Authors: Walter Chaw Archives - Page 95 of 145

The Iron Giant (1999) [Special Edition] – DVD

March 7, 2005****/****, 1990s, Action, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Coming of Age, Drama, DVD, Family, FFC Must-Own, Sci-Fi

****/**** Image A+ Sound A+ Extras A+
screenplay by Tim McCanlies, based on The Iron Man by Ted Hughes
directed by Brad Bird

by Walter Chaw Brad Bird's The Iron Giant, based on a children's book, The Iron Man, that British poet laureate (and Mr. Sylvia Plath) Ted Hughes wrote after his wife's suicide, is improbably transformed from the dark and Anglocentric source into a throughline pure and sweet to the rapturous Americana of Richard Donner's Superman. It captures an impossible period existing between the idealism of Rockwell and the lonely realist decompositions of Edward Hopper in a flurry of animated cels, telling the tale of a boy and his robot in the month or so when Sputnik was scaring the bejesus out of a suddenly-humbled, suddenly-Luddite United States. Accordingly, the Colour from Outer Space that was the monstrous bad guy in the book is transformed in the film into the paranoia of a country taught to fear an invisible (or barely visible) foe–marking The Iron Giant as something of a timeless picture particularly topical for a country embroiled in a war on foreign soil, a war with an invisible enemy, and the makings of a cold war with a country that has decided the only way to combat American aggression is with nuclear weapons. Tellingly, it's the appearance of nukes at the end of The Iron Giant that coaxes out the heart of the titular tin man–the last word that he has in the picture–"Superman"–whispered with something like awe that has never failed to bring a tear to my secretly-patriotic eye.

The Witch Who Came from the Sea (1976) [Special Edition] + The Loveless (1982) – DVDs

March 5, 20051970s, 1980s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blue Underground, Drama, DVD, Horror, Thriller

THE WITCH WHO CAME FROM THE SEA
**½/**** Image B+ Sound B Extras C
starring Millie Perkins, Lonny Chapman, Vanessa Brown, George "Buck" Flowers
screenplay by Robert Thom
directed by Matt Cimber

THE LOVELESS
***/**** Image B+ Sound A Extras A
starring Willem Dafoe, Marin Kanter, Robert Gordon, J. Don Ferguson
written and directed by Kathryn Bigelow

by Walter Chaw Looking and feeling a lot like a classic 1970s Seka porno flick, Matt Cimber's seedy, disquieting The Witch Who Came from the Sea straddles an exploitation line in telling a simple tale with an unexpected degree of pretense and, if only occasionally, artistry. History suggests that most of this is due to the contribution of cinematographer Dean Cundey, working here early in his career in his preferred 'scope format and offering the sort of stunning seaside-tableaux counterweight he would employ to greater success in John Carpenter's underestimated The Fog. His landscapes dwarf the lost heroine of the picture, swallowing her whole in the ocean of her past, her obsession with television commercials, and the culture of machismo that manifests itself in 1976 Southern California as muscle beaches and professional football. Opening with Molly (Millie Perkins) telling a tale of her long lost sea captain father to her two nephews (shades, again, of The Fog), The Witch Who Came from the Sea finds its themes topical even when its presentation skews often and badly into the unfortunately-dated.

The Jacket (2005)

March 4, 20052000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Esoterica, Germany, Horror, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller

***½/****
starring Adrien Brody, Keira Knightley, Kris Kristofferson, Jennifer Jason Leigh
screenplay by Massy Tadjedin
directed by John Maybury

by Walter Chaw Lyrical, dislocated, and grim in the fashion of a Derek Jarman film (and director John Maybury served as editor on Jarman's The Last of England), The Jacket, like Altered States, Miracle Mile, Jacob's Ladder, and 12 Monkeys before it, is the sort of doom-filled genre romance that's regularly underestimated in popular contemporary conversation. Peter Deming (the cinematographer on David Lynch's Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive and on the Hughes Brothers' From Hell) shoots the film in a straightforward, beautifully-(under)lit fashion that is equally adept at underscoring the claustrophobia in some sequences and the breathless expanse of others. A scene where Adrien Brody, as Gulf War I vet Jack Starks, wanders away from his loony bin down a long tunnel in a Robert Frost wood and Dr. Lorenson (Jennifer Jason Leigh) stumbles after him demonstrates both, with Deming painting a beautiful landscape from paint pots full of bleak, oppressive isolation. Scored lightly by a series of Brian Eno compositions, The Jacket is an apocalyptic poem of love and loss that's unusually wise about its visual vocabulary–about ways of looking, the line between dreaming and reality, and how eyes on film can be a powerful and elastic metaphor for the audience engaged in a kind of liquid dreaming.

Be Cool (2005)

March 4, 20052000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Music, Satire, Theatrical

**/****
starring John Travolta, Uma Thurman, Vince Vaughn, Cedric the Entertainer
screenplay by Peter Steinfeld, based on the novel by Elmore Leonard
directed by F. Gary Gray

by Walter Chaw At some point you decide that you're either going to play pool with Be Cool or you're not. You're going to have to decide whether Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson's mincing caricature of a gay man is actually a self-parody of his own pumped-up, homoerotic image (see also Vin Diesel's simultaneously-opening Mr. Mom ape, The Pacifier), and whether this studied unkindness towards black people is actually only a satire of the bling-bling gangster culture that has all but defined rap music and young urban culture for the wider mainstream white audience. If you're resolved that Be Cool is meta-fiction that's more sociologically self-aware than other masturbatory cameo hustlers like Ocean's Twelve (and it might be), then it is indeed sort of liberating to give up and laugh along with the horde. (What could be funnier, really, than The Rock limping his wrist and doing a dialogue, solo, from cheerleading classic Bring It On?) But there's this lingering, disturbing thought I can't quite shake that Be Cool is only being a smartass part of the time–and maybe being a smug, insufferable prig all of the time.

Exorcist: The Beginning (2004) [Widescreen Edition] – DVD

March 1, 20052000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD, Horror, Mystery, Thriller

½*/**** Image A Sound A Extras C
starring Stellan Skarsgård, Izabella Scorupco, James D'Arcy, Remy Sweeney
screenplay by Alexi Hawley
directed by Renny Harlin

by Walter Chaw Beginning with a kinky apocalypse that Ken Russell would surely have created had ever he the budget and equipment, Renny Harlin's Exorcist: The Beginning is good, old-timey drive-in exploitation garbage. It hates children with a unique fury, boasting the highest dead-kid count since Schindler's List, and sure enough, somehow Harlin manages to work in an uncomfortable subplot about exorcising Holocaust demons as our happy Catholics exorcise a literal one. I don't know if Paul Schrader, the man who helmed the first run at this troubled production (the very first director attached was the late John Frankenheimer)–ostensibly scrapped because it wasn't scary enough (and frankly, the guy who did the Nastassja Kinski Cat People should probably not be going near horror movies in the first place)–included a Holocaust subplot in his version of the flick, but I'm hoping not. Mainly because when you introduce a Holocaust subplot into a movie that also features hyenas ripping apart a little boy in protracted, excruciating detail, a woman giving birth to a maggot-infested infant, and another Holocaust survivor bleeding gallons from her Nazi-ruined vagina, you're wandering into the territory of cinema as audience punishment.

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.