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.

Say It Isn’t So (2001) – DVD

August 3, 2001Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD, Romance

*/**** Image A Sound B Extras C+
starring Heather Graham, Chris Klein, Orlando Jones, Richard Jenkins
screenplay by Peter Gaulke & Gerry Swallow
directed by J.B. Rogers

by Walter Chaw A gross-out comedy in the vein of the Farrelly Brothers’ There’s Something About Mary, Say It Isn’t So (produced by the Farrellys) is a blander-than-bland bit of formula fluff that miscalculates badly, for starters, in handing over its lead romantic roles to warmed-over oatmeal actors Chris Klein and Heather Graham. Though it begins promisingly enough, with an agreeably shocking family dinner and Klein reprising his well-meaning oaf from Election, as soon as the main love story surrounding Klein and Graham kicks up in earnest, Say It Isn’t So slows to an awkward standstill with a curiously lacklustre series of punchless gags and forced madcap. The film reminds the most, in fact, of a straining stand-up comedian, a sheen of flop-sweat decorating his upper-lip as joke after rhythm-less joke falls on an increasingly hostile and distracted audience.

Dracula 2000 (2000) – DVD

July 26, 2001Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD, Horror, Thriller, Vampire, Wes Craven

½*/**** Image A Sound A Extras A
starring Jonny Lee Miller, Justine Waddell, Gerard Butler, Colleen Ann Fitzpatrick
screenplay by Joel Soisson
directed by Patrick Lussier

by Walter Chaw Dracula 2000 is so wilfully contrived and tirelessly stupid that by the end of the film, the fact of itself becomes a matter of onanistic speculation. In other words, what could anyone have possibly been thinking when they decided to not only resurrect the dusty Stoker “Dracula” mythos with a cast of WB-type irregulars, but also follow the lead of Candyman II in featuring a great evil stalking New Orleans circa Mardis Gras?

The Caveman’s Valentine (2001) [Widescreen] – DVD

July 25, 2001Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Crime, Drama, DVD, Music, Mystery, Superhero, Thriller

***½/**** Image A+ Sound A+ Extras B-
starring Samuel L. Jackson, Ann Magnuson, Aunjanue Ellis, Tamara Tunie
screenplay by George Dawes Green, based on his novel
directed by Kasi Lemmons

by Walter Chaw A strange mixture of Shine, Basquiat, Angel Heart, and Grant Morrison & Dave McKean’s graphic novel Arkham Asylum, The Caveman’s Valentine is a feverish tale of a homeless madman-cum-detective who, on the morning of February 14th, discovers a “valentine” just outside his New York cave: one of Ella Fitzgerald’s strange fruit, stuck in the crotch of a tree–a young male model murdered and frozen to a branch. Believing at first that his imagined nemesis Stuyvesant, who shoots evil rays into his mind from atop the Chrysler Building, is responsible for the murder, Romulus (Samuel L. Jackson) is put on the trail of an avant-garde photographer in the Mapplethorpe mold, David Leppenraub (Colm Feore). His minor sleuthing interrupted by the occasional delusional fit and bouts with an ecstasy of creation (Romulus was a brilliant Julliard-trained pianist prior to his psychosis), Romulus uncovers clues and harasses suspects on his way to convincing his police-woman daughter (Aunjanue Ellis) that even though he’s a nut, that doesn’t mean he can’t solve a high-profile society murder.

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.