Cheaper by the Dozen (2003) [Baker’s Dozen Edition] – DVD

November 24, 2005Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD, Family

½*/**** Image A- Sound B Extras C
starring Steve Martin, Bonnie Hunt, Piper Perabo, Tom Welling
screenplay by Craig Titley, based on the book by Frank B. Gilbreth Jr. and Ernestine Gilbreth Carey
directed by Shawn Levy

by Walter Chaw Walter Lang's 1950 version of Frank B. Gilbreth and Ernestine Gilbreth Carey's semi-autobiographical Cheaper by the Dozen ends with patriarch Frank (Clifton Webb) kicking the bucket, and seat-warmer Shawn Levy's (fresh off the triumph Just Married) 2003 adaptation of the same ends with patriarch Tom (Steve Martin) capitulating to his simpering children. Such is the decline of courage in western popular culture that even sickening cultural artifacts like Lang's Cheaper by the Dozen out-balls an updated version fifty-three years hence. Infantile regression the rule of the day in a climate increasingly desperate to shoehorn its post-modern anti-narratives into comfortable family fare, it's interesting to consider that the original was already seen as something of a throwback to Depression-era family values at the time of its release. In conflict with the popular wag that people are stupider now than they've ever been, the excrescent original was also defended as good old-fashioned escapist fare. People are exactly as stupid as they've always been, it seems, but the lords of our popular entertainment have been noticeably castrated.

Rent (2005)

November 23, 2005Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Musical, Romance

½*/****
starring Rosario Dawson, Taye Diggs, Wilson Jermaine Heredia, Jesse L. Martin
screenplay by Steve Chbosky, based on the play by Jonathan Larson
directed by Chris Columbus

Rentby Walter Chaw On the list of painful experiences, the modern Broadway musical ranks fairly high, so it's fair to wonder how an adaptation of Rent–by Chris Columbus, of all people–could have struck anyone as a bright idea. In all honesty, though, pretending not to understand the reasoning behind a project like this is disingenuous snobbery, because when something this terrible has proven to be that popularly galvanizing, it's only a matter of time, really, before Hollywood moneymen come calling with dollar signs in their eyes and memories of Chicago dancing in their heads. (I can only assume that that's also the reason the legendarily awful Phantom of the Opera got a greenlight with Joel Schumacher at the helm–and that Matthew Broderick and Nathan Lane's stupendously popular (and similarly awful–film and play both) The Producers is set to bow this Christmas.) But with Rent, in place of a name like Webber or Mel Brooks to drive its inexplicable success, you find a genuine middlebrow cause célèbre, loaded well beyond safe with Message carried on the backs of a thundering stable of Alphabet City freaks and caricatures of freaks, each of them wilting from a romantic wasting disease (AIDS, naturally, or 'disenchantment' in place of source La Boheme's 'consumption')–the same one, not-so-incidentally, that claimed creator Jonathan Larson a few tragic months before Rent's triumphant debut on the Great White Way.

The Beautiful Country (2004); Me and You and Everyone We Know (2005); The World (2005)|The Beautiful Country – DVD

November 23, 2005Posted in****/****, 2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, China, Comedy, Drama, DVD, France, Japan, Norway, Theatrical

THE BEAUTIFUL COUNTRY
**½/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
starring Nick Nolte, Tim Roth, Bai Ling, Temeura Morisson
screenplay by Sabina Murray
directed by Hans Petter Moland

ME AND YOU AND EVERYONE WE KNOW
*½/****
starring John Hawkes, Miranda July, Miles Thompson, Brandon Ratcliff
written and directed by Miranda July

Shijie
****/****
starring Zhao Tao, Chen Taisheng, Jing Jue, Jiang Zhong-wei
written and directed by Jia Zhang-ke

Beautifulcountrycapby Walter Chaw Norwegian director Hans Petter Moland makes films about isolated individuals trapped in simulacra of motion, and his best work is savage and melancholic: a trip taken by broken people to the bedside of a dying mother in Aberdeen; a pilgrimage made by a poet to locate his masculinity in the company of a maniac in Zero Kelvin. Even his first film, the quiet Secondløitnanten, touches on men oppressed by the caprice of nature–of other men driven to their natural state and the situations that melt away the lies that keep our lives liveable. Moland's films are beautifully framed (picaresque, it's not too much to say), capturing in their sprawling, austere landscapes the plight of individuals dwarfed by the mad, engulfing entropy of existence. He's a good fit with American auteur Terrence Malick, in other words–so it's without much surprise that Malick approached Moland to direct The Beautiful Country, a project he'd worked on, on and off, for a period of years before deciding that the producer's role would better suit him in this instance. The result is a picture that looks, sounds, often feels like a Malick film–even more so, it goes without saying, than Moland's early output does, leaving the project something that feels uncomfortably like ventriloquism. And though I'm a fan of both puppet and master, I find that I prefer the one drawing a line to the other rather than pulled around by the master's strings.

DIFF ’05: The President’s Last Bang

November 20, 2005Posted in****/****, 2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DIFF/SDFF, Drama, Film Festivals, South Korea, Thriller
****/****starring Song Jae-ho, Han Suk-kyu, Baek Yun-shik, Jeong Won-jungwritten and directed by Im Sang-soo by Walter Chaw Im Sang-soo's transcendently good political satire The President's Last Bang is so far the smartest, chanciest flick of the year--an alchemical brew of balls and technical brilliance that produces tremors of recognition and aftershocks of import. Whether it's DP Kim Woo-heong's rapturous tracking shots or Kim Hong-jib's tango soundtrack, there is something ineffable embedded in the fabric of the piece, making of the assassination of South Korean president Park Chung-hee something like the boxing sequences of Scorsese's Raging Bull. It's appropriate, with Park…

DIFF ’05: Duane Hopwood

November 18, 2005Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DIFF/SDFF, Drama, Film Festivals
*½/****starring David Schwimmer, Janeane Garofalo, Judah Friedlander, Susan Lynchwritten and directed by Matt Mulhern by Walter Chaw David Schwimmer goes the grimy indie route for actor-turned-director Matt Mulhern's sophomore feature Duane Hopwood, finding himself an alcoholic pit boss in Atlantic City about to lose custody of his two daughters to ex-wife Linda (Janeane Garofalo). Duane (Schwimmer) takes in aspiring stand-up comedian Anthony (Judah Friedlander) as a roommate/sidekick in the mold of Friedlander's previous role as a lovable spaz in American Splendor, their travails building to an unlikely custody hearing and an even unlikelier climax at one of Anthony's gigs as…

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2005)

November 18, 2005Posted in2000s, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Family, Fantasy, Mystery, Theatrical, UK

**/****
starring Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint, Emma Watson, Robbie Coltrane
screenplay by Steven Kloves, based on the novel by J.K. Rowling
directed by Mike Newell

Harrypotter4by Walter Chaw Just as Harry and the other arms of his archetypal triangle stumbled into adolescence with aplomb and poetry under the guidance of Alfonso Cuarón in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, they awkward-and-gangly their way into a holding pattern in Mike Newell's puttering Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (hereafter Harry Potter 4). It looks grungy and it lacks grace: the moments meant to inspire are tired and the moments meant to edify are portentous and unbearably drawn-out. There's not a lot here for the non-fanatic, with screenwriter Steve Kloves failing the material for the first time and Newell showing himself to be exactly the kind of director who would make slick, protracted nothings like Mona Lisa Smile and Pushing Tin. The Newell film Harry Potter 4 most resembles, however, is Four Weddings and a Funeral (his conduit to the big time and, consequently, the one he's most likely to cannibalize when handed the golden ticket), in that this third sequel tries to worry itself about the trials of youngsters falling in puppy love, going to their first formals, and learning that there are such things in the world as death and taxes. A noble pursuit, chasing characters as they grow from chapter to chapter, from innocence to churlishness to experience (we presume)–but for me, at least, Harry Potter 4 is the first wholly dispensable instalment, repeating the best parts of Cuarón's film and adding to the conversation only the disturbing resurrection of archenemy Voldemort.

DIFF ’05: Brick

November 17, 2005Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, DIFF/SDFF, Drama, Film Festivals, Mystery, Thriller
**½/****starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Lukas Haas, Nora Zehetner, Laura Dannonwritten and directed by Rian Johnson by Walter Chaw Brick is a cult classic-in-the-making and one for which I harbour a goodly amount of affection. (I should say I admire its chutzpah, if not its ultimate success.) It's an experiment in screenwriting and matching shots, a gimmick stretched to feature-length by first-time hyphenate Rian Johnson that puts Raymond Chandler's hardboiled lexicon into the mouths of disconsolate teens seething at a high school somewhere in the twenty-first century. It would've been a fantastic noir except for that displacement, as its coolness decomposes every…

DIFF ’05: The Matador

November 16, 2005Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, DIFF/SDFF, Film Festivals, Germany, Ireland, Mexico, Thriller
**½/****starring Pierce Brosnan, Greg Kinnear, Hope Davis, Philip Baker Hallwritten and directed by Richard Shepard by Walter Chaw Wearing a sleazebag moustache and an ugly print shirt, Pierce Brosnan watches a bartender shake his drink instead of stirring it and the film slows down and blurs accordingly. It's post-modernism as gauzy, lazy hallucination--a swoon that suggests a minor, nearly-imperceptible tremor in reality and the only moment in which hyphenate Richard Shepard acknowledges the irony of the former 007's presence in another licensed-to-kill role as assassin-for-hire Julian Noble. Fond of bottomless tequila and "sucky-fucky" instead of "blushy-blushy," Noble is an unctuous,…

DIFF ’05: The White Countess

November 15, 2005Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, China, DIFF/SDFF, Drama, Film Festivals, Germany, Romance, UK, War
**/****starring Ralph Fiennes, Natasha Richardson, Vanessa Redgrave, Lynn Redgravescreenplay by Kazuo Ishigurodirected by James Ivory by Walter Chaw Even without recently-deceased partner-in-crime Ismail Merchant, stalwart period-costume-drama codger James Ivory delivers the slavishly middlebrow, meandering, Anglo-centric goods with The White Countess, the tale of a sightless American ex-diplomat, Jackson (Ralph Fiennes), who falls for refugee Russian countess Sophia (Natasha Richardson) in Shanghai on the eve of Japanese occupation. Packed to the rafters with Redgraves (Lynn and Vanessa also appear) and meticulously airless accents, the picture represents a certain ossified breed of prestige picture of the A Room with a View and…

DIFF ’05: Casanova

November 13, 2005Posted in2000s, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DIFF/SDFF, Film Festivals, Romance
*/****starring Heath Ledger, Sienna Miller, Jeremy Irons, Oliver Plattscreenplay by Jeffrey Hatcher and Kimberly Simidirected by Lasse Hallström by Walter Chaw Casanova is a perfectly dreadful Lasse Hallström/Miramax picture that can be claimed, appropriately enough, by Buena Vista now that the Weinsteins have moved on to produce this kind of stuff for their new company. It's "The Merchant of Venice" stripped of any whiff of controversy, going through the motions of its shrivelled little romantic-comedy checklist with the miserable meticulousness of the truly unimaginative. For a change, why don't you tell me how it works? Two people meet and hate…

DIFF ’05: Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story

November 11, 2005Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DIFF/SDFF, Esoterica, Film Festivals, UK
***/****starring Steve Coogan, Rob Brydon, Gillian Anderson, Keeley Hawesscreenplay by Martin Hardy, based on the novel The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Esq. by Laurence Sternedirected by Michael Winterbottom by Walter Chaw This whole idea of post-modern meta-movies just doesn't thrill me the way it used to. Nonetheless, Brit maverick Michael Winterbottom's once around on the Adaptation. wheel is buoyed by a game cast and an actual purpose: rather than the impossibility of a blocked writer trying to adapt a bad novel, find here a post-modern film about a novel that predicted, in a way, post-modernism itself. Winterbottom addresses…

Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (2005)

November 11, 2005Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Christmas, Comedy, Crime, Mystery, Theatrical, Thriller

***½/****
starring Robert Downey Jr., Val Kilmer, Michelle Monaghan, Corbin Bernsen
written and directed by Shane Black

Kisskissbangbangby Walter Chaw The same kind of movie as Doug Liman's Mr. and Mrs. Smith but more so, Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang marks the hyphenate debut of star screenwriter Shane Black, and it's the kind of movie his Last Action Hero would have been had they aimed it at adults (and cast actors). A meta-exercise taken to plucky, insouciant excess, Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang is nihilistic, misanthropic, and it just might hate its audience a little, but damn if it doesn't wash out as something as exhilaratingly lawless as Sin City and recklessly experimental as Rian Johnson's Brick (two other examples of noir's recent extreme makeover). Though it's not shy in its one agonizing scene of gore, the picture seems more concerned about the way we assimilate–and anticipate–sex and violence at the movies.

DIFF ’05: The World’s Fastest Indian

November 10, 2005Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, DIFF/SDFF, Drama, Japan, New Zealand, Sports
*/****starring Anthony Hopkins, Christopher Kennedy Lawford, Chris Williams, Annie Whittlewritten and directed by Roger Donaldson by Walter Chaw Kiwi filmmaker Roger Donaldson follows up his intensely impersonal The Recruit with the intensely personal The World's Fastest Indian, a fictionalization of a documentary he shot some thirty years ago about dotty old coot Burt Munro, who in 1967 set a land speed record for motorcycles under 1000ccs on Utah's Bonneville Salt Flats. Funny how the results of both are sanded down almost beyond recognition: so baptized are they in the scouring attentions of high-grade clichés that they're inhumanly frictionless. See Burt…

DIFF ’05: Duck

November 10, 2005Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, DIFF/SDFF, Drama, Film Festivals, ZERO STARS
ZERO STARS/****starring Philip Baker Hall, Bill Brochtrup, Amy Hill, Noel Gugliemiwritten and directed by Nicole Bettauer by Walter Chaw In Duck, hale character actor Philip Baker Hall finds himself delivering long, rambling, and likely improvised monologues to a duck that has imprinted itself on him in Los Angeles, 2009. Though it's probably more interesting to talk about why so many science-fiction films are set in Los Angeles, it's more fascinating to try to reconcile all the car-wreck non-sequiturs that comprise the mismatched, miasmic whole of this piece. Hall plays Arthur, freshly widowed and ready to pill himself into oblivion when…

Frankenstein (2004) – DVD

November 10, 2005Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, DVD, Horror, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Television

½*/**** Image A Sound B Extras B
starring Parker Posey, Vincent Perez, Thomas Kretschmann, Adam Goldberg
screenplay by John Shiban
directed by Marcus Nispel

by Walter Chaw Marcus Nispel's Frankenstein, conceived by schlock-meister general Dean Koontz as the pilot for a stillborn USA Network series, is the very model of style over substance. Would that the style even belonged to Nispel: all of muted greens and bleached yellows, memories of Se7en swim, bidden, to the mind of the genre enthusiast. It's one thing to frame the American backcountry in shades of monumentalized sepia (as Nispel did in his Texas Chain Saw Massacre redux), another altogether to throw a haze of music-video mute over the Big Easy. If the cinematography weren't enough, the title sequence and faux–Nine Inch Nails score take it the rest of the way, establishing the picture as a police procedural of a certain kind while the (misleading) title announces a supernatural bent. The real bogeys haunting the piece, though, are the careers of Parker Posey and Michael Madsen, together rattling chains disinterestedly as the former slides into her third decade as someone who's not very good but has managed to continue working based on some misconception of early indie-queen dividends, the latter too comfortable being both cast the crooked cop and mistaken for Tom Sizemore.

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005) – DVD

November 9, 2005Posted in2000s, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Directors: Tim Burton, DVD, Family, Fantasy

**½/**** Image A Sound A Extras C
starring Johnny Depp, Freddie Highmore, David Kelly, Helena Bonham Carter
screenplay by John August, based on the novel by Roald Dahl
directed by Tim Burton

Charlieandthecapby Walter Chaw The first hour is so obsessively faithful to the Roald Dahl source material that I was lulled into believing that Tim Burton's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was going to be a classic, a magnificent return to form for the dark fantasist who, once upon a time, denied Edward Scissorhands a happy ending, and let the Headless Horseman come back for the little kid under the floorboards. The set design of little Charlie's hovel on the edge of an industrial town is stunning–a throwback to the German Expressionism of Burton's Vincent and, in its canted walls, the best of its kind since The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Thus the tragedy and the irony of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory's return to earth is that its ultimate mediocrity has a lot to do with the addition of a worthless backstory that draws it closer to Burton's auteur tendencies and away from Dahl's cruel, austere master plots. Burton's loner-punk heroes (Edward Scissorhands, Bruce Wayne, Pee-Wee, Ichabod Crane, Ed Wood), see, live alone or in a metaphor for isolation, divorced from their horror-legend father figures (Vincent Price, Martin Landau as Bela Lugosi, now Christopher Lee) and largely failing to hide their disfigurements while struggling to achieve a semblance of "ordinariness" in their familial relationships. (Even the demon Beetlejuice has a moment where he throws his arms around his victims and yells, "C'mon, we're simpatico here!") At their core, Burton's films are by and large hopeful–bittersweet or piquant, they're consistently portraits of misfits with dreams. But until Big Fish and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, they hadn't been trite or, perish the thought, fearful.

Breakfast on Pluto (2005)

November 8, 2005Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Ireland, Theatrical, UK

**½/****
starring Cillian Murphy, Stephen Rea, Brendan Gleeson, Liam Neeson
screenplay by Neil Jordan and Patrick McCabe, based on McCabe's novel
directed by Neil Jordan

by Walter Chaw It would seem impossible that Neil Jordan could maintain the ebullient energy of Breakfast on Pluto, and sure enough, it peters out somewhere in the film's second hour. But for as long as it lasts, the picture stands as Jordan's most cheerful, mining joy from the resilience of an Irish transvestite in London as he squeezes all of the Irish experience through his insouciant prism. It mixes magic realism with a certain fairytale sensibility that has been the hallmark of Jordan's career (his hero even wakes in a castle at one point), used here as something like a Miltonic homily along the lines of "The mind is its own place, and in itself, can make heaven of Hell, and a hell of Heaven." A film about the influences of religion, fanaticism, politics, friendship, and love on identity, it's also a survey history of the Irish/English conflict from the trippy, mod '60s into the '70s, and, by the end, an actors' workshop on how to build a performance based on quirks into a character based in emotion.

A Farewell to Arms (1957) + Francis of Assisi (1961) – DVDs

November 8, 2005Posted in1950s, 1960s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Drama, DVD, Romance, War

A FAREWELL TO ARMS
½*/**** Image B Sound B- Extras D
starring Rock Hudson, Jennifer Jones, Vittorio De Sica, Mercedes McCambridge
screenplay by Ben Hecht, based on the novel by Ernest Hemingway
directed by Charles Vidor

FRANCIS OF ASSISI
*/**** Image B Sound B- Extras D
starring Bradford Dillman, Dolores Hart, Stuart Whitman, Pedro Armendariz
screenplay by Eugene Vale, James Forsyth and Jack Thomas
directed by Michael Curtiz

by Walter Chaw One of David O. Selznick's many attempts to shape the largely immutable mug of lady-love Jennifer Jones into the face that launched a thousand cinematic ships, the badly-fumbled Hemingway adaptation A Farewell to Arms finds Jones, about two decades past the age of her Red Cross nightingale Catherine, paired opposite the not-quite-long-in-the-tooth-but-almost Rock Hudson as her doomed love Lt. Henry. The setting is Italy during The Great War; playboy Lt. Henry falls for mad "Cat," who, as written by the legendary Ben Hecht (himself a decade removed from his best work and well on his way to becoming king of cheese epics), comes off as an entirely inappropriate nod to Blanche Dubois. Selznick served John Huston–the right man for this picture–his walking papers early on for correctly identifying the love story in Hemingway's novel as just a metaphor for the tragedy and irony of WWI's carnage, subbing Huston with second-stringer Charles Vidor, who meekly agreed to amplify the alleged love between Lt. Henry and Cat while pushing all manner of hysterical spectacle to the wings of the proscenium.

Mr. & Mrs. Smith (2005) [Widescreen] – DVD

November 7, 2005Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, DVD, Espionage, Romance, Thriller

***/**** Image N/A Sound A Extras B-
starring Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie, Adam Brody, Kerry Washington
screenplay by Simon Kinberg
directed by Doug Liman

by Walter Chaw Having more to do with Alfred Hitchcock's screwball comedy of the same name than would initially appear, Doug Liman's Mr. and Mrs. Smith affects the sexy, light-hearted, insouciant derring-do of the BBC's "The Avengers" and, paced as it is by Liman's trip-hammer way with an action scene, makes as strong a case for a franchise as any. (At the least, between Go, The Bourne Identity, and now Mr. and Mrs. Smith, Liman should become the first choice of anyone looking for an action helmer.) If the early going is often awkward, blame the complexity of the premise and its requirement that it stay absolutely airtight while setting up its preposterous premise: two of the world's top assassins living in holy matrimony without knowing that the other is a killing machine.

Noah’s Arc: FFC Interviews Noah Baumbach

November 6, 2005Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Interviews

NbaumbachinterviewtitleNovember 6, 2005|The son of author Jonathan Baumbach and former VILLAGE VOICE film critic Georgia Brown, Noah Baumbach is married to Jennifer Jason Leigh and counts among his friends long-time husband and wife Kevin Kline and Phoebe Cates (whose son, Owen, has a pivotal role in Baumbach's new film The Squid and the Whale). I know he wrote and directed a 1995 film called Kicking and Screaming that I liked a great deal, that he co-wrote The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou with Wes Anderson and that Anderson produced The Squid and the Whale, and that he made another flick (the underestimated Mr. Jealousy) and still another (Highball) he had taken away from him and will no longer discuss. I believed that was all I really needed to know about Mr. Baumbach's personal life–and maybe too much already, besides.