Kate & Leopold (2001)

Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Romance, Theatrical, Time Travel

**½/****
starring Meg Ryan, Hugh Jackman, Liev Schreiber, Breckin Meyer
screenplay by James Mangold and Steven Rogers
directed by James Mangold

by Walter Chaw That the consistently grating Meg Ryan, now milking her second decade as a suspect princess of perk, stars in yet another variation on the When Harry Met Sally, “opposites in love against all odds” scenario augers ill, to be certain. But Kate & Leopold is a decent addition to the beleaguered and overcrowded romantic comedy genre (think Somewhere in Time meets Splash); look for an explanation in James Mangold’s steady direction, the clever, deconstructive screenplay he wrote with Steven Rogers, and a rock-steady performance by Hugh Jackman that is confident and unembarrassed.

Evolution (2001) [Widescreen] – DVD

Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD, Sci-Fi

½*/**** Image A- Sound A Extras C+
starring David Duchovny, Julianne Moore, Orlando Jones, Seann William Scott
screenplay by David Diamond & David Weissman and Don Jakoby
directed by Ivan Reitman

by Walter Chaw Ira Kane (David Duchovny) is a science teacher at a community college in Arizona. Not biology, not chemistry, not physics, but “science.” Uh-huh. His friend at the college is Harry Block (Orlando Jones), an honorary member of the United States Geological Society (not to be confused with the United States Geological Survey). When a meteorite smashes into Earth, totalling the vintage ’73 Riviera of complete moron Wayne (complete moron specialist Seann William Scott, late of Dude, Where’s My Car?), of course Harry and Ira are called in to collect “scientific” samples in the name of…um…”science.”

Osmosis Jones (2001) – DVD

Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Family

**½/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B
starring Bill Murray, Molly Shannon, Elena Franklin, Chris Elliott
screenplay by Marc Hyman
directed by Bobby Farrelly, Peter Farrelly, Piet Kroon and Tom Sito

by Walter Chaw If the devil is in the details, so, in Osmosis Jones, is most of the humour. It is one part Farrelly Brothers biological comedy and one part Piet Kroon and Tom Sito (late of The Iron Giant) animated genius; that the balance of the film is heavily in favour of the latter speaks to rare good thinkin’ from the Hollywood brain trust. The live-action part stars Bill Murray as the slovenly Frank–Murray out-repulses co-star Chris Elliot, which means that he is very possibly the most disgusting human ever captured on film. The animation side features the voice of Chris Rock as the titular Osmosis Jones, a white blood cell cop who, after a controversial stomach evacuation, is busted down to mouth duty. If you’re not sure what “mouth duty” entails–it’s bad. When Frank is invaded by an evil virus named Thrax (Laurence Fishburne), Osmosis gets one last chance to make good, paired with a blustering blunderbuss of a timed flu capsule named Drix (David Hyde Pierce).

Intimacy (2001)

Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, France, Germany, Romance, Spain, Theatrical, UK

**½/****
starring Mark Rylance, Kerry Fox, Susannah Harker, Timothy Spall
screenplay by Patrice Chéreau, Hanif Kureishi, Anne-Louise Trividic
directed by Patrice Chéreau

Intimacyby Walter Chaw Jay (Mark Rylance) is a sour bar manager who, six years previous, walked out on his wife and two young boys. Claire (Kerry Fox) is a dour acting teacher and mother of one married to an oafish Cockney cabbie (Andy, played by Timothy Spall like the refugee from a Mike Leigh film he is). Every Wednesday at two in the afternoon, Jay and Claire couple in Jay’s austere, unfurnished flat. As a homosexual French bartender–the too-awkward representation of uninhibited sagacity–helpfully supplies, “It’s rare that two people meet one another who have the same needs.” But Jay appears to have needs different from Claire’s: Trailing her after they rendezvous, he watches her as she drops off her dry-cleaning, takes public transportation, and finally ends up at a hole-in-the-wall drama company to perform badly in a Tennessee Williams revival. Striking up a mine-strewn conversation with his lover’s husband over pints of bitter and a game of billiards, Intimacy seismically shifts from one powerful cinematic symbol (sex) to another (theatre), and in so doing demonstrates a remarkable courage in its nakedness; and an exasperating lack of focus in its thrust.

The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001)

Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Fantasy, Theatrical

***½/****
starring Elijah Wood, Ian McKellen, Viggo Mortensen, Sean Astin
screenplay by Fran Walsh & Philippa Boyens & Peter Jackson, based on the novel The Fellowship of the Ring by J.R.R. Tolkien
directed by Peter Jackson

Fellowshipoftheringby Walter Chaw At the heart of Peter Jackson’s brilliant The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring–the first of three cinematic adaptations of Tolkien’s beloved fantasy, shot simultaneously for release in consecutive years–is a favourable melancholy, a despair born of two things: the crucial feeling of desperation that infests a small band of heroes striving against an invincible evil; and the knowledge that this film will soon end, its sequel twelve months away. Jackson has translated nearly every element of Tolkien’s universe, from a vast, sprawling history implied in the language and the actions of its multi-specied characters, to a completely immersive fantasy realm with nary a seam to spoil the illusion, to a quest that’s worthy of epic attention. He’s captured the sadness and moral weight of Tolkien with the kind of deep reality that seems effortless but is born of a meticulous preparation and all-consuming vision. It takes a certain skill to make things look good; it takes genius to keep the pretty pictures from overwhelming the narrative of what is, in this case, a universally familiar story. Ridley Scott never quite got the hang of it.

Backyard Dogs (2000) – DVD

Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD, Sports, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/**** Image B Sound C
starring Scott Hamm, Bree Turner, Walter Emanuel Jones, Roger Fan
written and directed by Robert Boris

by Walter Chaw A painfully amateurish reworking of Play It to the Bone set against the turgid, redneck world of backyard wrestling, Robert Boris’s Backyard Dogs is the kind of head-scratcher that makes filmmakers of folks who never realized that making a movie was this easy. See, using the template provided, all you need is a digital camera, a bimbo who doesn’t mind flashing the groceries a couple of times, and a rent-a-script that shows how an already terrible mainstream film might actually be made worse with a little effort. Backyard Dogs is so hideous that with only a little imagination it begins to function as something of a satire of both Kickboxer-type death sports movies and gay pornography. You know you’re in trouble when the highlight of your film is an opening montage comprising real footage of idiots trying to kill one another in their backyards; you know you’re in bigger trouble when the title of your movie comes from an early moment in which a character steps on a pile of dog excrement.

Children of the Living Dead (2001) – DVD

Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD, Horror, Thriller, ZERO STARS, Zombie

ZERO STARS/**** Image D Sound C-
starring Tom Savini, Martin Schiff, Damien Luvara, Jamie McCoy
screenplay by Karen Lee Wolf
directed by Tor A. Ramsey

by Walter Chaw With the appearance of having been shot over a long weekend in someone’s backyard, Children of the Living Dead is a cynical attempt to cash in on George Romero’s zombie trilogy (and The Blair Witch Project) so stale and amateurish that it qualifies as a barely-releasable embarrassment to everyone involved, including gore-legend Tom Savini, who seems to have hit rock bottom in his extended cameo. The film starts just outside of the old house from Romero’s seminal Night of the Living Dead, with rednecks potting zombies in a field–a scene already familiar to fans of Dawn of the Dead, but robbed of all pathos and dread–and continues on through a series of disconnected vignettes that neglect genre imperatives like gore, nudity, and fear plus narrative film prerequisites like story, acting, directing, and script. Children of the Living Dead doesn’t even offer any puerile thrills.

Along for the Ride (2001) – DVD

Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD, Germany, Romance, ZERO STARS

Forever Lulu
ZERO STARS/**** Image B- Sound B
starring Melanie Griffith, Patrick Swayze, Penelope Ann Miller, Joseph Gordon-Leavitt
written and directed by John Kaye

by Walter Chaw For as bad an actress as Melanie Griffith is (Night Moves and Another Day in Paradise notwithstanding), it’s not entirely her fault that John Kaye’s Forever Lulu (inexplicably renamed Along for the Ride for its DVD release) is unspeakably awful. True, her Betsy-Wetsy kewpie doll elocution and its attendant dead eyes–which wore out their welcome almost the second she trotted them out for an incredulous audience about twenty-six years ago–are in full-bore here, but what makes Along for the Ride, in which she plays the title role, so abominable are such exchanges as this one:

LULU
Did you know that sometimes I ask my pillow late at night, “How much sadness do I have to feel?” And did you know that love is the greatest painkiller and that Marilyn Monroe wore a mask of tragedy over her pubic hair?

CLAIRE
You’re right, I should go talk to Ben.

Jurassic Park III (2001) [Collector’s Edition – Widescreen] – DVD

Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD, Sci-Fi, Spielberg, Thriller

**/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Sam Neill, William H. Macy, Téa Leoni, Alessandro Nivola
screenplay by Peter Buchman and Alexander Payne & Jim Taylor
directed by Joe Johnston

by Walter Chaw Jurassic Park III is completely critic-proof, a smirking cash machine with its amplifiers turned up to “11.” That it happens to be an amazingly tight little film (every single element of its first half predicts a correlative in the second) doesn’t excuse its bratty attitude. If Jurassic Park III were the insolent snot-nosed little punk it most resembles, it’d be turning out its lower lip whilst jutting an insouciant chin at potential critics and naysayers: “Go ahead,” the pipsqueak would say, “hit me with your best shot.”

Okay, here goes.

Little Women (1933) – DVD

Posted in1930s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Family, Romance, War

**/**** Image B Sound C-
starring Katharine Hepburn, Joan Bennett, Paul Lukas, Edna May Oliver
screenplay by Sarah Y. Mason & Victor Heerman, based on the novel by Louisa May Alcott
directed by George Cukor

by Walter Chaw A scant six years after The Jazz Singer introduced talking to the motion picture, George Cukor’s Little Women came to the screen with the awkwardness of a foundling art form (silent-picture burlesque and stage melodrama) in tow. It’s extremely difficult to view the film unjaundiced by a modern opinion of performance, script, and direction: Although the adapted screenplay by Sarah Y. Mason and Victor Heerman won an Oscar that year, Little Women is impossibly dated and difficult to swallow. Part of the problem is the casting of actresses (each one at least a decade too old for her role), whose performances are such sweeping caricatures that it takes some effort to remind oneself that they were once acceptable simulacrums of reality.

Deep in the Woods (2000) – DVD

Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD, France, Horror, Thriller

Promenons-nous dans les bois
***½/**** Image A- Sound A (French) C (English) Extras D+
starring Francois Berleand, Denis Lavant, Michel Muller, Thibault Truffert
screenplay by Annabelle Perrichon
directed by Lionel Delplanque

by Walter Chaw The newest generation of young Gallic filmmakers is involved in reinvigorating many of the thriller’s forms: the hybrid, HK-influenced actioner (Brotherhood of the Wolf); the Cronenbergian investigation of parasitic identification (A Matter of Taste); and the Hitchcockian psychosexual wrong-man intrigue (Mortal Transfer). Perhaps inspired by countryman Luc Besson’s La Femme Nikita, and Leon (a.k.a. The Professional), the abovementioned movies are bathed in frosty blues and greens, filmed and edited with a smooth professionalism–the latest wave to wash through the French cinema is all about a carefully calibrated cool.

Rush Hour 2 (2002) [infinifilm] – DVD

Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, DVD, Hong Kong, Jackie Chan, Martial Arts, Mystery, Thriller

**/**** Image A+ Sound A- Extras A-
starring Jackie Chan, Chris Tucker, John Lone, Zhang Ziyi
screenplay by Jeff Nathanson
directed by Brett Ratner

by Walter Chaw For as long as Jackie Chan has been the logical heir to Buster Keaton’s crown, it becomes apparent during the course of Brett Ratner’s Rush Hour 2 that he may also be the heir to Peter Sellers’s Inspector Clouseau/Pink Panther crown. Blithely mixing the broad racial humour with the broad slapstick theatrics that typify Sellers and Blake Edwards’s classic comedies of criminal bad taste, Rush Hour 2 even makes time for a couple of bombshell secret agents, a brief and largely inexplicable interlude involving breasts rendering a man amusingly mute, and a cheerfully inept sidekick who gets in the stray kick now and again. The tenor, then, is dedicatedly light, and the humour is predictably free of cleverness–mostly involving Asians eating dogs and killing chickens, and African-Americans preferring their chickens fried and their karaoke with a heaping helping of Jacko gesticulations. That Rush Hour 2 (and the Pink Panther saga, for that matter) is often so genial in its cheap humour and gratifying in its physical exertions speaks to an almost universal desire to see people get a pie in the face while inelegantly breaking societal taboos. Rush Hour 2 never once aspires to anything other than formula fluff and never once descends into the dangerous realm of superlative entertainment. It is the prototypical summer film: loud, cheap, exploitive, and forgotten almost as soon as it’s over.

Wishmaster 3: Beyond the Gates of Hell (2001) – DVD

Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, DVD, Fantasy, Horror, Thriller

½*/**** Image A- Sound B- Extras A-
starring Jason Connery, A.J. Cook, Tobias Mehler, John Novak
screenplay by Alex Wright
directed by Chris Angel

by Walter Chaw The most interesting thing about the train wreck Wishmaster 3: Beyond the Gates of Hell is that it’s actually bookended by two car wrecks. The first is a dream our heroine Diana (A. J. Cook) has of her parents being killed in a collision for which she feels responsible; the second involves the Archangel Michael (Tobias Mehler, who also plays Diana’s boyfriend, Greg–don’t ask), for some reason incapable of freeing his ethereal self from a shoulder restraint without the intervention of the redemption-seeking Diana. Knowing that Wishmaster is a series of films dealing with an evil wish-granting Djinn, I had hope from the first accident that Wishmaster 3 would be an updating of W.W. Jacobs’s marvellous short story “The Monkey’s Paw”, with poor, bereaved Diana foolhardily resurrecting her deceased parents. By the time the second (literally) rolled around, I had hope only that the extreme suckitude of the film didn’t somehow damage my DVD player. Wishmaster 3 is simply abominable–a horror film free of fear and the two things that made the series worthwhile in the first place: genre writer Peter Atkins, absent since the first instalment, and Andrew Divoff as the titular bogey.

Dark Victory: FFC Interviews Jan Sverák

Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Czech Republic, Interviews

DarkvictoryNovember 18, 2001|When the communists invaded Czechoslovakia in 1968, it spelled the end for the Czech New Wave that had been led by such directors as Milos Forman, Ivan Passer, Věra Chytilová, and Jiří Menzel. The "great harvest" of Czech cinema peaked with The Shop on Main Street (Obchod na korze: Ján Kádár and Elmar Klos) (1965) and Closely Watched Trains (Ostře sledované vlaky: Jiří Menzel) (1966), both of which received Oscars for Best Foreign Language Film. Forman was nominated in this period for Loves of a Blonde (Lásky jedné plavovlásky) (1966) and Firemen's Ball (Hoří, má panenko) (1968), and would later be honoured by the Academy for his English language films One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and Amadeus. Ivan Passer's American-made Law and Disorder is one of the lost classics of the 1970s.

Jeepers Creepers (2001) [Special Edition] – DVD

Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD, Horror, Mystery

**½/**** Image B- Sound A- Extras A-
starring Gina Philips, Justin Long, Jonathan Breck, Patricia Belcher
written and directed by Victor Salva

by Walter Chaw Set on the rural highways and dirt byways of Anywhere, America during a long, hot summer, Victor Salva’s Jeepers Creepers is a film of two distinct halves–the first astonishingly good, the second derivative–drawn together by a finale that is both fair and surprising. It could have been much better overall had it isolated its sympathetic heroes in the middle of a Texas Chain Saw Massacre nightmare, and indeed, the parts of it that work best are those that most recall Tobe Hooper’s rustic nightmare. (Particularly the suddenness of the initial attack and the subsequent discovery of the beast’s abattoir lair.) Once policemen and bumpkins are introduced in a series of repetitive “I don’t believe your story–hey, why did the lights go out” scenarios, however, Jeepers Creepers, while retaining Salva’s indisputably cinematic eye, becomes something a good deal more predictable and consequently safer. The creation of a comfort zone halfway through is a terrible shame, not because it’s horrible in and of itself, but because for almost an hour, Jeepers Creepers holds great promise.

The Life and Times of Hank Greenberg (2000) – DVD

Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Documentary, DVD, Sports

**½/**** Image B Sound B- Extras A-
directed by Aviva Kempner

by Walter Chaw Thirteen years in the making, Aviva Kempner’s The Life and Times of Hank Greenberg is an exhaustive and affectionate, if tunnel-visioned, documentary about “the Jewish Jackie Robinson”: Detroit Tigers slugger Hank Greenberg, who broke cultural barriers during the anti-Semitic Father Coughlin/Henry Ford years, just prior to the onset of WWII. Towering over his teammates at 6’4″ and 210lbs, Greenberg became a stereotype-busting role model for an entire generation of Jewish youngsters and, unlike many of his modern athletic counterparts, Greenberg didn’t take his responsibility for granted.

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (2001)

Posted in2000s, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Family, Fantasy, Theatrical, UK

Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone
**/****
starring Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint, Emma Watson, John Cleese
screenplay by Steven Kloves, based on the novel by J.K. Rowling
directed by Chris Columbus

Harrypottersorcererby Walter Chaw There is such a dedicated lack of controversy and tension in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone that all of its benefit as a children’s fiction is lost to the machinery of Hollywood spectacle. Gone is the dread uncertainty, the persecution of a child because of parents or class, and any true appreciation of consequences in the various action scenarios that lockstep unfold to the strict dictates of the plot; it’s Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory without the candy. At a bloated 152 minutes, the film depends to a peculiar degree on our familiarity with J.K. Rowling’s outrageously popular series of books: it does little to establish the characters and has such a feeling of clockwork inevitability that it’s shocking when the finale comes and goes with almost nothing resembling purpose, much less resolution. Though it’s arguably faithful to the major movements of the book (thus satisfying a large population of its tyke fans until they begin to develop discretion), Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone suffers from what I like to call the “Wizard of Oz” malady: no brain, no heart, no courage.

Freddy Got Fingered (2001) – DVD

Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD, Esoterica

**½/**** Image A Sound B Extras A
starring Tom Green, Rip Torn, Marisa Coughlan, Eddie Kaye Thomas
screenplay by Tom Green & Derek Harvie
directed by Tom Green

by Walter Chaw Tom Green’s Freddy Got Fingered is the most startling debut since Luis Buñuel’s Un chien andalou, with which it has a few things in common: both are constructed with a wilful disdain towards narrative; both are aimed at the outer limits of shocking imagery; both display an open hostility for the cultural status quo; and both joke on their audience’s entrenched preconceptions of film form. Even more admirably seditious, Freddy Got Fingered, unlike Un chien andalou, was actually backed and released by a major studio. (It’s extremely instructive to read Roger Ebert’s review of Un chien andalou as the definitive piece on Freddy Got Fingered, though I suspect Ebert would object to that notion.) The crucial of many differences between the two films is that Buñuel and Salvador Dali’s experiment in inciting an audience was only seventeen minutes long while Freddy Got Fingered is an excruciating eighty-seven. That said, it is destined for instant cult status and eventual critical respect.

Guadalcanal Diary (1943) + Wing and a Prayer (1944) – DVDs

Posted in1940s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, War

GUADALCANAL DIARY
*/**** Image B Sound C+
starring Preston Foster, Lloyd Nolan, William Bendix, Richard Conte
screenplay by Jerry Cady, based on the book by Richard Tregaskis
directed by Lewis Seiler

Wing and a Prayer (The Story of Carrier X)
*½/**** Image B- Sound C+
starring Don Ameche, Dana Andrews, William Eythe, Charles Bickford
screenplay by Jerome Cady
directed by Henry Hathaway

by Walter Chaw Filmed just months after the actual invasion of Guadalcanal late in 1942 and based on Richard Tregaskis’s wildly popular (but excessively jingoistic and poorly-written) memoir of the same, Guadalcanal Diary is interesting for a glimpse at the Hollywood propaganda machine of WWII, if not for any other reason. With predictable inflammatory dialogue and plotting and broad burlesque performances by a gaggle of recognizable character actors in familiar stereotypes, Guadalcanal Diary is a rush job notable today for an early appearance by Anthony Quinn, in a role as the token ethnic fellow meant to inspire volunteerism in the barrio.

Halls of Montezuma (1950) – DVD

Posted in1950s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, War

***½/**** Image A Sound B
starring Richard Widmark, Jack Palance, Reginald Gardiner, Neville Brand
screenplay by Michael Blankfort
directed by Lewis Milestone

by Walter Chaw Released in 1950, Lewis Milestone's Halls of Montezuma is gritty and fascinating, free of a good deal of the jingoism that flavoured earlier WWII studio productions and as influential as they come within the genre. A haunting sequence set during a nighttime rocket attack and lit only by occasional strobes while an unseen enemy screams out at frayed Marines recalls a similar one from Coppola's Apocalypse Now, while Richard Widmark's reluctant Lt. Anderson (a quiet former schoolteacher beset by doubt and anger) and Neville Brand's Sgt. Zelenko are clearly the prototypes for Tom Hanks's Capt. John Miller and Tom Sizemore's Sgt. Horvath, respectively, in Saving Private Ryan. The film's most impressive to the war-movie vocabulary is its ambiguous philosophy: Halls of Montezuma is alive with the creeping suspicion that war may not be all it's cracked up to be–that it might in fact be hell. While there's certainly nothing shocking about that sentiment in our post-Vietnam, post-Korea psyches, that kind of philosophical dissention was rare in the pre-Korea 1950s, and in regards to the unflagging "popularity" of WWII, uncommon even today.