Bride of Re-Animator (1990) – DVD

October 30, 2003Posted in1980s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD, Horror, Japan, Sci-Fi, Thriller

**½/**** Image C Sound C
starring Bruce Abbott, Claude Larl Jones, Fabiana Odento, David Gale
screenplay by Woody Keith and Rick Fry
directed by Brian Yuzna

by Walter Chaw Screaming Mad George is a genius. Make-up artist extraordinaire, his legacy is born of Stan Winston and Tom Savini, but his touch is more witty than the former and more perverse than the latter, resulting in a body of work that, by itself, makes the third Children of the Corn film a winner, the climax of Brian Yuzna’s Society unspeakably sticky, and this, Yuzna’s sequel to Stuart Gordon’s classic splatter flick Re-Animator, a gore flick of unusual visual wit and energy. A continuation of the sad events at H.P. Lovecraft’s doomed Miskatonic University, the tale of mad Herbert West (B-movie legend Jeffrey Combs) and his experiments in reanimating living tissue (undaunted, apparently, by his run-in with an over-eager intestinal tract in the first film) with hapless assistant Dan (Bruce Abbott), Bride of Re-Animator captures a lot of the gleeful lack of boundaries of the first film without, predictably, the attendant surprise and freshness. Still, what emerges is a genre picture that, for all of its lack of psychosexual subtext and subtlety, gains for its jubilant indulgence in the wetworks.

Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (2003) [2-Disc Widescreen Edition] – DVD

October 29, 2003Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD, Germany, Schwarzenegger, Sci-Fi, UK

**½/**** Image A- Sound A+ Extras B
starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Nick Stahl, Claire Danes, Kristanna Loken
screenplay by John D. Brancato & Michael Ferris
directed by Jonathan Mostow

by Walter Chaw Where the first film banked on romantic melancholy, and the second on a literalization of both techno-paranoia and the Oedipal split, Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (hereafter T3)–the first in the Terminator trilogy to be directed by someone other than James Cameron (U-571‘s Jonathan Mostow)–is essentially a mega-budgeted slasher flick rematted as a hero mythology, but without the sociological significance of the genre. What T3 is, at its core, is a post-modern picture with a few agreeable moments of self-knowing humour that devolve into a self-worshipping reverence. With Arnold Schwarzenegger threatening to jettison his foundering movie career (something of a disaster since the last Terminator film) to pursue a terrifying career in politics, the picture plays like an Academy highlight reel, with Arnie delivering three variations of his “I’ll be back” as well as a quick “I lied” for the dozen or so people who still remember Commando. T3 never gets more clever than that, really (though a moment where Arnie’s killer robot dons a pair of Elton John sunglasses is a classic image only missing a quick refrain of “The Bitch is Back”), and the picture resolves itself as derivative (I should say “slavishly, worshipfully derivative”) of the other films in the trilogy while adding a lot of loud “nothing new.”

Milk Money (1994) + I.Q. (1994) – DVDs

October 28, 2003Posted in1990s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD, Romance

MILK MONEY
*½/**** Image B Sound B
starring Melanie Griffith, Ed Harris, Michael Patrick Carter
screenplay by John Mattson
directed by Richard Benjamin

I.Q.
**/**** Image B+ Sound B
starring Meg Ryan, Tim Robbins, Walter Matthau, Charles Durning
screenplay by Andy Breckman and Michael Leeson
directed by Fred Schepisi

by Walter Chaw The first preteen sex comedy I’ve ever seen, Richard Benjamin’s inexplicable Milk Money is a fascinating example of a movie that was never a good idea brought to life in a presentation that is every bit as misguided as its appalling premise would suggest. Melanie Griffith is a hooker who flashes her goodies for a bag of change collected by a trio of pre-pubescent youngsters who seem to live in 1994 but act like they’re from 1950. They’ve idealized The City in an impossibly provincial “aw shucks” country-mouse sort of way, proclaiming it the place where anything can happen and, more importantly, anything can be bought. It’s stupid, but at least its naivety is echoed in the way they earn their cash, the cool “Fonzie” kid selling a brief turn with his leather jacket for a handful of change. I’m not certain what freakish netherworld Benjamin and writer John Mattson (responsible for this and two Free Willy sequels) dragged themselves out of, but Milk Money is a product of the same kind of autumnal bullshit-spring from which wells magnificent falderal like The Majestic.

Tough Enough: FFC Interviews Wes Studi

October 25, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, DIFF/SDFF, Film Festivals, Interviews

WesstudiinterviewtitleOctober 26, 2003|For all the praise afforded it in recent years, Michael Mann's 1992 The Last of the Mohicans is still an undervalued film of big emotions, boasting of a macho sensibility more bracing than any number of post-modern ruminations on the cult of manhood. Above all its technical achievements and ecstatic scripting, it offers Magua, perhaps the most important modern depiction of any minority character and one that arguably, single-handedly, made the casting of the Native American as the impossibly noble Child of the Earth suddenly déclassé. Wes Studi is much of the reason for the success of Mohicans, his portrayal of Magua revealing depths that reverberate with me still, offering hope that Asians in American cinema might one day be as difficult to minimize as Native Americans have become. Tied in with that respect, however, is of course the reality that roles for Indians have become relatively scarce in recent years.

The Singing Detective (2003)

October 24, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Esoterica, Musical, Mystery

***/****
starring Robert Downey Jr., Robin Wright Penn, Jeremy Northam, Mel Gibson
screenplay by Dennis Potter, based on his miniseries
directed by Keith Gordon

Singingdetectiveby Walter Chaw A film about transplants (UK to America, Michael Gambon to Robert Downey Jr., postwar-'40s English tunes to 1950s American doo-wop), The Singing Detective has as its most effective moments the parts transplanted whole from Dennis Potter's amazing six-hour BBC miniseries. Not to say that Keith Gordon's The Singing Detective isn't a frequently fascinating beast all by itself (the late Potter's own screenplay, shot nearly word-for-word by Gordon, assures a measure of quality almost deliriously high), but to say that the inevitable comparisons will be harsh and, frankly, unfair, given the author's hand in the adaptation and the strain of compression.

Scary Movie 3 (2003)

October 24, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, Satire, Theatrical, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Anna Faris, Charlie Sheen, Regina Hall, Denise Richards
screenplay by Craig Mazin and Kevin Smith and David Zucker
directed by David Zucker

Scarymovie3by Walter Chaw Even without the Wayans Brothers, the latest Scary Movie sequel is unspeakably bad. A disjointed series of set-piece recreations from popular films (Signs, The Matrix Reloaded, The Ring, 8 Mile) populated by idiots and scripted with a flat collection of obvious fall-down gags and scatology, the picture doesn't even respect the movies it mocks enough to understand what it is about them that fails. More, with the absence of the Wayans (who are replaced by David Zucker, one-third of the braintrust behind successful spoofs like Airplane! and The Naked Gun), the repeated shout-outs to heroes of hip-hop (an entire record label shows up in cameo bits) and attendant disrespect of the culture land with disturbing racial undertones. The film is aimed specifically at an African-American demographic: That's one thing when the filmmakers are African-American, another thing altogether when they're not.

The Same River Twice (2003) + The Weather Underground (2003)

October 24, 2003Posted in****/****, 2000s, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Documentary, Theatrical

THE SAME RIVER TWICE
****/****
directed by Robb Moss

THE WEATHER UNDERGROUND
***/****
directed by Sam Green & Bill Siegel

by Walter Chaw I've just seen an episode of CNN's "Crossfire" that featured as one of its topics the proliferation of "Bush Bashing," which, for as scatologically intriguing as it sounds, refers to the growing popularity of pummelling our dimwit president for his dimwit philosophies and hilljack presentation. The verbal assault gratifying for what it is, what's missing in the new American dyspepsia is any real activism: The movies feel like-Sixties movies, and the government certainly feels like the late-Sixties government, but the level of outrage is something just north of "mild simmer." Students aren't massing, the National Guard isn't mobilizing, and there's no new Flower Power generation to oxymoronically stir the great, slobbering melting pot of American sex and politics. What there is, however, is a glut of underground documentaries finding their way into small theatres to smaller audiences but enough critical support to at least put the intelligentsia on record as suitably discomfited.

Willard (2003) [New Line Platinum Series] – DVD

October 22, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Drama, DVD, Horror, Thriller

*½/**** Image A Sound A Extras A+
starring Crispin Glover, Laura Elena Harring, Jackie Burroughs, R. Lee Ermey
screenplay by Glen Morgan, based on the screenplay by Gilbert Ralston and Ralston's novel Ratman's Notebook
directed by Glen Morgan

by Walter Chaw If you're going to remake an Ernest Borgnine movie from the Seventies, I'd rather see a redux of The Devil's Rain. But Willard it is; for the blissfully uninitiated, Willard concerns the travails of a lonesome weirdo who makes friends with a bunch of rats, Phenomena-style (Argento not Travolta, which brings us back to The Devil's Rain, curiously), and sends them on a crusade against an evil boss who wants to buy Willard's house. Bruce Davison as the original Willard has a nice moment in that film where he implores his rat-kinder to "tear it up" good, but the film is probably best remembered for the theme song of its sequel, Ben, penned by Michael Jackson v.0.2. The theme song, and Davison, have stupid cameos in the new Willard.

Beyond Borders (2003) + Radio (2003)

October 22, 2003Posted in2000s, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Drama, Germany, Romance, Sports, Theatrical, War

BEYOND BORDERS
*/****
starring Angelina Jolie, Clive Owen, Linus Roache, Teri Polo
screenplay by Caspian Tredwell-Owen
directed by Martin Campbell

RADIO
*/****
starring Cuba Gooding Jr., Ed Harris, Riley Smith, Sarah Drew
screenplay by Mike Rich
directed by Michael Tollin

Beyondradioby Walter Chaw Some pharaohs spent their reign building mighty pyramid tributes to themselves, so in that respect we should feel lucky that Angelina Jolie and Cuba Gooding Jr. have only used up the latter part of their plummeting careers constructing towering monuments to their splendid ideological isolation. The real wonder of it all is that there's room enough in the universe for both of their dangerously inflated senses of self-satisfaction, simultaneously reaching their respective pinnacles in a pair of atrocious films that at least have the virtue of being really funny, albeit for all the wrong reasons. For Jolie, her desire to save the entire third world, one orphan at a time, manifests itself in a picture that poses the big-lipped beauty carefully as a fashion plate and a sainted martyr; a debutante with an amazing wardrobe and a UN worker with a streak of activism; and a figure in its way as ridiculous as Gooding Jr.'s caricature of a severely mentally-disabled man (James Robert Kennedy) that reminds, of all things, of that acorn-crazed, pre-verbal prehistoric squirrel from Ice Age.

DIFF ’03: Sam & Joe

October 21, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, DIFF/SDFF, Drama, Film Festivals
½*/****written and directed by Jason Ruscio by Walter Chaw Amateurish and lit like a hospital ward, the extraordinarily unpromising feature debut of Jason Ruscio is bolstered a bit by a game cast (especially a luminous Petra Wright, who deserves better) but undermined by a determined lack of craft, a clumsy, over-burdened screenplay, and a surplus of mordant self-righteousness. A tale of a woman (Wright) who makes the mortal error of returning to her abusive husband (Michael T. Ringer), Sam & Joe is shot on jittery, ugly, handheld DV exacerbated by what appears to be an over-affection for Tarantino's whip-pans, time-skip…

DIFF ’03: Shattered Glass

October 21, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Canada, DIFF/SDFF, Drama, Film Festivals
***/****written and directed by Billy Ray by Walter Chaw The saga of disgraced NEW REPUBLIC journalist Stephen Glass is retraced in Billy Ray's hyphenate debut Shattered Glass, an unassuming walk across the crossed threads of deceptive webs fuelled by an interesting pair of performances from Hayden Christensen as Glass and Peter Sarsgaard as embattled editor Chuck Lane. Fascinatingly repetitive, the picture itself is something of a scam, portraying Glass's tall tales in straight flashback fashion before systematically debunking them, replicating, in a sense, the feeling of betrayal that Glass's readership, his audience, must have felt upon learning that they'd been…

DIFF ’03: The Wild Dogs

October 20, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, DIFF/SDFF, Drama
**/****written and directed by Thom Fitzgerald by Walter Chaw Thom Fitzgerald makes movies that celebrate the cult of himself. Carefully nourished by his sense of smug self-satisfaction like a private pleasure garden, his pictures, numbering five, are auteur in the sense that they're predictable now: one cannot fail to be scolded when sitting down to a Fitzgerald piece, and even his best work (The Hanging Garden) shows flashes of the pedantic sermonizer he's about to become. The topics into infinity are the holy trinity of the father, oppressed subcultures (especially homosexuals); the son, AIDS; and the holy ghost, Fitzgerald himself,…

DIFF ’03: The Event

October 20, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, DIFF/SDFF, Drama, Film Festivals
*½/****screenplay by Tim Marback, Steven Hillyer and Thom Fitzgeralddirected by Thom Fitzgerald by Walter Chaw Thom Fitzgerald's rip-off of--of all things--It's My Party miscasts Parker Posey as a hard-nosed prosecutor intent on exposing the assisted suicide of a terminally AIDS-ridden man by his well-meaning coterie of family and quirky friends. While Olympia Dukakis doesn't entirely embarrass herself as the dead guy's mother, the same is impossible to say for Fitzgerald, who, by trying to ultimately equate the AIDS holocaust with the 9/11 atrocity, manages to be both distasteful and ideologically suspect. Tragedy aside, the equation, however tenuous, of a virus…

DIFF ’03: Bitter Jester

October 19, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DIFF/SDFF, Documentary, Film Festivals, Road Movie, Romance
***/****directed by Maija DiGiorgio by Walter Chaw Bitter Jester is a hard-to-watch record of an irritating, dangerously self-destructive stand-up comedienne named Maija (director Maija DiGiorgio) who, with a video camera and goombah ex-boxer boyfriend Kenny in tow, imposed herself on the frighteningly neurotic underworld of stand-up performers. With the endorsement of Kenny's legend-in-the-stand-up-world pal Richard Belzer and Maija's dead therapist, the pair set out to make a documentary on the effectiveness of throwing oneself at the mercy of antagonistic comedy-club audiences as therapy for working out childhood trauma and pathological personality defects. What results is a surreal, Hunter S. Thompson-esque…

DIFF ’03: The Flower of Evil

October 19, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, DIFF/SDFF, Drama, Film Festivals, France, Thriller
*½/****screenplay by Caroline Eliacheff and Louise L. Lambrichs, adaptation by Claude Chabroldirected by Claude Chabrol by Walter Chaw Claude Chabrol, the master of the French thriller, is perhaps better described as the master of the French femme-fear film, making an art of women empowering themselves through the destruction of class and gender distinction. With The Flower of Evil (La Fleur du Mal) (no relation to the Baudelaire), Chabrol continues his slide into quaint, comfortable insignificance with his umpteenth treatment of a theme; he's become sort of a French Ozu, if you will, but with murder. This time around, the aging…

DIFF ’03: Bright Future

October 19, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, DIFF/SDFF, Drama, Esoterica, Film Festivals, Japan
Akarui mirai***½/****written and directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa by Walter Chaw Like many of Kiyoshi Kurosawa's pictures, Bright Future is about the virulence of apathy, the way that malaise seeps into the cracks of character, infecting ambition into inaction or inspiring sudden, malevolent acts inspired not so much by violence, but by a lack of prevention of violence. The Yin to Takashi Miike's Yang, Kurosawa increasingly finds himself at the fringe of narrative, making this film a remarkable companion piece to Gus Van Sant's similarly haunted, lyrical, and allegorical Elephant. Yuji (Joh Odagiri) is a shiftless youth working in a towel…

Wrath of Caan: FFC Interviews Scott Caan

October 18, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, DIFF/SDFF, Film Festivals, Interviews

ScaaninterviewtitleOctober 19, 2003|It's in a subterranean hotel breakfast nook with fountains and a tiny little glassed-in room for God knows what that I meet the manic Scott Caan, who wears a tight baseball t-shirt and demonstrates yo-yo tricks to the slight consternation of a publicist eyeing the glass enclosure, I thought, a little nervously. After showing me a trick of his own devising, the Caan Machine Gun, I asked him to repeat it so that I could photograph it:

DIFF ’03: Resist!: To Be with the Living

October 17, 2003Posted in****/****, 2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Belgium, DIFF/SDFF, Documentary, Film Festivals, Germany
****/****directed by Dirk Szuszies by Walter Chaw I have long been sustained by the belief that film can change the world, and that the most interesting dialogues I have ever had about the medium (the idea that it is the logical child of the oral storytelling tradition--Lord Byron's seed and wind, both) are connectable some way to the larger issues of my, or any, day. Dirk Szuszies and Karin Kaper's Resist!: To Be with the Living draws a line of crystal purity from the cycles of Greek tragedy (the eternal fight for individuality, moral objection, and freedom of "Antigone") and…

Veronica Guerin (2003)

October 17, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Crime, Drama, Ireland, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

*/****
starring Cate Blanchett, Gerard McSorley, Ciarán Hinds, Brenda Fricker
screenplay by Carol Doyle and Mary Agnes Donoghue
directed by Joel Schumacher

Veronicaguerinby Walter Chaw By the end of the piece, the only thing missing is John Wayne in ill-fitting Centurion garb, drawling "I do believe she truly was the son of God" over the corpse of slain journalist Veronica Guerin (Cate Blanchett), so at pains is Joel Schumacher's tedious spectacle of a hagiography of Guerin to paint her as some sort of sainted martyr. Veronica Guerin is horrible, really, a passel of forced dramatic slow push-ins framing Blanchett's mannered performance (in a Princess Diana haircut, no less, to really ramp up that pathos) all of insouciantly arched eyebrows and saucy eyeballs and centred dead and soft-lit like a Giotto effigy. Much is made of Guerin's print peers looking down on her, then a closing title card offers a statistic on the number of journalists killed in the line of duty, the suggestion being that journalists are sniffy elitists who don't like someone who can't write, has no background or experience in journalism, and takes unnecessary risks with themselves and their families–and that journalists are heroes regularly martyred by their thirst for truth. You really can't have it both ways, and that lack of focus isn't ambiguity so much as confusion brought about by a mortal dose of self-righteousness.

Pieces of April (2003)

October 17, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Theatrical

**/****
starring Katie Holmes, Patricia Clarkson, Oliver Platt, Derek Luke
written and directed by Peter Hedges

Piecesofaprilby Walter Chaw Modest in its intentions and achievements, Peter Hedges's Pieces of April has an undercurrent of paternalistic racism that verges on the disturbing. April (Katie Holmes, great but wasted) and her boyfriend Bobby (Derek Luke) invite April's difficult family to Thanksgiving dinner. Because it's potentially, ominously, the "last" Thanksgiving, the estranged nuclear unit composed of mom Joy (Patricia Clarkson), dad Jim (Oliver Platt), grandma Dottie (professional grandma Alice Drummond), and their other two children Beth (Alison Pill) and Timmy (John Gallagher Jr.) pack themselves into the station wagon and head up the interstate. The picture cuts between April struggling to find someone in her tenement who'll lend her the use of an oven and the family doing their best to suffer the acerbic, often nasty Joy.