Trouble Every Day (2001)

July 20, 2002Posted in****/****, 2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: Claire Denis, Drama, France, Germany, Horror, Japan, Theatrical, Thriller, Vampire

****/****
starring Vincent Gallo, Tricia Vessey, Béatrice Dalle, Alex Descas
screenplay by Claire Denis & Jean-Pol Fargeau
directed by Claire Denis

by Walter Chaw Plaintive and sad, Claire Denis’s remarkable Trouble Every Day is a rare combination of honesty, beauty, and maybe even genius. It isn’t enough to say that the picture captures the barbarism festering at the core of gender dynamics, nor is it sufficient to express my frank amazement at how Denis subverts genre in ways perverse and powerful. Here’s a canny director who knows the vocabulary of cinema as well as the cruel poetics of sexual anthropology; perhaps it’s enough to say that Trouble Every Day captures something ineffably true about the sex act with images vital, frank, and unshakable.

The Films of John Sayles (1980-2002)

July 6, 2002Posted in****/****, 1980s, 1990s, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Disability, Drama, Family, Fantasy, Ireland, Mexico, Mystery, Romance, Sci-Fi, Sports, Thriller, Western

Filmsofjohnsayles

Return of the Secaucus Seven (1980)
**/****
Buy DVD at Amazon.com
John Sayles's directorial debut has taken on the aura of a folk tale, the details of its genesis are that well known: With a $40,000 budget raised largely from the quadruple-threat's (writer/editor/director/actor) work for the scripts for Roger Corman's Battle from Beyond the Stars, Piranha, and Alligator, Sayles shot a film at a rented lake house with friends possessed of neither experience nor know-how and redefined the American indie movie scene. Return of the Secaucus Seven had two separate New York runs, made appearances on several year-end lists, and became a cause célèbre for snobs "in the know" deriding Kasdan's The Big Chill as a Secaucus rip-off. Twenty-some years later and the bloom is off the rose, so to speak: Return of the Secaucus Seven reveals itself to be sloppily made, overwritten, and horrendously performed (with the exception of David Strathairn and Gordon Clapp). Still, there are moments of truth in the picture that are pure: an embarrassing interlude when two old friends pass on their way to an unfortunately placed bathroom, and another during a feverish pick-up basketball sequence that steadily develops a delicious subtext. Gathering for what might be an annual reunion, the titular seven reminisce about characters who never appear, discuss past indiscretions (legal and sexual), and locate themselves on the verge of their third decade unmoored from the virulent liberalism of their flower-powered youth. Stealing the show is nerdy "straight" man Chip (Clapp), demonstrating the kind of unaffected naturalism indicative of Sayles's later work but a naturalism buried for the most part here by oodles of hanging plots, mismanaged character moments, odd editing choices, and a peculiarly literate lack of focus indicative of a brilliant novelist moonlighting as a filmmaker. 104 minutes

Atanarjuat (2002)

June 28, 2002Posted in****/****, 2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Drama, Theatrical

Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner
The Fast Runner
****/****
starring Natar Ungalaaq, Sylvia Ivalu, Peter-Henry Arnatsiaq, Lucy Tulugarjuk
screenplay by Paul Apak Angilirq
directed by Zacharias Kunuk

by Walter Chaw Zacharias Kunuk’s Atanarjuat (The Fast Runner), the first motion picture presented entirely in the Inuit language Inutkikuk, is what it means to be transported by the cinema: taken to another place and another time on the flickering wings of film’s lunar art. It is the realization of the full possibility of the movies to present the alien as familiar while providing a vital anthropological connection through the naturalism and glorious universality of its characters and story. An Inuit legend passed through centuries of oral tradition that demonstrates a very particular peculiarity of world mythology, Atanarjuat, seen one way, is a classic banning fable–thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s wife and possessions, thou shalt not murder. Jung spoke of a common well of images and signifiers from which we draw our stories, and Atanarjuat, unfolding on a cold-blasted primeval arctic plain, has the quality of totem.

Black Hawk Down (2001) – DVD

June 22, 2002Posted in****/****, 2000s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: Ridley Scott, Drama, DVD, FFC Must-Own, UK, War

****/**** Image A- Sound A+
starring Josh Hartnett, Ewan McGregor, Tom Sizemore, Eric Bana
screenplay by Ken Nolan, based on the book by Mark Bowden
directed by Ridley Scott

Mustownby Walter Chaw Black Hawk Down is a living, seething animal, full of courage and heroism, stinking of blood and gunpowder. It lacks the paternalistic moralizing of Saving Private Ryan as well as much of the poetry of The Thin Red Line, but it captures the best images of both while discarding the chaff of the former. One scene towards the end of the film, as exhausted U.S. Rangers are led to safety by a group of Somali children, is a fine example of that brute synergy. Ridley Scott’s film is the only big budget spectacle film of the last several years (Pearl Harbor, The Perfect Storm, all the way back to Titanic) that actually has the nerve to honour the event it seeks to recreate. The characters aren’t stock movie stereotypes–in fact, they’re so minimally portrayed that the general homogeny of its soldiers in battle serves to highlight mainly a minimalist “us against them” mentality. Black Hawk Down trusts its audience; it is perhaps the first and only time that this will be said of a Jerry Bruckheimer production.

Waking Life (2001) – DVD

May 6, 2002Posted in****/****, 2000s, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: Richard Linklater, Drama, DVD, Esoterica, FFC Must-Own

****/**** Image A Sound A Extras A-
starring “Wiley Wiggins and an ensemble of 74 other actors”
written and directed by Richard Linklater

Mustownby Walter Chaw It begins with a child’s game that ends with the chilling premonition “Dream is destiny” and closes with what appears to be the fulfillment of that statement. Richard Linklater’s Waking Life is an anti-narrative with no discernible story arc: The film’s conflict arises between its characters’ varying cosmologies and the challenge that presents to the viewer’s own existential verities, such as Descartes’s dictum cogito ergo sum (“I think, therefore I am”). Waking Life is one of the most interesting and engaging films of a year that sports its fair share of complex, fascinating fare (Mulholland Drive, Va Savoir).

Flesh and Bone (1993) – DVD

April 28, 2002Posted in****/****, 1990s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Mystery, Romance

****/**** Image B Sound A-
starring Dennis Quaid, James Caan, Meg Ryan, Gwyneth Paltrow
written and directed by Steve Kloves

by Walter Chaw Steve Kloves’s follow-up to his exceptional The Fabulous Baker Boys is Flesh and Bone, a dark-hued journey through the Southern Gothic that represents career pinnacles for Meg Ryan and (until The Royal Tenenbaums) Gwyneth Paltrow. That Flesh and Bone–a doom-filled piece that glowers with malevolence from its horrifying opening sequence to its unsettling conclusion–never received a great deal of attention upon its initial release isn’t as much of a surprise as the fact that not even the passage of time has cemented it as a minor classic. There are few pictures more deserving of critical revisionism.

Film Freak Central Does Hot Docs 2002 Canadian International Documentary Festival – April 27

April 27, 2002Posted in****/****, 2000s, Austria, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Czech Republic, Film Festivals, France, Germany, Hot Docs, Israel, Switzerland

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover

TREMBLING BEFORE G-D (2001)
****/****
directed by Sandi Simcha Dubowski

One doesn't normally expect a film about religion and homosexuality to come down affirming both, but that's exactly what's happened in this elegant and powerful documentary about gays and Orthodox Judaism. Trembling Before G-d shows how, against tremendous resistance and incomprehension by the religious community, gay Jews insist on staying with God and try all manner of counter-measures to make their families and community understand their plight. One man confronts the rabbi who sent him into aversion therapy years ago, demanding a better answer; two women serve as a support centre for Hasidic lesbians; and many fight an uphill battle in re-connecting with the families that rejected them.

Mulholland Drive (2001) – DVD

April 14, 2002Posted in****/****, 2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: David Lynch, Drama, DVD, Esoterica, FFC Must-Own, France, Mystery, Thriller

Mulholland Dr.
****/**** Image A- Sound A
starring Justin Theroux, Naomi Watts, Laura Elena Harring, Ann Miller
written and directed by David Lynch

by Walter Chaw

Was it a vision, or a waking dream?
 Fled is that music — Do I wake or sleep?
– John Keats, Ode to a Nightingale

MustownDavid Lynch’s Mulholland Drive contends that the answer to the eternal struggle between what is real and what is fantasy comes in the form of a Keatsian confusion–it’s the difference between Adam’s dream and Eve rendered flesh, blurred in the mind of the creator and his audience. A film is a dream of the director made tangible, a conceit familiar from the fourth-wall-breaking in Ingmar Bergman’s Persona (banishing any mystery there might have been regarding the visual references to that film in Lynch’s piece), and a movie’s characters therefore become projections of its maker’s sublimated longing (clarifying too the auteur’s use of wardrobe and colour schemes from Hitchcock’s meditation on objectification, Vertigo, as well as those of his first collaboration with inamorata Tippi Hedren, The Birds).

The Starz Independent FilmCenter Project, Vol. 1

April 5, 2002Posted in****/****, 1950s, 1990s, 2000s, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Czech Republic, Drama, Fantasy, France, Horror, Japan, Mexico, Mystery, Netherlands, Satire, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

by Walter Chaw

BOB LE FLAMBEUR (1956)
***½/****
starring Isabelle Corey, Daniel Cauchy, Roger Duchesne, Guy Decomble
screenplay by Jean-Pierre Melville, dialogue by Auguste Le Breton
directed by Jean-Pierre Melville

With every minute of Henri Decaё’s cinematography looking like a Eugène Atget photograph, Jean-Pierre Melville’s Bob Le Flambeur is a visually stunning film from a director who influenced filmmakers as diverse as Jean-Luc Godard (who quotes Bob Le Flambeur at least twice in Breathless) and John Woo (whose The Killer takes its basic plot from Melville’s Le Samourai). It is film noir of the highest order, reminding in its ensemble intricacy of Kubrick’s The Killing (released a year later in 1956) and evoking the kind of chiaroscuro, gin-joint, smoke-drenched milieu where every ashtray has a name. It’s a love letter to the grim American gangster drama of the Forties that subverts the genre even as it reinvents it as a lyrical ballad to gamblers, losers, hoods, and wayward dames–a snapshot of the Montmarte district of Paris 47 years before Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s reinvention of the same.

The Evil Dead (1982) [The Book of the Dead Limited Edition] – DVD

February 21, 2002Posted in****/****, 1980s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: Sam Raimi, DVD, FFC Must-Own, Horror, Zombie

****/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras A+
starring Bruce Campbell, Ellen Sandweiss, Richard DeManincor, Betsy Baker
written and directed by Sam Raimi

Mustownby Walter Chaw The Evil Dead defies wisdom: It’s an ultraviolent horror film made on a nothing budget (rumoured to have been in the neighbourhood of three-thousand dollars) that still manages to produce an enduring and brilliant performance and demonstrate (like a Dario Argento shocker) that gore, if it’s perverse enough, can be the beginning and the end of horror. The product of Bruce Campbell’s hilariously physical turn, of Sam Raimi’s genius in fashioning dazzling camera moves, and of an uncredited Joel Coen’s flair at the editing table, The Evil Dead bristles with life and joy. It is a testament to how bliss and the spark of inspiration can elevate a film of any budget in any genre from routine to sublime.

Suspiria (1977) – DVD

January 19, 2002Posted in****/****, 1970s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: Dario Argento, DVD, Esoterica, Horror, Italy

****/**** Image A+ Sound A+ Extras D+
starring Jessica Harper, Stefania Casini, Flavio Bucci, Miguel Bosé
screenplay by Dario Argento and Daria Nicolodi
directed by Dario Argento

Mustownby Walter Chaw At their best, Dario Argento’s films are lurid splashes of Hitchcockian reinvention that bristle with audacity and a pornographer’s sensibility. He deconstructs the male gaze in the mutilation of beautiful women, taking a moment (as he does in Tenebre, Opera, and Suspiria) to make guerrilla art of their extravagant suffering. Argento’s films are generally split between two sub-genres of the slasher flick, each defined to a large extent by his contributions. The first is the giallo, films indicated by their impossibly convoluted mystery plots and elaborate set-piece murders; the second, of which Suspiria is one, is the “supernatural,” distinguished by their surreality and lack of a traditional narrative. Known as “The Italian Hitchcock,” Argento, as I’ve said before, is more accurately “The Italian DePalma,” in that Argento’s imitating reads as homage. And though he occasionally selects sources to ape badly (i.e. attempting to adapt Jeunet and Caro to “Phantom of the Opera”), when he finds the perfect source material to serve as foundation for his redux perversions (Psycho, Vertigo, The Birds, and Rebecca for Suspiria), the end result can be as original as it is discomfiting.

In the Bedroom (2001)

December 26, 2001Posted in****/****, 2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, Theatrical

****/****
starring Tom Wilkinson, Sissy Spacek, Nick Stahl, Marisa Tomei
screenplay by Robert Festinger & Todd Field, based on a short story by Andre Dubus
directed by Todd Field

by Walter Chaw Based on the short story “Killings” by the late Andre Dubus, arguably the finest American short-story writer of the past fifty years, Todd Field’s In the Bedroom is an emotionally brutal and laudably ambiguous film that does justice to the sober restraint and taint of truth that informs the best of Dubus’s work. It’s like an Atom Egoyan or Sean Penn film in its austere chronicling of families tossed to entropy’s capricious tide, though a more complete work those filmmakers have yet to achieve. What Field captures, in fact, is a whiff of Terrence Malick’s genius–not only in he and cinematographer Antonio Calvache’s spacious plateaus but also in the thematic preoccupation with nature’s rhythms and how they imbue the patterns of human behaviour. That said, In the Bedroom largely avoids Malick’s philosophical metaphors, focusing on the far less ephemeral poetics of Dubus’s preoccupation with the minute interpersonal dynamics–the subterranean movements and precarious psychic negotiation–of a marriage.

The Royal Tenenbaums (2001)

December 26, 2001Posted in****/****, 2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Directors: Wes Anderson, Drama, Theatrical

****/****
starring Gene Hackman, Anjelica Huston, Ben Stiller, Gwyneth Paltrow
screenplay by Wes Anderson & Owen Wilson
directed by Wes Anderson

Royaltenenbaumsby Walter Chaw Royal Tenenbaum (Gene Hackman) is the estranged patriarch of the Tenenbaums, a family of child prodigies that, beset by a series of “accidents and disasters,” has never again attained the heights of its early glories. Chas (Ben Stiller), an economics wizard, Margot (Gwyneth Paltrow), a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, and Richie (Luke Wilson), a tennis star, return after years of fecklessness to the home of their mother, Etheline (Anjelica Huston), drawn there by the news that Royal is mortally afflicted with stomach cancer. In his words, he has “six weeks to set things right” with his disenchanted, wounded kin, trying all the while to undermine Etheline’s budding relationship with their accountant, Mr. Sherman (Danny Glover).

Jump Tomorrow (2001)

October 31, 2001Posted in****/****, 2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Romance, Theatrical

****/****
starring Tunde Adebimpe, Natalia Verbeke, Hippolyte Girardot, Patricia Mauceri
written and directed by Joel Hopkins

by Walter Chaw An unlikely romance, an unlikely road movie, and an unlikely buddy picture all in one that somehow works (and with a surplus of charm and sweetness), Joel Hopkins’s debut feature Jump Tomorrow could be described as either Harold Lloyd by way of Jacques Tati or Jim Jarmusch by way of Thirties screwball. Or just simply “fantastic.” It is hopelessly romantic and subversively funny, a Being There-esque collection of guileless characters left to interact in ways that are so nobly old-fashioned and innocent, it takes a good half-hour before we realize that Jump Tomorrow doesn’t have a baseball bat clutched in the hand behind its back. It doesn’t have a hand behind its back at all.

On the Waterfront (1954) [Special Edition] – DVD

October 29, 2001Posted in****/****, 1950s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Best Picture (Academy Awards), Crime, Directors: Elia Kazan, Drama, DVD, Thriller

****/**** Image A- Sound B Extras B
starring Marlon Brando, Karl Malden, Lee J. Cobb, Rod Steiger
screenplay by Budd Schulberg
directed by Elia Kazan

by Walter Chaw There is a moment in the middle of Elia Kazan’s On the Waterfront that stands out for me as one of the defining in my love of movies. Terry Malloy (Marlon Brando) confesses to his girlfriend Edie Doyle (Eva Marie Saint) that he was involved in the Union execution of her brother, but rather than listen to Terry rehash events with which we’re already familiar, a steam whistle drowns him out. The precise way that Terry moves his hands and the expression on Edie’s face, growing from a gentle concern to horror, is among the most cinematic moments in the history of the medium. It’s breathtaking in its simplicity and subtlety, revolutionary in its presentation and its eye, and exactly the right choice for the film at the right moment.

Heathers (1989) – DVD

October 25, 2001Posted in****/****, 1980s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, DVD, Satire, Teen

****/**** Image A Sound B- Extras A-
starring Winona Ryder, Christian Slater, Shannen Doherty, Lisanne Falk
screenplay by Daniel Waters
directed by Michael Lehmann

Mustownby Walter Chaw Veronica Sawyer (Winona Ryder) is the only non-Heather "Heather," one of four girls in Westerberg High's most popular and fashionable clique. The conscience of a harridan quartet responsible for much of the insecurity and intimidation at their institution, Veronica confides to new kid J.D. (Christian Slater), "I don't really like my friends." Nor is there much to admire about Westerberg's other clusters, who spend their time destroying overweight students, tormenting the "geek squad," and placing themselves in humiliating situations for the sake of imagined boosts to their ill-gained status. J.D., a rebel with a cause, functions as the catalyst for Veronica's revenge fantasies: The two begin a killing spree of the beautiful people, getting away with it by playing on grown-ups' propensity to romanticize teenage suicide.

DIFF ’01: Hybrid

October 13, 2001Posted in****/****, 2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, DIFF/SDFF, Documentary, Esoterica, Film Festivals

****/****
directed by Monteith McCollum

by Walter Chaw Hybrid is an elegy for the passing of a man who fell in love early in his life and remained faithful until the day he died, two years past turning one-hundred. Presented in gritty blacks and whites, Monteith McCollum's six-year labour of love memorializing his grandfather Milford Beeghly is a stunning documentary that itself plays as a hybrid of something dreamed-up by Errol Morris and the Brothers Quay. Ostensibly about Beeghly's obsession with finding the perfect hybrid breed of corn as an industrial crop, the film somehow becomes a grand metaphor–for the rough grace of the American way of life, for the lingering death of the agrarian lifestyle, for the difficulties of balancing family with a calling, and even for the true meaning of happiness.

Va savoir (2001)

October 12, 2001Posted in****/****, 2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Drama, France, Germany, Italy, Romance, Theatrical

Who Knows?
****/****
starring Claude Berri, Catherine Rouvel, Hélène de Fougerolles, Jeanne Balibar
screenplay by Luigi Pirandello, Jacques Rivette, Pascal Bonitzer, Christine Laurent
directed by Jacques Rivette

by Walter Chaw

"I hate symbolic art in which the presentation loses all spontaneous movement in order to become a machine, an allegory – a vain and misconceived effort because the very fact of giving an allegorical sense to a presentation clearly shows that we have to do with a fable which by itself has no truth either fantastic or direct; it was made for the demonstration of some moral truth."
-Luigi Pirandello from Playwrights on Playwriting, ed. by Toby Cole, 1961

DIFF ’01: The Man Who Wasn’t There (2001)

October 11, 2001Posted in****/****, 2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Coen Brothers, Crime, DIFF/SDFF, Drama, Esoterica, Film Festivals, Scarlett Johansson, Thriller, UK

****/****
starring Billy Bob Thornton, Frances McDormand, Michael Badalucco, James Gandolfini
screenplay by Joel Coen & Ethan Coen
directed by Joel Coen

Manwhowasntthereby Walter Chaw The noir genre was born of discomfort with women in the workplace, the rise of cynicism, and a world polarized by international conflict (WWII). Its symbol, the hardboiled detective, became the projection of the collective paranoia about the ascent of globalism and the death of Pollyannaism. Women and foreigners are not to be trusted in the noir universe; information is slippery and expensive; and the solution of the puzzle more often than not points back to a rot at the heart of the detective. It is the Oedipus/identity trajectory, complete with a blasted plague land, a murder, its thinly veiled culprit (noir is typically invested in process, not mystery), the appearance of a femme fatale, and a solution involving mortal self-knowledge. The noir hero may save the day, but at the price of being betrayed by those he loves. He is impotent to avenge his fallen friends and lovers, and at the mercy of a larger corruption that is unalterable and serves only to further degrade individual confidence. Tellingly, a great many noir works in literature and film begin with the death of a best friend or a partner and end with the realization that any victory is a hollow one in light of society’s inexorable fall into chaos.

Citizen Kane (1941) – DVD

October 10, 2001Posted in****/****, 1940s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, FFC Must-Own, Mystery

****/**** Image A+ Sound A+ Extras A+
starring Orson Welles, Joseph Cotten, Dorothy Comingore, Ray Collins
screenplay by Herman J. Mankiewicz Orson Welles
directed by Orson Welles

by Walter Chaw There are two shots of Rosebud in Citizen Kane, the first as it’s covered by a blanket of forgetful snow outside the boarding-house of Kane’s mother, the second as it’s being consumed by flames in the basement of Kane’s Florida estate. Ice and fire. Citizen Kane is a film about contrast and duality, and it expresses this through nearly every facet of the production. Kane has two friends, two wives, makes two trips to his palatial estate, and visits Susan Alexander twice. He is torn in half by his duelling personas: public magnate and private misanthrope–both sides coming together when he writes an excoriating review of his own wife’s debut opera performance just prior to firing his best friend Jedediah (Joseph Cotten) from the newspaper they founded together.