaudeville act of one Mr. Memory (Wylie Watson): ask him a question and he'll answer it--a human search engine and the centre of a film dealing with the very Hitchcockian theme of performance and how it keeps at bay, uneasily, the teeming chaos beneath the surface. In the middle of his act, a gunshot rings out and the audience, already unruly, crushes for the exits. Men first, old women--one in particular--trampled in the panic. Hitchcock's cosmology is aligned with Jonathan Edwards's "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God," suspended as it were above anarchy and animalism by the thinnest of agreements among men to engage in civilization. I don't think Hitchcock disdains order--I think he mistrusts it. It's the root of his Wrong Man issues, no less despairing in its fatalism than Edgar Allan Poe's expectation/fear of premature burial. The critic Howie Movshovitz gave perhaps the best, certainly the most succinct, summary of Hitchcock's world of Catholic transference and Original Sin: "Everyone's got it coming."

Before We Vanish (2017)

***/****
starring Masami Nagasawa, Ryuhei Matsuda, Mahiro Takasugi, Hiroki Hasegawa
screenplay by Kiyoshi Kurosawa and Sachiko Tanaka, based on the play by Tomohiro Maekawa
directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa

by Angelo Muredda The apocalypse becomes an occasion for everything from learning what makes humans tick to getting to know the distant alien who is your significant other in Kiyoshi Kurosawa's genre-defying twentieth feature Before We Vanish, which might be most firmly characterized as a black comedy if it weren't so puckishly sunny. A return to form of sorts after Creepy and Daguerreotype, neither of which were without their charms but did feel at times like a master's idle wheel-spinning, Before We Vanish works best as a high-concept sampler platter of the wildly divergent tones Kurosawa is uncommonly good at mixing up. That isn't to say the alien-invasion framework and neatly-bifurcated dystopian road movie/romcom structure are purely excuses to see how much mileage Kurosawa can get out of his generic indeterminacy. Still, one would be hard-pressed to deny that half the fun lies in taking the film in as the strange sum of its many seemingly ill-fitting parts.

Planes, Trains and Automobiles (1987) - Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

Planes, Trains & Automobiles
****/**** Image C+ Sound A Extras B+
starring Steve Martin, John Candy, Laila Robins, Michael McKean
written and directed by John Hughes

by Bill Chambers It took thirty years and multiple viewings before I finally realized that John Hughes's Planes, Trains & Automobiles is about many things, but mostly it's about a trunk. A behemoth fit for a starlet taking a cruise to Skull Island, the trunk is the property of travelling salesman Del Griffith (John Candy), who peddles shower-curtain rings for American Light & Fixture.¹ Indeed, it's his avatar. Stuffy ad exec Neal Page (Steve Martin) trips over it while racing special-guest-star Kevin Bacon for a New York City cab at rush hour. It's fate. Del will obliviously steal the taxi Neal does manage to flag down, but it's not until they wind up sitting across from each other in LaGuardia that Neal puts a face to the trunk, reinforcing his bias against the moustachioed stranger--a sort of benign Ignatius J. Reilly who, between his girth and his luggage and, arguably, his indifference to Neal's boundaries, is the textbook definition of a man-spreader. The trunk disappears for long stretches, though it has a habit of bobbing back up into the frame the second you've forgotten about it completely. It's uncanny that way.

Lost in America (1985) [The Criterion Collection] - Blu-ray Disc

****/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras B+
starring Albert Brooks, Julie Hagerty
written by Albert Brooks & Monica Johnson
directed by Albert Brooks

by Bryant Frazer Early in Lost in America, David Howard (Albert Brooks) is trying to convince his wife, Linda (Julie Hagerty), that it's a good idea to abandon their Los Angeles house in favour of an interstate-ready mobile home. He describes the amenities in detail--it even has a "microwave that browns"--and outlines his dangerously misguided fantasy of dropping out of society to explore the country. "Linda," he says, "this is just like Easy Rider, except now it's our turn." That's a good line, and not just because Albert Brooks--round-faced, pushing 40, with enormous glasses and a distinctive Jewfro--is a physically and temperamentally unlikely candidate for the Easy Rider lifestyle. It's really funny because it's so clearly a terrible idea. In a rush of pride and vocal anger at being passed over for a desired promotion, David lost his job as an advertising copywriter, unwrapping himself from the protective swaddle of gainful corporate employment. Now he wants to drag Linda, a department-store HR functionary, into the void with him. It's like a car wreck in slow-motion, except the guy driving sold his air bags for gas money and is delivering a peppy monologue about how great it feels not to be wearing a seat belt. This, we understand, is a calamity in the making.

The Girl with All the Gifts (2016) + Logan (2017)

THE GIRL WITH ALL THE GIFTS
***/****
starring Gemma Arterton, Paddy Considine, Glenn Close, Sennia Nanua
screenplay by Mike Carey, based on his novel
directed by Colm McCarthy

LOGAN
****/****
starring Hugh Jackman, Patrick Stewart, Richard E. Grant, Dafne Keen
screenplay by Scott Frank & James Mangold and Michael Green
directed by James Mangold

by Walter Chaw Movements start this way, with one or two events that could be thought of as coincidence in response to some greater trend in our culture, perhaps--or, more likely, in response to some greater corruption. I've long referred to movies, especially genre movies, as indicator species in our cultural swamp. They're the first to show evidence of introduced toxins; at minimum, they're the first major art form to disseminate warnings widely. Jordan Peele's sleeper hit Get Out is just the latest in a recent spate of pictures that have caught the zeitgeist. Test the theory: would it have been as popular in another time? Movies are not unlike Percy Shelley's "dead thoughts... Like wither'd leaves" carried on divine winds to quicken new births. It's a florid reference to justify an unpopular concept. Not religious in any way, I find sublimity in the idea that human hands work in concert sometimes, and the close study of their products can provide insight into the world as it is, not simply as it was. Find in James Mangold's Logan and Colm McCarthy's more or less contemporaneous The Girl with All the Gifts (hereafter Girl) complementary, near identical concepts executed in largely the same way--proof for me of a body politic reacting in concert to poison. As grim as they are (with Logan actually verging on vile and mean-spirited), they are nonetheless to me evidence of at least some collective immune response. Artifacts of resistance left for the anthropologists. Despite their apparent nihilism, they are proof, as referenced explicitly in Girl, of hope.

Midnight Special (2016) - Blu-ray Disc

***½/**** Image A Sound A Extras C
starring Michael Shannon, Joel Edgerton, Kirsten Dunst, Sam Shepard
written and directed by Jeff Nichols

by Walter Chaw Jeff Nichols's Midnight Special is beautiful. It's a film about aspiration and sacrifice. It believes that the world is still a mysterious place anchored by love and hope and devotion to simple ideas about how hard it is to be a parent--and how important. It's about nurturing a thing with all your heart and letting it go when it's strong enough. It's about listening when it's the last thing you want to hear; it's about believing there's a future for your kids even if all evidence seems to suggest the opposite. It's like Tomorrowland in many ways, but mostly in its suggestion that there's a place maybe where things feel like they used to feel when you were a kid and everything was still possible. Even though nothing made sense, things would make sense one day when you were big. Midnight Special deserves its comparisons to films like E.T. and Starman and especially Close Encounters of the Third Kind. It works in the same small places with ordinary characters who grow to fill larger, echoing spaces. Nichols puts us in medias res with Roy (Michael Shannon) and his best friend Lucas (Joel Edgerton) on the run from cult leader Calvin Meyer (Sam Shepard), having fled at some point before the movie starts with Roy's son, Alton (Jaeden Lieberher). We learn it was around Alton's oddities that the cult largely formed. We learn that Alton's oddities are perhaps supernatural, or extraterrestrial, or interdimensional. It doesn't really matter. They're profoundly strange, and there are times it appears that he's able to tell a little of the future.

Midnight Special (2016)

***½/****
starring Michael Shannon, Joel Edgerton, Kirsten Dunst, Sam Shepard
written and directed by Jeff Nichols

by Walter Chaw Jeff Nichols's Midnight Special is beautiful. It's a film about aspiration and sacrifice. It believes that the world is still a mysterious place anchored by love and hope and devotion to simple ideas about how hard it is to be a parent--and how important. It's about nurturing a thing with all your heart and letting it go when it's strong enough. It's about listening when it's the last thing you want to hear; it's about believing there's a future for your kids even if all evidence seems to suggest the opposite. It's like Tomorrowland in many ways, but mostly in its suggestion that there's a place maybe where things feel like they used to feel when you were a kid and everything was still possible. Even though nothing made sense, things would make sense one day when you were big. Midnight Special deserves its comparisons to films like E.T. and Starman and especially Close Encounters of the Third Kind. It works in the same small places with ordinary characters who grow to fill larger, echoing spaces. Nichols puts us in medias res with Roy (Michael Shannon) and his best friend Lucas (Joel Edgerton) on the run from cult leader Calvin Meyer (Sam Shepard), having fled at some point before the movie starts with Roy's son, Alton (Jaeden Lieberher). We learn it was around Alton's oddities that the cult largely formed. We learn that Alton's oddities are perhaps supernatural, or extraterrestrial, or interdimensional. It doesn't really matter. They're profoundly strange, and there are times it appears that he's able to tell a little of the future.

The Good Dinosaur (2015) - Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

***/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras B+
screenplay by Meg LeFauve
directed by Peter Sohn and Bob Peterson

by Walter Chaw Arlo (voiced by Raymond Ochoa) is the runt in a frontier family of stylized dinosaur herbivores who struggles to live up to the example of towering Poppa (Jeffrey Wright) on the family farmstead. He's clumsy, though, and easily frightened, and when he finds himself incapable of killing a mammalian vermin (Jack Bright), he unwittingly causes the death of his father. Arlo joins forces with the vermin, eventually, dubbing him "Spot" (he's a little orphaned human boy) and relying on him to forage sustenance for him in the wild world outside. Spot, in return, relies upon Arlo for protection in the film's final set-piece as Spot is set upon by a flock of fundamentalist pterodactyls. Pixar's The Good Dinosaur is, in other words, a horror western about a frontier bespotted with monsters and monstrous ideologies, set right there at the liminal space--as all great westerns are--between the old ways and the encroaching new. It's far more disturbing than has generally been acknowledged and, in being disturbing, it offers a tremendous amount of subtext layered onto a deceptively simple story. It posits an Earth where the dinosaur-ending comet misses impact, leading to millions of years of evolved adaptations and ending, as the film begins, with the emergence of homo sapiens on schedule, but skittering around on all fours and howling at their saurian masters. The Good Dinosaur is an existential horrorshow.

Dirty Grandpa (2016)

ZERO STARS/****
starring Robert De Niro, Zac Efron, Aubrey Plaza, Dermot Mulroney
written by John M. Phillips
directed by Dan Mazer

by Walter Chaw It's one of those boilerplates about an uptight guy on the eve of marrying a harridan taking a road trip with a free spirit to discover that maybe he doesn't want to spend the rest of his life (or the few years until he secures a divorce--the subtext of these things is always curiously traditional) selling out to The Man. Jason (Zac Efron) is that potential sell-out. You can tell because he dresses like the villain from an Eighties college sex comedy, is a corporate lawyer, and is engaged to a materialistic bimbo (Julianne Hough) who will justify his unconscionable hedonism by being a secret slut herself in his absence. The best of these films is its prototype, obviously (Capra's It Happened One Night), but the one I return to most often is Bronwen Hughes's curiously sticky--if only to me--Forces of Nature. The high concept this time around is that De Niro is the free-spirit road-tripper in a role that asks him to, literally at one point, be rapping grandmother Ellen Dow from The Wedding Singer. The imposition of this masterplot is really the only thing separating the film from "Jackass" spin-off Bad Grandpa, just as one word is the only thing separating the two concepts. De Niro's Dick (and you do indeed get to see his dick--though admittedly, it's probably a stunt dick) is a former Green Beret, by the way, which explains/doesn't explain why he gets a Presidio fight sequence against a bunch of black hoods who've been taunting a gay black guy Dick has also recently been taunting.

Tammy (2014) [Extended Cut] - Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

click any image to enlarge

*½/**** Image A- Sound A Extras C
starring Melissa McCarthy, Susan Sarandon, Allison Janney, Kathy Bates
screenplay by Melissa McCarthy & Ben Falcone
directed by Ben Falcone

WATCH IN iTUNES - USA|CANADA

by Bill Chambers Though in the vein of the crude, crass characters Melissa McCarthy has given us since her breakout performance in Bridesmaids, McCarthy's Tammy swaggers onto the screen with a presumptuousness for which the actress's young but popular big-screen persona can't fully account. Even more than other SNL spinoff Sims like Joe Dirt or Hot Rod, there's something uncannily familiar about Tammy, and the maddening struggle to contextualize her makes her, ironically, all the more inexplicable. Tammy is about the adventure that spirals out from one very bad day for the title heroine: In quick succession, her car hits a deer, she gets fired, and she catches her husband (Nat Faxon) wining and dining their neighbour (Toni Collette, in perhaps the most thankless role of her career). But Tammy's slovenliness, minimum-wage job, and obvious lack of education--she doesn't know what "pattern" means--contrast sharply with details like the good housekeeping of her home, Faxon's zombie-like unflappability, and the mis-typecasting of Allison Janney in soccer-ready Solondz mode as her mom. A shorthand bit of characterization the filmmakers seem to nurture (by putting Tammy on a jet ski and casting Steve Little) sees the overbearing Tammy as the distaff equivalent to Kenny Powers of "Eastbound and Down"--but Kenny had legitimate talent and success behind him, thus explaining, if not justifying, not only his monstrous ego, but also some of the slack people cut him. Without either that foundational backstory or the luxury of an established cultural identity, Tammy remains a private joke between McCarthy and her co-writer/director/husband, Ben Falcone.

TIFF '14: Ned Rifle

***/****
written and directed by Hal Hartley

by Bill Chambers The third, shortest, and presumably final entry in an improbable film series of seesawing returns, Hal Hartley's Ned Rifle is the religious component of a triptych that has thus far loosely tackled Art (Henry Fool) and Politics (Fay Grim). Titular Ned (Liam Aiken) is the offspring of drifter Casanova Henry Fool (Thomas Jay Ryan) and hapless Fay Grim (Parker Posey), the latter of whom begins this movie in prison as a result of Henry's antics, consigning Ned to the care of a reverend (Martin Donovan) and his family. Wanting to biblically avenge his mother, Ned follows a trail of breadcrumbs back to his deadbeat dad; yes, the film has the same basic quest premise as Fay Grim, though it takes the form of an askew It Happened One Night this time instead of another globetrotting "Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego?" journey. Ned's interloping travelling companion is Susan (Aubrey Plaza--not a fan, but she curtails her most irritating mannerisms here, and looks dynamite), a grad student with a hidden agenda that somehow entails writing her thesis on the poetry of Simon Grim (James Urbaniak) and ghost-authoring Fay's memoirs. ("Susan's brilliant, and she's a good person, but she's totally fucked-up," Simon warns Ned. He could be describing any Hal Hartley protagonist.) A God-fearing Born-again, Ned fends off what he perceives as her advances, but he bristles with jealousy once they track down Henry at a mental hospital and she becomes drawn into his father's orbit, like so many before her.

Weekend (1967) [The Criterion Collection] - Blu-ray Disc

WEEK END
****/**** Image A- Sound B Extras B
starring Mireille Darc, Jean Yanne, Georges Staquet, Juliet Berto
written and directed by Jean-Luc Godard

by Angelo Muredda "The horror of the bourgeois can only be overcome with more horror." So says a militant cannibal as he stands over the remains of one such bourgeois husk late in Weekend, Jean-Luc Godard's farewell to the alienated pop art and American genre gerrymandering of his early period. As the line about horrors piled upon horrors implies, Weekend is nasty, as valedictory addresses go--a scorched-earth attack on France under Charles de Gaulle that finds nearly all of its citizens massacred in car crashes of their own design and converted into consumable products, namely food. The humanism of minor tragedies like Vivre sa vie and the heedless joy of Frank Tashlin homages like Une femme est une femme has here curdled into a new, ugly form. Although its title suggests a world of leisure and free play, one doesn't enjoy Weekend so much as one endures it.

We're the Millers (2013) - Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

**/**** Image A Sound A Extras D
starring Jennifer Aniston, Jason Sudeikis, Emma Roberts, Ed Helms
screenplay by Bob Fisher & Steve Faber and Sean Anders & John Morris
directed by Rawson Marshall Thurber

by Walter Chaw Rawson Marshall Thurber's return to the territory of the screwball gross-out comedy that put him on the map, the better-than-it-should-be Dodgeball, is the better-than-it-should-be (but not as good as Dodgeball) We're The Millers, an essentially plotless road-trip intrigue that nonetheless glances off 2013's concern with the decline of the middle class while providing a couple of chuckles along the way. It's the lowbrow version of Albert Brooks's Lost in America if looked at through a particularly sympathetic lens--a hint of a conversation about class, a whiff of something about how hard it is to make a living on streets getting meaner by the day. Ultimately, it's probably just lucky that the cast assembled has an impressive improvisational pedigree (and that the director is open to making adjustments midstream), lending a stale comedy of mistaken identity a degree of perhaps-undeserved life. It probably doesn't hurt that We're the Millers never, at any point, tries to be something it's not: rescued by a total lack of ambition.

A Perfect World (1993) - Blu-ray Disc

click any image to enlarge

****/**** Image B+ Sound A-
starring Kevin Costner, Clint Eastwood, Laura Dern, T.J. Lowther
screenplay by John Lee Hancock
directed by Clint Eastwood

by Walter Chaw Time and distance have conspired to replace Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven with A Perfect World in my mind as his best film and one of the best movies of the '90s. The two occur within a year of each other and mark, with In the Line of Fire between them, a renaissance of the Eastwood brand that had taken a few licks of late with embarrassments like Pink Cadillac, The Rookie, City Heat, Heartbreak Ridge, and on and on. While I was growing up, Eastwood was a Dirty Harry joke and the guy who acted with Orangutans. The first time I saw him in anything was in Bronco Billy, which, frankly, isn't the first time you want to see anyone in anything. What Unforgiven did for me was inspire a curiosity about Sergio Leone and, with that, a new reason to respect Eastwood's legacy; my first time through A Perfect World disturbed my notion of who Kevin Costner was (baseball player/cowboy) at the height of his power and sway in Hollywood, and I was distracted. Every time I've revisited A Perfect World since (and I've been compelled to revisit it at least once every few years), as Costner's star has faded and Eastwood's elder statesmanhood behind the camera has somehow dwarfed his iconhood in front of it, I feel the melancholy nostalgia of the film more and more. It's an American masterpiece. I make that distinction because it's distinctly American; and I mean it when I say that it's as fine an essay of the dying of an age as anything in Cormac McCarthy's Border Trilogy.

The Hangover Part III (2013) - Blu-ray + DVD + Digital

click any image to enlarge

*½/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras C
starring Bradley Cooper, Zach Galifianakis, Ken Jeong, John Goodman
screenplay by Todd Phillips & Craig Mazin
directed by Todd Phillips

by Angelo Muredda When Project X spilled forth from its amniotic septic tank last spring, I read it as a prime example of a producer-driven form of auteurism pioneered by Judd Apatow. That found-footage chronicle of a house party-turned-apocalypse, I suggested, was a monument to producer Todd Phillips's equally noxious Hangover series, where the same Dionysian impulses and deep-seated hatred of the different--whether female, trans, queer, or disabled--were championed by a trio of middle-aged men. What a difference a year makes. If Project X was a brand consolidator and The Hangover Part II was a morbidly curious recalibration of its predecessor, displacing Phillips's demonic impulses and scarcely controlled misogynist rage from Bradley Cooper's Phil to Ed Helms's Stu, Part III is an actors' contract negotiation sputtered to life. Since the previous instalment, Cooper has become a respectable leading man and Oscar nominee and Helms has been savaged for the degeneration of his irritating Andy Bernard character on "The Office", while co-star Ken Jeong's fortunes have inexplicably risen. Consequently, gone now are the days of Phil's "Paging Doctor Faggot," along with Stu's loveable dude-rage and the Wolfpack's infinite jokes about Mr. Chow's shrunken Asian manhood. In their place is a surprisingly neutered, if inarguably more ethical, product with very few laughs and no reason for being.

Telluride '13: Nebraska

***½/****
starring Bruce Dern, Will Forte, June Squibb, Stacy Keach
screenplay by Bob Nelson
directed by Alexander Payne

by Walter Chaw Alexander Payne returns to form after the disappointing The Descendants with the muted, often hilarious, and sentimental-without-being-schmaltzy filial road trip Nebraska. It's easily his most tender work, despite the mordant, sometimes bitter humour Payne has become known for in his best work (Election remains his crowning achievement; About Schmidt is no slouch, either), and it makes a brilliant move in offering a showcase opportunity for national treasure Bruce Dern. Shot in black-and-white, with a spare, minimal production design making it an expressionist piece projecting the barren interiors of its broken characters, Nebraska, though not the adaptation of the identically-named collection of Ron Hansen short stories I initially hoped it was, at least possesses the same wintry, intellectual mien.

On the Road (2012) - Blu-ray Disc

*½/**** Image C+ Sound A- Extras D+
starring Sam Riley, Garrett Hedlund, Kristen Stewart, Viggo Mortensen
screenplay by Jose Rivera, based on the novel by Jack Kerouac
directed by Walter Salles 

click any image to enlarge

by Angelo Muredda "You goin' some place, or just goin'?" a fellow traveller asks Sam Riley's Sal Paradise in the long-gestating, still-undigested On the Road, Walter Salles's handsomely-mounted but stiff adaptation of Jack Kerouac's hipster Bible. While that's a dangerous line to adapt in such an aimless movie, it isn't even the most unfortunate moment of meta-commentary within the first ten minutes. Consider Sal's panicked voiceover about the text he's spinning out, ostensibly the same one we're trudging through: "And what is there to talk about exactly? The book I'm not writing? The inspiration I don't feel? Even the beer's flat." What, indeed? What's left to say about a project that insists on reviewing itself at regular checkpoints and keeps finding its inspiration wanting?

The Hangover Part III (2013)

*½/****
starring Bradley Cooper, Zach Galifianakis, Ken Jeong, John Goodman
screenplay by Todd Phillips & Craig Mazin
directed by Todd Phillips

by Angelo Muredda When Project X spilled forth from its amniotic septic tank last spring, I read it as a prime example of a producer-driven form of auteurism pioneered by Judd Apatow. That found-footage chronicle of a house party-turned-apocalypse, I suggested, was a monument to producer Todd Phillips's equally noxious Hangover series, where the same Dionysian impulses and deep-seated hatred of the different--whether female, trans, queer, or disabled--were championed by a trio of middle-aged men. What a difference a year makes. If Project X was a brand consolidator and The Hangover Part II was a morbidly curious recalibration of its predecessor, displacing Phillips's demonic impulses and scarcely controlled misogynist rage from Bradley Cooper's Phil to Ed Helms's Stu, Part III is an actors' contract negotiation sputtered to life. Since the previous instalment, Cooper has become a respectable leading man and Oscar nominee and Helms has been savaged for the degeneration of his irritating Andy Bernard character on "The Office", while co-star Ken Jeong's fortunes have inexplicably risen. Consequently, gone now are the days of Phil's "Paging Doctor Faggot," along with Stu's loveable dude-rage and the Wolfpack's infinite jokes about Mr. Chow's shrunken Asian manhood. In their place is a surprisingly neutered, if inarguably more ethical, product with very few laughs and no reason for being.

Due Date (2010) + Megamind (2010)|Due Date - Blu-ray Disc

DUE DATE
***½/**** Image A Sound A Extras C-
starring Robert Downey Jr., Zach Galifianakis, Jamie Foxx, Michelle Monaghan
screenplay by Alan R. Cohen & Alan Freedland and Adam Sztykiel & Todd Phillips
directed by Todd Phillips

MEGAMIND
**/****
screenplay by Alan J. Schoolcraft & Brent Simons
directed by Tom McGrath

by Ian Pugh SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Peter Highman (Robert Downey Jr.) is eager to fly out of Atlanta back to Los Angeles to witness the birth of his child, but a chance encounter with wannabe actor/lone weirdo Ethan Tremblay (Zach Galifianakis) lands the pair on a no-fly list and leaves Peter without his luggage or his wallet. With no alternatives, Peter becomes Ethan's unwilling passenger--taking a seat alongside a small dog and the ashes of Ethan's late father--on a road trip west. There appears to be a general consensus that the premise of Todd Phillips's Due Date too closely resembles that of John Hughes's Planes, Trains & Automobiles, but there's a vital difference in that Due Date's lead characters are legitimately crazy. The exasperated straight man is re-imagined as a sneering jerk full of jealousy and rage (Downey Jr. maintains a cold, sweaty stare throughout), while the lovable klutz is a dangerously irresponsible lout. Roger Ebert once wrote that the Hughes film was about "empathy [and] knowing what the other guy feels." So it is; by virtue of its characters, Due Date bypasses empathy altogether, yet it still talks about treating other people with a modicum of compassion. Phillips has finally made a naughty comedy that contemplates the consequences of its actions. Here's a movie in which a father-to-be grows so frustrated with an annoying boy that he socks him in the stomach, then unknowingly mocks a disabled veteran (Danny McBride) and gets his ass kicked for it.

Eat Pray Love (2010) - Blu-ray Disc

ZERO STARS/**** Image B Sound B+ Extras D
starring Julia Roberts, James Franco, Richard Jenkins, Javier Bardem
screenplay by Ryan Murphy & Jennifer Salt, based on the book by Elizabeth Gilbert
directed by Ryan Murphy

by Walter Chaw It's a little tempting to not take the piss out of this latest instalment of How Julia Got Her Tube Packed, but the sins of Ryan Murphy's unwatchable Eat Pray Love are such that it's nigh impossible for any sentient human to resist. More interesting might be to chart the route America's sweetheart has taken to becoming one of the most irritating and hateful personas in the modern pantheon--how the once top-earning female star is lately this pinched, drawn, graceless thing trying her best and in vain to recapture the sociopathic sprightliness of her early successes. It could simply be the natural process of aging that makes it harder for her wronged-woman act to cull any sympathy: a 43-year-old woman making pouty lips and acting out is a much different animal than her 23-year-old self doing same. If she were to poison her husband or steal her best friend's bridegroom now, it would play very differently. And play differently it does as she dumps her non-descript/non-character hubby (Billy Crudup, typecast), buys an Italian phrasebook ("Every word in Italian is like a truffle!" the moron says), and travels to Bali in search of wisdom at the feet of adorably helpful minorities who only exist in movies like this to help coddled, rich, white people be content with their unimaginable privilege. If On the Waterfront was Kazan's apologia for singing like a canary, then Julia's late career seems an apologia for buying someone else's husband and getting away with it, for the most part, in the court of public opinion.

Easy Rider (1969) [40th Anniversary] - Blu-ray Disc

****/**** Image A Sound A Extras A
starring Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper, Jack Nicholson, Luke Askew
screenplay by Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper, Terry Southern
directed by Dennis Hopper

WATCH IN iTUNES

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. It's not easy to mark the beginning of the Sixties as an idea. Me, personally, as it's the way I'm wired, I like to use as the starting gun the trilogy of dysfunctional pictures--Psycho, Eyes Without a Face, Peeping Tom--that literally inaugurate the decade, but I'd also accept that 1962's Cuban Missile Crisis was enough for many of the nearly-disaffected to become completely what-the-fuck disaffected. And if you go with that, then what happens at the end of 1963 with the assassination of JFK is that Zapruder places film as the end-all of Truth. A lot changed with those 26.6 seconds of film--or, should we say, a lot changed back, to a period where the newsreel, no matter how doctored or fabricated, was the primary mass means of information-gathering before television began to encroach on it. A lot of ink's been spilled about the extent to which movies in the mid-to-late-Fifties tried to outdo the boob-tube with grand Technicolor visions; comparatively little has been written about Zapruder's 486 colour frames, which stole the thunder of television's hold on vérité--remember, in 1960, Hitch wanted to shoot Psycho in a televisual style for its implicit realism--as elegantly as a shell fired from a mail-order Carcano. TV achieves a stalemate by broadcasting Vietnam during the dinner hour, yet it doesn't win outright until the '90s when it embraces shakycam and film unveils itself once and for all as a magician's medium: smoke, mirrors, Forrest telling LBJ he needs to piss, and the Titanic going down again to the tune of a tween tearjerker.

Brothers (2009) + Everybody's Fine (2009)

BROTHERS
***/****
starring Tobey Maguire, Jake Gyllenhaal, Natalie Portman, Mare Winningham
screenplay by David Benioff, based on the motion picture Brødre by Susanne Bier
directed by Jim Sheridan

EVERYBODY'S FINE
*/****
starring Robert De Niro, Drew Barrymore, Kate Beckinsale, Sam Rockwell
screenplay by Kirk Jones, based on an earlier screenplay by Massimo De Rita & Tonio Guerra & Giuseppe Tornatore
directed by Kirk Jones

by Ian Pugh If you're feeling charitable towards Susanne Bier's Brødre, you'll probably consider Jim Sheridan's Brothers an extraordinarily faithful remake--one that follows the original recipe so closely it could be considered a step-by-step recreation. But a quick survey of what screenwriter David Benioff excised and expanded reveals that he wasn't merely a glorified script doctor, having squeezed some real pathos from a tactless source. It's still the story of a loving father, Sam (Tobey Maguire), who is forced to perform unspeakable acts as a POW in Afghanistan. Because Sam's presumed dead, his ex-con brother Tommy (Jake Gyllenhaal, finding the perfect balance between guilt and innocence) straightens out his life and grows ever closer to Sam's wife (Natalie Portman) and children. Sam's sudden reappearance in their lives is further complicated by the onset of the soldier's post-traumatic stress, but gone are the heavy-handed lines about the nature of good, evil, and death from Bier's film. In their place, moments of shaky acceptance as new members are integrated into a family--followed by stares of betrayal as loved ones become interlopers in their own home.

The Go-Getter (2008) - DVD

**½/**** Image B Sound C Extras C+
starring Lou Taylor Pucci, Zooey Deschanel, Jena Malone, Maura Tierney
written and directed by Martin Hynes

by Alex Jackson Martin Hynes's The Go-Getter is a sweet but thin wafer of a movie. It isn't great art, it doesn't evoke an especially strong or complex emotional reaction, and it doesn't ask any difficult questions. It doesn't aspire to do anything more than pleasantly and efficiently eat up an hour-and-a-half of your time. That's the very definition of faint praise, but praise I'm offering it all the same. When I first saw the film at Sundance in 2007, I felt rejuvenated. This had come after a string of bad movies that nonetheless demanded a lot from me. The sheer frivolousness and good cheer of The Go-Getter was a kind of tonic that helped me remember why I love the movies in the first place. Still, I knew enough to only give it two-and-a-half stars, and my second viewing pretty much confirms that two-and-a-half stars is about right.

Kill Bill, Volume 2 (2004) - Blu-ray Disc

Kill Bill, Vol. 2
****/**** Image A Sound A Extras C+
starring Uma Thurman, David Carradine, Michael Madsen, Daryl Hannah
written and directed by Quentin Tarantino

by Walter Chaw Genre poetry from B-movies' poet laureate, Quentin Tarantino's conclusion to Kill Bill is marked by the filmmaker's carefully-calibrated celluloid insanity, as well as a deceptive maturity that allows a few powerfully-struck grace notes for the cult of femininity and the sanctity of motherhood. Its first portion overwhelming for its craft before lodging in the craw with its ever-present but tantalizingly difficult-to-nail moral code, Tarantino's epic whole clarifies a dedication to a sort of low, Samuel Fuller/Nicholas Ray tabloid cosmology, grounding itself eventually in the bold, lovely, curiously old-fashioned declaration that the last best reward is to be true to the primal clay of an idea of innate gender roles. The Bride (Uma Thurman) is so named not merely for camp grandeur's sake, but also to highlight the power of cultural archetypes and their roots in biology.

Kill Bill, Volume 1 (2003) - Blu-ray Disc

Kill Bill, Vol. 1
****/**** Image A- Sound A Extras C+
starring Uma Thurman, Lucy Liu, Vivica A. Fox, David Carradine
written and directed by Quentin Tarantino

by Walter Chaw There is a palpable, undeniable perversity to Quentin Tarantino's fourth feature film, a taste for the extreme so gleeful and smart that its references are homage and its puerility virtue. I seem to find a reason between every Tarantino film to dislike him, to cast aspersions on my memories of his films, but I'm starting to think the source of my dislike is jealousy. Tarantino is the director Spielberg is too timid to be: a gifted visual craftsman unafraid of the contents of his psychic closet, and a film brat whose teachers happen to be blaxploitation, samurai epics, and Shaw Brothers chop-socky instead of John Ford and Alfred Hitchcock. And it isn't that I have aspirations of becoming a filmmaker, it's just that I want to be as good at something as Tarantino is at making movies.

Free Zone (2005) + The Secret Life of Words (2005) - DVDs

FREE ZONE
*/**** Image C- Sound B Extras F
starring Natalie Portman, Hanna Laslo, Hiam Abbass
written and directed by Amos Gitai

THE SECRET LIFE OF WORDS
*½/**** Image A- Sound B+
starring Sarah Polley, Tim Robbins, Javier Cámara, Julie Christie
written and directed by Isabel Coixet

by Walter Chaw The not-at-all-hamfisted allegory of an Israeli woman and a Palestinian woman trekking across the disputed land to find an American who will settle some non-specific debt, Amos Gitai's tediously strident Free Zone opens with ten minutes, uninterrupted, of Natalie Portman weeping over what we discover to be the end of a love affair. It's showy and about as subtle as a kidney-punch--ditto the conception of Portman's passive Rebecca (Portman), the American on the sidelines, a matinee-beautiful beacon who stands by as impassively as Milton's God. That said, the device of a long, car-bound road trip narrated by flashbacks of the protagonists' separate journeys to this journey is, at least for a while, intoxicating. The problem--and it's a doozy--is that Gitai's picture is so blatant an allegory that nothing any of the characters say comes free of dramatic distance or irony, making it impossible to take the film seriously as anything other than ventriloquism for Gitai's, let's face it, unsurprising politics. Nothing wrong with Wailing Wall lamentations about the state of the world, but watching someone shake a fist at a dead horse, long past the hope of resurrection, for upwards of two hours, is tiring and futile. Is there traction in proposing that the film merely mirrors the hopelessness of the Middle East conflict? I guess, but then how many people--specifically, how many people renting a film called Free Zone directed by Amos Gitai--are going to feel edified by that?

Wild at Heart (1990) [Special Edition] - DVD

**½/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras B
starring Nicolas Cage, Laura Dern, Willem Dafoe, Crispin Glover
screenplay by David Lynch, based on the novel by Barry Gifford
directed by David Lynch

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Back when I ran my website DAYS OF THUNDER, I identified the problem with David Lynch in general (and with Mulholland Drive in specific) as that of a man who didn't want to know: his films tend to revolve around bland milquetoast heroes and heroines who open Pandora's Box and then either become destroyed or must stuff horrible people back inside. But when I wrote that, I had repressed the memory of Wild at Heart, which chucks Velveeta America entirely and imagines a world run by Frank Booth and his ilk. Indeed, Wild at Heart wallows in the kinds of kinky horrors that are viewed in Lynch's other films from a distance, and it's not a pretty sight. Here is the fallen Eden, Lynch-style, where everyone has eaten from the Tree of Knowledge and been cast out of paradise to fuck, shoot, and act unnaturally before meeting untimely, gory ends.

Smokey and the Bandit (1977) [Special Edition] - DVD

*/**** Image B Sound B+ (DD)/A (DTS) Extras B
starring Burt Reynolds, Sally Field, Jerry Reed, Jackie Gleason
screenplay by James Lee Barrett and Charles Shyer & Alan Mandel
directed by Hal Needham

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover One thing is inescapably true: Smokey and the Bandit was not aimed at people like me. Only the most casual, least demanding filmgoer need apply to this good-ol'-boy version of Vanishing Point--people with as much beer in them as possible, ready to laugh at cheap jokes and root for a speed demon. They are welcome to the movie, but the fact remains that anyone with even a scintilla of interest in film as art is pretty much left out in the cold. As I can hear a mountain of e-mail forming denouncing me for my perceived elitism, let me be perfectly clear: anyone in the market for Burt Reynolds driving fast and making Jackie Gleason apoplectic will find this the sort of thing that they like.

Harry and Tonto (1974) - DVD

**/**** Image B+ Sound B Commentary B+
starring Art Carney, Ellen Burstyn, Geraldine Fitzgerald, Larry Hagman
screenplay by Paul Mazursky and Josh Greenfeld
directed by Paul Mazursky

by Alex Jackson I complain a lot about film criticism being reduced to archaeology, but I don't think I've ever seen anything quite as impenetrable along these lines as Paul Mazursky's 1974 sleeper Harry and Tonto. It never coheres, it never makes its point, and it never justifies its existence. You know Mr. Bernstein's anecdote about the girl in the white dress in Citizen Kane, or Marge Gunderson's drink with her old high school chum in Fargo--those nice little throwaway moments that haven't much to do with the actual movie? In Harry and Tonto, Mazursky gets rid of the "actual movie" and gives us nothing but throwaway moments. Yeah, it's that kind of film.

Transamerica (2005) + Mrs. Henderson Presents (2005)

TRANSAMERICA
**/****
starring Felicity Huffman, Kevin Zegers, Fionnula Flanagan, Graham Greene
written and directed by Duncan Tucker

MRS. HENDERSON PRESENTS
*½/****
starring Judi Dench, Bob Hoskins, Will Young, Christopher Guest
screenplay by Martin Sherman
directed by Stephen Frears

by Walter Chaw Duncan Tucker makes his hyphenate debut with Transamerica, one of the first pictures distributed by the Weinsteins under their new aegis. Predictably, all the earmarks of the earnest indie genre Miramax blazed are cemented into place: it's over-written when it's not overreliant on a soundtrack of ethnically-cued melodies (the wood flute marks the appearance of an Indian, for instance) and folksy ballads (I challenge you not to 'pit up when a tune about a rose blooming accompanies our hero swapping his "outie" for an "innie"); narratively creaky; and hangs its hopes on its star, Felicity Huffman, to impose nuance where there is none. Huffman's performance being the sort of stunt in a minor independent film that plays fast and loose with smug liberal paternalism should guarantee her an Oscar nomination--and it can't hurt that another Leonardo DiCaprio doppelgänger arrives post-Michael Pitt in the form of Kevin Zegers, trailing a little pathos and a little inappropriate titillation on his thin shoulders.

The Blues Brothers (1980) [25th Anniversary Edition (Widescreen)] - DVD

**/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B
starring John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd, James Brown, Cab Calloway
screenplay by Dan Aykroyd and John Landis
directed by John Landis

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Long before Quentin Tarantino would run a tear across the super soul sounds of the '70s, there was the strange case of John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd in the deadly "Blues Brothers" affair. Sitting somewhere at the low end of White Negro trickle-down, the Blues Brothers were two conspicuously white soul singers who made up for in enthusiasm what they lacked in talent--though their "Saturday Night Live" clowning conveniently omitted this bit of information, half-expecting us to take them seriously as they tumbled and caterwauled their way through various musical numbers. Where a true hipster would have meticulously re-created their favoured forms, Joliet Jake Blues (Belushi) and his brother Elwood (Aykroyd) had nothing but "heart" and "sincerity"--a nice way of saying they were rank amateurs doing primitive karaoke. They were compellingly frantic performers, but they weren't the blues and never would be.

Broken Flowers (2005)

***½/****
starring Bill Murray, Jeffrey Wright, Sharon Stone, Frances Conroy
written and directed by Jim Jarmusch

by Walter Chaw I think that humour is a sharply-honed defense mechanism: something ingratiating in its ability to transcend taboo and thus, through laughter, enlist others in a secret club where the only law of membership is mutual transgression. And I think that comedians--the good ones--work from a well of demons deep and dire. It's no surprise to me that Robin Williams can actually manage a human performance in Dead Again, or that Jim Carrey can be brilliant in The Truman Show and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, since so much of comedy is knowing what's acceptable and, more importantly, what's not. More to the point, it's no surprise that Bill Murray could refashion his career from the drunken bully of "Saturday Night Live" into this aging penitent, seeking absolution from some unnameable sin forever regenerating itself like a Promethean liver. It only took a couple of decades, but Murray has finally become Somerset Maugham's pilgrim Larry Darrell (whom he played in 1984's underestimated The Razor's Edge)--true maturity having a lot to do with the understanding that it doesn't take a shake-up as seismic as WWI to turn a man to blue moods. Often the first step in an existential journey is spurred by something as simple as a realization of how big of an asshole you used to be.

Undertow (2004) - DVD

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

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

Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore (1974) - DVD

**½/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras B+
starring Ellen Burstyn, Kris Kristofferson, Billy Green Bush, Diane Ladd
screenplay by Robert Getchell
directed by Martin Scorsese

by Bill Chambers The zeitgeist made Martin Scorsese and his mentor John Cassavetes artistically simpatico in 1974, when the two helmed "women's pictures" independent of each other's counsel. It was the beginning of women's lib, and Warner hoped to corner the market via Ellen Burstyn and her pet project Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, while it would seem that with his brilliant A Woman Under the Influence, Cassavetes just wanted to say something hopeful about marriage to counter the prevailing propaganda. Both pictures were demonized in certain feminist circles for yoking their heroines to knights in tarnished armour, but in the case of Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, they were preaching to the compromised.

Boxcar Bertha (1972) [The Martin Scorsese Film Collection] - DVD

**½/**** Image A- Sound B+
starring Barbara Hershey, David Carradine, Barry Primus, Bernie Casey
screenplay by Joyce H. Corrington & John William Corrington, based on Sisters of the Road by Bertha Thompson, as told to Ben L. Reitman
directed by Martin Scorsese

by Bill Chambers Although a Martin Scorsese retrospective could easily survive the absence of Boxcar Bertha, the film is a cornerstone of the director's filmography: Without it, there is conceivably no The Last Temptation of Christ--Bertha herself, Barbara Hershey, introduced Scorsese to the Nikos Kazantzakis source novel during production--and no Mean Streets. Because he'd been toiling away on the Hollywood fringe after getting fired from his would-be sophomore effort, 1970's The Honeymoon Killers, for shooting everything in master (an experiment he would repeat to great acclaim with The King of Comedy), Scorsese agreed to helm AIP's umpteenth Bonnie and Clyde wannabe, an in-name-only sequel to the drive-in sensation Bloody Mama (which incidentally starred his future muse, Robert De Niro). "You just spent a year of your life making a piece of shit," went John Cassavetes's immortal response to the results, a critique not so much of the work itself as of Scorsese's decision to play the hired gun. Thus aborted his mission to position himself as one of the California film brats conquering the industry, as Cassavetes's tough-love approach spurred him to return to New York and resurrect the idea for Season of the Witch, a thematic follow-up to Who's That Knocking At My Door that eventually became Mean Streets.

Chastity (1969) - DVD

½*/**** Image B Sound B
starring Cher, Barbara London, Stephen Whittaker, Tom Nolan
screenplay by Sonny Bono
directed by Alessio de Paola

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover There is nothing more dangerous than a cuddly celebrity with avant-garde pretensions. The idea of a cheesy popular entertainer pouring his heart into something "serious" and "artistic" is wrong on so many levels: not only does it usually show him up as ignorant of the good work in the field he wants to hijack, but it also denigrates the deflationary appeal of what he actually does well. Normally the result just falls flat on its face, but with a little flamboyance--as in the case of William Shatner's "Transformed Man" album--the effort can result in a camp howler of uncommon magnitude. That would likewise be the fate of Chastity, a Sonny Bono-penned opus meant to endow his then-paramour Cher with the gravitas she clearly lacked on their variety show. With every (drunken, staggering) motion it takes towards significance, Chastity gets further and further away from it. We're talking planets.

Johnson Family Vacation (2004) - DVD

½*/**** Image A Sound A- Extras C+
starring Cedric the Entertainer, Bow Wow, Vanessa Williams, Shannon Elizabeth
screenplay by Todd R. Jones & Earl Richey Jones
directed by Christopher Erskin

by Bill Chambers Big fan of National Lampoon's Vacation that I am, I was actually intrigued by the prospect of its central characters undergoing a racial inversion. On their trip to a mecca of family fun known as Wally World, the Caucasian Griswolds left their suburban cocoon only to discover how socially ill-equipped they were for the rest of an increasingly stratified America--an apologue in the vein of The Wizard of Oz that's more than un-PC: it's anthropological; a black retread hewed to its line has the potential to be far more applicable to the African-American experience than, say, The Wiz. Unfortunately, while National Lampoon's Vacation was scripted by John Hughes, the Reagan era's premier commentator on class relations, the creators of something called "C-Bear and Jamal" wrote Johnson Family Vacation. Maybe their lack of pedigree is irrelevant, but so is the film, which we can only generously call a pale imitation of National Lampoon's Vacation. After the opening credits, I wished the movie had had the wit to rib its derivative genesis with a parody of National Lampoon's Vacation's signature song ("Ease on Down the Holiday Road"--isn't it obvious?). By the end of the movie, I wished it had wit.

Chasing Liberty (2004) [Widescreen Edition] - DVD

ZERO STARS/**** Image A- Sound A Extras C
starring Mandy Moore, Matthew Goode, Jeremy Piven, Annabella Sciorra
screenplay by Derek Guiley & David Schneiderman
directed by Andy Cadiff

by Walter Chaw Giving a whole new meaning to the term "Grand Old Party," now that Jenna and Barbara Bush have made being the first daughter delinquent-delightful again after that stick-in-the-mud scholar/ambassador Chelsea (the "Family Values" party has a little 'splainin' to do), gird yourself for no fewer than three films featuring the exploits of the most powerful girl-child in the free world: David Mamet's Spartan, the Katie Holmes starrer First Daughter, and, first out of the block, Andy Cadiff's execrable Chasing Liberty.

Overnight Delivery (1998) - DVD

½*/**** Image B- Sound B
starring Reese Witherspoon, Paul Rudd, Christine Taylor, Larry Drake
screenplay by Marc Sedaka and Steven Bloom
directed by Jason Bloom

by Bill Chambers A cult film without a cult, Overnight Delivery has gained a reputation, if not a following, for being the uncredited inspiration behind slippery documentarian Todd Phillips's official fiction debut, Road Trip. And, of course, it stars the Reese Witherspoon who had not yet been body-snatched by the species that also got Ashley Judd, although it's worth noting that Overnight Delivery is a harbinger of Sweet Home Alabamas to come, with Witherspoon a conduit for one meet-cute cliché after another. I'll admit that she's adorable in the picture, but her character, a college student whose bad taste in men is made a virtue by the workhorse plot, is a cipher steadily depleting the goodwill she shamelessly earns in her introduction as a stripper in a Catholic school uniform named Ivy Von Trapp. In true Hollywood fashion, Ivy's striptease is cut short before her Pointer Sisters get to do the Neutron Dance--she's too busy squatting for the patrons stuffing bills into her skirt.

Cold Mountain (2003)

*½/****
starring Jude Law, Nicole Kidman, Renée Zellweger, Donald Sutherland
screenplay by Anthony Minghella, based on the novel by Charles Frazier
directed by Anthony Minghella

by Walter Chaw Existing in an awards-season netherworld where the ugliest girl is Renée Zellweger (or Jena Malone), dad is Donald Sutherland, and Odysseus is Jude Law, Anthony Minghella's Cold Mountain is a tarted-up march to the awards-night podium starring Nicole Kidman, possibly the most over-exposed actor of the last five years. Everything about the film is careful artifice, from its casting to its grandiloquent direction to its half-baked dialogue ("Small moments like a bag of diamonds," indeed), with only Law, Philip Seymour Hoffman, and the magnificent Brendan Gleeson emerging unscathed from the golden wreckage. What Minghella seems best at is recasting edged, emotionally tumultuous novels into sun-kissed temples to the cinematographer's craft, the more dappled sunlight in the eye with which to bedazzle awards-season voters. The strength of Charles Frazier's National Book Award-winning source material lies in its socio-political details of America's Civil War period, but Minghella has focused his picture unerringly on the overrated novel's weaknesses instead: its dialogue, its clumsy Homeric riff (for better country-fried Odyssey, stick to O Brother Where Art Thou?), and its sweeping gothic romance, which finds its characters, at one point, reading the real deal in Wuthering Heights. The result is, like Minghella's previous literary adaptations (The Talented Mr. Ripley and The English Patient), lavish, lugubrious, and off-target.

DIFF '03: Bitter Jester

***/****
directed by Maija DiGiorgio

by Walter Chaw Bitter Jester is a hard-to-watch record of an irritating, dangerously self-destructive stand-up comedienne named Maija (director Maija DiGiorgio) who, with a video camera and goombah ex-boxer boyfriend Kenny in tow, imposed herself on the frighteningly neurotic underworld of stand-up performers. With the endorsement of Kenny's legend-in-the-stand-up-world pal Richard Belzer and Maija's dead therapist, the pair set out to make a documentary on the effectiveness of throwing oneself at the mercy of antagonistic comedy-club audiences as therapy for working out childhood trauma and pathological personality defects. What results is a surreal, Hunter S. Thompson-esque travelogue wherein we learn that Kenny quit boxing because he had reached "the pinnacle" of the profession (and witness the aftermath of Kenny trying to kill Jerry Seinfeld)--that professional pinnacle being the in-ring murder of one of his hapless opponents. We learn a lot about Kenny because, while the pair wins interviews with a few of the biggest stars on the stand-up circuit (Rita Rudner, George Carlin, Chevy Chase, Whoopi Goldberg, and so on), Kenny is completely incapable of not revealing the breadth of his scary pathology. The tragedy of Maija and Kenny is equalled by the tragedy of these comedians clamouring to be included in this project--many of them solely because they see other people clamouring to be a part of this project. An honest and frightening confirmation of more than I ever wanted to know on the subject of fame and performance (particularly when the picture watches as Kenny joins the rescue effort at ground zero following 9/11 before organizing a benefit for the children of the victims of the atrocity attended by most of the people interviewed), Bitter Jester lends something like an amazing perspective on how complicated a person can be--and, oddly enough, how transforming September 11^th was on a collective and personal level.

Gasoline (2002)

Benzina
**/****
starring Maya Sansa, Regina Orioli, Pietro Ragusa, Mariella Valentini
screenplay by Anne Riitta Ciccone & Monica Stambrini, based on the novel by Elena Stancanelli
directed by Monica Stambrini

by Bill Chambers Scarlett Johansson-esque Regina Orioli stars in Monica Stambrini's Gasoline (Benzina) (hereafter Benzina) as Lenni, a bespectacled loner who went looking for work at a coffee bar/gas station one day and found love with its proprietor, Stella (Maya Sansa). When Lenni's mother (Mariella Valentini) comes to visit and tries to talk her once-presumed-straight daughter out of her gay lifestyle, a scuffle ensues between madre and Stella in which the former is inevitably accidentally killed; even more inevitably, Stella doesn't think they should tell the police despite her innocence looking forensically sound; and most inevitably of all, Lenni's mom had a fortune in her purse. If you're playing the home game and guessed that Stella and Len go on the lam, give yourself ten points--twenty if you had it down that they would do so with a body in the trunk.

Goin' Down the Road (1970) [Seville Signature Collection] - DVD

***½/**** Image C Sound B Extras A
starring Doug McGrath, Paul Bradley, Jayne Eastwood, Cayle Chernin
screenplay by William Fruet & Donald Shebib
directed by Donald Shebib

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover As close to a classic as Canadian cinema gets, Donald Shebib's Goin' Down the Road touches greatness without really trying; its virtue lies in its refusal to force things, eschewing the jackhammer editing and hard-lined composition of traditional cinema in favour of a hazy, genial approach to its look and feel. Under regular Northern circumstances, this would be a liability: our country's inability to make conscious aesthetic choices has reduced more than a few films to a thin bland soup. But here it works like gangbusters, passively recording the protagonists' misadventures with a combination of helplessness and sympathy as they thrash about, trying to claim an American dream in the midst of a Canadian nightmare. It's simple, lovely, and heartbreaking, and it makes you wonder how Shebib could have somehow managed to disappear into obscurity.

Rabbit-Proof Fence (2002)

***/****
starring Everlyn Sampi, Tianna Sansbury, Laura Monaghan, David Gulpilil
screenplay by Christine Olsen, based on the book Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence by Doris Pilkington
directed by Phillip Noyce

by Walter Chaw A very small story set on a very large stage, Phillip Noyce's affecting Rabbit-Proof Fence is perhaps the most visually beautiful film of the director's career, proving between this and his other movie from this year, the Graham Greene adaptation The Quiet American, that not only is it possible to go home again (as in Noyce to Australia) but also that it's often wise. Shot on a minimal budget (in the six-million dollar range) with a cast of largely non-professional actors (Kenneth Branagh the main exception), the picture is a tremendous hit among the self-congratulatory film festival/arthouse crowd, who, after all, like to feel as though they're applauding the right things.

Bubble Boy (2001) - DVD

**½/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Swoosie Kurtz, Marley Shelton, Danny Trejo
screenplay by Cinco Paul & Ken Daurio
directed by Blair Hayes

by Walter Chaw At its giant heart, Bubble Boy attempts the Herculean task of convincing us that the best parts of America died with the forced naiveté of "Land of the Lost". Single-handedly, the film tries to resurrect the cheesiness of that awful Kroft Brothers' show that held my generation transfixed after Saturday morning cartoons, allowing its titular protagonist to play a mean electric guitar version of its theme song (provided by Dweezil Zappa) while featuring a dream sequence cobbled together from outtakes from that late, lamented prehistoric Neverland. If this strikes you as a strange thing for a movie to try, consider that Bubble Boy is also the finest Todd Solondz film that Solondz never made.

Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back (2001)

**/****
starring Jason Mewes, Kevin Smith, Jason Lee, Chris Rock
written and directed by Kevin Smith

by Walter Chaw Self-referential and self-satisfied, Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back is a continual stream of grotesque sexual references, leering at scantily clad, foul-mouthed women, and enough broad swipes at mainstream cinema (while featuring a parade of celebrity cameos) that it ends up being a cross between "Beavis and Butthead", Cecil B. Demented, and a Bob Hope Christmas special, not to mention an endurance test. It is, in other words, exactly the kind of film that Jay and Silent Bob would make if they were real and given fifteen million dollars to hock their adventures in arrested development to fawning fans, as well as the other 99% of the world.