Blood and Chocolate

Blood and Chocolate (Katja Von Garnier, 2007) - C

Von Garnier's werewolves don't transform with screams of pain and grotesque morphs; nor do they become gangly, ugly human-canine hybrids; nor are they hampered by such niceties as the lunar cycle. They leap into the air gracefully in the heat of the hunt, and transform into real, gorgeous wolves in a flash of light that may have been used to reduce the effects budget, but ends up being perfectly appropriate to illustrate something that need not really be all that technically impressive. They're hardly monsters at all, really, and the point is that irrational fear "of what we're not" is what turns them into objects of horror. Could have been tragic, except Von Garnier insists on turning the movie into a rejected WB-pilot, with weirdly dull-eyed Agnes Bruckner running off with plucky, unsuspecting Hugh Dancy, their love proscribed as bad for the werewolf community. The film is so invested in this that it forgets about the damn werewolves, who wind up pretty much incoherent: it's suggested that they have some level of superhuman strength and prowess, but all we see is Bruckner skipping off walls Little-Red-Riding-Hood-style, and later Dancy starts dispatching the creatures with a butter knife (albeit a silver one). Also goes on several climaxes too long, mistaking itself for a competent action film. The kind of movie that seems interesting for a while, before you realize it's totally clueless.

Catch and Release

Catch and Release (Susannah Grant, 2007) - C

The kind of movie where all plot progression depends on characters' stunning and improbable lack of tact, or alternatively on characters overhearing insulting things about themselves (the film even comments on this: "It's a small house, everyone hears everything"). Glaringly artificial, in other words, full of awkward screenplay-isms (e.g. people starting conversations with a nonsense line, only to reveal [after the other person says "What?"] that they were making an oblique reference to something that happened earlier -- does anyone actually do that?) and contrived, arbitrary twists; it's all unbelievably manipulative and fundamentally boring despite some nice performances by Kevin Smith (!), Fiona Shaw, and sporadically Timothy Olyphant. Jennifer Garner does a lot of pouting and shocked indignation, making her character more self-important than sympathetic, and Juliette Lewis has what might be the most thankless and impossible task of all time: trying to be shrill, deranged and likable at the same time. But it's Grant's screenplay that's the basic problem -- sickly sweet and clumsy, it never manages to convince us that the dead character at its center actually existed. And the fishing metaphor is retarded.

Venus

Venus (Roger Michell, 2006) - B+

I was ready to be the voice of backlash on this, but I must admit it's a lovely send-off (?) for O'Toole, who proves equally adept at heavy drama and slapstick at the formidable age of 74. I could say it's about Dying With Dignity, but that makes it sound more boring and clichéd than it is, and The Sea Inside this ain't: it's more about rising above the depressing situation where death is the default position and anything more than that is gravy. What struck me was the inconsiderate nonchalance of the doctors and the nurses, who seem to think that O'Toole's elderly thespian should leap in the air with glee at any suggestion that he's not about to keel over: one attempts to engage in idle chit-chat while administering a prostate exam; two gossip among themselves while sticking him with needles; a fourth curtly pronounces that though impotence and incontinence are sure to follow the operation, Maurice will emerge alive. It's a nightmare of indifference, which is what all the film's characters seem to be struggling with -- but love is the answer, as it usually is, and the early description of Venus as love and temptation that brings with it despair and foolishness turns out to be way off as to the latter. The movie starts out off-kilter, with an oddly jerky rhythm, but then settles into a tone of wry amusement, cheerfully lingering on the unpleasant details of growing old (toenail clipping, colostomy bags) and then, in a touching display of optimism, turning them into jokes. Sweet, sad, and funny too: "Not yodeling! Yodeling? Modeling!"

Miss Potter

Miss Potter (Chris Noonan, 2006) - B

"To love and be loved in return," etc., but the movie nicely integrates that into the much more interesting question of whether the relationship of an artist with her art can substitute for meaningful human interaction and other more traditional means of personal fulfillment. Answer: probably not, though the bottom line seems to be that true happiness, at least for Beatrix Potter, requires ruffling some feathers, be it of her churlish socialite mother and kind failed artist father, some greedy land developers, or even just an innocent guy strolling in the park as her carriage speeds by, with her insisting that they go faster, faster! The even, almost deadpan tone (it's just as earnest pushing Emily Watson's feminist posturing as it is predictably undercutting the same later) and exaggeratedly genteel dialogue give the movie a stifled air that (unlike its protagonist) it never quite manages to break through, but it's genuinely amiable and nice -- the perfect Sunday-afternoon senior-citizen-cinema, really -- and more thoughtful about the title character than all the clichéd Don't-Bring-Tradespeople-Into-the-House-They-Bring-Dust stuff lets on. If someone can explain to me why Renée Zellweger insists on constantly scrunching her face together in that grotesque way, though, I'd be grateful.

Steve Irwin was wrong

Primeval (Michael Katleman, 2007) - C+

A message movie about Africa: Gustave the enormous crocodile is (or is engendered by, if you prefer) the evil in the hearts of men that turns "the cradle of all mankind" into a famine-ravaged warzone where, as the film helpfully points out, "people shoot at each other" -- the title isn't arbitrary, and nor is the fact that the fearsome local warlord is monikered "Little Gustave." Our protagonists -- a news production team -- come in for the same reasons and with the same attitudes that most westerners have when they turn their attention to the continent: Gustave has just claimed a white victim and thus made it to American tv sets, exasperation quickly outs as characters start saying things like "the more you help, the worse it gets," and their plan to take the croc alive (lasso human nature?) is mysteriously devoid of any inkling of what to do afterward. The movie doesn't know what to do with the enormous crocodile either, shoehorning in occasional horror sequences but forgetting about him altogether for long stretches. The horror stuff doesn't really work, since it's mostly dark and murky and the special effects suck, but Primeval is surprisingly sincere about its subtext (so much so that it repeatedly turns subtext into text), and the degree to which it takes the time to stop and admire the scenery -- literally and figuratively -- is surprising. Had this actually functioned as a genre film, we might have had something; still, I'm intrigued by its notion that the place where humanity began is not coincidentally also a hellish pit of despair.

Annual Counterprogramming

Black Christmas (Glen Morgan, 2006) - C-

The key was to invert the holly jolly Christmas signifiers into portents of doom, but the movie is sloppy and impatient -- it's on to something with the persistence of blinking lights (though those are kind of like clowns, in that it takes but a minor tweak to take them from cheery to eerie) but most other attempts to toy with the iconography backfire, largely because every scene quickly devolves into either typical horror violence or over-the-top baroque absurdity (e.g. the cannibalistic Christmas cookies). The tone is all wrong, too: Morgan goes for sarcasm when he needed solemnity, even if it was of the self-conscious variety; little things like the faux-Christmas font in the title cards give the film the impression of being delivered with a sneer. Worse, it's mostly tension-free, since Morgan is weirdly committed to his silly backstory, leaving the terrorized present-day characters to be interchangeable and irrelevant. I thought Glen Morgan was promising after the lithe, beautiful Willard, but he seems to be joining James Wong and Rob Bowman on the list of "X-Files alums not worth a whole heck of a lot." Shame.

You Smell Funny

Perfume: The Story of a Murderer (Tom Tykwer, 2006) - A-

Some fierce religious overtones here, to the point where I think it might just be allegory. It's suggested that Grenouille has no soul (no scent of his own), and thus spends his time collecting others'; once he's put together the right "formula," he commands absolute power, or at least influence, over the public; at one point, he's excommunicated, in absentia, from the Catholic Church. Everyone he encounters on his journey dies immediately after sending him on his way. Tykwer shoots Grenouille's victims brightly and him in shadow. He turns bloodlust into beauty. Is he the antichrist? The Great Deceiver? Others prefer to interpret the ending as a metaphor for the relationship of an artist with his audience, though that has the unfortunate side effect of rendering the rest of the film irrelevant. And I dare you to look into Grenouille's eyes when he's reciting perfume formulas for Dustin Hoffman's Baldini and not feel an otherworldly chill. Tykwer's film is elegant, unnerving storytelling; Ben Whishaw will have a long and bountiful career.

Code Name: The Cleaner (Les Mayfield, 2007) - D-

I really should know better than to waste my time like this. Too irritated to write anything substantive; suffice it to say this is the sort of incoherent comedy-of-idiocy I can't stand.

'Breaker' Morant

'Breaker' Morant (Bruce Beresford, 1990) - A-

This one's all about rhythm, consisting of a lengthy military court-martial sequence punctuated by constant, short, often staccato interruptions, some expository, some rueful, others sarcastic. Seems to settle down a bit toward the end, at least insofar as the chronology becomes more or less straightforward, but the editing continues the disorienting sensation, eliding time and skipping over key revelations only to announce them later with three bitterly shouted words ("Same as Morant"). It's a tension-builder, and an effective stand-in for the film's overwhelming cynicism -- men's fates are decided by the pettiest of political considerations (e.g. Australia not wanting to appear "colonial"); much is made of the execution of POWs without a "fair trial" but the court-martial is obviously a kangaroo court -- and it turns the movie into a shot to the heart rather than simply maudlin moral condemnation. The ending is crushing.