Her birthday is coming up in a few weeks, so I thought I’d go ahead and re-post this review of Charlize Theron‘s break-through movie, Monster, which originally appeared in another publication on occasion of the film’s special edition DVD release in 2004. To wit, slightly redacted:

Christina Ricci, the greatest accomplishment of first-time
writer-director Patty Jenkins’ serial killer tale is its capturing — in disarming
ways — the reality that there is “love,” that there is some impulse for
connection, in everyone, no matter how screwed up, formally uneducated,
self-medicated and monstrous they are. (Hey, who knew Journey’s “Don’t Stop
Believin’,” used here pre-Sopranos finale, could be an anthem of the disenfranchised?)

The rise of the so-called geek elite — the kids who
purchased and hoarded comic books and action figures in the 1980s, and then
slipped in the back door of the entertainment industry as grown-ups — is having
far-reaching influences, of which only the first wave we are now experiencing. Movies
like Sin City and 300
are new standards by which genre product will be judged, not merely some quirky
aberrations.

Renaissance fits
into this trend is somewhat hard to say. A French, animated sci-fi crime thriller
that didn’t really catch on at the theatrical box office earlier this year, the movie is set in
the labyrinthine underworld of 2054 Paris,
and unfolds in starkly captivating black-and-white frames that perhaps turned
some folks off. A dystopian thriller loosely in the vein of Blade Runner and Minority Report, the movie paints a bold vision of a not-so-distant
future where all life is monitored, recorded and regulated, thanks to the City
of Lights’ largest corporation, the
health and beauty conglomerate known as Avalon. Detective Barthelemy Karas (voiced
by Daniel Craig in the movie’s English translation) has a reputation for
finding anyone at any cost, but while tracking down Ilona Tasuiev (voiced by Romola
Garai), a scientist abducted in the midst of some groundbreaking anti-aging research,
Karas ultimately finds himself buried beneath the film’s illicit world of
corporate malfeasance and soulless genetic research. Added pressure comes in
the form of Ilona’s bad girl sister, Bislane (voiced by Catherine McCormack),
and her shady boss, Paul Dellenbach (Tony Award-winner Jonathan Pryce), who heads
up Avalon. (Also providing voice work is Ian Holm.)

Whatever one feels about the story, Renaissance’s visual bonafides are not in question; it’s a dizzy,
wondrous, slurry experience. One often finds their mind slinking off into
recesses of the frame, and wondering about the world just out of our field of
vision. The interesting thing is that the movie relies on motion capture for
the bulk of its body animations, which is a strange mixture with black-and-white.
It sort of tricks the brain every once in a while, and you find yourself
sometimes so caught up in the visuals, and trying to piece together backgrounds
in fill-in-the-blank fashion, as to miss a line or two of dialogue.

Directed by Christian Volckman, the film also makes smart,
consistent and specific use of futuristic items that seem plausible in their
extension from today’s society, perhaps due to an exacting and mentally
rigorous pre-production process (Alexandre De La Patelliere, Matthieu
Delaporte, Jean-Bernard Pouy and Patrick Raynal share screenplay credit). If
there’s a knock, it’s that the story is kind of boilerplate, and even attempts
to subvert certain noirish genre clichés announce themselves with, well,
black-and-white signposting.

Renaissance comes
housed in a regular Amray case, presented in its original 2.35:1 widescreen
aspect ratio, enhanced for 16:9 televisions. The film’s video transfer is
excellent, with sharp edges, no enhancement problems or other blemishes. As one
might expect, its tones are quite necessarily deep; there’s no room for shades
of grey here. Audio comes in the form of a Dolby digital 5.1 surround sound
track, and in either English or French it’s powerful, consistent and deep, with
action effects echoing from all channels during the movie’s shoot-outs and brawnier
sequences. Apart from a clutch of trailers, the film’s sole DVD bonus feature consists of a lengthy making-of featurette which explores the
innovative process by which Volckman and his collaborators brought the
digitally animated noir tale to life, over the course of five painstaking
years. Along with interviews with many of the behind-the-scenes players, the
featurette also includes footage of the movie’s wireframe mock-ups and its motion
capture work players — a great look at the unsung heroes of a new-fangled production
like this. There’s also a glimpse at the musical scoring process. B- (Movie) B (Disc)

Ahh, what to make about The
Undagrind
, a gritty little documentary which bills itself with solemnly
introduced title cards as being about “struggle and respect,” then cuts to a
g-string-clad dancer shaking her butt cheeks and executing a stripper’s split?
Every trend spawns its own particular wave of hackish aspirants, of course, but
seemingly none quite so much as the inner city rap craze, at least recently.

The Undagrind isn’t a documentary in any
sort of traditional or even loose sense, which is to say that it might attempt
to explain or illuminate a trend, issue or person. Its back cover text claims
the movie explores the hardships that rap artists endure while they battle to
be heard and respected “on the streetz,” but this meandering, skull-numbing
collection of footage seems assembled in totally random, haphazard fashion.
There is literally no reason or rhyme to be found, apart from several of the
couplets that some rappers drop in freestyle. It’s true that there are a good
number of interview snippets here, with artists popular and unknown alike —
folks like David Banner, Three Six Mafia, Young Jeezy, Slim Thug, Lil’ Scrappy,
PSC, the Ying Yang Twins, Juvenile, I-20, Frasier Boy, Gucci Mane, Poo Baby and
2 Live Crew’s Luke Skyywalker, aka Luther Campbell. But there’s zero contextualization, the bits are
often extremely short and the inane ramblings run about 9:1 over any legitimate
insights (sample inspiration: “You gotta walk before you crawl, and you gotta
crawl before you run,” says a gent named Hustla, slapping the blacktop and
peddling copies of a self-produced CD). Vincent Phillips, president of BME, is
a notable exception, providing a bit of edifying on-the-fly history with
respect to the track laid by underground regional rap artists.

Some of the underground show footage could conceivably be
interesting to aficionados, but it’s not introduced or set up at all, leaving
one to draw their own conclusions about what comes from where. This is an awful
exercise in air-quote filmmaking, plain and simple, a bunch of home video-style footage
strung together in crass fashion. And there’s nary a sense of irony when an associate producer from
a radio station where an on-air rap battle is being held (and maybe even the
movie’s associate producer, Trey Dungy?) is billed onscreen with the moniker “ass.
producer.”

Housed in a regular Amray case, The Undagrind is presented in 1.33:1 full screen, with Dolby
digital 5.1 surround sound audio mix. The disc’s sole supplemental extra? Well,
I wasn’t really sure what the cover tag “bonus shake-off” really meant, but that
would be 12 minutes of booty-wobbling and quaking, performed for cash in front
of a crowd by a quartet of bikini-clad girls. Seriously. I don’t know whether
that’s the best or most objectionable thing about this trough-scraping disc,
but I do know that I need to go take a shower, like, right now. I see this movie, perhaps not so strangely, getting some run from the same crowd who purchase volume after volume of Extreme Chickfights. For more
information, one can visit the movie’s eponymous web site. Oh, right… if that’s
too big a word, umm… just type in The
Undagrind, followed by .com. F (Movie) C- (Disc)

Even my affinity for Michael Keaton can’t lift the snarky little indie flick The Last Time up to the level of a sincere recommendation. He’s the best thing here in this mish-mashed tale of ambition and deceit, but one scenery-chewing character does not a film make, alas.

The Last Time marks the feature film writing and directorial debut of Michael Caleo, who honed his chops on television shows like The Sopranos and Rescue Me. The film centers around Ted (Keaton), the cynical but hard-charging, top salesman at Bindview, a high-tech New York City company. Ted is chafed by having to show the ropes to optimistic, enthusiastic Ohio transplant Jamie (Brendan Fraser), but when he meets Jamie’s beautiful fiancee Belisa (Amber Valletta), Ted falls hard. The two begin an illicit affair (getting it on in front of a passed-out Jamie, actually), and the Ted of old slowly emerges. Losing his bitterness, though, somehow robs him of his edge, and sales failures follow. Jamie, meanwhile, continues to flounder at the sales game, and Ted’s guilt over the affair prompts him to feed Jamie what’s left of his own sales leads to try and keep him afloat. For Ted, his dalliance with Belisa really seems to mean something, but can the same be said for her?

The benchmarks here are obvious, whether it’s Glengarry Glen Ross or even a few of the bored-housewife-in-the-new-big city B-plot strands of movies like The Devil’s Advocate. The problem is that The Last Time can’t really measure up to any of the films that it most immediately summons to mind. The performances are certainly not bad, but consistency of tone is a bit of a bugaboo, and the movie’s third act twist seems like a commercial contrivance, a genuflection at genre salability. That’s ironic, I guess, given the movie’s backdrop.

Presented on a single-sided disc in both full-screen and a 2.35:1 anamorphic widescreen transfer, The Last Time comes housed in a regular plastic Amray case, and with a smattering of subtitle options. Its Dolby digital 5.1 audio mix sometimes favors the swell of compower Randy Edelman’s score over dialogue straightforwardness, but wide-ranging dynamism isn’t necessarily part of the film’s conceptual sound design anyway, so it doesn’t become too big of an issue. The only supplemental extra is a clutch of nine deleted scenes, running just under 12 minutes in total. More Keaton isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but this showcase isn’t the best platform for him. And for a movie with such an authorial bent, where’s Caleo? To order the film via Amazon, click here. C (Movie) C+ (Disc)