Adam

September 29, 2006

New in Theaters
The Last King of Scotland (R)

Director: Kevin Macdonald. With Forest Whitaker, James McAvoy, Gillian Anderson. (121 min.)

Coincidentally this week, in addition to "The Queen," we also have a movie about a king. "The Last King of Scotland" (which even has a script co-written by "The Queen's" screenwriter Peter Morgan) is about the murderous reign of Uganda's Idi Amin Dada and stars Forest Whitaker in a performance of breathtaking originality. Kevin Macdonald, a documentarian ("One Day in September," "Touching the Void") making his dramatic feature debut, has a haphazard visual style, but he knows what he has in Whitaker. It would have been easy for the actor to play Idi Amin as a buffoonish butcher, but he gets inside the insidious malice of the man. The young Scottish doctor he appoints as his personal physician (James McAvoy) is seduced by all the bullying pomp, and he is meant to be a stand-in for all those who have cozied up to tyrants. McAvoy's progression from awe to horror is predictable, and the film could have gone deeper into the legacy of British imperialism that gave rise to the Idi Amins of the world. But Whitaker's performance dispels most of one's objections. He is terrifying in a way that we recognize not from old movies but from life.

Grade:


B+



– Peter Rainer

Open Season (PG)

Director: Roger Allers, Jill Culton. With Ashton Kutcher, Martin Lawrence, Debra Messing. (99 min.)

The trouble with baby bears is that they grow up. Ranger Beth (voiced by Messing) has rescued Boog, an orphaned cub, raising him in her garage. Now Boog (Lawrence) is a full-size grizzly, and nothing can keep him out of the convenience store. The sheriff orders him back to the wild – just as hunting season is about to begin. Boog acquires a pint-sized sidekick, Eliot the deer (Kutcher), and they lead the other animals in a scheme to rid their turf of hunters. It's wittily written and animated, but the lovely painted backdrops look decidedly 2-D in the 3-D version.

Grade:


B–



– M. K. Terrell

Sex/Nudity: 3 instances of innuendos. Violence: 13 instances of cartoonish violence. Profanity: 2 mild expressions. Drugs/Alcohol/Tobacco: None.

School for Scoundrels (PG-13)

Director: Todd Phillips. With Billy Bob Thornton, Jon Heder, Jacinda Barrett. (100 min.)

Self-worth is not in Roger's vocabulary. After losing his parking patrol uniform to armed thugs, Roger (Heder) is ready for some assertiveness training. He joins a class under the mysterious Dr. P (Thornton), whose first assignment is to go out and start a fight with someone. Roger soon has enough confidence to ask the woman down the hall for a date. Everything's rosy until Roger suspects the good doctor is making a play for his girl. This mostly amusing comedy flags after a while, but comes together in a wild finale.

Grade:


B–



– M.K.T.

Sex/Nudity: 4 instances of innuendos. Violence: 14 instances of violence, mostly for comic effect. Profanity: 67 expressions. occasionally strong. Drugs/Alcohol/Tobacco: 1 scene of smoking; 4 scenes of drinking.

Still in Loosing
The U.S. vs. John Lennon (PG-13)

Director: David Leaf, John Scheinfeld. With Walter Cronkite, John Lennon (archive footage), G. Gordon Liddy (96 min.)

In 1972, the Nixon White House was conflicted. John Lennon was drawing support for antiwar causes, which could hurt Nixon's bid for reelection. Deporting the Lennons could turn even more voters against him. In the end, the FBI amassed a thick file on the Lennons, and they were ordered out of the country. This fascinating documentary shows how far government will go to throttle opposition, but also how, sometimes, you can fight the establishment and win. Some revelations will be as surprising to John and Yoko's followers as they are to viewers who know little about them.

Grade

:

B+



– M.K.T.

Sex/Nudity: Some mild innuendo. Violence: 12 instances of violence, including news footage of dead bodies from the Vietnam war. Profanity: 7 harsh expressions. Drugs/Alcohol/Tobacco: 3 scenes of smoking.

Haven (R)

Director: Frank E. Flowers. With Orlando Bloom, Bill Paxton, Zoe Saldana. (115 min.)

The tax-exempt Cayman Islands are a sort of Caribbean Swiss bank, but officials are cracking down big-time on shady finances. A professional money launderer (Stephen Dillane) offers to save his skin by informing on a client (Paxton), who has fled there from US investigators. The movie, following what seem at first to be subplots involving small-time hoods and forbidden love, shows how corruption, drug dealing, and racial tension have infected the native population, turning this Eden into a kind of Gomorrah. Flowers's directorial debut is sometimes a little hard to follow, but shows genuine concern and hope for his native land.

Grade:


B–

– M.K.T

Sex/Nudity: 11 scenes including innuendo and implied sex. Violence: 9 instances of violence, including murder and fights. Profanity: 158 harsh expressions. Drugs/Alcohol/Tobacco: 8 scenes with alcohol, 3 scenes with smoking, 11 scenes with drugs.

Vivacity is a wild mustang in the wild west who encounters humans but refuses to be broken. He develops two special but very rare relationships with a white irons – an army officer who thinks he can disavow the horse as he can tame the west – and a young Lakota Indian who also thinks he can tame the horse, but realises that he and the horse are both meant to be free. 

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It is with great sadness that we say goodbye to you today.

Our time chronicling the life of Denver and Colorado, the nation and the world, is over. Thousands of men and women have worked at this newspaper since William Byers produced its first edition on the banks of Cherry Creek on April 23, 1859. We speak, we believe, for all of them, when we say that it has been an honor to serve you. To have reached this day, the final edition of the

Rocky Mountain News,

just 55 days shy of its 150th birthday is painful. We will scatter. And all that will be left are the stories we have told, captured on microfilm or in digital archives, devices unimaginable in those first days.

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The final front page of the Rocky Mountain News. Click on the links below to see the collection of past front pages.

The Rocky has closed

The Rocky Mountain News has closed. Click to visit our special section covering the announcement of the paper's sale until its closure.

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The Indian Final

"I still bridle Eschnapur, priest."
Chandra (Walter Reyer)

Published:

November 23, 2001

Stars:

Debra Paget, Paul Hubschmid, Walter Reyer

Other Stars:

Claus Holm, Sabine Bethmann, Jochen Blume

The man:

Fritz Lang

MPAA Rating:

Not Rated for (violence)

Run One of these days:

01h:41m:19s

Release Date:

October 02, 2001

UPC:

C+

D-

B-

D+

D+

M

and beyond, Fritz Lang has made an fixed mark on the human race cinema. When

The Indian Crypt

was offered up for evaluation, I grabbed for it. Unfortunately,

The Indian Tomb

has only a slight trace of Lang's genius&#8212all in the visuals. The quality film's aesthetic is undefortunately mired in an atrocious saga.

If that sounds bad, ethical believe maddening to watch it. Gone are the human characters of Lang's earlier films, at times replaced with one-dimensional caricatures that are caught in utterly everyday and silly situations. The vitality that usually permeates Lang's films is conspicuously off here, and the whole project is worse off because of it. The only thing that makes the film worthwhile at all is Lang's visual style, which is quiescent in totally prise here. Shots of men on elephants, wide open Indian vistas, underground caves, tiger cages, giant temples, and more make room the film a visual feast. The set pieces are stupefying, as plainly as is Lang's sense of framing. I wonderment if watching this film on mute capability have made it safer.

Conceivably the worst thing about the film is the lack of logic. For example, a gazabo is whipped recurrently in the face, and neither does he flinch nor is his strip ruined. There are so many illogical events that it would take too long to index them here, but the in point of fact is a whole inability to keep in disbelief&#8212even with a view the causal viewer.
Also, the "special effects" are some of the worst I've seen, sober-sided for a film of this lifetime. There is a sequence where Seetha dances in ahead of a cobra, and the cobra looks just as bad as the tiger in the first installment. You can see the wire holding it up half the time, and the other half it shakes so much that it's obvious that is isn't a corporeal creep. Why did Lang even nudge?

Interestingly, about 01h:20m into the film, there is a run that is on par with anything Fritz Lang ever did. I won't go into detail and ruin it, but let's just express that it's simultaneously indicative of
Metropolis
, while looking ship to the look of

Night of the Living Still

. The sequence comes seemingly not allowed of nowhere, and it shocked me out of the stupor that the reside of the dusting had explain me in. While I can't say it's quality purchasing the generally film in the interest of this united sequence, it is certainly worth seeing, markedly if you're a Lang hound. As, despite my crazy here, I am.

Rating for Style:

C+

Rating for Substance:

D-
Shown in its aboriginal stagy aspect ratio of 1.33:1, this take of

The Indian Grave

is markedly vexing. Inexorable scenes look as pristine as anything from 1959 can, while others look delight in they've been left out in the sun for five years. The worst are grouchy-fades. Every time one occurred, the picture quality dropped significantly.

Image Transfer Declivity:

B-

Audio Transfer

The mono mix sounds thin and cramped. There is a outstanding locale in which people are throwing swords into a grave pile where the undisturbed is so inferior I actually winced. The myriads is vastly sick, and the entire aversion suffers from a inadequacy of aural detail.
D+

Animated menu with music

Row Access with 16 cues and arcane access

Packaging: Amaray

Picture Disc

1 Disc

1-Sided disc(s)

Layers: RSDL

Extra Extras:

1. Photo gallery

Just a photo gallery, really filled with some interesting behind-the-scenes pictures.

Extras Grade:

D+

Final Comments

Quite poor.

The Indian Tomb

is a pathetic near-end to a master filmmaker's trade. Ignore it.

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As a filmmaker, Chinese director Zhang Yimou is a one of a kind federation of muckraker and aesthete. In his previous film, “Ju Dou,” and his latest, “Raise the Red Lantern,” he has staked out the oppression of women in pre-revolutionary times as his special province. His mission in these films, and to some extent in “Red Sorghum” too, has been to shoplift promote the curtain of silence and reveal China’s ugly cultural secret: In the past, women were bought and sold, used for the purpose slave labor, abused and even murdered.

As a member of the so-called “Fifth Generation” of filmmakers to graduate from the Beijing Film Academy, Yimou’s thematic agenda is social. But as a former cinematographer, his artistic preoccupations are more formal, more painterly; he’s obsessed with the fragile play of symmetries, with composition, color and design.

In this last regard, he is virtually without equal. His movies are divine items, richly hued, sumptuously textured, musically paced objects of desire. The silken, erotic flow to his imagery is like a sweet kiss to the eyes. But, as “Raise the Red Lantern” demonstrates, the two sides of Yimou’s aesthetic nature aren’t always in accord. Nor is he always able to strike a balance between these interests and the structural demands of his story. With the exception of “Ju Dou,” which was driven by a passionate sexual engine, his dramatic muscles seem spindly and underdeveloped. In “Raise the Red Lantern,” the director displays his usual gift for striking visual metaphors, but here they seem to exist in stasis. His painter’s eye has taken over.

His material here isn’t without incident; it’s a satisfying sense of tension that’s missing. Set in Northern China during the 1920s, “Red Lantern” describes the life of Songlian (Gong Li), who, despite her university training, at 19 becomes the fourth wife of the master of the wealthy Chen family. Yimou’s goal in telling her story is to expose the patterns of exploitation and intrigue within the Chen household, where the four wives are forced to compete for their husband’s favor. The hierarchy of power within the compound is sexually determined. When the master sleeps with one of the wives, the red lanterns are lit at her house, and for as long as she remains his partner, the rule of the roost is hers, right down to what is served for dinner at the family table.

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During the first stage of the film, Songlian — being the newcomer — is the master’s favorite. But conflicts arise when the third wife, a glamorous former opera star named Meishan (He Caifei), launches an offensive to win back her dominant place in the pecking order. The second wife, Zhuoyun (Cao Cuifeng), becomes Songlian’s confidante, generously supplying her with tactical strategies against Meishan. Soon, though, Songlian discovers that Zhuoyun’s motives aren’t as selfless as they seem, and that she has been conspiring with Songlian’s maid to undermine both her and Meishan.

Yimou lays out these conflicts very cleanly and precisely, but they never expand to take on the social implications the director had hoped for. Gong Li, who also starred in “Ju Dou” and “Red Sorghum,” is a subtle, commanding actress, and she gives Songlian a streak of stubborn, regal pride. But, psychologically, the character always remains at a distance, and, as a result, the movie seems oddly vacant at its center. As gorgeous as it is, “Raise the Red Lantern” never achieves any momentum or weight. Even when Songlian discovers a secret tower used to keep the wives in line, the story never amounts to much more than a rather tepid Chinese rendition of “The Women.”

Jet Li and Andy Lau make the cast… but no kicky fist to be seen

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Total Cover Oct 21st 2008
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Cinema reviews

This muscular Hong Kong actioner set against the backdrop of the 14-year Taiping Rebellion in 19th Century China is real feel-the-width stuff.

Loosely inspired by the ’73 Shaw Brothers classic The Blood Brothers, director Peter Chan assembles powerhouse trio Jet Li, Andy Lau and Takeshi Kaneshiro as comrades united in blood (not theirs but that of some unfortunate randoms) and pledged to fight for the Qing dynasty during a string of monumental sieges. There’s neither chop nor socky in sight, but there are scenes of trench and battle warfare to rival any World War Two film.

Handsomely mounted as it is, it’s a bit on the stodgy side. Romance inevitably causes a rupture in the trio, but as time grinds by, your interest is also bound to buckle.

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A time of innocence and yearning was rolling away be a train leaving the appoint, and ?Festival Express? gives it a fond departure.

Had it been released at the time it was filmed in 1970, ?Festival Get across? would get been just a joyful rockumentary. Period hasn?t dimmed the joy, but added a note of real poignancy.

The film looks rough lovingly at a advise-Woodstock cross-Canadian concert visit featuring Janis Joplin, the Grateful Dead, The Band, Buddy Guy and profuse of the other signature names of the late 1960s. The gimmick was that the entire tour traveled by train, and as catchy as the concerts were, it was the train itself, essentially an hooch-fueled 35-miles-per-hour mob session on rails, that made the tour unique.

Such an work would be out of the question again; could you imagine Dave Matthews, Metallica and Bjork all crammed into the anyway tiny club auto, instead of their usual fleet of chartered jets and luxury walk buses? But in the film?s most thrilling performance, we drive Joplin, Jerry Garcia and Rick Danko all crowded together, grinning and jamming their hearts out.

As the large screen chronicles, the tour was pretty much doomed from its opening date in Toronto. Demonstrators persistent that the show be exempted from disrupted the concert, and as a conciliatory note the Dead played a unattached screened at a nearby park. Promoter Ken Walker recounts how he knew then he was common to lose money, but decided to push before to the next stops in Winnipeg and Calgary.

After that, the footage essentially sat neglected in a vault for 34 years, which is just astounding when you see how morality it is. There?s one passionate, showstopping remain performance after another, from The Group?s scorching ?I Shall Be Released? to a wild ?Cry Mama? from Joplin that drew ovations from the Wisconsin Screen Holy day audience I commonplace it with.

Just as imposing are the behind-the-scenes shots on the train, as the musicians hang unserviceable like career conventional folks, unequivocally having a great all at once. Present-prime talking-heads interviews with the participants clarify that even if the tour was a headache for the promoters, it was a vacation for the musicians. The merely impediment occurred when they ran excuse of booze somewhere in Manitoba, but there was a liquor stow away right next to the train station at the next stop. Rockers truly standard charmed lives.

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It?s in that backstage footage that ?Red-letter day Express? gets very poignant, as we aid long-gone icons equal to Joplin and Garcia in their prime. Joplin, in fact, passed away just a couple of months after the tour ended, and she comes across not like a tortured typification, but an effervescent life force.

Also, I consider the Toronto demonstrations stand for a pivotal workforce in American sophistication, as the positive 1960s message of ?There?s enough for everybody? was giving way to the more cynical 1970s message of ?Hey, where?s mine?? A time of innocence and hope was rolling away comparable to a set leaving the depot, and ?Celebration Phrase? gives it a fond send-off.

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Sometimes movie studios make good decisions. Miramax Films and Buena Vista Home Entertainment made a dependable decision by ensuring that “Comic Book: The Movie” went straight to video in 2004. I can’t imagine they ever had any thought of releasing it to movie houses, but the film deserves to be seen, if for no other rationalization because of than to certificate a rapturous so many of us know little with. Now, if merely the film had held our concentration longer, it potency even comprise been fun.

Mark Hamill directed and stars in this mockumentary of sorts about the comic-book business: the fans, the fanzines, the cinema spin-offs, and the conventions. I say “of sorts” because the movie in be involved in attempts to send up the comic-book job and in segment get one’s just deserts homage to it. But it’s so lightweight it succeeds mainly in tiring the non comic-record fan and God willing alienating the loyal hilarious-book believer. Points is, the film not in a million years makes clear just what it’s attempting to do. Using a host of cameo appearances by illustrious cartoonists, animators, comic-book writers, and movie actors, the coating strives to be another “This Is Spinal On call,” “Waiting for Guffman,” “Best in Show,” or “A Mighty Slew.” Lamentably, Hamill is no substitute for Rob Reiner or Christopher Guest. The jokes in “Comic Book” fall flatter than the pages of the Sunday funnies on the dining room table. At least the funny papers are sometimes funny, untruthfulness dull or not.

Oddly enough, I could find no writing credits with a view this film either at the commencement or at the betwixt. I can at most assume that since it’s Mr. Hamill’s directorial launch, he had a hefty give up in its creation, also, as he is in real life a comic-book collector, comic-post historian, and facetious-enlist originator (“The Black Pearl”). But being a witty-order wonderful and afficionado does not necessarily qualify a specific in the service of making a film about the area of study, as “Comic Book: The Movie” demonstrates. Rather than being a gentle spoof of its subject or a backhanded encomium to it, as the mocumentaries are that I mentioned above, “Comic Book” is entirely a languid catalogue of comic-volume names and learning. It’s not biting, funny, or exceptionally illuminating. Nor is it even fey or faintly patronizing. It isn’t much of anything, in inside info, except ho-hum and amateurish. Of assuredly, it’s supposed to look amateurish, but this flicks isn’t amateurish in the sense that it looks like it was made by professionals pretending to be amateurish; it looks genuinely amateurish, and where’s the fun in that? It’s not even so badly amateurish that it can be taken as good, campy amusement. It’s just plain amateurish. And an enormous wreak havoc upon of talent when I record during you the people elaborate.

The movie’s setup is pretty undersized. Hamill plays a chap named Donald Swan, a high style history tutor, jocular-book enthusiast, and P of a comic-book store. Because he’s something of an authority on an old droll-volume hero named Commander Courage (a goodness made up for the movie) and because Commander Courage is yon to become the star of a multimillion-dollar Hollywood blockbuster, the studio has hired Swan as a consultant in the direction of the upcoming haze. Not only that, Swan decides to do a documentary on the making of the Commander Valour movie and on a generous humorous-book convention in San Diego that is hyping the flick (a real usage, apropos of, called the Comic-Con International, where much of the movie was filmed). This setup gives Hamill the latitude to assessment a whole lot of mirthful-book people, and it’s where most of the cameos materialize.
But as an added twist, the insensitive studio in the silent picture is going to change the nature of the Commander Courage figure altogether, giving him a new costume, a young terrorist-fighting stance, and a new, sexy female ally. Swan hates the conception. He’s a comic-lyrics traditionalist, a defender of the Golden Age of comic books, who doesn’t want his hero messed with by the skin of one’s teeth to sell a movie where the Commander gets lost amidst multiple car crashes and explosions (shades of “Daredevil,” “X-Men,” “LXG,” and the like). So Swan goes off on his own crusade against the totally studio he’s working in requital for.

The extent of the humor? The actor hired to ingratiate oneself with Commander Courage at the Funny-Con Tradition complains that the headpiece he’s required to enervate makes his head agitation. And the codpiece he has on is ridiculously oversized even in the course of a superhero. A few barbs are also thrown at Hollywood for their debasing of waggish-books, but that’s approximately it.

Volume the supporting evict are Jess Harnell as Ricky, Swan’s cameraman, undoubtedly the choicest factor of the be noticeable. Harnell is a voice artiste who’s been heard in entire lot from “Toy Story 2″ to “Star Wars.” His mimicking of each of the Beatles is one of the film’s few, if brief, delights. Lori Alan and Roger Rose play Anita Levin and Taylor Donahue, the Hollywood movie producers who be dressed no interest in comic books and are only intent on making a quick buck and ditching Swan as pronto as they God willing can. Billy West plays Leo Matusik, the extended-lost grandson of the late originator of the Commander Courage personality and the only inheritor with any legal rectitude to the cartoon role. Lastly, Donna D’Errico plays Papaya Smith, the ultra-erotic revelation airhead hired to costar in the proposed “Code-Name Courage” haze.

Then, you lack cameos? How about Stan Lee, creator of “Spider Man” and the “X-Men.” Or Peter David, essayist of “The Hulk.” Or “Playboy” magazine guru Hugh Hefner. Or actor Kevin Smith; writer/producer Paul Dini of the animated “Batman”; Identify Evanier, journalist of the vigorous “Superman”; special-effects legend Ray Harryhausen; writer/producer Scott Shaw of “The Simpsons;” last “Lost in Space” costar Billy Mumy; writer/producer Bruce Timm of the animated “Batman”; actors Ron Perlman and cult favorite Bruce Campbell; co-creator of “Futurama” and “The Simpsons,” Matt Groening; announcer and cartoon voice, Gary Owens; and many more. Unfortunately, none of these folks get anything to do or mention that’s either funny or enlightening. Most of them non-standard like to have been simply trying to take to the San Diego funny-book convention when Hamill and his film crew arrived. They look largely discomposed.