Spider-Man (2002) [Full Screen Special Edition + Superbit] – DVDs

June 13, 2003Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: Sam Raimi, DVD, Sci-Fi, Spider-Man, Superhero

***½/****
SE – Image C Sound A- Extras B
SUPERBIT – Image A Sound A (DTS) A- (DD) Commentary B
starring Tobey Maguire, Willem Dafoe, Kirsten Dunst, James Franco
screenplay by David Koepp
directed by Sam Raimi

Spidermansbitcap1

by Walter Chaw Sam Raimi’s banana yellow, 1973 Dodge 88 Oldsmobile is Uncle Ben’s (Cliff Robertson, himself the happy–however briefly–subject of a lab experiment in 1968’s Charley) ride in Spider-Man, and it is as canny and appropriate a cameo as any since Hitchcock’s greedy quaff of a champagne flute in Notorious. The good news is, the appearance of said vehicle is as clever as the rest of Spider-Man, that rare variety of modern popular film boasting of subtext and tricky riptides tackling puberty and abrupt Oedipal splits with good humour, insight, and grace. If not for the abominable CGI (really only overused in two scenes), I would have a hard time finding fault with Spider-Man, the model comic book movie in its surprisingly dark tone, lively pace, shrewd performances, sense of humour, and sly intelligence.

Hollywood Homicide (2003)

June 13, 2003Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Theatrical, Thriller

**/****
starring Harrison Ford, Josh Hartnett, Keith David, Lena Olin
screenplay by Robert Souza & Ron Shelton
directed by Ron Shelton

by Walter Chaw The kind of movie where a cop who calls himself “Smokey” is referring to Smokey Robinson (more to the point, the kind of movie where Smokey Robinson makes a cameo), Ron Shelton’s Hollywood Homicide is a diary of decline made by aging filmmakers and aimed at an aging audience. Shelton returns to the old guy/young guy/slut dynamic of Bull Durham while Harrison Ford turns in what is possibly the first “old guy” performance of his career–one that pings poignantly off his patented “weary bemusement” shtick before a finale (a comedy of humiliation) that functions as the only part of the film that really works. Sandwiched between the standard buddy/too-convenient-crime caper formula set-up and that deliriously good conclusion is a laboured exercise in forced bonhomie and a mysterious existential melancholy that feels a great deal like a tired exhalation. Hollywood Homicide is an extraordinarily average film that has something of a distinct, dark intimation nudging at its corners. A shame the Ron Shelton of today is not the Ron Shelton of Cobb.

Dumb and Dumberer: When Harry Met Lloyd (2003)

June 12, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Theatrical, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Eric Christian Olsen, Derek Richardson, Luis Guzmán, Eugene Levy
screenplay by Robert Brenner & Troy Miller
directed by Troy Miller

Dumbanddumbererby Walter Chaw Harry (Derek Richardson) and Lloyd (Eric Christian Olsen) are imbecile best friends played by two young actors doing their best (which is pretty good) Jeff Daniels and Jim Carrey impersonations. Meet-cute’ing in a high school being bilked by an evil administrator (Eugene Levy) and his lunch lady squeeze (Cheri Oteri), the pair tick off the litany of Farrelly-inspired gross-out gags with neither the heart nor the timing. Asians are made great sport of in an antiquated sort of way that isn’t so much offensive as slack, scat-like material is smeared all over a bathroom, Bob Saget gets a paycheck, and Mimi Rogers makes out with Rachel Nichols in a Hef grotto. On the plus side, its entendre-laden script isn’t actually worse than Down With Love‘s.

Basic (2003) – DVD

June 12, 2003Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, DVD, Mystery, Thriller

*½/**** Image B Sound A Extras B-
starring John Travolta, Connie Nielsen, Samuel L. Jackson, Brian Van Holt
screenplay by James Vanderbilt
directed by John McTiernan

by Walter Chaw It occurred to me about midway through Basic that director John McTiernan, having nowhere to go but up after last year’s amusingly noxious Rollerball, was taking a page from the Michael Bay book of filmmaking before realizing that Bay had the McTiernan school (the McTiernan of Die Hard and Predator) to thank for the whole of his austere career. The Hollywood shooting match is an incestual Moebius strip, it seems, and for who was once the best action director in the United States to find himself a hollow shade of not only his past glory, but also Bay, is depressing beyond words. Which is not to say that Basic doesn’t start out extremely well: For a full minute, the picture provides a brief history of the French attempt at digging a canal in Panama in the 1880s scored to Bizet’s Carmen; the problem is that by the end of Basic, the only justification for the Carmen cue is that it’s also packed to the gills with bull.

Film Freak Central does the Sixth Aurora Asian Film Festival

June 10, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, China, Comedy, Documentary, Drama, Film Festivals, Hong Kong, Japan, Philippines, Romance, South Korea, Thailand

Aurorafestpagelogo6thJune 11, 2003|by Walter Chaw There’s a genuine sense of community engendered by the Aurora Asian Film Festival, down on East Colfax where a great deal has been done to make an old community feel intimate and inviting. Old-growth trees dot the sidewalks and nice cobbled walks bisect the intersections. A lot of construction along Colfax reminds that this area may boom if we ever get Democratic leadership back in office, and a lot of uniformed police officers remind that until we do, economic revitalization is sort of holding its breath down here. On the last night of the festival, I moderated a Q&A with director Gil Portes after an exceedingly well-received screening of his tedious film Small Voices; just before that, my wife and I had dinner at my favourite diner (Pete’s Kitchen) and then dessert at a little Mexican bar across the way that not only had no waitresses who spoke English, but also no menus (and Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes playing in Spanish on a beat-up television (it’s better that way)). Nothing like a little cultural displacement to get the juices flowing.

This Is Alexander, He Makes Movies: FFC Interviews Alexander Payne

June 7, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Interviews

ApayneinterviewtitleJune 8, 2003|Eyes glowering under a shock of black hair, Alexander Payne, tall and angular, strikes a sort of middle-American Neil Gaiman figure, cutting through the crowds gathered for the 12th Aspen Shortsfest with authority and something like diffidence. Meeting in the lobby of the Wheeler Opera House, we go off in search of a shot of espresso; along the way he corrects that he didn't study Spanish Philosophy in college, but Spanish Philology; makes it a point to punctuate some statements with a companionable squeeze of my arm; and then says something sort of curious: "I don't know why you'd want to talk to me, Walter, I don't have anything interesting to say." I chuckled, of course, but he was deadly serious and would repeat the statement a couple of times. Judging it to be neither a strategy to avoid interviews nor a way to disarm a would-be interrogator, I took it as weariness with the entire junket/publicist/interview process.

Dark Blue (2002) [Special Edition] – DVD

June 6, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, DVD, Germany, Thriller, UK

**/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B-
starring Kurt Russell, Scott Speedman, Ving Rhames, Brendan Gleeson
screenplay by David Ayer
directed by Ron Shelton

by Walter Chaw Lost in the familiarity of critics calling films combinations of two similar films is the truism that, in all likelihood, these films were pitched exactly the same way to stuffed wallets lacking in much imagination. In this spirit, Dark Blue is Training Day meets L.A. Confidential–to that end, Training Day scribe David Ayer wrote the screenplay from a story by James Ellroy, author of L.A. Confidential the novel. In other words, Dark Blue is a chimera composed of the worst parts of a pair of better films–a green rookie/corrupt grizzled vet police thriller set in Los Angeles (Training Day) that, banking on the borrowed gravity of historical events to lend itself a measure of importance, features an evil Irish mentor/supercop responsible for the picture’s central crime (L.A. Confidential) and a tired storyline riddled with exhausted characters (a showboat role, a thankless role) and racial conveniences. It’s by now fair to wonder if director Ron Shelton will make another Blaze, let alone another Bull Durham.

Whale Rider (2003) + Rivers and Tides (2002)

June 5, 2003Posted in****/****, 2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Documentary, Drama, Family, Finland, Germany, New Zealand, Theatrical, UK

WHALE RIDER
***½/****
starring Keisha Castle-Hughes, Rawiri Paratene, Vicky Haughton, Cliff Curtis
screenplay by Niki Caro, based on the novel by Witi Ihimaera
directed by Niki Caro

RIVERS AND TIDES
****/****
directed by Thomas Riedelsheimer

by Walter Chaw The images in Niki Caro’s second film, Whale Rider, are so heartbreakingly beautiful that at times the narrative diminishes its mythic gravity. It resembles John Sayles’s brilliant The Secret of Roan Inish not only in subject, but also in the understanding that film has the potential to be the most cogent extrapolation of the oral storytelling tradition. When the picture’s young protagonist sings an ancient Maori song to a dark ocean, there is an indescribable power to the film that springs from firelight–what we’ve lost in modernity as orphans to our collective past.

Man on the Train (2002); Chaos (2001); And Now… Ladies and Gentlemen… (2002); The Son (2002)

June 5, 2003Posted in****/****, 2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Belgium, Comedy, Crime, Directors: Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, Drama, France, Germany, Japan, Mystery, Romance, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

L’Homme du train
***/****
starring Jean Rochefort, Johnny Hallyday, Jean-François Stévenin, Charlie Nelson
screenplay by Claude Klotz
directed by Patrice Leconte

CHAOS
*/****
starring Catherine Frot, Vincent Lindon, Rachida Brakni, Line Renaud
written and directed by Coline Serreau

AND NOW… LADIES AND GENTLEMEN…
***½/****
starring Jeremy Irons, Patricia Kaas, Thierry Lhermitte, Alessandra Martines
screenplay by Claude Lelouch, Pierre Leroux & Pierre Uytterhoeven
directed by Claude Lelouch

Le fils
****/****
starring Olivier Gourmet, Morgan Marinne, Isabella Soupart, Nassim Hassaïni
written and directed by Jean-Pierre Dardenne & Luc Dardenne

by Walter Chaw After a brief period where French cinema seemed exclusively interested in the ugliness and violence festering in its anti-Semitic margins, what with pictures as variegated as Baise-moi, Trouble Every Day, My Wife is an Actress, and indeed, Gasper Noé’s sensationalistic Irréversible (which demonstrates a continuing fascination with a tumultuous French cinema in extremis), the old guard begins to reassert itself with its own tales of the underbelly of life displacing the façade of the comfortable upper class. Patrice Leconte’s new film Man on the Train (L’Homme du train) is reserved and slight while Chaos by Coline Serreau (who was born the same year as Leconte, as it happens) tries to soften the cruelty of much of modern French cinema by overlaying it with a patina of feminist uplift and misplaced social satire. Films like Rohmer’s The Lady and the Duke and Godard’s In Praise of Love attempt to draw a line between the nouvelle and the digital age (and Chaos is shot in ugly DV), and pictures like Rivette’s wonderful Va Savoir and now Claude Lelouch’s And Now... Ladies and Gentlemen… act as surveys and auto-critique of the medium itself. With these three pictures, the meta-critical instinct–something of a hallmark of French culture in general and cinema in particular–finds a new voice in, ironically, its older generation of directors. Somewhat apart from all of that is the Dardenne Brothers’ The Son (Le Fils), which is on its own stylistically but looks thematically for common ground in its own tale of obsession and reconciliation.

My Friend Flicka (1943) – DVD

June 4, 2003Posted in1940s, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD, Family, Western

**/**** Image A+ Sound B
starring Roddy McDowall, Preston Foster, Rita Johnson, James Bell
screenplay by Francis Edwards Faragon, based on the book by Mary O’Hara
directed by Harold Schuster

by Walter Chaw Revealing itself as a primary source for Spielberg’s E.T. (complete with scene in which a boy and his extra-species pal are found unconscious in a stream), Harold Schuster’s prototypical horse opera My Friend Flicka finds its locus in the relationship between a boy and his animal, its comic relief in a bratty little sister (Diana Hale) who can’t be trusted, and its antagonist in a stern but loving father (Preston Foster). Released to good success in 1943, the film (based on three novels by Mary O’Hara) fostered two sequels and a popular television show that banked on the syrupy good old-fashioned paterfamilias values that proliferated in TV’s late-’50s “Golden Age.” Accordingly, the film is burdened by a surplus of problem/solution climaxes and a perversely invasive score by Hollywood legend Alfred Newman that telegraphs every emotional response with a moldy insistence best described as “John Williams-y.”

The Other Side of Heaven (2002) – DVD

June 3, 2003Posted in2000s, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Disney, Drama, DVD, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/**** Image A Sound A Extras D
starring Christopher Gorham, Anne Hathaway, Nathaniel Lees, Joseph Folau
written and directed by Mitch Davis

by Walter Chaw To call The Other Side of Heaven “appalling” would be to underestimate just how dangerous entertainments like it can be. The film positions itself as “based on a true story” and “based on a memoir” without understanding that the two are often mutually exclusive. Then, without apology, it proceeds to manufacture scenes for maximum manipulation, everything from the messianic to the mundane. An opening dance sequence set in a Cleaver American Fifties features more stunt people, professional dancers, and trampolines than Cirque du Soleil, its artificiality setting the tone for the rest of the film, while the scene’s conclusion (with the picture’s hero trapping the celebrants in a giant dance hall, dooming them to death should a fire break out) serves as a pretty succinct summary of the film’s feckless themes and carelessness.

The Italian Job (2003)

May 29, 2003Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, France, Germany, Italy, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

**½/****
starring Mark Wahlberg, Charlize Theron, Edward Norton, Seth Green
screenplay by Donna Powers & Wayne Powers, based on the screenplay by Troy Kennedy Martin
directed by F. Gary Gray

by Walter Chaw The Italian Job may be the very definition of a perfunctory remake. There’s no arguing with its professionalism and, at times, it threatens to hear the music, but when its best moments are those in which Donald Sutherland–in Venice again after 1973’s Don’t Look Now–summons up the horrific ghosts of Nicolas Roeg films past, the picture reveals itself to be inspired only by movies that were first, and better. In that spirit, among the recent crop of heist films, The Italian Job is better than Frank Oz’s The Score and David Mamet’s Heist, but not nearly so good as James Foley’s Confidence. It finds itself at the mercy of the rhythms and images of pictures it seeks to ape, drumming out in the end an often flat, frequently limp product that seems to know, to its credit, the difference between “style” and “seizure.” But with a cast that is either predictably flat (Mark Wahlberg, Charlize Theron, Jason Statham) or convinced they’re too good for the movie (Ed Norton; only Seth Green seems like he’s having genuine fun), The Italian Job is just a prettified reflection glancing off the surface of a deep well.

Adaptation. (2002) [Superbit] – DVD

May 29, 2003Posted in****/****, 2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Charlie Kaufman, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Esoterica, FFC Must-Own, Nicolas Cage

****/**** Image A+ Sound A+
starring Nicolas Cage, Meryl Streep, Chris Cooper, Cara Seymour
screenplay by Charlie Kaufman and Donald Kaufman, semi-based on the novel The Orchid Thief by Susan Orlean
directed by Spike Jonze

by Walter Chaw A breathless map of the nervous play of axons and dendrites, Spike Jonze and Charlie Kaufman’s Adaptation. is an intimate cartography of the human animal in all its florid insecurity, ugliness, and potential for passionate pursuit. In relating its tale of screenwriter Kaufman’s existential wrestle with adapting Susan Orlean’s The Orchid Thief, the picture takes on a tangle of Lacanian meta-observation that begins with the nervy creation of a Kaufman-doppelgänger/id-projection and ends with a literal destruction of said phantom. A deceptively simple film given all its contortions and acrobatics, Adaptation. is concerned with the ways in which a man doubts himself, doubts his relationships (as well as the implicit lie of the social “professional smile”), and learns almost too late the damnably difficult (for the intelligent and the sensitive) ability to accept the simple and the obvious at face value. The picture suggests that to be genuinely adaptive is to give oneself over to entropy armed only with the knowledge of self; more than right, its journey is fantastic.

The Pianist (2002) [Limited Soundtrack Edition] – DVD

May 26, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Drama, DVD, France, Germany, Music, Palme d'Or Winner, Poland, UK, War

***/**** Image C Sound A Extras B+
starring Adrien Brody, Daniel Caltagirone, Thomas Kretschmann, Frank Finlay
screenplay by Ronald Harwood, based on the book by Wladyslaw Szpilman
directed by Roman Polanski

by Walter Chaw It comes as little surprise that when the Nazis begin to build a wall around the Warsaw ghetto is also when Roman Polanski’s Holocaust drama The Pianist becomes distinctive, as the director is at his best bound by the endlessly symbolic edifices and crannies of architecture. The story of Polish pianist Wladyslaw Szpilman (Adrien Brody) and his survival under the auspices of the Polish underground, serendipity, and fear is almost anti-heroic, its central figure passive like the most memorable of Polanski’s heroes (Rosemary, Carol Ledoux, Trelkovsky, even Jake Gittes after a fashion), and its indignities more intimate than the grand tapestry of the Holocaust generally allows. The loss of Szpilman’s entire family to The Final Solution is less wrenching than the line that precedes it as Szpilman says to his sister, “I wish I knew you better,” and less difficult again as the musician’s inability to play a piano he’s imprisoned with in a tenement flat while in hiding. Far from insensitive, The Pianist is actually intensely humanist, focused as it is on the little indignities that bring a man from his comfortable environment to the furtive edge of capricious extinction.

Viva Valeria!: FFC Interviews Valeria Golino

May 24, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Interviews, Italy

Vgolinointerviewtitlerevised

May 25, 2003|The decorations in the leather-lined bar of Denver's Panzano restaurant tend towards distressed dark wood and coloured glass; it's a new town's take on the old world and the perfect place to meet actress Valeria Golino. The daughter of an Italian scholar and a Greek painter, Ms. Golino is passionate about film as art, considers herself fortunate to have worked with so many strong auteur voices, and feels somewhat dissatisfied with her own contribution to the medium to this point.

Just Married (2003) – DVD

May 24, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Germany, Romance

½*/**** Image A Sound A- Extras C+
starring Ashton Kutcher, Brittany Murphy, Christian Kane, David Moscow
screenplay by Sam Harper
directed by Shawn Levy

by Walter Chaw Just as 2002 began with Orange County, a disappointing, somewhat lacklustre comedy (though certainly nowhere near as terrible as the film I’m here to review), 2003 begins with Just Married, a comedy so dedicatedly unfunny that the best way to approach it would be through the perspective that it’s actually meant to be disturbing. In fact, until the first line of dialogue about a minute in, the picture feels like a mordant, tongue-in-cheek, domestic-horror film–something along the lines of The War of the Roses. It doesn’t take long for optimism to give way to extreme predictability, unrelieved puerility, and the creepy realization that Cristophe Beck’s invasive score is a riff on Orff’s “Musica Poetica,” best known perhaps as the main theme to Terence Malick’s own black love story Badlands. There seems a realization, in other words, that a better, darker film about America’s fifty-percent divorce rate is waiting frustrated in Just Married‘s wings.

The In-Laws (2003)

May 22, 2003Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, Germany, Theatrical, Thriller

***/****
starring Michael Douglas, Albert Brooks, Ryan Reynolds, Lindsay Sloane
screenplay by Nat Mauldin and Ed Solomon, based on the screenplay by Andrew Bergman
directed by Andrew Fleming

Inlawsby Walter Chaw Casting Albert Brooks as the prototypical nebbish and Michael Douglas as a testosterone-geeked maniac is almost too easy, but given a vehicle like The In-Laws, with this much heat invested in its direction, the casting doesn’t seem so much lazy as inspired. Based on a 1979 film starring Alan Arkin and Peter Falk in the roles of put-upon father-of-the-bride and crazed father-of-the-groom, respectively, the remake doesn’t have a single scene as classic as the “serpentine” gag of the first but compensates with the sort of instant familiarity afforded by veteran personalities in comfortable roles. Douglas has been here before in another tale of familial dysfunction, The War of the Roses, and Brooks has never really been anywhere else; the picture, paced like a trip-hammer by director Andrew Fleming, only really fails in its drab newlywed couple and a passel of homosexual gags that are badly dated and bordering on unkind.

Respiro (2002)

May 22, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, France, Italy, Theatrical

***½/****
starring Valeria Golino, Vincenzo Amato, Francesco Casisa, Veronica D’Agostino
written and directed by Emanuele Crialese

by Walter Chaw Emanuele Crialese’s Respiro has the rhythm and the pulse of the southern Italian island on which it was filmed. It is all of breathtaking panoramas and impossible colours, and in the middle of it is Greek-Italian actress Valeria Golino evoking, in a career-defining performance, late countrywoman Gina Lollobrigida. (Golino would have been a far better choice than Penelope Cruz in the remake of Fanfan la Tulipe, currently not-wowing audiences at Cannes.) A film by turns savage and languid, for the first part it seems as though the film, with its clashing bands of shirtless youths, will be a reworking of The War, but then it becomes more a metaphor for grief and redemption in a feral environment fettered for too long by men and their illusions of cities.

About Schmidt (2002) – DVD

May 22, 2003Posted in****/****, 2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD, FFC Must-Own, Jack Nicholson

****/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B-
starring Jack Nicholson, Hope Davis, Dermot Mulroney, June Squibb
screenplay by Alexander Payne & Jim Taylor, based on the book by Louis Begley
directed by Alexander Payne

Mustownby Walter Chaw Alexander Payne’s (Citizen Ruth, Election) third film is his best. He (like Wes Anderson and his third film, The Royal Tenenbaums) has come into his own as an auteur voice for a new American cinema that finds its underpinnings in David Lynch and John Cassavetes–in the Midwest grotesque and the elevation of the banal. In relating a Prufrockian tale of a man reassessing the ruin of his life upon the occasion of his retirement from a life-insurance firm, Payne strikes a balance between absurdity and pithiness, becoming in the process the sort of satire that exposes essential truths about the disintegrating spiral of life and the human condition. Married as it is to another wonderful late-career performance by Jack Nicholson, About Schmidt is heartbreaking and brilliant.

Star Trek: Nemesis (2002) [Widescreen Collection] – DVD

May 21, 2003Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD, Sci-Fi, Star Trek, Thriller

*/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B-
starring Patrick Stewart, Jonathan Frakes, Brent Spiner, LeVar Burton
screenplay by John Logan
directed by Stuart Baird

by Walter Chaw For a film in a tired franchise trying to duplicate Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (inarguably the best of the cinematic “Trek” line) down to an articulate arch-villain, heroic sacrifice, and mind-meld cheat, the irony of having the central conflict revolve around a defective clone is delicious and hilarious. Star Trek: Nemesis (hereafter Nemesis) is abominable pretension draped in the sheep’s frock of sci-fi pulp–pap of the first water invested in undergraduate doubling subtexts and ridiculous stabs at existentialism reminding of the discovery of the wizard of God in the fifth Trek flick.