Daddy Day Care (2003)

May 8, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Family, Theatrical

½*/****
starring Eddie Murphy, Anjelica Huston, Jeff Garlin, Steve Zahn
screenplay by Geoff Rodkey
directed by Steve Carr

by Walter Chaw A little like a drowned earthworm, Daddy Day Care is less repulsive than pathetic, an anemic, flaccid little curiosity with nary a hint of life nor much resemblance to what it was when it was alive–or maybe now I’m talking about its star, Eddie Murphy. After the year Eddie just endured, however, with the elusive “legendary flop” hat trick of Showtime, The Adventures of Pluto Nash, and I Spy, I wouldn’t be all that spry either. Eddie’s first flop of the new year is, as unlikely as it seems, somehow more listless and boring than his previous three films, taking its inspiration from the Bush economy and our failed childcare system and making of it a saccharine puff-piece heavy on manufactured epiphanies and potty humour. It’s Kindergarten Cop without the gratuitous violence; who knew that gratuitous violence in what advertises itself as a children’s entertainment would be missed?

The Shape of Things (2003)

May 8, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, France, Romance, Theatrical, UK

*½/****
starring Paul Rudd, Rachel Weisz, Gretchen Mol, Fred Weller
screenplay by Neil LaBute, based on his play
directed by Neil LaBute

by Walter Chaw Early in Neil LaBute’s The Shape of Things, a character mistakes “Medea” for “My Fair Lady”. Not an easy thing to do, for sure, it’s something that points to both LaBute’s instinct to proselytize and to his unpleasant air of smug intellectual superiority. LaBute’s films are science projects involved in the dissection of sexual politics; at their best, they illustrate the harshest salvos lobbed in the gender war, and at their worst, they serve mainly to confirm that LaBute has become so disdainful of his audience that first Possession and now The Shape of Things most resemble listless beasts over-burdened with broad symbol, churlishness, and portentous allusion. LaBute wants to hit you over the head and get away with something at the same time, his existential rage cooling in direct proportion to the self-pitying belief that no one understands him.

The Emperor’s Club (2002) [Widescreen] – DVD

May 4, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Coming of Age, Drama, DVD

*½/**** Image B- Sound B+ Extras B-
starring Kevin Kline, Emile Hirsch, Embeth Davidtz, Rob Morrow
screenplay by Neil Tolkin, based on the short story “The Palace Thief” by Ethan Canin
directed by Michael Hoffman

by Walter Chaw Saccharine, derivative, and overlong, Michael Hoffman’s often-painful The Emperor’s Club is remarkable only for the extremes to which it goes to avoid the clichéd ending–and the sad karmic (and ironic, given the film’s carpe diem, hakuna matata catchphrase) completeness with which it fails to do so. Set in the Sixties at an exclusive all-boys prep school, The Emperor’s Club is immediately recognizable as another iteration of Dead Poets Society, even more so when one realizes that the film features the same quartet of student types (the troubled one, the trickster, the bookish one, the gregarious one–also the same breakdown you’ll find in Stand By Me, come to think of it) and the same crinkly-eyed inspirational professor who finds a lesson for young lives in the heartening words of dead versifiers. That The Emperor’s Club spends its second half flashed-forward twenty-five years as said crinkly-eyed scholar discovers that his truest legacy is the success of his students reduces it to a variation of the miserable Mr. Holland’s Opus.

Love, Death & Gambling: FFC Interviews Richard Kwietniowski

May 3, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Interviews, UK

RkwietniowskiinterviewtitleMay 4, 2003|Small and soft-spoken, director Richard Kwietniowski is quietly emerging as one of the most exciting new “serious humanist” filmmakers of the last ten years. His two feature films, Love and Death on Long Island and Owning Mahowny, his latest, tackle issues of love and obsession with a deft visual sense and a surprisingly gentle touch. In Love and Death on Long Island, Kwietniowski fashions one of the most enigmatic and charming characters since Chauncey Gardner with John Hurt’s reclusive author Giles De’Ath: after a humiliating radio interview, the technology-shy De’Ath finds himself in the wrong theatre watching a cheap teensploitation flick starring “Tiger Beat” idol Ronnie Bostock (Jason Priestley); smitten, De’Ath embarks upon an unlikely quest for beauty and completion that brings him into the modern age and too close an association with the truth behind the fantasy.

Black Swan (2002) – DVD

May 3, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, Disability, Drama, DVD, Mystery

½*/**** Image D Sound C Extras B
starring Melanie Doane, Janet Monid, Michael Riley, Ted Dykstra
screenplay by Wendy Ord and Matt John Evans
directed by Wendy Ord

by Walter Chaw Wendy Ord’s Black Swan had me at “I’m tellin’ you, there were traces of blood on that feather.” The film is a dedicatedly stupid murder-mystery/small-town hick opera featuring your standard collection of comely waitresses bound for better things, saucy diner matrons, scumbags with sidekicks, stolid policemen, preternaturally bright children, and literal idiot savants. Set in a tiny hamlet in the Great White North (“Hopeville,” natch), the picture opens with an indecipherable prologue that cuts between three separate storylines: a bunch of teens in a car; the titular black swan doing whatever it is that large waterfowl do at night; and a pair of scumbags going through their nocturnal rituals. The rest of the film follows suit by stuttering between two children playing hooky, a cute waitress (Melanie Doane) flirting with a drifter while dreaming, Steve Earle-like, of getting out of Dodge, and of an investigation of a possible serial killer who leaves black swan feathers at the scenes of his crimes.

Hot Docs ’03: The Last Round

May 3, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Canada, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs
The Last Round: Chuvalo vs Ali***/****directed by Joseph Blasioli by Travis Mackenzie Hoover A look at the crazy, labyrinthine ways of boxing as seen through the eyes of Canadian heavyweight George Chuvalo. Ostensibly about the day in 1966 when he went head-to-head with Muhammad Ali and managed to last the full 15 rounds, it follows the contours of his career as he strives for the world championship belt. A precocious, driven athlete, he becomes Canadian champion at an early age and sets his sights on the world--but the world has other ideas for him, and his yearning for a title…

Hot Docs ’03: Driving Me Crazy (1988)

May 2, 2003Posted in1980s, 2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs, UK, West Germany
**½/****directed by Nick Broomfield by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Of interest to pupils of documentary--and no one else--is Driving Me Crazy, a film in which Nick Broomfield, for better and for worse, reveals his own machinations on camera and upstages his ostensible subject. Hired by producer friend Andrew Braunsberg to document an Austrian stage production on African-American music, the director shamelessly inserts himself into the scene, recording the financial and political transactions that allow him to continue with his work. In so doing, he antagonizes many who work on the production and doesn't seem to care, concerned only with continuing the…

Treasure Planet (2002) – DVD

May 1, 2003Posted in2000s, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Disney, DVD, Family, Sci-Fi

**½/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B-
screenplay by Ron Clements & John Musker and Rob Edwards, based on the novel Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson
directed by John Musker & Ron Clements

by Walter Chaw Beginning as a clever updating of Robert Louis Stevenson’s kiddie adventure classic Treasure Island, by its end, Disney’s Treasure Planet washes out as another bombastic familial reconciliation fable that marks the flat trajectory of most Disney “boy” animations. Released just a few months removed from Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away in North America, Treasure Planet‘s narrative and character shortfalls are all the more glaring for their studied lack of depth and the picture’s general overreliance on excess, broad comic relief, and all of the stale portfolio of hackneyed Disneyisms. Treasure Planet even comes complete with that most irritating of cutesy crutches: an anthropomorphic globular whatzit created with what appears to be more of a concern for ease of holiday season polymer mass-reproduction than narrative foundation. The existence of one slapstick comic-relief gag not enough, enter Martin Short as homosexual robot B.E.N.–an animated caricature of Short’s Ed Grimley character whose appearance mid-film is as handy a signal as any that Treasure Planet, for all serious intents and aesthetic purposes, is over.

Hot Docs ’03: Baader-Meinhof: In Love with Terror

May 1, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs, UK
**/****directed by Ben Lewis by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Or rather, Ben Lewis: In Love with Obviousness. This brief history of the ultra-left Red Army Faction, whose terrorism swept West Germany during the '70s, doesn't really deal with the issues that created it; the film is far more interested in the sensational aspects of their rampage than in any of the questions that it raised. Admittedly, some of the details depicted are fascinating: I didn't realize that Andreas Baader's squeeze Gudrun Ensselin was a sex-movie queen, or that the BMW, RAF getaway car of choice, became known as the "Baader-Meinhof Wagon."…

Hot Docs ’03: Hush!

May 1, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs, Russia
***/****directed by Victor Kossakovsky by Travis Mackenzie Hoover By far the most original of this year's crop is Hush!, in which director Victor Kossakovsky turns his gaze through his apartment window and collects the goings-on outside. Lovers meet in the street, dogs are walked, street cleaners sweep up the curb, and public workers tear up the street to do... something. Seasons change, rain and snow fall, a police van has a close call at an intersection and the hole in the street gets bigger and bigger as the workers continue to do God-knows-what. Sometimes the action unfurls in real time,…

Owning Mahowny (2003)

May 1, 2003Posted in****/****, 2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Crime, Drama, Theatrical, Thriller

****/****
starring Philip Seymour Hoffman, Minnie Driver, Maury Chaykin, John Hurt
screenplay by Maurice Chauvet, based on the Gary Stephen Ross book Stung: The Incredible Obsession of Brian Molony
directed by Richard Kwietniowski

by Walter Chaw Richard Kwietniowski’s Owning Mahowny charts the mendacity of addiction with something like a poet’s lyrical melancholy. The director’s follow-up to his surprisingly gentle take on Thomas Mann, Love and Death on Long Island, finds another story of obsessive love that is itself obsessed with the importance of place in defining the accumulated essence of identity and desire. Kwietniowski’s films seem to be about secret outsiders finding themselves at some point swept out to proverbial sea, the land fading fast. While in Love and Death on Long Island that divorce illustrates the reach traversed by reclusive novelist Giles De’Ath (John Hurt) to claim his inamorata, in Owning Mahowny, the widening gyre is considerably (and deliciously) more complicated; the film marks Kwietniowski’s emergence as the most promising cartographer of self-confessional mortification since countryman Terence Davies. And Kwietniowski does it all with gentle, uncompromising humour.

The Dancer Upstairs (2002)

April 30, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Crime, Drama, Spain, Theatrical, Thriller

**/****
starring Javier Bardem, Laura Morante, Juan Diego Botto, Elvira Mínguez
screenplay by Nicholas Shakespeare, based on his novel
directed by John Malkovich

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Why do people insist on making movies as though all Latin-American countries are the same? How is it that they can get away with ignoring cultural differences and national identities as though they were nothing? The same first-world writers who set their scripts “somewhere in Latin America” would surely find an Ecuadorian or a Peruvian presumptuous for setting his or her own tale “somewhere in Western Europe.” But these jokers have no guilt about herding millions and millions of people into the same leaky boat, and defining the stretch from Mexico to Argentina as one big, ugly banana republic. The results are usually not pretty, and The Dancer Upstairs is no exception to the rule.

Hot Docs ’03: Rockets Redglare!

April 30, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs
***½/****directed by Luis Fernandez de la Reguera by Travis Mackenzie Hoover The lively but tragic saga of Michael Morra, a.k.a. Rockets Redglare, is explored in this somewhat crude but extremely moving documentary. Morra/Redglare lived a life that would be ennobled by the word "marginal": he was born a heroin-addicted baby, raised in grinding poverty, all but witnessed the murder of his mother, and bounced from needle to rehab to needle again in a titanic losing battle with addiction. But he was also an extremely creative individual, and rose in the '80s to become a character actor, comedian, and performance artist…

Hot Docs ’03: And Along Came a Spider

April 29, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs, Iran
Va ankaboot amad***/****directed by Maziar Bahari by Travis Mackenzie Hoover You'd think it would be clear-cut: a serial killer who murders 16 prostitutes should be treated with a maximum of scorn. But that's not how it happened in Iran, where the notorious Saeed Hanei dispatched members of society who were already believed to have been the scum of the earth. The sadistic "spider-killer," already high on killing from the Iran-Iraq war, believed that he was doing God's work, and interviews with his family reveal that they are proud that their son/husband/father was taking a stand on those who would corrupt…

Hot Docs ’03: Stupidity

April 29, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Canada, Film Festivals, Hot Docs
½*/**** directed by Albert Nerenberg by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Words fail me in describing this travesty, a hypocritical assault on the senses which traffics in the very imagery it pretends to deplore and leaves you drained, battered, and completely demoralized. Ostensibly, it's about the media events and herd behaviours that conspire to keep the stupid oppressed and the even dumber in power, but despite the presence of Noam Chomsky and scattered other intellectuals, Stupidity is an exercise in smug superiority that does nothing to fight the powers that be. It's more interested in looking smarter than the crowd instead of…

Hot Docs ’03: Kim’s Story (1997)

April 29, 2003Posted in1990s, 2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Canada, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs
**½/****directed by Shelley Saywell by Travis Mackenzie Hoover This is the story of Kim Phuc, who was napalmed during the Vietnam War and became the subject of an infamous photo that shocked the world. Her life is full enough of incident: Having become a symbol of America's brutality during the war, she was turned into a propaganda instrument by the Vietnamese government and subsequently defected to the west. She remains, however, a committed pacifist and continues to build bridges between herself and veterans--including, in the film's biggest surprise, the pilot who dropped the napalm on her. Alas, the crew that…

Hot Docs ’03: How High is the Mountain + How Deep is the Ocean

April 28, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs, Taiwan

HOW HIGH IS THE MOUNTAIN
***/****
directed by Shiang-Chu Tang

HOW DEEP IS THE OCEAN
***½/****
directed by Shiang-Chu Tang

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover These are two tangentially related films by the Taiwanese director Shiang-Chu Tang, and they're like nothing else in the Hot Docs festival. They're neither as overly schematic as so many socially-minded documentaries nor overly aestheticized like the school of Errol Morris. In fact, those poles don't really apply to these films, which record social processes through the examples of individuals and which have a formal beauty to them that is totally non-coercive. Watching them, you don't feel forced into taking a stance–you are provided with the stuff of peoples' lives to draw your own conclusions as to how they ended up the way they did.

Love Liza (2002) – DVD

April 27, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD, France, Germany

***½/**** Image B Sound A- Commentary B+
starring Philip Seymour Hoffman, Kathy Bates, Jack Kehler, Sarah Koskoff
screenplay by Gordy Hoffman
directed by Todd Louiso

by Walter Chaw Philip Seymour Hoffman is Dante and the slings and arrows of mendacity are his Virgil, chasing him through the inferno of his day-to-day. A remarkable actor at his frequent best when deserted by a lover, Hoffman in Love Liza is Wilson Joel, a man whose wife has just killed herself and left a sealed letter behind. It becomes his albatross, toted around unexamined, as Wilson descends on a spiral of juvenile addiction (gasoline huffing) and avoidance. He sleeps on the floor outside his bedroom and does his best to dodge his mother-in-law (Kathy Bates)–hiding the sharp odour of his addiction behind the lie of becoming a radio-controlled airplane pilot.

Hot Docs ’03: Generation of Hate

April 27, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Canada, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs
**/****directed by Shelley Saywell by Travis Mackenzie Hoover In Generation of Hate, Shelley Saywell goes to Iraq and doesn't come back with much you didn't already know. Apparently, the Iraqi people hate America for constantly attacking them and aren't allowed to speak about Saddam's oppression--shocker! Sure, it can't hurt to hear that one more time, but Saywell's primitive technique doesn't give the subject much urgency beyond the common liberal "tsk." Lacking in structure and confused in focus, the video ricochets from subject to subject, taking sound bites here and there and imposing frightfully obvious voice-overs that often repeat themselves. The…

Hot Docs ’03: The Lost Boys (2002)

April 27, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Documentary, Film Festivals, UK
**/****directed by Clive Gordon by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Can a film have a wealth of new information and still be a failure? If the film is Clive Gordon's The Lost Boys, the answer is an unfortunate "yes." Dealing with the ultimate fate of some of the "lost boys" of the Sudan, who fled to northern Kenya when they were attacked by the Arab army, it shows a handful of the 3,500 who were selected for resettling in America. On the plus side, it shows a process that rarely is seen on film, that of people struggling to adjust to a…