Category Archives: Film Reviews

28 Weeks Later

May 16, 2007Film ReviewsBrent

In 2003, Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later helped put a new, rabidly charged spin on
the post-apocalyptic zombie sub-genre, telling the story of an English coma
patient (Cillian Murphy) who awakens to find what on the surface appears to be an
eerily empty London in fact overrun by victims of a “rage virus.” Shot in
gritty fashion on digital video for only $8 million, the film was a tremendous summer
success for distributor Fox Searchlight, who used a canny grassroots marketing
plan and drew upon bubbling, post-September 11 world anxiety to evoke dreadful parallel
delight (unspeakable violence delivered with an unnerving fervor) and scare up $45
million domestically and another $37.5 million overseas. Opening at 1,100 more
venues than its predecessor, 28 Weeks Later pulled in $10 million this past weekend, just under
the 2003 film, but on par with zombie maestro George Romero’s 2005 entry Land of the Dead, and good for
second place at the box office behind Spider-Man 3’s sophomore frame. The movie’s creative execution,
though, represents a headlong plunge off the first film’s fairly reasoned
cliff, and may jeopardize future franchise viability if justifiably sour word-of-mouth
proves as contagious as the movie’s viral plague.

28 Weeks Later is a
disappointment both as a narrative continuation of its forerunner and merely as its
own stand-alone thrill ride. Its putative emotional centerpiece — a sequence
involving a mass escape which turns into a military shooting gallery — is a
piece of cheap, empty theater, exacerbated by thunderously illogical staging. And though marked by certain political allusions — talk of re-populated “green zones” and
the like, all patrolled by American-led armed NATO forces — the film does little to
interweave these into the story in a significant and meaningful way.

The very best that can be said of 28 Weeks Later is that it
grabs hold of a frenetic pace and doesn’t let go, but Fresnadillo
utilizes too many cuts in his editing scheme, and the movie is a bungled mess
of misinformed plot strands and poorly delineated spatial
relationships. Action scenes often literally make no sense,
and so they become merely wearying instead of tension- or
anxiety-provoking. On the plus side, composer John Murphy’s
synth-driven score conveys a lilting sense of emo-doom. It clings to
you, even if nothing else about the movie does. For the full review, from FilmStew, click here.

Georgia Rule

May 13, 2007Film ReviewsBrent

Georgia Rule is a film about secrets and lies, and the manner in which mistreatment and violation unchecked breed more dysfunction.
The film’s tagline — about attitude not skipping a generation — is
true in the very loosest sense, but the issues churning underneath this
estrogenized dramedy are surprising if somewhat disarming for a May
studio release with this high of a profile and hearty P&A budget.

Lindsay Lohan
stars as Rachel Wilcox, a spitfire party girl given to blurted
exclamations, unapologetic flights of fancy and physical acting out,
all of which serve as an obvious mask for some scarcely hidden
psychological damage. Felicity Huffman is her exasperated mother, and
Jane Fonda her estranged grandmother, with whom Rachel gets dumped to
live in small town Idaho for the summer. Georgia Rule
is characterized by what might be called not so much a novelistic depth
as a certain independent-minded whimsicality. Not all of it really
works — in fact, it’s what you could rightly call an interesting
failure — but there’s an at-odds variance with much of this time of
year’s Hollywood studio product that makes it a welcome-enough visitor,
and part of the film’s saving grace, ironically, may be just the
off-screen image of careening, wild-child disregard that’s dinged
Lohan’s previous efforts to be taken seriously, in fare like A Prairie Home Companion and Bobby. Rachel is a mess, but in a very specific and determinable way, and Lohan imbues in her a sense of wounded, nervy grace. For the full review, from FilmStew, click here.

The Salon

May 12, 2007Film ReviewsBrent

A voluble hit parade of familiar bits, gripes, and go-girl posturing, The Salon doesn’t feature characters so much as sounding boards for sassy
rejoinders and rah-rah speechifying about societal issues like gay
rights, racism, corporal punishment, and interracial dating. Barbershop
writer-producer Mark Brown’s awkwardly directed film centers on single
mother and hair salon proprietor Jenny Smithe (Vivica A. Fox, above),
and her chatty crew of stylists, customers, and neighborhood
hangers-on. Unfolding over the course of a single day, it finds Jenny
nursing a slow-burn crush on a lawyer (Darrin Henson) representing the
DWP in an eminent domain case that threatens her shop’s future. For the full capsule review, from CityBeat, click here and scroll down.

Double Dare

May 8, 2007Film ReviewsBrent

Grindhouse, but I was distracted by… umm, I’m going to say a naked woman. Riding an ostrich. How does that sound? At any rate, abridged and tweaked from its original run concurrent with the movie’s 2005 theatrical release comes this assessment of Amanda Micheli’s Double
Dare, a fascinating documentary look at the Hollywood stunt industry.

The movie unfolds through the eyes of two of its separate-but-equal participants — 60-plus
year-old Jeannie Epper, who doubled for Lynda Carter as Wonder Woman in the
1970s, and the aforementioned Bell (above right), a neophyte who landed the coveted job of doubling for Lucy
Lawless on Xena: Warrior Princess
when she was only 18. Plenty “insider documentaries” of this ilk
interweave behind-the-scenes footage and multiple interview subjects to
generally illuminating effect. But Double Dare
does so with a rare savvy, and has an extra layer of import in its joint looks
at both the here and now and yesteryear of its trade.

If you think Hollywood offers
dwindling options for actresses over 40, try landing stunt work when
approaching senior citizenhood. A grandmother of four (with a husband 20 years
younger, incidentally), Epper details the challenges of working without pads
(though the second season of Wonder Woman
they did finally impress upon producers the need for flat boots instead of the
wedge-heel go-go variety) and talks about how she doesn’t want to leave the
business. “I know my body,” she says simply. Yet even with stunts now
comprising more and more of typical Hollywood movies,
her gender and age bracket make almost every job a hustle. It’s no better
trying to line up work as a stunt coordinator, where again elements of the
old boys’ club come into play.

We meet Bell halfway
across the world in New Zealand,
and it’s not long before she must deal with the big life change of deciding
whether to leave her native country to continue her professional career in the
wake of the completion of Xena’s run.
(She does, in a little project called Kill
Bill.)

Spanning several years and including interviews with
filmmakers Steven Spielberg and Quentin Tarantino, actresses Lawless and
Carter, President of the Stuntmen’s Association Conrad Palmisano and many more
industry figures, Double Dare doesn’t
always do as crisp of a job of delineating the timeline of the events it
chronicles, but it does capture its pair coming together wonderfully and
naturally (at the World Stunt Awards ceremony in Los Angeles, where Gary Busey
makes a skeevy cameo). It’s there that a rich, casual mentorship between Epper
and Bell develops, and viewers reap the benefit of seeing a torch being passed,
though perhaps not in the way Epper might have envisioned it (we also see her
daughter Eurlyne, a fellow stuntwoman, cope with debilitating surgery).

Double Dare also
assays the lurking familial and relationship tension of its subjects lives
(particularly Epper’s), as well as confronting in a frank but not overly
dramatic or forced fashion what it means to be a woman in such a masculinized
trade (we see Epper and a friend consulting for liposuction and plastic
surgery). Documentaries of this type — a light into a world holding its own
native interest — are often only morsels of entertainment for the more
voyeuristic of cinephiles, but Micheli — who received a Student Academy Award
for her first film, Just for the Ride
— shows a palpable and deft touch with narrative construction that marks her as
a natural born filmmaker and her movie as an engaging, outside-the-box treat.
For more information, visit the film’s still-active web site by clicking here. (Balcony Releasing, unrated, 81 minutes)

Lucky You

May 8, 2007Film ReviewsBrent

Lucky You was going to get annihilated at the
box office this weekend was a foregone conclusion, opening as it did at
2,525 venues against Spider-Man 3, which played on more than
10,000 screens at 4,250 locations. Still, the scale of the sacrificial
slaughter was relatively astounding. Mega-blockbuster run-off these days apparently suffers from a bone-dry tributary. Spider-Man 3, of course, posted new record numbers this past weekend, opening to $150 million. Lucky You, meanwhile, rang up a meager $2.5 million, debuting in sixth place, below the sophomore-week runs of The Invisible and Next, as well as slightly more stalwart holdovers like Disturbia and Fracture.

A Las Vegas-set poker drama of coded glances and emphatic table taps directed by Curtis Hanson (L.A. Confidential, Wonder Boys), Lucky You suffers from co-writer Eric Roth’s terribly dull and
ambling screenplay, and doesn’t have enough energy to sustain itself even as a
sub-cultural curio. To follow or focus on a character devoid of much
big-picture ambition is fine, and achievable. But the rousting of cardsharp Huck (Eric Bana) from
personal stasis feels both overly plotted and still lacking. And the
picture’s romance is a complete non-starter; it’s not so much that Bana and Drew Barrymore lack any chemistry as that their characters have no reason to be
together. Barrymore’s would-be singer Billie is a complete cipher, leaving the actress to cycle
through her familiar catalogue of coy, relatable-girl affectations. For the full review, from FilmStew, click here.

Fateless

May 7, 2007Blu-ray/DVD Reviews, Film ReviewsBrent

So I’m filing this piece on Fateless, an affecting yet
unsentimental portrait of one boy’s journey through the horrors of the Auschwitz
concentration camp, as both a first-run film and DVD review, because the bulk of it was written for IGN, but never posted there. Go figure. To wit:

Hungary’s
official Academy Award entry in the Best Foreign Language Film category last
year, and the deserving winner of a slew of international festival prizes, Fateless is the directorial debut of cinematographer Lajos Koltai,
who gorgeously captured admitted lookers Monica Bellucci and Annette Bening in Malena and Being Julia, respectively. So the film captivates most immediately
with its image, certainly. (The Heart of
Me’s Gyula Pados, serving here as director of photography, should also
garner special credit and mention.) Drained subtly and almost completely of color
as it progresses, Fateless possesses
a painterly bleakness that artfully parallels the slow-building emotional
devastation on display in the narrative, recalling the paintings of Peter
Breugel or the wartime photographs of Roger Libner.

It’s the central, haunted performance of young Marcell Nagy,
however, and the movie’s quiet, steely commitment to the collective quotidian
experiences of deportment and detainment that so effectively hold your
attention. Set in 1944, as Adolf Hitler’s “Final Solution” policy sweeps across
Europe, novelist Imre Kertész’s semi-autobiographical screenplay centers on
14-year-old Gyuri Köves (Nagy), a young, metropolitan Jew who’s never felt
particularly connected to his religion but who finds himself nonetheless swept up
in the mass deportations of Budapest. When the mild irritations of restriction
and impingements on personal freedom — which Gyuri views as indicative of a
general hatred of Jews, and not something he at all takes too personally — give
way to expatriation, Gyuri finds himself sent to Auschwitz.

Slowly coming to terms and grappling with, as he puts it,
the knowledge that he could be killed “at any time, any place,” Gyuri
cultivates a dignified, swallowed and somehow soulful alienation. Scenes in
which he witnesses bartering with a Hungarian for water on the eve of their
deportation and, later, pantomimes eating — almost unconsciously mimicking a
German guard — in an effort to stave off hunger, are notable for the manner in
which they innately humanize the horrors of the Holocaust.

Fateless also draws
certain parallels to another tale of undue adolescent woe, Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist. Though obviously their
scales and settings are vastly different, the narratives are similar in that
each story locates and seizes upon a certain choked humanity amidst the anguish
and wretchedness inflicted upon their protagonists. In fact, Fateless is indisputably the more
optimistic of the two pieces. It’s not a movie of declamatory conflict and drama,
of shrill, heart-rending goodbyes and mothers and children ripped apart. Rather
— in what was almost certainly a more common deportation experience — Fateless shows Gyuri quietly hugging his
father goodbye and debating with two bickering relatives whether or not the
train or bus offers the most direct path for report to Auschwitz.

As its miseries mount, the sense of panic Fateless induces builds naturally, yet
so too does the sense of awed hope it instills. Gyuri and many of his fellow
prisoners are bowed but not broken. Fateless
locates compassion in the worst sort of circumstances, and thus stokes the fire
of hope in humanity, which is never a bad thing. At two hours and 20 minutes,
it’s a grueling journey, but a rewarding one.

Fateless arrives
on DVD in a 4:3 letterbox presentation, and its transfer is a gorgeous one, preserving
the epic scope and evocative, stylized palette of Koltai and Pados’ stirringly
beautiful visual work. The image is clear and free from grain, and the movie’s
many fade-ins and outs (a device which Koltai likens to novelistic chapters)
achieve consistent blacks before returning us to the next scene. Examining the
inconsistency of skin tones here is not only pointless but counter to the
entire enterprise, since Fateless
morphs from a warm color scheme to a cold and barren one, at which point you
literally cannot tell if you’re watching a movie in color or processed,
sepia-tinged black-and-white.

Two competent audio tracks, in 5.1 digital surround and
stereo 2.0, provide ample coverage for the movie’s dialogue and immediate
effects, with the slight nod going to the latter for its edge in robustness
during exterior sequences. That said, the movie’s sound mix generally doesn’t
lockstep match the grim enthrallment of its visuals. Case in point: the arrival
at Auschwitz, in which rain too quietly pours off the
roofs of the barracks that will come to house Gyuri and his fellow prisoners.
English subtitles obviously also grace the movie, which is Hungarian.

Bonus features kick off with the film’s theatrical trailer and a collection of
other arthouse previews. Nobel Prize-winning author Kertész sits for a solid, 28-minute
subtitled interview in which he humbly gives props to Koltai and traces the
film’s production history, including a strained, previous attempt at adaptation
with an unnamed English director. (Koltai is also Hungarian.) Less smoothly involving is a 23-minute making-of
documentary that significantly loses something in translation. While the on-set
footage gives a fascinating glimpse behind the impressive scope of the movie
(including a to-scale replica of Auschwitz’s staging area and barracks), and
chats with young extras (in which one point-blankly reveals his grandfather
followed the same path of his character) lend it a deepening humanity, the
translated subtitles, though, feel off (director Koltai praises his star’s
“punctuate acting”). Young Nagy, though, does reveal how he auditioned for the
movie without being told anything of its content, and he talks candidly about
the most difficult scenes for him to film. B (Movie) B (Disc)

Spider-Man 3

May 4, 2007Film ReviewsBrent

Spider-Man 3 enters the marketplace as perhaps the most widely anticipated franchise film of all time… at least until Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End opens three weeks later. A movie of significant, almost unparalleled to-scale ambition, Spider-Man 3 is, most essentially, a flamboyant test of the audience’s affection for
and remembrance of its characters. Raimi, working from a script crafted
with brother Ivan Raimi and returning writer Alvin Sargent,
has fashioned a film that is at once ultra-aware of the commercial
marketplace — jam-packed as it is with cutting-edge special effects —
and yet also in many ways completely disregarding of its more rote
obligations.

The best analogy I can make is that Spider-Man 3 is
essentially a soap opera blowout extravaganza. It collapses a small
screen serial season’s worth of juicy storylines for almost every
character (Mary Jane sings on Broadway! Mary Jane gets replaced! Mary
Jane gets a job as a jazz club waitress! Mary Jane gets blackmailed by
Harry!) into an hour and 45 minutes, and then embellishes that with
another 30 to 35 minutes or so of discrete, web-slinging,
characteristically acrobatic action. The degree to which this
mad compression, and all its associated tonal swings, works hinges not on
the “wow” factor that helped make the first film (and, in residual
fashion, the second installment) a big hit, but rather on one’s
connection to the characters and their intertwined fates, friendships
and rivalries. It’s a bold bet on story in a film that, you know, just
happens to have cost a couple hundred million dollars to make.

Spider-Man 3 rates high enough on ambition and effort that casual fans surely
won’t feel too cheated by its entertainment value. Still, it doesn’t really
cohere in a deeply fulfilling way.
The paradox is that such slices of mega-budget, mass entertainment are
presumably so successful precisely because they appeal not to
substantive and long-lasting emotional investment, but rather an
audience’s desire to be thrilled, and then move on. Sam Raimi clearly believes otherwise. For the full review, from FilmStew, click here.

The Majestic

May 1, 2007Film Reviews, Old Made NewBrent

It’s the beginning of the month and I’m fleshing out the archive a bit, though in admittedly slow-hand fashion. Next on the docket: this review of The Majestic, originally published upon its theatrical release in 2001. Why now? Let’s say… because I just saw Jim Carrey and Jenny McCarthy having sex in the hot tub which my balcony overlooks. Does that work? Did that get your attention? OK, settle down. On to the review:

The elastic-faced Jim Carrey, who started his career on Fox’s sketch comedy show In Living Color and first sprung to cinematic prominence in Ace Ventura: Pet Detective by talking with his butt cheeks and sporting a pompadour that would shame both an “Uptown Girl”-era Billy Joel and a modern day Chris Isaak, has been on a slow and steady quest to get serious. His first two dramatic feature film leads, The Truman Show and Man on the Moon, brought mixed results. For the most part critically lauded, both as a whole and with respect to his performances, the films secured Carrey Golden Globe Best Actor wins from the Hollywood Foreign Press Association (though the latter was curiously in the comedic category, something Carrey himself poked fun at in his acceptance speech). Yet each film was met with degrees of indifference at the box office, as well as virtual Academy Award lock-outs. What, then, to make of these mixed signals?

April 30, 2007Film ReviewsBrent

There’s typically just something kind of right about Nicolas Cage and dusty localities, from John Dahl’s criminally underrated Red Rock West to David Lynch’s enthusiastically overwrought road trip Wild at Heart,
which winds its way across the country on what might be described as
the a fever dream tour of demented trailer parks, both literal and
figurative. Maybe it’s because, for all the charm and magnetism of his
easygoing smile, there’s still something slightly wounded and aloof
about Cage; a bit melancholic even when he’s happy, he seems vaguely
wolfish, and is thus easy to imagine skulking around in a desert,
searching for something, the content of which even he might not know.

Next, with its slightly orange-hued trailers and TV ads, has the look, on its
surface, of another enjoyably dusty Cage flick, albeit much more of the
disposable popcorn variety. But a collectable-worthy Sin City Cage trilogy (alongside Honeymoon in Vegas and Leaving Las Vegas), alas, Next, does not make.
In fact, it’s not heresy, I promise, to say that Next doesn’t really qualify as a film. A sort of wan warm-up for the heroism of his now-lensing National Treasure sequel, Next is a shrugging, unsolvable riddle, if not necessarily a completely boring one.

Its future-vision gimmickry is flippantly handled, and one can’t reasonably parse
the specifics of the nuclear bomb plot with any more clarity, only that
an oft-mentioned “eight million lives” are hanging in the balance.
Sense is reduced to a greater-than/less-than sign; it’s a simple
cinematic equation you’re being asked to buy into. Cage, meanwhile, looks pensive, and is occasionally charming. Next is a
piece of good-time, eye-catching, desperately of-the-moment entertainment that just happens to be captured in celluloid form. That said, its hold is still awfully loose. For the full review, from FilmStew, click here.

The Invisible

April 30, 2007Film ReviewsBrent

Caught in a state of bodily limbo, well-off but emotionally isolated teenager Nick Powell (Justin Chatwin, above) must try to unravel his own death in David Goyer’s The Invisible, an evocatively gloomy, elliptical drama of redemption that pretty nicely captures the palpable disconnection of youth. The problem is that the race-against-time elements aren’t always quite galvanizing enough to elicit and hold the attention and appreciation of younger audiences wanting or expecting a goosing supernatural thriller. This is much more a character-rooted, sustained mood piece than a commercially geared film, but since it’s about teenagers, well… it faces an uphill climb wooing its target demographic. All in all, though, certainly not a bad movie. For the full review, from Screen International, click here.

Stephanie Daley

April 26, 2007Film ReviewsBrent

A movie about a small-town teen (Amber Tamblyn) accused of smothering her newborn baby, and the forensic psychologist (Tilda Swinton), pregnant herself, hired to determine the truth behind the family’s curtain of denial, writer-director Hilary Brougher’s Stephanie Daley artfully avoids the more traditional and mawkish customs of its movie-of-the-week origins. Continue reading Stephanie Daley →

Hot Fuzz

April 21, 2007Film ReviewsBrent

Hot Fuzz, a comedy that makes appreciable but not quite as brilliant use of buddy-cop genre conventions.

If a lot of Hot Fuzz‘s best bits are revealed in the trailer, the movie, admirably, still advances an actual story, even if it does eventually veer off into a bizarre, Wicker Man-esque communal conspiracy. Where the film is most comfortable and successful, though, is in more
quietly tweaking the personal conventions of the cop genre, as in the scenes of
beer and bonhomie that served as Shaun of the Dead’s underpinning. When playing upon these clichés of the gruff, melting-heart mentor and the newly hardened pupil, Hot Fuzz crackles, courtesy of the energy and interplay between Pegg and Frost. For the full review, from FilmStew, click here.

Vacancy

April 21, 2007Film ReviewsBrent

Vacancy
isn’t quite as much of a thoughtless gumbo of torture and gore as one
might automatically suspect. (Great that that passes for a compliment in some quarters, and a dis in other chatrooms.) As a gleefully unapologetic exercise in
pure celluloid stalking, though, director Nimrod Antal’s film does have the unfortunate distinction of feeling rather emotionally
vacant and psychologically unpalatable, coming as it does the week of
the Virginia Tech campus shootings, the worst single school massacre in
American history.

The plot centers on a bickering married couple, Amy (Kate Beckinsale) and David Fox
(Luke Wilson), returning from
one last trip together before finalizing their divorce. Driving through
the desert, David decides to take an unfamiliar short cut down a
desolate back road. Naturally, their car breaks down, and the pair end
up at a creepy motel with an oddball manager named Mason (Frank Whaley), a plot contrivance which Wilson referred to as “that old
number” during an awkward pitchman’s appearance on The Tonight Show earlier this week.

Overall, a lot of energy is expended and sweat produced — fueled by leering camerawork from cinematographer Andrzej Sekula (Pulp Fiction, Reservoir Dogs) that makes heavy use of close-ups — but this genre exercise isn’t a cathartic one.
With mainstream audiences already cooling on Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez’s admittedly flawed, double-feature Grindhouse
experience, will they be any more inclined to see something of the
exact same sort of exploitative field, only less referential and more
straightforward, but also a lot less fun? Studio-employed box office trackers will know later tonight; normal folks can wait until Sunday or Monday, and check back. For the full review, from FilmStew, click here.

The Upside of Anger

April 20, 2007Film Reviews, Old Made NewBrent

The “Old Made New” designation
had its roots in the recommendation of catalogue titles, films that had
sort of slipped through the cracks or were a bit off the beaten path. One of the great things about “the Internets,” as our president would say, is of course that you can upend more traditional notions of archiving, and slot and re-post things as you see fit.

To that end, given my perhaps surprisingly strong regard for Reign Over Me, I thought it would be an interesting counterbalance to post my review of writer-director Mike Binder’s The Upside of Anger,
his last prior theatrical wide release, which bowed in March of 2005 to
just over $18.5 million domestically. Reading back over the piece, I
was struck by some of the overt thematic similarities — both movies find Binder exploring the post-Sept. 11 world tension in the air — I had forgotten, perhaps because of the more… not distasteful, really, but headache-inducing elements of The Upside of Anger. I have to say, I think Reign Over Me is much more judicious in its moments of pique and showcased frustration. It shows evidence of someone who’s grown leaps and bounds as director. To wit:

An awkward and generally off-putting amalgamation of
codependency and “zeitgeist” posturing written and directed by Mike Binder
(HBO’s The Mind of the Married Man), The Upside of Anger is a romantic
dramedy ostensibly about fury and resentment’s ability to transform, about the
corruptible power it has over not only those exercising it but those under its
umbrella.

Joan Allen stars as harridan Terry Wolfmeyer, a woman whose
husband suddenly disappears — she thinks the result of an affair. Terry
presides over her four implausibly un-flummoxed teen and young adult daughters
(Alicia Witt, Keri Russell, Erika Christensen and Evan Rachel Wood) and a large
suburban house where it’s loud even when no one is talking due to the forceful
stamp of her furrowed-brow personality. The Wolfmeyers’ next-door neighbor is
the rumpled Denny Davies (Kevin Costner), an ex-jock turned Detroit
radio deejay who doesn’t want to talk about sports and his baseball career,
even as he signs crates of baseballs to anonymously auction off on eBay. As the
days turn into weeks and more, Terry and Denny engage in a clumsy, discomfited
mating dance, and Denny finds something transforming about all the new estrogen
in his life. Terry is crazy and unhinged, but for whatever reason she helps bring
Denny’s life into focus, and he hers.

The two best things going for The Upside of Anger are its clever casting inversions, which find
the genteel Allen tearing into her rich bitchery with full-hearted aplomb, and
Costner playing a rumpled scalawag who thinks he’s a charmer but no one’s
actually charmed by (at least until the Wolfmeyers come around to his
loose-tongued candor). That both Terry and Denny are functional alcoholics is
fertile (if familiar) comedic ground but a bit of an emotional cop-out. It unnecessarily
negates and blurs their motivations. The main problem is one of tone, though. In
order for a character as bitter and abrasive as Terry to work, he or she really
has to be set against a more serene background, which the film pretends to have
in the loafing Denny. But The Upside of
Anger is every bit as shrill and strident as its lead.

The film provokes, sure, but not in a meaningful way. It
doesn’t rankle because it challenges
you, but rather because it’s so clamorous and insistent of its own ornamental,
idiosyncratic charms. There are a few wild-eyed moments of comic delight — an
awkward dinner scene where the film cements its R rating with a wicked glimpse
into Terry’s mind’s eye — that succeed because you feel the movie isn’t running
along some carefully prescribed track; anything can happen. But overall The Upside of Anger merely comes off as
discordant. Additionally, it must be said that there’s no palpable sisterly
chemistry between the young actresses, and that Swimfan’s Christensen — all giant, blank-faced blinks and eyebrow
quirks — gives a jarringly awful, wince-inducing performance. Each scene that
foregrounds her is amongst the worst of the movie.

Whatever your appraisal of Binder’s talents as a writer and
actor (he costars here as Adam “Shep” Goodman, Denny’s horndog producer and the
skeazy wooer of Christensen’s middle daughter, Andie), as a director he evinces
no clear sense of control, no ability to carefully mold a scene in order to
bring both the tension and comedy to full boil — something, say, Sam Mendes
accomplished smashingly in American
Beauty, a film of suburban dystopia which The Upside of Anger obviously wants to emulate. Setting the movie
several years ago, Binder tries to tie his thesis (that anger’s upside is… that
it’s the person you become?) to post-Sept. 11 world tension in the air. It
works to negligible effect; the screwiness feels patterned and arbitrary.
There’s little Upside here. (New
Line, R, 116 minutes)

Fracture

April 20, 2007Film ReviewsBrent

Fracture
centers around Ted Crawford (Anthony Hopkins), a well-to-do man who kills his
cheating wife, and readily admits it to the responding police officer. Crawford
has his eyes on a bigger game, though, and mitigating circumstances, including
the lack of a matching weapon, give him several important trump cards when he decides to represent himself in court against hotshot Los
Angeles assistant district attorney Willy Beachum (Ryan
Gosling).

A very well made genre picture full of smartly modulated
friction, Fracture
is predicated
on a few significant leaps in believability, certainly (a murder case going to
trial in under two weeks, for one), but director Gregory Hoblit (NYPD Blue, Primal Fear) knows his way
around the criminal justice system. Hopkins,
of course, is reliably steady. Gosling, meanwhile, gives a great, engrossing
performance as the slick, narcissistic Willy — a blithe egotist with one foot
already out the door for a lucrative job at a private law firm. When he comes under
fire and suddenly finds an embarrassing blight on his near-perfect record, it
ignites in him a deep competitive instinct that Fracture, quite agreeably, never pawns off on a
reawakened idealism. Willy’s a bit of a jerk, actually, but never less
than fascinatingly watchable. For the full capsule review, from CityBeat, click here.

Year of the Dog

April 19, 2007Film ReviewsBrent

Year of the Dog is the directorial debut of screenwriter Mike
White (Chuck and Buck, School of Rock), and
it lives in the same neighborhood of flattened emotional affect and just-so
domesticity as Punch-Drunk Love and The Royal Tenenbaums,
telling the story of a simple, single secretary (Molly Shannon) and her offbeat personal journey after the death of her canine companion. White,
though, is a much more of an ambler; he isn’t concerned with the pursuit of any
cinematic trends, nor particularly any apparent agenda beyond an intimate,
tossed-off character sketch.

To that end, the movie sometimes seems tonally repetitive,
indulging the same penchant for mostly sweet people colliding with and
intersecting one another in uncomfortable fashion. Its impassivity, as much as
its blend of heartbreak and relatable chuckles, will confound those seeking
some sort of more formal judgment. What gives the undersized Year of the Dog its to-scale
hold, though, is a nice performance from Saturday Night Live vet Shannon, who gets to display a much wider and
more interesting range of emotions than her broader comedic personae have
heretofore allowed. For the full capsule review, from CityBeat, click here.

Perfect Stranger

April 14, 2007Film ReviewsBrent Simon

Perfect Stranger is one of those utterly anonymous film titles,
lightly evocative in its own way and yet suitable enough to be applied
to any number of situations or genres. It feels like a relic of the 1980s, an
indie flick title designed to conjure up an association with some
bigger hit.

Starring Halle Berry and Bruce Willis, and evincing a style that might best be described as deliciously retarded, Perfect Stranger is an overloaded, under-reasoned thriller that’s wholly engineered in reverse. It culminates in one of
those chunky scenes wherein a potential victim laboriously explains a
murderer’s entire convoluted plot directly to said person. Except in Perfect Stranger,
that scene is actually spread out over three different locations, and
includes the killer and deductive explicator snuggling up together on a
couch. Yes, seriously. A single graspable tone is the film’s greatest mystery; file this one under “comedy, unintentional.” For the full review, from FilmStew, click here.

Are We Done Yet?

April 13, 2007Film ReviewsBrent

Now, was there ever a chance that Are We Done Yet? — a sequel to 2005’s $82 million-grossing Are We There Yet? — was going to
be a critics’ darling? No, probably not. But the first film was a
harmless enough family comedy about besieged masculinity and eventual
maturation. It had its moments of diverting amusement, and it actually
told a linear story in some loose, relatable sense. This sub-moronic
re-up, though, is completely divorced from any sort of reality (even
of its own devising) and totally mind-numbing, even at well under 90 minutes.

That Are We Done Yet? runs on comedy of the predictable is surely
no surprise, but Hank Nelken’s script is especially atrocious, a
desultory mix of slapstick and bland bickering, powered by
mind-boggling contradictions in character. You know going in
that there will be: a) toys stepped on; b) a leaky roof; C) a falling
chandelier; d) a comic electrocution; and e) Ice Cube falling through said
roof. And there are. What you don’t expect, necessarily, are bits involving a talking
raccoon, a deer whose eyes bug out in cartoonish fashion and Ice Cube
wrestling a giant sturgeon.

But it’s the breathtaking manner in which the movie so immediately
announces its complete gracelessness and lack of respect for its
audience’s intelligence that is most amazing. After an animated opening
credits sequence that trumps the entire combined feature for
imagination and sheer entertainment value, Ice Cube’s character is awakened by his
alarm clock, at 5 a.m., to an outdoors that is completely bright and spilling sunlight into the room. Nothing gets much better from there, in either attention to detail or certainly cleverness. For the full review, from FilmStew, click here.

The Reaping

April 10, 2007Film ReviewsBrent

Did Hilary Swank, above, just smell the movie she’s in? Yes, the $12 million, extended holiday weekend haul for The Reaping is already more than the entire domestic receipts garnered by Swank’s “artistic” leading lady debut, Boys Don’t Cry (we won’t count The Next Karate Kid).
Still, the fact remains that audiences don’t seem particularly drawn to
Swank in anything other than asexualized roles, and thus their mandate on her as a leading lady could
best be described as neither-here-nor-there. Swank, it seems, is both pigeonholed and not heartily loved. If
audiences are predisposed to the genre or material, they might give it
a look; otherwise, they’re looking past Swank, not at her.

In The Reaping, that would be with good reason. Directed by
Stephen Hopkins, the movie is a religious-tinged supernatural thriller
that feels absolutely dutiful in all its included and (loudly) sounded
beats. It’s a given that the project was green-lit as both a reflective
sign of these troubled, uncertain times and an attempt to tap into the
evangelical market via genre product. The somewhat crass manner in which The Reaping ties together
haunted personal experience with its main story of quasi-apocalyptic
mayhem, though, feels like some studio note passed down a secular
executive who heard from his assistant, or maybe his teenage daughter, about a piece on Slate that described the “mysterious” but deeply held faith-based beliefs of those in flyover country. For the full review, from FilmStew, click here.

More Thoughts on Grindhouse

April 7, 2007Film Reviews, MusingsBrent

Grindhouse’s classification. And yep, that description of Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez’s cinematic experiment — a lovely, bloody “fuck you” of a pop diorama valentine in a very precious liberal arts school fine art class — just about covers all the
major bases. Yet the movie is also notable for the manner in which it coyly sidesteps (its faux trailers notably excepted) a certain staple of the grindhouse and exploitation genre: namely, leading lady nudity.

A love scene between McGowan and Freddy Rodriguez in Planet Terror is trimmed down and interrupted by a feigned missing reel, and a much discussed lap dance in Tarantino’s Death Proof is given the same treatment. One can call this subversion, certainly, but it also feels
like a bit of a cop-out, given that the same “joke” is effectively deployed
twice. Toss in the fact that Rodriguez allegedly had an indiscretion with McGowan on the set of Planet
Terror — an affair that resulted in the implosion of his marriage with wife
Elizabeth Avellán, also Grindhouse‘s producer — and it feels additionally
suspicious. And a bit disingenuous. Just a bit…

It’ll be interesting to see how the leering fanboy crowd reacts to this — if they’re too caught up in the respective stories to care, or it becomes wordlessly emblematic of a greater frustration with the movie(s). For what it’s worth, in my opinion the bit works much better in Planet Terror, not merely because that segment comes first, but also because it occurs later within that movie, and “at least” happens mid-coitus; Rodriguez sustains the grindhouse touchstones and blemishes better, and it thus feels like less of a gyp. In Death Proof, you can almost hear Tarantino’s stuttering, self-satisfied laugh, though there are rumors that the missing scene will pop up in longer international (and, by extension, DVD) cuts of the film. Meanwhile, for a full review pass at the movie, this time from FilmStew, click here.

The Hoax

April 6, 2007Film ReviewsBrent

A fantastic about-face for both director Lasse Hallström and star Richard Gere — representing the best work in years for each — The Hoax tells the story of Clifford Irving, a novelist who, in 1971, faked an autobiography of reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes. A roguish, spry and
darkly comedic caper, The Hoax is a movie that milks high drama out of low-key
stakes before then folding the secrets and lies at the core of its
story into an even grander speculative conspiracy than its blithely egotistical
protagonist could have initially imagined — one tied to burgeoning paranoia in the Nixon White House.

What William Wheeler’s superb script smartly taps into is not just the
outlandish and colorful surface intrigue of its story — the nuts and
bolts of the faking of the biography — but the secret, unexplainable
thrill that all of this gives Irving. Even if it’s heretofore been
dormant, it’s hardwired to his soul, this need for attention and
respect. What we’re actually watching, then, is the magnificent implosion of an addictive
personality, and the adrenaline rush that piling lie on top of lie
gives Irving. Knowing that only the most bizarre and outlandish ones
will work (to match Hughes’ eccentric and impulsive personality), the
author’s spiraling deception is the fuel on which The Hoax
runs. So potent is its force, too, that by the end of the movie, one is
improbably siding alongside Irving, waiting on a rooftop for a
helicopter visit from Hughes that one knows can’t possibly be coming. For the full review, from FilmStew, click here.

Penelope Cruz: Spanish Ayes

April 4, 2007Film Reviews, MusingsBrent

Volver and Penelope Cruz gets re-spun on FilmStew today, courtesy of the DVD release of Pedro Almodóvar’s film. The basic gist of it is that Cruz is much more at home and in her skin in native-language releases. Though part of it is surely a quality-of-parts issue, there’s also just a comfort factor that’s readily apparent. For the full feature piece, click here.

Blades of Glory

April 2, 2007Film ReviewsBrent

Blades of Glory centers on toothy golden-boy Jimmy MacElroy (Jon
Heder, above center), a technically proficient but socially sheltered champion figure skater rigorously
groomed for success since childhood. Boozy bad boy Chazz Michael Michaels
(Will Ferrell) is his polar opposite — a self-described “ice-devouring sex tornado”
who relies on instinct and on-ice improvisation. When a tie at the World
Championships erupts into an embarrassing, medal-stand brawl in front of a
horrified crowd, both Jimmy and Chazz are stripped of their awards and barred
from their sport. Years later, Jimmy’s coach encourages them to exploit a loophole and compete together as the first male/male pair in the history of figure skating. Hungry for laurels, the duo agrees.

Fitfully amusing but indefatigable, Blades of Glory doesn’t touch the anarchic highs of the inspired Talladega Nights, but there’s some pleasantly inspired riffing from Ferrell, and the movie’s early story-beat, sitcom-style repartee is actually pretty solid, before it descends into only half-sketched macro arcs. Relying on Ferrell’s trademark mock intensity and
man-child ignorance, the movie wraps its plot around comfortable clichés
of warped competition found most recently in fellow insistently silly sports flicks
like Dodgeball, Heder’s The Benchwarmers and Ferrell’s
Kicking and Screaming.

Oh, and for the record, while Blades of Glory does wring plenty of laughs from the tension of its male-male pairing, it doesn’t really succumb to the tag of “New Homophobia” comedy that’s being bandied about by some writers. (That sentiment is actually much more prevalent in this spring’s Wild Hogs.) For the full, albeit somewhat canted and analytical review, from FilmStew, click here.

Grindhouse

April 2, 2007Film ReviewsBrent

Grindhouse delivers an uneven mixture of patchwork, sugar-rush thrills.

Consisting
of two discrete features strung together by a series of fake trailers
shot by Edgar Wright, Eli Roth and Rob Zombie, the movie benefits mostly from
the recombinant pop of Rodriguez’s Planet Terror (above), a strikingly well designed and tackily atmospheric zombie action flick, before the twin-bill’s finale, Tarantino’s muddled Death Proof, fumbles its way through a pointless set-up to an invigorating car chase climax.

A charm offensive of cool that will play well to those heartily psychologically invested in the concept of genre homage, the degree to which Grindhouse successfully spreads outside of its chief demographic target
depends on word-of-mouth amongst those for whom referential lionization
for lionization’s sake means very little. For the full review, from Screen International, click here. For more isolated critical thoughts on each separate feature, check back on Shared Darkness throughout the week.

Shooter

March 28, 2007Film ReviewsBrent

Shooter, directed by Antoine Fuqua, a leg up on more anonymous political-conspiracy thrillers like The Sentinel, playing the material with a hard-charging heart and
rugged determination that capture the essence of these
strong-and-silent-types who fall hard for the loft rhetoric of
idealism, do occasionally awful things in the service of their
country’s mission, and then fall even harder when they come to learn so
many of their superiors don’t believe the same things that they do.

While the film lacks a there-will-be-blood fatalism and/or
more explicit, hot-button topicality that would have, in my estimation,
truly pushed it over the hump to near-classic thriller status, it can’t
be said that the movie cops out on any level. When Bob Lee Swagger sets
out to set things right, by God, that means there will be justice, and not of the candy-ass variety. For the full review, from FilmStew, click here.