Lauryn Hill: MTV Unplugged No. 2.0 (2002) – DVD

July 31, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD, Music

ZERO STARS/**** Image B+ Sound A+
directed by Joe De Maio

by Walter Chaw A seemingly endless series of repetitive, politically embarrassing diatribes, Lauryn Hill: MTV Unplugged No. 2.0 (since released on CD as the singer/songwriter’s follow-up to her acclaimed debut “The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill”) is extraordinarily hard to watch and even harder to listen to. Over the course of thirteen largely indistinguishable four-chord folk tracks, Ms. Hill proselytizes in ways so mindless and nasty that the cumulative effect of her (racist, adolescent, and naïve) ranting is one of ever-mounting shrillness: one-note and off-key.

The Time Machine (2002) [Widescreen] – DVD

July 29, 2002Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD, Sci-Fi, Time Travel, United Arab Emirates

*/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B-
starring Guy Pearce, Jeremy Irons, Philip Bosco, Phyllida Law
screenplay by David Duncan and John Logan, based on the novel by H.G. Wells
directed by Simon Wells

by Walter Chaw A cacophonous mess of misguided revisionism and misplaced emphasis, Simon Wells’s (and an uncredited Gore Verbinski’s) updating of H.G. Wells’s poli-sci-fi schlock masterpiece The Time Machine is a miasmic disaster, a sinkhole of shrug-worthy special effects, matte paintings, relentless music, and dangling plotlines and motivations. It isn’t that The Time Machine is incoherent; it’s that the film aspires after several rewrites to one day become incoherent. Not even the best efforts of the always-excellent Guy Pearce can save what is in essence a pathetic cutting-room attempt to wrest the movie back from the abyss of a director suffering a nervous breakdown with eighteen days to go in the shooting schedule and a governing philosophy that believes Orlando Jones would make a good HAL-9000.

Elvis: His Best Friend Remembers (2002) – DVD

July 27, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Documentary, DVD, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/**** Image B Sound B Extras D+
directed by Terry Moloney

by Walter Chaw Cynically timed to coincide with the twenty-fifth anniversary of The King’s August 16th death, Elvis: His Best Friend Remembers, the “video scrapbook” of Elvis’s best friend “Diamond Joe” Esposito, is a mawkish self-parody that plays like some weird Masterpiece Theater sketch with neither a point-of-view nor a compelling reason for being.

Joe Somebody (2001) – DVD

July 27, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B-
starring Tim Allen, Julie Bowen, Kelly Lynch, Greg Germann
screenplay by John Scott Shepherd
directed by John Pasquin

by Walter Chaw There is no life to Joe Somebody; it is a rotting, derelict husk of a film that drifts anchorless in a sea of dead jokes and plot detritus. It has no excuse for existing, and should be held up as the prime example whenever conversation turns to what’s wrong with our culture in general and the movies in particular. Joe Somebody is so sloppily put together that when it comes time at last to end this cinematic thumbscrew, its moments of uplift make little, if any, sense because of the lack of care taken to establish a place for them. If you have a moment to which the entire film is supposedly building, I humbly offer that it’s probably not good when that epiphany appears with neither warning nor justification. It’s like having a story that is not otherwise about a playwright wrapping up with a playwright having her first play produced. Exactly like that, in fact.

Mad Monster Party (1967) – DVD

July 27, 2002Posted in1960s, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD, Family, Horror, Musical

Mad Monster Party?
***/**** Image A+ Sound B+ Extras B
screenplay by Forrest J Ackerman, Leo Korobkin, Harvey Kurtzman
directed by Jules Bass

by Walter Chaw From Arthur Rankin Jr. and Jules Bass, the creators of such disturbing “animagic” fare as Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and the unintentionally terrifying Frosty the Snowman comes 1967’s Mad Monster Party?, a sort of Jay Ward Lite stop-motion revue featuring the vocal talents of Boris Karloff (shudder) and Phyllis Diller (shudder) as well as Allen Swift doing his best Jimmy Stewart, Peter Lorre, and Bela Lugosi.

The Starz Independent FilmCenter Project, Vol. 10

July 26, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, Romance, Theatrical, Thriller
by Walter Chaw READ MY LIPS (2001)Sur mes lèvres***½/****starring Vincent Cassel, Emmanuelle Devos, Olivier Gourmet, Olivia Bonamyscreenplay by Jacques Audiard and Tonino Benacquistadirected by Jacques Audiard Suffused with intelligence, courage, and the unmistakable taint of life, Jacques Audiard's remarkable Read My Lips is a brilliant picture with a few problems that, because they exist in so carefully structured a film, will probably iron themselves out under more careful reconsideration. At the bottom of a corporate jungle inhabited by wild boors, Carla (Emmanuelle Devos, winner of the 2001 Best Actress César for this film) is a kettle of repressed sexual desire…

Tadpole (2002)

July 25, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Coming of Age, Drama, Romance, Theatrical

**/****
starring Sigourney Weaver, Aaron Stanford, John Ritter, Bebe Neuwirth
screenplay by Heather McGowan & Neils Mueller
directed by Gary Winick

by Walter Chaw An underwritten indie The Graduate (a connection the film makes itself) that plays a little more like one of J.D. Salinger’s terrible short stories than like Wes Anderson’s dead brilliant Rushmore (which it aspires to be at every turn), Tadpole emerges as exactly the kind of self-conscious product that crowds equate, knee-jerk-like, with independent credibility. Buoyed at times by an occasional sweetness and Bebe Neuwirth’s fantastic performance as a hippie still flying her freak flag (or at least her free-love banner), Tadpole hints at what it might have been had it the courage to follow through on the ramifications of a fifteen-year-old boarding school Voltaire-quoting brat using the language of his absent mother to attempt to win his stepmother Eve (Sigourney Weaver) away from his ineffectual academic of a dad (John Ritter).

Dragonfly (2002) [Widescreen] – DVD

July 24, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Fantasy, Germany, Mystery, Romance, Thriller

*/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras B-
starring Kevin Costner, Joe Morton, Kathy Bates, Ron Rifkin
screenplay by David Seltzer and Brandon Camp & Mike Thompson
directed by Tom Shadyac

by Walter Chaw Emergency-room sawbones Joe Darrow (Kevin Costner) loses his do-gooder wife Emily (Susanna Thompson) when she’s killed in a rockslide in Venezuela. Soon he and his bald parrot believe that Emily has returned from the dead with a message about rainbows. I like Kevin Costner and his oeuvre. I find him to be a charming simpleton in the Gary Cooper mould. Until Dragonfly, his films never felt condescending to me, largely because Costner appears to be learning things at the same pace as his screenplay. His guileless wonder (‘Can you believe we did this to the Indians? Holy smokes!‘) sits well with me and makes him peculiarly suited to play the traditional American hero: good-looking, witless, and dull as dishwater. Casting Costner as a doctor is a mistake: the other person he played who had an advanced degree was New Orleans DA Jim Garrison in Oliver Stone’s JFK, and that character was clearly insane. Costner just doesn’t have the spark of erudition necessary to convince as a serious individual with letters after his name (not unless those letters are LHP), and his performance in Dragonfly is unconvincing, joyless, and scattershot.

Chat Room (2002) – DVD

July 24, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD, ZERO STARS

The Chatroom
ZERO STARS/**** Image D Sound B-
starring Brian Hooks, Darryl Bronson, Christopher Richards, Troy Winbush
screenplay by Barry Bowles & Carl Washington
directed by Barry Bowles

by Walter Chaw A feature-length episode of “What’s Happening!!” minus the nuance and sophistication of that late lamented blaxploitation garbage, Chat Room shares with the Seventies sitcom an unholy diner-hangin’ trinity of fat one, dumb one, and the one with whom we’re supposed to identify. Following this trio of miscreants during an online booty call, Chat Room begins with a You’ve Got Mail sequence of the guys “chatting” in the titular chatrooms edited together so hopelessly as to suggest, oh so hilariously, that these horny dudes are actually talking to each other.

K-9: P.I. (2002) [Widescreen] – DVD

July 21, 2002Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, DVD

*/**** Image A Sound A
starring James Belushi, Gary Basaraba, Kim Huffman, Jody Racicot
screenplay by Gary Scott Thompson and Ed Horowitz
directed by Richard J. Lewis

by Walter Chaw Much more interesting than talking about a film called K-9: P.I. is talking about exactly the kind of mind it takes to embrace the idea of a standard buddy picture composed of one half mangy dog and one half German Shepherd not once, not twice, but thrice. On the night of their retirement, Dooley (James Belushi) and Jerry Lee (King) break up a microchip heist, which, of course, makes them the prime suspects of the crime in the eyes of the evil FBI. The feds are always wicked bumblers in films of this breed; the police chiefs always give the heroes a hard time; and there are always femmes fatale to briefly distract the hero from the super-bland "appropriate" love interest.

The Starz Independent FilmCenter Project, Vol. 9

July 20, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Crime, Documentary, Drama, France, Theatrical

by Walter Chaw

MURDEROUS MAIDS (2000)
Les Blessures assassines
***/****
starring Sylvie Testud, Julie-Marie Parmentier, Isabelle Renauld, Dominique Labourier
screenplay by Jean-Pierre Denis & Michèle Pétin, based on the novel L'affaire Papin by Paulette Houdyer
directed by Jean-Pierre Denis

Heavenly Creatures by way of Henry James, Jean-Pierre Denis's Murderous Maids–based on the true story of two sisters who, in 1933, murdered and mutilated the bodies of their employers in a small French town–is haunting and uncompromising. Denis proposes that taciturn Christine (Sylvie Testud) and open, elfin Léa (Julie-Marie Parmentier) were engaged in an incestuous relationship; that this relationship was founded on the basis of a deep resentment of a mother (Isabelle Renauld) who hired them out as housemaids and collected their salaries to fund her "love of life"; and that this relationship–arrested sexuality, repressed beneath a veneer of unbearable religiosity (a third sister, supposedly raped by a long-absent father, joins a convent) and the humiliations of the master/servant dynamic–eventually imploded into an orgy of bloodlust and madness. Denis's unwillingness to sensationalize (let alone explain) first incest and then murder results in a certain harshness that magnifies every bourgeoisie slight against the long-suffering proletariat into a potentially triggering event, yet also prevents very much in the way of suture with either the sisters or their eventual victims. The bloodletting made as sterile as the eroticism in an affectively airless chamber piece, Murderous Maids falls short of Claude Chabrol's brilliant La Cérémonie and Nancy Meckler's underseen Sister, My Sister, in that the same reserve that allows its actresses to shine (Testud, in particular) inhibits very much in the way of actual involvement or tension beyond a kind of clinical interest. Still, the weight of the piece, the unerring professionalism of the chilly production, and the fascination embedded in the lurid topic prove recommendation enough.

Trouble Every Day (2001)

July 20, 2002Posted in****/****, 2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: Claire Denis, Drama, France, Germany, Horror, Japan, Theatrical, Thriller, Vampire

****/****
starring Vincent Gallo, Tricia Vessey, Béatrice Dalle, Alex Descas
screenplay by Claire Denis & Jean-Pol Fargeau
directed by Claire Denis

by Walter Chaw Plaintive and sad, Claire Denis’s remarkable Trouble Every Day is a rare combination of honesty, beauty, and maybe even genius. It isn’t enough to say that the picture captures the barbarism festering at the core of gender dynamics, nor is it sufficient to express my frank amazement at how Denis subverts genre in ways perverse and powerful. Here’s a canny director who knows the vocabulary of cinema as well as the cruel poetics of sexual anthropology; perhaps it’s enough to say that Trouble Every Day captures something ineffably true about the sex act with images vital, frank, and unshakable.

Stuart Little 2 (2002)

July 19, 2002Posted in2000s, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Family, Theatrical

**/****
starring Michael J. Fox, Geena Davis, Hugh Laurie, Jonathan Lipnicki
screenplay by Bruce Joel Rubin
directed by Rob Minkoff

Stuartlittle2by Walter Chaw As boring as it is generally well-intentioned, Stuart Little 2 takes a page from the Hunchback of Notre Dame II playbook by presenting a wilting fatale with a heart of gold (Melanie Griffith voices a larcenous canary) adopted as an orphaned chick by an evil criminal mastermind (James Woods, speaking for a falcon) and infiltrating a kind family’s good graces for the purposes of pilfering. The family in question, based loosely on that described in E.B. White’s beloved Stuart Little, consists of a cheery mom (Geena Davis), a cheery dad (Hugh Laurie), an insipid kid with a giant head (Jonathan Lipnicki), and an adopted mouse named Stuart (voiced by Michael J. Fox), whom the Littles treat like one of their own. No wonder–Stuart can talk, wear clothes, walk upright, drive little toy cars and, in the standard sequel amplifications, fly a little toy airplane and fall in love with something outside his species.

The Final Hit (2001) – DVD

July 14, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD

The Last Producer
½*/**** Image C Sound B+
starring Burt Reynolds, Lauren Holly, Sean Astin, Benjamin Bratt
screenplay by Clyde Hayes
directed by Burt Reynolds

by Walter Chaw Seeing himself as Hollywood’s last angry man (the film was originally and just as inexplicably called “The Last Producer”), Burt Reynolds, in the twilight of his benighted resurrection, jumps behind the camera to helm his self-starred anti-Hollywood tirade The Final Hit, which washes out as equal parts senior citizen grotesquery and unfocused satire. Wall-to-wall with Peter M. Robinson’s excrescent scatty woo-bop score, The Final Hit, in discussing how Tinsel Town disdains the older generation of actors, proceeds to give the stage back to that same older generation and, in the process, demonstrates exactly why these people aren’t getting much work.

Storytelling (2002) [Unrated and R-rated Versions] – DVD

July 12, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Esoterica, Romance, Satire

**½/**** Image B+ Sound B+
starring Selma Blair, Leo Fitzpatrick, Robert Wisdom, Paul Giamatti
written and directed by Todd Solondz

by Walter Chaw The line between love and misanthropy is thin, and Todd Solondz is a cunning cartographer of that precarious divide. He sees political correctness as an insidious product of the kind of paternalistic racism that discards truth in favour of generally held truisms, a crutch for well-meaning racists who lack the wit to grasp that the basic misunderstanding of difference driving a desire to discriminate against minorities is identical to that which drives a desire to protect minorities. Solondz’s films are confrontational in the extreme, full-frontal assaults on the hypocrisy that fuels most relationships and stark dissections of the politics of cruelty.

The Starz Independent FilmCenter Project, Vol. 8

July 12, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, Mystery, Theatrical, Thriller
by Walter Chaw THE SALTON SEA (2002)**/****starring Val Kilmer, Vincent D'Onofrio, Doug Hutchison, Peter Sarsgaardscreenplay by Tony Gaytondirected by D.J. Caruso The Salton Sea opens with a trumpeter-in-Hell kind of thing, sort of a Chet Baker in Drugstore Cowboy image where Danny Parker (Val Kilmer) plays a mournful Miles in a cool hat while bundles of cold cash burn like little pyres to the bluesman's lost ideals. We know there'll be a dame he shouldn't have trusted (Deborah Kara Unger, beaten up on screen yet again) and a gallery of rogues fervid in their multiplicity of deformities (Vincent D'Onofrio's redneck…

Fathom (1967) – DVD

July 10, 2002Posted in1960s, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD, Espionage, Satire, UK

*/**** Image A- Sound B
starring Tony Franciosa, Raquel Welch, Ronald Fraser, Greta Chi
screenplay by Lorenzo Semple Jr.
directed by Leslie H. Martinson

by Walter Chaw There’s something desperately wrong with veteran television director Leslie H. Martinson’s spy spoof Fathom, and it took me the whole movie to figure it out: Raquel Welch, as the titular va-va-va-voom dental hygienist cum parachutist cum superspy spends the entire film running from symbols of aggressive virility. Clad fetchingly in a variety of swimsuits and tight shirts (but never pants), our Fathom is pursued by a man with a speargun, by a Russian paramour mistaking our heroine for a prostitute, through various tunnels, and through a train. In its barest form, Fathom appears to be a rape fantasy involving a helpless, screaming, occasionally castrating Welch (though, tellingly, the only person she kills is another woman), who plays a variation on her standard cocktease and–naturally–deserves getting prodded about by a bull while a collection of bad guys poke at her with phallic shunts.

Hart’s War (2002) – DVD

July 7, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, War

**½/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B-
starring Bruce Willis, Colin Farrell, Terrence Dashon Howard, Vicellous Reon Shannon
screenplay by Billy Ray and Terry George, based on the novel by John Katzenbach
directed by Gregory Hoblit

by Walter Chaw Director Gregory Hoblit’s fourth consecutive celluloid guilty pleasure, Hart’s War constantly dances the razor’s edge of offensively pat (equating Nazi Germany with Macon, GA circa 1944) while providing enough canned tension and studied theatricality to put A Few Good Men to shame. With Bruce Willis as a smirky secondary character and largely-untested Irishman Colin Farrell asked to shoulder the brunt of the courtroom hijinks, Hart’s War is an exceptionally well-done bad movie that hums along on its earnestness. Though if you think about the film at all after the lights come up, best not to contemplate the plot, which is littered with holes like P-51 rocket craters.

World Traveler: FFC Interviews John Sayles & Maggie Renzi

July 6, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Interviews

JohnsaylesinterviewtitleJuly 7, 2002|There are a great many similarities between John Sayles and Billy Wilder (save, obviously, Wilder’s affection for the Hollywood studio system). Both: are writers who became directors; exhibit a knack for developing strong characters and eliciting fine performances; are loyal to a small cadre of performers and technical crew; prefer simple shooting schemes that don’t obscure the primacy of the script; generally detail the infiltration of a corrupt society; are fond of sports metaphors and analogies; and, despite some auteur hallmarks, are unbound by genre. One of the great lost Wilder projects is a professional wrestling picture called The Masked Marvel, which was to star Charles Laughton, while Sayles once wrote a professional wrestling play called “Turnbuckle”–curiouser and curiouser.

Lagaan: Once Upon a Time in India (2001)

July 6, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, India, Musical, Sports, UK

***/****
starring Aamir Khan, Gracy Singh, Rachel Shelley, Paul Blackthorne
screenplay by Kumar Dave, Sanjay Dayma, Ashutosh Gowariker
directed by Ashutosh Gowariker

by Walter Chaw With the subtitle “Once Upon a Time in India,” Ashutosh Gowariker’s Lagaan holds a kinship to Tsui Hark’s Once Upon a Time in China in more than just appellation and an abiding dislike of the Colonial British. Other than substituting elaborate musical numbers–as is Bollywood’s wont–for Hong Kong’s martial arts features, Lagaan is in fact as interested in the sociology of enslavement before the rush of technology (embodied in cameras and firearms) as its farther-eastern brethren. The rather serious-minded attack of India’s own caste system and the ineffectualness of its Raj ruling structure lends additional layers to the picture’s surprising depths, yet all the politicized subtext in the world does little to suppress the essential exuberance of the gaudy visceral Bollywood experience.