DIFF ’01: LaLee’s Kin: The Legacy of Cotton

October 20, 2001Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, DIFF/SDFF, Documentary, Film Festivals

***½/****
directed by Albert Maysles

by Walter Chaw Following four generations of women from LaLee Wallace's destitute family in the heart of the Mississippi delta's cotton country, legendary documentarian Albert Maysles's LaLee's Kin: The Legacy of Cotton is full of the quiet tragedy of being human. Poetic and demanding, it very subtly changes you as you watch it, shaming us for our petty concerns in the face of what LaLee bears on a daily basis. Entire African-American generations are ruined in the cotton country of the fertile Mississippi delta crescent–a cycle of illiteracy and poverty unexpectedly precipitated by the transition of the cotton industry from hand to machine. The documentary follows one of LaLee's grandchildren ("Granny") and one of her great-grandchildren ("Main") as they struggle to conjure up the pennies needed to purchase the paper and pencils that will gain them entrance into school. It simultaneously details the trials of that school as it tries to raise its Iowa Aptitude Exam Scores to a minimum standard, thus preventing the government from perhaps imposing a system that is unsympathetic to the plight of the locals.

DIFF ’01: Mortal Transfer

October 19, 2001Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, DIFF/SDFF, Film Festivals, France, Germany, Thriller

Mortel Transfert
***/****
starring Jean-Hugues Anglade, Helene de Forgerolles, Denis Podalydes
screenplay by Jean-Jacques Beineix, from the novel by Jean-Pierre Gattengo
directed by Jean-Jacques Beineix

by Walter Chaw Returning to the "nouvelle noir" grotesquery that marked his 1981 debut Diva, Jean-Jacques Beineix's Mortal Transfer is wickedly funny, visually stunning, and perverse in a malevolent way that, along with Bernard Rapp's Une affaire de gout, appears to be a Gallic specialty this festival season. Its highlight is a ghoulish, hilarious scene having to do with a corpse, an icy road to be crossed, and a rather unorthodox means of delivery; and though the film never quite seems at ease with its own black heart, its game cast is more than up to the task of the earnest deadpan that Stygian farces require.

DIFF ’01: Mutant Aliens

October 19, 2001Posted in2000s, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DIFF/SDFF, Film Festivals, Sci-Fi

**/****
starring the voices of Dan McComas, Francine Lobis, Matthew Brown
written and directed by Bill Plympton

by Walter Chaw Oscar-winning animator Bill Plympton's full-length animated feature The Tune is among my all-time favourite films. It's perverse, hilarious–a whiff of brilliance, proving Einstein's contention that imagination is more powerful than science and the truism that the pen is sharper by far than the rapier wit. Detailing a jingle writer's search for the perfect commercial hymn, The Tune is 80 minutes of kinetic bliss sketched out in Plympton's distinctively rough style that nonetheless demonstrates the kind of pure artistry betrayed by, say, Bill Watterson. It is with great anticipation, then, that I entered Mr. Plympton's latest foray into squiggles for the cinema, Mutant Aliens–and it is with some disappointment that I left the auditorium 80-odd minutes later. Eighty very odd minutes, as it turns out, and more's to the benefit of the film and of no surprise to the illustrator's fans. What offsets Plympton's trademark lunacy this time around, however, is not a joy of creation, but rather a somewhat disturbing puerility that relies once too often on humping to further the plot or provide comic relief. Mutant Aliens plays a little like Harlan Ellison's short story "How's the Nightlife on Cissalda?": all xeno-erotica and bestiality. Except for a few moments involving how a man imagines his member (chainsaw, locomotive, erupting volcano, wild horses), the rampant sexuality of Mutant Aliens mostly falls embarrassingly flat.

DIFF ’01: Tape

October 19, 2001Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, DIFF/SDFF, Directors: Richard Linklater, Drama, Film Festivals

***/****
starring Robert Sean Leonard, Ethan Hawke, Uma Thurman
screenplay by Stephen Belber from his play
directed by Richard Linklater

by Walter Chaw Vincent (Ethan Hawke) is a volunteer fireman and sometime drug pusher who meets his best friend John (Robert Sean Leonard) at a seedy Michigan motor inn for a little beer, drugs, and conversation. Very quickly, what was a genial bout of male bonding devolves into hidden agendas, past hurts, and psychological manipulations, all geared towards resolving an event that may or may not have happened. When Amy (Uma Thurman), an old girlfriend of them both, shows up at the room, she functions as a catalyst to exploding the resentments that have bound them invisibly over the years.

DIFF ’01: Go Tigers!

October 18, 2001Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, DIFF/SDFF, Documentary, Film Festivals, Sports

*½/****
directed by Kenneth A. Carlson

by Walter Chaw Although it starts out well enough and detours in the middle with a vaguely interesting, if too-brief, look at how it must be for intellectuals to live in a place like Massillon, OH, Kenneth A. Carlson's documentary Go Tigers! is a repetitive and unenlightening piece whose attitude alternates between sympathy and scorn. The small town of Massillon, it seems, is obsessed with football–glimpses of other Ohio towns suggest that Massillon's fanatical fervour is perhaps the small-town Ohio norm. (Apocryphal tales suggest that Texas and Nebraska might be worse.) The revelation that rubes like their blood sports served rare is more than a trifle unsurprising; Go Tigers! very gradually amends our rooting for the high-school gridiron heroes to succeed, and we start to wish that the team bus would crash and save the world from a couple dozen illiterate, ill-bred, spoiled animals who dangerously reached their peak at the tender age of seventeen–er, nineteen.

DIFF ’01: Big Bad Love

October 18, 2001Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DIFF/SDFF, Drama, Film Festivals, Romance

½*/****
starring Arliss Howard, Debra Winger, Paul Le Mat, Rosanna Arquette
screenplay by James Howard & Arliss Howard, from stories by Larry Brown
directed by Arliss Howard

by Walter Chaw Arliss Howard's Big Bad Love (or, "Fear and Loathing in Appalachia") is both self-conscious and self-indulgent. It doesn't pass the sniff test in terms of truth and lack of pretense, malodorous with that peculiarly rank stink of hubris. Marking his auteur debut, veteran character actor Howard adapts a collection of Larry Brown short stories wearing three hats (star, director, and writer–co-writer, actually, with brother James), each of which fits uneasily if at all. As a director, Howard tosses so many gimmick shots and narrative tricks (dream sequences, fantasy sequences, magic realism, etc.) at the celluloid wall that it's almost a statistical impossibility for not a one of them to stick–but it happens. Gimmicks like fake voiceover news broadcasts are distracting and irritating at the best of times; when overused, as in Big Bad Love, they're screaming bores rather than endearing quirks. As an actor, Big Bad Love is evidently a vanity vehicle for Howard, and it's again something of a marvel that Howard is so consistently ineffective and emotionally flat. Onscreen for about 98% of the time, Howard's exercise in self-love backfires to the extent that every other performer he shares a scene with blows him off the screen. Finally, as screenwriters, the Brothers Howard prove themselves to lack a sense of grace in their symbolism and a sense of coherence in their narrative.

DIFF ’01: Margarita Happy Hour

October 18, 2001Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, DIFF/SDFF, Drama, Film Festivals

**½/****
starring Eleanor Hutchins, Larry Fessenden, Holly Ramos
written and directed by Ilya Chaiken

by Walter Chaw If a song by Maggie Estep, the original riot grrl, were ever made into a film, it would probably turn out like Ilya Chaiken's Margarita Happy Hour. Profane and invested in the underground scene of late-Eighties Greenwich Village and Brooklyn, the film carries on a certain gritty slice-of-street life storytelling tradition with an appropriately grim ethic, though its resolution is curiously upbeat. Margarita Happy Hour's tagline says a lot: "Hipsters, Single Moms, and the Cycles of Life." Essentially about being trapped in a miserable existence with few prospects for improvement, the film spends altogether too much time on extended metaphors concerning the ephemeral knot of existence and broken symbolism involving being isolated and adrift in a sea of sharks.

DIFF ’01: Faat Kiné

October 18, 2001Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DIFF/SDFF, Drama, Film Festivals, Senegal

***½/****
starring Venus Seye, Mame Ndumbe Diop, Ndiagne Dia
written and directed by Ousmane Sembene

by Walter Chaw Though John Dunne clarified that "no man is an island, entire of itself," for all cinematic intents and purposes, Ousmane Sembene is the whole of the Dark Continent. Now 73 years old, the African auteur presents Faat Kiné ("Aunt Kiné"), a wonderful film resplendent with Sembene's unaffected anti-style and even-handed approach to thorny issues of the ails–new (AIDS) and old (neo-colonialism, violent misogyny)–festering at the core of the modern African sensibility, stunting its growth as surely as the murderous European invasions of a century ago. Faat Kiné is Sembene's sunniest piece, defining a trend for 2001 when one considers the return of another legendary, septuagenarian filmmaker: Jacques Rivette's effervescent Va savoir. But although Va savoir and Faat Kiné share strong and opinionated female protagonists and sweet love story endings, Rivette (eternally) grapples with the absurdism of identity; Sembene's demons are rooted in the absurd notion of a people divided by damning traditions and crippling prejudice.

The Last Castle (2001)

October 18, 2001Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Prison, Theatrical, Thriller

*/****
starring Robert Redford, James Gandolfini, Mark Ruffalo, Steve Burton
screenplay by David Scarpa and Graham Yost
directed by Rod Lurie

by Walter Chaw As I walked out of the theatre after a screening of part infinity-plus-one of Robert Redford’s “I am an American Icon” film series (adding three-star general to his playboy, cowboy, investigative journalist, and baseball pitcher), a grey old lady exclaimed for our consideration: “Fantastic film. Just perfect for the time.” I assumed that by “the time” she meant “our post-September 11th, anthrax-paranoia time.” That much was clear. What bothers me is that while I was watching a film about a prison uprising resulting in multiple guard fatalities led by a megalomaniacal and disgraced army man (who proudly confesses his bad judgment in leading eight of his men to their demise), this woman was seeing a battle hymn “perfect for the time.” How does one address this difference in perception, and how do these two readings intersect in the idea of what is distinctly American?

DIFF ’01: The Devil’s Backbone

October 17, 2001Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, DIFF/SDFF, Drama, Film Festivals, Horror, Mexico, Spain

***/****
starring Federico Luppi, Marisa Paredes, Fernando Tielve
screenplay by Guillermo del Toro and Antonio Trashorros & David Munoz
directed by Guillermo del Toro

Devilsbackboneby Walter Chaw More of a sepia-stained Spanish fairy tale about the dehumanizing effects of war than a horror film, Guillermo del Toro's melancholy labour of love The Devil's Backbone (it's dedicated to his parents) is redolent with atmosphere and lacking in conventional fright payoffs, which aren't the point of the exercise, anyway. The Devil's Backbone centres around a colony of lost boys led by a stately Pan, Dr. Cásares (Argentine legend Federico Luppi). The head of a refuge for war orphans (we never know who's winning, and neither do the characters), Dr. Cásares and the one-legged matron Carmen (Marisa Paredes) share chaperone duties with the swarthy Jacinto (Eduardo Noriega) and the comely Alma (Berta Ojea). Look to each of the adult character's infirmities, strengths, and vanities for clues as to what they represent in the Guernican tragedy of the Spanish Civil War, specifically of how the doomed republican rallying cry of "No pasaran!" ("You will not pass!") becomes the hollow promise of ghosts defending an abandoned orphanage.

The Business of Stettner: FFC Interviews Patrick Stettner

October 16, 2001Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, DIFF/SDFF, Film Festivals, Interviews

BizstettnerOctober 17, 2001|Quick with a smile and a self-deprecating laugh, Patrick Stettner is not the dour cynic his films–the 14-minute Flux (starring Allison Janney) and his feature debut, the wicked The Business of Strangers–lead one to expect. I sat down to talk with the polite and effusive Mr. Stettner, who is utterly passionate about and eager to discuss independent cinema, among many other topics.

Z-Boys Are Back in Town: FFC Interviews Stacy Peralta

October 14, 2001Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Documentary, Interviews

ZboystitleOctober 14, 2001|Eloquent and passionate about his work, generous with his thoughts and fears, Stacy Peralta seems to be free of the burden of self-importance that stunts many who attain fame and fortune at an early age. Poised on the precipice of stardom again some twenty-six years after the Del Mar National Skateboard Championships put he and his seven Zephyr Skateboard Team teammates on the map and into underground subculture lore, the surprise success of Mr. Peralta's Dogtown & Z-Boys (the winner of the audience and director's prizes at this year's Sundance Film Festival), chronicling the exploits of the Z(ephyr)-Boys, has led to scripting duties on a new David Fincher project (called "Dogtown") and another directing gig produced by Sean Penn based on the Hunter Thompson-esque memoirs of surfer/photojournalist/author Allan Weisbecker's In Search of Captain Zero.

DIFF ’01: Hybrid

October 13, 2001Posted in****/****, 2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, DIFF/SDFF, Documentary, Esoterica, Film Festivals

****/****
directed by Monteith McCollum

by Walter Chaw Hybrid is an elegy for the passing of a man who fell in love early in his life and remained faithful until the day he died, two years past turning one-hundred. Presented in gritty blacks and whites, Monteith McCollum's six-year labour of love memorializing his grandfather Milford Beeghly is a stunning documentary that itself plays as a hybrid of something dreamed-up by Errol Morris and the Brothers Quay. Ostensibly about Beeghly's obsession with finding the perfect hybrid breed of corn as an industrial crop, the film somehow becomes a grand metaphor–for the rough grace of the American way of life, for the lingering death of the agrarian lifestyle, for the difficulties of balancing family with a calling, and even for the true meaning of happiness.

Iron Monkey (1993)

October 12, 2001Posted in1990s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, Hong Kong, Martial Arts, Theatrical

***½/****
starring Yu Rong Guang, Donnie Yen, Jean Wang, Tsang Sze Man
screenplay by Tsui Hark, Elsa Tang, Lau Tai Mok
directed by Yuen Wo Ping

by Walter Chaw I first saw Yuen Woo-ping’s Iron Monkey on what must have been a third-generation bootleg: it was in unsubtitled Cantonese and fullscreen pan-and-scan, brought home unlabeled on a cheap Maxell videotape from a Vietnamese grocery down on South Federal. As a native Mandarin speaker, I didn’t understand a word of it, and the quality of the tape was such that it was impossible to decipher any shadow detail, but it was clear to me even then that Iron Monkey was something extremely special. Long a cult favourite in the United States (although it didn’t do particularly well when released theatrically in Asia), Iron Monkey received an extremely nice DVD transfer in 1998 from Media Asia; it is a disc that holds a place of honour in my personal collection. With the massive popularity of The Matrix and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (both choreographed by Woo-ping), as well as the surprising success of Americanized re-issues of Jackie Chan’s old Hong Kong films, Iron Monkey has been cleaned up, freshly subtitled, and booked in American moviehouses in an attempt to capitalize on the sudden popularity of wire-fu in particular and the dizzying HK cinema in general.

DIFF ’01: Lantana

October 12, 2001Posted in2000s, Australia, Authors: Walter Chaw, DIFF/SDFF, Drama, Film Festivals, Germany, Mystery, Romance

***/****
starring Anthony LaPaglia, Geoffrey Rush, Barbara Hershey, Kerry Armstrong
screenplay by Andrew Bovell, based on his play
directed by Ray Lawrence

by Walter Chaw Leon Zat (Anthony LaPaglia) is a police officer suffering from low self-esteem and a dwindled passion in his marriage to Sonja (the incredible Kerry Armstrong). When we first meet Leon, in fact, we know him only as an adulterer, witness to the first of his two indiscretions with the newly-separated Jane (Rachael Blake). Suspecting that Leon may be straying, Sonja visits a therapist, Valerie (Barbara Hershey), confiding that, "It isn't that he's slept with another woman, it's that he's lied to me about it that's the betrayal." Lantana is obsessed with repression, of how one small secret kept for too long mutates and festers into insurmountable guilt and fear. Leon feels guilty about his adultery and is fearful of being discovered; later, Leon feels guilty for having been discovered, and is fearful that his wife no longer loves him. Sonja similarly worries that she doesn't love him anymore.

Va savoir (2001)

October 12, 2001Posted in****/****, 2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Drama, France, Germany, Italy, Romance, Theatrical

Who Knows?
****/****
starring Claude Berri, Catherine Rouvel, Hélène de Fougerolles, Jeanne Balibar
screenplay by Luigi Pirandello, Jacques Rivette, Pascal Bonitzer, Christine Laurent
directed by Jacques Rivette

by Walter Chaw

"I hate symbolic art in which the presentation loses all spontaneous movement in order to become a machine, an allegory – a vain and misconceived effort because the very fact of giving an allegorical sense to a presentation clearly shows that we have to do with a fable which by itself has no truth either fantastic or direct; it was made for the demonstration of some moral truth."
-Luigi Pirandello from Playwrights on Playwriting, ed. by Toby Cole, 1961

DIFF ’01: The Son’s Room (2001)

October 11, 2001Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, DIFF/SDFF, Drama, Film Festivals, France, Italy, Palme d'Or Winner

La stanza del figlio
**/****
starring Nanni Moretti, Laura Morante, Jasmine Trinca, Giuseppe Sanfelice
screenplay by Linda Ferri, Nanni Moretti, Heidrun Schleef
directed by Nanni Moretti

by Walter Chaw Teetering along the narrow line that separates “poignant” from “maudlin,” the curiously detached The Son’s Room (La Stanza del figlio) ultimately errs on the side of the latter through increasingly unsubtle and rote revelations about the process of grief. Written (with Linda Ferri and Heidrun Schleef), directed, and starring the “Italian Woody Allen,” Nanni Moretti, the film is too clearly the product of a veteran comedian’s mind: all seriocomic vignettes barely tied together by the loosest of narrative structures. It may be more appropriate to describe Moretti as the Italian version of America’s own teary velvet clown: Robin Williams. (Unflattering, yes.) The winner of the prestigious Palme d’or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival (beating out Mulholland Drive, In The Bedroom, and The Man Who Wasn’t There, each this film’s superior), La Stanza del figlio is well performed but unconvincing, aspiring to a sober emotional depth that is consistently undermined by high-decibel wailing, a tinkling, sappy soundtrack and score, and melodramatic trials and their telegraphed resolutions.

DIFF ’01: The Man Who Wasn’t There (2001)

October 11, 2001Posted in****/****, 2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Coen Brothers, Crime, DIFF/SDFF, Drama, Esoterica, Film Festivals, Scarlett Johansson, Thriller, UK

****/****
starring Billy Bob Thornton, Frances McDormand, Michael Badalucco, James Gandolfini
screenplay by Joel Coen & Ethan Coen
directed by Joel Coen

Manwhowasntthereby Walter Chaw The noir genre was born of discomfort with women in the workplace, the rise of cynicism, and a world polarized by international conflict (WWII). Its symbol, the hardboiled detective, became the projection of the collective paranoia about the ascent of globalism and the death of Pollyannaism. Women and foreigners are not to be trusted in the noir universe; information is slippery and expensive; and the solution of the puzzle more often than not points back to a rot at the heart of the detective. It is the Oedipus/identity trajectory, complete with a blasted plague land, a murder, its thinly veiled culprit (noir is typically invested in process, not mystery), the appearance of a femme fatale, and a solution involving mortal self-knowledge. The noir hero may save the day, but at the price of being betrayed by those he loves. He is impotent to avenge his fallen friends and lovers, and at the mercy of a larger corruption that is unalterable and serves only to further degrade individual confidence. Tellingly, a great many noir works in literature and film begin with the death of a best friend or a partner and end with the realization that any victory is a hollow one in light of society’s inexorable fall into chaos.

The Mists of Avalon (2001) – DVD

October 10, 2001Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Czech Republic, Drama, DVD, Fantasy, Germany, Television

**/**** Image A Sound B-
starring Anjelica Huston, Julianna Margulies, Joan Allen, Samantha Mathis
teleplay by Gavin Scott, based on the novel by Marion Zimmer Bradley
directed by Uli Edel

by Walter Chaw A lavish television adaptation of Marion Zimmer Bradley’s minor feminist classic, The Mists of Avalon is three hours of ripping bodices, slashing swords, ludicrous, DeMille-tinged fertility rites, and snarling, imperious heroines. It is a retelling of the Arthur myth through the eyes of Morgan le Fey (recast as “Morgaine” and played by the terrifying Julianna Margulies), diminishing Merlin’s (Michael Byrne) role to that of doddering secondary foil and Arthur’s (Edward Atterton) to a brooding cuckold cipher.

Citizen Kane (1941) – DVD

October 10, 2001Posted in****/****, 1940s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, FFC Must-Own, Mystery

****/**** Image A+ Sound A+ Extras A+
starring Orson Welles, Joseph Cotten, Dorothy Comingore, Ray Collins
screenplay by Herman J. Mankiewicz Orson Welles
directed by Orson Welles

by Walter Chaw There are two shots of Rosebud in Citizen Kane, the first as it’s covered by a blanket of forgetful snow outside the boarding-house of Kane’s mother, the second as it’s being consumed by flames in the basement of Kane’s Florida estate. Ice and fire. Citizen Kane is a film about contrast and duality, and it expresses this through nearly every facet of the production. Kane has two friends, two wives, makes two trips to his palatial estate, and visits Susan Alexander twice. He is torn in half by his duelling personas: public magnate and private misanthrope–both sides coming together when he writes an excoriating review of his own wife’s debut opera performance just prior to firing his best friend Jedediah (Joseph Cotten) from the newspaper they founded together.