TIFF ’03: Vodka Lemon

Posted in2000s, Armenia, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Drama, Esoterica, Film Festivals, France, Italy, Switzerland, TIFF
***/**** starring Lala Sarkissian, Romen Avinian, Ivan Franek, Armen Marouthian screenplay by Hiner Saleem, Lei Dinety, Pauline Gouzenne directed by Hiner Saleem by Bill Chambers Discombobulating and deadly dull for its initial half-hour, Hiner Saleem's Vodka Lemon coalesces before it's too late into something by no means unaffecting. The first in an accumulation of vignettes finds an old man being schlepped in his bed through the Armenian tundra to a funeral site, where he promptly removes his dentures to pipe a dirge for the other mourners. The picture continues to lightly tread such surreal ground until the whimsical closing shot,…

TIFF ’03: Gozu

Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Crime, Drama, Esoterica, Film Festivals, Horror, Japan, Mystery, Thriller, TIFF
Yakuza Horror Theater: Gozu***½/****starring Hideki Sone, Sho Aikawa, Kimika Yoshino, Keiko Tomitascreenplay by Sakichi Sotodirected by Takashi Miike by Bill Chambers I've sat here staring at a flashing cursor, wondering what to write about Takashi Miike's Gozu--a picture whose spirit harks back to the David Lynch of Eraserhead--that could persuade you to see it: Though Gozu begs a viewing, any description likely to pique one's interest would force you to pre-emptively pass moral judgment on a film that a) explicitly requests to be taken as a joke, and b) is too fecund to truly offend. Gozu begins with the over-the-top…

TIFF ’03: The Five Obstructions

Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Belgium, Denmark, Directors: Lars von Trier, Documentary, Esoterica, France, Switzerland, TIFF
De Fem Benspænd***½/****a film by Jørgen Leth & Lars von Trier by Bill Chambers Jørgen Leth struck a self-described "Faustian" deal with half-insane auteur Lars von Trier to remake his own experimental short film The Perfect Human five times according to "ruinous" changes mandated by von Trier. But the mouse repeatedly outwitted the cat with an incapacity for anything but quality product: The first four of the titular "obstructions" are up there with, well, early Leth, and the venture teaches von Trier--who thrives on unforeseen obstacles and how they lead to personal dissatisfaction with his work--that you can't make crap on…

TIFF ’03: Falling Angels

Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Canada, Comedy, Coming of Age, Drama, Film Festivals, TIFF
*½/****starring Miranda Richardson, Callum Keith Rennie, Katharine Isabelle, Kristin Adamsscreenplay by Esta Spalding, based on the novel by Barbara Gowdydirected by Scott Smith by Bill Chambers Falling Angels has accumulated a lot of buzz over the past couple of days at the TIFF, but I don't mind telling you to ignore it. Basically a Sunday-funnies version of The Virgin Suicides, the film stars an already-typecast Katharine Isabelle as the most embittered of three daughters who live under the gun of a live-wire buffoon (Callum Keith Rennie) while tending to their catatonic mother (Miranda Richardson, doing a mean Joan Allen impersonation).…

TIFF ’03: The Cooler

Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Drama, Film Festivals, Romance, TIFF
*½/****starring William H. Macy, Alec Baldwin, Maria Bello, Shawn Hatosyscreenplay by Frank Hannah & Wayne Kramerdirected by Wayne Kramer by Bill Chambers A lame exercise in Mamet posturing, The Cooler has been subject to inexplicable pre-release hype for both its tame (by post-Irréversible standards) sex scenes and, allegedly, for being good. William H. Macy plays another variation on his stock nebbish, this one employed by the Shangri-La Casino to "cool" gamblers on a hot streak with his contagious bad luck--a premise that contains the potential to expose the heart of the most superstitious city in America. But writers Frank Hannah…

TIFF ’03: Bon Voyage

Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Drama, Film Festivals, France, Mystery, Romance, Thriller, TIFF, War
*½/****starring Isabelle Adjani, Gérard Depardieu, Virginie Ledoyen, Yvan Attalwritten and directed by Jean-Paul Rappeneau by Bill Chambers "And I'll huff, and I'll puff, and I'll boorrre the hell out of you." Jean-Paul Rappeneau's Bon Voyage labours harder than any film in recent memory to entertain, but the result is so draining I don't remember grooving with it once. In the opening scene, the latest vehicle for champagne starlet Viviane Denverts (Isabelle Adjani, who at 48 should be too old to play an ingénue, but looks at least half her age--it's quite miraculous, really) leaves rapt the attendees of a French…

There’s Only One Sharif in This Town: FFC Interviews Omar Sharif

Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Egypt, Film Festivals, Interviews, TIFF

OmarshariftitleSeptember 7, 2003|He made one of the cinema's greatest (and lengthiest) entrances in Lawrence of Arabia, appearing as a heat-obscured speck of dust that gradually adopts the form of a black-swathed man on horseback, one Sherif Ali ibn el Kharish. Omar Sharif's regal stride into our appointed meeting place, a third-floor room within Toronto's Hotel Intercontinental, felt almost as dramatic to me, for his every step is weighted with a half-century of fame. Mr. Sharif is at the Toronto International Film Festival promoting a delicate French film in which he stars opposite young Pierre Boulanger, François Dupeyron's Monsieur Ibrahim et les fleurs du Coran. The picture works largely because of the legend-in-his-own-time baggage the actor brings to the title role of a neighbourhood grocer yearning to pass his considerable wisdom on. When I interviewed him, Mr. Sharif was, like his alter ego Ibrahim, pensive and forthcoming, with little patience for subtext. I found him both gracious and melancholy, and was heartbroken when our all-too-brief time together ran out.

TIFF ’03: Elephant

Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Crime, Directors: Gus Van Sant, Drama, Film Festivals, Palme d'Or Winner, Teen, Thriller, TIFF
***½/****starring Alex Frost, Eric Deulen, John Robinson, Elias McConnellwritten and directed by Gus Van Sant by Bill Chambers Though it ultimately garnered Gus Van Sant the Best Director prize (in addition to the Palme d'or), Elephant's lukewarm reception among ink-slingers at last May's Cannes Film Festival confirms the dulled senses of the critical establishment--that a contemporary masterwork can practically blind with its colour scheme and still go unrecognized as such by cinema's ambassadors is more terrifying than anything in Van Sant's searing interpretation of the Columbine atrocity. The first film intended for theatrical exhibition to be screened in Academy ratio…

TIFF ’03: Monsieur Ibrahim et les fleurs du Coran

Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Coming of Age, Drama, Film Festivals, France, TIFF
**½/****starring Omar Sharif, Pierre Boulanger, Gilbert Melki, Isabelle Renauldscreenplay by François Dupeyron, based on the novel by Eric-Emmanuel Schmittdirected by François Dupeyron by Bill Chambers Set, for the most part, against the backdrop of a Paris ghetto circa the early 1960s, Monsieur Ibrahim et les fleurs du Coran ("Coran" being the French spelling of the Qur'an) is an agreeable coming-of-age fable in the Tony Gatlif vein. Moses "Momo" Schmitt (Pierre Boulanger), an artless Jewish youth accustomed to holding down the fort while his father sweats away in an office for a piddling wage, regularly purloins items from the grocery run…

TIFF ’03: The Barbarian Invasions

Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Canada, Comedy, Crime, Drama, Film Festivals, France, Mystery, Romance, TIFF
Les Invasions barbares**½/****starring Rémy Girard, Stéphane Rousseau, Marie-Josée Croze, Marina Handswritten and directed by Denys Arcand by Bill Chambers Denys Arcand's The Decline of the American Empire belongs to the homecoming genre of films like Lawrence Kasdan's The Big Chill and John Sayles's Return of the Secaucus Seven, but its quasi-sequel, twice honoured at this year's Cannes Film Festival (for Marie-Josée Croze's performance and Arcand's screenplay), is a Muppet movie with socialists. When embittered poli-sci professor Rémy (Rémy Girard) is diagnosed with untreatable cancer, his estranged, millionaire son Sébastien (David Duchovny look-alike Stéphane Rousseau) seeks out Rémy's Marxist friends of…

Confidence (2003) – DVD

Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, DVD, Thriller

***½/**** Image A Sound A Extras A
starring Edward Burns, Rachel Weisz, Andy Garcia, Dustin Hoffman
screenplay by Doug Jung
directed by James Foley

by Walter Chaw The urban surfaces of Americana are lent the sheen of Edward Hopper's neon isolationism by cinematographer Juan Ruiz Anchía in the appropriately named Confidence, which finds director James Foley back on noir ground, where his footing is firmest. It's the same effect generated by Foley/Anchía's Glengarry Glen Ross, here in Confidence used to mellifluous affect rather than staccato at the service of a caper flick if not the equal to Jules Dassin's seminal contributions to the genre, at least several times better than the slickified nonsense (The Score, the Ocean's Eleven remake) and sinkholes of talky illogic (Heist) of recent fare. A successful heist film as rare as a film that uses Edward Burns correctly in a sentence, Confidence is proof positive–if proof were needed–that James Foley, when he's at the top of his game, is at the top of the game.

Out for a Kill (2003) – DVD

Posted in2000s, Action, Aruba, Authors: Bill Chambers, Crime, DVD, Martial Arts, Thriller

*/**** Image A- Sound A-
starring Steven Seagal, Michelle Goh, Corey Johnson, Kata Dobó
screenplay by Dennis Dimster
directed by Michael Oblowitz

by Bill Chambers The other day, my friend and I were at the CNE, Toronto's annual expo of overpriced amusements, when we got a hankering for the raw sewage peddled inside its flea-market-sized food court. Where we wound up eating was at Kentucky Style Chicken, one of the many transient take-outs named for maximum copyright infringement and serving a synthetic mock-up of the already-inedible. Out for a Kill exists in the same spirit: Steven Seagal's first direct-to-video production in weeks, its designation combines the titles of his early pictures Hard to Kill and Out for Justice while mixing and matching nearly every trend, past and present, of the martial arts genre, on whose outskirts Seagal has toiled throughout his film career. Here, imitation isn't the sincerest form of flattery, it's a cloaking device–"Doesn't this remind you of something?" vs. "Boy, does this stink." You know something? Sometimes I get a hankering for movies I know I'll regret, too.

Bend It Like Beckham (2002) [Widescreen Edition] – DVD

Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Germany, Romance, Sports, UK

**½/**** Image A- Sound A Extras A-
starring Parminder Nagra, Keira Knightley, Jonathan Rhys-Meyers, Anupam Kher
screenplay by Gurinder Chadha, Guljit Bindra, Paul Mayeda Berges
directed by Gurinder Chadha

by Bill Chambers This year's British-import-pre-sold-as-a-hit Bend It Like Beckham coasts on its similitude to John Badham's magnificent Saturday Night Fever, but when all a picture is doing is reminding you of a better one without embarrassing itself, it can hardly be called a triumph. I'm surprised that more critics haven't picked up on the film's debt to Saturday Night Fever, actually, which extends to the set design and placement of key props. It's this kind of popular coding that has, I suspect, buoyed Bend It Like Beckham aloft the market doldrums of other mainstream-pitched East-meets-West comedies (East Is East, Bollywood/Hollywood): the subliminal affiliation of one ethnicity (orthodox Sikh) with another (Italian-Americans) that was long ago embraced by the masses.

Down with Love (2003) [Widescreen] – DVD

Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD, Germany, Romance

*/**** Image B Sound A Extras B+
starring Renée Zellweger, Ewan McGregor, David Hyde Pierce, Sarah Paulson
screenplay by Eve Ahlert & Dennis Drake
directed by Peyton Reed

by Walter Chaw Renée Zellweger doesn't look altogether well and Ewan McGregor appears a little bored in Peyton Reed's post-modern take on the three Doris Day/Rock Hudson innuendo operas of the late-'50s and early-'60s. An opening voiceover informs that it's "Now, 1962!" and the jokes don't get any funnier than that; Down with Love makes so many miscalculations about its cast and premise that its theatrical release concurrent with The Matrix Reloaded doesn't seem so much "counter-programming" as "hide the evidence." Its greatest crime isn't that its one joke is tiresome from the thirty-minute mark on, it's that at the end of the day the picture doesn't particularly convince as a romance, tickle as a comedy, or score as a satire of any kind.

Walking on Water (2002)

Posted in2000s, Australia, Authors: Bill Chambers, Drama, Theatrical

***/****
starring Vince Colosimo, Maria Theodorakis, Judi Farr, Nicholas Bishop
screenplay by Roger Monk
directed by Tony Ayres

by Bill Chambers Last year’s admirable ode to grief Moonlight Mile was given an injection of freshness by the cruelly luminous Ellen Pompeo, but in the end, the chaos the film depicted seemed too straightforwardly resolved. Australia’s Walking on Water, which likewise explores the aftermath of an untimely death (thus finding itself plum in a new niche market with Moonlight Mile and the cable phenom “Six Feet Under”), isn’t as entertaining as Moonlight Mile, but nobody in it can say one thing that will fix everything, and, boy, is it well observed. The picture is little more than–yet sufficiently–a medley of grief gestures (as screenwriter Roger Monk has remarked, “No two people react [to the death of a loved one] in the same way”): some joshing (praying for reincarnation to spare the departed from coming back as a “poof”), others piercing (kicking a mourner out of the wake for crying too loud), all coalescing into a gripping and mildly devastating viewing experience.

Memoirs of an Invisible Man (1992) – DVD + John Carpenter: The Prince of Darkness – Books

Posted in1990s, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Books About Movies, Directors: John Carpenter, DVD, Sci-Fi

MEMOIRS OF AN INVISIBLE MAN
**/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras C
starring Chevy Chase, Daryl Hannah, Sam Neill, Michael McKean
screenplay by Robert Collector & Dana Olsen and William Goldman, based on the book by H.F. Saint
directed by John Carpenter

JOHN CARPENTER: THE PRINCE OF DARKNESS
FFC rating: 6/10
written by Gilles Boulenger

by Bill Chambers In John Carpenter: The Prince of Darkness, a new interview book by Gilles Boulenger, John Carpenter says that you don’t see the possessory credit on Memoirs of an Invisible Man (i.e., “John Carpenter’s Memoirs of an Invisible Man“) because the film is not 100% his, but rather the product of studio interference he knew full well would take place prior to signing on. (“Warner Bros. is in the business of making audience-friendly, non-challenging movies,” Carpenter declares.) Boulenger doesn’t ask his subject how he stomached accepting the project–funnyman Chevy Chase’s darling, which Chase had shepherded through an abortive incarnation to be directed by Ivan Reitman and scripted by William Goldman before Carpenter climbed aboard–despite his misgivings, since he obviously did it for the A-list boost and the last time he did that (Christine) felt tormented about it for years after. (“When there is no connection between the movie and my inner soul, I get lost and I walk through it.”) You’ll find that’s the pattern of Boulenger’s Q&A: Carpenter feeds his interrogator provocative morsels, and they go untested because Boulenger has a set-list he wants to get through. (It’s the spontaneous follow-up question, the willingness to confront, that tests an interviewer’s mettle.) I fear we may have another Laurent Bouzereau on our hands, for Boulenger’s favourite query–he uses it over and over again–is also his most reductive: “Do you recall one telling anecdote about the shoot?”

The Hunted (2003) [Widescreen] – DVD + William Friedkin: Films of Aberration, Obsession and Reality – Books

Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Books About Movies, Crime, Directors: William Friedkin, Drama, DVD, Thriller

THE HUNTED
***/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Tommy Lee Jones, Benicio Del Toro, Connie Nielsen, Jenna Boyd
screenplay by David Griffiths & Peter Griffiths and Art Monterastelli
directed by William Friedkin

WILLIAM FRIEDKIN: FILMS OF ABERRATION, OBSESSION AND REALITY
FFC rating: 9/10
written by Thomas D. Clagett

by Walter Chaw Hot on the heels of Bruce Willis’s bwana wish-fulfillment fantasy Tears of the Sun comes William Friedkin’s The Hunted, a film that introduces its titular fugitive in a flashback to Kosovo at the height of the Albanian genocide. The parsing of historical atrocity functioning as shorthand for backstory to what is essentially a pretentious action movie is distasteful, the insertion into that history of elite American soldiers righting wrongs un-righted to this day a kind of unspeakable arrogance late unique of Yankee cloth. That being said, The Hunted is a cheerfully ridiculous movie that manages over the course of its running time to entertain with a series of action set-pieces that recall Friedkin’s work in The French Connection. Though riddled with plot impossibilities and stunning coincidences, the picture, courtesy, perhaps, of Caleb Deschanel’s magnificent cinematography, reminds of the nearness of nature and violence of John Boorman’s Deliverance; of the kineticism of Doug Liman’s The Bourne Identity; and of the premise and execution of a little-read Rex Miller novel called S.L.O.B.. If it also reminds of the creaky Abraham/Oedipus by way of Robert Bly wilderness dynamic of Mamet’s appalling The Edge, so be it: the fun parts outweigh the infuriating ones.

Identity (2003) [Special Edition] – DVD

Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD, Mystery, Thriller

***/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring John Cusack, Ray Liotta, Amanda Peet, Alfred Molina
screenplay by Michael Cooney
directed by James Mangold

by Walter Chaw Although by the end it isn’t nearly as interesting as it is clever, James Mangold’s take on the slasher genre Identity is a tricky little beast that fits in peculiarly well with the recent trend of deconstructive horror films (such as The Ring and Soft for Digging). Its use of Hughes Mearns’s haunting “Antigonish” (1899, “I was going up the stair/I met a man who wasn’t there!/He wasn’t there again today!/I wish, I wish he’d stay away!”) reminds of Dario Argento’s nursery dirge in Deep Red, while the film’s telescoping storytelling style evokes, of all things, the caper genre. With its title suggesting a certain high-mindedness, when a character glances for a swollen moment at Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, it tells too much of what the film will be about: the philosopher’s existential definition of consciousness projected onto reality and the dangers of mauvaise foi (bad faith), the process by which people, within themselves, elude responsibility for what they do. Still, the film is such a professional exercise on every level that its obviousness–better, its literalness–can be forgiven.

Piglet’s Big Movie (2003) – DVD

Posted in2000s, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Disney, DVD, Family, Musical, Mystery

*½/**** Image A Sound A- Extras C-
screenplay by Brian Hohlfeld, from stories by A.A. Milne
directed by Francis Glebas

by Bill Chambers To its credit, Piglet's Big Movie, unlike so many Disney franchise pictures, is inoffensive (unless being monotonous is offensive), but it was hamstrung (har-har) from the outset by the departure through death or firing of original Pooh voice actors Sterling Holloway (Pooh), Paul Winchell (Tigger), Ralph Wright (Eeyore), Junius Matthews (Rabbit), and Hal Smith (Owl). Only the inveterate John Fiedler returns to lend his pipes to the eponymous Piglet, and while Jim Cummings technically sounds like Holloway and Winchell in replacing them, he lacks the mischievous twinkle that both brought to their respective roles. Meanwhile, the character-sprung songs, a major ingredient of the series' charm, are too attached this time around to Carly Simon, who appears in an inexplicably live-action closing-credits sequence singing solo in the Hundred-Acre Wood like she's a real "get" for an audience that hasn't learned to tie their shoes yet. (There are no tunes to get kids in touch with their melancholy side early like Winnie the Pooh and the Blustery Day's depressing "The Rain Rain Rain Came Down, Down, Down," only stuff to teach them how most songs are sub-folk music until you replace your Fisher-Price radio with a ghetto blaster.) And while it makes more sense here, given that Pooh's first feature film The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh was a compilation of short subjects, did we really need another Disney flick with an anthology structure on the heels of Cinderella II, Atlantis: Milo's Return, and Tarzan & Jane? It's starting to feel like an injection mold.

The Cuckoo (2002)

Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Drama, Russia, Theatrical, War

Kukushka
**/****
starring Anni-Christina Juuso, Ville Haapasalo, Viktor Bychkov
written and directed by Aleksandr Rogozhkin

by Bill Chambers As with the ineffably similar No Man’s Land, Danis Tanovic’s “Twilight Zone”-esque morality play in which a Bosnian and a Serb duke it out while the dead body of a Serb soldier threatens to detonate a landmine between them, when you’re done watching The Cuckoo, you’re done thinking about it as well. Both films make their points too baldly–the stress of analysis and the joy of drawing conclusions are pleasures you won’t much experience after a viewing of The Cuckoo despite its having the pretense of being profound. An awkwardly-translated quote that writer-director Aleksander Rogozhkin provided for the film’s North American pressbook–“I don’t write scripts, I write novels for cinema… I could just note ‘Sniper Veiko shoots from a rifle,’ but it will be an absolutely different approach if I write ‘Sniper Veiko shoots from old Austrian rifle, with optical sight rifle'”–is telling: he’s not a man who likes to leave many doors open to interpretation.