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Film Freak Central’s Top 10 of 2002

January 1, 20032000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Best-of Lists, Blog

THE YEAR THAT WAS…
by Walter Chaw

Love stories were the rule of the day for the year that was 2002. Sprung love stories, twisted love stories, emotionally devastating love stories flavoured by entropy and nihilism. The films that seem to fall out of that purview, About Schmidt and Morvern Callar, show themselves ultimately to be pictures moved by the deaths of a loved one or, as with Wendigo, studies of the dynamics of family from surface ideal to subversive schism. Romance is the prism through which identity and normalcy are redefined–a certain celluloid co-dependency that made 2002 (and 2001) the best years for film, and American film in particular, since the heyday of American cinema in the 1970s.

Confessions of a Dangerous Mind (2002)

December 31, 2002****/****, 2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Charlie Kaufman, Espionage, Theatrical

****/****
starring Sam Rockwell, Drew Barrymore, George Clooney, Julia Roberts
screenplay by Charlie Kaufman, based on the book by Chuck Barris
directed by George Clooney

by Walter Chaw The second of two biographies of television personalities to make it to the cinema in 2002, George Clooney’s Confessions of a Dangerous Mind is almost the anti-Auto Focus, tying itself to the chaotic memoirs of game-show host Chuck Barris and locating its identity in anarchic precepts of post-modernism (in sharp contrast to Auto Focus‘ reductive realism). Curiously, both films find a climax of sorts in a dream–I should say “dementia”–sequence wherein the stars of the show find their fantasies acted out through their small-screen vehicles. Where Bob Crane’s bizarre personal life appears to be truth, however (the crux of familial challenges of the film seem to hinge on Crane not being moody and never having had a penile implant), Barris’s contention that he split time between “The Gong Show” and being a fulltime CIA assassin gives considerably more pause. The real distinguishing quality of Confessions of a Dangerous Mind is that it is a big-budget biopic that acts as simultaneously a satire of, and adherent to, the familiar progression of the genre–the layers of self-reflexivity so multi-foliate and rich that it comes as no surprise that screenwriter Charlie Kaufman (Adaptation., Being John Malkovich) is the scribe responsible for its slipperiness.

Chicago (2002)

December 27, 20022000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Best Picture (Academy Awards), Musical

**½/****
starring Catherine Zeta-Jones, Renée Zellweger, Richard Gere, John C. Reilly
screenplay by Bill Condon, based on the musical by Fred Ebb & Bob Fosse and the play by Maurine Dallas Watkins
directed by Rob Marshall

by Walter Chaw As adaptations of stage musicals go, Rob Marshall’s film of the Bob Fosse revue Chicago is professional and slick, if lit too darkly and oddly flaccid. Its musical set-pieces are generally excellent, with a trio of performances from Renée Zellweger, Catherine Zeta-Jones, and Richard Gere that surprise with their versatility and verve, but the unevenness of Marshall’s direction lends the picture a sort of confused rhythm that threatens to stall it during every narrative stretch. Buoyed by Sam Mendes’s recent Broadway revival of another Kander and Ebb classic, “Cabaret”, “Chicago” suffers from a distinct slightness, its attack on the evils of media culture not so much current as battered to death by decades of same. Chicago offers no surprises, then, only really coming to life during a press-conference scene with Zellweger the dummy and lawyer Gere the ventriloquist and puppet master. It’s gorgeously shot and choreographed and throws the malaise of the rest of the picture into sharp relief.

The Hours (2002)

December 27, 20022000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Drama, Esoterica, France, Germany, Romance, Theatrical, UK

**/****
starring Meryl Streep Julianne Moore, Nicole Kidman, Eileen Atkins
screenplay by David Hare, based on the novel by Michael Cunningham
directed by Stephen Daldry

by Walter Chaw Nicole Kidman is a wonderful Virginia Woolf–a distracted mess in a film that is a literalization of that description. The only real problem with Kidman’s performance is her prosthetic nose–it’s a no-win situation in which The Hours finds itself: allow Kidman to look like Kidman as Woolf and there will arise such a clamour of voices; make Kidman look like Woolf and not only is it impossible to stop looking for the line at the bridge, there will still arise such a clamour of voices. The problematical manipulations and presumptions of the rest of the film are as difficult to overlook as the nose stuck on Nicole’s face: The Hours is mannered to no good purpose, glowering with no good justification, and the sort of artificial construct that presents life lessons writ large by a cadre of talented performers who recognize a mainstream prestige piece when it presents itself. The only thing that separates The Hours from garbage like A Beautiful Mind (last year’s odds-on favourite to disappoint people who care while pleasing people who don’t really give a damn and don’t remember the morning after anyway) is that its marquee disability is being a woman and, apparently, being a lesbian.

Catch Me If You Can (2002)

December 25, 2002****/****, 2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Comedy, Crime, Drama, Spielberg, Theatrical

****/****
starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Tom Hanks, Christopher Walken, Jennifer Garner
screenplay by Jeff Nathanson, based on the book by Frank W. Abagnale and Stan Redding
directed by Steven Spielberg

by Walter Chaw There’s an old Ray Bradbury story from 1948 called “Touch and Go” (since reprinted as “The Fruit at the Bottom of the Bowl”) that tells the tale of a burglar who surprises the homeowner in his house and accidentally kills him. Erasing his fingerprints from a few surfaces, the burglar panics and starts wiping objects in rooms he hadn’t visited and items, such as the fruit at the bottom of a bowl, he could not have handled. When the police find him hours later, he’s in the attic polishing old silverware. Like Bradbury’s thief, Spielberg is getting away with murder in most of his films post-Close Encounters of the Third Kind (particularly A.I., Minority Report, Schindler’s List, Empire of the Sun, and Saving Private Ryan) until self-doubt and paranoia consume him, seducing him to a fatal eleventh-hour appeal. Spielberg is the bad test-taker, changing his answers to damn his instincts.

Wendigo (2002) – DVD

December 21, 2002****/****, 2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD, FFC Must-Own, Horror, Mystery, Thriller

****/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B+
starring Patricia Clarkson, Jake Weber, Erik Per Sullivan, John Speredakos
written and directed by Larry Fessenden

mustown-1059860 by Walter Chaw Larry Fessenden’s Wendigo plays like a chthonic rite: it’s terrifying in its brutal purity and delicious in its ability to pull domestic trauma into the well of archetype where it festers. The film is a further examination of what William Blake cajoles in his “Marriage of Heaven and Hell”–that “men forgot that all deities reside in the human breast,” and it justifies itself beautifully in a Romanticist discussion, a Jungian explication, even a socio-political and historical examination. Wendigo is an extraordinarily thorny film, no question; that it manages to be so without pretension while providing an experience that is terrifying and gorgeous is a remarkable achievement. It’s why we go to the cinema: to be fed through the eye, the heart, the mind.

Narc (2002)

December 20, 20022000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, Mystery, Theatrical, Thriller

***/****
starring Ray Liotta, Jason Patric, Chi McBride, Busta Rhymes
written and directed by Joe Carnahan

by Walter Chaw Anchored by a powerhouse performance from Ray Liotta, Joe Carnahan’s Narc is a police procedural buddy psychodrama that reminds a great deal of Sidney Lumet’s underappreciated Q&A. The first film mounted in part by Liotta’s new production company, the film is fond of the kind of fluid tracking shots popularized by Martin Scorsese (and Goodfellas, as it happens) and has a crackling ear for dialogue that sadly doesn’t translate into a gift for monologue. Still, there’s a rough intelligence and visceral edge to the film–hewn from its tough-talking vernacular and graphic violence–that feels great in an era where both sides of the ratings divide: PG and R, are hell-bent on edging into the grey PG-13 arena where mental adolescents and the easily-diverted play. Narc works largely because it’s a mature film for adults, smoothing over some of the rough spots where the film begins to lose itself in a labyrinth of flashbacks and surprise revelations.

Personal Velocity (2002)

December 20, 20022000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Romance, Theatrical

Personal Velocity: Three Portraits
**½/****
starring Kyra Sedgwick, Parker Posey, Fairuza Balk, John Ventimiglia
written and directed by Rebecca Miller

by Walter Chaw Three short films about three women and the men who mistreat them, Rebecca Miller’s DV triptych Personal Velocity: Three Portraits is a fine-looking film that plays a little like Catherine Breillat-lite–a series of iterations of Yeats’s “Leda and the Swan” that suggest the evil that men do to women only makes women stronger. Emancipation for Delia (Kyra Sedgwick), battered wife and renowned slut, comes in the form of a handjob given a grateful backwoods hokum in the front seat of his beater; for book editor Greta (Parker Posey), in the separation from the mediocrity of her milquetoast husband and pocket dictator boss; and for runaway Paula (Fairuza Balk), in the latent maternal instinct she discovers through the betrayal of a young hitchhiker.

Two Weeks Notice (2002)

December 20, 20022000s, Australia, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Romance, Theatrical

*½/****
starring Sandra Bullock, Hugh Grant, Mark Feuerstein, Dorian Missick
written and directed by Marc Lawrence

by Walter Chaw Nearly the same movie as last week’s Maid in Manhattan (only with more likeable stars and more believable chemistry between them), Sandra Bullock and Hugh Grant’s Two Weeks Notice (sic) is essentially just another opportunity for Bullock to play her wound-up, frumpy pratfall princess (recently hijacked by Nia Vardalos and her hard-to-stomach My Big Fat Greek Wedding), and for Grant to do his insufferable prat routine, both against the backdrop of the impossibly romantic golden Manhattan that is not to be confused with Spike Lee’s impossibly dour boilerplate Manhattan. Bullock is Lucy Kelson, Harvard-educated lawyer who has taken on the Birkenstock cause in her crusade against big business. Grant is George Wade, uneducated baron of big business who is so zealous to knock down historic landmarks that even his wrecking balls are emblazoned with Wade-Co’s giant “W.”

Gangs of New York (2002)

December 20, 20022000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Directors: Martin Scorsese, Drama, Theatrical

*½/****
starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Daniel Day-Lewis, Cameron Diaz, Jim Broadbent
screenplay by Jay Cocks and Steven Zaillian and Kenneth Lonergan
directed by Martin Scorsese

by Walter Chaw Beginning as Martin Scorsese’s Apocalypse Now, Gangs of New York, at the end of the auteur’s thirty-year dream of it, more resembles his Titanic. Buoyed on a tsunami of dark rumours of behind-the-scenes clashes (the line “Please don’t make that sound again, Harvey” registering as either a jab or a plea to Miramax head Harvey Weinstein), eleventh-hour cuts, and release delays pushing the film nearly a year from its projected release date, the picture is a booming, period-exact mess: disinteresting, unbalanced, and burdened by the weight of too much ambition blinding an artist to his celluloid offspring’s congenital, mortal defects–hubris redefined for the postmodern age. Though sprawling, it reduces to a series of vaguely connected dramatic snippets that largely fail to anchor the film to any specific place (the exception being a visually, viscerally arresting stream of coffins unloaded from ships ferrying the dead from the frontlines of the Civil War). It’s a malady exacerbated by the fact that the same five or six characters–played, with one stunning exception, as tepid variations on banal–seem to be everywhere in New York at all times.

Human Nature (2002) – DVD

December 18, 20022000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Charlie Kaufman, Comedy, DVD, Esoterica

½*/**** Image A Sound A-
starring Patricia Arquette, Rhys Ifans, Tim Robbins, Ken Magee
screenplay by Charlie Kaufman
directed by Michel Gondry

by Walter Chaw From the second screenplay by Charlie Kaufman, the ink-stained wretch behind Spike Jonze’s quirk classic Being John Malkovich, French music-video director Michel Gondry’s sadly misguided nature/nurture sex romp Human Nature scores once or twice but ultimately thuds like a brick zeppelin. It’s a film that thinks it a good idea for Rhys Ifans to appear either full monty or in a diaper for the majority of his performance, likewise that Patricia Arquette have a pelt of hair covering every curve of her Romanesque physique. (Though the latter is played for some surreal yuks as Ms. Arquette writhes on a miniature Empire State Building while a dwarf (Peter Dinklage) walks around in a biplane harness.) Human Nature, in short, isn’t nearly as funny as it thinks it is; neither is it as smart.

Focus Puller: FFC Interviews Paul Schrader

December 17, 20022000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: Paul Schrader, Interviews

December 17, 2002|A pivotal member of the small group of film-school 'brats' to single-handedly manufacture in 1970s America what is arguably the most important and vital decade in the history of the medium, Paul Schrader (screenwriter of such seminal texts as Taxi Driver and Raging Bull and writer-director of Hardcore, Blue Collar, and Light Sleeper, to name a few) follows up his brilliant Affliction and his disappointing Forever Mine with the new film Auto Focus. Another in a line of Schrader-helmed biopics (Mishima, Patty Hearst), Auto Focus follows the rise and mysterious murder of "Hogan's Heroes" star Bob Crane, locating the TV actor as a man discovering his masculinity in an ascetic, downbeat way reminiscent of the work of Schrader's hero, director Robert Bresson.

The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002)

December 9, 20022000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Fantasy, New Zealand, Theatrical

***/****
starring Elijah Wood, Ian McKellen, Viggo Mortensen, Sean Astin
screenplay by Fran Walsh & Philippa Boyens & Peter Jackson, based on the novel by J.R.R. Tolkien
directed by Peter Jackson

by Walter Chaw Suffering from the problems inherent in split narratives, Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (hereafter The Two Towers), at least for its first half, is disjointed and overreliant on a familiarity with not only the first film (which is essential), but also the Tolkien source material. Furthermore, the first cracks in Jackson’s conversance with CGI begin to show in the entirely animated Gollum character (a creature that bears an uncanny resemblance to Steve Buscemi), and too much time is given over to characters standing around looking at digital phantoms. Unlike its predecessor (The Fellowship of the Ring), The Two Towers feels too long by half despite the elision of key scenes from the source tome; the picture only picks up during its last ninety minutes, and then only as an unusually well-crafted action spectacle largely lacking in the nuance, pathos, and sharply-drawn characterizations of the first film.

Johnson County War (2002) – DVD

December 9, 20022000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD, Germany, Television, Western

*/**** Image C+ Sound B+
starring Tom Berenger, Luke Perry, Rachel Ward, Burt Reynolds
screenplay by Larry McMurtry & Diana Ossana, based on Riders of Judgment by Frederick Manfred
directed by David S. Cass, Sr.

by Walter Chaw The Hallmark Channel's epic remake of Heaven's Gate–based, like that film and Frederick Manfred's Riders of Judgment, on the Johnson County Range War of 1892–does the impossible by making Michael Cimino's legendary boondoggle gain esteem in memory and by comparison. Actually a remake in subject only, legendary stuntman-turned-really bad TV director David S. Cass, Sr.'s Johnson County War (clocking in at an inexcusable 180 minutes) is a dog's breakfast of hoary western clichés, appalling film craft, and wooden performances from B-list talent.

KylieFever2002 (2002) – DVD

December 9, 20022000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Concert Doc, DVD, Music, UK

Kylie Minogue: Kylie Fever 2002 in Concert – Live in Manchester
*/**** Image B Sound A Extras B-
directed by William Baker, Alan MacDonald

by Walter Chaw A quick glance at the back cover of the KylieFever2002 <In Concert – Live in Manchester> DVD divulges three questions I couldn't help but answer before actually indulging in the spectacle from start to finish. The answers are that "Fever" and "In Your Eyes" are not what you think they are, and that "Locomotion" and "The Crying Game" are indeed, exactly what you think they are. The exercise, in short, is a good news/bad news scenario.

Equilibrium (2002)

December 6, 20022000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Christian Bale, Emily Watson, Taye Diggs, Angus MacFadyen
written and directed by Kurt Wimmer

by Walter Chaw After cutting his teeth as a director on the Brian Bosworth vehicle One Tough Bastard, Kurt Wimmer proves himself grotesquely unprepared for his hyphenate debut: the futuristic stink-fest Equilibrium, starring Christian Bale, Emily Watson, and Taye Diggs. Set in the post-apocalypse via a series of tired title cards and voice-overs, the film is immediately recognizable as an ironically illiterate rip-off of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 and George Lucas’s Aldous Huxley photocopy THX-1138. Pulling scenes entire from Blade Runner, Citizen Kane, and The Matrix while pulling philosophies entire from–yes, I was surprised, too–Gymkata, Equilibrium is another Dimension genre film made for no money that stinks a lot like Gary Fleder’s excrescent Impostor from earlier this year, though it somehow manages to be considerably funnier.

Analyze That (2002)

December 6, 20022000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Drama, Robert De Niro, Theatrical

*/****
starring Robert De Niro, Billy Crystal, Lisa Kudrow, Joe Viterelli
screenplay by Peter Steinfeld and Harold Ramis and Peter Tolan
directed by Harold Ramis

by Walter Chaw The first mistake that directors make with actors who need to get brought up sharply against the reins now and again is that they sometimes request of them to feign that which they already are. Case in point is asking Robin Williams to be a gibbering velvet clown, asking Melanie Griffith to be a side of beef with a Betsy-Wetsy voice, and now asking Robert De Niro to feign mental illness and sociopathic tendencies. De Niro jumping on a table and singing selections from West Side Story isn’t one of those cinematic moments for the ages, but rather one of the more tragic examples of self-delusion and career torpor.

A Picture of Sam Jones Goes Here: FFC Interviews Sam Jones

December 1, 2002****/****, 2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Documentary, Interviews, Music, Theatrical

December 1, 2002|An accomplished photographer whose work has been featured in ESQUIRE, GQ, VANITY FAIR, and ROLLING STONE, Sam Jones makes his directorial debut with the raw, fantastic music documentary I Am Trying to Break Your Heart, which follows alt-country band Wilco as they complete their album “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot.” Shot in Super16 and resembling such seminal rock-docs as Don’t Look Back, Jones’s debut is a superbly-crafted, expertly-paced piece that details the band as they’re dropped by their record label, lose a key member, and struggle through the agonies and ecstasies of creation and commerce. The picture impresses most with the universality of its themes, hitting narrative highs and lows that have nothing to do with a familiarity with the band in question. All the same, fans should be well pleased with Jones’s photographer’s eye as he captures the musicians at work in their small loft and from behind the mixing board.

Solaris (2002)

November 27, 2002****/****, 2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: Steven Soderbergh, Drama, Esoterica, Mystery, Romance, Sci-Fi, Theatrical

****/****
starring George Clooney, Natascha McElhone, Jeremy Davies, Viola Davis
screenplay by Steven Soderbergh, based on the novel by Stanislaw Lem
directed by Steven Soderbergh

by Walter Chaw Steven Soderbergh's best film since sex, lies, and videotape (and the film most like it in theme and execution), Solaris is a moving, hypnotic adaptation of the classic Stanislaw Lem novel, which was first made into a film in 1972 by Andrei Tarkovsky. Co-produced by James Cameron's company Lightstorm, Solaris fits loosely into Ridley Scott's Alien future with its monolithic "Company" and the need for a specialist to infiltrate a corrupted interstellar outpost–a future Cameron plumbed in 1986 with his modern genre classic Aliens. But Solaris is less a science-fiction film than it is an existentialist melodrama that, by winnowing itself down to the fierce romanticism at the heart of Lem's novel (and Tarkovsky's trance-like adaptation), locates the core issues of identity and love that plague the dark hours.

Rabbit-Proof Fence (2002)

November 27, 20022000s, Adventure, Australia, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Drama, Road Movie, Theatrical

***/****
starring Everlyn Sampi, Tianna Sansbury, Laura Monaghan, David Gulpilil
screenplay by Christine Olsen, based on the book Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence by Doris Pilkington
directed by Phillip Noyce

by Walter Chaw A very small story set on a very large stage, Phillip Noyce’s affecting Rabbit-Proof Fence is perhaps the most visually beautiful film of the director’s career, proving between this and his other movie from this year, the Graham Greene adaptation The Quiet American, that not only is it possible to go home again (as in Noyce to Australia) but also that it’s often wise. Shot on a minimal budget (in the six-million dollar range) with a cast of largely non-professional actors (Kenneth Branagh the main exception), the picture is a tremendous hit among the self-congratulatory film festival/arthouse crowd, who, after all, like to feel as though they’re applauding the right things.