A Taste of Freeman: FFC Interviews Morgan Freeman

December 19, 2004Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, DIFF/SDFF, Film Festivals, Interviews

MfreemaninterviewtitleDecember 19, 2004|A man who needs little introduction in American cinema, Morgan Freeman is taller in person than you'd expect (slimmer, too) and gracious to the point of delaying his lunch so that we could finish our conversation. In town to receive a lifetime achievement award at the 27th Starz Denver International Film Festival, Mr. Freeman granted interviews with no specific movie to hump, his long-awaited reunion with director Clint Eastwood, Million Dollar Baby, still flying low on the radar at that point. He was there sans agenda, in other words, a rare place to find an interview subject and an invitation–a daunting one–to go over some ground that has already been trampled flat. The challenge of chatting with someone as well-known as Mr. Freeman is always going to be finding something new to discuss: even if you come up with a fresh question, after all, like anyone polished in the apple of the public eye, the super-famous and the oft-dissected have developed a skill for reverting to stock answers and widely-published responses. (As the saying goes, they answer the question they wish they were asked.) It's not affectedness, exactly–it's training. And after a while, that training becomes as helpless a reflex as blinking.

Spanglish (2004)

December 17, 2004Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Romance, Theatrical

*/****
starring Adam Sandler, Téa Leoni, Paz Vega, Cloris Leachman
written and directed by James L. Brooks

Spanglishby Walter Chaw Take a real close look at the two fertile women in James L. Brooks’s Spanglish: one, Deborah (Téa Leoni), is a fright-masked, screeching harridan who resurrects all by herself the offense once implied by the term “hysterical,” and the other, a fiery Latina clothed in soft browns named Flor (Paz Vega), is nurturing, reasonable, and maternal to the point of smothering her daughter. Which is the worse stereotype would be an interesting conversation to have; how the both of them torment John (Adam Sandler), the decent white guy hero (Deborah with outbursts, Flor with forbidden fruit), is a conversation not worth having. You expect a lot of things from a Brooks film: lethal levels of schmaltz, diarrheic streams of introspective dialogue, precocious tots–but you generally don’t anticipate a lot of underdeveloped characters, a disquieting undercurrent of paternalistic racism, and one central personality apparently constructed for the sole purpose of being the lightning rod for the audience’s every aggression. (Deborah is the most hellish–and consequently the most memorable–affront to rich white women I’ve seen since Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?.) The only two interesting characters in the piece are Deborah’s alcoholic mother Evelyn (Cloris Leachman) and chubby daughter Bernice (Sarah Steele)–not coincidentally, the two characters least like convenient pastiches. Frankly, the film should have been about them.

Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events (2004)

December 17, 2004Posted in2000s, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Family, Fantasy, Germany, Theatrical

A Series of Unfortunate Events
**½/****
starring Jim Carrey, Jude Law, Liam Aiken, Emily Browning
screenplay by Robert Gordon, based on the books The Bad Beginning, The Reptile Room, and The Wide Window by "Lemony Snicket"
directed by Brad Silberling

Lemonysnicketby Walter Chaw The best children's entertainments accentuate a child's strengths, encouraging the pursuit of aptitude and bliss instead of impossible pipe dreams. It's the lesson of The Incredibles, one of the bravest, most subversive films the year–and it seems to be the lesson of Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events as well until the picture caves in to kid-flick conventions and worse. But while it's humming along with the freshly-orphaned Baudelaires–Violet (Emily Browning), Klaus (Liam Aiken), and little Sunny (Kara and Shelby Hoffman)–doing what they do best (Violet the engineer, Klaus the reader, Sunny the biter), Lemony Snicket, with its gothic sets and grotesque gallery of rogues, offers up a brilliant antidote to the saccharine blather of traditional holiday fare. Fleetingly effective or no, it's a shot of insulin in a season that generally offers up bloated prestige items for the grown-ups and freakishly genial, accidentally perverse fare for the kiddies.

Grande école (2004) – DVD

December 16, 2004Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Drama, DVD, France, Romance

**/**** Image B+ Sound B Extras A-
starring Gregori Baquet, Jocelyn Quivrin, Arthur Jugnot, Alice Taglioni
screenplay by Robert Salis, based on the play "Editions Actes Sud Papiers" by Jean-Marie Besset
directed by Robert Salis

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover It's often interesting to watch people try to justify their actions–especially when they themselves know that what they're doing is wrong. Such is the case with Robert Salis's Grande école, a film that shortchanges class in its attempts to address sexual identity. Its saga of an upper-middle-class snob and his love for, among others, an Arab labourer, wants desperately to do the right thing as far as social levelling is concerned, but it's too impressed with its own benevolence to really serve much purpose. The main event is always its hero's conflicts, in particular his desire to remove the shackles of his upbringing–his illicit love is more a prod to his essential goodness than it is a genuine challenge to privilege. But if Grande école fails as a critique, it succeeds as a weird conflicted thing making excuses for itself.

Ginger Snaps Back: The Beginning (2004) – DVD

December 14, 2004Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Drama, DVD, Horror, Werewolf

**/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Katharine Isabelle, Emily Perkins, JR Bourne, Tom McCamus
screenplay by Christina Ray and Stephen Massicotte
directed by Grant Harvey

by Walter Chaw Ravenous but not funny, the clumsily-titled Ginger Snaps Back: The Beginning takes the venerable Canadian she-wolf franchise and, in Canuck fashion, de-sexualizes it by suggesting that the appearance of two relatively nubile lasses at an isolated fort populated entirely by men rouses no passions beyond a metaphorical anxiety of invasion from without. The females in horror films tend to be the consumptive dank underground–in slashers specifically, they're the avatar for teen-boy fantasies of revenge. But in Ginger Snaps Back, they're neither avatar nor holy object, really, just catalysts for the interpersonal dramas of male settlers. The implications are many, most strident among them the unavoidable one that in Canadian cinema, sex is either perfunctory, ugly, forced, or involves a dead person. We've come a long way from the budding sexuality of the first Ginger Snaps film–all the way to an almost complete evasion of both the Orientalism in a medium-hot near-tryst wet dream with a Native American warrior and subsumed homosexual buddy lust. This despite the menstrual implications so cannily established by the franchise.

Blade: Trinity (2004)

December 8, 2004Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Horror, Sci-Fi, Superhero, Theatrical, Vampire

*/****
starring Wesley Snipes, Kris Kristofferson, Jessica Biel, Ryan Reynolds
written and directed by David S. Goyer

Bladetrinityby Walter Chaw A genuinely bad film, Blade: Trinity gains a little currency by banking on some of the hot topics in our cultural diaspora (blacks vs. whites, rich vs. poor, privileged vs. ghettoized) as well as sporting a pretty heady fascination with progeny and parentage. But it’s not nearly enough to forgive the film’s excrescent dialogue, tepid action scenes, or asinine performances. It finds David S. Goyer, writer of all three Blade films in addition to Alex Proyas’s modern classic Dark City, at the helm of a feature for the second time having learned nothing from Proyas and Blade II‘s Guillermo Del Toro. When the director of an action film takes pains to turn off the lights right before each action scene is set to begin, begin to worry. If Goyer does anything, he confirms the idea that if you’re not a brilliant writer (like Wes Anderson, say), then you probably shouldn’t be directing the mediocre scripts you’ve written (like George Lucas, say), because writers who usher their own scripts to the screen tend to think of their word as law instead of as a good place to start. For the first time in this series, I was bored, disinterested, and didn’t get any kind of blaxploitation charge out of Wesley Snipes cool-mutha-shut-yo-mouf method-spawned half-vampire avenger. If Blade: Trinity is the end of the cycle, it came one movie too late.

Prolific: FFC Interviews Kevin Bacon

December 5, 2004Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, DIFF/SDFF, Film Festivals, Interviews

Kbaconinterviewtitle

December 5, 2004|"It's just orange juice, no vodka," I said, pointing to my little plastic cup emblazoned with the brand name of a certain Russian beverage that, this autumn morning, was also a sponsor for the ten-day 27th Starz Denver International Film Festival. "Would've been all right with me," Kevin Bacon assured. Spectral in frame and bearing, Mr. Bacon is in town to receive the John Cassavetes Award–an honour that would seem questionable but for the actor's recent output: unfailingly maverick, skirting with dangerous. Handsome in a feral sort of way, he's best known for his iconic turns in guilty Gen-X pleasures like Footloose, Flatliners, Diner, and, at the top of the heap, Tremors, and yet a closer look at Mr. Bacon's career reveals his tendency towards the dark in the middle of the tunnel as a thing a long time in the making. His is a gallery of rogues and misfits stretching from a bit part in JFK (which the actor cites as a breakthrough for his career) to psychopath performances in films like Criminal Law, The River Wild, and Murder in the First. Between his work in last year's criminally dismissed In the Cut and now The Woodsman, a cautious ode to a recovering pederast, it's possible that Bacon will finally stop being a prisoner of his good-guy, middle-American hero image.

Sleepover (2004) [Special Edition] – DVD

December 1, 2004Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD, Family, Romance

*/**** Image A Sound A Extras C-
starring Alexa Vega, Mika Boorem, Jane Lynch, Sara Paxton
screenplay by Elisa Bell
directed by Joe Nussbaum

Sleepoverdvdcapby Walter Chaw Okay, I admit it: I'm fascinated by Joe Nussbaum's squirmy, sleazy Sleepover, a comedy for kids so queasy in its conception and execution that I'm reasonably certain it qualifies as child abuse in most states. It's not as bad as the Olsen Twins' New York Minute, mainly because it isn't disgustingly racist in addition to disturbingly paedophilic–but I have a sneaking suspicion that Sleepover engages in with some measure of cunning what New York Minute engages in recklessly. It's thus better than the evil 13 Going on 30 as well, though not nearly as good as the only so-so Mean Girls, marking it as one of those pieces of swill whose chief claim to glory is that it's subversive for adult audiences. Tragically, Sleepover is pitched at 'tweens, and the only adults likely to see it are either parents stupid enough to rent it to watch with their children or critics stupid enough to review it themselves in lieu of running Kevin Thomas's predictably lonesome positive review off the wire.

National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation 2: Cousin Eddie’s Island Adventure (2003); National Lampoon’s Holiday Reunion (2003); Dorm Daze (2004) – DVDs

November 29, 2004Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Canada, Comedy, Crime, DVD, Mystery, Romance, Television

Christmas Vacation 2: Cousin Eddie's Island Adventure
½*/****
 Image B Sound B Extras F
starring Randy Quaid, Miriam Flynn, Dana Barron, Jake Thomas
screenplay by Matty Simmons
directed by Nick Marick

Thanksgiving Family Reunion
ZERO STARS/**** Image B+ Sound B
starring Bryan Cranston, Judge Reinhold, Hallie Todd, Penelope Ann Miller
screenplay by Marc Warren & Dennis Rinsler
directed by Neal Isreal

DORM DAZE
*/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras C
starring Tatyana Ali, Botti Bliss, James DeBello, Marieh Delfino
screenplay by Patrick Casey, Worm Miller
directed by David Hillenbrand and Scott Hillenbrand

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Did anybody ever actually read NATIONAL LAMPOON? That question occurred to me while contemplating the idea of reviewing three recent, awful exploitations of the magazine's name, and I came to the conclusion that I've never met anybody who in fact had. Maybe I was slightly too young to know the rag's heyday, for all I remember were the movies stamped with their logo–and it's largely through the popularity of Animal House and the Vacation series that most of the non-snarky population felt their influence. Whatever its content as a publication, it sold tickets for a good stretch–but decades have passed and the Lampoon brand has lost its currency, meaning it's been largely reduced to whoring itself out to low-grade imitations of past successes. Thus we have the ignominy of National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation 2 (relegated to television), Holiday Reunion (cable), and Dorm Daze (more or less straight-to-video), all of which cost money better spent on special editions of National Lampoon's glory-days titles.

Dawson’s Creek: The Complete Fourth Season (2000-2001) – DVD

November 29, 2004Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Coming of Age, Drama, DVD, Teen, Television

Image B- Sound B+ Extras B-
"Coming Home," "Failing Down," "Two Gentlemen of Capeside," "Future Tense," "A Family Way," "Great Xpectations," "You Had Me at Goodbye," "The Unusual Suspects," "Kiss Kiss Bang Bang," "Self Reliance," "The Tao of Dawson," "The Te of Pacey," "Hopeless," "A Winter's Tale," "Four Stories," "Mind Games," "Admissions," "Eastern Standard Time," "Late," "Promicide," "Separation Anxiety," "The Graduate," "Coda"

by Bill Chambers SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. "Dawson's Creek" recuperated from the departure of Kevin Williamson in time to mastermind the series' shrewdest tangent yet, that which brought Joey (Katie Holmes) and Pacey (Joshua Jackson) together as boyfriend/girlfriend. Stoking the fourth and smoothest season of the show, the growing pains of that initially illicit union are deftly drawn within the parameters of entertainment for–I shan't kid myself–the young and the docile. Indeed, year four of "Dawson's Creek" is arguably the first (and, unfortunately, indisputably the last) in which all of the protagonists are recognizably human at regular intervals–even the series floaters are not their customarily boorish selves, with the exception of a snobby yacht club proprietor (Carolyn Hennesy) whom the creators just as admirably demonstrate no urge to redeem. (Of course, they can't resist a few geek-revenge moments at her expense.) Most of the season's missteps are, tellingly, not only a by-product of striking out into fairly virgin territory (literally, in some cases), but also harbingers as ominous as black cats and broken mirrors of "Dawson's Creek"'s downward spiral once the action moved from fictional Capeside to refinished sets posing as Boston.

Eloise at Christmastime (2003) – DVD

November 26, 2004Posted in2000s, Adventure, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Christmas, Comedy, Disney, Drama, DVD, Family, Television, UK

***/**** Image B Sound B+ Extras B+
starring Julie Andrews, Sofia Vassilieva, Kenneth Welsh, Debra Monk
screenplay by Elizabeth Chandler, based on the book written by Kay Thompson & illustrated by Hilary Knight
directed by Kevin Lima

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Last year around this time, I was expressing my surprise (and perhaps embarrassment) at having actually enjoyed Disney's first Eloise TV movie, Eloise at the Plaza. For once, the Mouse House had perpetrated something that was cleverly conceived, skilfully shot, and lacking in the mushy sentiment that oozes out of many a Disney enterprise. But the jaded cynic in me was wary of the sequel, Eloise at Christmastime, which, if only to salvage my integrity, I hoped would be a cheap quickie riding on the success of the original. No such luck: Eloise at Christmastime is every bit the effervescent piece of fluff that its predecessor is. Once again director Kevin Lima has sized up the limitations of the material and obscured them with a fleet-footed visual wit, creating one of the few Christmas specials you can watch without wincing.

A Very Long Engagement (2004)

November 26, 2004Posted in2000s, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, France, Mystery, Romance, Theatrical, War

Un long dimanche de fiançailles
**½/****
starring Audrey Tautou, Gaspard Ulliel, Dominique Pinon, Clovis Cornillac
screenplay by Jean-Pierre Jeunet & Guillaume Laurant, based on the novel by Sébastien Japrisot
directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet

by Walter Chaw Jean-Pierre Jeunet reunites immediately with his Amélie minx Audrey Tautou in this curious little Great War bauble, which locates the last time the French were considered military powers in a story of cowardly self-mutilation at the Front that results in the obsessive search of one war widow for the erstwhile deserter fiancé she knows in her heart is still alive. The picture, in other words, blows the patriotic flute for both the French and the Yanks, who, surely coincidentally, are the two entities financing the piece. (It’s also probably a coincidence that a period epic romance set against war is opening just in time for Oscar consideration.) A Very Long Engagement is a tale of suffocating, all-consuming love, thus it works as something like a bloody companion piece to the oppressive romantic illness of Amélie, going so far as to dip into that film’s bag of tricks (the matte Paris, the heroine returning lost artifacts, the butter-smooth montage introductions, the affection for idiosyncratic secondary characters) and recycle its tone of freakish insouciance. Jeunet’s latest is so charming that it feels aggressive–and so well made that the horrors of trench warfare have all the impact of a beautifully dressed, slightly morbid department store window.

Christmas with the Kranks (2004)

November 24, 2004Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Christmas, Comedy, Family, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Tim Allen, Jamie Lee Curtis, Julie Gonzalo, Dan Aykroyd
screenplay by Chris Columbus, based on the novel Skipping Christmas by John Grisham
directed by Joe Roth

Christmaswiththekranksby Walter Chaw Jamie Lee Curtis is looking alarmingly like Kim Hunter from Planet of the Apes and Tim Allen remains the single most aggressive, unpleasant personality who's supposed to be sunny and hilarious in the medieval endurance ritual that is Christmas with the Kranks. An act of self-flagellation like wearing a hair shirt, say, or whipping oneself with a cat-o-nine tails whilst chanting the liturgy, the picture has all the Christmas cheer of a reindeer carcass and is the finest evocation of being in Hell since The Passion of the Christ. People voting for "moral values" this last election should take a good hard look at Christmas with the Kranks, which purports to champion all those old-fashioned, God-fearing, middle-American moral landmarks (family, community, Christmas) but ends up championing consumerism, venality, hedonism, vanity, and intolerance. So much intolerance, in fact, that it plays rather well as a horror movie. A character is asked if a family not celebrating Christmas is Jewish or Buddhist: "No, none of that," he says. It reminds a lot of that "Twilight Zone" episode "The Monsters are Due on Maple Street," where a crisis shows suburban everymen to be monstrous, tribal, and dogmatic.

Alexander (2004)

November 24, 2004Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Drama, France, Germany, Italy, Morocco, Netherlands, Romance, Thailand, Theatrical, UK

*/****
starring Colin Farrell, Angelina Jolie, Val Kilmer, Jared Leto
screenplay by Oliver Stone and Christopher Kyle and Laeta Kalogridis
directed by Oliver Stone

Alexanderby Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Oliver Stone's Alexander is packed tight to the girders with catchphrases like "By the sweet breath of Aphrodite" and "By Apollo's eye" and "By Dionysus yours is the very soul of Prometheus!" It's stuffed to the gills with sword-and-sandal histrionics and props that become kitsch artifacts the instant they're rolled out for display in this awards season's gaudiest rummage sale. If it's not going to set anybody's codpiece on fire, Alexander at least lays claim to being one of the funniest movies of the year. It would have worn the title Oliver! more comfortably, opening as it does with Virgil's "fortune favours the bold" and ending, after a ridiculously long time, with the not-stunning revelation that what Stone has done is imagine the travails of a fourth-century B.C. Macedonian king as his very own. Conspiracies abound, popularity in the court of public opinion fades, bottomless campaign budgets are squandered in faraway lands for mysterious personal reasons, Oedipus rears his travel-worn head, and gay subtext begins to feel a little homophobic because it's subtext. Rosario Dawson in all her animalized glory? No problem. Colin Farrell giving Jared Leto a little peck on the cheek? Not in this house, buddy.

The Trojan Horseman: FFC Interviews Mark Brian Smith

November 21, 2004Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Documentary, Interviews

MbsmithinterviewtitleNovember 21, 2004|There's a scene in Mark Brian Smith and Tony Montana's new documentary Overnight that has already become notorious: asked to reimburse fellow wanderers on the weird odyssey of certified platinum dipshit Troy Duffy (he of The Boondocks Saints infamy), Duffy responds: "You deserve it, but you're not going to get it." Ah, a man of the people, verily. A dead ringer for "Trading Spaces"/"Extreme Makeover: Home Edition" carpenter Ty Pennington, Smith seems like an affable, reasonable guy, which begs the question of how, exactly, he got caught up in the dank updraft of a psychopathic loser like Duffy–a guy who, given the proverbial keys to the Hollywood executive washroom, spent months on end complaining about everything with a level of delusion and hate that would be funny if it weren't real. (When Roger Ebert is telling you on national television to get help for your drinking, there's definitely something amiss.) I had the same reaction to Overnight that I had to Chris Smith's (no relation) American Movie: I wondered for a long while whether this was a mockumentary. But it's not–more, it's actually a cleverly-conceived, smartly-edited film in its own right.

Dolls (2002) – DVD

November 18, 2004Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Japan, Romance

***/**** Image B+ Sound B
starring Miho Kanno, Hidetoshi Nishijima, Tatsuya Mihashi, Chieko Matsubara
written and directed by Takeshi Kitano

by Walter Chaw Dolls is beautiful–that much can be expected from Japanese director Takeshi Kitano. It's meticulously-framed, interested in theatre, obsessed with the ocean, and stately in a way that re-establishes Kitano as a bridge of sorts between the formalism of Japanese cinema's past and the lawlessness of its present. But the film, the rare Kitano-directed piece in which he does not also appear, dispenses with hinting around at his absurdist auteur tendencies and sublimates his subtext into the text. To that end, it opens with an extended Bunraku performance–shot with a devouring fascination that hints at the ningyo (doll worship) suggested by the title and set to follow–concerning two doomed lovers that parallels the three barely-intersecting couples whose stories comprise the body of this anthology. The decision to make a film that is all subtext, however, is seldom successful: such pictures tend towards the pretentious, for one; and in emptying the basement, logic follows, they leave the basement empty. So it is with Dolls, which says everything it has to say, leaving only the speculation upon a repeat viewing (if one is necessary or desired) for how personal a project this might have been for Kitano and ultimately what this film tells us about the rest of Kitano's films. Then again, there's something that nags about Dolls, opening the possibility for another possible eventuality for this kind of piece.

Once Upon a Time: FFC Interviews Marc Forster

November 14, 2004Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Germany, Interviews, Switzerland

MforsterinterviewtitleNovember 14, 2004|Looking more than a little like Michael Stipe, German-born, Switzerland-raised director Marc Forster speaks with a soft Swiss accent, supplementing his thoughts with delicate hand gestures and a nervous self-deprecation. He seems almost too fragile for the world, and in fact admits that he retreats into fantasy, the womb of fable, when he can. His instinct to fashion metaphor out of life's cruelties drew his debut and sophomore features–the festival darling Everything Put Together (about the loss of a child) and arthouse smash Monster's Ball (which won an Oscar for Halle Berry while making of race and class a fairy tale of the reconstruction), respectively–their fair share of criticism. A gauzy look at the South, Monster's Ball, for instance, reminded me of Faulkner but many others of Jim Crow. Taking the harsher edges of life and rounding them into allegory rubs me, where Forster's first two films are concerned, the right way. I can't say the same for his latest, Finding Neverland.

Finding Neverland (2004)

November 12, 2004Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Drama, Family, Romance, Theatrical, UK

**/****
starring Johnny Depp, Kate Winslet, Julie Christie, Radha Mitchell
screenplay by David Magee, based on the play "The Man Who Was Peter Pan" by Allan Knee
directed by Marc Forster

Findingneverlandby Walter Chaw Marc Forster's Finding Neverland is well-traveled territory: a historical melodrama that's been over-scored to the point of diabetes and overwritten to the point of retardation. The presumption isn't that we're unfamiliar with J.M. Barrie's play "Peter Pan", but that we're incapable of understanding that this adaptation of Alan Knee's play "The Man Who Was Peter Pan", now three degrees removed from history, lives and dies by its conveyance of the idea that the dagger of make-believe is mightier than the mundane sword of reality. How better, after all, to tell the tale of the man who created one of the darkest, most brilliantly subversive attacks on the status quo than to return him to the land of storytelling and mythmaking? Forster seems to get it–the film looks ravishing and the casting of sprightly, ethereal Johnny Depp as Barrie is a stroke of genius, but both actor and director are betrayed by a project that side-steps the disturbing issues at hand in its suggestion of this Barrie's suspected paedophilic tendencies and his inability to grow up. "Peter Pan" is the shadow; the tedious and evasive Finding Neverland is the candle. The J.M. Barrie estate is upset that the film isn't accurate. They should be upset that it isn't very good.

I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead (2004) – DVD

November 11, 2004Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, DVD, Mystery, Thriller, UK

***½/**** Image A Sound B
starring Clive Owen, Charlotte Rampling, Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Malcolm McDowell
screenplay by Trevor Preston
directed by Mike Hodges

by Walter Chaw Mike Hodges has only made a handful of films in the last three decades, even disowning a couple of them along the way because they were taken from him and edited to accommodate someone else's vision. Hodges's first film is the legendary revenge flick Get Carter featuring a never-better Michael Caine, and his latest, I'll Sleep When I'm Dead, functions very much as a bookend to his directorial debut: it's the tale of a man of few words on a mission to avenge a wrong. Reuniting Hodges with Clive Owen, star of his modest hit Croupier, I'll Sleep When I'm Dead is beautifully-lensed by long-time DP Michael Garfath in a manner that, although the picture was shot in London, looks extraordinarily like an Edward Hopper painting. Hodges, beyond being a narrative stylist, has evolved into something of a visual stylist as well. In this way, he suggests a British Wim Wenders.

Mickey’s Twice Upon a Christmas (2004) + It’s a Very Merry Muppet Christmas Movie (2002) [Special Edition] – DVDs

November 10, 2004Posted in2000s, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Christmas, Comedy, Disney, DVD, Family, Muppets, Musical

*½/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras C
directed by Matthew O'Callaghan

by Bill Chambers 2-D animation is dead, long live 2-D. Mickey Mouse and his apostles move into the realm of 3-D with Mickey's Twice Upon a Christmas, cementing this maddeningly disposable gewgaw's place in the history books next to far more sublime firsts like 1928's Steamboat Willie (Mickey's debut) and 1935's The Band Concert (Mickey's colour debut). But while it's tempting to lob cheap shots along the lines of "Uncle Walt is spinning in his grave," fact is Disney's frosty remains were already a veritable "Price is Right" wheel by the early '70s, and if he'd lived to see the digital revolution, he probably would've been one of its pioneers. In other words, it's not sacrilege to experiment with a CGI Mickey, but the results probably never should've seen the light of day.