Spider (2002)

June 28, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Canada, Directors: David Cronenberg, Drama, Esoterica, France, Mystery, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

***½/****
starring Ralph Fiennes, Miranda Richardson, Gabriel Byrne, Bradley Hall
screenplay by Patrick McGrath and David Cronenberg, based on the novel by Patrick McGrath
directed by David Cronenberg

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover After a period of indifferent projects, declining audiences, and three years of disconcerting silence, the unthinkable has become reality: David Cronenberg is back on top. His new film Spider intensifies all of his past thematic concerns with a pictorial eloquence practically unheard of in his oeuvre–it’s like watching one of the sex slugs from Shivers turn into a beautiful, fragile butterfly. For once, the trials of his sexually confused lead resonate beyond the merely theoretical, and for once, you feel his pain instead of contemplating it from a distance. The antiseptic restraint of Crash and Naked Lunch has been replaced with a dread and sadness that overwhelm you with their emotionalism; Spider is easily the best film he’s made since Dead Ringers, possibly even since Videodrome. I hope that it marks a turning point in the career of Canada’s most conspicuous auteur.

Atanarjuat (2002)

June 28, 2002Posted in****/****, 2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Drama, Theatrical

Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner
The Fast Runner
****/****
starring Natar Ungalaaq, Sylvia Ivalu, Peter-Henry Arnatsiaq, Lucy Tulugarjuk
screenplay by Paul Apak Angilirq
directed by Zacharias Kunuk

by Walter Chaw Zacharias Kunuk’s Atanarjuat (The Fast Runner), the first motion picture presented entirely in the Inuit language Inutkikuk, is what it means to be transported by the cinema: taken to another place and another time on the flickering wings of film’s lunar art. It is the realization of the full possibility of the movies to present the alien as familiar while providing a vital anthropological connection through the naturalism and glorious universality of its characters and story. An Inuit legend passed through centuries of oral tradition that demonstrates a very particular peculiarity of world mythology, Atanarjuat, seen one way, is a classic banning fable–thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s wife and possessions, thou shalt not murder. Jung spoke of a common well of images and signifiers from which we draw our stories, and Atanarjuat, unfolding on a cold-blasted primeval arctic plain, has the quality of totem.

Fast Times: FFC Interviews Zacharias Kunuk & Norman Cohn

June 24, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Interviews

FastrunnerinterviewtitleJune 25, 2002|For all of George Lucas's frothing exhortations for exhibitors and filmmakers to wean themselves off celluloid, the most compelling argument for digital video exists in independent cinema–smaller productions have thus far benefited the greatest from DV's affordability, flexibility, and intimacy. Zacharias Kunuk and Norman Cohn's Atanarjuat (more commonly, The Fast Runner) (Kunuk is listed as director and Cohn as DP, but the reality is closer to their responsibilities being equal and the same), shot entirely on DV and then transferred to 35mm (much like Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones), is the kind of unique indie project that gives hope and reason to the format; without DV, The Fast Runner would have been too expensive and cumbersome to shoot. A stark and beautiful telling of an ancient Inuit banning fable, The Fast Runner is also the first major cinema product from the Inuit people, the first picture shot entirely in the Inutkikuk language, and the first picture to present Inuit people to a western audience free of Nanook of the North stereotypes. Besides being entertaining, The Fast Runner is an important film.

Century Hotel (2001) – DVD

May 20, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Drama, DVD, Esoterica

**½/**** Image B+ Sound A Extras A+
starring Joel Bissonnette, Lindy Booth, Colm Feore, David Hewlett
screenplay by David Weaver and Bridget Newson
directed by David Weaver

by Walter Chaw A little of Mystery Train, a little of Barton Fink and Hotel Room, a little of Million Dollar Hotel and Aria, and eventually too much of Four Rooms, Canadian David Weaver’s debut feature is the flawed Century Hotel. Rife with the Freudian implications of a hotel composed of one hall and one room (and all its attendant illicit sexual fixations), the picture carries seven storylines in seven different periods set in the same room of (presumably) the titular inn. Without a traditional framing story and united only by a common theme of individual freedoms as expressed through sexuality, Century Hotel is the very definition of representational ambition (though I could have done without a champagne bottle cork transition emerging out of a homosexual kiss). In a film aspiring to fable with its virgins and whores, the critical lack of mothers and crones speaks to a certain lack of balance to the piece.

The Starz Independent FilmCenter Project, Vol. 4

May 10, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, Cyprus, Drama, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Romance, Theatrical, UK

by Walter Chaw

THE CHERRY ORCHARD (2000)
*/****
starring Tushka Bergen, Frances de la Tour, Charlotte Rampling, Gerard Butler
screenplay by Michael Cacoyannis, based on the play by Anton Chekhov
directed by Michael Cacoyannis

Written at the end of his life in 1904, "The Cherry Orchard" is the last of Anton Chekhov's great masterpieces, so ethereal it verges on the surreal and so circular it approaches the ineffable and the serene. The work is as balanced between its condemnation as it is winsome in its distillation of a lifetime spent in observation. By turns, it is also humanistic and mordantly funny, capturing a period of time (just prior to the Russian Revolution of 1905) in a way that perhaps no other play ever has any other period. Produced under some duress from Moscow Art Theater co-founders Konstantin Stanislavsky and Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, Chekhov began work on "The Cherry Orchard" in 1903–putting off the MAT pair with vague promises of a new farce or vaudeville. What he finally presented was what Stanislavsky feared: "…Instead of a farce again we shall have a great big tragedy."

Film Freak Central Does Hot Docs 2002 Canadian International Documentary Festival – May 5

May 5, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Canada, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover

BOLLYWOOD BOUND
***/****
directed by Nisha Pahuja

Bollywood Bound is a perfectly decent film about aspiring actors working in Bombay that would be even better without the cutesy editorializing of director Nisha Pahuja. There's a wealth of interesting information in this examination of Canadian expatriates trying to make it in Hindi filmmaking; Pointing out that Bollywood provides a place for East Indian descendants that Hollywood won't provide, it shows the various cultural distortions that several actors faced regarding India, Indian culture, and themselves. Previously known to their white schoolmates as "the Indian kids," they suddenly find themselves equally marginalized as "the Canadian actors," and discover that the pure "Indianness" they fought to protect in Canada is largely non-existent.

Film Freak Central Does Hot Docs 2002 Canadian International Documentary Festival – The Innovators: Frederick Wiseman

May 5, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Blog, Canada, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover

The Revival, Toronto|After being lulled into a stupor by the sins and shortcomings of this week's panellists, today's Frederick Wiseman talk was like being slapped back into full consciousness. There was no "drama" and "truth" spouted by this man, there were no sweeping generalizations about the places and people he films. There was simply a desire to explore the things that interest him and widen the scope of institutional life. And with a refreshing blunt humour and low tolerance for bull, Wiseman cut through the pretensions and got to the point of how and why he works as he does.

Film Freak Central Does Hot Docs 2002 Canadian International Documentary Festival – Filmmaker Discussion: History and Innovation

May 5, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Blog, Canada, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover

The Revival, Toronto|The more I listen to documentarians, the less I trust the documentary. The line that separates fact from fiction and reportage from drama is so fine that it frequently disappears altogether; even the best-intentioned filmmaker is under pressure to give shape to something that is essentially formless, and in so doing leaves out much essential information. The directors on today's panel, which deals with the vagaries of representing the past for the present, did their best to downplay the dangers of such a situation, but their words kept raising more questions than they answered, and I walked out of Revival even more leery of the form than I was going in.

Film Freak Central Does Hot Docs 2002 Canadian International Documentary Festival – May 4

May 4, 2002Posted in1960s, 2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Canada, Documentary, Film Festivals, Germany, Hot Docs

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover

ABSOLUT WARHOLA (2001)
*½/****
directed by Stanislaw Mucha

There is, believe it or not, an Andy Warhol museum in the remote Slovenian town of Medzilaborce; sadly, director Stanislaw Mucha can't scare up much of a reason to know about it. Essentially a stomp-the-hicks number, his film takes great pains to mock the residents of Warhol's ancestral home, who, though not quite sure why these paintings are supposed to be important, are nevertheless pleased to have such a famous relative and native son. But as Absolut Warhola heavy-handedly contrasts the guileless and homey Warholas–who prattle on about everything from the television and the relative merits of Lenin and Stalin–with the ultra-urbane art objects enshrined in the leaky museum, the film backfires on itself: it makes Warhol seem less interesting by showing how little he matters to people who live outside an urban cultural elite.

Film Freak Central Does Hot Docs 2002 Canadian International Documentary Festival – Filmmaker Discussion: Epic Adventures and Heroic Quests

May 2, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Blog, Canada, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs

The Revival, Toronto| Today's "Filmmaker's Discussion" was marked by its divergence from yesterday's ethical certitude. Where the earlier panel dealt with the responsibility of the filmmaker towards its subjects, the four panellists on hand today spoke of the Faustian bargain between making a stirring film and keeping conscientious. Despite the talk's grandiose title "Epic Adventures and Heroic Quests"–alluding to the probing nature and uncertain outcomes of the panellists' films–the matter at hand was the fine detailing that keeps a documentary interesting, which is not necessarily the same thing as keeping it truthful.

Film Freak Central Does Hot Docs 2002 Canadian International Documentary Festival – Filmmaker Discussion: Working with Community

April 30, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Blog, Canada, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs

The Revival, Toronto|The thorny matter of working with alien communities was the issue at hand at today's Hot Docs filmmaker's panel. Directors Lucy Walker (Devil's Playground), Sandi Simcha Dubowski (Trembling Before G-d), Sherine Salama (A Wedding in Ramallah), and Susanna Helke (The Idle Ones) hashed out their views on the burning question: Does one protect the privacy of the subject or expose them in the name of the truth? The unanimous answer? The subject must not be exploited, even if that leads to some logistical nightmares.

Film Freak Central Does Hot Docs 2002 Canadian International Documentary Festival – April 30

April 30, 2002Posted in1990s, 2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Canada, Documentary, Film Festivals, Germany, Hot Docs

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover

THE LAST JUST MAN
***½/****
directed by Steven Silver

The Last Just Man is a conventional but engrossing account of the appalling UN SNAFU in Rwanda, told from the point of view of the scapegoat who tried to stop it. Canadian Lt. Gen. Roméo Dallaire had little field experience when he headed into Rwanda–he likened it to sending a fireman in prevention to a four-alarm blaze–and discovered, when the country was on the verge of erupting, that his superiors would refuse to get involved. Smarting from the debacle in Somalia, they were skittish about sending troops in, but as the ruling Hutus take out their historical animus against the Tutsis (manufactured decades before by brutal Belgian colonists), their self-protection left Dallaire and the Tutsis at the centre of the apocalypse.

Jason X (2002)

April 24, 2002Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Horror, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller

*/****
starring Kane Hodder, Lexa Doig, Lisa Ryder, Chuck Campbell
screenplay by Todd Farmer
directed by James Isaac

by Walter Chaw Having apparently renounced the name given him by The Man, Jason X features inexorable slasher killer Jason Voorhees (Kane Hodder) cryogenically frozen at the “Crystal Lake Research Facility” in 2010 and picked up by a salvage spaceship (or something) called “Grendel” in 2455. When the bimbo Rowan (Lexa Doig), defrosted along with our invulnerable flesh golem (the Demolition Man possibilities remain untapped), perkily offers that this means she’s been cold and stiff for “455 years,” no one bothers to correct her. I’m not really sure why I bothered, come to think of it.

Canadian National Cinema – Books

April 17, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Books About Movies, Canada

FFC rating: 7/10
by Christopher E. Gittings

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Canadian National Cinema is a valiant stab at something that had previously not existed: a work on Canadian cinema that includes all Canadians. Taking on the not inconsiderable task of levelling the playing field for those who do not fit the white hetero male standards that serve as its default position, author Christopher E. Gittings, a professor at the University of Alberta, sees through official culture and de-centers centralized discourses that distort and oppress. While his sheepish methods ultimately boomerang on him and constrict the scope of his discussion, there’s no denying he’s created an excellent introductory text that clearly establishes the important issues in Canadian film studies.

Red Green’s Duct Tape Forever (2002)

April 12, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Canada, Comedy, Theatrical

Duct Tape Forever
½*/****
starring Steve Smith, Patrick McKenna, Bob Bainborough, Wayne Robson
screenplay by Steve Smith
directed by Eric Till

Redgreensducttapeforeverby Travis Mackenzie Hoover Lord knows I don’t ask much of a Red Green film. Just a little mild guy humour with some obvious set-ups and payoffs, cliché riffs on tools and machinery, and a little Canadian self-deprecation to keep it from degenerating into macho head-slamming. Not too much to expect, is it? But while the Red Green show, modest though it is, understands precisely what can be done within its means, the atrocious Red Green movie is so clearly a cash-grabbing afterthought that it appears to have been shot and edited over a kegger weekend at Steve Smith’s cottage. I defy anyone to derive even mild amusement from its age-old plot, unfunny jokes, and astonishing technical ineptitude: not only are the gags from deep in the vaults, but their execution is so clumsy and their delivery so broad that they make Mack Sennett look like Noel Coward by comparison.

Film Freak Central Does Hot Docs 2002 Canadian International Documentary Festival – The Opening Press Conference

April 12, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Blog, Canada, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs

The Revival, Toronto, April 8|The swellegant club/restaurant Revival, with its yellow-brick interiors and Japanese-paper chandeliers, was the appropriately modern setting for the unveiling of the 2002 Hot Docs festival line-up. As the press gallery filtered in (after a stop at the food table), the programmers gravitated towards the mic and announced program highlights culled from the 104 documentaries on offer in their expanded ten-day event, which runs from April 26th to May 5th.

Suspicious River (2002)

April 7, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Canada, Drama, Theatrical

*½/****
starring Molly Parker, Callum Keith Rennie, Mary Kate Welsh, Joel Bissonnette
screenplay by Lynne Stopkewich, based on the novel by Laura Kasischke
directed by Lynne Stopkewich

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Suspicious River is the dying of the light against a rage. While it knows full well that its heroine is bored, damaged, and begging for some escape, it can’t bring itself to pull the protagonist out of her doldrums; instead, it leads her down a degrading primrose path until disaster drives her back into the arms of safe ennui. Though the film feigns interest in her mission to ditch her boring hometown and ugly past, it’s largely interested in demonstrating the futility of her efforts and leaves her with Margaret Atwood’s model of the Canadian condition: “Endurance, survival, but no victory.”

Wedding Night (2001) – DVD

March 31, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, DVD, Romance

Nuit de noces
½*/**** Image B- Sound B Extras D+
starring François Morency, Geneviève Brouillette, Pierrette Robitaille, Jacques Girard
screenplay by Marc Brunet, Émile Gaudreault
directed by Émile Gaudreault

by Walter Chaw A film so precious and insipid that it hurts, Émile Gaudreault’s screwball roundelay is an exercise in self-indulgence and cliché. Hailed as one of the best Canadian comedies in recent memory, Wedding Night (Nuit de noces) is a haphazard collection of slapstick, magic realism, sped-up Benny Hill interludes, dream sequences, absurdist wall-breaking, and terrifyingly trite musical cues (poor Bernard Herrmann is spinning in his grave). The film is a disaster, neither funny nor poignant nor observant of the poetics of love and marriage, a horror of malformed ideas and unearned moments. Who are these people? Why should we care about what happens to them?

The Hole (2001) [Deluxe Special Edition] – DVD

March 11, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Canada, Drama, DVD, France, Mystery, Thriller, UK

**½/**** Image A Sound B Extras B
starring Thora Birch, Desmond Harrington, Daniel Brocklebank, Laurence Fox
screenplay by Ben Cort & Caroline Ip, based on the novel After the Hole by Guy Burt
directed by Nick Hamm

BUY @ AMAZON CANADA

Holecapby Bill Chambers Sam Mendes, her American Beauty director, has called her the next Marlon Brando; indeed, I wrote in my list of the Top 10 Films of 2001 that I find Thora Birch the most captivating actress working, and I meant it. Her Ghost World performance struck me as a modern parallel to Brando in roles as disparate as Terry Malloy or Don Corleone, not for any more explicit reason than the way the film becomes a living, breathing animal when she's on screen and the fact that she looms large over scenes from which she's absent. The same is true for the British production The Hole, in which she is again the very convincing centre of gravity. She's dynamite, though the movie itself wants for an artist of Mendes's or Terry Zwigoff's calibre to pull it all together.

A Glimpse of Hell (2001) – DVD

March 3, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Drama, DVD, Television

**/**** Image A Sound A-
starring James Caan, Robert Sean Leonard, Daniel Roebuck, Jamie Harrold
screenplay by David Freed
directed by Mikael Salomon

by Walter Chaw Apart from the satirical possibilities, it appears that the rationale behind the title A Glimpse of Hell is the graphic aftermath of an explosion in the gunnery chamber of the U.S.S. Iowa. A made-for-TV docudrama that breeds Edward Dmytryk’s The Caine Mutiny with Rob Reiner’s A Few Good Men, A Glimpse of Hell impresses only with its dedication to mediocrity. While the subject is topical, recounting the possible malfeasance aboard an aging battleship that resulted in a magazine explosion, the execution is theatrical and cardboard from direction (by Mikael Salomon, cinematographer of The Abyss) to performance.