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.

Skeletons in the Closet (2001) – DVD

August 25, 2001Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, DVD, Mystery, Thriller

**/**** Image A Sound B Extras B
starring Treat Williams, Linda Hamilton, Jonathan Jackson, Gordon Clapp
screenplay by Donna Powers & Wayne Powers
directed by Wayne Powers

by Walter Chaw An example of the sort of generational paranoia film that cropped up following the flower-power strangeness of the late-Sixties, Skeletons in the Closet is a definite product of the post-Columbine cinematic zeitgeist: it all but demands a re-examination of our relationships with our disenfranchised youth. In a very real way, it plays as an interesting companion piece to McGehee and Siegel’s arthouse thriller The Deep End. Both are interested in how single parents deal with criminal delinquency (real or imagined) in their confused children, and both are showcases for actors who are either relatively unknown (Tilda Swinton in The Deep End), or sadly marginalized (Treat Williams).

L.I.E. (2001)

August 24, 2001Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Coming of Age, Crime, Drama, Theatrical

***½/****
starring Paul Franklin Dano, Billy Kay, Brian Cox, Bruce Altman
screenplay by Stephen M. Ryder and Michael Cuesta & Gerald Cuesta
directed by Michael Cuesta

by Walter Chaw A marriage of Harmony Korine and Larry Clark’s bleak suburban sensibilities and Michael Mann’s smooth visual sense, veteran commercial director Michael Cuesta’s debut film L.I.E. (“Long Island Expressway”) is a coming-of-age drama that includes a trio of knock-out performances, a gritty, wise screenplay, and directorial choices that are pitch perfect. It opens like Korine’s Gummo, with a child on an overpass and a voice-over providing brief backstory and mood. Like Gummo, L.I.E. betrays itself as a subversive literary piece: Korine’s work following the major tropes of John Keats’s Ode to a Grecian Urn and Cuesta’s film faithful to the philosophy and tone of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. Further, L.I.E. sets itself up as one of the most technically accomplished (and restrained) members of the dissident teen social genre, lending a direct thematic explication to the generational paranoia subtexts of 1970s cinema paid visual tribute by Korine/Clark and Todd Solondz.

Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back (2001)

August 24, 2001Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Road Movie, Satire, Theatrical

**/****
starring Jason Mewes, Kevin Smith, Jason Lee, Chris Rock
written and directed by Kevin Smith

by Walter Chaw Self-referential and self-satisfied, Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back is a continual stream of grotesque sexual references, leering at scantily clad, foul-mouthed women, and enough broad swipes at mainstream cinema (while featuring a parade of celebrity cameos) that it ends up being a cross between “Beavis and Butthead”, Cecil B. Demented, and a Bob Hope Christmas special, not to mention an endurance test. It is, in other words, exactly the kind of film that Jay and Silent Bob would make if they were real and given fifteen million dollars to hock their adventures in arrested development to fawning fans, as well as the other 99% of the world.

All Over the Guy (2001)

August 23, 2001Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Romance, Theatrical

**/****
starring Dan Bucatinsky, Richard Ruccolo, Adam Goldberg, Sasha Alexander
screenplay by Dan Bucatinsky
directed by Julie Davis

Allovertheguyby Walter Chaw Produced by Don Roos, the man behind the intelligent interpersonal dynamics of Bounce and The Opposite of Sex, Julie Davis’s film All Over the Guy is based on a Dan Bucatinsky one-act stage play, and it never quite breaks free of its theatrical roots. All Over the Guy is a rapid-fire, talk-driven, inverted sitcom that promotes gay friends to the forefront and pushes their hetero pals into the background–a film that admirably attempts to demystify a homosexual relationship by taking parts originally written for a man and a woman and giving them to two men. Ironically, in attacking the stereotypes reserved for the homosexual community, it endorses the stereotypes of the light romantic comedy, making All Over the Guy the first gay-themed indie as predictable and unlikely as any soupy Nora Ephron fantasy.

When Dinosaurs Roamed America (2001) – DVD

August 23, 2001Posted in2000s, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Documentary, DVD, Television

***/**** Image A Sound B+ Extras C-
narrated by John Goodman
written by Georgann Kane
directed by Pierre de Lespinois

by Walter Chaw A co-production of the Discovery Channel that originally aired there, When Dinosaurs Roamed America is a computer-generated simulation of dinosaurs in their habitat, interacting like lions and elephants on an African savannah. It is narrated with homey warmth by John Goodman and interrupted now and again by paleontologists, who present the most recent information available on the beasts portrayed. A hi-tech bit of necromancy, When Dinosaurs Roamed America is consistently fascinating; the fact that all of the information and images presented are highly theoretical and possibly already outdated only distracts a little from the overall impact of the piece.

The Deep End (2001)

August 21, 2001Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, Mystery, Romance, Theatrical, Thriller

**/****
starring Tilda Swinton, Goran Visnjic, Jonathan Tucker, Peter Donat
screenplay by Scott McGehee & David Siegel, based on the short story “The Blank Wall” by Elisabeth Sanxay Holding
directed by McGehee & Siegel

by Walter Chaw There is a moment at the very beginning of Scott McGehee and David Siegel’s The Deep End wherein our maternal heroine Margaret Hall (Tilda Swinton) fills in a crossword puzzle line with “glacier.” It is an early clue to Margaret’s glacial temperament, the cool blue colour suffusions that dominate the film’s lighting schemes, and, unfortunately, the feeling of icy detachment one experiences during the course of the film. The Deep End is neither a noir nor a Hitchcockian thriller, but rather a somewhat conventional, vaguely derivative Mildred Pierce-ian estrogen melodrama that plays a lot like a Lifetime bodice-ripper written by David Mamet. It is essentially a lifeless version of Blood Simple, complete with misunderstandings, extortion, and a hide-the-corpse intrigue inspired by the urge to protect a loved one. Not to say The Deep End is a bad film, exactly, rather it’s a forgettable one that is remarkable only for its almost complete lack of distinction.

Dead Simple (2000) – DVD

August 20, 2001Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, Crime, Drama, DVD, Music

Viva Las Nowhere
**/**** Image B+ Sound B Extras B
starring Daniel Stern, Patricia Richardson, Lacey Kohl, Sherry Stringfield
screenplay by Richard Uhlig and Steven Seitz
directed by Jason Bloom

by Walter Chaw A bizarre cross between Psycho, Something Wild and Tender Mercies, Jason Bloom’s Dead Simple is one of those derivatively named direct-to-video productions that attempts the black comedy genre with a reasonable amount of aplomb and wide-eyed enthusiasm. It’s a Very Bad Things farce of escalating atrocities, and though Dead Simple never achieves the kind of sustained comic brilliance and continual nastiness of that movie, it does manage a few edged moments and keen performances from a cast that includes legendary bug-eyed hambones Daniel Stern and James Caan.

The Trumpet of the Swan (2001) – DVD

August 20, 2001Posted in2000s, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Family, India, Musical, South Korea

½*/**** Image C Sound C Extras C
starring Jason Alexander, Mary Steenburgen, Reese Witherspoon, Seth Green
screenplay by Judy Rothman Rofe, based on the book by E.B. White
directed by Richard Rich, Terry L. Noss

by Walter Chaw Gracelessly-animated, unevenly voice-acted, and so carelessly told that it’s often unintentionally disturbing (our human hero fries eggs for breakfast when he meets our swan hero), Rich-Crest Animation’s The Trumpet of the Swan is an embarrassing cut-rate cartoon based on E.B. White’s melancholy 1970 novel. It strips White’s wonderful prose to its base essentials, inserts vulgar slapstick involving a skunk, a jive-turkey squirrel, and an aborted Graduate intrigue, and opens with an off-putting and borderline tasteless Lamaze egg-birthing prologue. Its catalogue of atrocity is so variegated and pungent that to list them all would be more effort than has in fact gone into the film’s production. Absolutely the only saving grace for this slack entertainment is its modest length–which, at a brisk 75 minutes, still plays like a film twice as long.

Bread and Tulips (2000)

August 16, 2001Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Italy, Romance, Switzerland, Theatrical

Pane e tulipani
**/****
starring Felice Andreasi, Vitalba Andrea, Tatiana Lepore, Ludovico Paladin
screenplay by Silvio Soldini & Doriana Leondeff
directed by Silvio Soldini

Breadandtulipsby Walter Chaw There are great chunks missing from Bread and Tulips, story transitions that appear inconsequential until one finds them neglected. An action is announced and several scenes later we are left to presume that the action has been performed; an event occurs and several scenes later we give up waiting for the reaction. Nowhere is that discrepancy more jarring than at the conclusion, when our heroine is spirited away from her family and loved ones and deposited in the middle of a different movie. There is a considerable problem with a film that insists on holding your hand through score or ham-handed direction; on the flipside, there is a considerable problem with one that discards basic narrative cohesion in favour of a calculated whimsy. A film like Bread and Tulips.

Apocalypse Now Redux (1979/2001)

August 16, 2001Posted in****/****, 1970s, 2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: Francis Ford Coppola, Drama, Mystery, Palme d'Or Winner, Theatrical, War

Apocalypse Now
****/****
starring Marlon Brando, Robert Duvall, Martin Sheen, Frederic Forrest
screenplay by John Milius and Francis Coppola, narration by Michael Herr
directed by Francis Coppola

by Walter Chaw Taking his cue from Orson Welles’s aborted screen translation of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now sought to transplant Marlow’s journey down the Congo in pursuit of mad ivory trader Kurtz to Vietnam during the war. America’s involvement in Southeast Asia is, of course, a good fit with what Conrad calls “one of the dark places of the world,” and Apocalypse Now, easily one of the most literary big-budget blockbusters of the modern era, is utterly faithful to the intellectual and visceral impact of Conrad’s vision. Apocalypse Now is so overheated and pretentious, in fact, that the best way to explain its thematic core might be through an examination of the ways it uses three T.S. Eliot poems (The Wasteland, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, The Hollow Men) and nods obliquely towards a fourth (The Dry Salvages, which refers to the animalism of rivers as the “brown god”).

The Black Cat (1981) – DVD

August 16, 2001Posted in1980s, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD, Horror, Italy

Gatto nero
*/**** Image C+ Sound B
starring Patrick Magee, Mimsy Farmer, David Warbeck, Al Cliver
screenplay by Lucio Fulci, Biagio Proietti, Sergio Salvati
directed by Lucio Fulci

by Walter Chaw Ostensibly based on Edgar Allan Poe’s short story of the same name, Lucio Fulci’s The Black Cat is actually more akin to John Wyndham’s The Midwich Cuckoos (brought to film twice under the name Village of the Damned), with the titular feline taking the place of the telepathic tykes of Wyndham’s apocalyptic fable. Like the children of Wyndham’s tale, the evil cat is a physical by-product of the Freudian id, in this case a creature/familiar that, predictably, runs amuck. Fans of the “Godfather of Gore,” Lucio Fulci, and the Italian horror genre (and specifically the giallo sub-genre of the same) will doubtless be disappointed in what amounts to be a staid amalgam of lurid Hammer Studios plots and settings. Patrick Magee’s performance as the human counterpart to the evil pussycat constitutes the best reason to see an otherwise lifeless gothic horror film. A role Vincent Price or Christopher Plummer would have played once, Magee is appropriately fervent and pitched to campy perfection.

The Others (2001)

August 12, 2001Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, France, Horror, Italy, Mystery, Spain, Theatrical, Thriller

***½/****
starring Nicole Kidman, Elaine Cassidy, Christopher Eccleston, Fionnula Flanagan
written and directed by Alejandro Amenábar

by Walter Chaw The Others is an intricate character drama that takes turns shifting its suspicions on any number of scenarios and suspects. It subtly considers each of its small troupe of players as alternately worthy of mistrust, and its fantastic cast is more than equal to director Alejandro Amenábar’s quiet attributions of innocence and diabolical attributions of wickedness. Throughout, Amenábar maintains the unnerving possibility that, despite the spectre of a hoax or a plot ever-looming in the sometimes-inexplicable actions of one or more of its characters, something paranormal might, in fact, be at work.

Mimic 2 (2001) – DVD

August 8, 2001Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD, Horror, Sci-Fi, Thriller

*½/**** Image A Sound A Extras A+
starring Alix Koromzay, Bruno Campos, Jon Polito, Edward Albert
screenplay by Joel Soisson
directed by Jean De Segonzac

by Walter Chaw The direct-to-video Mimic 2 abandons the B-movie brilliance of its predecessor in favour of such lacklustre slasher movie conventions as an inexorable monster and a cast of disposable victims. It introduces an inexplicable sexual punishment/revenge theme, a resourceful scream queen, the “surprise” ability of the villain to withstand bullets/beheading/burning for one last scare, and a closed environment consisting all of ill-lit halls and basements. Consequently, as Mimic 2 reveals itself to be more of a slasher flick than a monster movie, it honours repetition-honed slasher sequel conventions: the body count escalates, the gore and blood increases, the time the creatures spend on-screen mounts, and the characteristics of the bad guy/s evolve. Sadly, the only things this film really has in common with the original are similar creature effects and the return of the least memorable supporting character, now in the lead role.

Greenfingers (2001)

August 7, 2001Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Romance, Theatrical, UK

*/****
starring Clive Owen, Helen Mirren, David Kelly, Natasha Little
written and directed by Joel Hershman

by Walter Chaw A disturbingly optimistic (and particularly unlikely) redemption fable from Britain that marries the bare blue-collar buttocks of The Full Monty with the spunky seniors of Waking Ned Devine and Saving Grace, Joel Hershman’s Greenfingers is less “inspired by a true story,” as its title cards suggest, than it is “slavishly devoted to formula.” Greenfingers is so entrenched in provincialism that it encourages American audiences to chuckle knowingly at the staid peculiarities of the English–and so dedicated to soft-pedalling dangerous criminals that it reveals itself as preachy and pernicious. It is the type of film that treats anyone with the audacity to question the wisdom of allowing murderers and rapists to serve out their sentences with no guards around and in the company of young women driving Rolls-Royces as the worst kind of close-minded fascist. By the twentieth time its simpleminded mantra (bringing a life into the world instead of taking one can change a hardened heart) is summoned literally and imagistically, culminating in a grotesque effigy of a fallen friend posed in the middle of an indistinct tableau, Greenfingers has lost all power to instruct and become something at once odious and unintentionally funny.

The Wicker Man (1973) [Limited Edition] – DVD

August 7, 2001Posted in1970s, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD, Horror, Mystery, UK

Anthony Shaffer’s The Wicker Man
***½/**** Image B+ (Theatrical)/C (Extended) Sound C Extras A
starring Edward Woodward, Christopher Lee, Diane Cilento, Britt Ekland
screenplay by Anthony Shaffer
directed by Robin Hardy

by Walter Chaw Early in The Wicker Man, poor Sergeant Howie of the West Highland Police shows the picture of a missing lass to a gaggle of locals on remote Summerisle Island. As he turns away, having received no information of value, the camera crops his head off. Later, during a pagan May Day festival, Sergeant Howie nearly gets his head cut off again, this time by six swords forming an interlaced sun symbol. The loss of the head represents castration (Sergeant Howie is shown to be impotent from the start), one of literally dozens of symbols both overt and subtle employed in this unique and brilliant genre film.

Sweet November (2001) – DVD

August 6, 2001Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Romance, ZERO STARS

Sweetnovember

ZERO STARS/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras D
starring Keanu Reeves, Charlize Theron, Jason Isaacs, Greg Germann
screenplay by Kurt Voelker, based on the 1968 screenplay by Herman Raucher
directed by Pat O’Connor

by Walter Chaw After Sara Deever (Charlize Theron) and the horribly named Nelson Moss (Keanu Reeves) meet-cute during a test at the DMV, Nelson offers to pay all of Sara’s expenses for a month to compensate for his part in her failure to have her license renewed. Indignant, Sara wonders aloud if Nelson treats all women like hookers. Hippie chick Sara, by the way, has no visible means of support, lives in a giant apartment in San Francisco, and bangs a different rich man for a month every month in some kind of Bull Durham sexual scholarship lottery arrangement. I can only assume that Sara’s specious offense at Norman’s innocuous “implication” is that she’s amazed that it shows.

The House by the Cemetery (1981) – DVD

August 6, 2001Posted in1980s, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD, Horror, Italy

*½/**** Image B+ Sound B
starring Catriona MacColl, Paolo Malco, Ania Pieroni, Giovanni Frezza
screenplay by Lucio Fulci, Giorgio Mariuzzo, Dardano Sacchetti
directed by Lucio Fulci

by Walter Chaw Released in 1981, the same year as his superior The Beyond, Lucio Fulci's The House by the Cemetery is an unintentionally hilarious film that nonetheless manages to provide a few cringe-worthy gore showcases on its way to collapsing in on its own shaky foundation. The score, by Walter Rizzati, is an entirely inappropriate homage to the melodramatic histrionics of Hanna-Barbera's "Scooby-Doo" organ flourishes, and the horrifically bad dubbing only goes partway towards explaining the awfulness of the acting and the pointlessly gimmicky direction. The only time that The House by the Cemetery is something other than an alien soap opera, in fact, is when Fulci does what Fulci does best: leer at Gino De Rossi's (Cannibal Ferox) superbly discomfiting make-up effects.