13 Going on 30 (2004)

April 23, 2004Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Romance, Theatrical, Time Travel

**/****
starring Jennifer Garner, Mark Ruffalo, Judy Greer, Christa B. Allen
screenplay by Cathy Yuspa & Josh Goldsmith and Niels Mueller
directed by Gary Winick

13goingon30by Walter Chaw Threatening at any moment to veer off the populist tracks and become something legendarily, unpleasantly subversive, the middling 13 Going on 30 is really little more than a collection of "I Love the '80s" vignettes presided over by Jennifer Garner's peculiar mien. It's also peculiar that the genre of body-swapping/quick-aging jibber-jabber is making a resurgence now a couple of decades after the last spate (18 Again, Vice Versa, Big), and peculiar again that with Mark Waters's Freaky Friday and Gary Winick's 13 Going on 30, the genre is being re-imagined through the prism of young women. (Perhaps not so strange when you consider that the key demographic slavered over by studio wonks has shifted from the pre-adolescent boys of the mid-'80s to post-Titanic pre-adolescent girls.) It's clear that this film is meant to satisfy some sort of wish-fulfillment fantasy for 13-year-old members of the babysitters' club, but with Eighties references that can only be amusing to people who've passed the third-decade mark, it manages mostly to be a wish-fulfillment fantasy for thirtysomething men who want emotionally immature, sexually malleable women who happen to resemble television starlets.

Young Adam (2003); Millennium Mambo (2001); Secret Things (2002)

April 23, 2004Posted in****/****, 2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Drama, Esoterica, France, Romance, Taiwan, Theatrical, UK

YOUNG ADAM
**½/****
starring Ewan McGregor, Tilda Swinton, Peter Mullan, Emily Mortimer
screenplay by David Mackenzie, based on the novel by Alexander Trocchi
directed by David Mackenzie

Qian xi man po
****/****
starring Shu Qi, Jack Kao, Tuan Chun-hao, Chen Yi-Hsuan
screenplay by Chu T'ien-wen
directed by Hou Hsiao-hsien

Choses secrètes
***½/****
starring Coralie Revel, Sabrina Seyvecou, Roger Mirmont, Fabrice Deville
written and directed by Jean-Claude Brisseau

Youngadametcby Walter Chaw David Mackenzie's Young Adam opens with a shot from below of a duck paddling placidly along the surface of a lake that's replaced by a woman's corpse, then replaced by a filthy barge-worker and his mate fishing the cadaver out with a gaffing hook. Young Adam is a beautiful picture, really, its interiors sepia-tinged like a cameo photograph and its exteriors bleached and desperate, and as a film about surfaces, it marches to its own logic with the dyspeptic malaise, if not the consistent nihilistic poetry, of a Kiyoshi Kurosawa. Surfaces include skin, of course, and a scene where tattooed Les (Peter Mullan) washes his hired help Joe (Ewan McGregor) is as blandly erotic as a scene where Joe performs cunnilingus on Les's wife Ella (Tilda Swinton), an act that wins him the fried egg he was denied at breakfast. Consumption suggesting sustenance seeps into a scene where Joe covers his girlfriend, Cathie (Emily Mortimer), with custard, ketchup, and mustard before caning and raping her. Joe's furnace is unquenchable: as Biblical doppelganger, his carnal curiosity is constantly stoked by the invitation of moribund English housewives and widows–and his ire is only aroused when an appropriate mate choice threatens to free him from his fleshy fixations. Young Adam is about being trapped and listless, about the lost generation afflicted by a plague of ennui–paddling in a circle, floating between updrafts in the widening gyre.

The Punisher (2004)

April 20, 2004Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, Germany, Revenge, Romance, Superhero, Theatrical, Thriller

***/****
starring Tom Jane, John Travolta, Rebecca Romijn-Stamos, Laura Harring
screenplay by Michael France and Jonathan Hensleigh
directed by Jonathan Hensleigh

by Walter Chaw A barometer of our culture–an exploding western world balanced between listless fatalism on the one side and violent nihilism on the other (Elephant and Young Adam vs. Walking Tall, The Passion of the Christ, and Man on Fire)–at this exact moment in time, long-time blockbuster scribe Jonathan Hensleigh's hyphenate debut is his adaptation of Marvel Comics' vigilante title The Punisher. With the possible exception of Mel Gibson's ode to sadism, this is the year's most irredeemable picture thus far, but it's elevated by a bracing idea, an astonishingly courageous idea: that its hero and villain are equally reprehensible, and, by extension, that both of them do what they do because in their psychotic haze, the only thing they have to tie them to any kind of illusion of equilibrium is the dangerous idealization of their families. When a picture like this appears in the middle of a glut of vigilante flicks and in the middle of a society that may have been led into a predictably cruel and bloody war on the basis of a personal grudge, one forgiven by many for its specious association with a collective insult to our illusion of sanctuary, people should prick up their ears. While The Punisher may not be a particularly good film, it is a particularly important one.

Prey for Rock & Roll (2003) – DVD

April 19, 2004Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Music

*½/**** Image A Sound A Extras D+
starring Gina Gershon, Drea De Matteo, Marc Blucas, Shelly Cole
screenplay by Cheri Lovedog & Robin Whitehouse
directed by Alex Steyermark

by Walter Chaw Released haphazardly in the same calendar year as Alex Proyas's endlessly disappointing Garage Days, Alex Steyermark's Prey for Rock & Roll travels similar garage band routes while taking the distaff trail and deciding to play it as if its central band, the cleverly monikered Clam Dandy, is better than horrible (in an L7 78-played-at-45 kind of way). My familiarity with grrrl rock begins and ends with a Seven Year Bitch concert at the base of Seattle's Space Needle about a decade ago, as well as a brief affection for Hammerbox, but I remember the genre being at its best full of anger and tempo. That Clam Dandy doesn't rock too terribly hard is a major stumbling block only exacerbated by director Steyermark's decision to feature a few of their listless, pop-inspired heavy metal tunes in their allegedly poignant entirety. It makes for rough-going in the not-so-proud Light of Day/Satisfaction tradition.

Ripley’s Game (2002) – DVD

April 19, 2004Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, DVD, FFC Must-Own, Italy, Mystery, Thriller, UK

**** Image A Sound A
starring John Malkovich, Dougray Scott, Ray Winstone, Lena Headey
screenplay by Charles McKeown and Liliana Cavani, based on the novel by Patricia Highsmith
directed by Liliana Cavani

Mustownby Walter Chaw When I heard that The Night Porter auteur Liliana Cavani was adapting one of Patricia Highsmith's Mr. Ripley novels, I knew to expect something more in line with René Clément's brilliant Purple Noon than Anthony Minghella's lavishly simpering The Talented Mr. Ripley. What I didn't anticipate was that this film, which never received any sort of domestic theatrical distribution before being summarily dropped, supplement-free, onto the home video market, would be one of the best of its year–indeed, of its kind. Ripley's Game is doomed to the "direct-to-video" label and an ignominious eternity buried in the Blockbuster shelves for the occasional stunned bemusement of the well traveled and the John Malkovich fetishist–it languishes there while over-masticated tripe like The Alamo finds its way to thousands of screens, its lingering impact to remind again that the slippery slope in Hollywood's distribution game just got steeper. Ripley's Game would have looked great on the big screen–and some genius robbed us of the opportunity to see it that way, thinking we'd prefer American Splendor or Along Came Polly.

Bergman – Unfiltered: FFC Interviews Nir Bergman

April 17, 2004Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Interviews, Israel

NbergmaninterviewtitleApril 18, 2004|"Cigarettes, okay?"

And of course I agree. The bar of Denver eatery Panzano is low-hung with a thin haze of "cool" (not to be confused with "stale" or "seedy") second-hand smoke, the sort of atmosphere romanticized by noir and one where I feel curiously out-of-time. A gauzy pre-spring Colorado day obliges by shooting shafts of sunlight cathedral-like through the particulate pollution, reminding of a scene in Nir Bergman's debut Broken Wings (Knafayim Shvurot) in which a depressed teen ponders the worlds-upon-worlds of dust motes in perpetual Brownian motion.

The United States of Leland (2004)

April 16, 2004Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Disability, Drama, Theatrical

*/****
starring Don Cheadle, Ryan Gosling, Chris Klein, Jena Malone
written and directed by Matthew Ryan Hoge

Unitedstatesoflelandby Walter Chaw Featuring the valedictorians of the indie brat pack past and present, Matthew Ryan Hoge’s sophomore hyphenate feature The United States of Leland is woefully overwritten, self-indulgent, and plodding–a shame given the squandering of another nice clenched-jaw performance from Ryan Gosling, and no surprise given the full martyred weight of actor/producer/saviour-of-mankind Kevin Spacey, thrown behind the project as simultaneous catalyst for completion and guarantee for failure. Pedestrian in look and execution, it’s the sort of kiddie cautionary tale (wed here uneasily to our new cinema of disaffected nihilism) in which a message of the tragedy of the widening gyre is resolved with its main adult character cradling a limp body and howling his outrage to the uncaring heavens. If Mel Gibson were to take on a Judy Blume adaptation, it’d look a little like this.

Bulletproof Monk (2003)

April 15, 2004Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, Fantasy, Theatrical

*/****
starring Chow Yun-Fat, Seann William Scott, Jamie King, Karel Roden
screenplay by Ethan Reiff & Cyrus Voris
directed by Paul Hunter

Bulletproofmonkby Walter Chaw There is a moment in the middle of Bulletproof Monk: Chow Yun-Fat leaps to the top of a car, brandishing two pistols, his overcoat flaring in slow-motion as he rains down bullets on the bad guys. It's an homage to Brother Chow's work with John Woo, of course, in the seminal HK action flicks The Killer, Hard-Boiled, and A Better Tomorrow–and Woo is listed among the film's producers. It sort of makes you wonder why the pair doesn't stop dancing around and just make another movie together already, particularly since neither Chow nor Woo has really made a film worth a damn since sailing over to a Hollywood that doesn't understand them. The American film industry would rather marginalize them into racial caricatures than take advantage of their unique talents.

Connie and Carla (2004) + Japanese Story (2003)

April 15, 2004Posted in2000s, Australia, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Drama, Music, Romance, Theatrical

CONNIE AND CARLA
*½/****
starring Nia Vardalos, Toni Collette, David Duchovny, Stephen Spinella
screenplay by Nia Vardalos
directed by Michael Lembeck

JAPANESE STORY
*/****
starring Toni Collette, Gotaro Tsunashima, Matthew Dyktynski, Lynette Curran
screenplay by Alison Tilson
directed by Sue Brooks

Conniejapaneseby Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Pity Toni Collette, her inability to land a lead role that might catapult her into the limelight bespeaking of either a general dearth of quality lead actress roles or an inability to choose her "breakthrough" projects carefully. The highlight of a lot of good movies (The Sixth Sense, Clockwatchers, About a Boy) and bad ones (Muriel's Wedding, Hotel Splendide), too, her latest chance to evolve beyond accomplished second fiddle has elicited a glorified supporting role in Nia Vardalos's latest bit of unwatchable crowd-pleasing garbage (Connie and Carla) and the ingenue part in an embarrassing bit of housewife Orientalism erotica that transplants the Yellow Peril of the American 1950s to a modern-day Outback setting (Japanese Story).

FFC Interviews Jennifer Baichwal

April 11, 2004Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Documentary, Interviews

by Walter Chaw|April 12, 2004|With just two feature-length documentaries under her belt, Let It Come Down: The Life of Paul Bowles and The True Meaning of Pictures: Shelby Lee Adams' Appalachia, Toronto-based filmmaker Jennifer Baichwal has already established herself as among the most thoughtful, inquisitive artists in a genre finally hitting its stride. The questions she asks about the exploitation, reality, and evasiveness of truth are, in a way, the only ones that matter. Governed by a clarity of philosophy that includes a sharp self-regard of her role as filmmaker, her first two films deal with artists whose work has become the loci for fierce socio-political/existential debate, while her new project is something she describes as a departure: "political." The imagination shudders even as anticipation builds.

The Whole Ten Yards (2004)

April 9, 2004Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Gangster, Theatrical, Thriller, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Bruce Willis, Matthew Perry, Amanda Peet, Kevin Pollak
screenplay by George Gallo
directed by Howard Deutch

by Walter Chaw Oz (Matthew Perry, racing Ray Romano for title of television personality least suited for the big screen) is a dentist married to ex-moll Cynthia (Natasha Henstridge) and ex-hitman Jimmy (Bruce Willis) is married to ex-dental hygienist Jill (Amanda Peet). Oz is constantly mugging, falling down, running into things, and making funny faces, which leads me to believe that Oz might be afflicted by some toxic stew of epilepsy, Tourette’s Syndrome, and limited comic actor’s disease–the last of which the sort of thing that otherwise dull or homely children contract to get attention in class. Through a devastatingly disinteresting sequence of convoluted events, our whimsical quartet is menaced by Hungarian mobster Lazlo Gogolak (Kevin Pollak, in his fourth decade of needing a bullet to the head) and his dimwit son Strabo (Frank Collison)–resulting in a shootout and a desperate series of speeches that don’t do a thing to explain how Jimmy pretending to be a housewife in a David Lee Roth wig relates to stealing millions from the mob.

Rana’s Wedding (2003) + Osama (2003)

April 8, 2004Posted in2000s, Afghanistan, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Netherlands, Palestine, Theatrical, United Arab Emirates

Al Qods Fee Yom Akhar
***½/****
starring Clara Khoury, Khalifa Natour, Ismael Dabbag, Walid Abed Elsalam
screenplay by Liana Badr, Ihab Lamey
directed by Hany Abu-Assad

OSAMA
*½/****
starring Marina Golbahari, Arif Herati, Zubaida Sahar, Gol Rahman Ghorbandi
written and directed by Siddiq Barmak

by Walter Chaw About thirty minutes into Hany Abu-Assad’s Rana’s Wedding (Al Qods Fee Yom Akhar), an old Palestinian man sets a small table down outside his building in Israeli-occupied Jerusalem, places a typewriter on top of it, and watches as Rana (Clara Khoury) is almost shot by an Israeli patrol when her cell phone is briefly mistaken for a revolver. The moment isn’t commented upon, and the next scene finds her wondering, as she’s wondered for the first parts of the film, where her true love is on this, the day that her father demands that she marry one of the suitors he’s approved for her or leave for Egypt to continue her schooling. The deadline sends Rana careening across the country in an increasingly complex quest to assemble the right people together to allow her to marry the man that she loves–the one who “understands me, and puts up with me when I’m angry.” The line is funny as the sentiment is familiar–it’s a grace note in a picture that somehow cloaks its ferocity in a sheath of gentility. Make no mistake that not commenting on the Israeli/Palestinian situation is not the same as avoiding the Israeli/Palestinian situation; as political films go, Rana’s Wedding is high among the films finding release in election year 2004 (Osama, The Fog of War, Broken Wings).

Ned Kelly (1970) – DVD

April 7, 2004Posted in1970s, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD, UK, Western

*/**** | Image B- Sound C
starring Mick Jagger, Clarissa Kaye-Mason, Mark McManus, Ken Goodlet
screenplay by Tony Richardson and Ian Jones
directed by Tony Richardson

by Walter Chaw Somewhere between the islets of McCabe and Mrs. Miller and Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, just off the coast of Performance and Mad Dog Morgan, floats Tony Richardson's less visited, incomprehensible, woefully miscalculated Ned Kelly. Edited with a cheese grater and scored with bizarre faux-Aussie folk by strange bedfellows Shel Silverstein and Waylon Jennings, all while giving lie to David Mamet-as-director's claims to originality in dispensing with exposition in favour of oblique, impenetrable dialogue and stilted performances, Ned Kelly is also home to one of the worst performances by a rock star in a world that knows Graffiti Bridge and Glitter. Really just the kissing cousin of such of its contemporary counter-cultural misfires as Myra Breckinridge and Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, the panicked 1970 policy of giving the kids what they want, whatever that might be, is filtered here through the disturbing prism of a 42-year-old Englishman's perspective. (Admittedly, as angry young men go, Mick Jagger is a better choice than Breckinridge's Rex Reed.) Curiously though, as it so often does, the rare convergence of everything gone wrong makes for pretty compulsive viewing.

Black Sunday (1977) – DVD

April 6, 2004Posted in1970s, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Directors: John Frankenheimer, Drama, DVD, Espionage, Thriller

***/**** Image A Sound B
starring Robert Shaw, Bruce Dern, Marthe Keller, Fritz Weaver
screenplay by Ernest Lehman, Kenneth Ross and Ivan Moffat
directed by John Frankenheimer

by Walter Chaw Before Thomas Harris created a genius shrink-turned-serial murderer, he wrote the everything-old-is-new-again terrorist saga Black Sunday, managing to incorporate the Super Bowl into its tale of good intelligence saving the day. How novel. What's constant between this and Harris's Hannibal Lecter trilogy is his interest in broken heroes: the inversion of the man of action archetype that germinated in the Fifties Western tradition and flowered in the voodoo ego-nomics of the Reagan-mad Eighties, locating Black Sunday firmly in the deep well of Seventies cinema–filthy with ineffectual champions and astringent endings. But where Harris's novel understood its place in the bittersweet, paranoid zeitgeist, Black Sunday, with its all-star cast (Robert Shaw two years after Jaws, Bruce Dern at his peak, Marthe Keller a year removed from Marathon Man), megalomaniacal producer Robert Evans, and blockbuster aspirations, proves to be another Star Wars-style harbinger of the impending end of what was possibly the most amazing period in film in history.

Stuck on You (2003) [Widescreen] – DVD

April 4, 2004Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD

**½/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B-
starring Matt Damon, Greg Kinnear, Eva Mendes, Wen Yann Shih
screenplay by Peter Farrelly & Bobby Farrelly
directed by Bobby Farrelly & Peter Farrelly

by Walter Chaw It may not be funny in the slightest, but like Shallow Hal, the Farrelly Brothers' Stuck On You is often fascinating for the extent to which it seeks to dissect the exploitation of disability in film. The picture is surprisingly affecting when it's addressing the conjoined twins at its centre, pointing at once to where the Farrellys are headed with their art, and to the realization that where this picture really fails is in the fallacy that it needs to be a comedy at all. (The most glaring gaffe the casting of Cher as herself, a joke as out of tune as it is out of time.) What emerges from the film isn't the sort of scatological brinkmanship the brothers are credited with/derided for, but rather an often sharp examination of identity, the strength of familial bonds, and the courage to dream–elements each to be found woven in some fashion throughout the filmmakers' critically underestimated oeuvre.

Mostly Martha: FFC Interviews Martha Coolidge

April 4, 2004Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Interviews

McoolidgeinterviewtitleApril 4, 2004|A long time has passed between big-screen assignments for filmmaker Martha Coolidge, the first woman president of the Director's Guild of America. It's been seven since her unofficial conclusion to the Grumpy Old Men franchise, Out to Sea–and thirteen years since her last good film, Rambling Rose. Making her mark in the early Eighties as a distaff John Hughes with a pair of teensploitation classics (Valley Girl and Real Genius), Ms. Coolidge, though she'll only hint at it, seems to be the victim of a particular sexism in the United States among directors (something perhaps exacerbated by her aforementioned election to the head of the DGA in 2002), a phenomenon relegating her to television projects, place-markers, and the occasional flyer on something that might actually be accidentally worth a damn with a little coaxing.

The Prince & Me (2004)

April 2, 2004Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD, Romance, Theatrical

**/****
starring Julia Stiles, Luke Mably, Ben Miller, James Fox
screenplay by Jack Amiel & Michael Begler and Katherine Fugate
directed by Martha Coolidge

by Walter Chaw Surprisingly good not the same thing as genuinely good, Martha Coolidge's The Prince & Me returns the director to her Valley Girl formula of cross-cultural teen romantic hurlyburly with a few nice moments and the pleasing aura of a light fantasy, but the film finds itself weighed down at the end by the requirements of its exhausted genre. Moreover, The Prince & Me fails the courage test, needing desperately to have ended about ten minutes before it actually does, and though not a moment of it demands (nor could a moment of it bear) to be assessed through the prism of realism, the gadget of its finale is less "fairytale" than insipid. One cliffhanger is more than enough in most fables, so when The Prince & Me decides to follow twist fast with preordained turn, it exposes its structure as far too flimsy to support the burden of those contortions.

Hellboy (2004)

April 2, 2004Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Superhero, Theatrical

***/****
starring Ron Perlman, Selma Blair, Jeffrey Tambor, Karel Roden
screenplay by Guillermo del Toro, based on the comics by Mike Mignola
directed by Guillermo del Toro

Hellboyby Walter Chaw A bona fide auteur in an age of facile pretenders, Guillermo del Toro is the pulp genre’s Martin Scorsese, his films filtering devout Catholic imagery through a lurid colour palette and obsessed with insectile machineries and mentor relationships between boys and old men. Del Toro’s pictures are deeply personal explorations of faith, of redemption and resurrection–he made of Blade II a tale of the prodigal son, and now with Hellboy he’s crafted a story of an evolving passion.

Wild Things 2 (2004) – DVD

April 2, 2004Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, DVD, Mystery, Thriller, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/**** Image A Sound A Extras D
starring Susan Ward, Leila Arcieri, Isaiah Washington, Tony Denison
screenplay by Ross Helford & Andy Hurst
directed by Jack Perez

by Walter Chaw Alligator swamps and high school, I get the comparison, but like the first film, Wild Things 2 is coy, smug, and not so much meta as a self-satisfied, misogynistic tease. Those looking for titillation will have to settle for a lot of slo-mo beach volleyball, multiple views of Susan Ward walking around slowly in such a way as to hide her alarming thighs, and a brief three-way featuring a body double for repulsive/hot (see also: Brittany Murphy) Leila Arcieri, who drops Arcieri down about two cup sizes while upping her pastiness by at least three Danes. Seriously here, how hard would it have been to find a couple of exhibitionistic starlets for a direct-to-video smut pic like Wild Things 2? The really disturbing thing about that is that Arcieri and Ward were apparently hired for their acting ability.

The Rundown (2003) [Widescreen] – DVD

April 1, 2004Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD, Schwarzenegger, Thriller

***/**** Image A+ Sound A+ Extras B+
starring The Rock, Seann William Scott, Christopher Walken, Rosario Dawson
screenplay by R.J. Stewart and James Vanderbilt
directed by Peter Berg

by Walter Chaw There’s an ebullient lustre to Peter Berg’s dedicatedly obnoxious The Rundown, an action film with so little pretension that it actually comes off as smart. It’s the same peculiar phenomenon that makes of Laurel & Hardy geniuses after the fact, banking on timing and carefully cultivated absurdity to at once define and rejuvenate the mismatched buddy-on-the-run genre. Consider a scene in which Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson fights a tribe of pygmy Brazilian freedom fighters, edited and choreographed like a Yuen Brothers wu xia married to a Weissmuller Tarzan flick. Delirious and ridiculous, exciting in spite of itself, The Rundown is the kind of adrenalized filmmaking that is, in fact, more intelligent and misanthropic than it seems. More, it’s not a fluke: Actor Berg’s directorial debut Very Bad Things remains, along with Doug Liman’s Go, one of the great underestimated time-capsule pitch-black comedies of the late-Nineties. If not for a few glaring moments where Berg displays the first symptoms of obfuscating Danny Boyle disease (CGI pullouts, nauseating zooms, and meaningless hyper-edits), particularly in its prologue, The Rundown would be something of a cult all-timer.