Ray Liotta is One Cool Bastard: FFC Interviews Ray Liotta
Wes Craven Presents Don’t Look Down (1998) – DVD
ZERO STARS/**** Image C Sound C
starring Megan Ward, Billy Burke, Terry Kinney, Angela Moore
teleplay by Gregory Goodell
directed by Larry Shaw
by Walter Chaw The easy thing to do with the Wes Craven-produced tele-shocker Don’t Look Down is to add the addendum “because you’ll see this movie at the bottom” to its title. Broadcast on the Hallmark Channel as a zero-budget, zero-thrills bit of particularly fragrant, past-its-sell-by-date cheese, the plot involves TV-movie Ashley Judd-alike Megan Ward (and, indeed, the actress played Ashley in a TV-movie, Naomi & Wynonna: Love Can Build a Bridge) as Carla, a woman who’s lost her feral hippie sister (Tara Spencer-Nairn–see her now in Wishmaster: The Prophecy Fulfilled!) in a freak sight-seeing accident and so develops a bad case of acrophobia.
I Spy (2002)
*/****
starring Eddie Murphy, Owen Wilson, Famke Janssen, Malcolm McDowell
screenplay by Marianne Sellek Wibberley & Cormac Wibberley and David Ronn & Jay Scherick
directed by Betty Thomas
by Walter Chaw The best bit of dialogue in Betty Thomas’s abysmal I Spy, a film saddled with a hack director and a too-many-cooks scenario that translates adroitly into the screenwriting process (the script is credited to Marianne Wibberley, Cormac Wibberley, Jay Scherick, and David Ronn), is a bit where Eddie Murphy “Cyranos” Owen Wilson to the tune of Marvin Gaye’s “Sexual Healing.” That out of a mercifully brief 90-minute film the best moment comes courtesy a cheap gag involving an R&B classic and a flash of panty is, really, statement enough about the wisdom and ingenuity of the entire enterprise. Proof positive, if more proof is needed of the fecklessness of this shipwreck, is the fact that Wilson, easily the most gifted screenwriter on set, was not among the many asked to put pen to paper for I Spy.
The Pool (2001) – DVD
Swimming Pool – Der Tod feiert mit
ZERO STARS/**** Image B Sound B Extras D
starring Kristen Miller, Elena Uhlig, Thorsten Grasshoff, Cordelia Bugeja
screenplay by Lorenz Stassen and Boris Von Sychowski
directed by Boris Von Sychowski
by Walter Chaw In an ineffable way, Boris von Sychowski’s The Pool reminds of those old Eighties television teensploitation summer camp movies starring the butch from “Facts of Life” and the fascist from “Family Ties”: poor production values enslaved to the straitjacket of rigid formula filmmaking, wrapped around G-rated titillation that at least in The Pool recognizes is the result in some part of submerged menace. Cabin date rape and teen pregnancy are represented here by the rude insertion of phallic blades through water slides.
Eight Legged Freaks (2002) [Widescreen Edition] – DVD
**½/**** Image B Sound B+ Extras B
starring David Arquette, Kari Wuhrer, Scarlett Johansson, Scott Terra
screenplay by Jesse Alexander & Ellory Elkayem
directed by Ellory Elkayem
by Walter Chaw Ellory Elkayem’s Eight Legged Freaks (sic) is less a throwback to the giant-bug howlers of Gordon Douglas and Jack Arnold than just another post-modern fright comedy long on ironic genre in-references and short on any real thrills. In tone, it reminds a great deal of Joe Dante’s Gremlins II–more jokey than scary, in other words, and, like Gremlins II, Eight Legged Freaks works better than it ought to because of some fairly nifty special effects (I’ve seen worse CGI) and better-than-average performances from its B-list cast.
The Civil War (1990) – DVD
****/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras A
directed by Ken Burns
by Walter Chaw Almost forgotten amidst the lavish praise and hyperbole heaped on Ken Burns’s eleven-hour foray into the American Civil War is that the picture is among the finest of its kind ever produced. The Civil War is an indescribably informative, exhaustively researched and compiled work that particularly astonishes not for its depth of information, the audacity of its creation, or the logic of its organization, but for the amount of emotion it evokes in recounting familiar events.
Film Freak Central Does San Franciso’s 2002 Dark Wave Film Festival
by Walter Chaw The question, and it's a question with currency, is why anyone in their right mind would subject themselves (and their long-suffering editors) to coverage of two concurrent film festivals. A pair of answers: the obvious is that I'm not in my right mind, but as obvious is the fact that San Francisco's Dark Wave, which ran from October 18-20, is one of the most exciting "small" film festivals in the United States. I wouldn't pass up the opportunity to talk about it, in other words–ulcers be damned. Presented by the hale San Francisco Film Society evenings and midnights at the historic Roxie, last year's presentation included one of this year's best films (Larry Fessenden's superb Wendigo) as well as the finest example of retro euro-horror (Lionel Delplanque's Deep in the Woods) since Dario Argento lost his marbles.
Desert Saints (2002) – DVD
**/**** Image C Sound C
starring Kiefer Sutherland, Melora Walters, Jamey Sheridan, Leslie Stefanson
screenplay by Rich Greenberg and Wally Nicols
directed by Rich Greenberg
by Walter Chaw Closer to Flashback than to Freeway, the Kiefer Sutherland vehicle Desert Saints is actually closer to Montana than either: a neo-Tarantino erstwhile buddy road trip that pairs Donald's son with a flighty dingbat channelling Rosanna Arquette. Kiefer is Banks, a hired killer who hatches a plan with woman-on-the-lam Bennie (Melora Walters) to play house, check into the same (!) hotel south of the border to do his wicked business, and evade the pair of feds, Scanlon and Marbury (Jamey Sheridan and Leslie Stefanson), hot on his trail. Soul-searching and gut-spilling lead to the kind of sudden reversals that shift power from Banks to Bennie and back before ending in what can only be described as a confusion of trick endings telegraphed from the start. It's less delightful than I make it seem.
DIFF ’02: Awake on the Downhill Slide (Wrap-Up)
by Walter Chaw I started getting screeners for the 25th Denver International Film Festival (hereafter DIFF) about three weeks before the festivities began. As I was exchanging some for a few others, Ron Henderson, the creative energy and inspiration behind the first quarter-century of the event, pulled me aside and asked if I’d pick and introduce a film for the annual “Critic’s Choice” selection. At the time, I had been in the Denver market for something like 13 months–the only Internet journalist invited to present in all the years of the festival, I found myself included among Robert Denerstein of the ROCKY MOUNTAIN NEWS, Steve Rosen of the DENVER POST, Bill Gallo of WESTWORD, Howie Movshovitz of NPR, and Greg Moody of our local NBC affiliate.
Queen of Swords: FFC Interviews Cheng Pei-pei
October 26, 2002|I confided in the amazingly beautiful Hong Kong action legend Cheng Pei-pei–recently seen as the villainous Jade Fox in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon–that a screening of her classic Shaw Brothers film Come Drink with Me on a grainy bootleg copy as a small child gifted me with both a lifelong love of martial arts films and my first crush. Still lovely and distinguished almost forty years later, Ms. Cheng met me at the Daily Grind coffee shop in the Old Tivoli Brewery, where the Denver Film Society was running the 25th Denver International Film Festival and featuring a new print of Come Drink with Me that was originally struck for this year's Venice Film Festival. She was soft-spoken, polite, and exceedingly gracious; I was stricken by her humility and friendliness–old crushes die hard, I guess. I began by asking Ms. Cheng about her training as a dancer.
Burger in a Restaurant: FFC Interviews Neil Burger
October 26, 2002|The writer-director of the nifty Interview with the Assassin, a Blair Witch construct involving suburban bogeys and the hypothetical existence of a gunman on the grassy knoll, Neil Burger arrived for our interview at Panzano restaurant in the suddenly chic downtown Denver. Tall, thin, dapper, Mr. Burger lives just six blocks from the World Trade Center site; over the course of our lunch, he recalled how large pieces of debris fell just feet from his home–and how an atrocity of that magnitude puts everything else into sharp perspective. We spoke about the massacre at Columbine High School near my house and compared notes on the funereal, vaguely psychotic atmosphere that followed our respective intimate tumults.
Heaven (2002)
***½/****
starring Cate Blanchett, Giovanni Ribisi, Remo Girone, Stefania Rocca
screenplay by Krzysztof Kieslowski, Krzysztof Piesiewicz
directed by Tom Tykwer
by Walter Chaw There is something of the alchemical when two disparate talents discover that their collaboration is inspired. It is an inkling of the excitement at the promise of A.I. with Kubrick’s misanthropy and Spielberg’s cult of childhood–or the pop-cultural satisfaction embedded in the narrative genius of Stephen King mixing easily with the stiff overwriting of Peter Straub. Heaven is the product of a screenplay by the late Krzysztof Kieslowski (and writing partner Krzysztof Piesiewicz) and surprisingly sedate direction by previously hyperactive wunderkind director Tom Tykwer. The result is another of Tykwer’s unpredictable romances blending with another of Kieslowski’s carefully metered, studiously non-didactic discussions of morality and consequence. The result of their union is often amazing.
The Rats (2002) – DVD
*/**** Image C Sound C Extras C+
starring Vincent Spano, Mädchen Amick, Shawn Michael Howard, Daveigh Chase
screenplay by Frank Deasy
directed by John J. Lafia
by Walter Chaw In a peculiar case of “how much do I cop to,” I admit that I felt a surge of excitement upon first beholding the cover for the DVD release of The Rats, largely because it resembles a great deal the artwork for an edition of English horror author James Herbert’s Rats from many moons ago. After searching the credits diligently (and futilely) for any mention of the hale Brit’s stamp of approval, it was with considerably less excitement that I beheld proper the latest from poor Vincent Spano and Mädchen “Didn’t you used to be on ‘Twin Peaks’?” Amick. The Rats is fairly typical monster-/Seventies disaster-movie fare, also following in the faded footsteps of Willard and Ray Milland’s perverse cult classic Frogs. The main difference being that in our post-modern amusement park (Entropy! Get your tickets now!), the picture isn’t so much about even something so banal as eco-paranoia, but about itself and the genre that it simultaneously lampoons and aspires to.
Noyce Guys Finish First: FFC Interviews Phillip Noyce
October 24, 2002|2002 is a banner year for director Phillip Noyce, who, after years toiling in the Hollywood dream factory, has returned home to his native Australia to helm a pair of spectacular and disparate films: The Quiet American and Rabbit-Proof Fence. Both played at the 25th Annual Denver International Film Festival, with Noyce also honoured as a tribute guest at a special screening of his marvellous "locked room" thriller Dead Calm (1989). I met Noyce at the historic Tivoli Brewery's hospitality suite on the coldest morning in Colorado since probably last March, resulting in the imposing Noyce (6'4", easy) bulking up even more in a down jacket.
Finding the Giant Within: FFC Interviews A.J. Schnack
October 24, 2002|The kind of interview that They Might be Giants (hereafter TMBG) might appreciate, my chat with filmmaker A.J. Schnack was short, sweet, and to the point. In town for the 25th Denver International Film Festival with his film Gigantic: A Tale of Two Johns, a pop journalist-laden look at the phenomena of geek rockers TMBG, I shared a large sofa with the nebbishy Mr. Schnack and asked what moved him to make a feature-length documentary on his favourite band.
DIFF ’02: Together
Together with YouHe ni zai yi qi**/****starring Tang Yun, Chen Hong, Chen Kaige, Liu Peiqiscreenplay by Xue Lu Xiao, Chen Kaigedirected by Chen Kaige by Walter Chaw Sentimental and overlong if beautifully shot and carefully structured, Chen Kaige's latest film Together is, in most respects, very much like his other films despite a contemporary setting. Focusing on music as a metaphor for transcendence and release in a way that has become a recurring hallmark of his career (Life on a String, Farewell My Concubine), Together follows a gifted young violinist, Xiaochen (Tang Yun), who finds that music is his only…
DIFF ’02: Swing
***/****starring Oscar Copp, Lou Rech, Tchavolo Schmitt, Mandino Reinhardtwritten and directed by Tony Gatlif by Walter Chaw An infectiously good-natured and bittersweet film about the Manouche Gypsy culture in France, Tony Gatlif's musical history Swing wraps a story of first love around the story of passion for the creation of music. A dream of flight scored by a haunting Gypsy lullaby marks the centre point of the film and defines as well the feeling of eternity that marks the picture and its threads of love, music, and place. (A burial at sea consists of the axe of a guitar sent…
DIFF ’02: Far from Heaven (2002)
****/****
starring Julianne Moore, Dennis Quaid, Dennis Haysbert, Patricia Clarkson
written and directed by Todd Haynes
by Walter Chaw Fascinating in its subversion of the conventions of the 1950s melodrama (Elmer Bernstein’s swooping score dead-solid in evoking that time and place), the halcyon euphoria of Todd Haynes’s Far from Heaven first surprises with its simplicity, then fascinates with its effectiveness. It is essentially a version of Douglas Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows (a title that itself speaks wryly about the Hays Code) that brings all of Sirk’s seething sexual subtext embarrassed to the front and centre. Taking that further, consider that if the subtext and text are flipped in Far from Heaven, then the artificiality of the film’s surfaces becomes the subtext to the sexual dysfunction. Haynes evokes Greek tragedy in the debunking of the fantasy of the golden, Golden Age nuclear family. He has crafted a pitch-black and hopeless picture, a torturous psychosexual exercise as played out by the Cleavers or Ozzie & Harriet.
DIFF ’02: Safe Conduct
Laissez-passer***/****starring Jacques Gamblin, Denis Podalydès, Charlotte Kady, Marie Desgrangesscreenplay by Jean Cosmos, Bertrand Tavernier, based on the book by Jean Devaivredirected by Bertrand Tavernier by Walter Chaw The best didacticism is one carried by a strong sense of humanism, and Bertrand Tavernier's oft-brilliant Safe Conduct ("Laissez-passer") wears its heart on its sleeve--a few inches sometimes from where a yellow star would have been sewn in the occupied Paris where it sets its scene. There is a reason to Tavernier's rambling madness (the film clocks in at just about three hours), found in the care taken in establishing a sense of…
DIFF ’02: Hejar
Big Man, Little LoveBüyük adam küçük ask*/****starring Dilan Erçetin, Sükran Güngörwritten and directed by Handan Ipekçi by Walter Chaw An unintentionally creepy, relentlessly political diatribe, Turkish director Handan Ipekçi's Hejar intends to tell the plight of the minority Kurdish--who aren't even allowed to speak their own language--in Turkey, through the deep-set eyes of a little girl orphaned by the majority's inhumanity to the Kurd downtrodden. Sort of like The Professional with an aging barrister in place of a highly-trained assassin, or The Omen and The Exorcist (complete with a bizarre semi-public carpet urination) in its startling musical stings and unmotivated…