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

August 17, 2003Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Books About Movies, Crime, Directors: William Friedkin, Drama, DVD, Thriller

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

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

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

City Hunter (1993) – DVD

August 14, 2003Posted in1990s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, DVD, Hong Kong, Jackie Chan, Japan, Martial Arts, Romance, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/**** Image C Sound C Extras D
starring Jackie Chan, Joey Wong, Kumiko Goto, Chingmy Yau
written and directed by Wong Jing

by Walter Chaw There’s a scene towards the middle of Jackie Chan’s unwatchable City Hunter where starving, womanizing Ryô (Chan) leers at a pretty bimbo, and director Wong Jing provides a point-of-view shot that replaces her breasts with hamburgers and her arms and legs with corresponding fried chicken parts. The film never gets any funnier. City Hunter is garbage–fetid and painful from its prologue to a conclusion 100 minutes later that feels for all the world like a week-and-a-half later. It’s misogynistic, which is not really a surprise as almost all of Jackie Chan’s modern-era films are virulently so, but it does what I wouldn’t have suspected to be possible: it makes Chan a smarmy, oafish reptile. The modern Buster Keaton is here recast as Lorenzo Llamas, with the level of violence towards women in the film so extreme and unacceptable that it feels not so much prehistoric as something of a first.

Identity (2003) [Special Edition] – DVD

August 11, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD, Mystery, Thriller

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

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

The Rose (1979) – DVD

August 10, 2003Posted in1970s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Music, Romance

*½/**** Image C- Sound C Extras C
starring Bette Midler, Alan Bates, Frederic Forrest
screenplay by Bill Kerby and Bo Goldman
directed by Mark Rydell

by Walter Chaw Lenny by way of John Waters, Mark Rydell’s The Rose is a film made obsolete by years of “Behind the Music”–this story of a Janis Joplin-inspired singer boozin’ her way into a theatrical grave counts a lack of vitality and anything resembling surprise as chief among its faults. Bette Midler’s performance scored an Oscar nomination in 1980, but it lands with a shrillness now that defeats its attempts at pathos and depth. Why we should care about a self-destructive blues siren with impulse control issues is one of those things unwisely taken for granted while by now, twenty-three years after the fact, the lessons of hedonism and the downward spirals of the performing kind are curiously tepid, delivered as they are with a bullhorn and a bad Otis the Town Drunk impersonation.

He Who Courts Controversy: FFC Interviews Peter Mullan

August 10, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Interviews

PmullaninterviewtitleAugust 10, 2003|An indisputable sign of my provincialism, ten minutes into my conversation with Scottish actor-filmmaker Peter Mullan and I was still thinking to myself how awesome his rolling brogue is–I’ve never been more tempted to ape Irvine Welsh. But there’s more to Mullan than an accent raised on Guinness, cigarettes, haggis, and golf: the man, a former schoolteacher and favourite of director Ken Loach, is an amazingly erudite and charismatic cultural observer, expounding at length about film craft, racism, even poetry. (It’s not often one can talk at length about Samuel Coleridge with anyone, and if Mullan’s next project is a biopic of the scribe, I’ll be the first in line–and wanting an acknowledgment for the casting suggestion of Timothy Spall.) An unlikely lightning rod for one of the most controversial films of the year, Mullan is quick with a smile and an indecipherable regional profanity, spry the morning after an extended Q&A session following a late invitational screening of his The Magdalene Sisters and duly impressed by Denver’s exceptional selection of quality microbrews. The man knows his beer, I’ll give him that, and while his film isn’t without its imperfections, Mullan seems to know his capacity for outrage as well; let’s not kid ourselves: that quality of passion in any filmmaker, in any age, is certainly not strained.

Johnstown Flood (2003) + The Pennsylvania Miners’ Story (2003) – DVDs

August 6, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Documentary, DVD

JOHNSTOWN FLOOD
*/**** Image B Sound B Extras A
directed by Mark Bussler

THE PENNSYLVANIA MINERS' STORY
*½/**** Image B- Sound B
starring Graham Beckel, Michael Bowen, Tom Bower, Dylan Bruno
screenplay by Elwood Reid
directed by David Frankel

by Walter Chaw Richard Dreyfuss's voice is like a weasel rubbed against a blackboard: not entirely nasal (not entirely not), with a sort of lisping sneer that makes him a particularly bad match for narration work. It's not an axiom–but it should be–that lately the only thing worse than watching Dreyfuss in a film is listening to him; to the credit of peculiar direct-to-video documentary Johnstown Flood, though we have to listen to Dreyfuss narrate the piece, we don't have to watch him emote his way through it. The effect of having Dreyfuss go on about one of the most horrific dam-break tragedies in the United States is that his Napoleon-complex, constipated Snagglepuss wheeze ("Heaventh to Murgatroid!") lends the recreated bits of the documentary a tense sort of edge that it doesn't otherwise earn and feels slightly left of true, besides. Through it all, it's not Dreyfuss but the badly written and performed re-enactments that are the main problem with the piece, demonstrating by their weakness just how good The History Channel's stolid re-enactments actually are.

American Wedding (2003)

August 1, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Romance, Theatrical

*½/****
starring Jason Biggs, Seann William Scott, Alyson Hannigan, Eddie Kaye Thomas
screenplay by Adam Herz
directed by Jesse Dylan

Americanweddingby Walter Chaw Joining the Porky’s triptych as teensploitation smut franchises that have made it to three instalments (the Revenge of the Nerds series has four chapters, but only the first two are really all that smutty), American Pie finds (hopefully) its conclusion in the dreadfully incomplete-feeling American Wedding. A series of set-ups without punchlines that compensate for the deficiency by featuring a truly impressive number of random de-pantsings, people caught in unlikely tableaux that are inevitably mistaken for some sort of sexual deviancy, and a stable of stock characters so locked into their exploitative roles that existential questions of predestination and choice tickle at making the picture interesting. Featuring the best fecal-consumption-mined-for-yuks scene since the second Austin Powers movie (though a disappointingly minimal amount of gratuitous nudity), American Wedding can, in all honesty, be analyzed with profit as a satire of the whole tits-and-zits genre. It resembles Jurassic Park III in its general disdain for its audience and fatigue with its own shake-and-bake premise, but it does have a couple of laughs–the best bits involving a surreal dance-off and a ridiculously convoluted sequence with a pair of role-playing strippers.

Mondays in the Sun (2002); Freaky Friday (2003); The Eye (2002)

August 1, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, France, Hong Kong, Horror, Italy, Singapore, Spain, Theatrical, Thriller

Los Lunes al sol
**/****
starring Javier Bardem, Luis Tosar, José Ángel Egido, Nieve de Medina
screenplay by Fernando León de Aranda, Ignacio del Moral
directed by Fernando León de Aranda

FREAKY FRIDAY
**/****
starring Jamie Lee Curtis, Lindsay Lohan, Harold Gould, Mark Harmon
screenplay by Heather Hach and Leslie Dixon, based on the novel by Mary Rodgers
directed by Mark S. Waters

Jian gui
*½/****
starring Angelica Lee, Lawrence Chou, Chutcha Rujinanon, Yut Lai So
screenplay by Jo Jo Yuet-chun Hui, Oxide Pang & Danny Pang
directed by Oxide Pang & Danny Pang

Mondaysfreakyeyeby Walter Chaw Fernando León de Aranda's Mondays in the Sun is probably best described as a Spanish version of Fred Schepisi's Last Orders: a journal of a depressed nation's aging gentry, ferrying one of their own on to the great symbolic hereafter. It aspires to the sort of myth of Vittorio Di Sica's neo-realism, portraying the plight of the dispossessed working class in its unadorned splendour, succeeding by the end only to be a repetitive tattoo around the threadbare theme of men defined by work and destroyed by obsolescence. A castration melodrama in several anecdotal horizontal movements, Mondays in the Sun loses steam and tests patience by making its one point to exhaustion. A scene where the great Javier Bardem rails at the fable of the grasshopper and the ants ("This is bunk! It has no sympathy for someone who is born a grasshopper instead of an ant!") says almost all there is to say about the film, while a lingering close-up of Bardem's battered mug in all its injured brute eloquence is, by itself again, enough.

The Magdalene Sisters (2002)

August 1, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Ireland, Theatrical, UK

**½/****
starring Geraldine McEwan, Anne-Marie Duff, Nora-Jane Noone, Dorothy Duffy
written and directed by Peter Mullan

by Walter Chaw Most discussions of Peter Mullan’s The Magdalene Sisters will probably focus on the extent to which the story that it relates is inspired by truth; the Catholic Church has been predictably swift in its blanket condemnation, while the film’s supporters have presented actual “Magdalene Laundry” survivors who attest that the reality was actually much grimmer. The skeleton truth of the film, then, falls somewhere between those extremes, and its presentation, likewise, vacillates between elegant reserve and keening hysteria. The picture is a fictional treatment of the forced labour of tens of thousands of “wayward” girls in the convents of the Irish Catholic order of the Sisters of the Magdalene–compelled through intimidation and abuse to literally wash their sins away with backbreaking work scrubbing butcher’s whites and the like under Dickensian conditions. When it works (as in a prologue and conclusion that mute dialogue in an approximation of collective guilt), it works on the strength of Mullan’s smooth visual sensibility and narrative acumen. And when it doesn’t work (as in a subplot concerning a priest stridently not a “man of God”), the film tends to grate and, worse, cast doubt on the extent to which Mullan’s willing to go to take sides on his subject.

Gigli (2003)

July 29, 2003Posted in2000s, Al Pacino, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Gangster, Romance, Theatrical

*/****
starring Ben Affleck, Jennifer Lopez, Justin Bartha, Lenny Venito
written and directed by Martin Brest

Gigliby Walter Chaw While it doesn’t live up to its hype as the worst film ever made, Martin Brest’s Gigli, with its creepy contention that Ben Affleck is the cure for lesbianism, certainly makes a run for the most unintentionally hilarious film ever made. Its first mistake is in giving not one, but two charisma vortexes the leading roles, the sucking black hole this creates at the film’s centre thrown into sharp relief whenever a real actor (Christopher Walken, Al Pacino) makes a cameo appearance. The most surprising thing about Gigli isn’t the failed casting gambit or the gruesomely over-written dialogue (this isn’t anyone’s first film, after all), however, but rather the idea that Jennifer Lopez would authorize the reduction of her famously outsized posterior on the posters–abandoning (after mocking it in Maid in Manhattan–which, as it happens, was written by Brest’s Meet Joe Black scribe Kevin Wade) what is arguably the only thing so far about Lopez that hasn’t proven to be facile and over-hyped.

All the Real Girls (2003) – DVD

July 27, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Romance

***½/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras B+
starring Paul Schneider, Zooey Deschanel, Patricia Clarkson, Benjamin Mouton
written and directed by David Gordon Green

by Walter Chaw David Gordon Green’s sophomore picture All the Real Girls has the quality of a Faulknerian myth, with rural North Carolina subbing for his Yoknapatawpha County. It reminds of (and refers to) Terrence Malick’s dreamlike naturalism more than in the stylistic similarity of Tim Orr’s meticulous compositions–there is in Green’s work an understanding of those delicate moments that carve indelibly into the collective sublime. Marking the unbearable tragedy of being human, in his second film Green observes the madness of love in a temporary world, his gift in charting the native poetry of place and imperfection. When he allows that inarticulate frustration to fester against the backdrop of a stained paradise (George Washington), he creates an American masterpiece; when that furious inability to communicate comments on first love (All the Real Girls), he creates something no less elegant though considerably less able to sustain the gravity of its treatment.

Cliff Notes: FFC Interviews Cliff Curtis

July 26, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Interviews, New Zealand

CcurtisinterviewtitleJuly 27, 2003|The lower level of Denver's Magnolia Hotel features as its twin centrepieces a fountain and a wet bar, an idea of water in a grotto that appropriately found me meeting Maori actor Cliff Curtis, who was in town to promote the opening of Niki Caro's Whale Rider. Dressed casually in jeans, loose shirt, and sandals, Curtis is an extremely warm, curious sort of fellow at once unfazed by his rising status in Hollywood (having appeared in numerous high-profile pictures playing a variety of ethnicities) and possessed of that particular airy disconnection of folks reared in the theatre. He's at the cusp of stardom, essentially, with leading-man good looks and an ineffable quality of fearless integrity that allows him to back away from the big-budget blockbusters in which he has found himself of late to take a small role in a small film, just because it's important to him. Simplicity itself, it seems, the call of Hollywood too often turns idealism into avarice, making a man doing the right thing for himself and his culture an anomaly–and a welcome one. With a heavy Kiwi accent and a relaxed attitude imported from the poetically-named Pacific, Curtis spoke to FILM FREAK CENTRAL, against the soft clatter of that fountain, about all manner of things in the middle of another murderous Colorado summer.

Final Destination 2 (2003) [infinifilm] – DVD

July 25, 2003Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, DVD, Horror, Thriller

**/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B+
starring Ali Larter, A.J. Cook, Michael Landes, Terrence ‘T.C.’ Carson
screenplay by J. Mackye Gruber & Eric Bress
directed by David Richard Ellis 

by Walter Chaw Earning some marks for a gratuitous tit shot and a few graphic kills, the mystical gorefest Final Destination 2 is an unusually mordant excuse to knock off a few good-looking caricatures. Philosophically speaking, it develops its mythology with a series of rules so Byzantine that rather than spend a surplus of time trying to unravel what’s going on, it’s best just to settle comfortably into the realization that the ones we’ve marked for death are, in fact, marked by Death in the film. The most interesting thing about the picture, in fact, is that it is self-reflexive for genre fans, who’ve made it something of a matter of course to pick out the heroine and the meat bags from the rest of the cattle. In our way, we become the avatars of the Grim Reaper, laying our bony fingers on each inevitable victim in turn. The audience, in a very direct way, becomes that invisible cold wind that announces the arrival of doom–Final Destination 2 is almost interactive.

Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over (2003)

July 25, 2003Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Family, Sci-Fi, Stallone

Spy Kids 3: Game Over
½*/****
starring Antonio Banderas, Carla Gugino, Alexa Vega, Daryl Sabara
written and directed by Robert Rodriguez

Spykids3dby Walter Chaw Robert Rodriguez’s deeply unpleasant conclusion to his Spy Kids trilogy lacks the smarts and inventiveness of the first two films in the series, putting all of its eggs in a 3-D basket that is so certain to cause headache that bottles of aspirin should be passed out alongside the flimsy red/blue glasses. All the weaknesses of the previous Spy Kids entries, unbolstered in Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over (hereafter Spy Kids 3) by a sense of joy and innovation, are unforgivable in this film: the genuinely awful child actors, the cheesy special effects, and that certain air of imported moral superiority that seems a late-hour attempt to justify the emptiness of the exercise. Out of nowhere, the lessons of family and respect for disability find themselves grafted to this flimsiest of low-tech frameworks–special effects that are so amateurish and poorly implemented they don’t so much remind of Tron as replicate Tron bit-for-bit twenty-one years after the fact. The narrative of the film, such as it is, reveals itself to be a life-support system for hyperactive incompetence, and for a series of stupid cameos that are at least preferable to Sylvester Stallone as something called The Toymaker.

Masked and Anonymous (2003)

July 24, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Esoterica, Music, Theatrical, UK, Western

*/****
starring Bob Dylan, John Goodman, Jessica Lange, Luke Wilson
screenplay by Bob Dylan & Larry Charles, writing under very dumb pseudonyms
directed by Larry Charles

Maskedanonymousby Walter Chaw The three or four times that Larry Charles's Masked and Anonymous features musical performances by its star Bob Dylan (particularly a rousing rendition of "Dixie"), the picture manages to be something just north of unbearable. The rest of the time, it's an interminable ego trip through Dylan's towering sense of self-importance, his almost total inability to relate with reality, and that curious phenomena of popular artists who are at once imperiously patronizing and desperate to be seen as common men. When failed concert promoter Uncle Sweetheart (John Goodman) asks down-on-his-luck folk singer Jack Fate (Dylan) about the importance of Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin to American rock-and-lore, the inanity of the answer (and the evasiveness of Dylan's demeanour–"Well, it matters to someone, I guess") isn't mysterious so much as inane and disingenuous; even the evocation of social phenomena as important and galvanizing to roots rock and the inner city as the myth of Stagger Lee is tossed off with a wry flick of the hand. Pretending that he doesn't know himself to be an icon in American music (and, arguably, even of American letters) is the worst kind of arrogance: the sin of false modesty, which Dylan doesn't wear particularly well and is frightfully unbecoming besides.

Irma la Douce (1963) – DVD

July 23, 2003Posted in1960s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Directors: Billy Wilder, DVD, Romance

***½/**** Image A Sound B
starring Jack Lemmon, Shirley MacLaine, Lou Jacobi, Bruce Yarnell
screenplay by Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond
directed by Billy Wilder

by Walter Chaw Until Irma la Douce (1963), movie prostitutes were of the touch-me-not variety, the Holly Golightly breed who invariably paid the (sometimes ultimate) price for the oldest profession–they were never happy, bright, and chirpily philosophical. The casting of Shirley MacLaine as the titular poule makes sense in that just three years after Billy Wilder's The Apartment, it brought her and Jack Lemmon back together as lovers divided by sordid circumstance (and cohabiting an apartment again, as it happens), but Wilder's wish to cast Marilyn Monroe instead would have been the better choice. She is, after all, far less burdened by the weight of intelligence and melancholy than MacLaine (or, at least, her screen persona is)–qualities that serve MacLaine extremely well in the darkly-hued The Apartment, and much less so in what is literally a gauzy Technicolor slapstick musical sans song-and-dance numbers. Still, what works about Irma la Douce is the sprightliness of the interplay between the elfin Irma and her arguably more elfin beau/benefactor Nestor (Lemmon), both finding in Wilder the sort of director who understood the quality of the "attractive goons, winsome losers, and sympathetic heels" Ethan Mordden described as comprising the prototypical Wilder hero. And it is that marriage of paradoxes, particularly the one which finds MacLaine cast as the bimbo, that gives Irma la Douce the kind of dark, self-reflexive undercurrent that defined the unrest of '60s cinema.

Dracula II: Ascension (2003) – DVD

July 22, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD, Horror, Romania, Vampire, Wes Craven

*½/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras B
starring Jason Scott Lee, Jason London, Craig Sheffer, Stephen Billington
screenplay by Joel Soisson & Patrick Lussier
directed by Patrick Lussier

by Walter Chaw As far as direct-to-video sequels to awful franchise films go, Patrick Lussier’s ponderously dubbed Wes Craven Presents Dracula II: Ascension (hereafter Dracula II) is better than Hellraiser 3 and Children of the Corn V, but really just a vampire knock-off of Suicide Kings, of all things. After tackling the mummy mythos in Russell Mulcahy’s dreadful Tale of the Mummy, poor Jason Scott Lee takes on the vampire canon, assuming the Van Helsing role of self-flagellating holy vamp hunter Uffizi, all decked-out in priestly black and doing his Bruce Lee berserker song-and-dance, this time armed to the nines with obscure weaponry. A shame that the film spends so much of its time watching a suddenly Aryan Dracula (Stephen Billington, Gerard Butler apparently not available) tied to a table between banks of ultraviolet lights while mumbling dreamy phrases in a Count Chocula accent, as the potential is there for a campy cheap-o action/gore piece.

May (2003) – DVD

July 19, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Horror, Thriller

***/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B-
starring Angela Bettis, Jeremy Sisto, Anna Faris, James Duval
written and directed by Lucky McKee

by Walter Chaw Lucky McKee takes a look at the end of the world and it comes half-blinded before a student version of Claire Denis’s Trouble Every Day and a poster-shrine to Dario Argento’s Opera. The apocalypse in May is the end of cinema, a self-consuming contemplation of itself as the product of genre, and so its touchstones are films that consider the horror of unnatural progeny, inappropriate consumption, and, of course, the literariness of “Frankenstein”‘s exhumation and reconstitution tropes. When May (Angela Bettis) pleads at the picture’s conclusion to be seen, more than the plaintive cry of a child molded by fear into something strange, it’s an understanding that the life of cinema is like the span of any beast: naivety into optimism into cynicism into contemplation into, finally, a breed of facile irony fed by the mordancy of existence at its extremity.

I Capture the Castle (2003)

July 18, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Romance, Theatrical, UK

**/****
starring Romola Garai, Rose Byrne, Henry Thomas, Marc Blucas
screenplay by Heidi Thomas, based on the novel by Dodie Smith
directed by Tim Fywell

by Walter Chaw A breezy light romantic caste-comedy in the vein of Cold Comfort Farm or any of a number of Jane Austens, Tim Fywell’s mannered comedy of manners I Capture the Castle is marked by some fine performances and hampered by a blueprint so threadbare that it has, by now, taken on something of its own unnatural half-life. Boasting one of the less revolting endlessly reproducible master-plots that needs only a new cast and crew to bring it shambling to Frankenstein-ian life, the heavy-booted I Capture the Castle lumbers from meet-cute to early-hate-into-blossoming-love to the idea of ‘marrying poetically’ that has been a staple of roundelay romance since Shakespeare and before. It’s a crowd-pleaser, then, in the sense that the word describes a film with no surprises, no controversy, a charming location, and a dangerous level of sweetness. Perhaps ‘crowd pacifier’ is a better term.

How to Deal (2003)

July 17, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Coming of Age, Drama, Romance, Teen, Theatrical, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Mandy Moore, Allison Janney, Alexandra Holden, Peter Gallagher
screenplay by Neena Beber, based on the novels Someone Like You and That Summer by Sarah Dessen
directed by Clare Kilner

Howtodealby Walter Chaw Based on a pair of Sarah Dessen novels that apparently deal with the tribulations of a particularly sour adolescent girl, Clare Kilner’s How to Deal is a disastrously twee Judy Blume knock-off that compacts every ill of growing up female into a hysterical parcel of over-reaching and hollow sanctimony. It’s the kind of movie that has its maudlin protagonist reading Madame Bovary to parse, I guess, some portion of romantic martyrdom when the irony of the reference is that at the root of Emma Bovary’s problems arguably lies her infatuation with mealy romance novels into which she might substitute herself for the heroines (not forgetting the role of Dessen’s books in the first place). Irony and incompetence being the two rules of the day as Kilner and her cinematographer Eric Alan Edwards (once Gus Van Sant’s DP, now relegated to stuff like this and Britney Spears’s Crossroads) make unforgivable decisions in lighting and camera placement that cast How to Deal as an unintentional horror film with at least three scenes loaded with tension and free-floating anxiety for no good reason save that the filmmakers don’t seem to know what the hell they’re doing.