Film Freak Central

Fantasia Festival '23: Aporia

**½/****
starring Judy Greer, Edi Gathegi, Payman Maadi, Faithe Herman
written and directed by Jared Moshé

by Walter Chaw Titled after a word meaning "irresolvable internal contradiction," Aporia is a tragicomedy of errors à la The Butterfly Effect in which three well-meaning suburbanites figure out a way to change the past but can't quite figure out how to avoid causing unexpected temporal fuckups in addition to the ones they're trying to cause. For what it's worth, their always remembering their former timelines isn't addressed in any meaningful way--nor, I guess, does it need to be, given that this is soft sci-fi and not Primer, but I did think about it. I also thought about how the title is probably fair warning against trying to Neil deGrasse Tyson the thing, and so: fair enough. What happens is that grieving widow Sophie (Judy Greer), seven months out from losing husband Malcolm (Edi Gathegi) to a drunk driver, does her best to manage the trauma she and her daughter Riley (Gaithe Herman) are going through, but it's a losing battle. She confides in her friend Jabir (Payman Maadi) that things are spiralling, and Jabir tells Sophie that he and Malcolm had been working on a time-travel device that could fire a burst of energy to a specific time and place in the past. If they were to kill the drunk driver, they figure, maybe all would be well again in their world. So they do it, and at first it seems like this Monkey's Paw is one of the rare benevolent Monkey's Paws. But then Sophie starts feeling guilty over the financial plight the drunk driver's wife, Kara (Whitney Morgan Cox), suffers in the absence of her lout of a husband.

The Flash (2023)

*½/****
starring Ezra Miller, Sasha Calle, Kiersey Clemons, Michael Keaton
screenplay by Christina Hodson
directed by Andy Muschietti

by Walter Chaw Andy Muschietti's jittery, frenetic The Flash has about it the feeling of someone getting away with something. Some of that's extratextual, given the tribulations of its ingratiating star Ezra Miller, who went on a mini crime spree--caught on camera choking a female fan, accused of grooming/kidnapping an underage girl and exposing an infant to a firearm, and so on--and some of it is due to Miller's performance, by turns irritating and overblown, which again is either on purpose or just who Miller is. Lots has already been written about this movie being allowed to go forward under David Zaslav's anti-art reign over the storied Warner Bros. brand while other, largely minority-led films and television shows get vanished into the tax write-off cornfield. Even more has been written about the delays that greeted this tentpole as the studio waited for Miller's name to dissipate from the news cycle. Everyone has their redline, and I'm not equipped to judge people who won't watch a Roman Polanski film yet own the entire Led Zeppelin discography. Everyone has a blind eye, and we turn it according to personal instructions hypocritical, mercurial, and mysterious. It is what it is. I am of the belief, however, that only the bad guys burn books.

12 Monkeys (1995) - Blu-ray Disc|4K Ultra HD

Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

Twelve Monkeys
***½/****
BD - Image A Sound A- Extras B
4K - Image A- Sound A- Extras B
starring Bruce Willis, Madeleine Stowe, Brad Pitt, Christopher Plummer
screenplay by David Webb Peoples & Janet Peoples, inspired by the film La Jetée written by Chris Marker
directed by Terry Gilliam

by Bryant Frazer Twelve Monkeys is a movie about a moment. Yes, sure, it's a decades-spanning science-fiction tale about time travel, the illusion of free will, and a romance at the end of the world. Yet its defining facet is its repeated, soulful depiction of a few terrible minutes in the life of a young boy who witnesses an event that's tragic in ways he can't comprehend. That's how the story starts and how it ends, the first thing we see and also the last--a child's eyes, open wide, as he is exposed to the spectacle of death, probably for the first time. Although Twelve Monkeys deals with the destruction of human civilization by a lethal contagion, and the plague's aftermath, less of the action centres on the plague itself than on this little boy. Mostly, it's concerned with a man named James Cole (Bruce Willis), who believes he's a time-travelling agent sent back from the 2030s, after a small number of survivors retreat to the safety of underground caves. Liberated from a prison cell for the mission to contemporary Philadelphia (ground zero for the virus release), Cole is trying to discover information about its origins that can be used, decades hence, to help make the earth's ruined surface safe for human habitation. Success means redemption, since Cole would return to his future world a hero. But in an ironic twist, Cole is almost immediately institutionalized; only psychiatrist Kathryn Railly (Madeleine Stowe), a specialist in "madness and apocalyptic visions," and fellow patient Jeffrey Goines (Brad Pitt), who may be a nascent environmental terrorist, suspect Cole's references to upcoming cataclysmic events may be more than just delusional.

Needle in a Timestack (2021)

*/****
starring Leslie Odom, Jr., Freida Pinto, Cynthia Erivo, Orlando Bloom
written for the screen by John Ridley, based on the short story by Robert Silverberg
directed by John Ridley

by Walter Chaw A cautionary tale about writing something whilst in a state of forced, artificial love-drunk, John Ridley's Needle in a Timestack is this year's Serenity: a film so intensely invested in its adolescent feelings that it's headed towards a specific state of camp immortality. Nick (Leslie Odom, Jr.)--because "Nick of time," get it?--is married to Janine (Cynthia Erivo), and they're that kind of The Notebook couple who speak to each other as though they were scripted by Nicholas Sparks, who, let's face it, on the Stephanie Meyer scale of cultural whoopsies, can barely string three words together. "Dance like no one's watching," someone moans in a high state of agitation. "Love is a closed circle," someone else declares; between that and "True Detective"'s "time is a flat circle," circles are doing a lot of heavy lifting in the realm of purple overwriting. In this future as imagined by a perfume commercial, time travel is a recreational lark indulged in by the hyper-rich, causing occasional "time waves" that wash over the world like the exact same visualization of the exact same concept in A Sound of Thunder, a film so terrible that your body's autonomous defense mechanism has already largely expelled it from your memory. That film, like this one, is based on a classic science-fiction story: Ray Bradbury there, Robert Silverberg here. The concept of "based" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in this instance, too.

Fantasia Festival '21: Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes

Droste no hate de bokura
****/****
starring Kazunari Tosa, Riko Fujitani, Gôta Ishida, Aki Asakura
screenplay by Makota Ueda
directed by Junta Yamaguchi

by Walter Chaw Junta Yamaguchi's directorial debut Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes is zero-budget high-concept done right, a fastball-down-the-middle of a time-travel movie landing right when the concept seemed to have been wrung dry. Logging in at a lean 70 minutes, it doesn't have a trace of fat on it. More, it manages in that brief span to paint fully-fleshed characters, conjure and pay off a romantic-comedy subplot, and juggle a couple of sharp tonal shifts. It's so good because it's so...simple. A strange thing to say about a premise that's kind of mind-breaking as a pair of connected, closed-circuit monitors accidentally creates a temporal wormhole across the span of two minutes, but there you have it. This little masterpiece proves the truism that whatever the plot might be, as long as the characters and their motivations remain legible and relatable, baby, you got a movie. Simple.

The Tomorrow War (2021)

**½/****
starring Chris Pratt, Yvonne Strahovski, J.K. Simmons, Betty Gilpin
written by Zach Dean
directed by Chris McKay

by Walter Chaw Not to be confused with Joe Haldeman's classic 1974 novel The Forever War, Chris McKay's super-stupid The Tomorrow War doesn't bear up under the slightest prodding yet demonstrates an admirable agreeability to "sciencing the shit out of" part of its solution while dealing, however rotely, with its father/son and father/daughter abandonment themes. Pratt, whose Q-meter stock has fallen because of a few public missteps, proves an affable presence as science teacher-cum-future soldier Dan Forester, enlisted by future soldiers into fighting the tomorrow war against thorn-tossing, bugbear monster things dubbed "White Spikes." See, in 30 years or so, humans are down to their last half-million and need people from the past to bolster their ranks. But doesn't that create some temporal anomaly problems? I'm very glad you asked. Yes, it does. That's why they only recruit people who are going to die within a decade anyway, which is either an incredibly stupid plan in its looseness or an incredibly cynical plan that presumes none of these people will procreate again within the next 10 years--or, you know, otherwise do something that will fuck with the future in an unexpected way. Maybe they've accounted for all that and simply don't share. Or maybe it's like that Mark Hamill anecdote about how his hair should have been filthy and wet for a scene shot out of sequence but meant to follow the trash-compactor escape in Star Wars: As Harrison Ford sagely informed him, "Kid, it ain't that kind of movie."

12 Monkeys (1995) - Blu-ray Disc

Twelve Monkeys
***½/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B
starring Bruce Willis, Madeleine Stowe, Brad Pitt, Christopher Plummer
screenplay by David Webb Peoples & Janet Peoples, inspired by the film La Jetée written by Chris Marker
directed by Terry Gilliam

by Bryant Frazer Twelve Monkeys is a movie about a moment. Yes, sure, it's a decades-spanning science-fiction tale about time travel, the illusion of free will, and a romance at the end of the world. Yet its defining facet is its repeated, soulful depiction of a few terrible minutes in the life of a young boy who witnesses an event that's tragic in ways he can't comprehend. That's how the story starts and how it ends, the first thing we see and also the last--a child's eyes, open wide, as he is exposed to the spectacle of death, probably for the first time. Although Twelve Monkeys deals with the destruction of human civilization by a lethal contagion, and the plague's aftermath, less of the action centres on the plague itself than on this little boy. Mostly, it's concerned with a man named James Cole (Bruce Willis), who believes he's a time-travelling agent sent back from the 2030s, after a small number of survivors retreat to the safety of underground caves. Liberated from a prison cell for the mission to contemporary Philadelphia (ground zero for the virus release), Cole is trying to discover information about its origins that can be used, decades hence, to help make the earth's ruined surface safe for human habitation. Success means redemption, since Cole would return to his future world a hero. But in an ironic twist, Cole is almost immediately institutionalized; only psychiatrist Kathryn Railly (Madeleine Stowe), a specialist in "madness and apocalyptic visions," and fellow patient Jeffrey Goines (Brad Pitt), who may be a nascent environmental terrorist, suspect Cole's references to upcoming cataclysmic events may be more than just delusional.

Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991) - 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital HD

Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

***/**** Image C+ Sound A- Extras B+
starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Linda Hamilton, Robert Patrick, Edward Furlong
screenplay by James Cameron & William Wisher
directed by James Cameron

by Bryant Frazer I remember the summer of 1991, when Terminator 2: Judgment Day landed in movie theatres with all the fuck-you noise, power, and momentum of a Ford Freightliner crashing from an L.A. thoroughfare overpass into a concrete spillway below. It was the year of Operation Desert Storm and the ending of the Cold War, the year LAPD officers were videotaped beating Rodney King. With the release of "Smells Like Teen Spirit" still a few months away, latter-day cock-rocker Axl Rose still led the most popular band in America. It had been a pretty good year for women in film, even if the material was grim--Jodie Foster helped open The Silence of the Lambs at #1 in February and Davis/Sarandon kick-started a thousand feminist (and anti-feminist) thinkpieces when Thelma & Louise arrived in May. But the main movie event of the summer was the testosterone-laden sequel to The Terminator. Serenaded by a hit single from Axl's Guns N' Roses, heralded as the most expensive movie ever made, and stuffed with apocalyptic imagery, T2 roared onto screens, smacked you upside the head, and stole your lunch money, then smirked about it as it strolled away.

Fantastic Fest '16: Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children (2016)

*/****
starring Eva Green, Asa Butterfield, Chris O'Dowd, Samuel L. Jackson
screenplay by Jane Goldman, based upon the novel by Ransom Riggs
directed by Tim Burton

by Walter Chaw The right material and collaborator can bring out the best in Tim Burton, but it's mostly a one-way street. Before it soured, his work with Johnny Depp compelled because of the pathos Depp imported into projects like Edward Scissorhands and Ed Wood. When Burton lands the right material, as he did with Sondheim's Sweeney Todd, he's capable of masterpieces. I would argue that his most personal picture by far, the only one that plumbs the exquisite gulfs of loneliness and disconnection suggested by his other pieces, is Batman Returns. There's a scene in it where Bruce Wayne drinks soup, recoils that it's cold, then digs in again without hesitation when told by his long-term keeper that it's supposed to be. Bruce is a broken clockwork and wholly dependent; it's a fascinating read of the Batman character. Burton's Catwoman is the purest representation of the gender injustice that results in her mania and rise to power. The film is a spiritual predecessor to Burton's poetry collection The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy and Other Stories, the contents of which speak of misbegotten births, misunderstood childhoods, and unimaginable betrayals that lead to lonesome deaths. These themes are always on the periphery of Burton's films. I wonder if as he's gotten more monolithic whether they don't become commensurately more difficult to tease out.

Edge of Tomorrow (2014) - Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

click any image to enlarge

***/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras B+
starring Tom Cruise, Emily Blunt, Bill Paxton, Brendan Gleeson
screenplay by Christopher McQuarrie and Jez Butterworth & John-Henry Butterworth, based on the graphic novel All You Need Is Kill by Hiroshi Sakurazaka
directed by Doug Liman

by Angelo Muredda Whatever one thinks of his weaselly insouciance as a performer, it's hard to argue against Tom Cruise's record of choosing solid collaborators to bring a certain kind of high-concept amuse-bouche to life. From Joseph Kosinski's Oblivion, a derivative film about derivatives, to the more or less solid auteurist permutations of the Mission: Impossible franchise, the results have varied, but Cruise's reputation as the sort of star who can get moderately interesting pulp bankrolled and realized by moderately interesting talents has deservedly persisted. So we arrive at Edge of Tomorrow, Doug Liman's first kick at the Cruise can--a clever, fleetly-paced sci-fi riff on Groundhog Day with all the paradoxes of Duncan Jones's structurally similar Source Code but a more playful demeanour.

X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014)

***½/****
starring Hugh Jackman, Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellen, James McAvoy
screenplay by Simon Kinberg
directed by Bryan Singer

by Walter Chaw The seventh X-Men film including the two Wolverine flicks, Bryan Singer's X-Men: Days of Future Past (hereafter X7) is a sterling return to form for Singer, exiled after X2 for choosing to helm the spectacularly-underestimated Superman Returns. He brings with him, as he brought to the Superman mythology, a complete empathy with the material. He understands that the X-Men property--comic-book mutants battling human bureaucrats aiming to outlaw them as alien threats--is, just like the Superman property, at its heart about the pain and complexity of being born different. They're assimilation melodramas that present their heroes with the seductive choice to pass as "normals" when possible, to seek vengeance against bigotry as it presents itself, or to rise above it to achieve a sense of self and carve out a corner of the world for themselves.

Plus One (2013) - DVD

+1
***/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B-
starring Rhys Wakefield, Logan Miller, Ashley Hinshaw, Natalie Hall
screenplay by Bill Gullo
directed by Dennis Iliadis

by Walter Chaw David (Rhys Wakefield) screws up and loses girlfriend Jill (Ashley Hinshaw), only to run into her the night of a gigantic, hedonistic, Gatsby-esque party attended by rave strippers, DJs, and drug dealers. An unlikely place to stage a comeback, David, with buddy Teddy (Logan Miller), coaxes Jill into a conversation that goes south--but then the lights cut out, there's a weird meteorite event outside, and David finds himself with the opportunity to try the conversation again: same place, different Jill. It seems that something's created a quantum split--a little bleed-over maybe from a parallel dimension that twists time and creates doubles of all the revellers, though only a few notice. The ones who don't party on in a kind of nightmarish inattention that reminds of the dreamscapes of Miracle Mile and After Hours; the ones who do begin to wonder what will happen when the time-slips overlap and they find themselves attempting to share the same space as their doppelgängers.

Hot Tub Time Machine (2010) [Unrated] - Blu-ray + Digital Copy

*½/**** Image A Sound A Extras D
starring John Cusack, Rob Corddry, Craig Robinson, Chevy Chase
screenplay by Josh Heald and Sean Anders & John Morris
directed by Steve Pink

by Walter Chaw Emboldened, perhaps, by the surprisingly good The Other Guys and the surprisingly great Get Him to the Greek, I went into Steve Pink's Hot Tub Time Machine with the belief that its high-concept idea--not the time travel, but the casting of '80s icon John Cusack in a film that would return him to his decade of greatest power and influence--would be at least enough for it to function as a fairly smart nostalgia piece. Sadly, it's not very smart, nor is it very funny--and the parts of it that work do so in spite of what feels like Cusack's disdain for this period that made him famous. It's pretty standard fare, really, full of obvious jokes about changing the past and the obvious "rebellion" of not honouring the Prime Directive by introducing The Black-Eyed Peas into an eighties music scene that, for everything you could say about Falco or Flock of Seagulls, never produced anything remotely as odious as The Black-Eyed Peas. No, not even Billy Joel. In other words, Pink and his stable of writers can't seem to tell what's ironic from what isn't, meaning the whole project was doomed before it left the starting gate.

Back to the Future: The Complete Trilogy - DVD|Back to the Future: 25th Anniversary Trilogy - Blu-ray + Digital Copy

BACK TO THE FUTURE (1985)
****/****
DVD - Image A- Sound A- Extras B+
BD - Image B+ Sound A Extras A
starring Michael J. Fox, Christopher Lloyd, Lea Thompson, Crispin Glover
screenplay by Robert Zemeckis & Bob Gale
directed by Robert Zemeckis

BACK TO THE FUTURE PART II (1989)
**/****
DVD - Image A- Sound B+ Extras B
BD - Image A- Sound A Extras A-
starring Michael J. Fox, Christopher Lloyd, Lea Thompson, Thomas F. Wilson
screenplay by Bob Gale
directed by Robert Zemeckis

BACK TO THE FUTURE PART III (1990)
**½/****
DVD - Image A Sound A- Extras B
BD - Image A- Sound A Extras A
starring Michael J. Fox, Christopher Lloyd, Mary Steenburgen, Thomas F. Wilson
screenplay by Bob Gale
directed by Robert Zemeckis

by Bill Chambers GREAT SCOT! SPOILERS AHEAD! It's finally here. As not only a mighty-big fan of Robert Zemeckis's Back to the Future but also a completist (and therefore keen to collect Back to the Future's substandard sequels), I've anticipated the DVD release of Back to the Future: The Complete Trilogy (henceforth BTTF) since the format itself became a reality. Alas, the 3-disc set--from its unsexy blue-and-white cover layout to the cheap menus to a slipshod three-part documentary--is problematic. Don't get me wrong: I'm happy as a clam that the films (remastered in effervescent 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen transfers--pan-and-scan sold separately--supervised by co-creator Bob Gale with Dolby Digital 5.1 remixes that beef up the re-entry effects especially) look and sound as good as they do and that, for the first time in home video's history, each picture is now being seen as it appeared in theatres (more on that below). But as a BTTF enthusiast, almost every single piece of supplementary material had me arrogantly believing I could've done a better job.

TIFF 2010: Wrap It Up

originally published September 27, 2010

• The films are fading fast in the rearview for me (no reflection on them, necessarily), but before they become too vestigial I want to at least highlight the rest of what I saw at this year's TIFF, starting with a movie called White Irish Drinkers (*/****). How I wound up catching this flick is fairly embarrassing: the director is "John Gray," which I misread in my bleary, end-of-festival state as "James Gray." I was severely late for the flick, so I don't want to pummel it (or even officially rate it), but keen auteurist that I am, I figured out my mistake pretty quickly: James Gray just wouldn't have a naked girl (the maddeningly familiar Leslie Murphy) run around a cemetery with "free spirit" music cued up on the soundtrack--he's not a de facto film student anymore. Though it turns out that John Gray has an extensive TV-movie resume, having done everything from The Marla Hanson Story to the remake of Brian's Song, this feels very much the work of a novice, not a little for its pretensions to be the next Mean Streets. Because Stephen Lang salvaged Public Enemies virtually single-handedly, I was hopeful when he turned up here, but his character may be even more one-note than the one he played in Avatar. As his put-upon wife, Karen Allen has seemingly recovered from the stupefying euphoria of getting to resurrect her iconic Marion in Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Strangely, I missed said goofy grin, yet she makes the most of a thankless role that indirectly references her previous brush with this genre, Philip Kaufman's The Wanderers. The rest of the cast is made up of baby-faced thugs who have to be given black eyes at regular intervals in order to pass for tough. On a related note, I never could shake the feeling that this is exactly the sort of project Vinnie Chase would be hot for on "Entourage".

Groundhog Day (1993) [Special Edition] - DVD|Blu-ray Disc

***½/****
DVD - Image B Sound B+ Extras B-
BD - Image A- Sound A Extras B
starring Bill Murray, Andie MacDowell, Chris Elliot, Stephen Tobolowsky
screenplay by Danny Rubin and Harold Ramis
directed by Harold Ramis

by Bill Chambers I've heard the argument that Groundhog Day fails because it proposes the redemption of world-class crank Bill Murray--but, boy, does redemption fight an uphill battle against him. I suspect the criticism is misdirected at the prolific cinéma du redemption in general. Maybe the finest film yet directed by Harold Ramis (who's unfortunately been stuck in a high-concept rut since--his own personal Groundhog Day), Groundhog Day turns the titular Americana celebration into an existential abyss for Phil Connors (Murray), a self-centred weatherman for a TV station he considers a pit stop on the way to bigger and better things.

The Final Countdown (1980) [2-Disc Limited Edition] - DVD|Blu-ray Disc

**½/****
DVD - Image A Sound A- Extras B
BD - Image A Sound A- Extras B-
starring Kirk Douglas, Martin Sheen, Katharine Ross, James Farentino
screenplay by David Ambrose & Gerry Davis
directed by Don Taylor

by Walter Chaw The first nine times I saw The Final Countdown, I was on a blanket on the hood of my parents' car, a chimichanga in one hand and a Coke in the other. This was August and September of 1980, and earlier that year I thought I'd seen the best movie ever: The Empire Strikes Back. The next summer, I'd take in--at the drive-in, at the Cooper, at the Lakeside Twin--Raiders of the Lost Ark, Superman II, and Dragonslayer. I believed this to be the way movies naturally were, unaware then that I was poised at the cusp of a decade of filmmaking that would redefine fantasy and science-fiction, setting precedents for the genre with films like Back to the Future and Predator, E.T., and Blade Runner, Near Dark, and Miracle Mile--the well was as deep for flights of fancy in the Eighties as it was for incomparable character-driven paranoia in the Seventies. It was an amazing and specific time to come of age in the movies, I see in retrospect; and I owe the embarrassing chills I still get watching big-budget mainstream previews to this day to my maturation in the church of the blockbuster.

Fetching Cody (2005) - DVD

ZERO STARS/**** Image B+ Sound A Extras C-
starring Jay Baruchel, Sarah Lind, Jim Byrnes, Robert Kaiser
written and directed by David Ray

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Canada is a nation of amateurs. Some terrible national weakness has taught us to be sheepishly inexact, as if trying to tell a story or form a coherent argument were about showing up and meekly filling in time as opposed to a complex array of intellectual and aesthetic decisions. We'll do the job, but we won't do it precisely--and frequently, the results are empty shells like Fetching Cody. I wouldn't be nearly so angry about its failure if I didn't know that there were more like it--long, unbroken streams of arrested preadolescents looking to get points for being "serious" and "meaningful"--coming down the pipeline. Critics are probably the largest segment of the population who'll see them, which probably accounts for why we're terse in our dismissals: we know we'll wind up talking to no one but ourselves.

The Lake House (2006)

*/****
starring Keanu Reeves, Sandra Bullock, Dylan Walsh, Christopher Plummer
screenplay by David Auburn
directed by Alejandro Agresti

by Walter Chaw I couldn't help but conjecture, while watching the trailer for Alejandro Agresti's inexplicable The Lake House, that when Keanu Reeves's character is poring over a letter, a little thought bubble above his head would say, "Dude, I totally can't read." Continuing to think that is the only thing providing much of a distraction during the laggardly-paced, sloppily-scripted, hilariously-acted proceedings, which, as that same preview gives away, concern the romance of two people separated by two years, exchanging letters through the providence of a magic mailbox. Argentinean director Agresti's visual compositions are meticulous and his eye for architecture is almost as good as that of his protagonist, Alex Wyler (Reeves), but it's cold comfort against the raging inferno of illogic attending this scenic, stupid, Nicholas Sparks-ian shipwreck. Not helping things is Agresti's lamentable penchant for cornpone, exhibiting itself most stridently in the piano-tinkle, magical-elf-opening-a-treasure-chest score and a series of whimsical wipe-edits and dog reaction shots. Among its dedicated sub-genre of time-warp kiss-face (Somewhere in Time, Happy Accidents), The Lake House is a dud, too, frustrating first because its big gushy epiphany is solved by everyone with a working pre-frontal within a second of it happening, and second because Wyler, lagging two years behind his beloved Kate (Sandra Bullock), never once thinks to ask for a lotto number or a World Series winner.

Primer (2004)

*½/****
starring Shane Carruth, David Sullivan, Casey Gooden, Anand Upadhyaya
written and directed by Shane Carruth

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. There's something of the word walls of Gertrude Stein or Eugene Ionesco about Primer, the indie Sundance sensation that would have been rode out of town on a rail if it weren't about time travel in addition to being obscure (thus garnering it nervous intellectual comparisons to La Jetée instead of a more accurate likening to David Mamet-cum-István Szabó). I suspect that a lot of people are afraid to admit they don't understand what's happening in the film, which talks too much in too stultifying a fashion, obscuring its heart of glass with blizzards of expositive candy in the faint hope that people are too dazzled by the rhetoric to ever consider the little guy behind the curtain. Whatever genre can do to fabulize lizard fears into metaphorical eurekas!, it can also lend a pre-emptive weight to flimsy pieces presented for the approval of audiences perhaps unaccustomed to science-fiction. In truth, Primer is more Theatre of the Absurd than sci-fi, with yuppie iterations of Vladimir and Estragon having an endless circular conversation while waiting for a Godot who never really comes. Taken as such, there arises the possibility of seeing the film as commentary on the essential listless, deconstructive jingo-babble of engineers and white-shirt-print-tie professions--though I suspect Primer has a lot more to do with a decision somewhere along the line to make a "what if?" time-travel flick as dense and protracted as possible.

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004)

****/****
starring Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint, Emma Watson, Gary Oldman
screenplay by Steven Kloves, based on the novel by J.K. Rowling
directed by Alfonso Cuarón

by Walter Chaw There's real poetry in Alfonso Cuarón's Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (hereafter Harry Potter 3), encapsulated in a moment where Harry mistakes a vision of himself for the phantom of his dead father. It's another of the Mexican director's magic-realism conversations about children coming of age emotionally and sexually, marking the picture as a lovely companion piece to his A Little Princess and identifying Cuarón as a gifted, eloquent voice for the rage and the rapture of adolescence. Opening with the 13-year-old Harry (Daniel Radcliffe) fiddling with his wand beneath a blanket, the theme of self-discovery unfolds along jagged, de-romanticized lines like the rough rhythms of an Irish lyric or, more to the heart of the matter, a Mexican folk tale, all of blood, dirt, and heroic fervour.

13 Going on 30 (2004)

**/****
starring Jennifer Garner, Mark Ruffalo, Judy Greer, Christa B. Allen
screenplay by Cathy Yuspa & Josh Goldsmith and Niels Mueller
directed by Gary Winick

by Walter Chaw Threatening at any moment to veer off the populist tracks and become something legendarily, unpleasantly subversive, the middling 13 Going on 30 is really little more than a collection of "I Love the '80s" vignettes presided over by Jennifer Garner's peculiar mien. It's also peculiar that the genre of body-swapping/quick-aging jibber-jabber is making a resurgence now a couple of decades after the last spate (18 Again, Vice Versa, Big), and peculiar again that with Mark Waters's Freaky Friday and Gary Winick's 13 Going on 30, the genre is being re-imagined through the prism of young women. (Perhaps not so strange when you consider that the key demographic slavered over by studio wonks has shifted from the pre-adolescent boys of the mid-'80s to post-Titanic pre-adolescent girls.) It's clear that this film is meant to satisfy some sort of wish-fulfillment fantasy for 13-year-old members of the babysitters' club, but with Eighties references that can only be amusing to people who've passed the third-decade mark, it manages mostly to be a wish-fulfillment fantasy for thirtysomething men who want emotionally immature, sexually malleable women who happen to resemble television starlets.

The Butterfly Effect (2004)

***/****
starring Ashton Kutcher, Amy Smart, Kevin Schmidt, Melora Walters
written and directed by J. Mackye Gruber & Eric Bress

by Walter Chaw The Butterfly Effect is tidy, nifty even, a great little genre picture that wallows in ugliness, child abuse, animal abuse, classism, and misogyny but with a dirty polish that tends to distract a little from the nastiness. Evan (Ashton Kutcher) suffers from blackouts, has ever since he was a kid, and no wonder, as there seems to be some nasty bouts of molestation, baby murder, and dog immolation buried in there, desperately in need of some good old-fashioned repression. Now a psych student at State U (his research having something to do with memory, naturally), he discovers that he can "possess" himself at various stages of his youth after being triggered by the comp book journals he's been keeping ever since he started having his spells. His efforts at "fixing" the tragedies of his life all tend towards failure, however, as every little wrinkle he puts in the fabric of time results in catastrophic changes in the present. The Butterfly Effect owes a great debt, then, to Ray Bradbury's "A Sound of Thunder," Brian Aldiss's "Poor Little Warrior," William Goldman's Control, and Clive Barker's "The Inhuman Condition"; that it manages to honour to some degree each one of its sources (if only with the precision lavished on the telling of its dank tale) identifies the picture as a most difficult beast to embrace--and just as difficult to dislike. The craft above reproach, it's the content that worries.

Stargate (1994) [Ultimate Edition - Director's Cut] - DVD

**/**** Image B Sound A Extras B-
starring Kurt Russell, James Spader, Jaye Davidson, Viveca Lindfors
screenplay by Dean Devlin & Roland Emmerich
directed by Roland Emmerich

by Bill Chambers Spawning a television show and solidifying the Hollywood career of German director Roland Emmerich, 1994's Stargate was the last movie to get the memo that Abyss-ian water walls and morphing technology no longer evoked World's Fair awe. These special effects are merely the epitome of Stargate's second-hand wonder; part of the film's value as a curiosity piece is its New York street-merchant vibe: like peddlers of the Rolux watch or Parda handbag, Emmerich and co-producer/co-writer Dean Devlin are selling us an approximation of a blockbuster by a licensed hitmaker, and we excuse them the same way we allow for the smudgy print of carbon copies or the colour bleed on VHS dubs. It must be a human impulse to absolve a facsimile of its absence of novelty.

The Time Machine (2002) [Widescreen] - DVD

*/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B-
starring Guy Pearce, Jeremy Irons, Philip Bosco, Phyllida Law
screenplay by David Duncan and John Logan, based on the novel by H.G. Wells
directed by Simon Wells

by Walter Chaw A cacophonous mess of misguided revisionism and misplaced emphasis, Simon Wells's (and an uncredited Gore Verbinski's) updating of H.G. Wells's poli-sci-fi schlock masterpiece The Time Machine is a miasmic disaster, a sinkhole of shrug-worthy special effects, matte paintings, relentless music, and dangling plotlines and motivations. It isn't that The Time Machine is incoherent; it's that the film aspires after several rewrites to one day become incoherent. Not even the best efforts of the always-excellent Guy Pearce can save what is in essence a pathetic cutting-room attempt to wrest the movie back from the abyss of a director suffering a nervous breakdown with eighteen days to go in the shooting schedule and a governing philosophy that believes Orlando Jones would make a good HAL-9000.

Black Knight (2001) - DVD

**/**** Image B Sound A- Extras B
starring Martin Lawrence, Tom Wilkinson, Marsha Thomason, Vincent Regan
screenplay by Darryl J. Quarles and Peter Gaulke & Gerry Swallow
directed by Gil Junger

by Walter Chaw Jamal Walker (Martin Lawrence) is a groundskeeper at an all-black amusement park who, just prior to falling in a stagnant moat, is given a dressing down for being "selfish" and not community-minded enough. ("Community" referring to the African-American populace of South Central Los Angeles.) Sharp-eyed viewers should instantly recognize that Black Knight will at some point metastasize from a farce to a public service announcement. (Luckily, we're given a solid first act and a few moments in the second before it does.) When Jamal goes into the moat in pursuit of a golden medallion, he surfaces from a fetid stew in a never-never land where the plain protagonist becomes the keystone in a kingdom-wide intrigue.

Kate & Leopold (2001)

**½/****
starring Meg Ryan, Hugh Jackman, Liev Schreiber, Breckin Meyer
screenplay by James Mangold and Steven Rogers
directed by James Mangold

A NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR

James Mangold's Kate & Leopold, the third holiday release from Miramax to undergo last-minute edits (The Shipping News and In the Bedroom are the two other victims), has been neutered and lobotomized on a snap decision made by Mangold himself. I'm thankful that I saw an unmarred print prior to its impending truncation, for although one of the changes is welcome, another handily excises the main reason that I gave the Kate & Leopold a break and mild recommendation in the first place. The original version begins in a test screening, where the marketing executive played by Meg Ryan presides over an early screening of a romantic comedy very much like the one in which she finds herself. After suggesting changes to what she saw that will amp up the saccharine shamelessness of the film within the film, an outraged director confronts her: "My characters are real--movies can be real, you know. You're sucking the life out of American cinema." Meg Ryan's Kate appears as a 19th century party guest in an early scene in Kate and Leopold. Sharp-eyed viewers spotting her amongst Victorian New York's glitterati would be able to piece together that the time travel conceit of the film will come full circle. It's clever, and "clever" being anathema in today's romantic comedy genre (if ever it held currency), now it's gone. The abovementioned post-modernist self-awareness was clever as well and earned Kate and Leopold the benefit of the doubt--it's gone, too. That would be deliciously ironic if it weren't also so painful to witness. The only welcome elision is the revelation that Liev Schreiber's ex-boyfriend character Stuart is related to Hugh Jackman's Leopold, thus sparing us the odd reveal that Stuart has been sleeping with his great-great-great grandmother for the previous two years. Had Mangold decided to examine the Jocasta-Oedipus implications of a bookish young man desiring carnal relations with a distant mother figure, I'd have little ethical complaint, but the plot point seemed a careless misstep and won't be missed. You are not seeing the version of Kate & Leopold that I've reviewed at right. Perhaps not surprisingly, a print of the edited version has not been made available for critical re-evaluation. In this way be forewarned: some other films that arrived in the cineplex without the benefit of a critic's screening include Texas Rangers, Pootie Tang, and The Wash. To accommodate the last-minute print changes (and to distance it from the sure-bet that is The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring), Kate and Leopold's release date has been moved to December 26th from its originally-scheduled bow of December 21st.-WC

by Walter Chaw That the consistently grating Meg Ryan, now milking her second decade as a suspect princess of perk, stars in yet another variation on the When Harry Met Sally, "opposites in love against all odds" scenario augers ill, to be certain. But Kate & Leopold is a decent addition to the beleaguered and overcrowded romantic comedy genre (think Somewhere in Time meets Splash); look for an explanation in James Mangold's steady direction, the clever, deconstructive screenplay he wrote with Steven Rogers, and a rock-steady performance by Hugh Jackman that is confident and unembarrassed.

Happy Accidents (2001)

**/****
starring Marisa Tomei, Vincent D'Onofrio, Nadia Dajani, Holland Taylor
written and directed by Brad Anderson

by Walter Chaw Too long by at least the length of an unwelcome framing device and an expert but superfluous performance by Holland Taylor as a therapist, Brad Anderson's Happy Accidents is invested in the 16^th-century ideal that Love is the abeyance of Entropy, in the idea that true romantic bliss is the key to staving off chaos in a world eternally falling into it. The phenomena of time flying when one's having fun is spoken of early in the film as a scientific verity rather than as a cozy homily, and Happy Accidents is likewise best defined as a familiar love story stretched to justify old Heinlein and Wells pulp. A series of still photograph interludes recalling Chris Marker's La Jetée are handled with skill and a surprising poignancy but give too much away as to the ultimate resolution of the film to those familiar with the experimental French short.