Akira (1988) – DVD (THX)

July 24, 2001Posted in1980s, Action, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Fantasy, Japan, Sci-Fi, Thriller

***/**** Image B+ Sound B (English)/A (Japanese)
screenplay by Katsuhiro Otomo & Izo Hashimoto
directed by Katsuhiro Otomo

by Walter Chaw What begins as a miracle of cinema ends as an obscure endurance test, but the visual landmarks that you pass along this strange animated journey’s way make the trip one of value. Akira is two hours and five minutes of philosophical soup, a surrealistic melding of Blade Runner, X-Men, Firestarter, and Frank Miller’s “Sin City” mixed with the melancholic sensibilities of the only culture that has experienced the Atomic bomb, with a healthy sampling of really fast motorcycles tossed in for visceral crunch.

You Can Count on Me (2000) – DVD

July 24, 2001Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD

***½/**** Image B Sound B Extras A
starring Laura Linney, Mark Ruffalo, Matthew Broderick, Jon Tenney
written and directed by Kenneth Lonergan

by Walter Chaw Five minutes into Kenneth Lonergan’s dialogue-driven You Can Count on Me, a pleasant-seeming middle-aged couple having a comfortably banal conversation on a night ride home gets smeared by a semi going the wrong way. The next moment, we meet up with the couple’s children as children, miserable at their parents’ funeral, and then flash forward several years to these same children as adults, miserable with the predictably decomposing orbits of their lives. In a film in which very little obvious happens, the most traumatic event of the piece, presented almost casually in its introduction, is easy to dismiss as a plot convenience, when the truth of it is that the death of the parents is the key to understanding the resonance of You Can Count on Me. For all its humour, You Can Count on Me is about dealing with grief and the excruciating difficulty of accepting the burden of maturity and its attendant responsibilities.

The Claim (2000) – DVD

July 14, 2001Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Drama, DVD, France, Romance, UK, Western

***½/**** Image A Sound A
starring Wes Bentley, Milla Jovovich, Nastassia Kinski, Peter Mullan
screenplay by Frank Cottrell Boyce
directed by Michael Winterbottom

by Walter Chaw Cold and barren as the winter’s landscape it inhabits, Michael Winterbottom’s exceptional retelling of Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge is the delicate and maddening The Claim. It’s told in undertones and sidelong glances, gathering its strength from the inexorable tides of fate and the offhand caprices of nature that reflect the essential chaos at the centre of every man’s character. Hardy stated about The Mayor of Casterbridge that “it is not improbabilities of incident but improbabilities of character that matter,” and the subtitle of the novel is, consequently, “A Man of Character.” Though it’s possible to take the subtitle as ironic seeing as the titular main character is guilty in the first chapter (an incident related in the film as a flashback) of an act that is at the very least heinous, both novel and film are earnest in exploring the sticky gradations of morality without value judgment.

The Magnificent Seven (1960) [Special Edition] – DVD

July 13, 2001Posted in1960s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD, Western

**/**** Image A Sound B Extras A+
starring Yul Brynner, Eli Wallach, Steve McQueen, Charles Bronson
screenplay by William Roberts
directed by John Sturges

by Walter Chaw Based loosely on Akira Kurosawa’s seminal The Seven Samurai, The Great Escape director John Sturges’s wildly uneven The Magnificent Seven vacillates from superbly choreographed (if stagy) action sequences to moments of sublime dialogue, and to extended character-enhancing business that grinds the film to a complete halt no fewer than five times. It has aged poorly in four decades, losing a great deal of modern appeal in a way that Sergio Leone’s adaptation (and extrapolation) of Kurosawa’s Yojimbo, the “Spaghetti Western,” A Fistful of Dollars, never has.

Monkeybone (2001) [Special Edition] – DVD

July 11, 2001Posted in2000s, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD, Esoterica, Fantasy

*/**** Image B- Sound B Extras B
starring Brendan Fraser, Bridget Fonda, Chris Kattan, Giancarlo Esposito
screenplay by Sam Hamm
directed by Henry Selick

by Walter Chaw At long last someone decided to crossbreed Cool World, Beetlejuice, and All of Me. Stu Miley (Brendan Fraser) is a cartoonist in the John Kricfalusi tradition on the cusp of semi-stardom, with his own animated half-hour series impending on Comedy Central. His creation, the titular “Monkeybone” (voiced by John Turturro), is a dangerously sexualized simian that, we learn, is born from the shame of a pre-adolescent’s erection and a disturbed man’s sublimated aggression. Seminal, indeed. Plunged into a coma, Stu is dropped into a Freudian stew of elaborate set-design and partially-successful live-action integration called Downtown, helpless as Monkeybone takes over his flesh body, bangs his angelic gal Julie (Bridget Fonda), and parlays Stu’s modest cartoon into a marketing monolith bent on pushing nightmare-inducing toys (ushering Monkeybone into the poorly-attended “Club Halloween III“). Making matters somehow more unbearable, in Downtown Stephen King is literally a character, Giancarlo Esposito is a satyr, and–as box-office watchers of her last ten films will attest–Whoopi Goldberg is Death.

Urbania (2000) – DVD

July 9, 2001Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD

**½/**** Image B Sound B Extras A-
starring Dan Futterman, Alan Cumming, Matt Keeslar, Samuel Ball
screenplay by Daniel Reitz and Jon Shear
directed by Jon Shear

by Walter Chaw We are each of us an anthology of disparate tales, rumors, poems, and melodramatic novellas. Clive Barker once wryly observed that we are books of blood, “wherever we’re opened, we’re red,” and for as intentionally grotesque as that sounds, Barker has a metaphysical point. It is the same point that Jon Shear’s directorial debut Urbania makes again and again (and, unfortunately, again): that the stories we tell others become our reality through their manipulated perceptions. If we are what others see us as, then what we cause others to see us as becomes what we are–each of us is very literally an author of our own identity through the abuse of others’ faith in our stories. There are two areas that this kind of reality crafting/testing holds a specific currency: sexual identity, and urban legend–“don’t ask, don’t tell,” and “this really happened to a friend of mine,” invocations to a post-modernist muse and a deconstructed vocal tradition.

Proof of Life (2000) – DVD

July 8, 2001Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Thriller

**/**** Image A Sound A- Extras C
starring Meg Ryan, Russell Crowe, David Morse, Pamela Reed
screenplay by Tony Gilroy
directed by Taylor Hackford

by Walter Chaw Proof of Life is essentially a re-telling of Someone to Watch Over Me with some bits of Missing in Action, Papillon, Casablanca, and Bridge on the River Kwai tacked on witlessly and serving as a faint excuse for Russell Crowe to slap on fatigues and crank up the virility from “high” to “stud bull.” For all of Crowe’s smouldering presence and incendiary gaze, however, there is remarkably little chemistry between he and his infamous on-set flame, Meg Ryan. Whether this sterility is a result of a script that relies on cliché and unlikely “meet cute” scenarios, or a result of Meg Ryan’s overreliance on trick two of her two-trick bag, I’m not certain. I’m content to call it an unfortunate combination of both.

Fast Fade: David Puttnam, Columbia Pictures, and the Battle for Hollywood – Books

July 8, 2001Posted in1990s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Books About Movies, UK

Fast Fade: David Puttnam, Columbia Pictures, and the Battle for Hollywood
FFC rating: 2/10
by Andrew Yule

by Walter Chaw Andrew Yule’s anecdotal biography-as-memoir of David Puttnam’s rise as an independent movie producer and brief run as the head of Columbia Pictures, Fast Fade: David Puttnam, Columbia Pictures, and the Battle for Hollywood is a poorly-written vanity piece that offers a minimum of analysis en route to being tediously repetitive and at least 30 pages too long. Packed to the gills with quotes from Puttnam, his wife Patsy, close friend/director Alan Parker, and an extended cast of British and Hollywood production glitterati, the book finds Yule interjecting occasionally in the tiresome reportage style of a relatively talentless journalist incapable of offering anything in the way of a trenchant critique. Chapter flows into chapter, bound only by chronology and Yule’s occasional stultifying transition, e.g.:

David probably did not realize it at the time, but The Mission marked the end of a major phase in his career. A very significant phase was about to begin.

Nightwatch (1994) – DVD

June 29, 2001Posted in1990s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Denmark, DVD, Horror, Thriller

Nattevagten
***/**** Image A- Sound B Extras C
starring Nikolaj Waldau, Sofie Graaboel, Kim Bodnia, Lotte Andersen
written and directed by Ole Bornedal

by Walter Chaw Dark and moody with a dash of post-modern relational philosophy, Ole Bornedal’s Nightwatch (Nattevagten) is a taut and unusual thriller that has been remade by the same director into the English-language Nightwatch, starring Ewan McGregor, Nick Nolte, and Patricia Arquette. In its original Dutch-language incarnation (seen by over 15% of the entire Dane population), Nattevagten is lent a good deal of weight by a satisfying subplot involving the nature of love and the rites of passage young men endure to become men in one another’s eyes. It sounds a little heady for what boils down to fairly typical serial-killer intrigue, but the uniformly fine performances, the uncompromising though tasteful direction, and the sharp screenplay (by Bornedal) combine to make the film something a little finer than what its barest plot synopsis would indicate. It reminds most of another foreign thriller largely ignored on American shores released in the same year, Anthony Waller’s Mute Witness.

The Boys Next Door (1986)

June 27, 2001Posted in1980s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, DVD, Thriller

*½/**** Image B Sound C
starring Maxwell Caulfield, Charlie Sheen, Patti D’Arbanville
screenplay by Glen Morgan & James Wong
directed by Penelope Spheeris

by Walter Chaw Wearing the white undershirt and blue jeans popularized as the uniform of disenfranchised youth since James Dean, Charlie Sheen’s Bo Richards in The Boys Next Door dresses the dress, but doesn’t exactly walking the walk. The first thing that should spring to mind when Sheen the younger staggers in from stage right in a thriller-killer film is his father, Martin, playing the same role in Terence Malick’s middle-American masterpiece Badlands fourteen years previous. The key difference is that not only is there a decade in which Martin Sheen used to be able to act (not so, Charlie), but that where Martin’s Kit Carruthers is the proactive force behind his murderous rampage, Charlie plays more the wilting, Sissy Spacek tagalong.

Manhunter (1986) – DVD (THX)

June 26, 2001Posted in1980s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Directors: Michael Mann, DVD, Mystery, Thriller

***½/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring William L. Petersen, Kim Greist, Joan Allen, Brian Cox
screenplay by Michael Mann, based on the Thomas Harris novel Red Dragon
directed by Michael Mann

by Walter Chaw Director Michael Mann’s third film is the remarkable Manhunter, the second cinematic adaptation of a Thomas Harris novel (the first being 1977’s John Frankenheimer-helmed Black Sunday) and the first to feature Harris’s dark serial killer antihero, Hannibal Lecter (spelled “Lecktor” in Manhunter). It is visually lush and possessed of the attention to craft and detail that has become a hallmark of Mann’s work; to say that it’s superior in nearly every way to the much-lauded and wildly popular The Silence of the Lambs would be something of an understatement.

Tora! Tora! Tora! (1970) [Special Edition] – DVD

June 19, 2001Posted in1970s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Japan, War

***½/**** Image A Sound B+ Extras A
starring Martin Balsam, Joseph Cotten, E.G. Marshall, Tatsuya Mihashi
screenplay by Larry Forrester, Ryuzo Kikushima, Hideo Oguni
directed by Richard Fleischer and Kinji Fukasuka & Toshio Masuda

by Walter Chaw A joint project between a Japanese film crew and veteran American director Richard Fleischer (20,000 Leagues Under the Sea), Tora! Tora! Tora! had Akira Kurosawa assigned as the lead Japanese director, poised to make his American debut with a mammoth script weighing in at well over four-hundred pages–and that just for the Japanese side of the story. Accustomed to complete autonomy in his projects, Kurosawa bowed out after several weeks following a series of run-ins with Fox executives over not only the unwieldiness of his vision, but also disagreements concerning the shade of white used in the interiors of the Japanese carrier ward rooms! Unfortunately, Kurosawa’s initial involvement with the picture resulted in his regular cohort Toshiro Mifune turning down the role of Admiral Yamamoto (a role he would play in Jack Smight’s 1976 Midway and in 1968’s Yamamoto biopic Rengo kantai shirei chôkan: Yamamoto Isoroku), as the two titans of Japanese cinema had lingering bad feelings over their last collaboration, the underseen Akahige.

Love Potion #9 (1992) – DVD

June 18, 2001Posted in1990s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD, Romance, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/**** Image D+ Sound C-
starring Tate Donovan, Sandra Bullock, Mary Mara, Dale Midkiff
written and directed by Dale Launer

by Walter Chaw Love Potion #9 is an indescribably bad film that elicits so many feelings of true hatred it should be classified as a post-expressionist nihilist experiment rather than a romantic comedy. It is a gimmick flick based on a novelty song that manages to be worse than the stillbirth of an idea that spawned it. I can only surmise that it's being resurrected now on the DVD format because of the inexplicable fame of Sandra Bullock–a realization that makes me not only want to sleep with the lights on, but also begin to dread the inevitable digital remastering of Religion, Inc..

Donovan’s Reef (1963) – DVD

June 16, 2001Posted in1960s, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD, Romance

*½/**** Image A Sound B
starring John Wayne, Lee Marvin, Elizabeth Allen, Jack Warden
screenplay by James Edward Grant and Frank Nugent
directed by John Ford

by Walter Chaw One of legendary director John Ford’s last films, and his final collaboration with John Wayne, Donovan’s Reef is, like much of Ford’s later work, a derivative amalgam of his earlier successes. Curmudgeonly and vicious, it’s a lighter-than-air farce with a black heart that feels suspiciously like the mad rantings of an old soldier describing his vision of a bucolic Valhalla to which he one day hopes to return. Released in the same year (1963) that saw Sidney Poitier become the first black man to win an Oscar in a major category (for Lilies in the Field), Donovan’s Reef is a shockingly, unapologetically racist and misogynistic film about braggadocio, therapeutic rape, and belittling the natives. In other words, John Ford apologists need to work overtime to dig their favorite auteur out from under this surreal bilge.

Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (2001)

June 15, 2001Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Fantasy, Germany, Japan, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

*½/****
starring Angelina Jolie, Daniel Craig, Leslie Phillips, Mark Collie
screenplay by Simon West and Patrick Massett & John Zinman
directed by Simon West

by Walter Chaw To say that Lara Croft: Tomb Raider is completely incomprehensible is not entirely accurate, for the basic plot appears to be pretty straightforward. The British Lara Croft (played by the American Angelina Jolie) is a sort of jet-setting archaeologist in the Indiana Jones mold who is extremely well outfitted by a gadget man in the James Bond mold, and who boasts of a loyal, shotgun-packing butler in the Batman mold. Her task is to discover two pieces of a triangular artifact before the Illuminati do on the day that a rare syzygy coincides with a solar eclipse, allowing the triangle-bearer to control time.

Cash Crop (1999) – DVD

June 13, 2001Posted in1990s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD

Harvest
*½/**** Image B Sound B- Extras C
starring James Van Der Beek, Jeffrey DeMunn, Mary McCormack, Fred Weller
screenplay by Jim Biederman, Stuart Burkin, David M. Korn
directed by Stuart Burkin

by Walter Chaw A micro-budget independent venture shot in twenty-six days, Stuart Burkin’s auteur debut Cash Crop (a.k.a. Harvest) is a pro-pot film (not to be confused with The Killing Fields, a Pol Pot film) that has as its headliner TIGER BEAT icon James Van Der Beek (Varsity Blues), who does indeed lend his Bert-browed visage to about five minutes at the beginning of the movie. The real stars of the show, however, are B-list veterans John Slattery (Traffic, Eraser) and the always excellent Mary McCormack (The Alarmist) as a rural Pennsylvania sheriff and a DEA agent, respectively. It is their performances alone which nearly rescue Cash Crop from its awkward plot progression, a handful of embarrassing subplots, and a few secondary turns that run the gamut from “torturous” to “unwatchable.” Slattery and McCormack don’t make Cash Crop a good movie, don’t get me wrong, they just make it a barely “not as terrible as it would otherwise have been” movie that I’ll forget, Lord willing, in a day or two.

The House of Mirth (2000) – DVD

May 29, 2001Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, France, Germany, Romance, UK

**½/**** Image B- Sound B Extras C
starring Gillian Anderson, Dan Aykroyd, Eleanor Bron, Terry Kinney
screenplay by Terence Davies, based on the novel by Edith Wharton
directed by Terence Davies

by Walter Chaw Terence Davies's adaptation of an Edith Wharton novel, The House of Mirth is ultimately a languid and luxurious failure, though always a lavish and often a compelling one. Gillian Anderson and Eric Stoltz are vaguely miscast as the Titian leads, while an appearance by Dan Aykroyd in a distracting role as a lascivious cad nearly sinks the production with every moment of his Elwood Blues quick-talking shyster patter, yet Davies's ability to infuse each of his films with a charge of self-confessional mortification lends the piece an air of sad gravity and outrage. The almost unbearable claustrophobic weight of alienation that flavours his non-linear portfolio (Death and Transfiguration, Distant Voices Still Lives, The Long Day Closes) can be traced to Davies himself feeling

Nine Months (1995) – DVD

May 22, 2001Posted in1990s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD, Romance

*/**** Image B+ Sound B
starring Hugh Grant, Julianne Moore, Tom Arnold, Joan Cusack
screenplay by Chris Columbus, based on the film Neuf mois by Patrick Braoude
directed by Chris Columbus

by Walter Chaw That Chris Columbus consistently gets opportunities to direct films in Hollywood is not a result of his talent or wit, but rather the American box-office’s indefatigable hunger for empty cinematic calories. When such unforgivably unpleasant and sentimental Columbus pap as Home Alone, Home Alone 2, Mrs. Doubtfire, Only the Lonely, and Stepmom drop like lead balloons into the cineplex to the approving chorus of the terminally uncritical and the incurably dim-witted, there is no possible reason for studios to try to create something of quality and value. Psst! Wanna make a fortune? Toss a cheap and manipulative tearjerker peppered with mean-spirited slapstick to Chris Columbus, and watch the money pour in.

Paradise Road (1997) – DVD

May 13, 2001Posted in1990s, Australia, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, War

**/**** Image A+ Sound A
starring Glenn Close, Frances McDormand, Pauline Collins, Cate Blanchett
written and directed by Bruce Beresford

by Walter Chaw In 1976, Polish composer Henryk Gorecki composed his stunning orchestral and choral piece Symphony No.3 Op.36 “Symfonia pie¶ni ¿a³osnych” (“Symphony for Sorrowful Souls”), a collection of smaller movements comprising, much like Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana, varied texts both sacred and found. Among those sources used by Gorecki are a 15th-century lamentation of the Holy Cross Monastery; a folk song from the Opole region; and, most specifically, a young prisoner’s inscription on the wall of her cell in Zakopane’s Gestapo prison.