Authors: Walter Chaw Archives - Page 101 of 146

Shall We Dance (2004)

October 15, 20042000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Romance, Theatrical

½*/****
starring Richard Gere, Jennifer Lopez, Susan Sarandon, Stanley Tucci
screenplay by Audrey Wells, based on the screenplay by Masayuki Suo
directed by Peter Chelsom

by Walter Chaw Shall We Dance sits on the screen like an unwelcome dinner guest, or a corpulent toad. It's a remake of a mediocre-but-popular Japanese film that jettisons the question mark after "Dance" on its title screen, the inflectionless phrase squatting there as this movie's moniker a curiously apt description of the dismal marionette's-waltz to follow. The only thing more inscrutable than Jennifer Lopez's self-effacing slide into the territory of Melanie Griffith's mumbling kewpie doll career is the filmmakers' concept of Richard Gere as a comic actor capable of carrying off long takes and haughty deliveries. After all, it's hard enough to believe that the glowering, pinched vision of J.Lo staring fixedly out a dance-studio picture window at Chicago's hurtling elevated train would serve as an invitation instead of a dire warning. The romance of the El has gone decidedly downhill since Tom Cruise, Rebecca DeMornay, and Tangerine Dream took a ride in Risky Business.

DIFF ’04: Kinsey

October 14, 20042000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, DIFF/SDFF, Drama, Film Festivals, Germany, Romance

***/****starring Liam Neeson, Laura Linney, Chris O'Donnell, Peter Sarsgaardwritten and directed by Bill Condon by Walter Chaw Liam Neeson plays the venerable zoologist-turned-sex scientist Alfred Kinsey, who, buoyed by a supportive Indiana University Bloomington dean (Oliver Platt) and a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, single-handedly drew back the curtains on the human libido in the rigid 1950s (1948-1953). The picture (written/directed by Gods and Monsters' Bill Condon) covers Kinsey's contentious relationship with his stentorian father (John Lithgow, reprising his evil preacher performance from Footloose), his open relationship with wife Clara "Mac" Kinsey (Laura Linney), and his stewardship of young Clyde…

DIFF ’04: Unknown Soldier

October 14, 20042000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, DIFF/SDFF, Drama, Film Festivals

*½/****starring Carl Louis, Postell Pringle, Carl Garrison, Layla Edwardswritten and directed by Ferenc Tóth by Walter Chaw With Unknown Soldier, a film that militarizes the terminology for the plight of inner-city youth, debuting writer-director Ferenc Tóth demonstrates a nice touch behind the camera but an anvil's touch at the typewriter. The story of a young man (Ellison (Carl Louis)) who loses his father--then his mooring, then his home, then his girl--before being shamed back into respectability takes on all the tedious trappings of the new urban template for coming-of-age dramas. The digital video looks a touch over-sharp, even as the rest…

Ray (2004)

October 14, 20042000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, DIFF/SDFF, Film Festivals, Music

***/****
starring Jamie Foxx, Kerry Washington, Regina King, Clifton Powell
screenplay by James L. White
directed by Taylor Hackford

by Walter Chaw Jamie Foxx is so mesmerizing as Ray Charles in Ray, Taylor Hackford's biopic of the legendary performer, that the typical Hackford-isms threatening to weigh down the piece don't seem as heavy as they usually do. At its heart, the film is really just another faux epic from Hackford: another glimpse at the rise and fall (and rise) of a uniquely American persona (Everybody's All-American, An Officer and a Gentleman), another recent-historical essay, and another picture that begins to feel a little repetitive in the hermetic rises and falls in action that comprise such things. But then there's Foxx. He's the real deal, I think, and between this and Michael Mann's Collateral, 2004 is the year that Foxx becomes a top of the line, bona fide superstar. He's going to win the Oscar in a couple of months–and as the third African-American to claim the Best Actor prize, he's going to deserve it more than Denzel Washington did for Training Day.

Unspeakable (2003) + Body Parts (1991) – DVDs

October 12, 20041990s, 2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD, Horror, Sci-Fi, Thriller

UNSPEAKABLE
*/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras C
starring Dina Meyer, Lance Henriksen, Pavan Grover, Jeff Fahey
screenplay by Pavan Grover
directed by Thomas J. Wright

BODY PARTS
***/**** Image A Sound A
starring Jeff Fahey, Kim Delaney, Lindsay Duncan, Brad Dourif
screenplay by Eric Red and Norman Snider, based on the novel Choice Cuts by Boileau-Narcejac
directed by Eric Red

by Walter Chaw Sort of a dude Meg Foster, blue-eyed B-movie actor Jeff Fahey has never quite attained the cult status of Jeffrey Combs or Bruce Campbell. I'm thinking it's because he's always had the air about him that he would rather be in something better than, say, The Serpent of Death, Serpent's Lair–anything in the general vicinity of "serpent." You get the impression that even in the midst of appearing in six or seven films a year, he's got his eye on the mainstream prize that would ferry him from the Bs to the vaunted As. I don't think Fahey is conceited so much as puzzled–but that aura of dissatisfaction detracts from the integrity of his work, no matter how admittedly flyblown the films in which his performances find themselves might be. Fahey is a sort of neo-William Shatner, or the post-Prince of the City Treat Williams: a probably-good actor who feels like he's gotten the raw end of the deal (true in Williams' case) and thus can't quite commit himself completely to camp.

Raising Helen (2004) [Widescreen] – DVD

October 12, 20042000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Romance

½*/**** Image A Sound A- Extras C
starring Kate Hudson, John Corbett, Joan Cusack, Hayden Panettiere
screenplay by Jack Amiel & Michael Begler
directed by Garry Marshall

by Walter Chaw I made a promise to myself after The Other Sister to never watch another Garry Marshall film, but I guess I don't have enough self-respect. Raising Helen is repellent in the way of roadside carrion: it just sort of lies there stinking, making it hard to find the energy to attack it. (Something about beating dead horses and all that.) To endure Raising Helen is to surrender to the quintessence of that which is wrong with our culture, to the definition of a term like "disposable culture," and to the self-knowledge that what you really want from your entertainment is the comfortable affirmation of schmaltzy emotions provoked countless times before by countless identical romantic comedies. Going to this movie is the equivalent of giving up on an intellectual and emotional life. Raising Helen will only appeal to and attract people with pathologically little patience for films that challenge them in any way, that elicit genuine reactions and are thus threatening for their potential to penetrate the carefully constructed layers of numb denial that make unexamined lives liveable–films that provide anything like insight into any level of existential verity. It is the lowest rung on the escapist ladder, representative of some wholly self-contained fantasy world where the racial make-up of Queens is 99% WASP and 1% quirky East Indian, and where Kate Hudson's incandescent choppers are Leading Lady material.

Primer (2004)

October 8, 20042000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller, Time Travel

*½/****
starring Shane Carruth, David Sullivan, Casey Gooden, Anand Upadhyaya
written and directed by Shane Carruth

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. There's something of the word walls of Gertrude Stein or Eugene Ionesco about Primer, the indie Sundance sensation that would have been rode out of town on a rail if it weren't about time travel in addition to being obscure (thus garnering it nervous intellectual comparisons to La Jetée instead of a more accurate likening to David Mamet-cum-István Szabó). I suspect that a lot of people are afraid to admit they don't understand what's happening in the film, which talks too much in too stultifying a fashion, obscuring its heart of glass with blizzards of expositive candy in the faint hope that people are too dazzled by the rhetoric to ever consider the little guy behind the curtain. Whatever genre can do to fabulize lizard fears into metaphorical eurekas!, it can also lend a pre-emptive weight to flimsy pieces presented for the approval of audiences perhaps unaccustomed to science-fiction. In truth, Primer is more Theatre of the Absurd than sci-fi, with yuppie iterations of Vladimir and Estragon having an endless circular conversation while waiting for a Godot who never really comes. Taken as such, there arises the possibility of seeing the film as commentary on the essential listless, deconstructive jingo-babble of engineers and white-shirt-print-tie professions–though I suspect Primer has a lot more to do with a decision somewhere along the line to make a "what if?" time-travel flick as dense and protracted as possible.

Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism (2004) + Uncovered: The War on Iraq (2004)

October 6, 2004****/****, 2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Documentary, Theatrical

OUTFOXED: RUPERT MURDOCH'S WAR ON JOURNALISM
*½/****
directed by Robert Greenwald

UNCOVERED: THE WAR IN IRAQ
****/****
directed by Robert Greenwald

by Walter Chaw A poll was recently conducted: 20,000 people were asked what news show they rely upon for their campaign information, and then they were asked six questions about the respective campaign platforms of each candidate. The sector of the population scoring the lowest (also the sector, according to the Nielsens, least likely to have attended college) consisted of people who watch insane person Bill O'Reilly's "The O'Reilly Factor" over on Fox News, while the population scoring the highest (and most likely to have been to college–something like a 3:1 ratio compared to O'Reilly's audience) preferred Comedy Central's "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart". Tied in with that stat–the revelation of which is only surprising to the GED nation flocking to Fox, 80% of whom still believe that Iraq was directly involved in the 9/11 attacks–is an article in the sharp THE ONION that described liberals in a state of "outrage fatigue." See, satire is a difficult concept, but once grasped it's the quickest, truest way to get at the heart of any absurd situation. Without satire and irony, the issues of the day become reductive and deadening.

Night of the Living Dead (1968) – (Off Color Films) DVD

October 5, 2004****/****, 1960s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: George A. Romero, DVD, Horror, Zombie

****/**** Image F (colorized)/C- (b&w) Sound C Extras F
starring Judith O'Dea, Duane Jones, Marilyn Eastman, Karl Hardman
screenplay by John A. Russo
directed by George A. Romero

by Walter Chaw George A. Romero's drive-in shocker is not only one of the most important independent and genre films of all-time, but also a dead brilliant civil rights metaphor featuring an unfortunately enduring rarity: a strong, virile, uncommented-upon African-American lead. The casting of Duane Jones came about, according to legend, mainly because Jones was the best actor any of the filmmakers knew. Say what you will of Night of the Living Dead, if you see no other ways that this seminal picture casts a long shadow, it casts a long one by just this merit-based example. The culmination of a lot of themes and trends in the American cinema at that time, the film features neighbour-suspicion, fear of children, fear of provincial National Guardsmen, and the creeping dread that the world may be ending because our government is run by assclowns and nepotists. It's a testament to the undertow of this text (or a testament to how short-sighted we are as a nation) that it still works in the same way over thirty-five years later. But Night of the Living Dead is more than just a devastating metaphor for the class struggle, for the rising tide of suspicion and corruption that tore a chasm through the middle of the United States: it's a tightly-edited, claustrophobically-framed horror film that retains, along with its relevance, its ability to startle and appall.

Sky’s Not the Limit: FFC Interviews Kerry Conran

October 3, 20042000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Interviews

October 3, 2004|The restaurant area of Denver's Hotel Teatro is split into two levels: a half-mezzanine sporting a bar that overlooks the street level, which in turn has its own bar and windows. In the late afternoon after the business lunch crowd has siphoned itself back into the buildings in and around lower downtown, the mezzanine is empty, brown, and swathed in shadow–making it an interesting place to meet the mastermind behind the somewhat baroque Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, Kerry Conran, who would seem to be at home here in this art deco oasis in the middle a liminal mountain metropolis.

Ladder 49 (2004)

October 1, 20042000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Theatrical, Thriller

½*/****
starring Joaquin Phoenix, John Travolta, Jacinda Barrett, Morris Chestnut
screenplay by Lewis Colick
directed by Jay Russell

by Walter Chaw I hate this film. It's shameless treacle with the maudlin dialled at near-lethal levels. It's Backdraft II: Post 9/11, a soap opera hagiography of firefighters that's as soft and sentimental as any sweeps-week episode of Oprah–and just as unforgivably self-aggrandizing and smug. Ladder 49 is a convention of Midwestern middle-school teachers' idea of a good time, a collection of fatigued contrivances and squeaky clean, buttermilk-scrubbed cardboard characters posed carefully for maximum schmaltz. It's a big plate of nachos: lots of corn, lots of cheese, easy to swallow, hard to digest. I have a lot of contempt for this film because it has a lot of contempt for its audience: Call it the self-defense school of taking aim at a piece of crap, or a losing battle to save the folks sobbing loudly into their hankies when the lights come up. In its insidious way, Ladder 49 is as dangerous as other middlebrow epics like Radio and The Other Sister, pictures in which edgeless noble savages teach us through their selfless examples about life and about what it means to avoid real responsibility and community involvement. Weeping in a back-patting sort of way over a film like Ladder 49 is, for many, the equivalent of giving at the office.

Shark Tale (2004)

October 1, 20042000s, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Family, Theatrical, Will Smith

*½/****
screenplay by Michael J. Wilson and Rob Letterman
directed by Vicky Jenson, Bibo Bergeron, Rob Letterman

by Walter Chaw Shark Tale is a soulless platform for the Will Smith persona, here voicing a duplicitous social climber called Oscar who disdains his legacy as a car wash (make that “whale wash”) employee in favour of a feckless dreamlife of bling and adulation. His wishes come true when a series of unfortunate events constructs the impression that little Oscar has slain Frankie (Michael Imperioli), favoured son of Godfather Don Lino (Robert De Niro), with Lino’s “other” son, Lenny (Jack Black), still missing. Dubbed “Shark Slayer” by all of a submerged fish-tropolis, Oscar finds himself a celebrity spokesman, complete with a posse composed of agent Sykes (Martin Scorsese), grouper groupie Lola (Angelina Jolie), and the girl-Friday-next-door with the heart of gold, Angie (Renée Zellweger).

The Motorcycle Diaries (2004)

September 24, 20042000s, Adventure, Argentina, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Brazil, Chile, Drama, France, Germany, Peru, Theatrical, UK

***/****
starring Gael García Bernal, Rodrigo De la Serna, Mía Maestro, Mercedes Morán
screenplay by Jose Rivera, based on the books Notas de viaje by Ernesto Guevara and Con el Che por America Latina by Alberto Granado
directed by Walter Salles

by Walter Chaw Adapting respective memoirs by then-young Cuban-by-way-of-Argentine revolutionary Ché Guevara (Gael García Bernal) and his best friend Alberto Granado (Rodrigo De la Serna) that documented their Kerouac-ian odyssey down the spine of South America to find the soul of their country, Walter Salles’s The Motorcycle Diaries is difficult at best. It’s a road movie and a good one, as far as it goes, but it lacks the fire of change of something like Easy Rider in its substitution of a picaresque travelogue lightly spiced with delightful romantic misunderstandings for Peter Fonda’s swiftly tilting planet and deserts of the real. Easy Rider talks about the dying of the light; The Motorcycle Diaries talks about how doe-eyed Ernesto Guevara became Ché, the Hoffa of Latin America and eventually the most reproduced and mass-marketed image since Marilyn Monroe’s.

Home on the Range (2004) – DVD

September 24, 20042000s, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Disney, DVD, Family, Western

*/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
written and directed by Will Finn & John Sanford

by Walter Chaw It opens with a musical number and a rabbit with a peg leg–and what feels like days later, Home on the Range ends with an ear-splitting action sequence featuring Cuba Gooding Jr. typecast as an over-animated pack animal. Meanwhile, a crass two-dimensional cow is typecast as Roseanne, her prize heifer Maggie introduced onscreen udder-first: "Yeah, they're real, quit staring." Real nice. And the intrigue, such as it is, revolves around yodeling cattle rustler Alameda Slim (Randy Quaid) narrowing his sights on the bucolic Patch of Heaven ranch, no-kill home of stock chickens ("It's a chick thing," hardy har har), a duck, a goat, and some swine.

September Tapes (2004)

September 22, 20042000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Pseudo-Documentary, Theatrical, Thriller, War, ZERO STARS

Septem8er Tapes
ZERO STARS/****
starring George Calil, Wali Razaqi
screenplay by Christian Johnston & Christian Van Gregg
directed by Christian Johnston

by Walter Chaw Exactly the kind of exploitative garbage that fellow post-9/11er The Guys was, September Tapes recasts The Blair Witch Project as a hunt for Osama Bin Laden in the wilderness of Afghanistan. It's this sort of film that takes collective tragedy and renders it something several degrees south of inconsequential, boiling horror down to soups and bones. The film is a vile, thick reduction, making a 9/11 victim's last cries the catalyst for a dimwitted first-person shooter with an unsympathetic protagonist and such stunning–and stunningly unsubstantiated–claims as, "America's not serious about tracking down Bin Laden." Maybe so, maybe not, but September Tapes isn't about politics, it's about bad filmmakers armed with a bad idea teaching an audience they imagine is less-informed than they are a lesson in seeking vengeance like a man. It's the "let's roll" school of Yankee machismo, the "bring it on" theory of diplomacy and warfare, and when the flick turns into the nightmare revisionist cartoon of Rambo, that susurration you hear isn't tension, it's resignation and maybe disgust. 9/11 has to be more than an excuse to make bad action/adventure flicks or (like The Guys) self-pitying chamber dramas.

Silver City (2004)

September 22, 20042000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Mystery, Satire, Theatrical, Thriller

*½/****
starring Chris Cooper, Richard Dreyfuss, Billy Zane, Danny Huston
written and directed by John Sayles

by Walter Chaw The Summitville Mine Disaster in Colorado left over 20 miles of the Alamosa river "dead," so contaminated by waste materials (cyanide chief among them) that it very simply killed all the fish. A good thing, I guess, that there wasn't a sizable human population downstream. A superfund site now and fast becoming a sore election point in a Senate race between A.G. Ken Salazar and beer magnate Pete Coors as third-party interests begin a round of misleading, venomous attack ads, Summitville represents in a way a handy microcosm of the ugliness of the Kerry/Bush presidential election. There's a point when third-party interests and smear campaigns, on either side of the divide, start to demean all of us as a people, feeding on our worst instincts and treating us like dumb, mute animals. The political discourse in our country has devolved into a playground jibe match where it's easy to forget in the mud storm who's the rubber and who's the glue; no great surprise that the general death of conversation in our culture includes the whole spectrum of politics.

Mean Girls (2004) [Special Collector’s Edition – Widescreen Collection] – DVD

September 21, 20042000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, DVD

***/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras B+
starring Lindsay Lohan, Rachel McAdams, Tim Meadows, Ana Gasteyer
screenplay by Tina Fey, based on the book Queen Bees and Wannabes by Rosalind Wiseman
directed by Mark S. Waters

by Walter Chaw Plastics instead of Heathers; Lindsay Lohan instead of Winona Ryder; director Mark Waters instead of screenwriter brother Daniel; lunchtime poll: same. The biggest difference between Mean Girls and Heathers is the lack of that unmistakable spark of dark, playful genius. Both the Waters brothers made a splash with their initial public offerings (Mark with the fantastic The House of Yes, Daniel with Heathers), but while Daniel's portfolio is sprinkled with lead balloons like The Adventures of Ford Fairlane and the fitfully interesting Demolition Man, he did score with Batman Returns; Mark, alas, has a Freddie Prinze Jr./Monica Potter, a Jason Priestly/Mariel Hemingway, and a pair of Lohans in his deck, making The House of Yes an anomaly, it seems–as outcast from its comrades as Waters's imperfect characters are from his vision of a perversely stolid normality. Not to say that Waters's work post-The House of Yes is without unifying vision, just that his tendencies betray themselves as desperately wanting to be popular. It's a yen that makes Mean Girls actually a little autobiographical, and, probably as a direct result of that transparency, better than it should be.

Saved! (2004) – DVD

September 20, 20042000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Satire

½*/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras B-
starring Jena Malone, Mandy Moore, Macaulay Culkin, Patrick Fugit
screenplay by Brian Dannelly & Michael Urban
directed by Brian Dannelly

Hot on the heels of Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen and Mean Girls, Saved! presents the same evil-girl-clique-victimizes-good-girl formula that is still defined by the wicked Machiavellian brilliance of Heathers, the last word on eloquence and intelligence in the bully sub-genre of teensploitation. In the wake of Columbine and the end-of-the-millennium spate of school mayhem, the greatest disappointment isn't the unabated gratification of the jock set, but the fact that school-based satires have yet to find the courage to address the absurdity of reaction post-atrocity while continuing to produce school-based satires at an unabated clip. If anything speaks to the ultimate triumph of the guilty bourgeoisie and the ineffectual leadership in charge of our nation's public schools, it's the glaring inadequacy of our cinema, that most agile and sensitive of our cultural barometers, in reproducing the voice of the oppressed. It's up to television's "Freaks and Geeks" (was, anyway) and NPR's stable of gifted monologists (Sarah Vowell, Dave Eggars, David Sedaris, and so on) to pick up the considerable slack.

Kaena: The Prophecy (2003) + The Lion King II: Simba’s Pride (1998) [2-Disc Special Edition] – DVDs

September 20, 20041990s, 2000s, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Disney, Drama, DVD, Family, Fantasy, France, Musical, Romance, Sci-Fi

KAENA: THE PROPHECY
*/**** Image A Sound B Extras C
screenplay by Tarik Hamoine and Chris Delaporte
directed by Chris Delaporte

THE LION KING II: SIMBA'S PRIDE
½*/**** Image B Sound B- Extras C+
screenplay by Flip Kobler and Cindy Marcus
directed by Rob LaDuca & Darrell Rooney

by Walter Chaw There's a timorous, resonant quality to Kirsten Dunst's voice. It's amazing, really: it vibrates at a contralto as tense and lovely as a cello string drawn–I think it's her most attractive feature. She's tailor-made, then, to be a vocal performer, and finds herself as such in French filmmaker Chris Delaporte's plodding misfire of a movie Kaena: The Prophecy. Completely computer-animated, it's every bit as ugly and prosaic as its American cousin Ice Age (insomuch as it even includes a prehistoric-squirrel vignette towards the end) and obsessed with the jiggle dimensions of Kaena (or is that me, obsessed?), who must save her tree-world Axis from destruction at the hands of the evil Selenites (whose queen is voiced by Anjelica Huston). The story is so Joseph Campbell hero's journey-obsessed, so humourless and–how do I say it delicately?–Bakshi in its execution, that poor Dunst, in the title role, is wasted on plucky pronouncements and grunts of exertion as her .gif alter-ego leaps hither and yon.

Wimbledon (2004)

September 17, 20042000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, France, Romance, Sports, Theatrical, UK

*½/****
starring Kirsten Dunst, Paul Bettany, Kyle Hyde, Robert Lindsay
screenplay by Adam Brooks and Jennifer Flackett & Mark Levin
directed by Richard Loncraine

by Walter Chaw If you go see Wimbledon, the umpteenth edition of Tired Romantic Comedy Theater, it's only because you have a checklist in your head and aren't content with a film that doesn't satisfy every contrivance. There's the meet-cute, the unlikely match, the handsome rival, the gay best friend, the falling-in-love montage, the plot conflict (spouse, parents), the break-up montage, the public apology, the triumphant reunion. Director Richard Loncraine's tepid foray into Richard Curtis territory is rife with the kind of familiar hallmarks that lull throngs of lonesome Mia Farrows to the warm embrace of The Purple Rose of Cairo–a brief respite from the used paperback bookstores that rely on a steady trade of romance novels the way that independent movie stores rely on porn. In fact, there's not that much of a difference between Wimbledon and porn: plot is predictable and secondary to the performers, who provide whatever interest there might be in the enterprise. Everything else is plug and play, so to speak.