Film Freak Central

Inglourious Basterds (2009)

****/****
starring Brad Pitt, Christoph Waltz, Michael Fassbender, Mélanie Laurent
written and directed by Quentin Tarantino

by Walter Chaw There are two stars in Inglourious Basterds (Quentin Tarantino and Christoph Waltz), the one to be expected, the other a shoo-in for Oscar consideration in what's easily the most mesmerizing, commanding performance I've seen in any film this year. The opening sequence, in which Waltz's SS Col. Hans Landa interrogates a French dairy farmer as to the whereabouts of a Jewish family that's gone missing, is, how to say this, perfect, but unlike the other perfect sequences of 2009 (the prologue of Up, the main titles of Watchmen), Inglourious Basterds matches this exceptional moment with another as Landa has a little confection with a rare survivor of his attentions, Shosanna (a stunning Mélanie Laurent); then another as German actress Bridget von Hammersmark (Diane Kruger) does her best to cover for her three suspicious pals in an underground speakeasy; then another with Landa again as he asks von Hammersmark to put her foot in his lap. At first glance two separate films that only fit together roughly, if at all, it becomes clear during Inglourious Basterds' final chapter, as the ghostly image of a beautiful woman cackles in the smoke above a burning auditorium ("This is the face of Jewish vengeance!"), that this is Tarantino no longer making something new and strange out of his obsessive movie-love, but something dangerous and risky about the ethics of vengeance and the shifting ground beneath moral quagmires we thought we'd put to bed. What better conflict than the last popular war to stage a conversation about whether or not the only reason the winners weren't held accountable for their atrocities is that they were the winners.

Valkyrie (2008) - DVD

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

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

Seattle International Film Festival '09: The Hurt Locker

***½/****
starring Jeremy Renner, Anthony Mackie, Brian Geraghty, Guy Pearce
screenplay by Mark Boal
directed by Kathryn Bigelow

by Jefferson Robbins It's either a shame or a blessing for Kathryn Bigelow's tense Iraq War drama The Hurt Locker to emerge now rather than in 2004, the year of its setting. Back then, war fury was all the rage and might have doomed the movie--we had to believe that invading Iraq was the right thing to do, or why else had we buried 1,100 soldiers by the time George W. Bush won reelection? But just the same, we could have used this reminder of the casualties who were still walking and drawing breath. Seldom squeamish about sharing tight spaces with sweaty males, Bigelow climbs into the Humvee with the "Blasters" of the Bravo Company bomb squad as they defuse IEDs in occupied Baghdad. Sgt. William James (Jeremy Renner) is rotated into an existing bomb unit to replace a technician pulped by a shockwave (Guy Pearce, first unrecognizable, then dead); James keeps his captured bomb triggers in a crate under his bunk--the locker of the title, though so could Iraq as a whole be. For their part, his new teammates are sorting through guilt over their fellow's demise (Brian Geraghty's Specialist Own Eldridge) or clinging to safety measures and protocols (Anthony Mackie's Sgt. J.T. Sanborn) that James knows can't possibly save him every time. Each disabled bomb is a sexual rush, calling for a cigarette afterward. He can't not accept the challenge, even that of a bomb stitched into a child's dead body. For all three men, the homefront--where James has an estranged wife (Evangeline Lilly) and a baby--is at best an abstraction, at worst a distraction from their own hovering doom. In their life in the camp, they are in death, with practically every interior (even the auto pool) a stark, institutional white, like Heaven's crappy waiting room. Bigelow, getting claustrophobically close with her camera and working from Mark Boal's eloquent but unflashy script, maintains a grenade-pin tension in the bombwork scenes but, surprisingly, lets out too much slack as James tries to take the fight to the hidden triggermen who detonate their payloads from afar. Ralph Fiennes cameos as a British merc who gets the Blasters tangled up in a sniper duel, leading to Bigelow's most effective image: while the gunmen lie in wait for the enemy to slip from cover, flies nestle on their faces, as if these men who rushed to embrace war are already dead.

Nanking (2007) - DVD

**½/**** Image A Sound A
directed by Bill Guttentag & Dan Sturman

by Alex Jackson Bill Guttentag and Dan Sturman's 90-minute documentary on the 1937 Nanking Massacre isn't so much reductive or simplistic as it is overachieving. The film suggests several promising avenues of discussion but stops there, at the level of overview, leaving you frustrated and hungry. As I felt similarly unsatisfied by the Ken Burns mini-series The Civil War, it occurs to me that the problem is one not of brevity but of excess ambition. With several hours at his disposal, Burns tried and failed to meet the likely-futile goal of creating the definitive document of the American Civil War. Even allowing for the decrease in scale, Guttentag and Sturman shouldn't have expected to sum up the entirety of the Nanking Massacre in a scant hour-and-a-half. By trying to tell us everything about the Nanking Massacre, Nanking ultimately tells us very little.

The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor (2008) [2-Disc Deluxe Edition]; Wanted (2008) [2-Disc Special Edition]; Mamma Mia! [2-Disc Special Edition] - DVDs

THE MUMMY: TOMB OF THE DRAGON EMPEROR
ZERO STARS/**** Image A Sound A Extras D
starring Brendan Fraser, Jet Li, Maria Bello, Michelle Yeoh
screenplay by Alfred Gough & Miles Millar
directed by Rob Cohen

WANTED
*/**** Image A Sound A Extras D
starring James McAvoy, Morgan Freeman, Terence Stamp, Angelina Jolie
screenplay by Michael Brandt & Derek Haas and Chris Morgan, based on the comic books by Mark Millar and J.G. Jones
directed by Timur Bekmambetov

MAMMA MIA!
ZERO STARS Image B Sound A Extras C-
starring Meryl Streep, Pierce Brosnan, Colin Firth, Stellan Stellan Skarsgård
screenplay by Catherine Johnson, based on the songs of ABBA
directed by Phyllida Lloyd

by Walter Chaw Fast becoming the post-Welles RKO without a commensurate Val Lewton to grease the transition from art to filthy lucre, today's Universal Pictures finds itself a long, long way from Psycho with a bumper crop of genuinely bad movies reverse-engineered from past box-office champions. Each of them--The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor, Wanted, and Mamma Mia!--broke the golden 100-million dollar mark, since they were made with just the Benjamins in mind; sadly, only the criticism of flaccid attendance was likely to curb an endless march of identical pictures this year. For the simpleminded, the success of these films despite the near-universal condemnation of them by anyone with a working prefrontal lobe is proof positive that critics are out of touch with the common man. On the contrary, I'd offer that, asked whether he thought the atrocious The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor (hereafter The Mummy 3) would be financially successful, the average critic would have said he'd be surprised if it didn't do a hundred-mil in its first three weeks of release. Out of touch is believing that something is good because it makes a lot of money.

Sundance '09: The Anarchist's Wife

**/****
starring María Valverde, Juan Diego Botto, Nina Hoss, Ivana Baquero
screenplay by Marie Noëlle
directed by Marie Noëlle & Peter Sehr

by Alex Jackson Affirmation, if nothing else, that Paul Verhoeven's Blackbook has become the dominant model for World War II pictures, Marie Noëlle and Peter Sehr's Verhoeven-esque The Anarchist's Wife alienated me early on by folding in stock footage to depict both the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War. On some level, I suspect this is a cheapoid strategy enabling the filmmakers to reserve more of their budget for costumes and sets. Whatever its intention, it dehumanizes the characters, translating them and their problems into unthreatening movie terms. This becomes even more explicit in a strange moment where the eponymous heroine Manuela (María Valverde) supplies the soundtrack to a movie she's watching with her daughter that was silenced by a bombing raid. Valverde's classical beauty and the mere way she can model a certain shade of red lipstick appears to be the principal reason for the film's existence--the rest feels like pretext as Manuela's husband Justo (Juan Diego Botto) is captured during the war and put in a concentration camp. He resurfaces in France several years later; Manuela finds him and they reunite, but he's secretly preoccupied with an anti-fascist group planning to overthrow Franco in Spain. There's a good movie in here somewhere, with Justo realigning his allegiances away from his family in their absence and identifying more exclusively as a revolutionary. But Noelle and Sehr seem reluctant to ever make either Manuela or Justo unsympathetic. Justo is never really held accountable for favouring the cause over his wife and family and Manuela is never held accountable for preferring her family to the cause. Noelle and Sehr see Justo's idealism as noble and romantic and Manuela doesn't waver in her devotion to her husband. The throughline between the flaw in the film's first half (said movieness) and the flaw in its second (the lack of any real conflict) suggests that too high a premium was placed on palatability. Indeed, The Anarchist's Wife goes down smooth, but it's not nearly bold enough to produce anything resembling nutritional value.

Miracle at St. Anna (2008) - DVD

**½/**** Image B+ Sound B+
starring Derek Luke, Michael Ealy, Laz Alonzo, Omar Benson Miller
screenplay by James McBride, based on his novel
directed by Spike Lee

by Ian Pugh Beginning with a moment of vocalized contempt for the John Wayne-ification of World War II in popular culture, Miracle at St. Anna thoroughly establishes its primary aim to give credit where credit is due to the unsung black heroes of the era. Director Spike Lee brings a broader sense of humanism to the table as well, though, orchestrating innumerable moments of fear and sympathy across several languages to impress upon viewers that there were, indeed, honest-to-gosh people on each side of a conflict not typically remembered for its moral ambiguity. If it's been done before, considering that Valkyrie subtly co-opted righteous, intelligent rebellion as an exclusively Anglo-American invention just a few short months after St. Anna's release, it's something of a necessary evil. Yet the picture is finally done a near-fatal disservice by Lee's often-painful (and, some might say, trademark) didacticism, with plenty of telegraphed prophecies on hand to reiterate that faith is more important than religion and that the common link of humanity overrides any national divisions. Messages well worth repeating, no doubt, but the film feels the need to drive them home with talking heads spouting heavy-handed philosophical ruminations that subtly give the mind license to wander. Sure, whether or not God exists, we should all act like He does--what else ya got?

Che (2008) + Milk (2008)

CHE
***½/****
starring Benicio Del Toro, Demián Bichir, Santiago Cabrera, Vladimir Cruz
screenplay by Peter Buchman, based on the memoir Reminiscences of the Cuban Revolutionary War by Ernesto "Che" Guevara
directed by Steven Soderbergh

MILK
*½/****
starring Sean Penn, Emile Hirsch, Josh Brolin, Diego Luna
screenplay by Dustin Lance Black
directed by Gus Van Sant

by Walter Chaw Steven Soderbergh's Che is the curative to the Hollywood biopic formula that insists on reducing interesting/important historical figures to their workshop elements. It sees Ernesto "Che" Guevara as a charismatic figure but no T-shirt deity, as a guerrilla fighter with blood on his hands but also a revolutionary almost holy in his single-minded conviction that things weren't fair in the world and that one man--or one small group of heavily-armed men--could affect change that mattered. It's not a political film in the sense that it takes sides, rendering it a political film by the fact of it having no agenda except to make it difficult to condemn or celebrate first the events leading up to the success of the Cuban Revolution, then the failure of the Bolivian Revolution (which ended in Che's death). Soderbergh goes from close and medium shots in the first half--known as Che Part One in its marathon "roadshow" incarnation and as The Argentine in parts of the country where it and Che Part Two (a.k.a. The Guerrilla) are being treated as unique films--to an increasing distance for the second, a subtle, evocative move away from Che's idealism.

Defiance (2008)

½*/****
starring Daniel Craig, Liev Schreiber, Jamie Bell, Alexa Davalos
screenplay by Edward Zwick & Clay Frohman
directed by Edward Zwick

by Walter Chaw It's finally happened: Red Dawn with Russian Jews. It's not so much unthinkable as inevitable after the fact. You could go your whole life without conjuring something so perverse; it's the kind of thing "South Park" might have done at a quarter the budget, with thrice the ingenuity, and without the star power of über-studs Daniel Craig and Liev Schreiber making a pretty convincing play for inclusion in the bad accent hall of fame. When Craig, as heroic bandit Tuvia Bielski, delivers his St. Crispian's Day speech in half-pidgin/half-Queen's English ("Uff vee shut die? Tlyin to liff? At least we die like human beings!") as director Ed Zwick ladles on the Fiddler on the Roof score and we get reaction shots of a Dickensian urchin all dirt and eyes, what choice do we have but to harden our hearts and wonder how it is that every "true story" run through this prestige mill ends up exactly the same grain. The moment when Tuvia and his woodsman brother Zus (Schreiber) take on the responsibility of two fine young lasses at the behest of a set-upon farm family, however, is the moment that it clicks that this piece of macho bullroar is a direct blood descendant of John Milius's stupidest movie of 1984. There but for the grace of Swayze and Sheen goes Defiance--a film so bad that it's not only worse than Red Dawn, but worse because instead of positing an imaginary occupation of heartland America, it sets itself smack dab in the middle of the Nazi occupation of Belorussia circa 1941--suggesting in the process that while it's not true there was no Jewish resistance in WWII, it might be true that the reason so many were killed is because they weren't as macho as Tuvia and Zus. Kind of a sticky wicket, that.

Australia (2008)

*/****
starring Nicole Kidman, Hugh Jackman, David Wenham, Bryan Brown
screenplay by Baz Luhrmann & Stuart Beattie & Ronald Harwood & Richard Flanagan
directed by Baz Luhrmann

by Walter Chaw Baz Luhrmann's Titanic begins--as you know that it must--with fusty, dusty-britches Mrs. Sarah Ashley (Nicole Kidman) tumbling out of a plane into the wilds of WWII Australia and the brawny arms of fair dinkum frontiersman The Drover (Hugh Jackman). They hate each other--she his disgustingly rugged physique and brusque manner, he her high-falutin' snobbery and belief that all men want to shag her. How miraculous, then, that the two come to love one another before the one-hour mark of the longest two weeks you'll spend in a theatre this year. But first, in a nod to Australia's "Lost Generation," of course, but more directly in most viewers' minds to Rabbit-Proof Fence, introduce pint-sized product of settler/aboriginal miscegenation Nullah (Brandon Walters), who lives on Sarah's late husband's cattle farm. Nullah is the emotional glue of the film (besides more importantly being the one who brings the cast's collective age down from AARP levels), the character imperilled, monumentalized, sought after, lost, recovered, hugged over, longed over, kissed over, and, in a stupid film's deeply stupid end titles, patronized with trivia about how the POME government at last apologized to the Aborigine people for their policy of forced intermarriage. How this saccharine, torpid love saga ends as a bromide is one of those things only the genuinely gifted can achieve: set in Darwin, Australia earns a Darwin Award for its dedication to self-destruction.

Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007) + Persepolis (2007)|Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007) - Blu-ray Disc

SWEENEY TODD: THE DEMON BARBER OF FLEET STREET
****/**** Image A Sound A Extras B+
starring Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter, Alan Rickman, Sacha Baron Cohen
screenplay by John Logan, based on the musical by Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler
directed by Tim Burton

PERSEPOLIS
***½/****
screenplay by Vincent Paronnaud & Marjane Satrapi, based on the novel by Satrapi
directed by Vincent Paronnaud & Marjane Satrapi

SWEENEY TODD: THE DEMON BARBER OF FLEET STREET

by Walter Chaw Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street is easily Tim Burton's best film. It's uncompromised, deceptively uncomplicated, perverse in the most delightful way, and, maybe most importantly, it represents at last the full potency of Burton's German Expressionist vision. No surprise that it's closest allayed to Burton's previous career-pinnacle, his self-contained fairytale Edward Scissorhands--sporting, like that film, a black-clad protagonist festooned with blades who achieves his adolescence (and purpose) in a slanted attic chamber. This is another gothic romance, no explanation for snow but instead demonstration of the frugal repast of revenge's dish served cold. It's best described as a diary of the unrequited, a journal of terminal, irresolvable frustration. A violent, giallo-lurid succession of leering throat-slashings with a soupçon of cannibalism (I'm kind of shocked, truth be told, that the picture was completed in this form), this adaptation of Stephen Sondheim's genius 1979 musical is a timely film, boasting the sort of contemporary topicality of which only eternal works like Sondheim's are capable. Whatever the circumstances of its creation, watching it in this way speaks explicitly to the dismal tide of 2007, the desire to recover the illusory past (its hero speaks of his younger self as "naïve")--the recognition at the last that things are only ever as terrible as they've ever been; and that the only refuge from despair is embracing the tiny moments of human connection that make life liveable.

Body of Lies (2008)

**/****
starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Russell Crowe, Mark Strong, Golshifteh Farahani
screenplay by William Monahan, based on the novel by David Ignatius
directed by Ridley Scott

by Walter Chaw Perfectly workmanlike, unimpeachably prestige-y, achingly contemporary, and a near-complete failure as revelation, Ridley Scott's Body of Lies tells the tale of modern spook-dom complete with spy satellites, cell-phone eavesdropping, torture, and terrorists. A compelling stew, one would think, yet something that a decade ago would be seen as science-fiction and as recently as a few years ago as satire today offers no surprises--no discernible sharp edges, smooth as a river stone worn down by a few fast years of crippling cynicism. So the United States is a fingernail factory skating on the razored edge of impossible technologies and still, because of two-minutes-ago wisdom and dusty bureaucrats, unable to exterminate subjects and achieve minimal objectives in our ideological war. The film advises that we trust no one, that the issues are complex, that our enemies aren't stupid, and that there will always be a super-suave Sharif-ian Arab in pictures like this lest we forget how much we're capable of getting behind the Disneyfied Aladdin portrait of the Near East when push comes to shove. It reminds that Russell Crowe can get fat with the best of them even if, after The Insider, no one was wondering--and it reminds that Leonardo DiCaprio is pretty good at this intense young man shtick (although no one was wondering that, either). The problem with Body of Lies isn't its craft (indeed, it's one of the most handsomely-mounted, professionally-executed pictures of the year)--the problem is that it's got nothing to say in a media-rich environment awash with pundits, alive with YouTube, and actually awake for all the sleepiness in our mid-section. The irony of Body of Lies is that it's about intelligence but its own is at least a few months behind the curve.

The Sum of All Fears (2002) [Special Collector's Edition] - DVD|Blu-ray Disc

**/****
DVD - Image A- Sound B Extras A-
BD - Image B+ Sound A Extras A-
starring Ben Affleck, Morgan Freeman, James Cromwell, Liev Schreiber
screenplay by Paul Attanasio and Daniel Pyne, based on the novel by Tom Clancy
directed by Phil Alden Robinson

by Walter Chaw The Sum of All Fears is a well-made techno-horror film based on a reasonably well-written (by Tom Clancy standards) techno-horror novel. It's a studio marketing department's worst nightmare post-9/11 (the movie revolving around a pilfered nuclear weapon and a terrorist plot to destabilize the universe) and a critic's wet dream: finally, something meaty to write about in popular film. Or so it would seem, for alas, The Sum of All Fears is just a well-made techno-horror film--in theme and suggestion, it's as moldy and stately as a Le Carré master plot with little comment regarding the state of our world besides "Bad people do bad things despite the best efforts of good people." See, we know that already; while I'm the first to decry the pathological dedication of mainstream pictures to provide easy solutions for life's injustices, The Sum of All Fears is a remarkably ill-timed piece that plays essentially like the sharp twist of a buried knife.

The Frank Sinatra and Gene Kelly Collection - DVD

ON THE TOWN (1949)
**/**** Image C Sound B-
starring Gene Kelly, Frank Sinatra, Betty Garrett, Ann Miller
screenplay by Adolph Green and Betty Comden, based on the play
directed by Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen

TAKE ME OUT TO THE BALL GAME (1949)
**/**** Image B+ Sound A- Extras C
starring Frank Sinatra, Esther Williams, Gene Kelly, Betty Garrett
screenplay by Harry Tugeno and George Wells
directed by Busby Berkeley

ANCHORS AWEIGH (1945)
**/**** Image C+ Sound B- Extras D
starring Frank Sinatra, Kathryn Grayson, Gene Kelly, Dean Stockwell
screenplay by Isobel Lennart
directed by George Sidney

by Alex Jackson One of the cinema's most startling moments in recent years was a close-up of Paul Dano early on in There Will Be Blood. Dano was never meant to get that friendly with the camera. I'm not sure I can properly convey this notion, but his close-up created a dissonant effect. It felt as though director Paul Thomas Anderson had broken some unstated rule of filmmaking. I think the reason it's so jarring is that the Close-Up wasn't designed for actors like Paul Dano. It was designed for somebody like his co-star, Daniel Day-Lewis. To put it as delicately as possible, Dano wasn't blessed with a "movie star" face. He's a bit strange-looking. In contrast, Daniel Day-Lewis is traditionally handsome and truly "belongs" on the silver screen. In and of himself, he's as cinematic as anything you're ever going to find in the movies.

Stop-Loss (2008) + 21 (2008)|21 - Blu-ray Disc

STOP-LOSS
*½/****
starring Ryan Phillippe, Abbie Cornish, Channing Tatum, Joseph Gordon-Levitt
screenplay by Mark Richard & Kimberly Peirce
directed by Kimberly Peirce

21
*/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
starring Jim Sturgess, Kate Bosworth, Laurence Fishburne, Kevin Spacey
screenplay by Peter Steinfeld and Allan Loeb
directed by Robert Luketic

by Walter Chaw The only thing really wrong with MTV--besides the fact that they don't show music videos anymore--is that its branding on some of the most vacuous, appalling celebrations of vanity, stupidity, and acting-out in the not-exactly-sterling history of the medium has spawned a rash of imitative programming. It's cheap to turn a few cameras on pretty idiots fucking each other figuratively and literally in resort locales, and so now there are Tiffany versions of this ("Survivor") on broadcast networks and sewer versions of this (those Flava Flav things, Anna Nicole's old show) on struggling basic-cable outlets. (Cartoon Network even has an animated send-up of "The Real World".) And if the genre momentarily appeared to be on the verge of extinction, it suddenly found new life with the recent writers' strike. Because a good many films nowadays are populated by pre-fabricated tween (and post-tween) stars, I have no idea who they are until they're shoved into my consciousness as "stars"; indeed, MTV's dread influence on popular culture has extended itself (hand-in-hand with Titanic's mammoth babysitter's-club popularity) into the multiplex. Too ephemeral for any nickname (no "brat pack" here, just a revolving door of fresh meat), the real legacy of MTV might be that it functions as a microcosm for the lost youth phenomenon in the United States: In every Britney Spears, I see a Virginia Tech. Promise the terminally untalented the moon and repay them with a goat's portion of disappointment, disillusionment, and frustration bound to simmer to a foul boil.

Atonement (2007) + The Kite Runner (2007)

ATONEMENT
*½/****
starring James McAvoy, Keira Knightley, Romola Garai, Vanessa Redgrave
screenplay by Christopher Hampton, based on the novel by Ian McEwan
directed by Joe Wright

THE KITE RUNNER
½*/****
starring Khalid Abdalla, Homayoun Ershadi, Shaun Toub, Saïd Taghmaoui
screenplay by David Benioff, based on the novel by Khaled Hosseini
directed by Marc Forster

by Walter Chaw No end-of-year sweepstakes would be complete without the requisite bushel of awards-baiting pabulum, rich with a nice, thick vein of glossy pandering. They're movies you're supposed to love: can't-miss, sure-fire formula flicks that bank on their sparkly casts and borrowed prestige the way blockbuster action flicks rely on special effects and the promise of mayhem. Reduce it down enough and the dreg at the bottom of the stew pot is still just making money--you don't reinvent the wheel by following a recipe, and indeed, a good 99% of movies in any given year don't boast of anything new. To say that you like something like August Rush is to say that you hate to be challenged by a film--that escapism is the first and last reason you go to the movies. Where something like Transformers wants to inspire a car- or girl-related boner, something like Atonement wants to ennoble the cineplex arthouse crowd into paroxysms of self-congratulation. It's the same feeling that compels awards bodies to vote for this stuff: mainstream passing as estimable while the real deal flies for the most part under the radar. The more assembly line chunder like Atonement and The Kite Runner gets chosen for Academy recognition, the fewer slots there are available for big studio pics that actually deliver the goods, like No Country for Old Men, The Darjeeling Limited, There Will Be Blood, and Sweeney Todd (presuming, of course, that an impressive number of remarkable studio flicks released earlier this calendar year are already lost causes).

Lions for Lambs (2007)

½*/****
starring Robert Redford, Meryl Streep, Tom Cruise, Derek Luke
screenplay by Matthew Michael Carnahan
directed by Robert Redford

by Walter Chaw Stilted, awkward, an Ayn Rand screed complete with straw men and pontiffs poised to burn them down, Robert Redford's smug, self-satisfied liberal weltschmerz anthem Lions for Lambs is tailor-made for festival-season standing ovations. It's the prime example of why a lot of Republicans get away with calling Hollywood--the single highest concentration of Big Business and corporate interest outside the Beltway--a lefty hotbed of pinko nonsense carried on a cloud of flatulent hot air. It's a prime example, too, of why it's so hard to vote for Democrats even when the alternative is the GOP. Put this one on the shelf between Sidney Lumet's Fail Safe and this year's deplorable Rendition--movies so earnest in their chest-pounding pontification that it's impossible to imagine on the one hand who could be converted by them and on the other who could resist changing their party affiliation out of sheer embarrassment. In this one, the call is for activism in whatever form said activism might take just for the sake of doing something, damnit. To quote a guy writing in the 1920s, "The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity."

Elizabeth: The Golden Age (2007)

½*/****
starring Cate Blanchett, Geoffrey Rush, Clive Owen, Samantha Morton
screenplay by William Nicholson and Michael Hirst
directed by Shekhar Kapur

by Walter Chaw I don't mind historical pictures that aren't historically accurate until that historical inaccuracy--like in U-571, for instance--becomes so fucking retarded that it lowers the temperature of the room. Elizabeth: The Golden Age is just that fucking stupid. Should being dumb not be reason enough to avoid this movie, know that it's also unintentionally hilarious, appears to have had its screenplay ghost-written by Bob Dylan, and casts Catholics and Spaniards as Skeksis in some perverse re-imagining of The Dark Crystal as a psychodrama about the cherry-busting beheading of Mary, Queen of Scots (Samantha Morton, dreadfully wasted) and penile conjugation-by-double-proxy of rapscallion Walter Raleigh (Clive Owen) into the hallowed womb (and womb-like cathedral interiors of this England). Cate Blanchett reprises her role from director Shekhar Kapur's first Bollywoodization of British history (he made one other, The Four Feathers, in between) as the Virgin Queen born fully-formed from the school of Arch and Tic. (I wonder if soon there'll be any actresses left who haven't played one Elizabeth or another--seems the distaff "Hamlet" proving ground of our time.) There's a Nostradamus character for whatever goddamned reason, a candlelit bath scene only because it's mandated in sub-BBC pieces of shit like this, and a thinly-veiled CIA spook, Sir Francis Walsingham (Geoffrey Rush), who acts as Elizabeth's chief intelligence officer.

300 (2007) [Two-Disc Special Edition] - DVD|Blu-ray Disc

*/****
DVD - Image B+ Sound A Extras B
BD - Image A Sound A+ Extras B
starring Gerard Butler, Lena Headey, David Wenham, Dominic West
screenplay by Zack Snyder & Kurt Johnstad and Michael B. Gordon, based on the graphic novel by Frank Miller
directed by Zack Snyder

by Walter Chaw There's an idea in the ancient world about a "beautiful death," achievable for the warrior only in mortal, one-on-one wartime combat--an idea that may have contributed to the length of the Trojan siege, and an idea vocalized by one of the captains serving under Spartan King Leonides (Gerard Butler) in Zack Snyder's 300. Based on Frank Miller's graphic novel of the same name, the film betrays a lot of the same macho aesthetic as Robert Rodriguez's adaptation of Miller's Sin City--but rather than content itself with the literally bestial terms of glory in the masculine psyche, it makes a play for allegory and equivocal morality (of all things) in the valorization of Sparta and the romanticization of a crushing military defeat. It's not that Leonides is seen martyred in the end in a tableau explicitly meant to evoke the passion of St. Sebastian, but that he goes out pining for his wife like a lovesick hamster, thus completing 300's devolution from remorseless Spartan militarism into gushy democratic idealism and all manner of liberal maladies. There's little profit in establishing the rules of this universe as uncompromising and brutal (it opens on a field of infant skulls--victims of a Spartan culling ritual of its own kind) if its intentions split time between justifying, in non-chest-beating terms, the decision to pit three-hundred against thousands while denying the Spartans their individual moments of "beautiful death" in favour of some collective date with pyrrhic immortality. History suggests that the Spartans, having exhausted their arms, died scratching and clawing with their bare hands; 300 suggests they died calling for their mothers and wives.

TIFF '07: Lust, Caution

***/****
starring Tony Leung Chiu Wai, Tang Wei, Joan Chen, Wang Leehom
screenplay by Wang Hui Ling and James Schamus, based on a short story by Eileen Chang
directed by Ang Lee

by Bill Chambers Blessed with an achingly beautiful score by Alexandre Desplat, Ang Lee's Lust, Caution is a more tasteful Blackbook, which is odd considering how much more graphic it is in its depiction of not just sexuality but, thanks to a darkly-comic homage to Torn Curtain, violence as well. Where Blackbook director Paul Verhoeven is a vulgarian, though, Lee projects civility and cultivation. That's how he so often manages to shank you. The affair between secret-service man Mr. Yee (Tony Leung Chiu Wai, never viler) and a young freedom fighter masquerading as a Mahjong-playing housewife (the incandescent Tang Wei) in pre-revolutionary Shanghai plays out in an interminable series of rape scenarios from which Lee never flinches, fostering an impression of artistic integrity that Lee has been only too happy to perpetuate by blithely accepting the MPAA's ruling of an NC-17 rating for the film. Alas, post-Brokeback Mountain, the intensity of the In the Realm of the Senses-style sex scenes is too conspicuous for its own good, prompting extratextual questions about Lee's motives. Friend and colleague Norman Wilner said something in passing that really got me thinking: that he would feel like Lee is rhetorically asking us, "Is this what you wanted from Brokeback?" had he more faith in Lee's intellect. At any rate, in light of the sheepishness of Brokeback Mountain's same-sex encounters, the gratuitousness of Lust, Caution's hetero liaisons does strike a note of methinks the lady doth protest too much. Yet the picture gets around to honouring its pretensions towards truthfulness in a climax that exposes the sham of Blackbook's romantic sacrifices and narrow escapes (Mata Hari will always face down a firing squad), even if it's only later, at home in the dark, that the full weight of Lust, Caution's misanthropy comes crashing down on you. If Lee is ultimately too prosaic to ever be anything but a great middlebrow filmmaker, consider what an oxymoron that is; we're lucky to have him. PROGRAMME: Special Presentations

Overlord (1975) [The Criterion Collection] - DVD

***/**** Image A Sound A Extras A
starring Brian Stirner, Davyd Harries, Nicholas Ball, Julie Neesam
written and directed by Stuart Cooper

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover If nothing else, Overlord has the distinction of inventing its own genre. A bold combination of fictional drama and found-footage assembly, it grimly blends the real and the imaginary to the point where you can't help but be a little affected by the actors' proximity to the real devastation of WWII. Long undistributed in North America and roundly-unseen on these shores except by those fortunate few who caught it on the late, lamented Z Channel, Overlord has acquired a cult mystique slightly disproportionate to its merit. Director Stuart Cooper and his co-scenarist Christopher Hudson only hint at the inner life of their hapless deer-in-the-headlights lead and don't quite sell the impending doom for which they so desperately reach. But make no mistake: this is a one-of-a-kind movie that should've opened new avenues for narrative filmmaking instead of dropping into the big black hole that it did.

The Painted Veil (2006) - DVD; The Good Shepherd (2006); The Good German (2006) - DVD

THE PAINTED VEIL
***/**** Image B- Sound A-
starring Naomi Watts, Edward Norton, Liev Schreiber, Diana Rigg
screenplay by Ron Nyswaner, based on the novel by W. Somerset Maugham
directed by John Curran

THE GOOD SHEPHERD
**/****
starring Matt Damon, Angelina Jolie, Robert De Niro, Alec Baldwin
screenplay by Eric Roth
directed by Robert De Niro

THE GOOD GERMAN
*½/**** Image A Sound A-
starring George Clooney, Cate Blanchett, Tobey Maguire, Jack Thompson
screenplay by Paul Attanasio, based on the novel by Joseph Kanon
directed by Steven Soderbergh

by Walter Chaw One of seemingly dozens of pretentious, self-produced vanity pieces from the Edward Norton grist mill, The Painted Veil, John Curran's adaptation of Somerset Maugham's story of colonial malaise, is a pleasant surprise. Naomi Watts and Toby Jones are fabulous (and Norton is steady); it's not terribly paternalistically racist despite being another Western film in which white people exert their magical influence in foreign lands; and even though it's all about prestige and hedonism, it manages now and again to actually be about prestige and hedonism. But like the simultaneously-opening Soderbergh noir The Good German, it's mostly interesting in the meta. What keeps this updating of the old Greta Garbo weeper from being literally better is the lack of immediacy in its tale of emotionally distant scientists and their flapper wives, adrift in the boiler pot of 1920s Shanghai. Not timeless in its remove but instead ineffably dated by it, it's an Old Hollywood production in both epic scale and lack of subtext, making the picture a lovely trifle not unlike other well-done bits of instantly-forgotten prestige (see: Philip Noyce's The Quiet American).

The Rodgers & Hammerstein Collection (1934-1965) - DVD

THE SOUND OF MUSIC (1965)
*½/**** Image B Sound B Extras B+
starring Julie Andrews, Christopher Plummer, Richard Haydn, Eleanor Parker
screenplay by Ernest Lehman
directed by Robert Wise

THE KING AND I (1956)
****/**** Image A Sound A Extras A
starring Deborah Kerr, Yul Brynner, Rita Moreno, Martin Benson
screenplay by Ernest Lehman, based on Margaret Landon's play "Anna and the King of Siam"
directed by Walter Lang

SOUTH PACIFIC (1958)
*½/**** Image A+ (Theatrical) A (Roadshow) Sound B Extras C+
starring Rossano Brazzi, Mitzi Gaynor, John Kerr, Ray Walston
screenplay by Paul Osborn, based on Tales of the South Pacific by James A. Michener
directed by Joshua Logan

CAROUSEL (1956)
**/**** Image A Sound A Extras C
starring Gordon MacRae, Shirley Jones, Cameron Mitchell, Barbara Ruick
screenplay by Phoebe and Henry Ephron, based on the Ferenc Molnár's play "Liliom"
directed by Henry King

LILIOM (1934)
****/**** Image B Sound B Extras B+
starring Charles Boyer, Madeleine Ozeray, Robert Arnoux, Roland Toutain
screenplay by Robert Liebmann, dialogue by Bernard Zimmer, based on the play by Franz (a.k.a. Ferenc) Molnár
directed by Fritz Lang

STATE FAIR (1945)
½*/**** Image B- Sound B- Extras A
starring Jeanne Crain, Dana Andrews, Dick Haymes, Vivian Blaine
screenplay by Oscar Hammerstein II, based on the novel by Philip Strong
directed by Walter Lang

STATE FAIR (1962)
**/**** Image A Sound A Extras C
starring Pat Boone, Bobby Darin, Pamela Tiffin, Alice Faye
screenplay by Richard Breen; adaptation by Oscar Hammerstein II, Sonya Levien, Paul Green
directed by José Ferrer

OKLAHOMA! (1955)
***/**** Image A (CinemaScope) C (Todd-AO) Sound B+ Extras B-
starring Gordon MacRae, Gloria Grahame, Shirley Jones, Gene Nelson
screenplay by Sonya Levien and William Ludwig
directed by Fred Zinnemann

by Walter Chaw God, The Sound of Music is so freakin' nice. Nazis are the bad guys, no controversy there; raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens--have you no heart, man? But when I like Rodgers & Hammerstein--and I like them quite a lot, truth be wrenched--I like their ambiguity, their irony, their goddamned fatalism in the face of eternal romantic verities. Consider the animal (jungle?) heat of "Shall We Dance," cut off like a faucet by the fascistic abortion of The King and I's secondary love story; or the persistence of love despite abuse and abandonment in Carousel; or the slapdash kangaroo court that justifies love in Oklahoma!. This is all so much more than the slightly shady (and ultimately redeemed) shyster of The Music Man--this is reality in the midst of the un-, sur-, hyper-reality of the musical form. Yet what The Sound of Music offers up is a military man shtupping an ex-nun with no corresponding sense of fetishistic eroticism. How is it that the two most popular adult Halloween costumes engaged in naughty Alpine sexcapades could be totally free of va-va-va-voom? It's so relentlessly wholesome that of course it's the most beloved artifact of its kind in the short history of the movie musical: If you're of a certain age, the plot of the thing is almost family mythology, resurrected every holiday like a dusty corpse at a decades-long Irish wake gone tragically awry. That ain't a grin, baby, it's a rictus.

Smokin' Aces (2007) + Seraphim Falls (2007)

SMOKIN' ACES
½*/****
starring Ben Affleck, Jason Bateman, Common, Andy Garcia
written and directed by Joe Carnahan

SERAPHIM FALLS
*/****
starring Liam Neeson, Pierce Brosnan, Angie Harmon, Anjelica Huston
screenplay by Abby Everett Jaques & David Von Ancken
directed by David Von Ancken

by Walter Chaw Director Joe Carnahan replicates a heart attack in the prologue of Narc, and David Von Ancken, in the action-packed opening to his feature debut Seraphim Falls, simulates a mildly hysterical bout of narcolepsy--but more on that later. Carnahan's third film, Smokin' Aces, is drawing a lot of unfavourable comparisons to Guy Ritchie's gangster sagas, but the real lineage can be traced to whatever strain of viral ADD infected Tony Scott. The film is so like Scott's Domino in its visual affectations and uniform incompetence that the two pictures could exchange scenes willy-nilly without losing a step. (Compare it to Wayne Kramer's similarly canted Running Scared for a mini-primer on when lawless misanthropy and the coked-up editor aesthetic can be wielded with delighted, visceral purpose as opposed to simply wielded.) Ultimately, Smokin' Aces is little more than a parade of sad "didn't you used to be..." stunt cameos installed for the missing "edge" that buckets of blood, rains of bullets, and a few power tools seem incapable of manifesting. With Narc, Carnahan showed real growth from his directorial debut (Blood, Guts, Bullets & Octane, which is actually not unlike the new one at all). Now he's just showing off.

Children of Men (2006) + Letters from Iwo Jima (2006)

CHILDREN OF MEN
****/****
starring Clive Owen, Julianne Moore, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Charlie Hunnam
screenplay by Alfonso Cuarón & Timothy J. Sexton and David Arata and Mark Fergus & Hawk Ostby, based on the novel by P.D. James
directed by Alfonso Cuarón

LETTERS FROM IWO JIMA
***½/****
starring Ken Watanabe, Kazunari Ninomiya, Tsuyoshi Ihara, Ryo Kase
screenplay by Iris Yamashita, based on the book Picture Letters from Commander in Chief by Tadamichi Kuribayashi and Tsuyoko Yoshido
directed by Clint Eastwood

by Walter Chaw Stop on any single frame of Alfonso Cuarón's remarkable war idyll Children of Men--a film that's rarely in repose, sometimes seeming composed of one long, frantic shot--and I suspect the sharp-eyed, educated viewer would be able to cull a reference to modern art, most likely one about men reduced to their base animal nature. For me, the two visual landmarks come in the form of a cue to the cover design for Pink Floyd's 1977 "Animals" when hero Theo (Clive Owen) goes to see his industrialist cousin Nigel (Danny Huston) for help and a re-creation of Richard Misrach's remarkable series of 1987 photographs documenting, among other things, a dead-animal pit in Nevada purportedly used to dispose of victims of a plutonium "hot spot." Both share a space with surrealism in the positioning of animals (artificial or deceased) in industrial spaces (London's Battersea Power Station is the iconic backdrop of the "Animals" cover) as mute commentary, perhaps, on man's destructive relationship with his environment--a read that jibes comfortably with the thrust of Children of Men, in which we're told that one day in the not-too-distant future, humans suddenly stop reproducing. (Fertile ground for science-fiction, this obsession with progeny (see: everything from Frankenstein to I Am Legend).) The picture opens with a Fleet Street terrorist bombing, a little like Terry Gilliam's dystopic Brazil--though rather than take the easier route of satirizing our current state of instability and free-floating paranoia, Children of Men makes a serious attempt to allegorize it.

Pan's Labyrinth (2006)

****/****
starring Ariadna Gil, Ivana Baquero, Sergi López, Maribel Verdú
written and directed by Guillermo del Toro

by Walter Chaw Brutal and ignoble, the antithesis of romantic, the violence in Guillermo del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth slaps metal against flesh like the flat of a hand against a steel table. It's the only element of the picture that isn't lush, that isn't laden with the burnished archetype of Catholic superstition as it exists in eternal suspension with the pagan mythologies it cannibalized. By itself, this seems a metaphor for the pain and the magic of how fable turns the inevitability of coming-of-age into ritual. An early scene where hero girl Ofelia (Ivana Baquero)--a storyteller equal parts experientially innocent and allegorically savvy, making her the manifestation of del Toro's ideal avatar--tells her prenatal brother a story about a rose that blooms nightly on a mountain of thorns touches in one ineffably graceful movement all the picture's themes of immortality, aspiration, isolation, and the promise of escape held, sadistically, just out of reach. There's something of the myth of Tantalus in Ofelia's tale, as much as there is of Lewis Carroll's Alice and the sagas of parental absence by the Brothers Grimm, which surface in the premise of a young girl traveling, as the film opens, with her pregnant mother into the war-torn Spanish countryside during Franco's rule to join her wicked stepfather Captain Vidal (Sergi López) at his remote outpost. Ofelia will be reminded repeatedly throughout the film that there's no such thing as justice or innocence left in the world, and that the best intentions are crushed by cynicism and rage. The question left as the picture closes has to do with whether Ofelia's taken the lesson to heart, to say nothing of del Toro--or us.

Sergeant York (1941) [Two-Disc Special Edition] - DVD

***½/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B
starring Gary Cooper, Walter Brennan, Joan Leslie, George Tobias
screenplay by Abem Finkel & Harry Chandlee and Howard Koch & John Huston
directed by Howard Hawks

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Before it settles into the martial flag-waver it clearly wants to be, Sergeant York is a terrific movie. Its story of Tennessee-born WWI hero Alvin York, heavily supervised by the man himself, is one of not just a military coup, but an evolving conscience as well--and if that conscience eventually cons itself into supporting that most pointless of international conflicts, the film is nevertheless a moving story of personal growth. Though it barely betrays the hand of Howard Hawks (it lacks the team spirit that courses through his oeuvre), the director tells the tale with the kind of conviction and nuance a lesser director couldn't provide. The movie feels York's progress from alcoholic ne'er-do-well to industrious would-be farmer and prospective husband, and instead of taking his emotions for granted, it expresses them with a noted lack of condescension.

1900 (1976) [Two-Disc Collector's Edition] + La Commune (Paris, 1871) (2000) - DVDs

1900
**½/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras B+
starring Robert De Niro, Gerard Depardieu, Dominique Sanda, Francesca Bertini
screenplay by Franco Arcalli, Giuseppe Bertolucci, Bernardo Bertolucci
directed by Bernardo Bertolucci

LA COMMUNE (PARIS, 1871)
****/**** Image B- Sound C+ Extras C+
directed by Peter Watkins

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover In this corner, Bernardo Bertolucci, weighing in with a massive budget courtesy of Alberto Grimaldi and a cast that includes De Niro, Depardieu, Sutherland, Lancaster, Hayden, and Sanda. Over here we have Peter Watkins, working for peanuts on a single soundstage with a cast of nobodies recruited from Paris and its environs. The fight, as it turns out, is more than one over who can make the longest movie (5hrs15mins for Bertolucci, 5hrs45mins for Watkins) or grab the most attention. The issue is: what are the conditions necessary for a revolutionary epic--moreover, what conditions get in the way? This is the real purpose of comparing 1900 and La Commune (Paris, 1871) (hereafter La Commune), for each film throws down for the Communist cause but only one is conscious of the nuances. Where Watkins and his troupe constantly reframe the idea of what it means to foment revolution, Bertolucci thinks he's got the idea--and proves, through mindless repetition, that he really doesn't.

DIFF '06: Rescue Dawn

**½/****
starring Christian Bale, Steve Zahn, Jeremy Davies, Marshall Bell
written and directed by Werner Herzog

by Walter Chaw Though a perfectly serviceable actioner, one that avoids almost every pitfall and cliché of the POW genre while supporting a singularly eccentric performance, Werner Herzog's Rescue Dawn, sadly, could have been directed by any one of a dozen directors. Gripping but not especially memorable, it lacks the mad Bavarian's insanity: his belief that nature is obscene, as well as his ability to make a trance from the mendacity of routine. (Because Herzog is a rare talent, his films butt up against greater expectations.) The irony of this being Herzog's most accessible film is that it's still probably best appreciated by Herzog fans, who will note--besides the obvious link to Herzog's Little Dieter Needs to Fly--an early moment where a sadistic Laotian guerrilla regards a giant butterfly on his arm like Kinski in B-roll for Fitzcarraldo. German-born Dieter Dengler is brought to life in Rescue Dawn as a bizarre pastiche of nervous tics and unrestrained energy by Christian Bale (the most impressive Method actor in Hollywood who still manages to leave no lasting impression whatsoever). Here Dieter, after getting shot down over Laos on a covert bombing run early in the Vietnam War, serves as leader to--and inspiration for--a group of prisoners-of-war closed off somewhere in the lush South Asian jungle. If it's meant as a continuation of Herzog's interest in blurring the lines between fiction and documentary, consider that Little Dieter Needs to Fly is already a near-perfect example of that particular auteurist concern, with even recent Herzogs like Grizzly Man addressing the same issues (and others, such as the horror of the Natural and the futility of man's struggle to transcend) with more subtlety, tragedy, and wit. Exactly no more and no less than what it is, Rescue Dawn is a Vietnam flick without a discernible political agenda; another opportunity for Jeremy Davies to act like a paranoid, emaciated junkie; and another chance for Steve Zahn to cement his second-banana status. There is one moment, however, that sings with poetry, as Dengler hallucinates a lost buddy and offers him the tattered sole of a shoe they'd been sharing through the wilderness. It's Herzog peeking through a canopy of expert nullity.

Platoon (1986) [20th Anniversary Edition] - DVD

***/**** Image A Sound A- (DD)/A (DTS) Extras B
starring Tom Berenger, Willem Dafoe, Charlie Sheen, Forest Whitaker
written and directed by Oliver Stone

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover A watershed in American cultural history, Platoon parsed the Vietnam subject in ways that broke from the defensive trend, trading Sylvester Stallone's hard, unyielding Rambo physique for the infinitely penetrable bodies of various poor sods on their way to destruction. This was the moment when Americans let go of the past and resigned themselves to the war's negative impact--so much so that the quality of the movie proper now seems irrelevant. Let it be known that Platoon is far from perfect: it's often schmaltzy, sometimes schematic, and burdened by a director's innocence that would later curdle at the altar of a "dying king" in JFK. But its accumulation of details distinguishes it from the efforts of message-mongering artists like Coppola, Cimino, and Kubrick. It's not a statement so much as a list of indignities on the road to nothing at all--a life in Hell rather than a glorious campaign that as we know led to pointless ruin.

TIFF '06: Black Book

Zwartboek
**/****
starring Carice van Houten, Sebastian Koch, Thom Hoffman, Halina Reijn
screenplay by Gerard Soeteman & Paul Verhoeven
directed by Paul Verhoeven

by Bill Chambers The word on Paul Verhoeven's Black Book (Zwartboek) around the TIFF was that it's "Showgirls meets Schindler's List," which is a cute bit of shorthand but decidedly misleading, not that I can begin to imagine what that movie would be like. All it really means is that we're never going to let Verhoeven live Showgirls down, so who can blame him for going back to Holland, where he's still an object of veneration? Alas, you can take Verhoeven out of Hollywood but you can't take Hollywood out of Verhoeven; Black Book is not so much a return to form--by which I mean a throwback to his subversive early work--as it is a supplement to his American output, the kind of Oscar-baiting wartime saga you just know he'd been aching to make with studio resources but only had the guts to execute in his native tongue. (In the press notes for the film, Verhoeven confesses that he stuck with genre in the U.S. because it better disguised his loose grasp of the English language.) The admittedly well-paced picture follows one Dutch Jewish woman's transformation from Anne Frank into Mata Hari as Rachel-cum-Ellis (Carice van Houten, for whom big things lie ahead) takes a Gestapo general (Jeroen Krabbé doppelgänger Sebastian Koch) for a lover as well as a job at his office, hoping it will all lead to the release of some fellow resistance fighters. Intended as a corrective of sorts to the implicitly anti-Semitic Soldier of Orange, Black Book is no less a sticky wicket in that it distils espionage tropes from the Nazi atrocities; when Rachel's entire family is gunned down on a barge along with other Jewish fugitives, it's a mere catalyst, lacking much in the way of sincerity or historical resonance. With its increasingly glib machinations (at least one late-film contrivance would embarrass the writers of "Three's Company"), the screenplay by Verhoeven and long-time collaborator Gerard Soeteman could, in fact, have just as easily served as the template for a Roland Emmerich/Dean Devlin turkey. Verhoeven the Auteur dutifully mimics Hitchcock here and there (and even Hitchcock heir Brian De Palma in a flagrant Carrie homage), though he's most evident in van Houten's multiple disrobings--which, despite being at odds with Black Book's commercial aspirations, give the film its strongest whiff of artistic integrity by shutting the door to the middlebrow-friendly PG-13 rating. PROGRAMME: Gala Presentations

MASH (1970) - DVD

***½/**** Image A Sound A Extras A
starring Donald Sutherland, Elliott Gould, Tom Skerritt, Sally Kellerman
screenplay by Ring Lardner, Jr., based on the novel by Richard Hooker
directed by Robert Altman

by Walter Chaw On the shortlist of Robert Altman masterpieces, MASH compares best with his The Long Goodbye in that both are unapologetically informed by the cult of masculinity: fucking and fucking people up. Tenderness in the film is someone breaking their hand on someone else's head when that someone else says something stupid to a kid. Better, it's giving a different kid a stroke magazine to counteract his de facto religious training at the hands of an obvious nutjob (who's nutty mainly because he's trying to impose enlightenment where enlightenment cannot by definition exist). Accordingly, matters of spirituality and men of the cloth are to be scoffed at while other rituals--like the rites observed in an operating theatre, or golf (a game played with clubs), or football, or the pursuit of women--are regarded with the obsessive gravity of a lower primate. It's about male bonding, all that cruelty towards women and disrespect of authority and open racism--the game of me-against-you in a film that, contrary to popular consensus, isn't a Hellerian satire about the absurdity of war, but what may be the saddest war film ever made in that it identifies conflict as something that, however contrary to civilization, is inextricably hardwired into our bestial nature. We're vile, stupid, ignoble apes and we aspire to ideals we're eternally incapable of honouring.

Occupation: Dreamland (2005) - DVD

***½/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras A-
directed by Garrett Scott & Ian Olds

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover

"I guess someone smarter than me knows what's going on."
-Pfc. Thomas Turner, Occupation: Dreamland

Last year's thoroughly deplorable Gunner Palace had exactly one mode of thought: things are bad for our boys. Treating the citizens of Iraq as errant children and the soldiers like tin gods, it ironically had the effect of making the Iraqis look like victims and the troops look like callous, oblivious schmucks. Occupation: Dreamland is the necessary corrective to that film, at once granting the low-ranking occupiers a claim to feeling righteously confused and the occupied the right to answer back to people they never wanted there in the first place. Though many of the troops are as contemptuous as they were in Gunner Palace (some of them even more so), the overwhelming feeling is that nobody knows anything, with the inevitable end result being a mess of chaos and recrimination that neither side on the ground has a direct means of stopping. It's a reminder that the people who "know what's going on" are generally silent, largely remote, and completely unconcerned with the mess their ill-considered orders create.

Jarhead (2005) - DVD

**/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras A
starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Peter Sarsgaard, Chris Cooper, Jamie Foxx
screenplay by William Broyles, Jr., based on the novel by Anthony Swofford
directed by Sam Mendes

by Walter Chaw I went to high school with a guy who fought in the first Gulf War. I remember him as a delicate, sensitive, beautiful boy who in retrospect looked a lot like Cillian Murphy. I directed him in a play--and though I haven't spoken to him since, I heard that when he returned home, he was not quite the same. I remember chortling about the first Gulf War, too, thinking how funny it was that our military pounded fourth-generation Chinese armour with bombs left over from Vietnam in a withering blitz that left Saddam Hussein's vaunted "million man army" of non-volunteer soldiers buried in their trenches and surrendering to the press. I've never been able to completely reconcile the two impressions of that war through the haze of my own youth--this introduction to modern warfare as complex and confusing to my adolescent mind as love and looming responsibility. War was either something frightening and mysterious that left you ineffably changed, or it was hilarious and chuff to a chest-pounding nationalistic ego. Whatever the case, you surmise that it involves the slaughter of hordes of faceless huns.

Sundance '06: The Ground Truth

The Ground Truth: After the Killing Ends
**/****
directed by Patricia Foulkrod

by Alex Jackson Too often I feel that critics and audiences place documentaries at the kid's table, refusing to critique them on the same level they do fiction films. Narration from the director, sit-down interviews with the subjects--in terms of filmmaking, we let documentaries get away with a lot of really primitive shit we probably wouldn't otherwise. Patricia Foulkrod's The Ground Truth is a pretty good rant, but not much of a movie; Foulkrod made it because she had a burning desire to say something, not because she had a burning desire to make a film. There's no excitement or joy in the aesthetics, it's all dreadfully utilitarian--just enough to illustrate her thesis without unduly affecting the audience. In part because there's no narrative, The Ground Truth doesn't have any dramatic high points, either: for the entire duration, it rumbles on the same low growl. Still, the film gets you good and angry, and because it's in that emotionally and cinematically vacant tradition of documentary-making called "objectivity," you know that you're getting angry off the ideas in it. The film is about how post-traumatic stress disorder is undiagnosed and untreated among veterans of the second Gulf War and how the media's whitewashing of the war's civilian casualties only exasperates the situation. If we were to truly "support the troops," we would have to acknowledge the damage they have caused the Iraqi people as well as the toll this has taken on their minds, hearts, and souls, to say nothing of their support for the actual war. To suppress the evil (necessary or otherwise) of the second Gulf War is an act of wilful naivety and a deflation of our troops' sacrifice. It's pitiful that a film like The Ground Truth had to be made, but it did.

Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World (2006) + Why We Fight (2006)

LOOKING FOR COMEDY IN THE MUSLIM WORLD
*/****
starring Albert Brooks, John Carroll Lynch, Sheetal Sheth, Fred Dalton Thompson
written and directed by Albert Brooks

WHY WE FIGHT
**/****
directed by Eugene Jarecki

by Walter Chaw The most frustrating thing about Albert Brooks's crushingly boring, infuriatingly unfunny Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World (hereafter Comedy) is the possibility that such was the intention all along. 'Lost in Arabia' (well, India and Pakistan--let's not get crazy, here) finds Brooks doing a high-wire act with post-modernism--the same one he's been doing his whole career, as it happens. At some point, though, it's fair to wonder how long you can push self-awareness before it finally flies apart in a storm of narcissistic deconstruction. Mull over, if you will, a moment where Brooks (as Brooks) recreates one of his classic gags--involving the world's most ironically-tragic ventriloquist--in the middle of an interminable stand-up routine staged in a New Delhi auditorium, closing his act with the dummy (the wooden one) drinking a glass of water. It's Brooks, and Brooks's film, in microcosm: a man who returns the term "mortification" to ritual and religion while being incapable of subsuming the belief that he's still the smartest guy in the room. The trick of Comedy is that in making a movie that isn't very funny about a man who isn't very funny in the middle of a gulf of cultural misunderstanding that's especially not very funny, Brooks hopes to draw a corollary between how the troubles of the world boil down to everybody's inability to communicate. As revelations go, it's not earth-shattering. Guess it goes without saying that it's also not worth the effort to get there.

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.

Tristan + Isolde (2006)

*/****
starring James Franco, Sophia Myles, Rufus Sewell, David O'Hara
screenplay by Dean Georgaris
directed by Kevin Reynolds

by Walter Chaw After bravely transforming the Robin Hood legend into a case of thirtysomething love jones with Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, Kevin Costner's well-known ex-best friend Kevin Reynolds turns the Tristan + Isolde legend into a WB/TIGER BEAT-friendly, mouth-breathing bodice-ripper indicated by lots of backlighting, orgasmic slow-mo, and dialogue purple enough to blind a Bronte sister. It's shot like a perfume commercial and written like a florid creative-writing exercise, one packed with such AM Gold, Luther Ingram treasures as: "Why does loving you feel so wrong?" Well, it might have something to do with said love being the basis for the Guinevere/Lancelot adultery story in which a woman comes between a king and his most trusted knight, leading to the ideological and literal collapse of a kingdom. Or it might have something to do with the fact that the actors playing the lovers in question never for a moment manage to spark the soggy tinder packed beneath the story. This allows a great deal of time for the sentient beings left in the audience after the ten-minute-mark exodus to suss out why this thing was delayed, then dumped in the middle of the January dead zone. It also, incidentally, caused me to fantasize about somehow harnessing the ability of films like this to make 125 minutes feel like six days for youth-giving effects and racing box scores.

Valiant (2005) - DVD

½*/**** Image A Sound B+ Extras D
screenplay by Jordan Katz, George Webster, George Melrod
directed by Gary Chapman

by Walter Chaw The animation is flat, the screenplay is insipid, the pacing is mortally off, and the voice acting is the mixed bag you generally get when you hire movie stars instead of professional voice talent (this is already the second animated film Ewan McGregor's tackled this year--third if you count Lucas's folly) to breathe life into your pixellated creations. But other than that, Valiant's fantastic. Its setting (WWII, circa D-Day) isn't as imaginative as that of Robots (this year's other glaring animated failure), and its CGI housefly sidekicks don't talk, as they did in Racing Stripes (this year's other glaring made-for-kids animal-related failure), but if you can overlook its obvious and subtle and inescapable deficiencies, well, what you have here is a blockbuster simply waiting to have its destiny fulfilled by the same group that flocked to the inexplicably popular Shrek films. Valiant's central marketing point is that it's from the same producer, John H. Williams, as the Shrek franchise, which, while technically true, ignores the movie's ten other producers.

DIFF '05: The White Countess

**/****
starring Ralph Fiennes, Natasha Richardson, Vanessa Redgrave, Lynn Redgrave
screenplay by Kazuo Ishiguro
directed by James Ivory

by Walter Chaw Even without recently-deceased partner-in-crime Ismail Merchant, stalwart period-costume-drama codger James Ivory delivers the slavishly middlebrow, meandering, Anglo-centric goods with The White Countess, the tale of a sightless American ex-diplomat, Jackson (Ralph Fiennes), who falls for refugee Russian countess Sophia (Natasha Richardson) in Shanghai on the eve of Japanese occupation. Packed to the rafters with Redgraves (Lynn and Vanessa also appear) and meticulously airless accents, the picture represents a certain ossified breed of prestige picture of the A Room with a View and Howards End variety, complete with novelist-turned-screenwriter Kazuo Ishiguro (he of The Remains of the Day) contributing another story of reticence and romance with a lead character who's actually blind this time, rather than just metaphorically so. Jackson dreams of insulating himself from the ugliness of the world within the velvet walls of a "perfect nightclub" he constructs with his savings, with Sophia--exuding that delicate balance between the erotic and the tragic--enlisted as the perfect hostess to minister to his guests. But it all feels dusty--the romantic dreams of old men, tired-out and beaten-up by life and enacted by stuffy actors so great at what they do that it's terrifically boring to watch them do it. It's tempting to hold a mirror under the film's nose for long, tasteful stretches, that sense of un-offended apathy not even quenched by my honest-to-goodness crush on the gracefully-aging Richardson. At the end of it all, The White Countess is as deluded and retreating as its hero, looking to duck the uglier aspects of its tale (prostitution and genocide never looked this chic) without even the early Merchant-Ivory inclination to offer at least a bittersweet ending to counteract the requisite 140 minutes of sickly chamber-room ethic.

A Farewell to Arms (1957) + Francis of Assisi (1961) - DVDs

A FAREWELL TO ARMS
½*/**** Image B Sound B- Extras D
starring Rock Hudson, Jennifer Jones, Vittorio De Sica, Mercedes McCambridge
screenplay by Ben Hecht, based on the novel by Ernest Hemingway
directed by Charles Vidor

FRANCIS OF ASSISI
*/**** Image B Sound B- Extras D
starring Bradford Dillman, Dolores Hart, Stuart Whitman, Pedro Armendariz
screenplay by Eugene Vale, James Forsyth and Jack Thomas
directed by Michael Curtiz

by Walter Chaw One of David O. Selznick's many attempts to shape the largely immutable mug of lady-love Jennifer Jones into the face that launched a thousand cinematic ships, the badly-fumbled Hemingway adaptation A Farewell to Arms finds Jones, about two decades past the age of her Red Cross nightingale Catherine, paired opposite the not-quite-long-in-the-tooth-but-almost Rock Hudson as her doomed love Lt. Henry. The setting is Italy during The Great War; playboy Lt. Henry falls for mad "Cat," who, as written by the legendary Ben Hecht (himself a decade removed from his best work and well on his way to becoming king of cheese epics), comes off as an entirely inappropriate nod to Blanche Dubois. Selznick served John Huston--the right man for this picture--his walking papers early on for correctly identifying the love story in Hemingway's novel as just a metaphor for the tragedy and irony of WWI's carnage, subbing Huston with second-stringer Charles Vidor, who meekly agreed to amplify the alleged love between Lt. Henry and Cat while pushing all manner of hysterical spectacle to the wings of the proscenium.

The War Within (2005) + Paradise Now (2005)

THE WAR WITHIN
**/****
starring Ayad Akhtar, Firdous Bamji, Nandana Sen, Sarita Choudhury
screenplay by Ayad Akhtar, Joseph Castelo, Tom Glynn
directed by Joseph Castelo

PARADISE NOW
***/****
starring Kais Nashef, Ali Suliman, Lubna Azabal, Amer Hlehel
screenplay by Hany Abu-Assad, Bero Beyer, Pierre Hodgson
directed by Hany Abu-Assad

by Walter Chaw Two films, one by New Jersey filmmaker Joseph Castelo, the other by Palestinian lenser Hany Abu-Assad, begin to make inroads into what is perhaps the most inscrutable phenomenon of the so-called War on Terror: suicide bombing. They're important films, I think, mostly because suicide bombers, like the Japanese Kamikaze pilots of WWII, make it easier to generalize and dehumanize/demonize the enemy as faceless zealots. Every manned car-bomb, every explosives-strapped martyr, creates ideological schisms on either side--more so and deeper, I'd offer, than conventional missiles or rifle shells do, because here we're striking at the very heart of the way we perceive life and the afterlife: holiness and sin, valour and cowardice. If there's ever to be some sort of olive branch in this millennia-old conflict, it has to start with an agreement not only to recognize the humanity beneath the atrocities committed by both sides in the name of defending home and hearth, but also to admit that centuries-old texts about the supernatural are piss-poor signposts pointing the light of right reason.

Invincible (2002) - DVD

***/**** Image A Sound A+
starring Tim Roth, Jouko Ahola, Anna Gourari, Jacob Wein
written and directed by Werner Herzog

by Walter Chaw With casting, in true Herzog fashion, being the lion's portion of performance, Finnish strongman Jouka Ahola starring as legendary Jewish strongman Zishe Breitbart in Herzog's Invincible is a stroke of inspired madness. Herzog fashions Ahola's total lack of experience and guile into something like an ecstatic holiness. He's done this before, of course, with madmen Bruno S. in The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser and Stroszek and the certifiable Klaus Kinski in some five astonishing pictures (astonishing not only for their quality, but also for the fact that there were five), so although extratextual complexity ever-threatens to become a distraction in Herzog's films, it's the sort of distraction that edifies Herzog's preoccupation with blurring the distinction between performance and naturalism, fiction and documentary. No less so than in Invincible: The first time Herzog has returned to the pre-Bellum Nazi period in Germany since his directorial debut, Signs of Life, it pits one of Herzog's classic social naïfs against a creature of pure manipulative malevolence, Hanussen (Tim Roth), who is, naturally, the kind of master showman/entertainer Herzog has always mistrusted.

November (2005); Brothers (2004); Ladies in Lavender (2005)

NOVEMBER
*/****
starring Courteney Cox, James LeGros, Michael Ealy, Nora Dunn
screenplay by Benjamin Brand
directed by Greg Harrison

Brødre
**½/****
starring Connie Nielsen, Ulrich Thomsen, Nikolaj Lie Kaas, Bent Mejding
screenplay by Anders Thomas Jensen
directed by Susanne Bier

LADIES IN LAVENDER
*½/****
starring Judi Dench, Maggie Smith, Natascha McElhone, Daniel Brühl
screenplay by Charles Dance, based on the short story by William J. Locke
directed by Charles Dance

by Walter Chaw There are as many middling to miserable movies in the foreign and domestic independent market as in the oft-maligned mainstream. If there are around five hundred films released in a twelve-month period, after all, only thirty or so are ever in contention for the best of the year--and of those, maybe three will be remembered once the hosannas have died down. The vast majority of pictures are just rest areas between elation and outrage; capturing lightning in a bottle is as unlikely for movies as for any product of any other branch of the arts. Here, then, are three smaller films in fast succession caught in the twilight zone of instant forgetfulness and doomed to spend eternity as either the film that was the long lonesome whistle stop for someone's career, or the promising picture that pointed the way to bigger and brighter things.

Kingdom of Heaven (2005)

**/****
starring Orlando Bloom, Liam Neeson, David Thewlis, Eva Green
screenplay by William Monahan
directed by Ridley Scott

by Walter Chaw The hero of Ridley Scott's film about The Crusades would rather not discuss that whole "God" thing. It's a stance that renders Kingdom of Heaven the second such impotent "prestige" picture to grace the early-summer screens after Sydney Pollack's simpering, stance-less The Interpreter, as well as another wondrously bland example of the toll that small minds and political correctness have taken on our popular culture. In The Interpreter's defense, it only slaughtered a few hundred thousand imaginary black people to get its white heroes making doe-eyes at one another--to get Kingdom of Heaven's cuties batting eyelashes, it takes tens of millions of real dead infidels. French Balian (Orlando Bloom) is a 12^th century blacksmith who has just lost his wife and child when his long lost father Godfrey (Liam Neeson) rides in with a small band of merry Crusaders to offer Balian lordship of a little town in the Middle East. Balian accepts, has run-ins with religious fanatic Templars Guy de Lusignan (Marton Csokas) and his henchman Reynald (Brendan Gleeson), and gains the trust of leper king Baldwin IV (Edward Norton) and ideological martyr Tiberias (Jeremy Irons).

We Live Again (1934) - DVD

**½/**** Image A Sound B+
starring Anna Sten, Fredric March, Jane Baxter, C. Aubrey Smith
screenplay by Maxwell Anderson, Leonard Praskins and Preston Sturges, based on Leo Tolstoy's novel Resurrection
directed by Rouben Mamoulian

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover The wrong side of the tracks is a bad place to be, unless you're in Hollywood and see a way to make a buck: hence We Live Again, an adaptation of Tolstoy's Resurrection that looks past the niggling period details to go straight for the selfless-sacrifice weeper at its core. As melodrama, it has its qualities, including half a good Frederic March performance and stellar cinematography by the great Gregg Toland, but as anything other than a soaking-wet emotional sponge, it's largely ridiculous. It knows its audience wants to see rich boy/poor girl working things out, and how much you get out of the film depends on how much you can respond to that device--though anyone else will either be outraged or on the floor. Which is not to say that We Live Again is entirely without merit.

Sahara (2005)

*½/****
starring Matthew McConaughey, Steve Zahn, Penélope Cruz, Lambert Wilson
screenplay by Thomas Dean Donnelly & Joshua Oppenheimer and John C. Richards and James V. Hart, based on the novel by Clive Cussler
directed by Breck Eisner

 

by Walter Chaw For as difficult as it is to read a Clive Cussler novel, it's no more or less difficult to read something by John Grisham, Tom Clancy, Robert James Waller, Dean Koontz, or Nicholas Sparks. A Cussler book is exactly what it is: a bestseller written specifically for people who base their reading decisions on how many other people have bought and ostensibly read a given book--bad grammar, bad sense, and ridiculous narratives be damned. So Sahara, Breck "Spawn of Michael" Eisner's feature debut (and what star Matthew McConaughey hopes is a franchise starter despite Cussler disowning the picture and threatening to sue), is an utterly faithful adaptation of the source material in that it's destined to become one of those movies people see or avoid depending on how low their expectations are going in or how irresistible the Friday night peer-pressure gets. It's a soulless picture, a wisp of a whimsy layered across what wishes it were an epic adventure, playing fast and loose with character and charisma while slathering on the boom-crash opera. The result isn't something awful so much as a spectacle without a hint of a human centre: a blockbuster played by action figures and written by children.

Gunner Palace (2005)

*/****
directed by Petra Epperlein & Michael Tucker

by Walter Chaw Some of the footage is interesting and some of the quotes are poignant, but Michael Tucker and Petra Epperlein's documentary Gunner Palace is hamstrung by embarrassingly trite narration and a lack of any sort of unifying theme in its editing. The film follows the United States 2/3 Field Artillery group--"Gunners"--as they take up residence in Uday Hussein's palace of earthly delights (redubbing the mansion "Gunner Palace" in the grunts' rough vernacular) in a bombed-out Baghdad during the months following U.S. occupation. More old ladies and shell-shocked children than hard-bitten insurgents are terrorized over the course of Gunner Palace, but what should have been an unbearable look at life under wartime and the constant threat of betrayal or ambush opens with a tone-setting Tucker voiceover that, with the callous defensiveness of a perspective-challenged, embittered vet, derides the audience for liking reality television like "Survivor". "Survive this," he says, spitting like a bona fide jarhead in the face of all us lefty wimps who've made the mistake of trying to learn something without getting shot at.

Gunga Din (1939) - DVD

*/**** Image B- Sound C Extras A
starring Cary Grant, Victor McLaglen, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., Joan Fontaine
screenplay by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, based on the poem by Rudyard Kipling
directed by George Stevens

by Walter Chaw To say that George Stevens's Gunga Din hasn't aged well overlooks the cold reality that the best one could ever say for it is that its hinges were once merely creaky instead of frozen. (It also presupposes that being a decent, moral person meant something different in 1939 than it does in 2005.) The picture is almost impossible to watch for a modern audience: the characterizations are broad and insulting; the dialogue strongly suggests that Rudyard Kipling's poems should be left untransmogrified (even by William Faulkner--deep in the sauce when it came his turn) into filmic narrative; and the attitude towards empiricism and oppressed native populations on display was always condescending and appalling for anyone not currently being shot at.

Judgment at Nuremberg (1961) [Special Edition] - DVD

***/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Spencer Tracy, Burt Lancaster, Richard Widmark, Marlene Dietrich
screenplay by Abby Mann
directed by Stanley Kramer

by Walter Chaw By the end of the Fifties, the toll of about two decades of mainstream entertainment steadfast in its studied inoffensiveness catalyzed a movement in film and televison ("The Twilight Zone", one of the most politically-charged TV series in history, launched in 1959) that, fuelled by the twin prods of the death of Louis B. Mayer (the last of the studio moguls) and the discovery of Ed Gein's naughtiness in his wood shed (both in 1957), began to redefine what it meant to be "real." (One freed the artists, the other seemed to inspire them.) The new turks of the New Hollywood were Steve McQueen and Paul Newman, a real jerk and a screen jerk, respectively--self-serving, self-satisfied Old Glory jackanapes-next-door who embodied the theory of the antihero. And they put it in context of the blue-eyed, milk-fed, horse-kicked average Joe, the guy you wanted to be or wanted to bed, not just because they were dead sexy, but also because they were the future. You cast your lot in the Sixties with the rebels and didn't do a lot of apologizing for it.