DIFF ’03: Introduction

September 29, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blog, DIFF/SDFF, Film Festivals

Difftitle2003by Walter Chaw I took a trip down Denver's revitalized Blake Street (baseball field on one end, Auraria Campus of the University of Colorado at the other) last week to meet with the Denver Film Society's Creative Director and whirlwind Ron Henderson, the brilliant and capable Director of Media Relations Britta Erickson, and dedicated Program Director Brit Withy to talk about the cancellation of the "Critics' Choice" program from the roster of the 26th Starz Denver International Film Festival. A mainstay of the event for the last quarter-century, I was told in sombre tones–or was that relief?–that the availability of prints on platters was getting increasingly scarce and the program had become unfeasible. Honoured last year as the first Internet-based ink-stained wretch to be asked to present a film at the festival, I was disappointed to have my sophomore bow (I planned on bringing McCabe and Mrs. Miller and then Fat City) erased by circumstance and the fickle tide of technology.

Cobb (1994) – DVD

September 28, 2003Posted in1990s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Drama, DVD, Sports

***½/**** Image A Sound B+ Extras B
starring Tommy Lee Jones, Robert Wuhl, Lolita Davidovich
written and directed by Ron Shelton

by Walter Chaw Completely uncompromising in a way that films, especially sports films, just aren’t, Ron Shelton’s Cobb is one of the most effective hagiographies in film history not for the way that it elevates its subject to sainthood, but for the way that it allows its subject to be one of history’s most notorious, relentless miscreants. A malcontent in every measurable way, Ty Cobb–habitual spousal abuser, virulent racist, sadist (Cobb sent twelve men to the hospital one season), alcoholic, braggart, trigger-happy pistol-brandisher, alleged murderer, and so on–also happens to be the best baseball player in the history of the game. (In a modern era where Barry Bonds is making a claim for the best the game’s produced while also being, hands down, its biggest jerk and public-relations nightmare, Cobb’s transgressions put all of Bonds’s childishness in perspective.) Accordingly, the picture is a beautifully lensed nightmare, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas shot as a road-trip horror film instead of an acid-enhanced carnival ride, where the villain is the devil in Cobb’s back pocket.

Duplex (2003)

September 26, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Theatrical

*/****
starring Ben Stiller, Drew Barrymore, Eileen Essel, Justin Theroux
screenplay by Larry Doyle and John Hamburg
directed by Danny DeVito

Duplexby Walter Chaw Danny DeVito's Duplex begins promisingly enough as a dark comedy, its resemblances to The War of the Roses (and Throw Momma from the Train) only natural as DeVito directed both of those as well. But by its sunny conclusion, Duplex is a spineless bit of populist garbage that tries to mine broad cheer from the murder of an irritating old lady. The movie of value in this premise is one that examines the ways that young people hate the frailties of senior citizens, and for long stretches of the picture, the neo-yuppies played by Ben Stiller and Drew Barrymore are cast as self-centered assholes more interested in procreation and real-estate values than in the golden years of their upstairs tenant. Sadly, DeVito is the worst kind of coward, condescending to an audience he doesn't believe able to handle ambiguity, crafting in the process a film that so completely betrays its moments of audacity at its conclusion that the failure of Duplex lingers in memory as something to be more pitied than derided.

Enigma (2001) [Special Edition] – DVD

September 23, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Espionage, Germany, Mystery, Netherlands, Romance, Thriller, UK, War

**½/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras A-
starring Dougray Scott, Kate Winslet, Jeremy Northam, Saffron Burrows
screenplay by Tom Stoppard, based on the novel by Robert Harris
directed by Michael Apted

by Walter Chaw The easy thing to say is that the Mick Jagger-produced Enigma is enigmatic–it's more difficult to pinpoint the exact reasons why. Stars Dougray Scott, Kate Winslet, and Jeremy Northam are fine, Tom Stoppard's screenplay would on the surface surely seem fine, and Michael Apted's polished, if unremarkable, direction is the very definition of just fine. So the onus must fall on the material adapted, Robert Harris's follow-up to his much-lauded Fatherland, which promised a Ken Follett romantic espionage page-burner while delivering a staid and occasionally incomprehensible period bodice-ripper crushed under the dual gorgons of the sophomore jinx and the Tom Clancy "guess I'm not very good at dialogue" bogey. Enigma's problems begin and end with its inability to overcome the essential faults of its inherited plot, its most interesting aspect–WWII cryptologists at London's Bletchley Park–subsumed by a run-of-the-mill mystery and a never-in-doubt love story. It appears the curse of many historical fictions that attempt to familiarize the "long ago" with a "universal" romantic story arc dooms Enigma's period and historical detail to function as mere decorative flourish.

Stevie (2003) – DVD

September 22, 2003Posted in****/****, 2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Documentary, DVD, FFC Must-Own

****/**** Image A Sound A- Extras A
directed by Steve James

Mustownby Walter Chaw Eleven years after mentoring little Stevie in an Advocate Big Brother program in rural Illinois, documentary filmmaker Steve James restores ties to find that Stevie is a troubled man, emotionally crippled and awaiting trial for molesting his eight-year-old cousin. In science, the Heisenberg Principle postulates that the essential nature of an object changes when that object is observed; its application to documentary filmmaking is obvious. The question, then, becomes whether the documentarian should give himself a part in the film or remain outside of it, the alleged unobserved observer that in several critical contexts (Lacanian, Heisenbergian) loses its meaning, anyway. Integrity in the observation of documentary subjects is a delicate thing to navigate, and Stevie chooses early and often to be more about the Steve behind the camera than the Stevie before it. Stevie fascinates because it's a little like Montaigne's essays–a process of self-discovery that manages to indict our broken health care system and our "selfish cell" society in one fell swoop.

Andrei the Giant: FFC Interviews Andrei Codrescu

September 20, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Documentary, Interviews, Romania

AcodrescuinterviewtitleSeptember 21, 2003|The Rattlebrain Theater Company resides at a bustling intersection of Denver's 16th Street Mall in the basement of what appears to have once been a church. Backstage, with a little kid functioning as the company's receptionist for some reason that will best remain a mystery to me, I sat on a tatty sofa in what's essentially a catacomb, the "blue room," to meet NPR regular, Louisiana State English Professor, and founder of EXQUISITE CORPSE alternative literary magazine, Andrei Codrescu. An exile of Ceausescu's Romania, Codrescu found refuge in among the thinkers and bohemians of the American Sixties: William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg his spiritual and literary advisors in the new world, Codrescu sought with his life and career to redefine what Transylvanian poet and philosopher Lucien Blaga called "Mioritic Space"–an idea taken from Romanian folklore about the Romanian character defined by his geography, distilled by Codrescu into the idea that thought is its own nation and the poet, forever in exile, the only creator of its shifting borders.

Underworld (2003)

September 19, 2003Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Fantasy, Germany, Horror, Hungary, Theatrical, Thriller, UK, Vampire, Werewolf

*½/****
starring Kate Beckinsale, Scott Speedman, Shane Brolly, Michael Sheen
screenplay by Danny McBride
directed by Len Wiseman

Underworldby Walter Chaw Appearing to be based on two White Wolf role-playing games–"Vampire: The Masquerade" and "Werewolf: The Apocalypse"–introduced a while back (and indeed, the games company is suing Sony, Screen Gems, and Lakeshore for copyright infringement, citing no fewer than sixty points of unique similarity), Len Wiseman's Underworld may prove to be less "Romeo and Juliet" than much ado about nothing. The picture looks fantastic, Kate Beckinsale and Scott Speedman look fantastic, and that's pretty much all there is recommend about the piece, which is so boring, lifeless, and humourless that White Wolf would do well to distance itself from the thing toot sweet. This is gravid filmmaking at its worst, indulging in its twin cults' puerile wish-fulfillment fantasies with a sexless lust: the life of an immortal rock star in period garb thirsting for the blood of bullies for the one, of a raging man-beast thirsting for the blood of bullies for the other. In between are tons of rip-offs of everything from The Crow to The Matrix to the leather fetish and arms of Blade to the sweaty bodice-ripping of Anne Rice to the Alien3 wall-crawling monster views of David Fincher. Wiseman, in his hyphenate debut (he co-concocted the story), has scored big with a real-life engagement to the ethereally beautiful–and undernourished and anaemic–Kate Beckinsale, enough to take the sting out of the blah of Underworld, I'd surmise. And why not? Many would fail worse for less, but as a writer and director he proves himself to be a pretty good set designer.

The Fighting Temptations (2003)

September 19, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Music, Romance, Theatrical

*/****
starring Cuba Gooding Jr., Beyoncé Knowles, Chloe Bailey, Demetress Long
screenplay by Elizabeth Hunter and Saladin K. Patterson
directed by Jonathan Lynn

Fightingtemptationsby Walter Chaw It's fair to wonder at some point what it is, exactly, about Cuba Gooding Jr. that appeals the most. Is it the broad mugging? The amazingly insulting material? Or is it the kind of manic energy that proves so enervating to most people too old to be entertained by insulting, mugging clowns? And while The Fighting Temptations isn't quite as bad as Snow Dogs, Boat Trip, or Men of Honor, it's somehow less of a movie than either–a collection of flimsy narrative excuses for musical numbers that manages to suggest that poor southern African-Americans are slavishly devoted to the word of New York advertising executives while confirming that there are some characters so revolting as to indeed be above redemption. In its zeal to graft a few uplift dramas to its gospel-highlights showcase, The Fighting Temptations finds in its protagonist an appalling yaw of moral cess and, worse, a lack entire of much of anything resembling a recognizable humanity. Gooding Jr. is typecast in the part, in other words, and things don't appear to be looking up with the dreaded upcoming disability opera Radio.

Dreamcatcher (2003) [Widescreen Edition] – DVD

September 16, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Drama, DVD, Horror, Sci-Fi, Stephen King, Thriller

*/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B-
starring Morgan Freeman, Thomas Jane, Jason Lee, Damian Lewis
screenplay by William Goldman and Lawrence Kasdan, based on the novel by Stephen King
directed by Lawrence Kasdan

by Walter Chaw As stupid as stupid can be, Lawrence Kasdan’s splashy comeback on the backs of two writers who haven’t really been any good for about 40 years between them (Stephen King and William Goldman) is riddled with knee-slapping plot inconsistencies and the sort of dunderheaded conveniences that reek equally of desperation and a lack of respect for the audience. Based on the first King novel written after the author was smeared across a Maine highway by a man who would later kill himself in a trailer, the book is a fine short story trapped in the body of a 600-page book. Hopelessly protracted, after the first 200 pages, the novel becomes a pathetic exercise in chronic self-reference: the malady of a successful author who’s begun to lose the line between reality and his cult of personality. King has become a writer interested in writing love letters to his fanbase and smug gruel for everyone else.

Cabin Boy: FFC Interviews Eli Roth

September 13, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Horror, Interviews

ErothinterviewtitleSeptember 14, 2003|Debuting with a splash at the 2002 Toronto International Film Festival, Eli Roth’s zero-budgeted Cabin Fever sparked a bidding war won by Lions Gate Entertainment to the tune of $3.5M. A throwback to the Spam-in-a-cabin flicks of the early 1980s, the picture, for all its references and debts to films like The Evil Dead, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and John Carpenter’s The Thing, bears the unmistakable mark of a young Joe Dante: equal parts Roger Corman and cartoons. Cabin Fever is energetic and puerile, best when it apes Dante’s energy and sense of humour, worst when it takes on Dante’s occasional sloppiness and lack of cohesion. It’s dedicated, in either case, to providing a nostalgic glut of gratuitous nudity and gore while offering something I’ve been missing for a while now: a special-effects movie reliant on Karo syrup, KY jelly, and imagination uncorrupted by the perfect lines of a mainframe. That there is the possibility for a deeper analysis of the picture, centring on menstrual anxieties and banning rituals, is almost beside the point when the picture boasts of a scene involving a lady Bic, a bathtub, and a girl infected by a flesh-eating virus.

The Experiment (2001) – DVD

September 6, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Germany, Thriller

Das Experiment
**/**** Image B+ Sound B+
starring Moritz Bleibtreu, Christian Berkel, Oliver Stokowski, Wotan Wilke
screenplay by Don Bohlinger, Christoph Darnstädt, Mario Giordano, based on the novel by Black Box by Giordano
directed by Oliver Hirschbiegel

by Walter Chaw Midnight Express with pretensions, Oliver Hirschbiegel's The Experiment is based loosely on Zimbardo, Haney, Banks, and Jaffe's "Stanford Prison Experiment," conducted in 1971 to test the reactions of twenty-four ordinary college students–some cast as prison guards, others incarcerated in a mock prison–paid fifteen dollars a day for their participation in the study. Having to end the experiment after only six days because of pathological prisoner reactions and sadistic guard reactions, the "Stanford Prison Experiment" remains one of the more ethically shaky mindfucks in Stanford's proud tradition of such things (my favourite of them being the one where experimenters tested men's "performance anxiety" while urinating in public restrooms)–a topic dramatic enough to merit a cinematic treatment, without question, but a treatment served poorly by the formula embellishments favoured by The Experiment.

Burnt Offerings (1976) – DVD

September 3, 2003Posted in1970s, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD, Horror, Italy, Mystery, Thriller

**/**** Image C+ Sound D+ Extras C
starring Karen Black, Oliver Reed, Burgess Meredith, Eileen Heckart
screenplay by William F. Nolan and Dan Curtis, based on the novel by Robert Marasco
directed by Dan Curtis

by Walter Chaw Plodding, ugly, moribund, Burnt Offerings is bolstered by a few great campy turns from a game cast that includes Oliver Reed, Karen Black, and Bette Davis in a performance that runs counter to the self-loathing roles of her Baby Jane/Sweet Charlotte days. Finding its way to the DVD format just a couple of weeks before another haunted house flick (Cold Creek Manor) debuts on the big screen, veteran television director Dan Curtis's horror quickie is one of those comfortable relics that doesn't scare so much as mildly chill, offering countless opportunities to shout at the screen without any sort of discernible payoff–until the end, that is, but even that shocker of a conclusion has been telegraphed since at least the midway point of the first act, muffling its surprise.

Confidence (2003) – DVD

September 1, 2003Posted 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.

The Ωmega Man (1971) – DVD

September 1, 2003Posted in1970s, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD, Horror, Sci-Fi

The Omega Man
*/**** Image A- Sound B Extras D
starring Charlton Heston, Anthony Zerbe, Rosalind Cash
screenplay by John William Corrington and Joyce H. Corrington, based on the novel I Am Legend by Richard Matheson
directed by Boris Sagal

by Walter Chaw Its dialogue and score at constant war with the tickle of poignancy threatening to justify The Ωmega Man‘s cult status, Boris Sagal’s at times astonishingly awful adaptation of Richard Matheson’s classic short novel I Am Legend is some kind of weird hippie elegy spiced with a few disturbing religious images and a lot of casual racism. The idea that Matheson’s vampires are now black-hooded (monastic and judicial) albino mutants living in an abandoned civic building, representative of not a new order but the oppressive old, is too clearly a lament for the doom of the flower-power generation. Frankly, the image of broken-down hippies trying to plant seeds in blasted earth in the middle of Easy Rider said it all with more elegance and brevity.

Like Looking Into a Mirror: FFC Interviews Mark & Michael Polish

August 30, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Interviews

PolishbrothersinterviewtitlAugust 31, 2003|I met Mark and Michael Polish in the Green Room of Denver's NBC affiliate just after the pair had appeared live on local television to banter with the indigenous fauna about their latest film–and last in a loose trilogy of Americana–Northfork. Garnering a great deal of national praise for their audacity-verging-on-pretension and collecting comparisons to filmmakers like Wim Wenders and Terrence Malick, the brothers, in person, have an air of something so rare it's like vintage from a forgotten cellar: they're grateful for where they are, excited for what the future may bring them. It's a lesson in thankfulness that found me at the right time, just before the crushing festival season, right at the tail end of the summer (and winter and spring) doldrums–questioning, truth be told, what it was again that I was supposed to be doing here when it just didn't seem that much fun anymore.

Never on Sunday (1960) + The Man from Elysian Fields (2002) – DVDs

August 28, 2003Posted in1960s, 2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Greece, Romance

Pote tin Kyriaki
***/**** Image A Sound B
starring Melina Mercouri, George Foundas, Titos Vandis
written and directed by Jules Dassin

THE MAN FROM ELYSIAN FIELDS
**½/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras C-
starring Andy Garcia, Mick Jagger, Julianna Margulies, Olivia Williams
screenplay by Phillip Jayson Lasker
directed by George Hickenlooper

by Walter Chaw They could be sisters in philosophy. The school of happy-go-lucky hookers perfected by Billy Wilder and his Irma La Douce (1963) also graduated Melina Mercouri’s Ilya three years previous in expatriated filmmaker Jules Dassin’s ebullient Never on Sunday (1960). Dassin and Wilder are involved in a perverse sort of mythmaking–fed by the artifice of classic theatre for Dassin, and for Wilder, more, the hysterical artifice of musical theatre, reclaiming the state of whore to the state of Madonna in what feels like a mania for order in a world without it. The whore as pacific nurturer, Rose of Sharon recast as Xaviera Hollander, represents a cynic’s compromise: the font of life and hearth nursed in the oft-fondled breast of a wanton woman. Mary Magdalene, unrepentant–ascendant.

Down with Love (2003) [Widescreen] – DVD

August 24, 2003Posted 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.

American Splendor (2003) + The Secret Lives of Dentists (2003)

August 22, 2003Posted in****/****, 2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Comedy, Drama, Esoterica, Theatrical

AMERICAN SPLENDOR
*½/****
starring Paul Giamatti, Hope Davis, James Urbaniak, Harvey Pekar
screenplay by Shari Springer Berman & Robert Pulcini, based on the comics by Harvey Pekar & Joyce Brabner
directed by Shari Springer Berman & Robert Pulcini

THE SECRET LIVES OF DENTISTS
****/****
starring Campbell Scott, Hope Davis, Denis Leary, Robin Tunney
screenplay by Craig Lucas, based on the novella The Age of Grief by Jane Smiley
directed by Alan Rudolph

by Walter Chaw The same between American Splendor and Ghost World is that both have middle-aged outcasts as protagonists who each collect old blues 78s, that both were adapted from comic books, and that there’s a bus stop in Cleveland. The difference between American Splendor and Ghost World is that with two solitary figures in search of completion, there is the possibility for recognition of sameness–but with two figures (underground comic book writer Harvey Pekar and his wife Joyce Brabner (Hope Davis)) who have found in one another a sympathetic orbit, a partner in life and lo, with a child dropped willy-nilly into their midst to tie up loose ends, there is instead a sort of alien, island of lost toys exclusion that makes for a further alienation of the very alienated audience to which Pekar’s comic so appealed and, eventually, took for granted and pandered. The difference between American Splendor and Ghost World is that one is in love with its contrivance, and the other is in love with its melancholy.

The Medallion (2003)

August 21, 2003Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Fantasy, Hong Kong, Jackie Chan, Martial Arts, Theatrical, Thriller

½*/****
starring Jackie Chan, Lee Evans, Claire Forlani, Julian Sands
screenplay by Bey Logan, Gordon Chan, Alfred Cheung, Bennett Joshua Davlin, Paul Wheeler
directed by Gordon Chan

Medallionby Walter Chaw I think it's fair at this point to say that I'm no longer so much a Jackie Chan fan as I really like a few Jackie Chan movies. His career has taken a rather conspicuous downturn since he reintroduced himself to Hollywood almost a decade ago, just after his last great film Drunken Master 2, scraping and bowing and remixing a few of his Hong Kong hits with English-dubs (and why is it that Asian films are the only ones consistently re-voiced for North American release?) and consenting to play ethnic Kato caricature to a string of Yank comedians for inexperienced directors and that screaming idiot Brett Ratner.

Dirty Pretty Things (2003); Shanghai Ghetto (2003); Camp (2003)

August 20, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Documentary, Drama, Musical, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

DIRTY PRETTY THINGS
***/****
starring Audrey Tautou, Sergi López, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Sophie Okonedo
screenplay by Steve Knight
directed by Stephen Frears

SHANGHAI GHETTO
**/****
directed by Dana Janklowicz-Mann & Amir Mann

CAMP
*½/****
starring Daniel Letterle, Joanna Chilcoat, Robin de Jesus, Steven Cutts
written and directed by Todd Graff

by Walter Chaw Stephen Frears, like antipodean director Phillip Noyce before him, found the Hollywood waters to be a touch turgid and so in 2000 went back to the small country where he first rose to prominence. For Frears, who made his first resonant mark with a fantastic quartet of films–My Beautiful Laundrette, Walter and June, Prick Up Your Ears, and Sammy and Rosie Get Laid–in the mid-’80s, the return to his homeland presaged a return to his interest in England’s bottom caste and immigrant class, first with the grim, slight Liam and now with the trancelike, nightmarish Dirty Pretty Things. Its title both a reference to smarmy hotel manager Juan’s (Sergi López) philosophy of hotel management (“Our guests are strangers–they leave dirty things, we make them pretty things”) and the idea that the “pretty things” might be the film’s pretty heroes, Nigerian refugee Okwe (Chiwetel Ejiofor) and Turkish illegal Senay (Audrey Tautou), dirtied by the realities of blue-collar London. The struggle between the pragmatism of Juan’s outlook and the idea of sullied purity of Okwe and Senay is really all you need know about the picture–it’s a piece composed of equal parts social realism and fairytale martyrdom, with either part watered down by the other.