Authors: Walter Chaw Archives - Page 95 of 145

Cursed (2005)

February 25, 20052000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Germany, Horror, Romance, Theatrical, Thriller, Werewolf, Wes Craven

*/****
starring Christina Ricci, Joshua Jackson, Jesse Eisenberg, Mya
screenplay by Kevin Williamson
directed by Wes Craven

by Walter Chaw Butchered beyond recognition by the almighty Weinsteins, director Wes Craven’s promised ‘hard R’-rated werewolf homage/satire Cursed is now a disjointed, disowned, completely sanitized PG-13 tweener shocker so chaste that it’s not entirely unlike watching Heidi with more jump scares. Great, giant bits of gore have been excised from the film and what’s left doesn’t match, has no rhythm, and is almost completely reliant on An American Werewolf in Paris-bad CGI. It’s been eviscerated like the werewolf’s first victim used to have been, resigning it to the sweet embrace of snarky irony that it hoped itself to use on the werewolf genre. Cursed is a terrible waste of makeup-effects master Rick Baker’s return to the game (he’s the guy behind the groundbreaking work in An American Werewolf in London); a waste of the menstruation metaphor suggested by its title; and a waste of the reunion of the creative team behind the gory, smart, post-modern slasher flick Scream (Craven and writer Kevin Williamson).

Born Into Brothels (2004)

February 23, 20052000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Documentary, Theatrical

Born Into Brothels: Calcutta's Red Light Kids
**½/****
directed by Zana Briski & Ross Kauffman

by Walter Chaw In a troubling moment about halfway through Born Into Brothels, co-directors Zana Briski and Ross Kauffman take the children of prostitutes in Calcutta's Red Light district on a field trip to the zoo and then, in a series of jarring juxtapositions, compare their plight to that of caged animals (elephants, big cats, camels, and, yep, a monkey behind bars). Paternalistic, no question, the picture crosses the line that separates documentation from activism into do-gooder theatre, with the filmmakers' half-measures–no matter how well-meant–sometimes striking as meddling. And unlike Steve James's revelatory Stevie, there's no existential examination of whether or not interference is actually more harmful to the subjects than it is useful.

Son of the Mask (2005)

February 18, 20052000s, Australia, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, Family, Fantasy, France, Germany, Romania, Superhero, Theatrical, Venezuala, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Jamie Kennedy, Alan Cumming, Traylor Howard, Steven Wright
screenplay by Lance Khazei
directed by Lawrence Guterman

by Walter Chaw Towards the end of the uniquely awful Son of the Mask, star Jamie Kennedy gets two fistfuls of his screen-wife Traylor Howard’s bosom (this after pummelling her head against the ground in a scary depiction of domestic violence) and declares, in so many words, “Eureka–so it is you, honey.” It’s a charming vignette that follows about an hour of fart, snot, golden shower, and Exorcist jokes, each trumping the last in level of inappropriateness until finally the deadened synapses begin to register that with sets like “Edge City” and “Fringe City”, the brain trust behind this abortion might actually have had something subversive in mind. A shame, then, that they’ve confused “edge” and “fringe” elements with puerile scatology and institutional dehumanization, intercut with baby and animal reaction shots and a marginal and failed television comedian (playing a marginal and failed television animator) mugging in an astoundingly lifeless approximation of “manic.” For a film that might want to be taken as “edgy,” in other words, Son of the Mask caters to the absolute lowest and commonest of the lowest common denominators.

Wicker Park (2004) – DVD

February 16, 20052000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Mystery, Romance, Thriller

***/**** Image B+ Sound A- Extras B
starring Josh Hartnett, Rose Byrne, Matthew Lillard, Diane Kruger
screenplay by Brandon Boyce
directed by Paul McGuigan

by Walter Chaw Paul McGuigan's Wicker Park is all about reflective surfaces. The whole thing casts Chicago (or Montreal, subbing for Chicago in just another slippery deception) as the house of mirrors sequence in The Lady from Shanghai, tempting us to dismiss it as stale noir sauced-up with a fresh spackle of postmodern, commercial/music video glamour. But Wicker Park, based on Gilles Mimouni's L'Appartement, is almost an act of pop art, opening with hunky Josh Hartnett walking the mean streets of the Windy City and shopping for a diamond engagement ring that becomes the prism through which the rest of the film, especially in its more pregnant moments, is seen.

Friday Night Lights (2004) [Widescreen] – DVD

February 15, 20052000s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Germany, Sports

***/**** Image A Sound B+ Extras B+
starring Billy Bob Thornton, Derek Luke, Jay Hernandez, Lucas Black
screenplay by David Aaron Cohen and Peter Berg, based on the book Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream by H.G. Bissinger
directed by Peter Berg

by Walter Chaw Turning the microscope on the reptile hearts and minds of small-town sports culture, Peter Berg's Friday Night Lights is so alive with seething energy and meanness that it emerges as one of the better sports films on the short list of good sports films. It's what the Omaha Beach sequence in Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan is to Oliver Stone's Platoon: an evolution by way of devolution that erases the veneer, such as there is, prettifying violent confrontation, becoming in the process the unadorned engine to which Stone's ultimately featherweight Any Given Sunday aspired. It finds Lucas Black (as star quarterback Mike Winchell) reunited with Sling Blade co-star Billy Bob Thornton (playing his coach, Gary Gaines), with the mental disability roles reversed ("There's something wrong with my head," Winchell complains) but the peek under the Rockwell covers at insular, provincial psychosis transplanted intact. Friday Night Lights is a work of sociology, a film that not only understands the all-American obsession with packaged violence and the cult of machismo, but is also a clearer barometer of the kind of sublimation of fear and loathing in these United States than any gross of pre-election political documentaries. Our country's in trouble because these brutal idiots can vote–and there are more of them than there are the rest of us.

The Notebook (2004) [New Line Platinum Series] – DVD

February 15, 20052000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Romance

½*/**** Image A Sound A Extras A
starring Ryan Gosling, Rachel McAdams, James Garner, Gena Rowlands
screenplay by Jeremy Leven, based on the novel by Nicholas Sparks
directed by Nick Cassavetes

by Walter Chaw Ah, Nicholas Sparks. I once saw an interview with Nicholas Sparks in which he accused literary critics of envying his success, thus shedding light on the consistently bad reviews he's gotten throughout his career while failing to explain why he got terrible reviews for his debut novel as well. Nor does this explain how it is that someone who's barely literate himself could have understood his critics enough to feel offended–after all, Sparks's admirers certainly aren't reading the reviews. In fact, that movie executives appear to be among Sparks's biggest fans (The Notebook is the third faithfully awful adaptation of a Sparks opus–two more to go) says a lot about both movie executives and Sparks's books.

I Am Camera: FFC Interviews Albert Maysles

February 13, 20052000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Documentary, Interviews

February 13, 2005|With their 1969 breakthrough film Salesman, a looks at the lives of four door-to-door bible salesmen, the Maysles brothers, David and Albert, became the forerunners of the "direct cinema" style of unblinking documentary filmmaking. Legends as influential to the modern documentary as John Cassavetes is to the modern anti-narrative, they're perhaps most famous for their quasi-concert film Gimme Shelter (1970), which captured the murder of an audience member by Hell's Angels hired as security guards for The Rolling Stones appearance at Altamont–in addition to, somehow more shockingly, the band's reaction to this homicide upon viewing the footage later. Pauline Kael declared Gimme Shelter a fraud, though she refused to ever reveal her reasoning for such a charge to either her editor or the outraged Albert. The wound is still fresh.

Hitch (2005)

February 11, 20052000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Romance, Theatrical, Will Smith

***½/****
starring Will Smith, Eva Mendes, Kevin James, Amber Valletta
screenplay by Kevin Bisch
directed by Andy Tennant

by Walter Chaw Defying all odds by not being awful, what Andy Tennant's Hitch lacks in originality it makes up for in chemistry between Will Smith (true heir to Cary Grant's romantic comedy crown) and the lovely Eva Mendes, both of whom find their stride in what amounts to a 'Black Eye for the White Guy' take on screwball farce. Only occasionally, in other words, is it apparent that the dialogue is excrescent and that this is another one of those movies that ends with a long wedding sequence where people shimmy in front of the camera. Strike against it that it resists pairing Smith with a Caucasian actress because African sexuality is almost as threatening to white sexuality as homosexuality, but it does allow the erstwhile helper fairy to have a love life of his own parallel to the hopeless fat cracker fast becoming the most popular of the new reviled minorities. It's a good thing that, for the most part, they don't seem to mind–call it the CBS/Homer Simpson/Matthew Perry syndrome.

Gunga Din (1939) – DVD

February 10, 20051930s, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD, War

*/**** Image B- Sound C Extras A
starring Cary Grant, Victor McLaglen, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., Joan Fontaine
screenplay by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, based on the poem by Rudyard Kipling
directed by George Stevens

by Walter Chaw To say that George Stevens's Gunga Din hasn't aged well overlooks the cold reality that the best one could ever say for it is that its hinges were once merely creaky instead of frozen. (It also presupposes that being a decent, moral person meant something different in 1939 than it does in 2005.) The picture is almost impossible to watch for a modern audience: the characterizations are broad and insulting; the dialogue strongly suggests that Rudyard Kipling's poems should be left untransmogrified (even by William Faulkner–deep in the sauce when it came his turn) into filmic narrative; and the attitude towards empiricism and oppressed native populations on display was always condescending and appalling for anyone not currently being shot at.

Mean Creek (2004) – DVD

February 9, 2005****/****, 2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Coming of Age, Crime, Drama, DVD, FFC Must-Own, Teen

****/**** Image A+ Sound A- Extras B-
starring Rory Culkin, Ryan Kelley, Scott Mechlowicz, Trevor Morgan
written and directed by Jacob Aaron Estes

by Walter Chaw Mean Creek is poised at the magic hour of the death of innocence. It deals in corruption like a maggot will, burrowing and gnawing its way through true fauna to take its sustenance in its blithe, indifferent way from the dying of the light. The film represents in its existence and function a transitional vehicle between the end of life and rebirth. In Mean Creek, a slug crawls across cold flesh in a quiet, crepuscular moment; a snail (similar/different) is punished an instant later by a clear-eyed little girl, completing her exile from Paradise in a stroke remarkably brutal not necessarily for the act, but for the freshness of the stain on the perpetrator. The picture's title refers not to malevolence, but to a nature metaphor that works as the centre-point–the protean "mean"–between two extremes. It is that ever-tilting line that marks childhood's end: mercurial, sure, yet as substantial and rude as a brick wall.

The American Astronaut (2001) – DVD

February 8, 2005****/****, 2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD, Esoterica, FFC Must-Own, Musical, Sci-Fi

****/**** Image B Sound A Extras A-
starring Cory McAbee, Rocco Sisto, Gregory Russell Cook, Annie Golden
written and directed by Cory McAbee

by Walter Chaw Opening with a mordant prologue that reminds of the expressionless absurdist sensibility of the late Douglas Adams and proceeding through something somewhere between Six-String Samurai and Dead Man (but a science-fiction musical), Cory McAbee’s The American Astronaut is dead brilliant. Demonstrating a truly dazzling level of technical proficiency (despite or due to what must have been a non-budget) and a breathless creativity fecund and macabre, the picture reminds of Harlan Ellison, Dr. Strangelove, and Dark Star in equal measure. Ultimately, The American Astronaut is something all its own, a film that sets itself up as an old-fashioned serial and goes on to explore cinematic and literary theory with a keen eye for composition and an ear for mad scenario and perverse dialogue. The reasoning is Beckett, the execution is Brecht and Weill, and the results are best described as an educational reel directed by David Lynch circa Eraserhead: self-aware and hallucinatory.

Project Runway: The Complete First Season (2004) – DVD

February 8, 20052000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD, Television

Image A Sound B+ Extras C+
"Innovation," "Vision," "Commercial Appeal," "Collaboration," "'Model' Clients," "Making a Splash," "Design a Collection," "Postal Uniform Challenge," "Design for the Red Carpet," "Reunion Show," "Fashion Week"

by Walter Chaw It's easy to get frustrated with the Brothers Weinstein and, to paraphrase someone wittier than me talking about Kevin Smith (one of Miramax's pet directors), how they single-handedly turned independent film into the Special Olympics, but I confess I like their "productive" reality shows, "Project Greenlight" and "Project Runway". The end-result may be no better than that of a "productive cough," but the processes in these shows–the labours the contestants are forced to endure and the idea that the product of those labours will be presented for us, the schadenfreudians, to take our pokes at–is brilliant. What better way to pass the time, after all, than to observe homosexual men and castrating women engaged in arcane pursuits and then judge the arcane outcome of said pursuits, with equal portions of disdain and rapture of the unknown the only qualifications with which we're armed?

The Hero’s Ambassador: FFC Interviews Dan Harris

February 6, 20052000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Interviews

February 6, 2005|I misled Dan Harris. I didn't mean to, but had I meant to, it would've been with the best of intentions. This is how it went down:

I met the young Mr. Harris on the promenade of the Denver Center for the Performing Arts one autumn-touched evening last October. We shook hands and I took note of how furtive he looked–too small in a plain jacket, particularly for the wunderkind who, under the good graces of director Bryan Singer, has found himself as the screenwriter of not only X2, but also Singer's upcoming reimaginings of Logan's Run and Superman. He earned this luck in part based on the strength of his screenplay for Imaginary Heroes, now freshly-produced and opening wide as his hyphenate debut. Mr. Harris had, unfortunately, read my capsule review of Imaginary Heroes preparatory to meeting me (he confessed that he reads his press), and after we found a seat in an abandoned open air café, he thought it prudent to tell me so while sprinkling the rest of our conversation with evidence that he'd all but memorized the piece.

Rory O’Shea Was Here (2004)

February 4, 20052000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Disability, Drama, France, Ireland, Theatrical, UK

Inside I’m Dancing
*/****
starring James McAvoy, Steven Robertson, Romola Garai, Brenda Fricker
screenplay by Jeffrey Caine
directed by Damien O’Donnell

by Walter Chaw Looking for shock value, the more unkind would call Rory O’Shea Was Here “One Rolled Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”: the film is a straight-up rip-off that substitutes Randle McMurphy and Chief Bromden for plucky punk afflicted with Muscular Dystrophy Rory (James McAvoy) and his cerebral palsy-afflicted chum Michael (not Donnie Wahlberg). Because neither actor is actually afflicted, it can be said that their performances are at best affected; at their worst, and at the service of a condescending screenplay, the two come off as patronizing caricatures engaged in an insipid waltz around the real issues that arise when you’re thrust by disability into the full-time care of strangers. It’s a great idea to cast the disabled in lead roles, even romantic (gasp!) roles, in motion pictures, but it’s a terrible idea to do so for the express purpose of making them into noble savages from which we can suckle our portion of moral outrage and smug, shit-eating superiority. Best, the rebel that brings a sparkle into the lives of everyone he touches has the decency to croak as his last act of charity, allowing the much-maligned social order to go on ticking with one fewer annoying gadfly.

The Chorus (2004)

February 4, 20052000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, France, Germany, Music, Switzerland, Theatrical

Les choristes
½*/****
starring Gérard Jugnot, François Berléand, Kad Merad, Jean-Paul Bonnaire
screenplay by Philippe Lopes-Curval, Christophe Barratier
directed by Christophe Barratier

by Walter Chaw The one good thing about Christophe Barratier's unbelievably inane, saccharine, and derivative The Chorus (Les Choristes) is that it offers the much put-upon American public a little comfort in the knowledge that the French mainstream (which made this film its top-grossing title of last year) has just as unquenchable a sweet tooth for pap. Useless to discuss at length, The Chorus is essentially another in a line of literally dozens of films in which an inspirational teacher changes the lives of a group of troubled/lower-class/underestimated children through will, kindness, and a rogue spark of crinkly-eyed genius that irks to no end the evil dean/headmaster/school board/community. It's not as bad as Filipino contribution Little Voices, nor is it as good as, say, Goodbye Mr. Chips–locating it somewhere in the neighbourhood of a disaster like Mr. Holland's Opus or the endlessly weird Wes Craven (!) picture Music of the Heart. Taken on its own merits, pretending that you've never seen Dead Poets Society, Stand and Deliver, The Blackboard Jungle, Conrack, Mona Lisa Smile, Dangerous Minds, Renaissance Man, Coach Carter, and so on and so on, The Chorus is still unspeakably maudlin and presented in so straightforward a fashion that if you did the right thing and asked for your money back after five minutes, you could reasonably fake having seen it to a circle of friends, who will admire your stamina in having sat through the whole benighted thing.

The Wedding Date (2005)

February 4, 20052000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Romance, Theatrical, UK

*/****
starring Debra Messing, Dermot Mulroney, Amy Adams, Holland Taylor
screenplay by Dana Fox, based on the novel Asking for Trouble by Elizabeth Young
directed by Clare Kilner

by Walter Chaw With Dermot Mulroney playing some kind of android gigolo and Debra Messing bronzed in her syndicated brand of humiliated never-a-bride shtick honed through years on "Must-See TV," The Wedding Date doesn't, at least, always accidentally resemble a horror flick, unlike director Clare Kilner's previous film, the creepy How to Deal. What it does is remind a lot of Pretty Woman if the whore in question were a charisma vacuum instead of Julia Roberts, and it finds work as a WASP bitch's-bitch of a mother for the hopelessly typecast Holland Taylor. It's the kind of film focus-grouped to such a precise dot that everyone in any audience that willingly attends the thing will not only be able to name each brand of luggage the characters use, but will do so with joy and pride.

Greg the Bunny (2002) + Crank Yankers – Uncensored: Season One (2002) – DVDs

February 3, 20052000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD, Television

GREG THE BUNNY
Image A Sound B Extras B
"Welcome to Sweetknuckle Junction," "Sock Like Me," "Dottie Heat," "SK-2.0," "Piddler on the Roof," "Rabbit Redux," "Father & Son Reunion," "Jimmy Drives Gil Crazy," "Greg Gets Puppish," "Surprise!," "The Jewel Heist," "The Singing Mailman," "Blah Bawls"

CRANK YANKERS – UNCENSORED: SEASON ONE
Image A Sound B Extras C-
episodes 1-10

by Walter Chaw What is it about puppets, exactly, that makes them the preferred avatars for children as they navigate the murky straits between childhood and adulthood? I'd hazard that there's a simplifying element to them, some sort of leavening of the peculiarities of human expression so that emotions aren't so subtle, so fraught with the landmines of nuance and subtlety. They're great teaching tools, the perfect bearer of allegory–hence the Japanese, with their tradition of sophisticated puppet theatre, have distilled it (as they have animation) into an adult medium. But in the western world, puppets are so embedded in our puerile, formative experiences (from "Sesame Street" to "Bear in the Big Blue House") that when they're subverted (as in Team America, for instance), there's something particularly naughty about it–above and beyond, perhaps, the specific offense. Alas, it can only hold its illicit thrill until the novelty and surprise of it wears off.

Kingdom Hospital: The Entire Series (2004) – DVD

February 2, 20052000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Drama, DVD, Horror, Mystery, Stephen King, Television

Image A Sound A Extras B
"Thy Kingdom Come," "Death's Kingdom," "Goodbye Kiss," "The West Side Of Midnight," "Hook's Kingdom," "The Young And The Headless," "Black Noise," "Heartless," "Butterfingers," "The Passion Of Reverend Jimmy," "Seizure Day," "Shoulda Stood In Bed," "Finale"

by Walter Chaw The sort of program you want other people to see in the same way you want someone else to smell how spoiled the milk is, the 13-part, 10-hour, Stephen King-scripted adaptation of Lars Von Trier's brilliant Danish miniseries "Riget" (a.k.a. "The Kingdom") is only as bloated, ridiculous, and incompetent as the rest of the master of terror's last decade of work. Auto-cannibalistic like his protagonist in "Survivor Type" and pitched as a cross between "E.R." and, one presumes, the TV version of King's "The Shining" (while playing like a community theatre rendition of "The Singing Detective"), "Kingdom Hospital" is awkward at best and eye-clawing hokum at its worst. There's no other way to describe a talking CGI anteater called "Antubis" (after the Egyptian god of death Annubis, I'm thinking) that fights a Depression-era vampire in the bowels of the titular place of healing. A spooky little girl à la The Shining (played by a terrible kid actor à la Danny from Kubrick's The Shining) describes him this way: "He eats disease, he likes to be scratched behind the ears. He's horrible. Beautiful." Yep.

The Grudge (2004) – DVD

February 1, 20052000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Horror, Japan, Mystery, Thriller

*/**** Image B Sound A- Extras A-
starring Sarah Michelle Gellar, Jason Behr, KaDee Strickland, Clea DuVall
screenplay by Stephen Susco, based on a screenplay by Takashi Shimizu
directed by Takashi Shimizu

by Walter Chaw Fans of Takashi Shimizu's Japanese horror franchise Ju-On, rest assured that his English-language but still Tokyo-set version of The Grudge is laudably faithful to the source material. So faithful, in fact, that The Grudge is completely free of those tedious drags character development, tension, scenario, narrative, plot, intelligence, point, sociological relevance, technical aptitude, and scares, really, since it leaves "pacing" somewhere back where the rest of that stuff was jettisoned. What The Grudge has a lot of, though, are "jump scares," the cats-through-windows thing where somebody crawls around in an attic with a lighter because they've heard an ominous knocking and then a face appears in the gloom accompanied by a sting note on the soundtrack.

Alone in the Dark (2005); Hide and Seek (2005); In the Realms of the Unreal: The Mystery of Henry Darger (2005)

January 28, 20052000s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Documentary, Germany, Horror, Mystery, Robert De Niro, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller, ZERO STARS

ALONE IN THE DARK
ZERO STARS/****
starring Christian Slater, Tara Reid, Stephen Dorff, Frank C. Turner
screenplay by Elan Mastai, Michael Roesch and Peter Scheerer
directed by Uwe Boll

HIDE AND SEEK
**/****
starring Robert De Niro, Dakota Fanning, Famke Janssen, Elisabeth Shue
screenplay by Ari Schlossberg
directed by John Polson

by Walter Chaw Edward Carnby (Christian Slater) is a "paranormal investigator," which in Uwe Boll's visual vernacular means that he dresses like Highlander Duncan MacLeod and lives in MacLeod's apartment, too. Chip through the film's hard veneer of unsightly stupidity (it looks a lot like a Jess Franco film shot on a smaller budget) and you'll begin to unearth a narrative of sorts concerning an ancient Indian tribe that opened a gateway between the light and dark worlds; most of this is imparted by an interminable opening scrawl that's read aloud because director Uwe Boll, himself illiterate, is sympathetic with his target audience, though we get other clues to a plot from an orphan in flashback who, unlike his twenty peers, escapes possession from, um, some bad thing, and a mad scientist Professor Hudgins (Mathew Walker) and his brilliant (snicker) assistant Aline (Tara Reid) trying to collect a bunch of relics so that they can, what, open the gateway between dark and light? I don't know. Casting Reid as a smart person is, by the way, the biggest miscalculation since casting Denise Richards as a nuclear physicist and Kevin Costner as a doctor, although it is admittedly amusing watching her struggle through phrases like "molecular composition."