Film Freak Central Does Hot Docs 2002 Canadian International Documentary Festival – April 28

Posted in2000s, Australia, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover

QUESTIONING FAITH
Questioning Faith: Confessions of a Seminarian
**½/****
directed by Macky Alston

On learning of his friend Alan Smith's death of AIDS-related complications, gay seminary student Macky Alston doubts the goodness and existence of God. In order to sort out his beliefs, he talks to a variety of friends and associates about their religious beliefs. I'd like to say that his search comes up with something to ponder, but this atheist was left largely unmoved by his unfocussed explorations, which have resulted in a documentary that should be longer and infinitely more articulate than it is. In all fairness, the gravity of the discussion keeps Questioning Faith moving as it goes from passionate affirmation to passionate denial: here the faith of Alan's mother and uncle, there the atheism of his partner's mother; here the belief of a hospital's Muslim chaplain in the face of a miscarriage, there the fervent Buddhism of a neighbour whose father has died.

Showtime (2002)

Posted in2000s, Action, Australia, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Eddie Murphy, Robert De Niro, Theatrical, Will Smith

*/****
starring Robert De Niro, Eddie Murphy, Rene Russo, Ken Hudson Campbell
screenplay by Keith Sharon and Alfred Gough & Miles Millar
directed by Tom Dey

by Walter Chaw Shaping up as a spoof but neither smart enough to earn that label nor exciting enough to sustain interest otherwise, Tom Dey’s slick Showtime is an incoherent mess of a film that relies on explosions and volume to distract from its tin ear and flat pacing. It wants desperately to be a self-aware genre exercise in the Scream vein, but after its characters mention that there are “rules” to the buddy-cop flick, it chooses to demonstrate them rather than subvert them. Screenwriters-by-committee Keith Sharon, Alfred Gough, and Miles Millar, patching together an abominable iteration of the same old Lethal Weapon tropes, have conspired to get De Niro to immediately make 15 Minutes again (but as an alleged intentional comedy) and to continue Eddie Murphy’s typecasting as an animated jackass. Piling on the offenses, Showtime suffers from a few distracting plotholes, an obviously tacked-on prologue meant to elicit a Kindergarten Cop-esque brand of “isn’t it funny to scare children with a terrifying actor,” and a score by Alan Silvestri that actually approximates the feel of hammers to the brainpan.

Ice Age (2002)

Posted in2000s, Adventure, Animation, Australia, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Family, Theatrical, UK

*½/****
screenplay by Michael Berg and Peter Ackerman
directed by Chris Wedge

by Walter Chaw Borrowing heavily from Disney’s aimless and laggard Dinosaur, Fox and Blue Sky Animation’s Ice Age is burdened from the outset by the vaguely disturbing reality that the titular epoch spells doom for most of the heroes of this animated mistake. When our quartet of cuddly endangered animals saunters off into the sunset, it feels disturbingly melancholy–something director Chris Wedge tries to assuage with a tedious epilogue that beats a long-dead running gag into the loam of an increasingly belaboured film.

Tackle Happy (2000) – DVD

Posted in2000s, Australia, Authors: Bill Chambers, Documentary, DVD, Esoterica

Tackle Happy (The Origins of “Puppetry of the Penis”)
**½/**** Image B Sound B- Extras C-
directed by Mick Molloy

by Bill Chambers A name actor once dropped trou’ in front of me, under non-sexual circumstances I dare not elaborate. I buried my face in my hands and this only inspired him to taunt me further with his manhood. “What’s the matter? It’s just a dick,” he said. The more I think about it (not that I’ve been dwelling on it), the more sage his plea of innocence becomes. Penises are obnoxious, and sometimes none too innocuous, but all in all, they’re not the least bit sacred. Compare the Western cultural reputations of the vagina and the penis: on stage, the former gets a pretentious monologue performed by everyone from Glenn Close to Alanis Morissette; the latter gets a puppet show.

Moulin Rouge (2001) – DVD

Posted in2000s, Australia, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Drama, DVD, Esoterica, Musical, Romance

Moulin Rouge!
***/**** Image A Sound A- (DD)/A+ (DTS) Extras A
starring Nicole Kidman, Ewan McGregor, John Leguizamo, Jim Broadbent
screenplay by Baz Luhrmann & Craig Pearce
directed by Baz Luhrmann

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover It’s been a long time since I’ve seen a mainstream film that tried to place its heart in the audience’s hands. Nothing in recent memory is as direct and open in its pleasures as the classic Hollywood musicals were, having been replaced by the sideways glance of the ironist and all of the false snobbery that pretends nothing is as it appears. While this is supposed to be a bellwether of our superior sophistication, it really just means that we strike a different pose: we must be superior to the events on screen and stop up our emotions with an arched eyebrow and a swift kick to the object of our gaze. The fact is that any evidence of true feeling–or, more to the point, true yearning for release–is treated as ridiculous and something to be lamented, but one must admit the current climate makes an affirmation of what we want seem very vulnerable and the efforts of those who decide to work without the net of condescension seem daring, if not suicidal.

DIFF ’01: Lantana

Posted in2000s, Australia, Authors: Walter Chaw, DIFF/SDFF, Drama, Film Festivals, Germany, Mystery, Romance

***/****
starring Anthony LaPaglia, Geoffrey Rush, Barbara Hershey, Kerry Armstrong
screenplay by Andrew Bovell, based on his play
directed by Ray Lawrence

by Walter Chaw Leon Zat (Anthony LaPaglia) is a police officer suffering from low self-esteem and a dwindled passion in his marriage to Sonja (the incredible Kerry Armstrong). When we first meet Leon, in fact, we know him only as an adulterer, witness to the first of his two indiscretions with the newly-separated Jane (Rachael Blake). Suspecting that Leon may be straying, Sonja visits a therapist, Valerie (Barbara Hershey), confiding that, "It isn't that he's slept with another woman, it's that he's lied to me about it that's the betrayal." Lantana is obsessed with repression, of how one small secret kept for too long mutates and festers into insurmountable guilt and fear. Leon feels guilty about his adultery and is fearful of being discovered; later, Leon feels guilty for having been discovered, and is fearful that his wife no longer loves him. Sonja similarly worries that she doesn't love him anymore.

Paradise Road (1997) – DVD

Posted in1990s, Australia, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, War

**/**** Image A+ Sound A
starring Glenn Close, Frances McDormand, Pauline Collins, Cate Blanchett
written and directed by Bruce Beresford

by Walter Chaw In 1976, Polish composer Henryk Gorecki composed his stunning orchestral and choral piece Symphony No.3 Op.36 “Symfonia pie¶ni ¿a³osnych” (“Symphony for Sorrowful Souls”), a collection of smaller movements comprising, much like Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana, varied texts both sacred and found. Among those sources used by Gorecki are a 15th-century lamentation of the Holy Cross Monastery; a folk song from the Opole region; and, most specifically, a young prisoner’s inscription on the wall of her cell in Zakopane’s Gestapo prison.

Me Myself I (1999) + Passion of Mind (2000) – DVDs

Posted in1990s, 2000s, Australia, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Drama, DVD, France, Mystery, Romance, Sci-Fi, Thriller

ME MYSELF I
**/**** Image B Sound A Extras C
starring Rachel Griffiths, David Roberts, Sandy Winton, Yael Stone
written and directed by Pip Karmel

PASSION OF MIND
**/**** Image A Sound B+
starring Demi Moore, Stellan Skarsgård, William Fichtner, Peter Riegert
screenplay by Ron Bass and David Field
directed by Alain Berliner

by Bill Chambers SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. With a bumper crop of "what if?" movies hitting screens over the past couple of years–enough of them, perhaps, to signify a genre–the time is nigh to examine, in the hope of capping, this Cinema of Regret, a marriage propagandist's dream. Both Me Myself I and Passion of Mind arrive (coincidentally?) on DVD this week, and each in its roundabout way encourages its existentially lost central character to attach sentimentalism to family values. Dan Quayle must be happy as a clam.

The Matrix (1999)

Posted in1990s, Action, Australia, Authors: Vincent Suarez, Martial Arts, Sci-Fi, Theatrical

***/****
starring Keanu Reeves, Laurence Fishburne, Carrie-Anne Moss, Hugo Weaving
written and directed by Lana and Lilly Wachowski (née The Wachowski Brothers)

by Vincent Suarez There's an early moment in The Matrix when Keanu Reeves's character retrieves contraband from a hollowed-out copy of one of the canonical texts of Postmodernism, Simulacra and Simulation, in which Jean Baudrillard suggests that modern reality is little more than a series of items and experiences replicating all that has come before; that ours is a reality comprising resemblances. It's details like these which elevate The Matrix above the vast majority of recent science-fiction films. Yet, like the strain of contemporary philosophy informing it, The Matrix is full of inconsistencies and contradictions, holes you could drive a truck through… But it's a scenic drive.

Analyze This (1999)

Posted in1990s, Australia, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Crime, Gangster, Robert De Niro, Theatrical

**½/****
starring Robert DeNiro, Billy Crystal, Lisa Kudrow, Chazz Palminteri
screenplay by Peter Tolan and Harold Ramis and Ken Lonergan
directed by Harold Ramis

by Bill Chambers Robert De Niro is not a comedian. He used this to his advantage in what is arguably his best performance, as The King of Comedy's Rupert Pupkin. In that 1982 media-age satire from Martin Scorsese, a film that becomes more prophetic with each passing year, Pupkin is a struggling comedian obsessed with talk-show host Jerry Langford (a self-parodying Jerry Lewis) and the thought of appearing on his program. Pupkin's routines, however, are painfully unfunny; moreover, he is blithely unaware of their mediocrity. That his jokes don't sound like they were written to bomb (they're like warmed-over Henny Youngman one-liners) is because of De Niro's desperate delivery–the actor has awful comic timing in his bones.