The Starz Independent FilmCenter Project, Vol. 5

May 17, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Coming of Age, Drama, New Zealand, Romance, Theatrical

by Walter Chaw

RAIN (2001)
***/****
starring Alicia Fulford-Wierzbicki, Sarah Peirse, Marton Csokas, Alistair Browning
screenplay by Christine Jeffs, based on the novel by Kirsty Gunn
directed by Christine Jeffs

Based on a Kirsty Gunn novel, Christine Jeffs's hyphenate debut Rain is a dulcet, haunting evocation of that moment of crisis in a young woman's life as she's poised on the precipice of sexual maturity. The film is golden and beautiful, edged in its understanding that a desire for sex almost always precedes an emotional or intellectual ability to cope with the fallout of the act itself. In honouring that concept, Rain makes no distinction between adults playing as children and children playing the grown-ups in scenes juxtaposed in ways whimsical and poignant. As much as it is a coming of age for a young woman, Rain is very much about the broader issue of power in gender politics as it defines family and relational dynamics.

“Sum” Kind of Wonderful: FFC Interviews Phil Alden Robinson

May 17, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Interviews

Parobinsoninterviewtitle

May 17, 2002|With a background in broadcast journalism and corporate and educational films segueing into a short stint writing teleplays for “Trapper John M.D.”, Phil Alden Robinson broke into feature films in 1984 with the screenplays for All Of Me and Rhinestone. The two experiences (the former with Carl Reiner, the latter with Sylvester Stallone) represented disparate filmmaking philosophies, one collaborative, the other in which an egotistical star decides everything. Wisely taking a page from Reiner’s book, Robinson has endeavoured in each of his films as director (beginning with the little-seen In the Mood and continuing through Field of Dreams, Sneakers, Freedom Song, and now The Sum of All Fears) to recreate that feeling of conviviality and bonhomie with his extended ensembles.

Good Advice (2001) – DVD

May 16, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD, Romance

**/**** Image B+ Sound B Extras C-
starring Charlie Sheen, Angie Harmon, Denise Richards, Rosanna Arquette
screenplay by Daniel Margosis & Robert Horn
directed by Steve Rash

by Walter Chaw In the proud tradition of Straight Talk and Dr. Detroit (and Spellbound, I guess), Charlie Sheen digs at his own apex role in Wall Street before pretending to be an abusive advice columnist at a failing paper run by the lovely Angie Harmon in Good Advice. More Hot Shots! than The Front Page, the film–buoyed by a consistently light screwball tone unfortunately only occasionally matched by neo-screwball dialogue–nonetheless has a few unexpectedly funny moments. Denise Richards is suitably reptilian when typecast as an airhead bitch princess, and Sheen demonstrates the kind of comedic timing and Shatner-esque gift for self-effacement (he gets an enema bath at one point) that might extend his career despite being a boondoggle magnet, e.g., the Heidi Fleiss thing and, of course, the “I married Denise Richards” thing.

“Attack of the Drones” – Reader Mail: May 16, 2002

May 16, 2002Posted inAuthors: Walter Chaw, Blog, Star Wars

PREFACE

There are common themes in hate mail–a fact no doubt nettling to those benighted souls putting hardscrabble pen to paper for perhaps the first non-"doomed community college application" purpose of their artless lives. They are as wanting for imagination and grace as the films they choose to defend. Without logic and without information, they respond kneejerk-like, rising in defence of films that, for the most part, they haven't seen with points that are indefensible and harangues impotent, ignorant, and occasionally disturbing.

Corky Romano (2001) – DVD

May 14, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, DVD, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras C
starring Chris Kattan, Peter Falk, Peter Berg, Roger Fan
screenplay by David Garrett & Jason Ward
directed by Rob Pritts

by Walter Chaw There’s an apocryphal tale from the set of John Sturges’s The Magnificent Seven concerning Steve McQueen consistently upstaging Yul Brynner until the bald-pated thespian, fresh off his Oscar for The King and I, threatened to take off his hat during McQueen’s scenes. An amusing anecdote about Hollywood egos and the urge to steal the limelight, it enters into a discussion of the abominable Corky Romano because a very curious thing happens in the film to its star, Chris Kattan.

On the Edge (2001) – DVD

May 13, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Ireland

**½/**** Image A Sound A
starring Cillian Murphy, Tricia Vessey, Stephen Rea, Jonathan Jackson
screenplay by Daniel James and John Carney
directed by John Carney

by Walter Chaw John Carney’s On The Edge is sort of a Gaelic One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest: an irreverent teen Murphy (“Cillian Murphy” as it happens, playing a character named Jonathan Breech) inspires a batch of ruined adolescents in a County Dublin asylum to restore themselves through the healing power of petty rebellion. It’s formulaic and derivative at the least, but the soundtrack, performances, and smooth look of the piece elevate its stagnant material into something–at least fitfully–emotionally engaging, if not intellectually involving.

Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones (2002)

May 13, 2002Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Sci-Fi, Star Wars, Theatrical

½*/****
starring Ewan McGregor, Natalie Portman, Hayden Christensen, Ian McDiarmid
screenplay by George Lucas and Jonathan Hales
directed by George Lucas

Episodeiiby Walter Chaw George Lucas and Jonathan Hales's screenplay for Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones is very close to the most inept piece of hubristic garbage I've ever had the alarming misfortune to see realized. The resultant film is 140 minutes of pure treacle: such words as "awkward swill" or "excrescence" do not begin to suggest the stink of it. While Lucas has always been a poor filmmaker (though THX 1138 at least displays directorial competence), his army of yes-men and his years of hermitage have led him to believe that his are the hands best-suited to guide the last three films of his Star Wars franchise–and that miscalculation will sadly only cost him the last lingering vestiges of his already miniscule credibility. In a way, though, I'm grateful to Lucas for making my job easier: Episode II is so atrocious that its screenplay–with lines like, "This is a nightmare! I want to go home!" and "You obviously have a great deal to learn about human behaviour"–serves as auto-critique, and its clumsiness as its own most damning censure.

How High (2001) [Widescreen] – DVD

May 10, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD

***/**** Image A Sound A Extras A
starring Method Man, Redman, Obba Babatundé, Mike Epps
screenplay by Dustin Lee Abraham
directed by Jesse Dylan

by Walter Chaw A surprisingly smart and wacky weed opus that gives the Messrs. Chong and Cheech a run for their money, How High is a crafty subversion of the endlessly offensive Soul Man collegiate race comedy. Its dis-contest mentality carried off with a lively disregard for the demagogues of political correctness, the film reaches a pinnacle of sorts with Spalding Gray’s bit as an unflappable Harvard professor of Black History. I don’t know that I’ve laughed that long or hard in ages–at least since the last episode of Robert Smigel’s “TV Funhouse”.

The Temp (1993) – DVD

May 10, 2002Posted in1990s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Horror, Thriller

***/**** Image A- Sound B
starring Timothy Hutton, Lara Flynn Boyle, Dwight Schultz, Oliver Platt
screenplay by Kevin Falls
directed by Tom Holland

by Walter Chaw The Temp borders on brilliant. A thriller from director Tom Holland, he of the “better than they ought to be” Fright Night and Child’s Play, the picture plays with corporate and gender politics in a fashion similar to the first half of Mike Nichols’s Wolf. Similarly, neither can The Temp hold its centre through to the end, resorting to cheap genre tactics and fright gags where a more faithful treatment of its workplace paranoia would far better serve the rapier instincts and execution of the rest of the piece.

The Starz Independent FilmCenter Project, Vol. 4

May 10, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, Cyprus, Drama, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Romance, Theatrical, UK

by Walter Chaw

THE CHERRY ORCHARD (2000)
*/****
starring Tushka Bergen, Frances de la Tour, Charlotte Rampling, Gerard Butler
screenplay by Michael Cacoyannis, based on the play by Anton Chekhov
directed by Michael Cacoyannis

Written at the end of his life in 1904, "The Cherry Orchard" is the last of Anton Chekhov's great masterpieces, so ethereal it verges on the surreal and so circular it approaches the ineffable and the serene. The work is as balanced between its condemnation as it is winsome in its distillation of a lifetime spent in observation. By turns, it is also humanistic and mordantly funny, capturing a period of time (just prior to the Russian Revolution of 1905) in a way that perhaps no other play ever has any other period. Produced under some duress from Moscow Art Theater co-founders Konstantin Stanislavsky and Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, Chekhov began work on "The Cherry Orchard" in 1903–putting off the MAT pair with vague promises of a new farce or vaudeville. What he finally presented was what Stanislavsky feared: "…Instead of a farce again we shall have a great big tragedy."

The New Guy (2002)

May 9, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Teen, Theatrical

*/****
starring DJ Qualls, Lyle Lovett, Eddie Griffin, Eliza Dushku
screenplay by David Kendall
directed by Ed Decter

by Walter Chaw What begins as a potentially subversive take on the inner-city school problem becomes the unlikely film that would be better with more Eddie Griffin. It’s a precipitous fall facilitated by the requisite defecation gag, by too many cameos from has-beens (Henry Rollins, Gene Simmons) and never-weres (Vanilla Ice, Tommy Lee, David Hasselhoff), and by the criminal misuse of Lyle Lovett and Illeana Douglas.

Watership Down (1978) – DVD

May 8, 2002Posted in1970s, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Esoterica, Thriller, UK

***/**** Image B Sound B
screenplay by Martin Rosen, based on the novel by Richard Adams
directed by Martin Rosen

by Walter Chaw Unsentimental and terrifying and set against lovely, John Constable-esque watercolour backgrounds, Martin Rosen’s adaptation of the Richard Adams novel Watership Down arose in that extended lull between Disney’s heyday and its late-Eighties resurrection. (This period also saw, in addition to Rosen’s film of Adams’s The Plague Dogs, Rankin & Bass’s The Last Unicorn and Ralph Bakshi’s most productive period, which included 1978’s The Lord of the Rings.) Watership Down points to the dwindled potential for American animation to evolve into what anime has become: a mature medium for artistic expression of serious issues. A shame that this flawed piece is possibly the pinnacle of animation’s ambition on these shores, Richard Linklater’s Waking Life notwithstanding.

High Heels and Low Lifes (2001) – DVD

May 6, 2002Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Drama, DVD, UK

½*/**** Image A Sound A Extras C+
starring Minnie Driver, Mary McCormack, Kevin McNally, Mark Williams
screenplay by Kim Fuller
directed by Mel Smith

by Walter Chaw Mel Smith’s feminist crime farce High Heels and Low Lifes blares Aretha Franklin and the Eurythmics‘ “Sisters are Doin’ It For Themselves” over its closing credits, always a bad sign. Trying desperately to combine the only two types of British films that have seen commercial success in the last decade (the gangster farce and the Jane Austen empowerment fable), this product from the director of Bean and the screenwriter of Spice World is so rote that its frantic attempts at good natured quirk come off as grotesque and uncomfortable.

Waking Life (2001) – DVD

May 6, 2002Posted in****/****, 2000s, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: Richard Linklater, Drama, DVD, Esoterica, FFC Must-Own

****/**** Image A Sound A Extras A-
starring “Wiley Wiggins and an ensemble of 74 other actors”
written and directed by Richard Linklater

Mustownby Walter Chaw It begins with a child’s game that ends with the chilling premonition “Dream is destiny” and closes with what appears to be the fulfillment of that statement. Richard Linklater’s Waking Life is an anti-narrative with no discernible story arc: The film’s conflict arises between its characters’ varying cosmologies and the challenge that presents to the viewer’s own existential verities, such as Descartes’s dictum cogito ergo sum (“I think, therefore I am”). Waking Life is one of the most interesting and engaging films of a year that sports its fair share of complex, fascinating fare (Mulholland Drive, Va Savoir).

Hollywood Ending (2002)

May 3, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Romance, Satire, Theatrical

**/****
starring Woody Allen, George Hamilton, Téa Leoni, Debra Messing
written and directed by Woody Allen

Hollywoodendingby Walter Chaw Woody Allen’s pictures are exhausting things about absolutely nothing save Manhattan and Woody Allen–Allen’s fascination with the cinema and younger women, Allen’s disingenuous fear of writer’s block, and more recently, Allen’s desire to reconcile with his children. Sometimes any one of those is enough.

Deuces Wild (2002)

May 3, 2002Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Theatrical

*½/****
starring Stephen Dorff, Brad Renfro, Fairuza Balk, Norman Reedus
screenplay by Paul Kimatian & Christopher Gambale
directed by Scott Kalvert

by Walter Chaw During the course of Deuces Wild, a bit of schizophrenic juvenilia (half nostalgic, half belittling) from director Scott Kalvert (The Basketball Diaries), there arises the uncomfortable realization that we are in the company of a “West Side Story” with trick-shots and graphic violence subbing for the Bernstein/Robbins book and staging. As mannered and artificial as the Neverland boroughs and lost-boy antagonists of Robert Wise’s film version of West Side Story, what Deuces Wild doesn’t have is the benefit of the traditional musical format to excuse its more gut-busting howlers. Kalvert’s film is of the sort that makes one wonder which version of history includes Debbie Harry as a zoned-out shut-in singing Christmas carols year-round while daughter Fairuza Balk laments, “Of course Santa exists, mommy, he just don’t come to Brooklyn no more.” Moreover, if such a history ever existed, it begs the question of why anyone would ever wish to revisit it, in art or otherwise.

A Shot at Glory (2002)

May 3, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Sports, UK

*/****
starring Robert Duvall, Michael Keaton, Ally McCoist, Libby Langdon
screenplay by Denis O’Neill
directed by Michael Corrente

by Walter Chaw Edited by David Ray (an awfully dignified name, methinks, for a chimp with a razor), A Shot at Glory is easily the worst-assembled film I’ve seen in ages, so incomprehensibly inept that the idea of continuity is not merely abandoned but trod and spit upon. The film’s pacing is lax, there is never anything approaching tension, and there is such a disconnect between shots (let alone between scenes) that the whole exercise plays like a particularly pointless and chaotic montage. I suspect the only reason the thing makes any sense at all is through one’s overwhelming familiarity with the underdog sports intrigue and the UK working-class saga. In other words, we have an idea of what’s going on in A Shot at Glory because it’s Hoosiers meets The Full Monty–neither scrimping on the male nudity nor the crusty “working class schleps make good” formula that such a horrific union implies. That’s also probably why the film got made in the first place.

Hard Lessons (1986) – DVD

May 2, 2002Posted in1980s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Drama, DVD, Television

The George McKenna Story
*/**** Image C- Sound C
starring Denzel, Lynn Whitfield, Akosua Busia, Richard Masur
screenplay by Charles Eric Johnson
directed by Eric Laneuville

by Walter Chaw Hot on the heels of Denzel Washington’s second Oscar–which was sort of a relieved, honorary accolade for avoiding the umpteenth resurrection of his Glory performance, another collaboration with Spike Lee, and a third slain civil rights leader–comes Artisan’s hasty repackaging of 1986’s TV movie The George McKenna Story, ironically dubbed Hard Lessons and refurbished with new promotional art.

Taking Care of Business (1990) – DVD

May 1, 2002Posted in1990s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD

½*/**** Image D Sound D
starring James Belushi, Charles Grodin, Anne De Salvo, Loryn Locklin
screenplay by Jill Mazursky & Jeffrey Abrams
directed by Arthur Hiller

by Walter Chaw Proving that hope springs eternal in the hearts of idiots and madmen, Taking Care of Business features the Cubs in a World Series and Jim Belushi in one of those showcase roles in which a nominal comedian gets to demonstrate his alleged madcap skills. Occurring in that weird twilight zone of cinema where once-topical humour is briefly funny again in a retro-Gen-X way (Jim’s exclamation upon entering a mansion, “I’m on freakin’ ‘Dynasty’!” would find a home in any neo-Tarantino screenplay), Taking Care of Business also features two “Star Trek: The Next Generation” stars (Gates McFadden and John de Lancie)–the one making a joke out of her breasts, the other nodding quietly in appreciation of them. The flick is, to summarize, interesting in a surreal sort of way.

Flesh and Bone (1993) – DVD

April 28, 2002Posted in****/****, 1990s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Mystery, Romance

****/**** Image B Sound A-
starring Dennis Quaid, James Caan, Meg Ryan, Gwyneth Paltrow
written and directed by Steve Kloves

by Walter Chaw Steve Kloves’s follow-up to his exceptional The Fabulous Baker Boys is Flesh and Bone, a dark-hued journey through the Southern Gothic that represents career pinnacles for Meg Ryan and (until The Royal Tenenbaums) Gwyneth Paltrow. That Flesh and Bone–a doom-filled piece that glowers with malevolence from its horrifying opening sequence to its unsettling conclusion–never received a great deal of attention upon its initial release isn’t as much of a surprise as the fact that not even the passage of time has cemented it as a minor classic. There are few pictures more deserving of critical revisionism.