In Conversation with Arthur Dong

September 26, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Documentary, Film Festivals, Interviews

AdonginterviewtitleSeptember 27, 2002|The latest by a veteran and much-lauded documentary filmmaker based in the Los Angeles area, Arthur Dong's Family Fundamentals examines the toll that hatred and intolerance have taken on either side of the ideological divide separating fundamentally Christian families from their homosexual children. Following three families, Dong's picture is notable for its remarkable restraint–its amazing lack of stridency in the face of as insidious–and puzzling–a form of fanaticism as any in our cultural dystopia. Such objectivity graces all of Mr. Dong's late production–works such as the (twice-honoured at Sundance) documentary Licensed to Kill (in which murderers of gay men are interviewed in prison) and Outrage 69, which details, in part, the Stonewall riots of that incendiary summer of '69. I talked to Mr. Dong, a Chinese-American and an openly gay man raised in the Chinatown section of San Francisco, about getting started in film and growing up Chinese in the United States.

When There’s No More Room in Britain: FFC Interviews “Shaun of the Dead” Filmmakers Edgar Wright, Simon Pegg, and Nick Frost

September 26, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Interviews

ShaunofthdeadinterviewtitleThe makers of Shaun of the Dead on building a better zombie movie

September 26, 2002 | I met up with Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, and Edgar Wright, the creative team behind the Britcom "Spaced" and now the brilliant zombie rom-com Shaun of the Dead, right before I was scheduled to host a Q&A after a free screening of the film (comprised mainly of Romero fanatics and genre geeks) at Denver's Pavilions Theater. As the movie unspooled, the four of us retired to a Planet Hollywood where they were playing, of all things, an old, unknown FIXX song from the '80s. There was something pleasantly right about that, chatting with these blokes–who had made a half-assed record collection in Shaun of the Dead into an arsenal to irritate the legions of the shambling undead–as the detritus of our glossiest, Teflon age pounded the corners of one of the most soulless prefab eateries in the world.

Mickey’s House of Villains (2001) – DVD

September 23, 2002Posted in****/****, 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, 1990s, 2000s, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Disney, DVD, Family, Horror, Short Films

**½/**** Image A Sound A Extras C-
directed by VARIOUS

by Walter Chaw Just in time for Halloween, Mickey’s House of Villains collects eight animated shorts spanning sixty-some years while illustrating the creative flatline that Disney has experienced from its heyday to well into its current decline. The Mouse demonstrates, too, a tiresome reliance of late on loosely framed anthologies for their direct-to-video releases and this one is no exception, as a gallery of Disney rogues collect in a nightclub to plot the demise of proprietors Mickey, Minnie, Donald, Goofy, et al.

Blade II (2002) [New Line Platinum Series] – DVD

September 21, 2002Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD, Horror, Sci-Fi, Thriller, Vampire

***½/**** Image A+ Sound A+ Extras A+
starring Wesley Snipes, Kris Kristofferson, Ron Perlman, Luke Goss
screenplay by David S. Goyer
directed by Guillermo del Toro

by Walter Chaw Detailing the uncomfortable alliance of Blade and his arch-enemy vampires against a mutant “crack-addict” form of vampire called “Reapers,” Blade II introduces the hints of a twice-illicit romance between Blade (Wesley Snipes) and a succubus princess Nyssa (Leonor Varela) that blossoms after a meet-cute involving the threat of beheading and castration (awww), as well as an unusually pithy look at strange bedfellows in a mutually beneficial conflagration.

Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever (2002)

September 20, 2002Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Germany, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Antonio Banderas, Lucy Liu, Roger R. Cross, Ray Park
screenplay by Peter M. Lenkov and Alan B. McElroy
directed by Kaos

Ballisticby Walter Chaw Walking away with the title of Most Incomprehensible Film of 2002 (walking away is also, incidentally, what you should do when presented with the prospect of seeing this film), Wych Kaosayananda’s ponderously branded Ballistic: Ecks Vs. Sever is a collection of puzzling explosions married to a series of alternately stunning and hilarious line deliveries of, to be fair, unspeakable exposition. It hopes to obscure its awfulness with its volume or, failing that, to dress up its stupidity with backlit shots of a woman communing with a captive manatee.

The Château (2002)

September 20, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Romance, Theatrical

**/****
starring Paul Rudd, Romany Malco, Didier Flamand, Sylvie Testud
written and directed by Jesse Peretz

by Walter Chaw A comedy of manners and the almighty malapropism, Jesse Peretz’s grainy DV picture The Château could almost be a dogme95 flick. The picture relies on acres of improvisation and that slapdash feeling of the seat-of-the-pants production hanging from a Jonathan Edwards-ian string over the abyss of self-indulgence and clattering dreariness–and succeeds, when it succeeds, based entirely on the timing and brilliance of its cast and the extent to which we remain disarmed by the incongruity of the setting with the subject. When that feeling of surprise and delight fades (and it fades midway), The Château‘s rough edges begin to show.

Mostly Martha (2002)

September 20, 2002Posted in2000s, Austria, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Germany, Italy, Romance, Switzerland, Theatrical

Bella Martha
**½/****
starring Martina Gedeck, Maxime Foerste, Sergio Castellitto, August Zirner
written and directed by Sandra Nettelbeck

by Walter Chaw A Bavarian Big Night, Sandra Nettelbeck’s Mostly Martha joins a romantic-comedy premise with a lost-child scenario, setting it all to a leisurely pace and framing it with an eye for the handsome. Its sightlines as crisp and clean as the dishes chef Martha creates in her immaculate kitchen, the picture is as relaxed a viewing experience as any this year–a dish without many exotic ingredients (like a good Salmon dish, the film tells us), but just enough substance to forgive the froth.

The Four Feathers (2002)

September 20, 2002Posted in2000s, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Romance, Theatrical, UK, War

*½/****
starring Heath Ledger, Wes Bentley, Kate Hudson, Djimon Hounsou
screenplay by Michael Schiffer and Hossein Amini, based on the novel by A.E.W. Mason
directed by Shekhar Kapur

Fourfeathers2002by Walter Chaw An old-fashioned epic of the type only Bombay attempts anymore, The Four Feathers (directed by a Bollywood ex-pat, natch: Shekhar Kapur)–the fifth film version of A.E.W. Mason’s turn-of-the-century, Count of Monte Cristo-flavoured tale of valour, redemption, and derring-do–is indicated by a feather-lightness at its heart that undermines the sweeping, operatic pretensions of the piece. The picture just doesn’t possess the kind of gravity that would hold together its broad strokes and gaping panoramas; all that remains is youngsters playing at dress-up, Kate Hudson cycling through both of her expressions, and one war set-piece that is very simply breathtaking while succumbing to nearly every “arrogant officer folds, religious soldier freaks, valiant soldier tragically wounded” cliché in the travel-worn war-movie book.

Kissing Jessica Stein (2002) – DVD

September 19, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Romance

**½/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B+
starring Jennifer Westfeldt, Heather Juergensen, Tovah Feldshuh, Esther Wurmfeld
screenplay by Jennifer Westfeldt & Heather Juergensen
directed by Charles Herman-Wurmfeld

by Walter Chaw New Yorker Jessica Stein, referred to at one point in Kissing Jessica Stein as the Jewish Sandra Dee, is looking for love in the brack of the late-twentysomething dating pool. This means that we’ll get a dating montage during which we sample the poor object choices available to the intrepid, sensitive, modern urban woman about town. A devout reader of Rilke (pegging her as both dreamy and pretentious, which also describes the film at hand), Jessica perks up when she hears a favourite passage quoted in a singles ad–only slightly tortured by the fact that the ad has been placed by another woman, Helen (Heather Juergensen). Helen runs a small art gallery, Jessica is an artist; Helen knows Rilke, Jennifer knows Rilke; and though Jennifer is almost pathologically incapable of falling headlong into lesbian sexuality, through the tender, Color Purple ministrations of Helen, she does come around in time.

Cory McAbee in Black and White: FFC Interviews Cory McAbee

September 17, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Esoterica, Interviews

CmcabeeinterviewtitleSeptember 18, 2002|Cory McAbee's The Billy Nayer Show is a brilliant aural assault of a band that just so happens to be involved in the process of filmmaking. The American Astronaut–written, directed, and starring McAbee–is an amalgamation of traditional 35mm cinematography, still photographs, paintings, and in one particularly disquieting scene, sculpture. In many ways, the film is the logical end to years of celluloid experimentation from McAbee, beginning with 1993's The Billy Nayer Show, a 150-second animated short film created with house paint and paper; continuing through 1994's twenty-minute Pixelvision-wrought The Man on the Moon, which details a cuckolded husband who takes his cat to the moon, where he broadcasts something of a radio show back to Earth; and reaching something of an anti-climactic pinnacle with 1995's thirty-minute The Ketchup and Mustard Man, essentially a discomfiting performance art concert (complete with a bizarre sculpted application) edited in such a way as to suggest that it's the fever dream of a demented mind (which may not, after all, be far off).

American Psycho 2 (2002) – DVD

September 17, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, DVD, Horror, Thriller

American Psycho II: All American Girl
*/**** Image B- Sound B Extras B
starring Mila Kunis, Geraint Wyn Davies, William Shatner, Robin Dunne
screenplay by Alex Sanger and Karen Craig
directed by Morgan J. Freeman

by Walter Chaw That William Shatner is the best actor in Morgan J. Freeman’s direct-to-video American Psycho 2 (a.k.a. American Psycho II: All American Girl), as easy a barnside to strike as almost any in popular culture, is one of those things that is taken with ironic mirth when it should be taken as a stern warning. Rachel (an overmatched Mila Kunis) as a little girl kills Patrick Bateman–the anti-hero of Mary Harron’s sometimes-brilliant ’80s exposé American Psycho–while he’s in the act of murdering her babysitter. That Bateman is not actually a killer doesn’t seem all that important to the makers of this picture, a moronic cross between Murder 101 and Heathers with none of the camp value of the former and none of the intelligence of either.

Three DVDs That Commemorate 9/11

September 17, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blog, Documentary, DVD, Television, ZERO STARS

by Walter Chaw Distilling raw viscera into heartbreaking stories at once the most dangerous thing that we as an American culture do and the thing at which we are the best, the first anniversary of the September 11th attacks on the United States finds three documentaries on DVD to go with the around-the-clock soft-milking of the events on what seems like every channel on the dial. While the endless cascade of now-familiar images continues to enrage and shock, too often the intention of the coverage is to find the "human" stories in the midst of the suggested carnage; to tug the heartstrings (and, truly, what human cannot be moved by orphaned children, widowed wives, widowed husbands, progeny-less parents, and martyred heroes) is fine so long as there is an accompanying resolve.

Stealing Harvard (2002)

September 13, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Theatrical

*½/****
starring Jason Lee, Tom Green, Leslie Mann, Dennis Farina
screenplay by Peter Tolan
directed by Bruce McCulloch

Stealingharvardby Walter Chaw A virtual clone of Jake Kasdan’s Orange County, Bruce McCulloch’s Stealing Harvard takes the same premise (low-aspiring kids get a chance at a prestigious school), the same quirky sensibility, and the same characters (Jason Lee fills in for Colin Hanks, Tom Green for Jack Black, and Leslie Mann (who is also in Orange County) for Schuyler Fisk), and does considerably less with them. Taken as bookends to 2002 up to the awards season or as a peculiarly precise comparison of how minor differences in screenplay, director, and cast can subtly push a somewhat dreary premise into a vaguely good film or a vaguely bad one, Stealing Harvard at its heart remains a picture that never finds a way to balance the laconic style of Lee with the erratic jitter of Green. Its inability to find any sort of cohesiveness (the same malady afflicting Albert Brooks’s and Brendan Fraser’s The Scout) dooms Stealing Harvard to long stretches of irritating torpor punctuated by the occasional line delivery that reminds, mainly, that Megan Mullally (as a character straight out of Drop Dead Gorgeous) has impeccable comic timing.

City by the Sea (2002)

September 6, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, Mystery, Robert De Niro, Theatrical, Thriller

*/****
starring Robert De Niro, Frances McDormand, James Franco, Eliza Dushku
screenplay by Ken Hixon, based on an article by Michael McAlary
directed by Michael Caton-Jones

by Walter Chaw Leaden with mock gravitas and embarrassing aspirations to the Shakespearean, Michael Caton-Jones’s aggressively uninteresting City by the Sea is a purported true story (based on an article by Michael McAlary) that proves to be just another by-the-numbers police procedural crunched with an abortive middle-age romance and a stultifying Oedipal complication. Opening with archive newsreel footage of Long Beach as a place of fun and hope before juxtaposing the burnt-out crack-house dead wonderland of the Long Beach of just a couple of years ago (a conceit carried out with far more grace in Stacy Peralta’s Dogtown and Z-Boys), the picture quickly reveals itself to be infatuated with a certain kind of dramatic irony in which the stock characters are unaware that they are clumsy allegorical pawns in a metaphorical landscape.

The Cat’s Meow (2002) – DVD

September 4, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Romance

**/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B+
starring Kirsten Dunst, Edward Herrmann, Eddie Izzard, Cary Elwes
screenplay by Steven Peros, based on his play
directed by Peter Bogdanovich

by Walter Chaw The Cat’s Meow is an impossibly distant snapshot of The Roaring Twenties and the mysterious death of movie mogul Thomas Ince, possibly the victim of sinister shenanigans aboard William Randolph Hearst’s yacht “Oneida” in November of 1924. Orson Welles groupie/scholar Peter Bogdanovich took a long time to do it, but he’s finally provided his own broadside at publishing giant William Randolph Hearst by restoring a subplot naturally elided from Citizen Kane.

Dinotopia (2002) – DVD

September 2, 2002Posted in2000s, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD, Family, Germany, Television, UK

*/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring David Thewlis, Katie Carr, Jim Carter, Alice Krige
screenplay by Simon Moore, based on the Dinotopia books by James Gurney
directed by Marco Brambilla

by Walter Chaw Dinotopia is not so much a remake of Sid and Marty Krofft’s schlock-classic television show “Land of the Lost” as it is “Land of the Lost” with computer graphics imaging. The miniseries, which originally aired on ABC last spring, comes complete with mystical power stones, lost cities, an unforeseen disaster leading to the outsider discovery of the primeval setting, mysterious old technologies, talking beasties, and, of course, dinosaurs. It’s not fair to say that Dinotopia is unwatchable, because four hours later, I’m shuddering proof that it is, technically, watchable–better to say it’s improbable that anyone over the mental age of five will finish this miserable marathon unless it’s their sad occupation to do so.

Frailty (2002) – DVD

August 29, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, DVD, Germany, Thriller

***½/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B+
starring Bill Paxton, Matthew McConaughey, Powers Boothe, Matthew O’Leary
screenplay by Brent Hanley
directed by Bill Paxton

by Walter Chaw Dad (Bill Paxton) gets lists of demons from God. He has also provided Dad with three weapons with which to dispatch said demons: a pair of work gloves, a length of pipe, and an axe named “Otis.” Oldest boy Fenton (Matthew O’Leary) and his little brother Adam (Jeremy Sumpter) are left to decide whether Dad is indeed touched by divine hand or just another redneck serial killer in a white van.

Near Dark (1987) – DVD (THX)

August 26, 2002Posted in****/****, 1980s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, DVD, FFC Must-Own, Horror, Romance, Thriller, Vampire

****/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras A-
starring Adrian Pasdar, Jenny Wright, Lance Henriksen, Bill Paxton
screenplay by Kathryn Bigelow and Eric Red
directed by Kathryn Bigelow

Mustownby Walter Chaw There is an element of the delirious in Kathryn Bigelow’s superb, genre-bending nomadic vampire fable Near Dark–an element of the hopelessly erotic, the melancholic, the breathless. Like the best vampire myths, it recognizes that the root of the monster lies in sexual consumption and addiction, in the interplay between nostalgia for the freedom of youth and the pricklier remembrance of the confused fever dreams of adolescence. (Hence the recurrence in modern myth of a Methuselah beast trapped in the soft body of a child.)

Your Secret is Safe with Payami: FFC Interviews Babak Payami

August 25, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Interviews, Iran

BpayamititleAugust 25, 2002|I met Babak Payami last week while he was drinking an espresso in a leather-upholstered booth at a chichi Denver eatery. In town to discuss his second film, Secret Ballot (Raye makhfi), Payami was not the craggy visage in a fisherman’s knit-wool sweater with a shock of white hair–the living incarnation of Samuel Beckett as would befit the author of a film that plays like a cross between “Waiting for Godot” and “Endgame”–I expected. Instead, I was greeted by a compact, powerful-seeming man in a sweater. Articulate and confident, yes, but there the similarity to papa Sam ended.

Butler Did It: FFC Interviews George Butler

August 25, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Documentary, Interviews

GbutlertitleAugust 25, 2002|George Butler is perhaps best known as the maverick filmmaker behind 1977’s Pumping Iron, the benchmark bodybuilding documentary that almost single-handedly introduced a young Austrian fellow by the name of Arnold Schwarzenegger to American audiences. Each of Butler’s subsequent projects have been examinations of the urge for achievement in ages of relative leisure, from the groundbreaking female bodybuilders of Pumping Iron II, the big game hunting of the disaster- and controversy-ridden project In the Blood, and finally this year’s IMAX Shackleton’s Antarctic Adventure and companion feature-length documentary The Endurance: Shackleton’s Legendary Antarctic Expedition. Despite the similarity of Mr. Butler’s projects, the bonhomie growing between people during strife and outrageous circumstance, and the evolution (or lack thereof) of machismo, he frowns on discussions of intentionality in his work and choices of subject material. That’s something that I learned the hard way. (Please note: this interview was conducted during last winter’s awards season.)