DIFF ’02: The Weight of Water

October 9, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Crime, DIFF/SDFF, Drama, Film Festivals, France, Mystery, Thriller
*½/****starring Catherine McCormack, Sarah Polley, Sean Penn, Josh Lucasscreenplay by Alice Arlen and Christopher Kyle, based on the novel by Anita Shrevedirected by Kathryn Bigelow by Walter Chaw Sort of a "Crucible" of period repression and sexual hysteria tied uncomfortably to Roman Polanski's Bitter Moon, Kathryn Bigelow's unreleased and maybe unreleasable The Weight of Water looks to parallel two distinct genres by mining the sexual tension in both. The problem with such a conceit is not its ambition--the picture's sort of admirable in a soggy, pretentious way--but rather the essential misunderstanding of the disparateness of the sources of that tension:…

American Psycho 2 (2002) – DVD

September 17, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, DVD, Horror, Thriller

American Psycho II: All American Girl
*/**** Image B- Sound B Extras B
starring Mila Kunis, Geraint Wyn Davies, William Shatner, Robin Dunne
screenplay by Alex Sanger and Karen Craig
directed by Morgan J. Freeman

by Walter Chaw That William Shatner is the best actor in Morgan J. Freeman’s direct-to-video American Psycho 2 (a.k.a. American Psycho II: All American Girl), as easy a barnside to strike as almost any in popular culture, is one of those things that is taken with ironic mirth when it should be taken as a stern warning. Rachel (an overmatched Mila Kunis) as a little girl kills Patrick Bateman–the anti-hero of Mary Harron’s sometimes-brilliant ’80s exposé American Psycho–while he’s in the act of murdering her babysitter. That Bateman is not actually a killer doesn’t seem all that important to the makers of this picture, a moronic cross between Murder 101 and Heathers with none of the camp value of the former and none of the intelligence of either.

TIFF ’02: Max

September 10, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Canada, Drama, Film Festivals, Hungary, TIFF, UK, War
***/****starring John Cusack, Noah Taylor, Leelee Sobieski, Molly Parkerwritten and directed by Menno Meyjes by Bill Chambers This portrait of an Angry Young Man posits Hitler as a starving artist. Living in squalor at an army outpost, feeling burned by the Treaty of Versailles, he befriends the fictional composite Max Rothman (John Cusack), the dashing, one-armed Jewish gentleman who runs the local art gallery--an abandoned warehouse with a leaky roof. (Working conditions are tough in postwar Munich, even for the upper class.) The result is an exercise in dramatic ironies, as well as the kind of thing you watch with…

TIFF ’02: The Good Thief

September 6, 2002Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Canada, Crime, Drama, Film Festivals, France, Ireland, Romance, Thriller, TIFF, UK
***/****starring Nick Nolte, Tcheky Karyo, Said Taghmaoui, Nutsa Kukhianidzewritten and directed by Neil Jordan by Bill Chambers A loose remake of Jean-Pierre Melville's Bob le Flambeur (director Neil Jordan seems to have cast Tcheky Karyo for the way "Bob le flambeur" rolls off his tongue), The Good Thief is a minor-ish work from Jordan that benefits mightily, as most movies would, from Chris Menges's cinematography. Nolte inherits Roger Duchesne's role as Bob Montagne, an expert gambler and larcenist who in this film is hooked on heroin out of what appears to be sheer boredom. (A hilarious scene finds him stumbling…

TIFF ’02: Ararat

September 6, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Canada, Directors: Atom Egoyan, Drama, Film Festivals, TIFF, War
**/****starring David Alpay, Charles Aznavour, Eric Bogosian, Brent Carverwritten and directed by Atom Egoyan by Bill Chambers Shuffling the picture's sequences like a deck of cards, Atom Egoyan's signature postmodernism smacks of a diversionary tactic this time in Ararat. A film about the Armenian Genocide was Egoyan's dream project, yet he maintains an intellectual distance throughout, transparently terrified of the ostensible subject matter. Drawing from his well-stocked stable of actors while tossing a few fresh faces into the mix, Egoyan casts wife Arsinée Khanjian as an art history critic named Ani, newcomer David Alpay as her son, Raffi, bombshell Marie-Josée…

Your Secret is Safe with Payami: FFC Interviews Babak Payami

August 25, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Interviews, Iran

BpayamititleAugust 25, 2002|I met Babak Payami last week while he was drinking an espresso in a leather-upholstered booth at a chichi Denver eatery. In town to discuss his second film, Secret Ballot (Raye makhfi), Payami was not the craggy visage in a fisherman’s knit-wool sweater with a shock of white hair–the living incarnation of Samuel Beckett as would befit the author of a film that plays like a cross between “Waiting for Godot” and “Endgame”–I expected. Instead, I was greeted by a compact, powerful-seeming man in a sweater. Articulate and confident, yes, but there the similarity to papa Sam ended.

Return to Never Land (2002) – DVD

August 23, 2002Posted in2000s, Adventure, Animation, Australia, Authors: Bill Chambers, Canada, Disney, DVD, Family

*/**** Image A Sound A Extras C+
screenplay by Temple Mathews and Carter Crocker
directed by Robin Budd, Donovan Cook

by Bill Chambers I can only assume that Disney buried Peter Pan in Stephen King’s pet sematary, for resurrected in the misbegotten Return to Never Land is one sour Fairy King. In the original Peter Pan, the title character lost his shadow; in the sequel, Peter is all shadow, a fascist dictator separated from the malicious Captain Hook by a single distinguishing feature: the hook. Return to Never Land pits the two in conflict once more, this time over the stolen treasure of Captain Hook, which Peter has stowed away for a rainy day. The movie gives no indication as to how Hook acquired the chest full of gold in the first place, thus our introduction to Peter is as a thief. And by the end of the picture, that’s the kindest thing I could think to call him.

Kids in the Hall: Brain Candy (1996) – DVD

August 10, 2002Posted in1990s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Canada, Comedy, DVD, Satire

**½/**** Image B+ Sound B+
starring David Foley, Bruce McCulloch, Kevin McDonald, Mark McKinney, Scott Thompson
screenplay by Norm Hiscock & David Foley & Bruce McCulloch & Kevin McDonald & Mark McKinney & Scott Thompson
directed by Kelly Makin

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover The mad Scotsman John Grierson, documentary king and architect of Canada's National Film Board, often made the naïve assertion that those who wanted to make Canadian fiction films should go to Hollywood and make them there. He would have been pleased to learn that in 1996, the Kids in the Hall did just that: left without any pop-film infrastructure on their home turf, they made a bid for Yankee stardom with Kids in the Hall: Brain Candy, shooting a Hollywood film that's Canadian to the core–for good and for ill.

Secret Ballot (2001)

August 6, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, Iran, Italy, Switzerland, Theatrical

Raye makhfi
***½/****
starring Nassim Abdi, Cyrus Abidi, Youssef Habashi, Farrokh Shojaii
written and directed by Babak Payami

by Walter Chaw It begins and ends with waiting, while the middle of Babak Payami’s Secret Ballot (Raye makhfi) is invested in the Theatre of the Absurd–this is Samuel Beckett, in other words, applied to the Iranian voting process, as an unnamed election agent (Nassim Abdi) travels to a remote Persian island on a quest to gather votes from citizens who may not know that it’s election time, are probably unfamiliar with the candidates, and almost certainly aren’t affected by the outcome anyway. If anything, Payami’s picture confirms that things are the same all over.

The Starz Independent FilmCenter Project, Vol. 11

August 2, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, Coming of Age, Crime, Drama, Teen, Theatrical

by Walter Chaw

SWIMMING (2002)
***/****
starring Lauren Ambrose, Jennifer Dundas Lowe, Joelle Carter, Josh Pais
screenplay by Lisa Bazadona, Robert J. Siegel, Grace Woodard
directed by Robert J. Siegel

An insightfully-written, delicately-performed coming-of-age piece that is good enough not to be cheapened by that genre appellation, Robert Siegel's Swimming captures one summer at tourist-filthy Myrtle Beach. (A film professor, Siegel directs his first feature here in some 20 years.) Frankie (Lauren Ambrose) works at her family's restaurant, right on the main drag next to childhood pal Nicola's (Jennifer Dundas) piercing parlour. Frankie's plain and pale, Nicola's brash and blonde; their banal day-to-day is interrupted by the introduction of floozy bombshell Josee (Joelle Carter), who begins as the standard catalytic plot device but ends as something complicated and possessed of unusual depth. The same could be said of the rest of the cast, from Dundas's volatility to Ambrose's amazingly transparent and tricky performance. Even-handedly negotiating the tricky shoals of hormone-addled actions and emotions, Swimming excels in presenting the sort of small-town yearning I most associate with Steve Earle's early production, the cruelty of teens on the make smartly presented with the same kind of nostalgic affection as the moment when a plain girl recognizes the strength of her decency and the inimitable quality of her difference. Observations of the ebbs and flows of adolescent angst are interesting in Swimming, though not interesting enough to make this charming adolescent melodrama resonate with the melancholia of Bogdanovich's similarly themed The Last Picture Show, and the picture runs out of steam with a goofy subplot involving a sweet-natured ganja-burner played by Jamie Harrold.

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.