Movie/TV Reviews

VIDEO UPDATE

Susan Granger’s VIDEO UPDATE for Friday, May 19:

Ralph Fiennes and Julianne Moore are an adulterous couple in “The End of the Affair,” Neil Jordan’s romantic tale set in London during W.W. II. He’s a moody novelist, tortured by jealousy, while she’s trapped by circumstance in a dull, loveless marriage to a civil servant, Stephen Rea.
In “Cradle Will Rock,” Tim Robbins evokes a true incident in the 1930s when theater and politics, big business and art collided in a mini-cultural revolution over Marc Blitzstein’s agit-prop musical drama. The cast includes Susan Sarandon, Bill Murray, Joan Cusack, and Hank Azaria.
“Dreaming of Joseph Lees” is a confused, conflicted Gothic tale of romantic obsession, starring Samantha Morton as an Englishwoman preoccupied with her second cousin, while “Felicia’s Journey” follows Atom Egoyan’s insidious story of a good-hearted, pregnant Irish country girl, Elaine Cassidy, who is befriended by a seemingly gentle caterer, Bob Hoskins.
For fun, there are two all-new “Batman Beyond” videos – “Spellbound” and “Crush,” each featuring three exciting new episodes of the popular Saturday morning TV series. “Walking With Dinosaurs,” the BBC’s highly acclaimed six-part series recently shown on the Discovery Channel is now on video and DVD. And, finally, after 20 years, you can view “The Hollywood Knights.” Reminiscent of “American Graffiti,” it recalls the comedy antics of “Porky’s” and “Animal House” with a very young Michelle Pfeiffer, Tony Danza, Fran Drescher and Robert Wuhl.
PICK OF THE WEEK: When you think of James Bond, you want escapist fantasy – and that’s just what you get in “The World Is Not Enough,” the 19th installment in the most successful, long-running film franchise in cinema history. As 007, Pierce Brosnan is after an international terrorist with Sophie Marceau and Denise Richards as beautiful distractions.

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VIDEO UPDATE

Movie/TV Reviews / Susan

Susan Granger’s VIDEO UPDATE for Friday, May 12:

Mother’s Day is this Sunday, so what better time to explore movie moms – good, bad and indifferent? If you’re feeling smothered, there’s Albert Brooks’ hilarious “Mother.” If you’re into sentiment, “I Remember Mama” is an old-fashioned tear-jerker. Plus there’s “Mildred Pierce,” “Murmur of the Heart,” and “Terms of Endearment.” More recently, try “Steel Magnolias,” “One True Thing,” “Stepmom,” “Mermaids” and “Baby Boom.” And, if you’ve ever thought of switching roles, try “Freaky Friday” with a very young Jodie Foster and Barbara Harris.
Richard Farnsworth copped an Oscar nomination as the elderly Midwesterner who drove his lawn-mower cross-country in “The Straight Story.” And “Gladiator” Russell Crowe, Oscar-nominated for “The Insider,” plays a small-town hockey star in “Mystery Alaska.”
Martin Scorsese is one of our most respect auteurs but “Bringing Out the Dead” resounds as a chaotic but ultimately hollow melodrama. Nicholas Cage is a tormented, sleep-deprived EMS worker in New York City. Subsisting on whiskey and cigarettes as he roams Hell’s Kitchen on the frenzied graveyard shift, he’s haunted by his rescues and failures.
“New Blood” is an action gangland drama in which Nick Moran, bleeding from a gunshot wound, turns up on the doorstep of his estranged father, played by John Hurt, who realizes his son might just be the heart donor who can save his ailing twin sister. But Nick’s not about to give up his heart for nothing – there’s a price to be paid and a deal to be struck between father and son.
PICK OF THE WEEK: Oscar winner “American Beauty” is a powerfully disturbing black comedy about dysfunctional families in American suburbia. Kevin Spacey won an Oscar as the burnt-out ad exec, while Annette Bening was Oscar-nominated as his high-strung, ambitious wife.

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VIDEO REPORT

Movie/TV Reviews / Susan

Susan Granger’s VIDEO REPORT for week of Friday, May 5th:

In honor of the Cinco de Mayo holiday, Columbia TriStar Home Video has repriced five titles at $9.95@ :”Dance With Me” starring singing star Chayanne; “Desperado” featuring Antonio Banderas; “Fools Rush In,” a cross-cultural romantic comedy with Salma Hayek and Matthew Perry; “La Bamba” with Esai Morales as Ritchie Valens; and “The Mask of Zorro,” a swashbuckling adventure with Antonio Banderas – all available with Spanish subtitles.
“Virtual Sexuality” is a cyber comedy about a 17 year-old (Laura Fraser) who is determined to find Mr. Right, even if she has to create an electronic facsimile using virtual reality. And “Dogma” is Kevin Smith’s controversial, irreverent fantasy about two banished angels who find a loophole to get back into heaven but must destroy humankind in the process. Matt Damon, Ben Affleck, salma Hayek, Linda Fiorentino and Alan Rickman star.
Susan Sarandon and Natalie Portman team up in “Anywhere But Here,” a kooky mother-teenage daughter coming-of-age road-trip from Bay City, Wisconsin, to Beverly Hills, California.
For tots, there’s the direct-to-video “Rugrats: Discover America,” featuring four different escapades plus a 7-minute behind-the-scenes feature on “Rugrats in Paris – The Movie.”
And, for collectors, a special edition of “The General’s Daughter” with John Travolta has four previously deleted scenes, including an alternate ending, and a “making of” feature.
PICKS OF THE WEEK: “Being John Malkovich” is Charlie Kaufman’s bold, unconventional and inventive blend of sci-fi with self-parody, starring John Cusack, Cameron Diaz, Catherine Keener and John Malkovich. And “Galaxy Quest” is a hilarious action comedy with Tim Allen and Sigourney Weaver as TV actors who starred in a once-popular sci-fi TV series and are now abducted by aliens who believe they really are intergalactic heroes.

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The New World

Movie/TV Reviews / Susan

Susan Granger’s review of “The New World” (New Line Cinema)

Writer/director Terrence Malick relishes poetic imagery the way other filmmakers devour plot and characters. In his movies, the scenery is often more memorable than the scenes.
It’s 1607 when three ships commissioned by the London Virginia Company land on the shores of the James River. Captain John Smith (Colin Farrell) and his British cohorts are see America for the first time, along with the exotic, brown-skinned “naturals.” While Smith and some of his men venture deep into the forest to meet with the feared Powhatan chief (August Schellenberg), others establish the colony that will become Jamestown. Starvation and disease may ravage others, yet Smith frolics in the splendor of the bucolic landscape, playfully rolling in the waving maize with the chief’s smitten daughter, Pocahontas (15 year-old Q’Orianka Kilcher). Although their idealized “romance” was probably more fiction than fact, it occupies the majority of the narrative. Eventually, Pocahontas will surrender to 17th century London “civilization” in high heels and a corset as she acquires an aristocratic husband (Christian Bale) and heartbreak.
Like in “Days of Heaven,” “Badlands” and “The Thin Red Line,” Malick reflects on innocence and paradise lost, utilizing voice-overs and redundant internal monologues, aided by Emmanuel Lubezki’s photography, Jack Fisk’s production design, Jacqueline West’s costumes and James Horner’s musical score, which incorporates Wagner and Mozart. Actors Christopher Plummer, David Thewlis, Wes Studi and Yorick Van Wageningen appear and evaporate, leaving little impression. On the Granger Movie Gauge of 1 to 10, “The New World” is a lyrical, meditative, slow-paced 6. Sumptuous but sleep-inducing, think of it as “Pocahontas” minus the songs.

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Wolf Creek

Movie/TV Reviews / Susan

Susan Granger’s review of “Wolf Creek” (The Weinstein Company)

Based on true serial murder cases, this violent horror picture is truly gruesome and repulsive.
It begins quietly with two British girls, Liz Hunter (Cassandra Magrath) and Kristy Earl (Kestie Morassi), on holiday in Australia, preparing to explore the remote meteor sites at Wolf Creek National Park. Their companion Ben (Nathan Phillips), a Sydney native, scares them with campfire stories about eyewitness accounts of flying saucers and unexplained phenomena. But the true terror does not emanate from outer space. Instead, it occurs when their car breaks down and their watches stop working at the same moment. That’s when a huge backwoodsman Mick Taylor (John Jarratt) appears, offering a tow and help with repairs. Ignoring omens of dread, they wind up as prisoners at his abandoned mining camp. Judging by the collection of corpses on his walls, he’s into crucifying unsuspecting tourists – and they’re next. Who will succumb? Who will survive? One thing for sure: this cackling, sadistic villain is certainly no Crocodile Dundee.
While writer/producer/director Greg Mclean refers to two unsolved crimes in the Outback, he seems to channel the bloody, masochistic “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” slasher concept, detailing a slow, gradual build-up, engendering mounting tension and suspense, along with a prolonged, punishing, graphic conclusion that makes “Open Water” look tame. His tortuous film-making technique on high-definition video stock is gritty and basic – with credit to photographer Will Gibson. His dialogue is realistic and Francois Tetaz’s score is creepy. But Mclean also never fully explains why the trio’s watches stopped working. On the Granger Movie Gauge of 1 to 10, “Wolf Creek” is a gratuitously vicious, ominous 1. Don’t say you weren’t warned.

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Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada

Movie/TV Reviews / Susan

Susan Granger’s review: “Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada” (Sony Pictures Classics)

Tommy Lee Jones makes an auspicious big-screen directing debut with this contemporary Western that emerged a 2005 Cannes Film Festival winner for Best Actor and Best Screenplay.
When rancher Pete Perkins (Jones) discovers that his close friend, Melquiades Estrada (Julio Cesar Cedillo), an illegal Mexican immigrant, has been brutally murdered and unceremoniously dumped into a shallow grave in the town cemetery, he vows to track down the killer and exact revenge. An accommodating diner waitress (Melissa Leo) passes along evidence that points to a particularly brutal Border Patrol agent, Mike Norton (Barry Pepper), newly arrived in Texas with his bored wife (January Jones). Since Sheriff Belmont (Dwight Yoakam) shows little interest in pursuing the “wetback” case, Pete kidnaps Mike, forces him to disinter Mel’s corpse and sets off with him on horseback across the punishing heat of desert to return Mel’s rapidly decaying body for a proper burial in his tiny, obscure hometown of Jimenez, located somewhere across the border. While evading the authorities, they have several encounters but none is more poignant than the moments spent with an old blind man (Levon Helm) subsisting in squalid isolation.
Working from a poetic, well-structured screenplay by Guillermo Arriaga, Jones assembles an excellent cast and takes a subtle, laconic approach to their journey, utilizing flashbacks to show the bond of trust that existed between Pete and Mel as they casually conversed in Spanish. Credit photographer Chris Menges and editor Roberto Silvi for comparisons with John Sayles’ “Lone Star.” On the Granger Movie Gauge, “The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada” is a simple, stoic 7, bringing a humanist point of view to bigger issues of the human heart and mind.

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The White Countess

Movie/TV Reviews / Susan

Susan Granger’s review of “The White Countess” (Sony Pictures Classics)

This last sophisticated, meticulously crafted production from the decades-long partnership of James Ivory and the late Ismail Merchant evokes exotic memories of “Casablanca.”
Beginning in 1936 in Shanghai, it’s the melodramatic story of the relationship between an embittered, blind American diplomat, Todd Jackson (Ralph Fiennes), and a poverty-stricken, widowed countess, Sofia Belinsky (Natasha Richardson), who works in a sleazy dance hall to support her 10 year-old daughter (Madeleine Daly), aging aunt (Vanessa Redgrave) and uncle (John Wood) and resentful in-laws (Lynn Redgrave, Madeleine Potter). Formerly nobility, they fled Russia during the Bolshevik Revolution. But the family fortunes change when the diplomat opens his own posh nightclub with the sensual White Countess as its aristocratic centerpiece.
Written by Japanese novelist Kazuo Ishiguro (“The Remains of the Day”), photographed by Christopher Doyle and directed by James Ivory, it’s a circumstantial, emotionally repressed character study and gradually growing, yet sedate and chaste courtship that culminates a year later with the Japanese invasion of Shanghai. After stunning turns in “The Constant Gardener” and “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire,” Ralph Fiennes proves his remarkable versatility in this disillusioned, Humphrey Bogart-like role, while luminous Natasha Richarson, utilizing an admirable Slavic accent, is poignant as the exquisite ŽmigrŽ who presides over his Asian version of Rick’s Place. Hiroyuki Sanada completes the stately trio as an enigmatic businessman who provides the pivotal political tension. On the Granger Movie Gauge of 1 to 10, “The White Countess” is a polished, elegant 8, revolving around refined, impeccable performances.

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V for Vendetta

Movie/TV Reviews / Susan

Susan Granger’s review of “V for Vendetta” (Warner Bros.)

Volatile and vehement, this timely cautionary tale about extremist hysteria emerges as the first exciting, insightful and, potentially, the most controversial film of 2006.
Set in London around the year 2020, this political thriller details how a lone vigilante, known only as “V,” blows up the Old Bailey courthouse and threatens to topple a fictional totalitarian regime, headed by a venal, villainous Chancellor (John Hurt), by exploding Parliament to commemorate November 5th, 1605. That’s when anarchist/folk hero Guy Fawkes’ plot to overturn the English government was foiled. Disguised beneath a grinning Guy Fawkes mask and black cloak, “V” (Hugo Weaving) is an enigma. While rescuing, then recruiting, a na•ve waif (Natalie Portman) and preaching fairness, justice and freedom, he methodically embarks on a series of vengeance killings, leaving a red rose at each murder scene – much to the consternation of an indefatigable police detective (Stephen Rea) whose relentless investigation unveils a perverse, multi-layered conspiracy, involving bio-terrorism, censorship, surveillance and state-sanctioned torture.
Based on Alan Moore’s graphic “comic-book” novel, illustrated by David Lloyd, the paranoid sci-fi concept was conceived in the 1980s in rebuttal to conservative Margaret Thatcher, evoking allegories like “1984,” “A Clockwork Orange,” “Planet of the Apes.”
“Matrix” creators Larry and Andy Wachowski adapted it, placing their long-time first assistant director, James McTeigue, at the helm. Photographer Adrian Biddle captures Owen Paterson’s darkly elegant production design; it’s streamlined by editor Owen Walsh and enriched by Dario Marianelli’s stirring score.
Although Portman’s character is, essentially, passive and her accent occasionally wavers, she’s vibrant, even if Weaving, Rea and Sinead Cusack deliver more subtle, persuasive performances. On the Granger Movie Gauge of 1 to 10, “V for Vendetta” is a cleverly compelling 8. Superficially, it’s an action adventure; dig deeper and it delves into the moral ambiguities inherent in contemporary society.

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Zathura: A Space Adventure

Movie/TV Reviews / Susan

Susan Granger’s review of “Zathura: A Space Adventure” (Columbia Pictures)

From the enchanted world of “Jumanji” comes this wondrous outer-space fantasy-fable.
When the harried father (Tim Robbins) of six year-old Danny (Jonah Bobo) and ten year-old Walter (Josh Hutcherson) leaves them in the care of their teenage sister (Kristen Stewart), Danny discovers a mysterious ’50s-style tin board game, Zathura. Immediately, the bickering brothers realize something extraordinary is happening: their house has been blasted into outer space and is being bombarded by meteors. But they’re not alone. There’s a loud, dangerous, malfunctioning robot and a stranded astronaut (Dax Shepard), along with reptilian carnivores called Zorgons. Worst of all, they’re being sucked into the dark void of Zathura – and they must keep playing!
Acclaimed children’s author Chris Van Allsburg wrote “Jumanji” and “The Polar Express,” which, on-screen, were filled with high-tech, computer-generated imagery. Instead, screenwriters David Koepp and John Kamps, led by actor-turned-director Jon Favreau (“Elf”), favor a wind-up, low-tech, episodic, “Buck Rogers” and “Hardy Boys” approach, leaving far more to the imagination. And it works, teaching a gentle lesson in cooperation and brotherly love that strikes an emotional chord – without any of the menacing “Jumanji” mean-spiritedness.
Both child actors are impressive, as is wry “Punk’d” comedian Dax Shepard. J. Michael Riva’s retro ‘spacecraft’ production design and John Debney’s score cleverly emphasize the creaky, clunky, claustrophobic, yet magical and unpredictable feeling that Favreau has deliberately created. On the Granger Movie Gauge of 1 to 10, “Zathura” zings with an action-packed, adventurous 8. It’s a PG, family-friendly film that everyone can enjoy.

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Chicken Little

Movie/TV Reviews / Susan

Susan Granger’s review of “Chicken Little” (Walt Disney)

In a new twist on the cautionary tale of the plucky chicken, this time, the sky really is falling!
Back in Oakey Oaks, nerdy, nervous Chicken Little (Zach Braff) is still humiliated from having claimed “the sky is falling” when he was clobbered by a falling acorn. It’s a year later and, after trying win approval from his jock’ish widower father, Buck Cluck (Garry Marshall), who urges him, to act “normal,” he has finally redeemed himself by becoming a local softball hero. Problem is: he’s conked again – this time by debris from an alien spaceship. Fearful of being doubted, he recruits his best “misfit” friends: Abby Mallard, the ugly duckling (Joan Cusack); Runt of the Litter, a huge but cowardly pig (Steve Zahn); and Fish Out Of Water, a walking fish in a diver’s helmet (Dan Molina). Together, they must warn the town of extraterrestrial danger.
Co-writer/director Mark Dindal stresses the lessons to be learned: love of family, loyalty to friends and, above all, tolerance. Emphasizing the family theme, there’s a pivotal fowl father/son confrontation when bespectacled Chicken Little says, “Dad, you never supported me.”
This is the first film made in-house at Disney, using all computer animation; previously, the studio relied on hand-drawn cartoons while distributing sophisticated Pixar creations like “Toy Story,” “The Incredibles” and “Finding Nemo.” Which explains Disney’s current commercial tie-ins with McDonald’s and Sears. Plus there are the razzle-dazzle 3-D “Chicken Little” versions in 84 theaters with digital projection. Disney’s partnership with Pixar expires in 2006, and Pixar wants to pay its new distributor a flat fee instead of sharing profits. On the Granger Movie Gauge of 1 to 10, “Chicken Little” is a splashy, spunky 7, geared to amuse its pint-sized audience.

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