From Hell (2001) [Director’s Limited Edition] – DVD

April 28, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Czechoslovakia, DVD, Horror, Mystery, Thriller, UK

***/**** Image A- Sound A+ Extras A
starring Johnny Depp, Heather Graham, Ian Holm, Paul Rhys
screenplay by Terry Hayes and Rafael Yglesias, based on the graphic novel by Alan Moore & Eddie Campbell
directed by Albert Hughes & Allen Hughes

by Walter Chaw Alan Moore’s brilliant graphic novel From Hell is first a work of Romanticism (in that it evolves from a mistrust of industry, a demonizing of all that the rail represents to the continued corruption of nature), then a nostalgia for a hopelessly idealized past. Once his Romantic roots are established, Moore clarifies the evolutionary link between British Romanticism and Modernism by lifting a quote from Jack the Ripper’s infamous letter: “One day, men will look back and say I gave birth to the twentieth century.” As it’s employed by Moore and in consideration of the author’s grasp of literary theory, this one quote eloquently juxtaposes the impact of Bloody Jack’s Grand Guignol rampage in London of 1888 with the fin de siècle (The French Revolution) that marked the actual birth of Romanticism in the Lake District of 1789. In simpler terms, From Hell is a work of incomparable incandescence–smart stuff for smart people and theoretically the easiest of Moore’s works to translate to the big screen.

Performance (1970) – DVD

April 26, 2002Posted in1970s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, DVD, Esoterica, Gangster, Music, UK

Performancecap

***½/**** Image B+ Sound C Extras C
starring James Fox, Mick Jagger, Anita Pallenberg, Michele Breton
screenplay by Donald Cammell
directed by Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg

by Walter Chaw Emerging in the middle of one of the most experimental, challenging periods in cinematic history, Performance–completed in 1968 but shelved until 1970–is a product at once ahead of its time and two years too late. Had its trippy-dippy, anachronistic cross-cutting and madly-inappropriate scoring appeared in 1968 (the year of Rosemary’s Baby, Night of the Living Dead, If…, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and the film to which it perhaps owes its greatest allegiance, Once Upon a Time in the West), Performance would’ve found traction and good company as a foundational film for the American New Wave instead of as a picture that, for all its foment and formal revolution, seemed hysterical against a maturing, more sedate(d) mainstream avant-garde parade of stuff like El Topo, Zabriskie Point, MASH, and Five Easy Pieces.

Y tu mamá también (2001)

April 26, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Mexico

***/****
starring Maribel Verdú, Gael García Bernal, Diego Luna, Marta Aura
screenplay by Alfonso Cuarón & Carlos Cuarón
directed by Alfonso Cuarón

Ytumamaby Walter Chaw In the midst of their own kind of “Nouvelle vague,” the Mexican cinema seems invested in the creation of unmannered, free-floating humanist pieces that follow disenfranchised protagonists through the grim straits of their day-to-day. Alfonso Cuarón’s Y tu mamá también takes on the dimensions of a Truffaut film, or a hyper-sexualized Antoine Doniel film, perhaps–one that fits between the child of The 400 Blows and the eighteen-year-old of Antoine et Colette. Structurally, it most resembles another Truffaut, Jules et Jim, and while Y tu mamá también is also ostensibly about a woman whose freedom of spirit functions as a catalyst for the maturation of two young men (and while it has its share of non-sequitur conversations and undercurrents of political exposition), it takes a far more visceral tactic to its tale.

The Starz Independent FilmCenter Project, Vol. 3

April 26, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Finland, Germany, Italy, Norway, Romance, Sweden, Theatrical

by Walter Chaw

FAITHLESS (2000)
Trolösa
***/****
starring Lena Endre, Erland Josephson, Krister Henriksson, Thomas Hanzon
screenplay by Ingmar Bergman
directed by Liv Ullman

It is perhaps most instructive to look back at the beginning of a life when contemplating the end of one. Swedish auteur Ingmar Bergman spent his nineteenth year in The Skerries (a Stockholm archipelago), a tumultuous period during which he lost the girl he loved, lost his faith in religion, and finally lost a close male friend to death. That year, when married with the all-pervasive influence of playwright Strindberg and a tireless love of the theatre, provides the root concerns shooting through Bergman's filmography: the idea that marriage is a constant negotiation of losses (abortions and suicides included in that mix) and that should God exist, He is grown apathetic.

Jason X (2002)

April 24, 2002Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Horror, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller

*/****
starring Kane Hodder, Lexa Doig, Lisa Ryder, Chuck Campbell
screenplay by Todd Farmer
directed by James Isaac

by Walter Chaw Having apparently renounced the name given him by The Man, Jason X features inexorable slasher killer Jason Voorhees (Kane Hodder) cryogenically frozen at the “Crystal Lake Research Facility” in 2010 and picked up by a salvage spaceship (or something) called “Grendel” in 2455. When the bimbo Rowan (Lexa Doig), defrosted along with our invulnerable flesh golem (the Demolition Man possibilities remain untapped), perkily offers that this means she’s been cold and stiff for “455 years,” no one bothers to correct her. I’m not really sure why I bothered, come to think of it.

Metropolis (2001) – DVD

April 22, 2002Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Japan, Sci-Fi, Thriller

***½/**** Image A+ Sound A+ Extras A
screenplay by Katsuhiro Ôtomo, based on the comic book by Osamu Tezuka
directed by Rintaro

by Walter Chaw There is a sense of wonder inherent in the exploration of new mediums. A young Maxim Gorky’s 1896 review of one of the first Lumiére Cinématographe shows in Russia begins, “Last night I was in the Kingdom of Shadows.” As I began exploring the anime medium (not a “genre,” I am assured, and I have come to concur) a scant couple of years ago, I felt similarly the interloper in a dreamscape conjured by a culture steeped in tradition, mythology, and the sort of artistic sensibility that could only evolve from the only people victimized by the most terrible weapon of mass destruction humans have devised. Anime is–perhaps predictably, then–often-post-apocalyptic (its themes exploring the existential by way of William Gibson’s cyberpunk and Philip K. Dick’s identity crisis) finding elements of the rapture in such rapturous fantasies as the lyrical Princess Mononoke, the viscerally charged Ninja Scroll, and the ferocious yet delicate Nausicaä of the Valley of Wind.

Three Fugitives (1989) – DVD

April 22, 2002Posted in1980s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD

½*/**** Image B Sound B-
starring Nick Nolte, Martin Short, Sarah Rowland Doroff, James Earl Jones
written and directed by Francis Veber

by Walter Chaw Written and directed by Francis Veber, remaking his own Les Fugitifs from two years previous, Three Fugitives is one of the middle-period films under Disney’s Touchstone imprint, although the growing pains are still obvious. What works in a French farce is wearying and disturbing in a purportedly “light-hearted” American comedy (see also: Three Men and a Baby, The Birdcage, and Cousins); not helping, of course, is a screenplay in English by a non-English speaker and a performance by Nick Nolte that is by turns unnecessarily terrifying and unintentionally grotesque. It is not as terrifying and grotesque, however, as the implications of a man released from prison after five years cuddling a little girl in an abandoned warehouse, nor of that same man demanding that little Martin Short dress up in drag.

Ocean’s Eleven (2001) [Widescreen Edition] – DVD

April 20, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Directors: Steven Soderbergh, DVD, Thriller

**½/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B
starring George Clooney, Matt Damon, Andy Garcia, Brad Pitt
screenplay by Ted Griffin
directed by Steven Soderbergh

by Walter Chaw Impeccably-costumed and impossibly-handsome action figures are arranged in cool poses throughout Ocean's Eleven, Steven Soderbergh's updating of the same-named Rat Pack caper. A throwback to the star-driven cinema of the Fifties and a reflection of our own fanatical interest in cults of personality, the film features transparent performances (with the exception of Don Cheadle, each performer in Ocean's Eleven is playing his- or herself), and the same kind of sadistic voyeurism that impels us to simultaneously deify and find fault with our favourite actors keeps our peepers glued to the screen as George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Matt Damon, Elliot Gould, and Carl Reiner revolve around one another in a loose heist intrigue intended to relieve Andy Garcia of both his millions and his girlfriend.

Crush (2002)

April 19, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Germany, Romance, Theatrical, UK

*/****
starring Andie MacDowell, Imelda Staunton, Anna Chancellor, Kenny Doughty
written and directed by John McKay

Crushby Walter Chaw A punitive film that has one of the more unpleasant third acts of any film in recent memory, John McKay’s Crush is an atonal estrogen opera that demonizes feminism while gifting the most sympathetic male of the piece with a nice vomit bath at his wedding. It isn’t political but rather misanthropic, a film that begins genially but ends with enough open contempt for each of its three protagonists that Crush seems something of an anti-romantic comedy. That would not be a bad thing save for the fact that the film aims for frothy uplift on the one hand and a heart-wrenching Love Story twist of fate on the other, with nary a whiff of satire or self-awareness to be found in-between.

Murder by Numbers (2002)

April 19, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Mystery, Theatrical, Thriller

*½/****
starring Sandra Bullock, Ryan Gosling, Michael Pitt, Agnes Bruckner
screenplay by Tony Gayton
directed by Barbet Schroeder

Murderbynumbersby Walter Chaw A shallow Leopold and Loeb riff crossed with a heaping helping of the kind of law-chick bullstuff made popular by the horrible novels of Patricia Cornwell, Murder by Numbers trudges along with its tired formula repertoire like a funeral procession for the genre. For a spell, it feels as if the film will transcend the unpromising irony of its title with a female protagonist painted as unflattering and tortured, but by the time the final credits roll after an unforgivable third act, Murder by Numbers washes out as just another imminently forgettable movie starring Sandra Bullock.

The Starz Independent FilmCenter Project, Vol. 2

April 19, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Norway, Romance, Sweden, Theatrical, UK

by Walter Chaw

ONE WEEK (2000)
*/****
starring Kenny Young, Saadiqa Muhammad, Eric Lane, Milauna Jackson
screenplay by Carl Seaton, Kenny Young
directed by Carl Seaton

One of the pleasures of junior high (towards the end of the year, once teachers have exhausted lesson plans and their patience) was the educational reel, that impossibly dated relic of the Fifties or Sixties that advised against, in the most stultifying terms possible, such sundry indiscretions as driving too fast or wandering around in the desert without extra water and a hat. The armed forces upped the ante with cautionary tales of green grunts succumbing to the wiles of Third-World call girls and the attendant itches of perdition. The only thing that separates Carl Seaton's zero-budget morality tirade One Week and scatological G.I. shock schlock is the fact that it's in colour (though the lighting in many scenes makes that distinction moot), and that it lacks a chiding talking condom.

McKay While the Sun Shines: FFC Interviews Jim McKay

April 18, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Interviews, UK

MckaytitleApril 19, 2002|With a background in BBC television as well as two well-regarded short features under his belt (Doom and Gloom (1996) and Wet and Dry (1997)), John McKay’s uneven and somewhat inauspicious feature-length debut Crush has garnered a slew of bad reviews until the only reviewers that really matter to most of North America, Ebert and Roeper, chimed in with their golden digits upraised. Yet the problems of the film remain unsolved by that increasingly devalued ascription of merit: what begins as something along the lines of Four Weddings and a Funeral takes a funereal turn into punitive plot twists and a general misanthropy at its conclusion. The tonal shift is one thing, the eleventh-hour attempt to gloss over what’s happened as something forgivable and perversely light-hearted is another altogether.

The Scorpion King (2002)

April 18, 2002Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Belgium, Comedy, Fantasy, Germany, Theatrical

*/****
starring The Rock, Steven Brand, Kelly Hu, Michael Clarke Duncan
screenplay by David Hayter and Wil Osborne and Stephen Sommers
directed by Chuck Russell

by Walter Chaw I stopped marking the rip-offs perpetrated in The Scorpion King once Kelly Hu’s jiggle priestess recreated a scene entire from Mike Hodges’s legendary craptavaganza Flash Gordon. Sadly, The Scorpion King doesn’t have the benefit of a Queen soundtrack to push the “just bad” into campy. It steals the rolling gong gag from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, the cave murders and human bow-hunting of Rambo III, the feral kid of The Road Warrior, and its overriding ethos, apparently unintentionally, from Sergio Aragonés’s comic book barbarian “Groo.” If you manage to stifle a chuckle when Dwayne Johnson (a.k.a. The Rock) suffers all manner of horrendous falls and physical mortifications with a confused expression that all but screams, “Did I err?”…well, you’re a better man than I.

Scratch (2002)

April 18, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Documentary, Music, Theatrical

**/****
directed by Doug Pray

by Walter Chaw Doug Pray’s non-fiction Scratch, about the men behind the dual turntables digging new grooves into much-abused vinyl, presents a fitfully fascinating glimpse into the DJ music scene. The problem with the film is that it’s more of a performance piece than a documentary, spending too much time extolling the questionable and specific virtues of the music while giving little insight into what it is that makes said music attractive to a growing audience. The picture’s strength lies in the curious revelation that in resurrecting old and forgotten “breaks” (beats embedded in vintage tunes), these generally uneducated “turntable-ists” are engaged in the same process as T.S. Eliot was: the reclamation of art as it is filtered through the prism of artists who see themselves as the repository of the whole of a particular Western media.

Burnt Money (2000)

April 18, 2002Posted inArgentina, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, Romance, Spain, Theatrical, Thriller, Uruguay

Plata quemada
**½/****
starring Eduardo Noriega, Leonardo Sbaraglia, Pablo Echarri, Leticia Brédice
screenplay by Marcelo Figueras, Marcelo Piñeyro, based on the novel Plata Quemada by Ricardo Piglia
directed by Marcelo Piñeyro

by Walter Chaw Pushing the submerged homoeroticism of Strangers on a Train to the surface, Burnt Money‘s homage begins with Jean-Pierre Melville’s genre cool and Hitchcock’s cigarettes and lighters at a carnival and ends with a certain Wellesian noir seediness (complete with The Lady From Shanghai‘s ill-fated passion, Touch of Evil‘s corrupt officials, and even Citizen Kane‘s totemic paperweight). Burnt Money is deliriously beautiful to look at–all pale greens and mute browns–but its overt politicism in the closing moments begins to dispel the film’s magic in favour of overheated parable. It’s an expert genre piece that tries to bear the brunt of all of Argentina’s national cynicism and economic corruption (a leaden socio-political platform reflected by its title), and despite his cineaste smarts, director Marcelo Piñeyro just isn’t up to the task.

Angels at the Multiplex: FFC Interviews Peter O’Fallon and John-Paul Macleod & Louise Clark Goddard

April 18, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Interviews

AngelsinthemultiplexApril 19, 2002|The Catholic Church's auto-immolation at the soiled hands of pederast priests unable to live in the imitation points to a crisis of perception for those hoping to proselytize the Christian walk. For a faith of which most of its sects are evangelical, the popular secular opinion that Christians are patronizing, hypocritical, close-minded, corrupt, and smug–mostly dormant since the heyday of the Bakkers and Swaggerts, though the occasional book-banning and Darwin-bashing keeps it breathing–is resurrected again in our current climate with an Old Testament fury. A spate of terrible Christian films the last couple of years (The Omega Code, Left Behind) has led to a spate of wildly-uneven offerings in just the last several months, pictures that were greenlighted and produced prior to this most recent need for a little low profile.

Nine Queens (2000)

April 18, 2002Posted in2000s, Argentina, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, Theatrical, Thriller

Nueve reinas
***/****
starring Ricardo Darín, Gastón Pauls, Graciela Tenembaum, María Mercedes Villagra
written and directed by Fabián Bielinsky

by Walter Chaw What may be the best David Mamet film since House of Games, Argentine director Fabián Bielinsky’s debut Nine Queens is a mannered, serpentine caper thriller that places its trust in the able hands of a troika of talented performers. Baby-faced Juan (Gastón Pauls), ferocious Valeria (Leticia Brédice), and twitchy Marcos (the gifted Ricardo Darín) find themselves involved in a plot to sell a sheet of counterfeit stamps (the titular “Nine Queens”) to Spanish collector Gandalfo (Ignasi Abadal), himself on the lam for some sort of fraud. Delightfully ludicrous and self-contained in the way of The Sting, the picture is a Rube Goldberg/Spanish Prisoner device translated into small-time cons and sin-stained grifters as they grind and smash into each other like sharks in the green noir bucket of Buenos Aires.

Not Another Teen Movie (2001) [Special Edition] – DVD

April 15, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD, Teen, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/**** Image B+ Sound B Extras B+
starring Chyler Leigh, Chris Evans, Jaime Pressly, Deon Richmond
screenplay by Mike G. Bender & Adam Jay Epstein & Andrew Jacobson and Phil Beauman & Buddy Johnson
directed by Joel Gallen

by Walter Chaw The first thing one notices about Joel Gallen’s Not Another Teen Movie is that it appears to have been shot on 16mm stock off the back of someone’s truck–grainy and shaky, it’s easily the cheapest-looking major studio release of the year. After a brief prologue in which our heroine Janey Briggs (Chyler Leigh, whose character’s name appears to spoof “Jason Biggs,” the star of American Pie–that’s as clever as the film gets) is caught by her entire extended family and clergy en flagrante with a giant mechanized dildo, the second thing one notices about Not Another Teen Movie is that it has no sense of timing, no sense of shame, and no reason for being.

Heavy Hitters of the New Argentine Cinema: FFC Interviews Juan Jose Campanello and Fabian Bielinsky

April 14, 2002Posted in2000s, Argentina, Authors: Walter Chaw, Interviews

ArgentinecinematitleApril 15, 2002|The film industry in Argentina reached its pinnacle in the 1930s and '40's when five-thousand artisans produced an average of forty-two films annually, each of them honouring popular and political themes primarily interested in social criticism. The prohibitive censorship of the first Peron presidency in 1943, however, precipitated the decline of the Argentine movie industry by forcing native films to turn their backs on the homegrown issues that spoke to the common audience. As Argentine cinema steadily lost viewership, foreign product (mostly from the United States, natch) gained a large foothold in the Argentine market. The problem eventually became so bad that Argentina tried to curb the influx with the Cinema Law of 1957, which, while not doing much to stem the influx of Yankee product, established the Instituto Nacional de Cinematografía to provide education and funding.

Mulholland Drive (2001) – DVD

April 14, 2002Posted in****/****, 2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: David Lynch, Drama, DVD, Esoterica, FFC Must-Own, France, Mystery, Thriller

Mulholland Dr.
****/**** Image A- Sound A
starring Justin Theroux, Naomi Watts, Laura Elena Harring, Ann Miller
written and directed by David Lynch

by Walter Chaw

Was it a vision, or a waking dream?
 Fled is that music — Do I wake or sleep?
– John Keats, Ode to a Nightingale

MustownDavid Lynch’s Mulholland Drive contends that the answer to the eternal struggle between what is real and what is fantasy comes in the form of a Keatsian confusion–it’s the difference between Adam’s dream and Eve rendered flesh, blurred in the mind of the creator and his audience. A film is a dream of the director made tangible, a conceit familiar from the fourth-wall-breaking in Ingmar Bergman’s Persona (banishing any mystery there might have been regarding the visual references to that film in Lynch’s piece), and a movie’s characters therefore become projections of its maker’s sublimated longing (clarifying too the auteur’s use of wardrobe and colour schemes from Hitchcock’s meditation on objectification, Vertigo, as well as those of his first collaboration with inamorata Tippi Hedren, The Birds).