DIFF ’01: Life as a House

October 9, 2001Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, DIFF/SDFF, Drama, Film Festivals

*/****
starring Kevin Kline, Kristin Scott Thomas, Hayden Christensen, Jena Malone
screenplay by Mark Andrus
directed by Irwin Winkler

by Walter Chaw Adrift in a turbid morass of such Forrest Gump-isms as, “Hindsight is like foresight without a future,” and “I like how it feels not to feel,” Irwin Winkler’s rumpled hankie of a movie Life as a House is that tired breed of awkward, self-important entertainment wherein people are always tenderly asking one another for permission to steal a kiss. There is not a moment unaffected by syrupy manipulation and severe underestimation of the audience. Worse, every major plot point in Life as a House is stolen from American Beauty, the film it most wishes to emulate and, ironically, least resembles in terms of intelligence and observation. From the doomed father’s voice-over to the Lolita love-kitten sexpot; from the wayward soccer moms to the attempts to facilitate a familial reconciliation through the discarding of a conventional 9-to-5 American dream; from the troubled young man who finds salvation in the arms of a chubby young woman to the last-minute denial of a conventional happy ending…the only thing that’s really different about Life as a House (besides the fact that it stinks) is an epilogue that uncomfortably recalls the ethic of another Kevin Spacey film: Pay It Forward.

DIFF ’01: Wish You Were Here (Introduction)

October 8, 2001Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blog, DIFF/SDFF, Film Festivals

Difflogo2by Walter Chaw Going to the movies for a living is an incalculable blessing.

Watching films and writing about them is the equivalent of a lovelorn voyeur's tear-stained journal. A failed relationship with the moronic and abusive Pearl Harbor shares column inches with blazing liaisons like the clever Memento and the acerbic Ghost World. Watching is a consummation, for me: sometimes I go back to a film multiple times; other times I regret having stayed all the way through even once. Doing it as a job means that you go for free, but you have to do it with every movie and stay to the bitter end. (Or at least you should.) I thought I was a voracious moviegoer before I started getting paid to do it. The revelation that I had actually been exercising an extraordinary amount of discretion in my viewing choices was hammered home when I watched both Glitter and The Musketeer in the same week, chewing the insides of my cheeks raw and eyeing the exits like a castaway eyes the cruel taunt of a ship's smoke on the horizon.

Serendipity (2001)

October 5, 2001Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, Romance, Theatrical

***/****
starring John Cusack, Kate Beckinsale, Molly Shannon, Jeremy Piven
screenplay by Marc Klein
directed by Peter Chelsom

by Walter Chaw Dense with the hip references and list-making that have become trademarks of John Cusack’s films, Serendipity is a sweet confection just smart enough to be considered tasteful and just dumb enough to be forgotten. Set in the same New York as every bad Nora Ephron film (which is all of Nora Ephron’s films), Serendipity is awash in a twinkling yuletide cheer and the kind of magical realism that South American authors have made their stock in trade. Perhaps not so peculiarly, then, it appears to be very loosely based on Gabriel García Márquez’s star-crossed temporal love song Love in the Time of Cholera, a first edition of which plays a crucial role in the film. The book details a pair of young people who fall in love with each other over passionate letters and coded telegrams, but part when the woman falls ill upon their first meeting. Seeing it as an act of destiny, she marries a man within her own social caste, only coming back to her true love years after their initial opportunity was lost.

Liam (2001)

October 5, 2001Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Coming of Age, Drama, France, Germany, Italy, Theatrical, UK

**½/****
starring Ian Hart, Claire Hackett, Anthony Borrows, David Hart
screenplay by Jimmy McGovern
directed by Stephen Frears

by Walter Chaw Liam is an Irish coming-of-age story that has more in common with John Boorman’s The General and Hope and Glory than it does with Alan Parker’s Angela’s Ashes. It balances the deprivation and desperation of growing up with crippling unemployment, a peculiarly sadistic brand of Irish Catholicism, and rising anti-Semitism with a good sense of humour and a lively feeling for pace that better captures the seesawing emotion of childhood than unrelenting horror or unleavened bliss. The truth of childhood, after all, lies somewhere in the grey liminal spaces between William Blake’s songs of innocence and songs of experience, though liberal time is spent in both extremes. In other words, the true power of Liam is not in the now-familiar images of scrounging for bread and cigarettes while enduring whippings at the hand of Sadeian priests, but in the shame of a little boy who walks in on his mother bathing and the embarrassment of a stuttering child unable to say his own name.

Our Lady of the Assassins (2000)

October 5, 2001Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Colombia, Crime, Drama, France, Spain, Theatrical

La virgen de los sicarios
**½/****
starring Germán Jaramillo, Anderson Ballesteros, Juan David Restrepo, Manuel Busquets
screenplay by Fernando Vallejo
directed by Barbet Schroeder

by Walter Chaw At his best (Barfly, Idi Amin Dada, Reversal of Fortune), Barbet Schroeder is mercilessly unblinking. He delves into the sundry with such a dedicated nihilism that it makes the horror of his situations palatable somehow. The same kind of thing Cronenberg does with grotesquery, Schroeder does with atrocity: we are led behind the curtain to where the real ugliness lies with a casual air that defuses sensationalism and murders prurience through protagonists–at least the best ones (Charles Bukowski, Idi Amin, Claus von Bulow)–drawn from the insipid impiety of real life. That’s perhaps the source of my discomfort with the anti-hero of Our Lady of the Assassins (La virgen de los sicarios“), an only semi-autobiographical writer first brought to life in Fernando Vallejo’s 1994 novel of the same name and now embodied in the lanky frame of Latin actor Germán Jaramillo. He is an existentialist philosopher torn by the eternal conflict between passion for life and passion for destruction, but he has no grounding in the mundane that would make the character something more than a wandering gadfly. If Vallejo, a jaded chronicler of a train-wreck who has no connection to the evolving horror, is the projection of a first-world consciousness observing the travails of a disintegrating third world, the greatest irony of the failure and success of the film is in its own triumphant disconnection.

Happy Accidents (2001)

October 5, 2001Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Romance, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Time Travel

**/****
starring Marisa Tomei, Vincent D’Onofrio, Nadia Dajani, Holland Taylor
written and directed by Brad Anderson

by Walter Chaw Too long by at least the length of an unwelcome framing device and an expert but superfluous performance by Holland Taylor as a therapist, Brad Anderson’s Happy Accidents is invested in the 16th-century ideal that Love is the abeyance of Entropy, in the idea that true romantic bliss is the key to staving off chaos in a world eternally falling into it. The phenomena of time flying when one’s having fun is spoken of early in the film as a scientific verity rather than as a cozy homily, and Happy Accidents is likewise best defined as a familiar love story stretched to justify old Heinlein and Wells pulp. A series of still-photograph interludes recalling Chris Marker’s La Jetée are handled with skill and a surprising poignancy but give too much away as to the ultimate resolution of the film to those familiar with the experimental French short.

Driven (2001) – DVD

September 26, 2001Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Sports, Stallone

*/**** Image A- Sound A Extras A
starring Sylvester Stallone, Burt Reynolds, Kip Pardue, Til Schweiger
screenplay by Sylvester Stallone
directed by Renny Harlin

by Walter Chaw A homoerotic cock-opera showing the sad and pathetic multiplicity of forms that mid-life crises can take, Driven, Renny Harlin’s ode to thick necks and macho poses, is more “programmed” than “directed.” The film resembles a particularly irritating and impenetrable video game juxtaposed with pages torn from the jug-heavy EASY RIDER magazine and scenes paraded out of the Big Book of Movie Clichés, all performed by a cast that provides a definitive example of the way “legendary” can be used in a derisive sense.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1992) – DVD

September 26, 2001Posted in1990s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD, Horror, Vampire

*/**** Image D+ Sound D
starring Kristy Swanson, Donald Sutherland, Paul Reubens, Rutger Hauer
screenplay by Joss Whedon
directed by Fran Rubel Kuzui

by Walter Chaw Constrained by, among other things, what writer/creator Joss Whedon calls Donald Sutherland’s reprehensible attitude and script tampering plus director Fran Rubel Kuzui’s inability to stand up to the veteran thespian, Buffy the Vampire Slayer is a slog through the underbelly of cinematic dredge that feels at least twice as long as its 86 minutes. The most stunning thing about this horror-comedy is that the TV series spun from it is very possibly among the top ten shows in regards to quality of writing, performance, and level of intelligence, of the past decade.

Glitter (2001)

September 26, 2001Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Music, Romance, Theatrical, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Mariah Carey, Max Beesley, Eric Benet, Vondie Curtis Hall
screenplay by Kate Lanier and John Wilder
directed by Vondie Curtis Hall

Glitterby Walter Chaw About halfway through Glitter’s bloated running time (105 minutes of unique hell), a foreign video director sagely complains: “The glitter can’t overpower the artist!” The two problems with Glitter are that the glitter does overpower the artist, and that the glitter itself is preposterous, dreary, and dull. Billie (Mariah Carey) is enlisted as the backup singer for an entirely talentless woman, and her voice is hijacked in a Singin’ in the Rain intrigue, natch. But even as I was resigning myself to a customary “VH1 Movies That Rock” piece of dreck about the girl singing behind the curtain getting rewarded for her saintliness on the opening night of a national tour, Dice the DJ (Max Beesley) swoops in and makes Glitter an interracial version of screenwriter Kate Lanier’s own What’s Love Got To Do With It?. Only Glitter‘s Ike is a pretty nice guy, despite his jealousy/management problems, and this Tina is as expressive as a person on a horse’s ration of Thorazine. When Billie told Dice, after some very chaste lovemaking, that she has trouble trusting people, I whispered to the screen, “Honey, you probably shouldn’t start at a guy named ‘Dice’ who sports a large gold pendant that says ‘DICE.'”

The Great L.I.E.: FFC Interviews Stephen Ryder

September 22, 2001Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Interviews

GreatlieSeptember 22, 2001|Stephen Ryder's voice is forceful and worn in the way of a man who has a lot of stories and knows that the stories are good ones. A published poet, a professor of dialogue and writing at NYU, and a former police officer and journalist nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for Op/Ed in 1976, he is a magnetic personality and a graceful speaker: careful not to interrupt and catching one off guard with an incisive question born of his experience as a professional interrogator. Mr. Ryder's new film L.I.E. bristles with a brittle reality balanced against a deep scholarly vein that is surprising only until you speak with the man. Also generous with his time, Mr. Ryder sat down with Film Freak Central recently to share some of his thoughts on his movie, Jack Valenti and the M.P.A.A., and Walt Whitman.

13 Ghosts (1960) – DVD

September 15, 2001Posted in1960s, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD, Horror, Mystery

*½/**** Image A Sound C Extras C
starring Charles Herbert, Jo Morrow, Martin Milner, Rosemary De Camp
screenplay by Robb White
directed by William Castle

by Walter Chaw 13 Ghosts, showman director William Castle’s gimmicky follow-up to his most infamous film The Tingler, is slow-paced hokum that gives lie to the belief that the horror movies of yesteryear are very much better than those of today. Between awful acting, a terrible screenplay by celebrated kiddie author and long-time Castle collaborator Robb White, and direction from Castle that alternates between plodding and ridiculous, 13 Ghosts is a good deal of fun in spite of itself. It is a prime candidate for a “Mystery Science Theater” treatment and best enjoyed with the quick-witted or the inebriated.

Together (2000)

September 14, 2001Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Denmark, Drama, Italy, Romance, Sweden, Theatrical

Tillsammans
**/****
starring Lisa Lindgren, Michael Nyqvist, Emma Samuelsson, Sam Kessel
written and directed by Lukas Moodysson

by Walter Chaw A cross between Lars von Trier’s The Idiots and an irritating home video made by flower children, Swedish phenom Lukas Moodysson’s Together (Tillsammans) is an aggressively affable, ultimately simplistic film that displays almost nothing in the way of the craft or sensitivity of an Ingmar Bergman, his mentor in spirit and most vocal supporter. It is a film that defies criticism by beating critics to the punch: “These people are unlikable hypocritical idiots? My point exactly,” says Moodysson. “It’s filmed with almost no knowledge of even the basics of filmmaking? What better way to show the rawness of real life?” But I don’t buy it, not when we’re eternally two steps ahead of the gutless screenplay and consistently pulled from the drama by the same repetitive series of establishing zooms and shaky framing. Tillsammans looks as bad as any Dogme 95 film.

Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975)

September 14, 2001Posted in1970s, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Satire, Theatrical, UK

***/****
starring Monty Python
screenplay by Graham Chapman & John Cleese & Terry Gilliam & Eric Idle & Terry Jones & Michael Palin
directed by Terry Gilliam, Terry Jones

by Walter Chaw Comprising Terry Jones, Terry Gilliam, Michael Palin, John Cleese, Eric Idle, and Graham Chapman, the comedy troupe Monty Python had as their stock in trade the dialogue-dense, mildly absurdist short-form sketch. To that extent, Monty Python and the Holy Grail is a series of comedic skits and improvisations bound loosely–very loosely–by the contention that this merry sextet of Britons is attempting to tell the Arthur myth without the aid of budget, plot, or accuracy. All of them are classically educated, and the film seems to be a giant flip of the nose at the pretension of the British literary tradition. In the act of being such, it nearly becomes the best telling of the Grail legend available. Monty Python and the Holy Grail is a satire that instructs with its informed irreverence, a piece that knows the rules before it breaks them and has shown itself over the course of 26 years to be almost as immediate and hilarious as it was upon initial release.

The Goonies (1985) – DVD

September 13, 2001Posted in1980s, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD, Family, Spielberg

*/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
starring Sean Astin, Josh Brolin, Corey Feldman, Kerri Green
screenplay by Chris Columbus
directed by Richard Donner

by Walter Chaw I went to see The Goonies at the age of twelve because I was a Cyndi Lauper fan. As co-star Ke Huy-Quan (now “Jonathan Ke Quan”) hammed it up, I glimpsed the torments of my upcoming sixth-grade year. See, Quan in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom doomed me to being called “Short Round” for several months, accompanied by Pidgin English recreations of choice line readings (“You caw heem Meesta Jones, Doll!”)–which was admittedly better than the “Wassa happenin’ hot stuff?” jibes inspired by Gedde Watanabe’s legendary act of race betrayal as Long Duk Dong in John Hughes’s execrable Sixteen Candles.

The Musketeer (2001)

September 7, 2001Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Germany, Luxembourg, Romance, Theatrical, UK

ZERO STARS/****
starring Justin Chambers, Catherine Deneuve, Mena Suvari, Stephen Rea
screenplay by Gene Quintano
directed by Peter Hyams

by Walter Chaw There is a moment in the trailer for Peter Hyams’s absolutely abominable The Musketeer where a series of scenes are edited in such a way as to suggest that Justin Chambers’s dashing D’Artagnan is promising stunned-looking waif Francesca (Mena Suvari) he will return for her. In the film, in truth, D’Artagnan makes the promise to his fallen horse (it’s an easy mistake to make). I mention this to right an injustice, for the great beast lying there frothing in all its exhausted equine glory turns in what is easily the best performance of the whole catastrophe. I felt a lot of sympathy for that poor steed, the only character in the film with which I had even a moment’s identification: we’d both been ridden hard and put away wet.

Two Can Play That Game (2001)

September 7, 2001Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Romance, Theatrical

*½/****
starring Vivica A. Fox, Morris Chestnut, Anthony Anderson, Gabrielle Union
written and directed by Mark Brown

by Walter Chaw I suspect that the preponderance of advertising executive characters in romantic films nowadays (What Women Want, Sweet November) is a misguided attempt to justify excessive product placement. There can be no other explanation for the blatant shilling of Coca-Cola and Miller Genuine Draft in Mark Brown’s smarmy, derivative Two Can Play That Game, a film not otherwise about soft drinks and cheap American beer that is festooned with more conspicuous logos than a NASCAR driver. The impression that the movie is little more than a naughty-talking, 90-minute commercial for cool refreshments and prehistoric gender stereotypes is enhanced by characters who keep breaking the fourth wall to address the camera directly.

Link (1986) – DVD

August 28, 2001Posted in1980s, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD, Horror, Thriller, UK, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/**** Image C+ Sound D+
starring Elisabeth Shue, Terence Stamp, Steven Pinner, Richard Garnett
screenplay by Everett De Roche
directed by Richard Franklin

by Walter Chaw A movie about a murderous orangutan and its bimbo prey being thrust together in a series of increasingly moronic scenarios, Richard Franklin’s excruciating Link is defined by a shot of a computer monitor testing the ability of chimpanzees–and Elisabeth Shue–to identify coloured shapes. (Shue wins, but barely.) The monitor reads: “IQ 43.” I’m afraid that of the three (Franklin, Shue, and the monkey), the only one to whom this number is not being generous is the chimp.

15 Minutes (2001) [Infinifilm] – DVD

August 26, 2001Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, DVD, Germany, Thriller

*½/**** Image A Sound A Extras A-
starring Robert De Niro, Edward Burns, Kelsey Grammer, Avery Brooks
written and directed by John Herzfeld

by Walter Chaw There’s a thing that happens about an hour into John Herzfeld’s 15 Minutes that is as bald and shameless a foreshadowing device as any in the tired pantheon of movie-groaners. It’s as bad as telling someone that you’ll marry them just as soon as you get back from this trip to Africa; as bad as showing the guys a picture of your corn-fed sweetie right before you charge that machine gun embankment. It is a moment of stunning conventionality in the middle of a film that is otherwise engaging and, for a moment or two, even shocking and provocative. 15 Minutes is defined by this scene in a great many ways: It’s a Hollywood film struggling with a controversial topic that finds a comfort zone in a script that tries to soften some images by obfuscation and others by a timidity that ultimately undermines its subject. The last time a big-budget picture tried to tackle a media culture involved in exploitation of the darkest crannies of the human heart was Joel Schumacher’s reprehensible and simpering 8MM. Sharing that film’s ignominious demise at the box office, it can be no real surprise that 15 Minutes is almost as repugnantly apple-polishing an experience.

The Last Warrior (2000) – DVD

August 26, 2001Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Sci-Fi, Thriller

The Last Patrol
½*/**** Image B Sound C-
starring Dolph Lundgren, Sherri Alexander, Joe Michael Burke, Rebecca Cross
screenplay by Stephen J. Brackely and Pamela K. Long
directed by Sheldon Lettich

by Walter Chaw I thought I was following along with The Last Warrior pretty well until star Dolph Lundgren met up with a school bus full of “Fat Albert” extras, led by the mystical shaman cum flower child, Rainbow (Brook Susan Parker). Set in a post-a-quake-alyptic California, where the Golden state is an island hemmed in by ocean and crawling with loonies and mutants, our story follows a small band of military types who have established some sort of refuge in the desert. When Captain Nick Preston (Lundgren) reminisces about the before-time, in the long, long ago when he befriended Rainbow the hippie and her cute-costumed tribe of Cosby-style moppets, The Last Warrior goes from being an incomprehensible and dull bit of cheap-o nonsense to an incomprehensible and dull bit of cheap-o new age psychobabble nonsense. I consoled myself with the supposition that the flashback is meant to provide a Lilies in the Field moment of uplift and an “in” to the inevitable pyrotechnics of the final act, but when Rainbow reappears from nowhere at the conclusion and makes it rain by gibbering incoherently and dancing in a circle, I sort of gave up.

Extreme Limits (2001) – DVD

August 26, 2001Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD

Crash Point Zero
½*/**** Image D Sound C Extras B
starring Treat Williams, Hannes Jaenicke, John Beck, Susan Blakely
screenplay by Steve Latshaw
directed by Jay Andrews

by Walter Chaw Beginning with stock footage of mountain climbing and a wholly unexpected (and unwelcome) reference to Hudson Hawk, Extreme Limits (formerly Crash Point Zero) is a micro-budgeted neo-Corman knock-off that boasts of an admirably irresponsible body count and a script so ludicrous that, once it’s deadened your senses (after about five minutes), it actually gets sort of funny. In fact, I don’t remember the last time I’ve laughed as long and as well as when a man gets mauled by a grizzly that is obviously some poor schmo in a bear suit, pinwheeling his arms when he gets struck by a flashlight.