How to Deal (2003)

Posted 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.

Bad Boys II (2003)

Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Directors: Michael Bay, Theatrical, Will Smith

½*/****
starring Will Smith, Martin Lawrence, Gabrielle Union, Joe Pantoliano
screenplay by Ron Shelton and Jerry Stahl
directed by Michael Bay

by Walter Chaw The very curious thing about Michael Bay/Jerry Bruckheimer’s latest dip into the shallow end is that for as vile as it is, for as putrid and unforgivable as it is, Bad Boys II may be the first Bay/Bruckheimer collaboration that marks a clear debt to a filmmaking tradition other than that blazed by John McTiernan. Sure, it’s got the slick surfaces and the ear-shattering explosions, the impossible sets (a cop can afford a few acres of prime beachfront property in Florida only in this breed of American mainstream twaddle) and class hatred (complete with fetishistic worship of guns and cars and all other things associated with diminutive penis size), but what Bad Boys II also has is a child’s working knowledge of the incendiary Hong Kong “heroic bloodshed” cinema of the 1980s. What it lacks is that genre’s sense of gravity, interest in the balance between good and evil, and the mysterious bonds between men–it’s missing finesse in its choreography, purpose in its relentless bloodletting, even a basic understanding of decency and honour. Without any recognizable human qualities, then, what Bad Boys II presents to the world is something genuinely sinister and twisted: nothing more than a reptilian collage of seething and hatred that stands as possibly the most misanthropic, nihilistic, exploitative, hopeless film ever released as a major studio’s mainstream blockbuster. It is easily the most expensive exploitation film I’ve ever seen–and besides, not nearly so funny or interesting as the similarly-themed Joe Piscopo/Treat Williams shoestring vehicle Dead Heat of many moons ago.

Reel Conversations: Candid Interviews with Film’s Foremost Directors and Critics – Books

Posted in1990s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Books About Movies

written by George Hickenlooper
FFC rating: 9/10

BUY @ AMAZON

by Walter Chaw Finding himself at the cusp of the supplementary-material revolution, filmmaker George Hickenlooper was afforded the rare opportunity to speak with a wide panoply of cinematic luminaries in the early-Nineties as LaserDisc changed the way that film historians could appreciate–and filmmakers could preserve–film. It’s possible to find in the dialogues collected in Reel Conversations: Candid Interviews With Film’s Foremost Directors and Critics (a book that seems at least partly inspired by a FILM COMMENT debate between Richard Schickel, Roger Ebert, and Andrew Sarris concerning the decay of popular film criticism in the United States) an ironclad justification for the very process of serious film criticism and authoritative discussion. I mentioned to Mr. Hickenlooper a few months ago that I thought it was something of a shame he was a filmmaker instead of a critic: People who understand movies are in short supply on both halves of the thin celluloid line between critics and directors. Speaking selfishly, I wanted one more good thinker on our side.

Witchy Woman: FFC Interviews Heather Donahue

Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Interviews

HdonahueinterviewtitleActress Heather Donahue on the curse of BLAIR WITCH

July 13, 2003|Castle Marne B&B, a literal house-sized castle, broods at the end of a tree-lined street in a marginal Denver neighbourhood, just a hop-skip-jump away from what used to be the red-light district. Out-of-place to say the least, the edifice rises in large grey blocks like a medieval vision, albeit one equipped with cozies, throws, knick-knacks, and Jacuzzis in every room. The funny thing about it is that of all the weird places to meet Heather Donahue, Castle Marne doesn't seem the weirdest: like the actress, it's theatrical, expansive, and, for the most part, out of sight. More's the pity for Ms. Donahue, as since her career-making role in The Blair Witch Project, she's been subjected to the same virulent backlash as the film, making her persona non grata in Hollywood even though her minimal work since then has been far and away the best part of marginal films–and indicative, besides, of genuine talent. What Ms. Donahue still has trouble with, and it's hard to blame her for not having critical distance on something so ambiguous in her life, is the importance of The Blair Witch Project in shaping modern film trends and the rarity of a picture that buggers sexual objectification. Although I've seen her in a few non-Blair Witch roles, just how attractive Ms. Donahue is remains something of a shock. It isn't that she's unattractive in her most famous role, it's that her attractiveness never enters into the equation–there's a thesis paper in there all by itself. In town to conduct a Q&A after a screening of Seven and a Match (released as part of Madstone's "Film Forward" series), on a beautiful early-summer morning a little less than four years after The Blair Witch Project opened in Denver, the animated Ms. Donahue sat down with me on the patio of Castle Marne.

The Sea (2002)

Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, France, Iceland, Norway, Theatrical

Hafið
*/****
starring Gunnar Eyjólfsson, Hilmir Snær Guðnason, Hélène de Fougerolles, Kristbjörg Kjeld
screenplay by Baltasar Kormákur, based on the play by Olafur Haukur Símonarson
directed by Baltasar Kormákur

by Walter Chaw A family melodrama that’s a little like Chekhov but a lot more like Telemundo, Baltasar Kormákur’s The Sea (Hafið) takes the bare bones of “King Lear” and fashions from them the sort of bleeding hair-render that runs roughshod through the Altman/Bergman canon without the benefit of genius. Its use of foreground, of mannered close-ups and overlapping dialogue, of old men journaling their lives at the end of their lives, all feel at odds with the film’s weightless, familiar tale of an old man shackled to the ideal of a better era in opposition with subsequent generations of useless, snivelling bastard children trying to feed off the corpse of said better era, the irony of that Icelandic tradition including a sort of culturally institutionalized rape (the contention of which I find to be not merely shockingly reductive, but deeply suspect besides) mentioned but left unexamined for the most part. The problems of The Sea aren’t restricted to this reliance on reckless ascriptions of cultural archetype for irony or poignancy (an Ayn Rand-ian predilection for staging hypothetical, unwinnable arguments in their extreme), extending to issues as problematic as a script (adapted from a Olafur Haukur Símonarson play by Kormákur, a sometime-actor who appeared as the mad scientist in Hal Hartley’s No Such Thing) that is as repetitive in regards to dialogue as to scenario.

Spun (2003) – DVD (R-rated)

Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Drama, DVD, Esoterica

*/**** Image A- Sound A Extras C
starring Jason Schwartzman, John Leguizamo, Mena Suvari, Patrick Fugit
screenplay by Creighton Vero & William De Los Santos
directed by Jonas Åkerlund

by Walter Chaw I don't have anything in particular against music-video directors making the transition to feature films, except that so often strobe-lighting and images-per-second are the only lessons about film craft they've ever learned. Swedish wunderkind Jonas Åkerlund, who cut his teeth as a chop-horse for Madonna and Moby, makes his feature film debut with jittery crystal meth opera Spun, a picture so misconstrued and haphazardly slapped together that it doesn't so much suggest the sensation of being "spun" on meth as it does getting thrown off a tall building in a washing machine. It strives for a sort of grimy realism but succeeds mainly in being Ken and Barbie Take a Shit-Bath: the young and the beautiful are covered in a patina of grotesquerie, it's true, but the filth isn't taking

Cowboy Bebop: The Movie (2001) [Special Edition] – DVD

Posted in2000s, Action, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, DVD, Japan, Sci-Fi, Thriller

***/**** Image A Sound A Extras C
screenplay by Keiko Nobumoto
directed by Shinichiro Watanabe

by Walter Chaw Yôko Kanno’s soundtrack for Cowboy Bebop: The Movie (hereafter Cowboy Bebop) is a jubilant a blend of funk, jazz, blues, soul, and punk that soars even though it’s a pale shadow of the “bebop” innovated by Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, and Bud Powell (and Kenny Clarke and Max Roach) in Minton’s Playhouse in the early 1940s. It functions as something of a brilliantly mellifluous backbone to the film and the series that spawned it–chimeric and socially significant, again like Bird’s bebop, in that the 26-episode Japanese television series became one of the most recognized and revered crossovers in animated series history. The bebop idea of riffing on a melody to the extent that the melody becomes unrecognizable (with an attendant introduction of dozens of beats to the standard four-beat bar) carries through in the frenetic kineticism of series that also, by its format, mirrors jazz bebop’s compact agility (generally carried by quartet and quintet arrangements)–making a feature-length film, then, a strange place for the “Cowboy Bebop” franchise to go.

It’s My Party (1996) [Special Edition] – DVD

Posted in1990s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Romance

*/**** Image B- Sound B Extras C
starring Eric Roberts, Margaret Cho, Lee Grant, Gregory Harrison
written and directed by Randal Kleiser

by Walter Chaw The only way to explain how disjointed and patchwork is Randal Kleiser’s It’s My Party, is by presuming out loud that the director is trying to simulate the vertiginous feel of a weekend of revelry culminating in the auto-euthanasia of a mortally ill man. As it is, the picture can only be taken in terms of theory and possibility–the piece, as it sits extant, is puerile in a self-obsessed sort of way, from performance to scripting to organization. The presence of Bruce Davison in a minor role serves mainly to remind that there are better films out there about the AIDS epidemic in its early days, recalling Longtime Companion (starring Davison) and the genuine emotions found therein that stand as sharp indictment of the dreadful, manufactured pathos of It’s My Party. Any movie trying this hard to get me misty is a lot more likely to make me angry.

The Guys (2003)

Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Theatrical

½*/****
starring Sigourney Weaver, Anthony LaPaglia, Irene Walsh, Jim Simpson
 screenplay by Anne Nelson and Jim Simpson, based on the play by Nelson
directed by Jim Simpson

by Walter Chaw As it manifests itself in popular art, the instinct to revisit the sins of the past for the purposes of reconciliation will as often take the unbecoming forms of self-congratulation or exploitation. The same urge to couch criticism in terms of personal reminiscence (“It’s good because it reminds me of my cat”), the same compulsion that drives middlebrow cineastes to donate five bucks to the ARC after a screening of The Other Sister, informs this variety of salutary cinema. Very fond of taking the correct stance on issues that are not particularly controversial, films like Jim Simpson’s The Guys (based on a briefly-timely stage play by Anne Nelson) allow for simpering middle-class navel-gazers to feel as though they’re involved in some way with events outside the breakfast nook. When Joan (Sigourney Weaver) says that she feels impotent in the face of 9/11 because she’s merely a journalist (devaluing the amazing work of THE NEW YORK TIMES following the atrocity) and grieving fire captain Nick (Anthony LaPaglia) responds, “Well, that’s your tool,” we’re dealing with self-righteous self-aggrandizing. And when Joan marvels, “When was the last time someone needed a writer,” the only possible response is: right around the time someone decided to adapt “The Guys” for the screen.

Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas (2003)

Posted in2000s, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Family, Fantasy, France, Theatrical, UK

**/****
screenplay by John Logan
directed by Patrick Gilmore & Tim Johnson

by Walter Chaw Making almost no impression at all, DreamWorks’ latest animated flick is a lot like their last animated flick, Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron: an endlessly-reproducible light romantic cartoon heavy on the derring-do and gender slapstick, and light on anything that could possibly be construed as memorable. The most noteworthy thing about the picture, in fact, is that it exposes the surprising quickness with which DreamWorks’ has become that which it most disdains: Disney redux–its sixth animated feature satisfying the maxim of joining what can’t be beaten and getting as entrenched and boring as Treasure Planet in the process. As soon as it’s declared that the quest of the film is for the “Book of Peace,” it’s already past time to let the eye-rolling commence.

Shanghai Knights (2003) – DVD

Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD, Hong Kong, Jackie Chan, Martial Arts, Western

**/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras A-
starring Jackie Chan, Owen Wilson, Aidan Gillen, Fann Wong
screenplay by Alfred Gough & Miles Millar
directed by David Dobkin

by Walter Chaw Crossing the Big Pond hasn’t exactly done wonders for the heroes of the halcyon days of Hong Kong cinema. Lured by the prestige and mythology of the Hollywood dream factory, folks like Chow Yun Fat, Jet Li, Michelle Yeoh, John Woo, Ringo Lam, Tsui Hark, and so on have transformed the honesty of their craft into the same sort of boom crash opera we’ve been churning out on Yankee shores for decades now. Without a strong sense of how to film action, of the martial arts tradition in Chinese cinema, nor of the particular strengths of a particular artist, even as this genre has taken a dramatic upturn in popularity in the West, the folks most responsible for its sophistication have become sidekicks (Michelle Yeoh in Tomorrow Never Dies), B-list hunks (Yun Fat), villains (Li), failures (Lam, Hark), starfuckers (Woo), and, in the sad case of Jackie Chan, broad racial caricatures at the mercy of people like Brett Ratner, Kevin Donovan, and Tom Dey. Chan has made over 100 films over the course of forty years as an actor, director, writer, producer, and stuntman; the first thing that happens to him when he comes to the United States is that he’s placed in the company of idiots and neophytes. It feels like racism.

From the Terrace (1960) – DVD

Posted in1960s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Romance

*/**** Image A Sound B Extras D+
starring Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward, Myrna Loy
screenplay by Ernest Lehman
directed by Mark Robson

by Walter Chaw The term “melodrama” comes from the Greek and the French, finding its literal meaning in something like “musical drama,” and Mark Robson’s From the Terrace (1960)–packed front to back with Elmer Bernstein’s gorgeous but intrusive and, in at least a few moments, hysterical orchestrations–fits the bill nicely. Adapted from a John O’Hara bodice-ripper by chronic adaptor Ernest Lehman and released during the gap between the Lehman-scripted marvels North by Northwest and West Side Story, the picture drips with the charged sexual innuendo of the former (and of Robson’s Peyton Place, come to think of it) while falling short of the caustic social commentary of the latter.

The Documentarian Becomes the Documented: FFC Interviews Andrew Jarecki

Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Documentary, Interviews

AjareckiinterviewtitleJune 29, 2003|When it came to light in 1987 that retired teacher/patriarch Arnold Friedman was a practicing pedophile, and that he and his youngest son Jesse had been accused of dozens of counts of child molestation, the mild-mannered, middle-class Friedman clan were caught up in a whirlwind. Being caught in a whirlwind is also what's happened to director Andrew Jarecki, who sold his company Moviefone to AOL in 1999 for an amount in excess of $350M and somehow wound up writing the theme song for TV's "Felicity" before finding himself at the helm of Capturing the Friedmans, a documentary feature (Jarecki's first film) that has already landed him the Grand Jury Prize for a documentary feature at this year's Sundance Film Festival, a featured hour on NPR's "Fresh Air", an article in THE NEW YORKER, and a record opening in New York, all of which has the picture poised to be the most talked-about of the year. And being caught in a whirlwind is the circumstance that found me talking to Mr. Jarecki–each on a burping cell phone, driving to other appointments in cities across the country from one another.

Ten (2002) + Lilya 4-Ever (2002)

Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Coming of Age, Crime, Denmark, Drama, Esoterica, France, Iran, Sweden

Dah
**½/****
starring Mania Akbari, Amin Maher, Kamran Adl, Roya Arabashi
written and directed by Abbas Kiarostami

Lilja 4-Ever
***/****
starring Oksana Akinshina, Artyom Bogucharsky, Lyubov Agapova, Liliya Shinkaryova
written and directed by Lukas Moodysson

by Walter Chaw The plight of women in oppressive and/or emerging cultures, on film, is a slipstream metaphor for the travails of all the citizenry of that place and, from there, the existential struggle of modern man–a heavy burden, to be sure, and one that forever teeters on the precipice of trite to the one side, affected to the other. (With “condescending” the great beast, crouched and ready to pounce.) Women are too often grail repositories of fear and loathing–indicator species, much like children in film, to be examined for hints of what’s toxic in the spirit of the time. That two foreign films by male directors find their way to the United States in fast company of one another, dealing with the plight of women (all women, all society, all the world) in ways frank and raw, is arguably not so much coincidence, then, as a synchronicity that, no matter their relative success, represents a sharp spur and a whip to the collective flank.

The Hard Word (2002)

Posted in2000s, Action, Australia, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Drama, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

*½/****
starring Guy Pearce, Rachel Griffiths, Robert Taylor, Joel Edgerton
written and directed by Scott Rogers

Hardwordby Walter Chaw You’d think that POME (“Prisoners of Mother England”) would be better at making a crime drama, but Scott Roberts’s hyphenate debut The Hard Word is a flaccid ripper of Kubrick’s The Killing thick in avuncular vernacular and notably thin of any real meat. Between a few funny throwaways (a character refers to Philip K. Dick’s A Scanner Darkly, Dick’s autobiographical survey of paranoia and drug psychosis, as a primer for modern marriage), and some decidedly David Lynch-ian violence, the picture feels a lot like a mish-mash of post-mod noir ideas (the butcher, the redeemed femme, cannibalism) arranged with little respect for rhyme and reason. Style over substance, the whole thing is delivered in accents so under-looped and thick that it occasionally falls out as a cast of Brad Pitt’s Snatch pikeys performing Tarantino outtakes.

Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle (2003)

Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Theatrical

½*/****
starring Cameron Diaz, Drew Barrymore, Lucy Liu, Demi Moore
screenplay by John August and Cormac Wibberley & Marianne Wibberley
directed by McG

Charliesangelsfullthrottleby Walter Chaw Even its subtitle an onanistic entendre, McG’s excrescent Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle takes self-awareness to the level of pornography in what boils down to one of the most queasily interesting trainwrecks in recent memory. It leaves the joyful goofiness of the first film in the dust of the “wanton slut” school of feminism, uncomfortable innuendo (incest just isn’t all that funny), and a parade of star cameos that would have derailed the film were it not already a mere series of references to other films. What the picture represents, in a very real way, is the death of cinema, swallowed whole by the same instinct that drives television: strobe cuts, shallow titillation, barely subsumed fetishism, gleeful stupidity… all fuelled entirely by a knowledge of medium. The picture doesn’t have any sort of meaning outside of the cinematic–it’s essentially a warm spasm of pop cultural goop, an extended succession of money shots with none of that distracting filler (plot, character, tension, purpose) that weighs down pictures exhibiting some measure of non-commercial ambition.

Capturing the Friedmans (2003)

Posted in****/****, 2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Documentary, Theatrical

****/****
directed by Andrew Jarecki

“Only that which has no history is definable”
-Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals, 1887

by Walter Chaw The rare film to encapsulate the macro and the micro with eloquence and no little existential disquiet, Andrew Jarecki’s amazing documentary Capturing the Friedmans tackles issues like the nature of film, the slipperiness of memory, and the unreliability of identity in ways that are uncomfortable and prickly. The revelations in the film about modern cultural anthropology are indescribably delicious, speaking to pleasure in a way that Jonathan Rosenbaum once identified as including the sensations of fear and unbalance–as an experience, the picture is as exhilaratingly unnerving as only an illicit document can be. When, early in the piece, eldest son of the Friedman clan David addresses the camera directly in what he warns is a personal journal, Capturing the Friedmans subverts the exploitive voyeurism that defines cinema, particularly pornographic cinema, in a way that is as cannily, uniquely, ironically filmic as Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom. It’s something we feel we shouldn’t be watching–a realization that, once established (within the first minutes of the picture), finds the audience formulated helpless and naked before the film’s reptilian regard.

Family Reunion: The Movie (2003) – DVD

Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/**** Image D Sound C+ Extras D
starring Red Grant, Reynaldo Rey, Bebe Drake, Sommore Jamal
written and directed by Red Grant

by Walter Chaw The sort of movie where Klansman dressed in the Teletubby rainbow are brutally beaten in a Southern Methodist church when they submit themselves to the mercy of the Lord, Red Grant’s Family Reunion: The Movie is a scattershot Def Comedy Jam routine filmed with a noxious, hostile artlessness made all the more impotent by its desire to be whimsical. Rather than being the sort of amateurish gut-rot that can make a claim to activism through its nihilistic misanthropy and racism, it’s the redheaded stepchild of the Friday series: screwball ethnic humour long on volume and short on laughs.

Phone Booth (2003) – DVD

Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Directors: Joel Schumacher, DVD, Mystery, Thriller

**½/**** Image B+ Sound A Commentary A
starring Colin Farrell, Kiefer Sutherland, Forest Whitaker, Radha Mitchell
screenplay by Larry Cohen
directed by Joel Schumacher

by Walter Chaw Responsible for some of my favourite weirdo low-tech cult films (Q, God Told Me To, It’s Alive!), underground auteur Larry Cohen’s output is a lollapalooza of high-concept hokum invested equally in the Catholic and the apocalyptic. Joining forces with master hack Joel Schumacher (who’s made a mean schlock classic or two himself–Flatliners, The Lost Boys, The Incredible Shrinking Woman) on the unfortunately-timed sniper fantasy Phone Booth, Cohen’s script reveals the man up to his old tricks: a barely feature-length product (about seventy-five minutes without credits) set inside a confessional-cum-8th Avenue phone booth that mires an anti-hero in an old-school oasis amidst our sterile technological wasteland. What should have been an agreeable bit of nonsense, however, gets tangled up in Cohen’s desire to proselytize, transforming the potential for a paranoid piece of B-sociology into something empty and pretentious–a tale directed by an idiot, full of some admittedly innovative sound design and a surplus of Method fury.

Resurface: FFC Interviews Scott McGehee & David Siegel

Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Film Festivals, Interviews

McgeheesiegelinterviewtitleJune 22, 2003|Aspen's NXT lounge and nightclub has, off its main floor, a series of smaller rooms and bars decorated in various shades of dirty opulence. Serving as the base of operations for the 12th Aspen Shortsfest, there I met dark complected Scott McGehee and silver-haired David Siegel–co-hyphenates behind icy technical pictures Suture and The Deep End–in a 20' x 30', glass-walled room sporting three over-stuffed love seats and little padded ottomans with Corinthian flares that I'm sure have a name and work well as a tape-recorder stand. After a brief, bonding conversation about the sorry state of modern film criticism (fed by the sorry state of modern major-daily entertainment editors) and the lack of a critical tradition in the United States in comparison to Europe, we moved on to Suture.