The Starz Independent FilmCenter Project, Vol. 1

Posted 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

Posted 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

Posted 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)

Posted 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)

Posted 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)

Posted 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

Posted 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

Posted 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

Posted 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)

Posted 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)

Posted 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

by 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 hard-boiled 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

Posted 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.

Apocalypse Now Redux (1979/2001)

Posted in****/****, 1970s, 2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: Francis Ford Coppola, Drama, Mystery, Palme d'Or Winner, Theatrical, War

Apocalypse Now
****/****
starring Marlon Brando, Robert Duvall, Martin Sheen, Frederic Forrest
screenplay by John Milius and Francis Coppola, narration by Michael Herr
directed by Francis Coppola

by Walter Chaw Taking his cue from Orson Welles’s aborted screen translation of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now sought to transplant Marlow’s journey down the Congo in pursuit of mad ivory trader Kurtz to Vietnam during the war. America’s involvement in Southeast Asia is, of course, a good fit with what Conrad calls “one of the dark places of the world,” and Apocalypse Now, easily one of the most literary big-budget blockbusters of the modern era, is utterly faithful to the intellectual and visceral impact of Conrad’s vision. Apocalypse Now is so overheated and pretentious, in fact, that the best way to explain its thematic core might be through an examination of the ways it uses three T.S. Eliot poems (The Wasteland, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, The Hollow Men) and nods obliquely towards a fourth (The Dry Salvages, which refers to the animalism of rivers as the “brown god”).

Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) [The Collector’s Edition] – DVD

Posted in****/****, 1970s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Drama, DVD, FFC Must-Own, Sci-Fi, Spielberg

****/**** Image A Sound A Extras A
starring Richard Dreyfuss, Teri Garr, Melinda Dillon, Francois Truffaut
written and directed by Steven Spielberg

Mustownby Bill Chambers If his Jaws was about the Fourth of July, then Steven Spielberg followed it up with something like the holiday itself. Close Encounters of the Third Kind, a soft-touched yet uncompromising hypothesis of benevolent flying saucers, seems structurally patterned after that day: domestic chaos, then military parades, then fireworks. It’s a film now in its third incarnation; Columbia TriStar’s DVD version, like their recent-vintage LaserDisc that preceded it, contains a Spielberg-sanctioned melding of the 1977 and 1980 theatrical releases, the latter the controversial “Special Edition” that effectively ransacked the imagination of fans. The latest rendition, which appears to have adopted the label “The Collector’s Edition,” is nothing short of masterful.

Wonder Boys (2000) – DVD

Posted in****/****, 2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Christmas, Drama, DVD, FFC Must-Own, Germany, Japan, UK

****/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Michael Douglas, Tobey Maguire, Frances McDormand, Katie Holmes
screenplay by Steve Kloves, based on the novel by Michael Chabon
directed by Curtis Hanson

by Walter Chaw While safely cocooned in the lushly-padded walls of academia, I had as my advisor a Grady Tripp–a man I respected as a professor and as a friend. We exchanged books often, we talked a great deal about the obscure minutiae of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s life, and we argued over whether William and Dorothy Wordsworth were engaged in a seedy incestual entanglement. (Yes, Brad, they were.) I even suspect that there was a tattered, coffee-stained manuscript tucked in the top drawer of his desk. If you’ve ever had a professor who shaped your opinions and a good portion of your intellectual life, and if you were additionally lucky enough to call him a friend as well as a mentor, then you’re predisposed to liking Curtis Hanson’s Wonder Boys.

Do the Right Thing (1989) [The Criterion Collection] – DVD

Posted in****/****, 1980s, Authors: Vincent Suarez, Directors: Spike Lee, Drama, DVD, FFC Must-Own, The Criterion Collection

****/**** Image A Sound A- Extras A+
starring Danny Aiello, Spike Lee, Giancarlo Esposito, Bill Nunn
written and directed by Spike Lee

Mustownby Vincent Suarez SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. I was one of the few Caucasians who defied the tabloid pundits and ventured into a New York City theatre to see Do the Right Thing in the summer of 1989. Seated beside me were not rioters, but a tiny African-American child very much like the sidewalk artist appearing both in the film and on its posters. Her mother and I got a kick out of her enthusiastic dancing to the strains of the Public Enemy tune that drives the credit sequence, and she spent the next two hours bobbing in her seat, softly singing “fight the power” whenever Radio Raheem’s box would blare its anthem.

Mother Night (1996) + Waking the Dead (2000) – DVDs

Posted in****/****, 1990s, 2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Canada, Drama, DVD, Esoterica, FFC Must-Own, Mystery, Romance, Thriller, War

MOTHER NIGHT
***/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras A
starring Nick Nolte, Sheryl Lee, Alan Arkin, John Goodman
screenplay by Robert B. Weide, based on the novel by Kurt Vonnegut
directed by Keith Gordon

WAKING THE DEAD
****/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras A
starring Billy Crudup, Jennifer Connelly, Molly Parker, Janet McTeer
screenplay by Robert Dillon, based on the novel by Scott Spencer
directed by Keith Gordon

by Bill Chambers In Timequake, the most recent and arguably most flawed of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.’s novels (like many of his fans, I found it only intermittently readable), the author writes: “…I have never used semicolons. They don’t do anything, don’t support anything. They are transvestite hermaphrodites.” Perhaps Keith Gordon’s Mother Night is one of the few artistically successful cinematic adaptations of a Vonnegut work because Gordon avoids semicolons in his filmmaking–there is no straining to cohere, here.

Titan A.E. (2000)

Posted in****/****, 2000s, Action, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Jarrod Chambers, Family, Sci-Fi, Theatrical

****/****
screenplay by Ben Edlund and John August and Joss Whedon
directed by Don Bluth & Gary Goldman

by Jarrod Chambers The true test of an animated film is whether it can make you forget that it is animated. Pixar has had great success in this regard: both Toy Story and A Bug's Life are so engrossing that I completely forgot that I was watching state-of-the-art computer animation. This was also the case with last year's The Iron Giant, and now we can add Titan A.E. to the list.

American Movie (1999) [Special Edition] – DVD

Posted in****/****, 2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Documentary, Drama, DVD, FFC Must-Own, Horror, Short Films

****/**** Image A- Sound B Extras A
directed by Chris Smith

Mustownby Bill Chambers You can imagine, as a virgin does sex, what it’s like to make a movie, but until you do it, you’ll never really know. In film school, I directed a couple of shorts–nothing you’ve seen, but that’s beside the point: American Movie reminded me of why I hate making movies and why I miss it all the same. For me, watching this picture was a religious experience: Our (debatable) class differences notwithstanding, I don’t know that I’ve ever identified with a screen character more than I did real-life struggling hyphenate Mark Borchardt. For non-directors, American Movie offers plenty of Fargo-style behavioral laughs, and it may kick-start the realization of your own elusive goals. This precious ode to fringe filmmaking pulls off the amazing feat of being accessible and specialized at once.