DVD Review: Two Lovers

One of the year’s best dramas arrives on DVD and Blu-Ray tomorrow.

Writer-director James Gray’s Two Lovers opens, as his previous We Own The Night began, with a succinct visual metaphor of what’s to come. Leonard Kraditor (Joaquin Phoenix), a deeply troubled young man draped in heavy winter clothes, throws himself off a pier into an icy body of water. Pulled to safety by passers-by who witnessed his plunge, he remains dumbstruck, unable to express gratitude for their efforts to save his life. Those themes of hopes rejected and stalled self-destruction form the backbone of the film’s searing character study and help establish it as one of the past year.

Skittish and sorrowful, Leonard stands on shaky ground both in his head and in his life. Diagnosed with bi-polar disorder and numbly devastated by an engagement that ended with ruthless logic by his lover’s family, he’s returned to the Brighton Beach home of his parents (Moni Moshonov and Isabella Rossellini) with nothing more ambitious in mind than working for their dry cleaning business and keeping to himself. The Kraditors are moving ahead, however, on the verge of merging their business with that of the neighboring and prosperous Cohen family. As a way of cementing the union, both sets of parents wouldn’t mind if Leonard struck up a romance with the Cohen’s smart, sensitive daughter Sandra (Vinessa Shaw).

Leonard and Sandra’s early flirtation is tentative, halting, almost childlike, and you get the sense that such gentle charm uses about all the energy Leonard can manage. That ennui changes once he meets his fiery upstairs neighbor Michelle (Gwyneth Paltrow), who’s come to live in their fortress-like Brooklyn apartment house as a kind of voluntary exile rendered by her boss and lover Ronald Blatt (Elias Koteas). Leonard is instantly transfixed by Michelle, who’s a beauty in the most painfully Daisy Buchanan-esque sense: always promising, in an elusive way, something great in return for love and devotion. Leonard pursues her to the best of his ability but finds his attentions first gently ignored and then rebuked. Disappointed, he pulls Sandra further into his orbit, settling into a comfortable relationship with her until the opportunity to win Michelle rears its dangerous head once again.

Gray co-wrote the script (with Ric Minello) based on the Fyodor Dostoevsky novella “White Nights,” and that author’s thoroughly downbeat worldview is well-suited to Gray’s visual vocabulary, which interprets Brooklyn and Manhattan alike as vast mazes of dreary buildings occasionally brought to ephemeral life by splashes of light and color. Gray’s films are always romantic in tone if not in attitude, and their characters are kept in almost chiaroscuro proportion to the urban megaliths surrounding them. That Two Lovers is set largely near the steely Atlantic during wintertime only heightens the sense of lifelessness surrounding the human drama. But unlike his earliest films (Little Odessa and The Yards) here Gray is getting more proficient at achieving a balance between the two contrasts. With Two Lovers the setting works in service to the characters, not the other way around.

Those characters, for their part, are played well and without ostentation, though some cast members inhabit their roles more than others. Phoenix gives Leonard a fragility that makes his vacillation between Michelle and Sandra not just believable but tightly suspenseful. The scenes in which Leonard attempts to fit in with Michelle’s group of clubbing friends is almost heart-rending to watch. Likewise Sandra’s futile attempt to convey her tenderness to Leonard, especially with a third-act gift that’s symbolic on probably a half-dozen different levels while simultaneously thumbnailing her character. Shaw is an underrated actress capable of showing great volume of emotion with the simplest of body movements, and here she takes a part that in lesser hands would have been irretrievably bland and makes a fleshed-out character worth liking – even loving, as we come to hope Leonard will.

Paltrow’s career has been dogged by skepticism for years, and in making Michelle both attractive and then repulsive she has in some ways the heaviest load to bear. By and large she succeeds, though in some scenes – as in her moments alone on the wind-swept rooftop with Phoenix – she seems to hold too much back; there’s a sense of a missing depth that might bring both characters into greater clarity. Of course that might be the fault of the script, but as everything else is planned and executed with clockwork precision such an oversight seems unlikely. Michelle is a woman who can’t get past her own selfishness to believe in anyone else’s sincerity. She’s a time bomb, one probably everyone but Leonard can recognize as such. Paltrow never quite lets that danger materialize.

Rossellini, regal even when talking on the phone, gives perhaps the film’s most poignant dialogue late in the film. Without spoiling anything, anybody who’s ever left home will recognize what she says as exactly the words you want to hear upon departure. It also arrives just as the events of the story collapse in on themselves, making what’s still to come seem as bitter as the winter wind howling around Leonard as he returns to the waterfront. 

The ending is raw, uncompromising, and multi-faceted. Everyone – almost everyone – gets what they want, which in the finest Russian literary tradition only seems charged with the potential for more misery. Whether you approve or agree with Leonard’s final decision, you can’t argue with its logic or question its unconventional contrast to most Hollywood dramas. You’ll definitely have an opinion about it, though, one way or another. Two Lovers is a movie audacious enough to make you think.

-Michael Kabel

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(Note: An earlier version of this review originally ran for the film’s theatrical release.)

70s Crime Cinema: Mean Streets

Martin Scorsese’s breakthrough film is still a joy to watch, even as its age begins to show.

One of its decade’s most influential films, 1973′s Mean Streets launched the careers of stars Robert DeNiro and Harvey Keitel while pushing then relatively unknown director and co-writer Martin Scorsese into the critical limelight. The film also sparked the Scorsese-DeNiro partnership, a long and fruitful collaboration which eventually created such important works as Taxi Driver (1976), The King of Comedy (1980), Raging Bull (1982) and Goodfellas (1990), among others, over the next three decades. If Mean Streets’ many sins are largely the result of youthful exuberance, it’s nonetheless impossible not to appreciate the film if only too see so many of the great director’s themes and tropes in their nascent forms.

Scorsese began work on the project after fellow director John Cassavetes (Faces) advised him to make movies based on personal experience and conviction. Working with frequent script collaborator Mardik Martin, he based the loose, episodic screenplay on his own deeply religious childhood in New York’s Little Italy, fusing elements of religious doubt and conviction with an unsentimental portrayal of the stifling influence of the mafia, a stranglehold that ran through almost all walks of neighborhood life. The quartet of young men at its center – played by Keitel, DeNiro, Richard Romanus and David Proval  – circle the edges of the criminal lifestyle, spending their days in a cycle of gambling, drinking, and low-level theft that never quite seems to bring enough money or satisfaction.

Only the quiet and principled Charlie (Keitel) seems capable of  imagining a more worthwhile existence, but that same wonder has led him into a moment of spiritual crisis. His passionate Catholicism on the wane, he takes solace in an illicit affair with his childhood friend Johnny Boy’s (DeNiro) cousin Teresa (Amy Robinson), an epileptic outcast from her family and a kindred lonely soul. She’s getting out, to an apartment Uptown, and wants Charlie to come with her. But after years of collecting bets for his uncle Giovanni (Cesare Danova), Charlie finds himself on the brink of managing a troubled restaurant, a move that might at last bring him a measure of true responsibility. Meanwhile the neighborhood, tradition, and his wearying loyalty to Johnny Boy, a compulsive gambler and malcontent, all keep him running in circles.

Presaging and inspiring the generation of movies to come, Mean Streets uses its setting both as a character and force of nature that defines its residents while at the same time trapping them. Charlie and his friends dress in stiff suits and guzzle scotch at a time when the rest of their generation was going nude and smoking grass. They live with their (never shown) parents in cramped apartments overstuffed with heirloom furniture. The restaurants and business are choked with cigarettes, cooking grease, and sweat. It’s a dirty world with few diversions that aren’t venal, but by and large the inhabitants are numbed and toughened to anything else. No wonder, as other critics have noted, the inhabitants break into fightfights at a moment’s notice: stuck in the fugue of their surroundings, the violence becomes a form of tacit commiseration.

Glimpses of the outside world come sometimes as palpable breaths of fresh air. A trip to the seashore with Teresa allows Charlie to express his joys, but even there he’s soon pulled back into the world from which they’ve temporarily escaped. “Nobody tries anymore,” he tells her. “To help. To help people.” Restless as he is, he’s unable to get out from under his uncle’s shadow, or cast off community expectations. In a fit of lust he asks out a dancer at his friend Tony’s (Proval) bar but stands her up for fear he’ll be seen in public with a black woman. He tries to rebuff Teresa when Giovanni describes her as “sick in the head.” His only unflagging loyalty is to Johnny Boy, whose increasingly self-destructive behavior – he owes low-level fence Michael (Romanus) several thousand dollars in unpaid “vig” – endangers both their lives.

Keitel and DeNiro, both young and eager to prove themselves, put one hundred percent into every scene. That’s a good thing more often than not, but as with the movie’s breakneck pace you often wish their characters would slow down – to think – and then come up with a plan rather than bulldoze through the next obstacle. It’s a smaller-scale version of the film’s larger issue of failing to endow lesser characters, such as Michael and Tony, with motivations for their action. For Michael especially, whose ultimate disgust with Johnny Boy sets the film’s climax in motion, such absence is sorely obvious. Johnny Boy, the only one to regularly venture outside the neighborhood, is a voice of contempt for the status quo, demonstrated by his refusal to repay loans and gambling debts (shown in the clip above). At times he seems more a force of nature than a person, but the character remains grounded by and lage by Charlie’s friendship, itself fueled by the leads’ natural camaraderie.

The script suffers from an embarrassment of riches – or rather, the potential for riches. It’s filled with a half-dozen unnecessary digressions and scenes of dialogue that boil down to only a few userful facts or lines. Other scenes are left too implicit, drifting off or getting shunted out of the viewer’s attention before ever pulling their own weight. And somewhat like Orson Welles making Citizen Kane, there’s a sense that Scorsese used every innovative camera trick or odd perspective he could imagine. Sometimes, as when a drunken Charlie wanders through Tony’s bar (with the camera strapped to Keitel’s chest, creating woozy intimacy), the result is revelatory and powerful. Other times, as with a long scene with Charlie and Teresa in bed together, the camera tricks and edits feel derivative and forced. Filmgoers who came of age in the 80s and 90s might find it hard to comprehend Scorsese paying homage to someone else, instead of the far more familiar other way around.

The film is also notable for watching Scorsese begin to craft ideas and imagery that would later become nothing less than iconic. Compare this scene from Mean Streets:

to a similar moment in Goodfellas, released seventeen years later:

Scorsese is hardly alone in quoting his own body of work (Michael Mann and Robert Redford have done it as well, to name just two), but there’s a sense when comparing the two clips above of Scorsese the director as a beginner and as an artist in his prime. With Mean Streets, the gusto – the exuberance – sustains the film through the technical overreach. Even until the ending, which is pretty baldly concerned with artistic effect over narrative cohesion, the attempt at creative filmmaking – the ambition – is unmistakable and completely worth celebrating.

To a certain degree, that exemption applies to many of the superfluous scenes, if only to watch the director work at making his ideas come across on camera. Some pay off, even in their gestating form – as above – while some don’t. If Scorsese the judicious editor was yet to come, watching him discover his own limitations – and in the 70s they were still few and far between – is a joy in itself.

- Michael Kabel

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Five Good Books That Should Be Great Movies

Great novels that are due and overdue for a leap to the big screen.

Ignatius Reilly, the poster child for Development Hell

Books, as we’ve said before, are like movies that play in your head. Good books are movies you don’t mind watching over and over again on the screen in your mind. The film industry has appropriated all kinds of books virtually since its inception, taking material from the best fiction and nonfiction as well as from the lowest genre potboilers. There’s just no way of predicting how a book will translate: Hollywood has made masterpieces out of humble paperbacks but also made garbage of bona fide classics. Films and movies aren’t exactly alike, but they’re close enough in structure and pacing that it’s sometimes hard to believe filmmakers could screw up excellent source material. But they manage.

We were excited by recent news announcing that Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War and Edgar Rice Burroughs’ John Carter of Mars novels are headed for filming soon, at last bringing two classics of science fiction into cinema. The following is five additional examples of worthy books we’d like to see on the screen, if only so that cinema’s much wider audience can take notice of their superb stories. Just for the sake of variety, we’ve tried to include samples of literature of many different styles and periods.

Life During Wartime, by Lucius Shepard (1987) Shepard’s Cold War thriller is part horror tale, part allegory and part military war epic, forming a mosaic of genres typical of his strange genius. Set amid a U.S.-led guerrilla war in Central America, the story follows infantryman David Mingolla as he joins an elite cadre of psychic tacticians but finds his fledgling abilities much much vaster than he realized, allowing him to bend reality to his will and challenge the other psychics manipulating world events. Suggested cast: We imagine Jeremy Renner (The Unusuals) playing Mingolla, with Vinessa Shaw (Two Lovers) as his adversary and kindred spirit Deborah. Imagine the film as: A cross between Scanners, Apocalypse Now, and The Matrix. Ideal director: David Cronenberg.

The Big Nowhere, by James Ellroy (1988) A homophobic sheriff’s deputy, a mafia thug and an anguished investigator desperately pursue a brutal serial killer through McCarthy-era Los Angeles while communists, gangsters and politicians jockey for power. The second and arguably the darkest of Ellroy’s “L.A. Quartet” cycle of novels, it’s similar in tone and structure to L.A. Confidential but even bleaker and more cynical. And its ending, for better or worse, is anything but “Hollywood.” Suggested cast: Ryan Gosling (Fracture) stars as the self-loathing Deputy Danny Upshaw, alongside Michael Hogan (Battlestar Galactica) as repentant enforcer Buzz Meeks and Dean Winters (Oz) as weary crusader Mal Considine. No one on Earth should be allowed to play the monumentally evil Dudley Smith except James Cromwell, who nailed the same role in L.A. Confidential. Imagine the film as: Chinatown, Body Double and Manhunter combined. Ideal director: James Gray.

Five Skies, by Ron Carlson (2007) Three men – a petty criminal, a recent widower, and a Hollywood construction foreman – work at building a stunt ramp beside a gorge in the Idaho wilderness, all so that a female stunt driver (think Danica Patrick) can jump the ravine on Pay Per View. The three men confront their past as the ramp slowly takes shape and form. Suggested cast: Damian Lewis (Life) stars as the guilt-ridden foreman Arthur Key, alongside Chris Pine (Star Trek) as thief Ronnie Panelli and Sam Elliott as the heartbroken Darwin Gallegos. Imagine the film as: The Wages of Fear and Tender Mercies merged with Days of Heaven. Ideal director: Terrence Malick.

The Good Soldier, by Ford Madox Ford  (1927) Easy to visualize as a costume drama with an edgy anger to it - an antidote to the huffing and puffing Oscarbait of recent years – Ford’s Victorian Era novel swirls around two married couples spending weeks together over twenty years at a German spa. The titular good soldier, Edward Ashburnham, is a perfect English gentleman except for his almost compulsive need to seduce women – including his friend’s wife. Long praised as an influential work both for its structure and style, the book was previously a 1981 telepic, so its time has easily come round again. Suggested cast: Liev Shreiber (Defiance) and Cate Blanchett (Bandits) play Ashburnham and his lover Florence Dowell; Robert Downey, Jr. costars as the cuckolded John Dowell alongside Maggie Gyllenhaal (The Dark Knight) as Leonora Ashurnham. Imagine the film as: A mix of Last Year At Marienbad, The Ice Storm, and The English Patient. Ideal director: Michael Winterbottom.

Night Train, by Martin Amis (1997) Amis’ critically-lauded 1997 fling with the hardboiled detective genre features an alcoholic, emotionally crippled police detective trying to solve the apparent suicide of a beautiful scientist with every reason to live. The investigation takes a turn for the darkly existential, and Amis twists conventions further by making the troubled detective a woman, too. The novel’s abrupt ending is like two fingers joliting out of the page, poking you in the eyes. Suggested cast: Laura Linney (Breach) plays the self-destructive Detective Mike Hoolihan, Amy Adams (Enchanted) plays the deceased Jennifer Rockwell, and Paul Schneider (Away We Go) co-stars as Rockwell’s lover and suspected killer Trader Faulkner. Imagine the film as: The Pledge, Prime Suspect and Laura compressed into a brainy whodunnit. Ideal director: John Dahl.

- Michael Kabel
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Preview: Extract

Mike Judge’s new comedy puts Jason Bateman and Mila Kunis in a sex-charged workplace comedy.

Arriving as something like a gourmet dessert after a summer more loaded with junk food than usual, September’s Extract returns animation guru Mike Judge to the big screen for the first time since the whip-smart genius of 2006′s Idiocracy. Judge’s films, such as that one and the now-classic Office Space, have a tendency to run a bit ahead of their time, only getting their due recognition once the rest of our culture catches up to their subversive wit. If five years from now we all remember Extract as a classic, remember you heard about it here first.

Recalling Office Space‘s hapless Peter Gibbons, the new film follows a well-meaning everyman as his life goes through some professional and personal rejuvenation. Joel (Jason Bateman) owns a factory that makes and bottles flavor extract for cooking, a job that’s every bit as exciting as it sounds. Bored with his job, his life, and especially his marriage, he spends a lot of time complaining to laid-back bartender pal Dean (Ben Affleck) and trying to woo his wife Suzie (Kristen Wiig) into bed. Suzie’s lost interest in herself and her marriage, it seems, leaving Joel shut off from getting any despite earnest efforts to play by her romantic rules. 

Things change after a freak chain-reaction mishap leaves a male factory employee hurt in a bad place and on the hook for a giant insurance settlement.  The injured worker’s replacement, a sexy temp named Cindy, gets Bateman worked up enough to start pondering a potential affair.

Though none of that sounds like groundbreaking comedic material, remember how Office Space used the same plot contrivance as Superman III to potent comic effect.  Judge has never shared the killer instinct that fellow animation auteurs Seth MacFarlane, Trey Parker and Matt Stone frequently exhibit, and while that means his humor is often more nuanced it’s also likely cost him a degree of edginess. His films are more about performance and observational satire more than invention, not poking fun so much as holding the already ridiculous up to light and letting it speak for itself. King of the Hill has served as the SCTV to Family Guy‘s more aggressive early years-Saturday Night Live for years now.

In that regard Extract is a perfect vehicle for Bateman, who’s been honing his John Ritter-esque ordinary guy charm in films like Hancock and The Break-Up. Likewise Kunis, who apparently plays the same tempting sweetheart she was in Forgetting Sarah Marshall. Seeing as she didn’t get the attention she deserved for that performance, we can’t really fault her taking another stab at perfecting her luminescent romcom potential. The film also stars the mighty J.K. Simmons as Bateman’s partner, continuing the wily comic snark that let him steal all his scenes in darker comedies like Burn After Reading and Thank You For Smoking.

Judge himself has described the film as a flip side to Office Space, this time making the boss the nice guy and the owners the troublemakers. Given the hip star power of his tight ensemble cast, which also includes Clifton Collins, Jr. (Sunshine Cleaning) and the ubiquitous David Koechner (Anchorman), maybe this new film will escape the unfair fates that befell his previous efforts.

Extract opens in limited release September 4.

-Michael Kabel
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Forces of Evil On A Bozo Nightmare

Eight of the worst films of the early 1990s, our generation’s gilded age.

About half a dozen things wrong with the era are in this picture.

When assorted by quality, the movies of any given period resemble a pyramid, or a mountain. There is very little at the top and much more in the middle. But the bottom is the widest section, the part that’s hard to get around or avoid. There are far more bad movies than good ones, and by proportion it just makes sense that there are more really, really awful films – films that can make you angry they even exist – than films that deserve lasting notoriety. Yet our culture is mesmerized by irony (a trend that started – ironically – in the 90s), so as a bitter result many of these craptacular movies linger on, year after year.

The early 90s were not the best handful of years for American cinema, but they likely weren’t the worst, either. In fact the truly horrendous films of the late 90s far outnumber their counterparts from the decade’s first half. Last week we mentioned seven films from the period that deserved more recognition. This week, as we threatened then, we’re considering seven of the worst from that pocket of history between the Big 80s and the Shallow 90s, an era that often encapsulated both decade’s cultural pitfalls.

This list is not supposed to detail the absolute worst films, and by no means should it be considered exhaustive. A couple of them are justly forgotten; some were notorious in their time and then forgotten later. Each one’s inclusion is just our opinion, and we understand that every film is somebody’s favorite. We hope yours isn’t among those below.

Highlander 2: The Quickening (1991) An early cable TV mainstay, the first Highlander was an overachieving B-movie about immortal humans fighting a clandestine war among themselves for the prize of omniscience. For the sequel, the creators made the immortals dissidents from the planet Zeist instead, sent here in exile by its fascist dictator (Michael Ironside). Also, this time around the noble immortal Conner MacLeod (Christopher Lambert) teams up with a freedom fighter (Virginia Madsen) to overthrow the corporation that’s keeping Earth locked in perpetual night. Overly violent, stupid, and yet pompous thanks to a global warming subplot, the film buried the franchise for years, until the first film got a TV spinoff that jettisoned almost everything about the sequel.

Hudson Hawk (1991) The early 90s were also a time when studios were still working out the bugs of making ultra-expensive blockbusters that people would get excited about seeing. Hudson Hawk, a smart-assed caper comedy starring Bruce Willis and the last dregs of the Bruno shtick he’d worked through the 80s, goes nowhere while spending piles of cash on pretty much everything – sets, stars, special effects, the works. Yet the film died hard, becoming a punchline and euphemism for “megaflop” until Battlefield Earth stole that dubious distinction in 2000. Not the absolute worst film of the era, except that Tri-Star expected people to line up for tickets. And play the video game. And collect the plastic cups, all to pay off its wretched excess.

The Vanishing (1993) We figure in his fifty-year career Jeff Bridges has only made maybe four or five really lousy films. This remake of the 1988 Dutch thriller Spoorloos, directed by that film’s Geroge Sluizer, is almost assuredly one of them. Cast somewhat against type as Machiavellian serial killer Barney Cousins, Bridges steamrolls over costar Kiefer Sutherland (playing a boyfriend obsessed with finding his girlfriend, one of Cousins’ victims) so completely that the psychological tug of war between the two collapses under its own lopsided weight. The original film understood how to build ambient dread out of the unknown, and the fear of knowing something you have no choice but to learn; The Vanishing telegraphs everything rather than take its time or risk boring its audience, then changes the script to give the story a happy ending. Ah, Hollywood.

Threesome (1994) Like the similarly false Reality Bites released the same year,  writer-director Andrew Fleming’s (Hamlet 2) romantic comedy attempted to cash in on Generation X’s coming of age with this pretentious soap opera about three Gen X’ers – two guys and a girl – sharing a college dorm suite. The script contains every indie trope beaten to death throughout the decade: the world-weary voiceover narration, the superficial sex, the self-consciously “witty” vulgarity, the abrupt and unearned emotional reversals. Stars Josh Hamilton, Stephen Baldwin, and Lara Flynn Boyle are good-looking, vacant, and stiffly deliberate, as if they’re aware they’re in a movie “with a message.” Gen X’ers stayed away in droves, even while the demographic-targeted soundtrack became a hit on college radio stations.

Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1992 and 94) We mention these two together because they were part of the era’s trend towards high-budget monster movies made by the era’s top talent. Francis Ford Coppola helmed the lush Dracula version, starring the reliably fearless Gary Oldman (The Dark Knight) as the titular count and Anthony Hopkins as his nemesis Van Helsing. Winona Ryder and Keanu Reeves are as flat as ever portraying doomed lovers Jonathan Harker and Mina Murray, and critics and fans of the novel took umbrage to the script’s liberal additions of sex and bloody violence. Coppola’s direction and production design are bloated and unconvincing. Hopkins hams away as usual while Oldman, in a scrotum-shaped wig and old lady nightgown, tries to keep up with the increasingly overheated proceedings.

Still, the film made money, and two years later Coppola produced a Frankenstein film directed by rising triple threat Kenneth Branagh, who cast himself as the mad doctor and Robert DeNiro as his creation. The result, somewhat surprisingly, was bleak, turgid, and opaque while struggling beneath the same middlebrow overreach that doomed Dracula. None of the actors are really bad, though DeNiro often seems uncomfortable in period dress, probably partly at least because Branagh and co-star Helena Bonham-Carter (Fight Club) always seem to be in movies about Victorian England. Critics at the time wondered if Branagh was out of his element or in over his head, and the film’s box-office failure delivered his until-then wunderkind career trajectory a punishing blow.

Jade (1995) A film seemingly built in studio committee for box office success, William Friedkin’s (The French Connection) Jade aimed to recreate the kinky titillation success of screenwriter Joe Eszterhaus’ previous Basic Instinct. Casting emerging leading men David Caruso and Chazz Palminteri alongside screen vamps Linda Fiorentino and Angie Everhart, the story of a gruesome murder linked to a sex club among San Francisco’s political elite was muddled, hard to follow, and surprisingly light on sex appeal. Friedkin, known for his gritty ultra-realism, was a poor choice to realize the story’s stylish affluence, and Caruso and Palminteri failed to generate chemistry with their gorgeous co-stars. The result was a film about dirty sex that was uncomfortable with itself.

Exit To Eden (1994) A notorious bomb about an island of dominatrices and the love slaves they love,the film inexplicably stars Dan Aykroyd and Rosie O’Donnell as New Orleans cops going undercover there to catch a gang of jewel smugglers, and – and! – it’s directed by Gary Marshall, the creator of Happy Days. Not funny and aggressively unsexy despite Dana Delaney’s (Desperate Housewives) warm turn as a mistress learning to soften up, the all-over-the-place vibe isn’t helped by O’Donnell’s smarmy narration or the smutty jokes that seemed a cop-out from the issues that Anne Rice’s original novel eagerly confronted. Even today, it’s hard to imagine the film’s target audience. Was it people who thought Julia Roberts should have worn more studded leather in Pretty Woman? Those who thought Aykroyd was sexy? Bondage enthusiasts who wanted to laugh at themselves?

YouTube doesn’t have much of this film. Perhaps that’s just as well.

On a special note, last night Screaming Blue Reviews received its 100,000th visitor. If you’ve been reading us from the beginning or (like most of you) showed up looking for a picture of Mickey Rourke or Grace Park, thanks for coming and please check us out again.

- Michael Kabel

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Review: Up

A clumsy and often formulaic story drags Pixar’s new adventure down.

At the risk of stating the obvious, after last year’s masterful Wall*E probably anything Pixar produced next would suffer in comparison. With Up, the studio’s tenth feature film, co-directors and screenwriters Pete Docter and Bob Peterson have instead made a frequently uninspired, sometimes dragging jungle adventure that too often bears comparisons to one of rival studio Dreamworks’ dreary marketing centerpeieces.  Too long in the middle and too predictable by half, the new film is the studio’s least achievement since the little-loved Cars. Sadly, it’s also seldom fun to watch.

To its credit, the film begins well, with the kind of sweet nostalgia that has infused depth and pathos to the studio’s previous The Incredibles, Ratatouille, and of course Wall*E (that robot casts a long shadow.) As a youth growing up sometime in the era of movie serials and dirigibles, plodding and  uncoordinated Carl Fredricksen (voiced by Ed Asner) dreams of following in the footsteps of his hero, the explorer and big game hunter Charles Muntz (Christopher Plummer). When he stumbles upon Ellie (Elie Docter), a neighborhood girl who shares his romantic wanderlust, the two kindred spirits grow up together and get married instead.

The montage showing their long and contented life together (despite their inability to have children) is the highlight of the film. Set entirely to Michael Giacchino’s lovely score and without dialogue, the sequence fills in a flurry of details with grace and sincere emotion (a good example: notice the subtle class distinction in evidence at the wedding) After Elie passes away and the home they shared becomes surrounded by high-rise construction projects, a 78-year old Carl attaches thousands of balloons to his house’s fireplace as a means of transporting it to Paradise Falls, the Venezuelan jungle (and home to Muntz) that was Ellie’s unrealized dream. The plan goes fine until Carl realizes the house has a stowaway in the form of chubby, cherubic Wilderness Explorer scout Russell (Jordan Nagai).

Despite Russell’s earnest bumbling, Carl gets the house close to the falls, landing just three days hike from the ideal spot Ellie wanted it to go. The trek through the surrounding jungle forms the second act, and that’s where the film gets lost in several different ways. Russell discovers a rare (and eminently merchandise-friendly) rainbow-colored ostrich thing that, unknown to them, is being pursued by the talking dogs bred by Muntz to patrol the jungle for interlopers. The old explorer, it seems, is determined to capture the bird after scientists dubbed his previous specimen a fake. Helped by the simpleminded but loyal hound Dug (Peterson), Russell convinces Carl to help get the bird to safety after Muntz and his dog pack turn on the hapless newcomers.

The chase from Muntz’s dirigible encampment and through the jungle, towards the bird’s – whom Russell names Kevin, for no discernible reason – sanctuary goes on too long, absorbing time that would better serve the story if used to flesh out the characters. Russell especially remains static throughout, all dim-witted enthusiasm and wide-eyed gusto that’s not as effective a counterpoint to the glum, rickety Carl’s grief-fueled determination as it needs to be. The product of a broken home and quietly despondent over an apathetic father, Russell in his own way is as desperate for escape as Carl. But in dumping his entire backstory into a single scene Docter and Peterson instead seem content merely to get his motivation over with. To quote Diana Rigg in The Great Muppet Caper, “It’s plot exposition. It has to go somewhere.”

Likewise the one-dimensional Muntz, who suffers for lack of depth in comparison to other Pixar antagonists such as The Incredible‘s Syndrome or for the kind of freewheeling snarl demonstrated by Monsters, Inc.‘s Randall Boggs. Muntz is ostensibly obsessed with bringing Kevin back to the world for his own glory, but doesn’t do much beside point and shout orders to his canine goon squad. Plummer’s rich voice, full of Old World patrician authority, isn’t really utilized to its potential as a result. Asner, an underrated character actor in the 70s and largely forgotten since the 80s, gives his performance a full range of emotions despite the repetitive situations into which Carl is flung.

Ultimately, all the running around has to lead somewhere, but a plot point involving Carl revisiting his battered house/ship for a last encounter with Ellie’s memory only leads in turn to more chasing, as situations dovetail tidily towards a conclusion. That’s fine, but it suggests Docter and Peterson know the film’s heart is its strength, and cash in on that warmth to move the plot forward. Worse, the chasing includes some pretty intense violence, including a beating given Dug by the pack’s domineering leader Alpha, fiery airplane collisions, and Muntz’s long fall to his death. Creating animation that holds adult audiences’ attention is a laudable goal, but getting there through the use of violence is an awful lot like cheating.

Fortunately the film comes to its senses near the end, with a lovely denouement that puts all the characters happily together while only seeming a little forced. The closing credits are clever as well, presented as a family album that, like Wall*E again, moves the characters’ story forward in a nice “bonus scenes” kind of way. Finally, the short film before the feature, a weird and high-concept fable entitled Partly Cloudy, is strictly hit or miss. I found it didactic and meanspirited, but the audience surrounding me seemed to enjoy it.

Up is the kind of film that you might love coming out of the theatre and esteem less each time you think about it. It is not Pixar’s best work, but given its many flaws in comparison to their previous accomplishments it’s hard not to think maybe they weren’t trying to outdo themselves after all. In this summer of disappointments, how sad to think that in making Up such gifted creators might have been aiming low all along.

- Michael Kabel

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Here we are now! Entertain us!

Seven unsung films from the first half of the 1990s, our generation’s gilded age.

The 90s were so great, even Mike Myers was cool.

To paraphrase the old cliche about the 1960s, if you can remember the 90s you probably wish you were still there. Described as “the best of times” by at least one historian, it was a decade of unheralded prosperity and at times tremendous naivete. It was also often much darker than that, an era whose popular culture was at times strangled by the superficial, obsessed with appearances, and in many ways the foundation of today’s cynical approach to nonthreatening, non-challenging entertainment pablum. Find a problem with mass culture today and it probably began in the 90s, including not least of which this damned Internet fad.

For film enthusiasts and scholars, the decade was a treasure trove. If not quite ever matching the artistic successes of the 1970s, the 90s at least offered a Silver Age of film craftsmanship and experimentation. The burgeoning indie film movement had yet to become the big business it’s mutated into now, and the major studios were still willing to take occasional chances on risky projects such as Terry Gilliam’s The Fisher King (1991) and Mike Figgis’ Leaving Las Vegas (1995). New directing talent such as Quentin Tarantino, James Gray, and David Fincher all began their careers, while many of the veteran filmmakers and stars of the 70s continued putting out quality work.

The following are seven films that were released between 1991 and 1995, more or less the heydey of marketing strategies aimed squarely at the so-called Generation X, though this list is not limited purely to films aimed at that demographic. Rather, it’s meant to illuminate the lesser known but no less noteworthy films of the time, so more famous works – i.e. Pulp Fiction, Reality Bites and its imitators, The Shawshank Redemption – here suffer a small case of benign neglect.

Ruby In Paradise (1993): Among the earliest darlings of Sundance, this low-budget, low-volume drama about a Tennessee woman (Ashely Judd, in her breakout role) fleeing an abusive husband for the relative beauty of off-season Panama City, Florida won raves for its emotional honesty and realistic characterizations. Defying the modern female protagonist stereotype, Judd’s Ruby is not wise beyond her years, spunky, or even whimsical. She’s complex, clever, and curious instead – harder to demonstrate on film, though Judd nails her performance. It’s time for a DVD re-release.

Rush (1991): Remember Eric Clapton’s comeback song “Tears In Heaven”? It was actually composed as the theme to this bleak based-on-truth drama about undercover Texas narcotics detectives (Jason Patric and Jennifer Jason Leigh) falling in love and getting hooked on smack while trying to bust a local drug kingpin (Gregg Allman). Eventually, the strung out pair resort to falsifying evidence to close the case. Not a cheerful film to watch, and more in keeping with the gritty cop films of the 70s than the fast-talking wiseguys that comprised much of 90s crime cinema, nevertheless it’s still gripping viewing.

Patric was for many years a popular public choice to play Jim Morrison – a role that eventually went to Val Kilmer in Oliver Stone’s turgid The Doors (1992). The trailer above shows his uncanny resemblance to the dead singer in full effect.

Single White Female (1992): Leigh starred or co-starred in no less than ten films between 1991 and 95, so it was probably only a matter of time before she crossed paths with the era’s similarly prolific Bridget Fonda. That teaming came in Barbet Shroeder’s (Reversal of Fortune) psycho roommate thriller Single White Female. Playing with equal mean-spirited glee on Fatal Attraction-inspired genre expectations as well as Fonda’s and Leigh’s respective good girl and vamp screen images, it nevertheless falls apart near the end, when some unconvincing psychobabble tries to redeem the preceding tawdry fun. Still, it’s a great pastiche of the era’s twentysomething angst. The trailer below is virtually a time capsule, including voiceover (like many of the trailers in this piece) by the late, great Don LaFontaine.

Bob Roberts (1992): Tim Robbins’ creative output has dwindled in the current decade, and as a result his ballsy body of work from the late 80s and early 90s is slowly getting forgotten. Robbins wrote and directed this caustic, tortuously prescient mockumentary about a charmingly evil Senatorial candidate who wraps his neo-Nazi dogma in Bob Dylanesque folk songs and faux-rebellious swagger. No less than Gore Vidal portrays Roberts’ hapless opponent Brickley Paiste, a character based in part on Senator Ted Kennedy. Much of the film was improvised and drawn from both This Is Spinal Tap and the Dylan documentary Don’t Look Back, weaving social and political commentary together with a wry assassination and conspiracy subplot that kept period audiences guessing and will keep current viewers ruefully shaking their heads. The film concludes with Roberts winning the election with 52 percent of the vote.

Dazed & Confused (1993): A sensation among critics who were just old enough by the mid-90s to remember what high school was like in the mid-70s, Richard Linklater’s nostalgic but honest look back at the summer of 1976 remains a mellow jolt of fun. And much like its spiritual ancestor Fast Times At Ridgemont High a decade before, the film was a finishing school for the decade’s indie film mainstays, including Parker Posey, Adam Goldberg, Rory Cochrane, Joey Lauren Adams and Nicky Katt, as well as featured appearances by bound-for-mainstream stars Ben Affleck, Milla Jovovich, and Matthew McConaughey. More about mood and setting than character or plot, the film remains merely a fun diversion, though its slacker aspirations never pretend to anything greater.

Kalifornia (1993): Stone’s Natural Born Killers got all the attention in the decade’s “serial killers hit the open road” sweepstakes, overshadowing this Dominic Sena (Swordfish) directed thriller. A pre-X-Files David Duchovny and Michelle Forbes (Homicide: Life On The Streets) play urbanite intellectuals (he’s writing a book on serial killers) who pick up redneck serial killer Brad Pitt and his girlfriend Juliette Lewis while visiting famous murder sites cross-country. The film is deliberately 70s-esque in its approach to its subject matter and showcasing realistic characterizations – probably why the more simplistic Killers got all the public adulation. Now, why Forbes wasn’t a bigger success as a femme fatale we’ll never understand.

Strange Days (1995): Exploiting the decade’s pre-millennial tension, Kathryn Bigelow’s taut near-future suspenser cast Ralph Fiennes as the awesomely-named Lenny Nero, an ex-cop turned dealer in illicit virtual reality videos. Stuck with a tape showing a powerful rapper/social reformer (Glenn Plummer) assassinated by the LAPD on the eve of the millennium, Nero tries to use the tape as leverage in getting back the singer ex-girlfriend (Lewis again) who dumped him years before, ruining his life. Even if the virtual reality angle is woefully outdated by now, Bigelow’s expert mood construction as well as ace acting by Fiennes, Angela Bassett and others – including Vincent D’Onofrio and William Fichtner as the last cops in the world you want pulling you over – make the film unmissable, even a troubled decade-and-a-half later.

Next Wednesday we’ll return to the era of the early 90s and explore some of the worst films of that period. In the meantime, please post your own additions to this list in the comments section.

- Michael Kabel
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DVD Review: The International

Actioner about an evil bank arrives on DVD and Blu-Ray tomorrow.

Two of director Tom Tykwer’s previous films – Run Lola Run and The Princess and the Warrior – feature their respective heroes robbing banks, so it’s probably no surprise that The International, his latest effort, centers around a pair of noble lawmen trying to bring down a corrupt banking institution. But unlike those earlier exceptional works the film fails hard, thanks in large part to first time screenwriter Eric Singer’s disrespect for mundane details.

The hero this time around is Louis Salinger (Clive Owen, Children of Men), an Interpol agent with a deeply personal vendetta against the International Bank of Business and Credit, a corrupt worldwide corporate leviathan that, beneath its legit activities, caters to money launderers, gangsters, political revolutionaries, and other criminals.  With the help of New York Assistant District Attorney Eleanor Whitman (Naomi Watts, Eastern Promises), Salinger pursues his crusade around the world, inevitably finding his integrity and his morals compromised along the way.

Ostensibly aiming for a more cerebral approach than the decade’s legion of Bourne imitators, Singer’s complicated script routinely gets lost in its own complexities. The Bank’s elaborate scheme – controlling the sale of Chinese missile launchers to conflict zones around the world, thereby positioning the Bank to have unfettered manipulation of global debt – demands the viewer’s attention but ultimately collapses under a tangle of narrative shortcuts and obfuscations. As a Bank employee (Armin Mueller-Stahl, Avalon) explains at one point, the difference between truth and fiction is that “Fiction has to make sense.” But Singer ignores his own logic, and as a result the story grows littered with paradoxes and conundrums that fly in the face of real world, “truthful” logic. It’s never fully explained why Whitman, a New York ADA, is allowed or even able to gallivant around Europe on the trail of European criminal activity. For that matter, what kind of villains would employ a hitman with an obvious, easily discernible disability? And how is Whitman able to get a hold of a top secret CIA dossier when the agency is supposed to be heavily involved with the Bank’s activities? 

Perhaps the most egregious jettisoning of logic is the film’s central set piece, staged in a life-size scale replica of the Guggenheim museum.  Salinger engages in open warfare with a slew of Bank-employed hitmen brandishing automatic weapons, even as clusters of innocent bystanders run and hide for their lives. The complete absence of first responders and security guards is so conspicuous and so completely out of tonal sync with the rest of the movie – loud, dumb and overly drawn out to the point of tedium – that the film’s momentum fully grounds to a halt. Like a daydream during a Poli Sci lecture, the entire sequence is a bit of fluff that ruins the impact of the heavier content taking place it. 

Admittedly, abstract displays of socioeconomic malevolence are nigh impossible to display within a two-hour movie without boring the audience straight towards the exits.  But it’s disappointing all the same that Tykwer takes the easy way out and conveys the Bank’s evil through intermittent exhibitions of extreme violence. The murders of Salinger’s colleague and of a sympathetic political candidate are loaded with viscera, but the Guggenheim sequence contains more blood and gore than some low-budget horror films. By comparison, acts of violence against the Bank’s personnel either occur off camera or are downplayed with minimal detail. It’s a disingenuous, at this point clichéd trick: rather than explore any moral ambiguity, the filmmakers sanitize violence against evil men by isolating the audience from it (even as they are brutally subjected to garish displays of wrath against the innocent). Loaded with detail on one end and gore on the other, such issues never rise above the muddle.

Given such a situation, it’s sometimes possible for a film to become redeemed through its performances, but that’s not the case here, but the casting is starting to feel a bit knee-jerk: misanthropically violent, European settings, political intrigue – this thing could only star Clive Owen.  If you’ve seen Closer, or The Bourne Identity, or Shoot ‘Em Up, or Children of Men, or Sin City, then you know exactly what to expect – staring laser beams, gravelly voice, snarling, blah, blah, blah.  The lovely, reserved Watts’ presence serves as a reminder of the vastly superior Eastern Promises (in which she starred opposite Viggo Mortensen, a bona fide actor), and while she’s an incredibly beautiful and talented she’s also miscast as a workaholic civil servant.  Still, the film’s most interesting idea is its villainy, and the villains dominate their screen time: Brian F. O’Byrne shines as the intense yet nondescript hitman, and Ulrich Thomsen exudes sinister, dispassionate charisma as the Bank’s mastermind.

Finally, something about the music. While  The International marks the first film where Tykwer doesn’t participate in screenwriting duties, he did once again compose his own musical score (along with frequent collaborators Johnny Klimek and Reinhold Heil). Sadly, this disappoints as well. The theme to The Princess and the Warrior was a haunting, ethereal work, and the riveting score to Run Lola Run remains a masterpiece both among soundtracks and the techno genre as a whole. What a shame, then, that the score to The Internationalgenerates no impressions one way or another. For any other director, such a venial flaw would not be noteworthy; but in light of his previous successes, Tykwer’s perfunctory musical effort only serves to dampen the film’s energy even further.

Undeniably the most mainstream of his films, one can’t help but wonder if The Internationalwould have been a stronger picture if the director had assisted Singer with the screenplay or taken the time to tailor it to his signature filmmaking style. Instead, moviegoers are left with a fragmented, derivative genre picture that its own director couldn’t reconcile.  Considering the crucial sociopolitical relevance of the subject matter, there’s still a good story in there somewhere – but if Tykwer can’t be bothered to find it, we shouldn’t be expected to look.

- Stephen Kabel

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(Note: An earlier version of this review originally appeared for the film’s theatrical release.)

David Carradine: 1936 – 2009

Prolific television and film star’s life often mirrored his work.

As you’ve probably already heard, legendary film and television actor David Carradine was found dead in a Bangkok hotel room Wednesday. He was 72 years old. While details surrounding his death are still emerging  – and the lurid details are available elsewhere - he will nevertheless be remembered  by most audiences for decades of starring and supporting roles, predominantly in the martial arts films genre. Perhaps known best for his starring turn on the television series Kung Fu, which aired from 1972-75, younger film audiences will more likely recognize him from Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill (2004), in which he played the titular villain Bill ‘Snake Charmer.’

With an astonishing resume listing more than 200 film and television appearances, almost entirely in action, martial arts, and western films, Carradine at times seemed an inevitable screen presence. The son of film star John Carradine, he trained as a musician and ballet dancer before beginning his career onstage in New York in the late 1960s. More television work followed before he became a household name playing the wandering martial arts paladin Kwai Chang Caine on Kung Fu. Ironically, he had no knowledge of martial arts before accepting the role but became a lifelong practioner of it during and after the show’s run.

During that same period he starred in several offbeat and unusual film projects, including Martin Scorcese’s Boxcar Bertha (1972) and Ingmar Bergman’s The Serpent’s Egg (1977). In 1975 he co-starred oppostie Sylvester Stallone in Death Race 2000, playing the antiheroic cross-country racer Frankenstein. Astonishingly violent and darkly comic, the film attracted a sizable cult following, eventually getting remade as the Jason Statham-starring Death Race just last year. He also starred in the underseen, Oscar-nominated Woody Guthrie biography Bound for Glory (1976). Featured roles in the television mini-series North and South (1985) and opposite his brothers Robert and Keith in the western The Long Riders (1980) also kept him in the public eye.

Carradine in Kill Bill

But Kung Fu cast a long shadow, and in time he found himself shoehorned into variations of the Caine character or cast in shabby low-budget efforts that exploited his public image: Safari 3000 (1982); Future Force (1989); Karate Cop (1991). Always a hard partier, he sank into years of alcohol and drug abuse that lasted through the 80s and 90s. His fortunes changed somewhat in the mid-90s, however, when the sequel series Kung Fu: The Legend Continues ran for four years in syndication. Though set in the present-day, Carradine co-starred as Caine’s grandson, himself a martial arts master, in modern day Los Angeles. He also finally dropped the booze and drugs in 1996, mirroring his most famous role by adopting a Zen attitude towards life.

In recent years he became a regular guest star on dozens of television shows, including Alias, Charmed, and Medium, usually employing his suave, relaxed screen presence as a means of subtly communicating great evil. His most visible recent screen performance was in Tarantino’s Kill Bill: the director reportedly only cast him as the duplicitous ringleader of a gang of assassins after Warren Beatty passed on the role. Though his appearance failed to launch a comeback to bigger-budget work, Carradine continued working in smaller-budget films, and at the time of his death he was in Bangkok to co-star in the internationally-financed Stretch.

By way of tribute, the following clip is Carradine’s “Superman” monologue from Kill Bill, Vol. 2, showcasing his effortless command of the material as well as the space around him.

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DVD Review: Defiance

Sometimes riveting, often flawed World War II true story arrives on DVD and Blu-Ray this week.

Defiance writer-director Edward Zwick (The Last Samurai, Blood Diamond) has a long history of making action movies with more substance – though only slightly – than the typical Hollywood special effects dross. There are actual stories contained within his films, and if an occasional gunfight or epic battle sometimes occurs to amp up each one’s bombast and make it more marketable to wider audiences, he seems content to walk that tightrope. If none of his films are necessarily great cinema, they’re not entirely disposable either.

With Defiance Zwick has potentially the best story material of his career with which to work, and published reports that he spent a dozen years getting its true-life World War II story to screen suggests his respect for the source material. Though the film’s performances are always engaging and the story nothing if not compelling, it nevertheless almost collapses under its action movie shoot-em-up quota and by a script that fails to articulate its ideas past the most obvious conclusions. Though it’s unfair to call the film disappointing, it never achieves its gripping potential, either.

 The film centers on the story of the four Bielski brothers, Polish Jews who fled into the Naliboki forests after the Nazi advance killed their father. The brothers, including Tuvia (Daniel Craig, Quantum of Solace), Zus (Liev Shreiber, X-Men Origins: Wolverine), and Asael (Jamie Bell, Jumper), initially plan to use the forest’s resources to outlast the Nazi occupation. But fellow Jewish refugees continue to wander into the forest, defenseless, and the Bielskis find themselves both caretakers and protectors of the growing refugee population. As word of Nazi and Nazi-sympathizer atrocities filter their way to the group’s ramshackle encampment, Zus begins leading raids both for food and revenge.

Tuvia and Zus are opposites, and their understated hostility, fueled by Zus’ badgering but agitated by Tuvia’s evasiveness, drives much of the film’s early drama. It’s a neat trick that screen tough guy Craig should play the more inward, methodical brother, the one given more to planning than action. By contrast, Shreiber’s Zus is a snarling bear of a man with percolating Socialist sympathies and a deep resentment of the “pretentious,” wealthier Jews who now need the Bielskis’ help. He eventually decamps to join a Soviet partisan band elsewhere in the forest, leaving Tuvia, Aseal, and youngest brother Aron (George MacKay) to help the swelling band of helpless refugees endure a freezing winter that brings with it a Typhus outbreak as well as a constant scarcity of food.

The film runs into trouble when it becomes time for something to happen, and what happens arrives too little or too late to bring the film together into a decisive success. It’s strange that a 137-minute long action film should feel hollow near its center, but the lack of context given to the refugees’ struggle doesn’t ground the film. Other reviews have suggested that the dearth of visible onscreen antagonists – a Nazi villain a la Ralph Fiennes’ Amon Goeth in Schindler’s List, for example – keeps any sense of danger from becoming too palpable. But such absence speaks to co-writer Zwick’s fine intentions but also his struggles as a storyteller. The script confines the struggle to the forest, creating a hyper-reality that should propel the mounting tension; yet the episodic structure (there must be a half-dozen subplots, not all of them necessary) incessantly diffuses forward momentum. Events begin to simmer and then the story shifts to one of the myriad other plot threads.

This lack of concentration also makes the plot and film itself feel longer than they are, which again with a two hour-plus runtime only makes the story feel flabbier. Some of the subplots are worthy of greater development: the camp layabouts who bully their weaker neighbors, the tension between the richer Jews and their poorer relations, a touching romance between Asael and a young villager (Mia Wasikowska). Other plots, including Zus’ bonding with his Soviet compatriots and a going-through-the-motions romance between Tuvia and an aristocrat (Alexa Davalos, Feast of Love), never get the room they need to develop. It’s not that they’re poorly played – Shrieber, Craig, and Davalos could all probably summon chemistry with a brick wall – but that the storylines themselves are as malnourished as the camp’s inhabitants.

As with Zwick’s The Last Samurai, all the character work leads up to a giant set piece battle climax, this time involving the long-feared full-strength Nazi assault. The two set pieces comprising the third act, a firefight against a tank and a bombing raid on the camp, are effectively staged even if they feel perfunctory arriving so close to the film’s ending. Zus’ cavalry charge rescue is also, unfortunately, Hollywood hokum at its finest. When the postscripts arrive – and make no mistake, this is the kind of film for which postscripts were invented – you almost feel as if the end is finally come, even as the story presented begins to peter out. Movies at their best tell us worthy stories of the human struggle. Defiance does its story justice, even if it doesn’t quite realize the same accomplishment for itself.

- Michael Kabel

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 (Note: An earlier version of this review originally appeared for the film’s theatrical release.)