Resident Evil (2002)

March 15, 2002Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Germany, Horror, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, UK, Zombie

*/****
starring Milla Jovovich, Michelle Rodriguez, Eric Mabius, James Purefoy
written and directed by Paul W.S. Anderson

Residentevilby Walter Chaw A group of highly-skilled soldiers infiltrates an abandoned facility where all the civilian workers of a multi-national corporation have mysteriously died. Suffering a holocaust themselves immediately thereafter, the surviving members of the squad break down into a cowardly tech-specialist (Eric Mabius); a covert agent of the corporation in question (James Purefoy); a tough-talking Latina with a big gun and a chip on her shoulder (Michelle Rodriguez); and a woman suffering from bad dreams who seems particularly adept at fighting the bad guys (Milla Jovovich). Discovering that the folks in the “hive” died during military research gone awry (thus unleashing hordes of nearly-indestructible villains), the foursome attempts to get out before a desperate time limit expires while also containing the evil to the site of infection.

Showtime (2002)

March 15, 2002Posted in2000s, Action, Australia, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Eddie Murphy, Robert De Niro, Theatrical, Will Smith

*/****
starring Robert De Niro, Eddie Murphy, Rene Russo, Ken Hudson Campbell
screenplay by Keith Sharon and Alfred Gough & Miles Millar
directed by Tom Dey

by Walter Chaw Shaping up as a spoof but neither smart enough to earn that label nor exciting enough to sustain interest otherwise, Tom Dey’s slick Showtime is an incoherent mess of a film that relies on explosions and volume to distract from its tin ear and flat pacing. It wants desperately to be a self-aware genre exercise in the Scream vein, but after its characters mention that there are “rules” to the buddy-cop flick, it chooses to demonstrate them rather than subvert them. Screenwriters-by-committee Keith Sharon, Alfred Gough, and Miles Millar, patching together an abominable iteration of the same old Lethal Weapon tropes, have conspired to get De Niro to immediately make 15 Minutes again (but as an alleged intentional comedy) and to continue Eddie Murphy’s typecasting as an animated jackass. Piling on the offenses, Showtime suffers from a few distracting plotholes, an obviously tacked-on prologue meant to elicit a Kindergarten Cop-esque brand of “isn’t it funny to scare children with a terrifying actor,” and a score by Alan Silvestri that actually approximates the feel of hammers to the brainpan.

Ice Age (2002)

March 15, 2002Posted in2000s, Adventure, Animation, Australia, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Family, Theatrical, UK

*½/****
screenplay by Michael Berg and Peter Ackerman
directed by Chris Wedge

Iceageby Walter Chaw Borrowing heavily from Disney’s aimless and laggard Dinosaur, Fox and Blue Sky Animation’s Ice Age is burdened from the outset by the vaguely disturbing reality that the titular epoch spells doom for most of the heroes of this animated mistake. When our quartet of cuddly endangered animals saunters off into the sunset, it feels disturbingly melancholy–something director Chris Wedge tries to assuage with a tedious epilogue that beats a long-dead running gag into the loam of an increasingly belaboured film.

The Perez Family (1995) – DVD

March 14, 2002Posted in1990s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Romance

***/**** Image A Sound A
starring Marisa Tomei, Alfred Molina, Chazz Palminteri, Anjelica Huston
screenplay by Robin Swicord
directed by Mira Nair

by Walter Chaw Sensuous and lush with a hint of Isabel Allende’s magical realism in the bleeding of a man’s broken heart and a string of rose petals trailing a line along the belly of a new lover, Mira Nair’s lovely The Perez Family is all ripe colours, song, sex, honour, and dance. A long-lost father asks his wife upon their decades-long separation if their grown daughter remembers him: “She says she remembers dancing with you.” In The Perez Family, that’s only as it should be.

Training Day (2001) – DVD

March 14, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, DVD, Thriller

**½/**** Image A Sound A Extras B+
starring Denzel Washington, Ethan Hawke, Scott Glenn, Eva Mendes
screenplay by David Ayer
directed by Antoine Fuqua

by Walter Chaw In Antoine Fuqua and Dominic Sena’s race to become David Fincher, Fuqua, with his colour-bleached urban noir Training Day, pulls slightly ahead. Essentially a feature-length version of the Fuqua-helmed video for Coolio’s “Gangsta’s Paradise,” Training Day is dankly lit, grim, and edited with a veteran music-video director’s need for speed (though there are considerably fewer cuts than those found in Fuqua’s previous efforts Bait and The Replacement Killers). So smooth and accomplished is the harsh vérité look of the piece that the sun-drenched streets of Los Angeles are as much a player in the film as its leads. But the striking cinematography, sharp screenplay by David Ayer, and undeniable chemistry between Denzel Washington and Ethan Hawke aren’t enough to disguise that Training Day is one bravura performance away from being the umpteenth rote grizzled vet/greenhorn rookie policier. (With a healthy dash of Casualties of War tossed in for that Captain Bligh/Mr. Christian dynamic.)

Breaking Away (1979) – DVD

March 12, 2002Posted in1970s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Romance, Sports

***/**** Image C- Sound C-
starring Dennis Christopher, Dannis Quaid, Daniel Stern, Jackie Earle Haley
screenplay by Steve Tesich
directed by Peter Yates

by Walter Chaw For me, Peter Yates’s Breaking Away is the logical precursor to the particular nostalgia of Bob Clark’s A Christmas Story. It details in its limpid, lissom way small-town life through the prism of quaint friendships and a family with a sympathetic mom (Barbara Barrie), a curmudgeonly pop (Paul Dooley), and David (Dennis Christopher), their stargazer son.

The Watcher in the Woods (1980) – DVD

March 10, 2002Posted in1980s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Disney, DVD, Family, Horror, Mystery, Thriller, UK

**/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras B
starring Bette Davis, Lynn-Holly Johnson, Kyle Richards, Carroll Baker
screenplay by Brian Clemens, Rosemary Anne Sisson, Harry Spalding, based on the novel by Florence Engel Randall
directed by John Hough

Watcherinthewoodscap

by Walter Chaw John Hough’s cult favourite The Watcher in the Woods is a movie about how a camera presents a point-of-view and how that point-of-view, if it’s not attached to a specific identity, can become menacingly voyeuristic; shame that The Watcher in the Woods isn’t also about a story with characters in whom you’re interested and performances that don’t set teeth on edge. One of the more unusual Disney productions of the late-Seventies, the film becomes yet another showcase for an aging Bette Davis’s hiccupping hag archetype and, sadly, an opportunity for figure-skater Lynn-Holly Johnson to demonstrate how good athletes seldom become good actors.

97 Brooks (2002)

March 10, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Theatrical, Thriller

*½/****
starring Colleen Wainwright, Robert Beckwith, Jason Sales, J. Keith Butler
written and directed by Mikon A. Haaksman

by Walter Chaw In order to get someone to vomit, one character asks another if they’d like to eat at Long John Silver’s. It’s a bright comic moment in the midst of the otherwise awkwardly scripted 97 Brooks, the zero-budget digital video debut of Mikon A. Haaksman, who raised money for his project by soliciting contributions from friends and family. While the cast (largely composed of Haaksman’s friends) is game, the screenplay, direction, and editing betray them at every turn. 97 Brooks lacks pace and rhythm–that visual or thematic hallmark that would have guided the movie over its essential lack of ear and many a narrative leap and difficulty. It isn’t so much that 97 Brooks is a terrible film, it’s that it has neither the wit nor the special something to overcome its amateurish screenplay and production values.

Thumbelina (1994) – DVD

March 10, 2002Posted in1990s, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD, Family, Fantasy, Musical, Romance

*/**** Image D Sound B
screenplay by Don Bluth
directed by Don Bluth, Gary Goldman

by Walter Chaw A predictably disturbing take on Hans Christian Andersen’s cautionary tale of the importance of conformity and the dangers of female sexual awakening, the diminutive heroine of Don Bluth and Gary Goldman’s Thumbelina arrives in the slow blossoming of a rose. After brief stops in which a hyper-sexualized, Charo-voiced frog teaches Thumbelina to shake her tiny money-maker, a sleazy moustachioed junebug (Gilbert Gottfried) abducts her to be its wife, and Bluth presents phallic stems and pregnant bulbs to the point of indecency, the message of “there’s someone for everyone” (or, closer to the mark, an “Eye of the Beholder”-like “stick with your kind, freak”) comes ham-fisting home.

A Troll in Central Park (1994) – DVD

March 10, 2002Posted in1990s, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD, Family, Fantasy, Musical

½*/**** Image D+ Sound B
screenplay by Stu Krieger
directed by Don Bluth, Gary Goldman

by Walter Chaw So Gnorga (voiced by Cloris Leachman), the queen of the trolls, hates flowers, outlawing them in her forsaken trolldom. Kindhearted simple-troll Stanley (Dom DeLuise) finds himself and his green thumb in quite the pickle: What’s a horticulturally inclined troll to do when everything his olive digit touches turns to a badly-animated flower? Get banished to Central Park in New York, of course–the only place in the universe more unpleasant (according to Gnorga) than Trolldom. Not content to be a worm in the Big Apple, fish-out-of-water intrigue, Don Bluth’s excrescent A Troll in Central Park also manages to shoehorn in a Mary Poppins, “parents too busy to fly a kite” bit of nonsense. It seems too much to wrap up in just under seventy-six minutes, but not only does it manage to do just that in its trundling, underdeveloped way, A Troll in Central Park also wastes what feels like hours on aimless and appalling musical numbers.

Monsoon Wedding (2001)

March 8, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, France, Germany, India, Italy, Romance, Theatrical

**½/****
starring Naseeruddin Shah, Lillete Dubey, Shefali Shetty, Vijay Raaz
screenplay by Sabrina Dhawan
directed by Mira Nair

by Walter Chaw Mira Nair’s Monsoon Wedding plays like an unedited wedding video, capturing peccadillo along with celebration and ugliness along with beauty. Slyly, a little in the manner of an Ousmane Sembene film, it weaves the troubling elements of its culture into the rituals of joy. (In the case of Monsoon Wedding, Nair explores India’s caste system, American cultural diffusion, the question of expatriated sons, and the inevitable death of tradition.) Yet Monsoon Wedding is also an exuberant Bollywood-lite soap opera with flat characterizations and badly telegraphed plot points punctuated periodically by bombastic sitar sing-alongs. What most separates Nair’s piece from Sembene’s masterpieces, however, is that ineffable sense of naturalism which better defines a culture than an abuse of its mad cinema’s mad archetypes.

The Anniversary Party (2001) – DVD

March 7, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Romance

**½/**** Image A Sound A Extras A+
starring Jennifer Jason Leigh, Alan Cumming, Jane Adams, Jennifer Beals
written and directed by Alan Cumming/Jennifer Jason Leigh

by Walter Chaw The overriding feeling in and of The Anniversary Party is high anxiety. The film represents a study of the ways in which insecurities manifest themselves through a dazzling panoply of multifarious defense mechanisms: pretension, jealousy, aggression, bootlicking, hostility, inappropriate flirtation, and casual drug abuse. It’s telling that for a toast, someone recites the last stanza of Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach”*–telling not for the sentiment of steadfastness in the face of societal unkindness, but for the fact that the poem has already once received a revision (in 1922 as “The Dover Bitch” by Anthony Hecht) and clearly receives another in Alan Cumming and Jennifer Jason Leigh’s very personal hyphenate debut. Not content to point out that the world is an ugly place, The Anniversary Party dares to suggest that the world’s ugliness is very often a product of marauding hordes of neurotic internal demons.

Heist (2001) – DVD

March 6, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, DVD, Thriller

**/**** Image B+ Sound B+
starring Gene Hackman, Danny DeVito, Delroy Lindo, Rebecca Pidgeon
written and directed by David Mamet

by Walter Chaw David Mamet the writer repeats himself in tight blobs of verbal noise, awkward turns of phrase, and staccato blasts. Mamet directs movies, I suspect, to preserve every beat of his favourite screenwriter’s (Mamet) careful, layered scripts. How he continues to lure big-name actors and producers to play in his exclusive little quicksand boxes of narrative dysfunction is a mystery. For as distinct as the celebrated playwright’s dialogue is, almost more so is the lamentable instinct to cast his largely talentless wives in pivotal roles (first Lindsay Crouse, now the consistently abominable Rebecca Pidgeon), not neglecting Mamet’s inability to transcend the mannered and under-populated staginess of the theatre in which he belongs.

Prophecy (1979) – DVD

March 4, 2002Posted in1970s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: John Frankenheimer, DVD, Horror, Sci-Fi, Thriller

½*/**** Image B Sound C-
starring Talia Shire, Robert Foxworth, Armand Assante, Richard Dysart
screenplay by David Seltzer
directed by John Frankenheimer

by Walter Chaw There is a moment in the middle of John Frankenheimer’s relentlessly campy (and prophecy-free) Prophecy when noble savage John Hawks (essayed by Irish-Italian Armand Assante), eluding the fuzz, runs through a forest clearing, into a cabin, and out a closed window. Why Hawks didn’t just take off into the woods is a mystery almost as great as what happened to Frankenheimer after the 1960s. I also liked a scene that finds professional weepy milquetoast Talia Shire with a mutant bear cub chewing on her throat.

Newsies (1992) [Collector’s Edition] – DVD

March 4, 2002Posted in1990s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Disney, Drama, DVD, Family, Musical

*½/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras B
starring Christian Bale, Bull Pullman, Ann-Margret, Robert Duvall
screenplay by Bob Tzudiker & Noni White
directed by Kenny Ortega

by Walter Chaw If the crick in my neck is any indication, I watched Kenny Ortega’s Newsies like a dog hears a new sound. Most probably, my eyebrow was also arched. I always marvel that a racist bit of juvenilia became The King and I, for instance, or when someone decides to turn a “Romeo and Juliet” into a West Side Story. So when I say that I am clueless as to how the newspaper-hawker strike of 1899 could make for a good musical, I might not be the best person to ask.

A Glimpse of Hell (2001) – DVD

March 3, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Drama, DVD, Television

**/**** Image A Sound A-
starring James Caan, Robert Sean Leonard, Daniel Roebuck, Jamie Harrold
screenplay by David Freed
directed by Mikael Salomon

by Walter Chaw Apart from the satirical possibilities, it appears that the rationale behind the title A Glimpse of Hell is the graphic aftermath of an explosion in the gunnery chamber of the U.S.S. Iowa. A made-for-TV docudrama that breeds Edward Dmytryk’s The Caine Mutiny with Rob Reiner’s A Few Good Men, A Glimpse of Hell impresses only with its dedication to mediocrity. While the subject is topical, recounting the possible malfeasance aboard an aging battleship that resulted in a magazine explosion, the execution is theatrical and cardboard from direction (by Mikael Salomon, cinematographer of The Abyss) to performance.

Last Orders (2001)

March 1, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Germany, UK

**/****
starring Michael Caine, Tom Courtenay, David Hemmings, Bob Hoskins
written and directed by Fred Schepisi, based on the novel by Graham Swift

by Walter Chaw Jack’s (Michael Caine) in a box–more accurately, his ashes are in an urn. His “last orders” (a term used in London pubs to announce a “last call” that serves double duty here) are for his remains to be scattered off a pier in Margate, a day’s travel for his three mates and his car salesman son, Vince (Ray Winstone). Lucky (Bob Hoskins; Anatol Yusef as a young man) likes to play the horses, Vic (Tom Courtenay; Cameron Fitch) is a stone-faced and quiet undertaker, and Lenny (David Hemmings; Nolan Hemmings) is the blowhard. Together, they bicker, get toasted, bicker some more, and stagger off to get filmed in hangdog medium shots that serve as platforms for flashbacks. That it’s well performed seems unavoidable, especially after Helen Mirren gets tossed into the mix as Jack’s widow Amy (Kelly Reilly as a young woman), but Last Orders is a dirge of lazy plotting.

40 Days and 40 Nights (2002)

March 1, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Romance, Theatrical, UK

**½/****
starring Josh Hartnett, Shannyn Sossamon, Monet Mazur, Maggie Gyllenhaal
screenplay by Rob Perez
directed by Michael Lehmann

40daysand40nightsby Walter Chaw Matt (Josh Hartnett) is an oversexed young man in a sanitized San Francisco who, after suffering a tough split from man-eater Nicole (Vinessa Shaw), decides to follow his brother John (Adam Trese), an apprentice in the seminary, in the walk of celibacy. He gives up sex for Lent in all its myriad forms (neglecting, dishonestly, orchid-alingus in the film’s dumbest bit of “Penthouse Forum” erotica), and spawns an Internet culture of schadenfreudens waiting for Matt to fall off the wagon and into the hay. During that period, can it be any wonder that Matt meets Erica (Shannyn Sossamon), the girl of his dreams, in a Hopper-esque laundromat?

The Five Heartbeats (1991) – DVD

March 1, 2002Posted in1990s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Music

*/**** Image C Sound C Extras D
starring Robert Townsend, Michael Wright, Leon, Harry J. Lennix
screenplay by Robert Townsend & Keenan Ivory Wayans
directed by Robert Townsend

by Walter Chaw I remember when Robert Townsend was the Next Big Thing. An alum of Chicago comedy troupe Second City, he got eyed for A Soldier’s Story and got his self-styled break with Hollywood Shuffle, a fitfully funny sketch farce about a starving black actor autobiographically frustrated by the lack of dignified roles for African-American performers. Townsend made waves by funding the project with credit cards, shooting without permits, and having the audacity (circa 1986, recall) to bite the hand that feeds. It’s ironic, then, that with all his newfound greenlight sway, Townsend promptly made one really bad film (The Five Heartbeats) and another, somehow worse one (Meteor Man), both of which revealed this hyphenate of the moment for a mugging, self-obsessed, stage-bound monologist.

Dragon and the Hawk (2001) – DVD

February 25, 2002Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, DVD, Martial Arts, Mystery

*½/**** Image D Sound D
starring Julian Jung Lee, Barbara Gehring, Trygve Lode
screenplay by Robert Gosnell
directed by Mark Steven Grove

by Walter Chaw I came to the startling and somewhat crushing realization midway through it that not only have I seen worse movies than Mark Steven Grove’s Dragon and the Hawk, I’ve seen worse movies today. Shot in and around Denver and Littleton, Colorado at locations where I’ve been tooling about for most of my life, Dragon and the Hawk is formula chop-socky involving martial arts master “Dragon” (Korean Tae Kwan Do expert Julian Lee) as a fish out of water looking for his missing sister (Gayle Galvez). The villain Therion (Trygve Lode) has abducted li’l sis and is injecting her with some kind of serum that turns innocent schoolgirls into goth hench-chicks. It’s up to Dragon and maverick cop “Hawk” (Barbara Gehring) to save the Denver metropolitan area from…goth hench-chicks, I guess.