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.

Queer as Folk: The Complete First Season (1999) – DVD (volumes 1 and 6 only)

February 19, 2002Posted in1990s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Romance, Television

Image C Sound C+ Extras ?

by Walter Chaw It's extremely difficult to review a television show in a traditional sense. Television series tend to be long-term investments–seldom is the first season of anything ("The Sopranos" being an obvious exception, "Cheers" being an obvious example) worth much of a damn, especially in comparison to later seasons, when everything hums like a well-oiled machine. Explanation for this can be found in the awkwardness inherent in too much desperate exposition crammed into too short a time. Accordingly, the first episode of "Queer as Folk", recently collected in a six-DVD box set (FILM FREAK CENTRAL was supplied only with discs one and six), is mannered and uncomfortable. That's almost beside the point.

Snow Dogs (2002)

January 18, 2002Posted in2000s, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, Disney, Family, Sports, Theatrical

½*/****
starring Cuba Gooding Jr., James Coburn, Randy Birch, Joanna Bacalso
screenplay by Jim Kouf and Tommy Swerdlow & Michael Goldberg and Mark Gibson & Philip Halprin, based on the book Winterdance: the Fine Madness of Running the Iditarod by Gary Paulsen
directed by Brian Levant

Snowdogsby Walter Chaw Brian Levant’s Snow Dogs counts on adult audiences rationalizing that although it was terrible, at least their kids liked it. Why is it that the standards we hold for our children are substantially lower when it comes to the movies? (And if kids will probably like anything, why not expose them to something a little less offensive than Snow Dogs?) It isn’t so much that Snow Dogs finds its humour in a black man getting humiliated by a pack of dogs who are smarter than him, nor that it also mines for yuks by placing a black man in mortal peril because of his suicidal stupidity. No, the moment that Snow Dogs crossed a line for me was when Cuba Gooding Jr., an Oscar-winning African-American actor (one of, what, six?), gets comically treed by a ferocious dog.

Zebra Lounge (2001) – DVD

January 14, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Canada, Crime, Drama, DVD, Thriller

*/**** Image B Sound B
starring Kristy Swanson, Brandy Ledford, Cameron Daddo, Stephen Baldwin
screenplay by Claire Montgomery & Monte Montgomery
directed by Kari Skogland

by Bill Chambers

“He is the straightest and most law-abiding citizen…in the world!”
-Wendy Barnet (Brandy Ledford), assessing her husband’s degree of innocence to a police detective

Zebra Lounge zippers shut the body bag around Stephen Baldwin’s career and confirms that Canadian filmmakers are no longer capable of good trash (director Kari Skogland is a veteran of the Saltine-dry Canuck TV show “Nothing Too Good for a Cowboy”), but most of all, it’s suffocatingly dull. This film should have a “do not operate heavy machinery” warning-label superimposed on it at all times. The made-for-cable movie marks not only the first time I have fallen asleep during a sex scene but also the first time I have fallen asleep during two consecutive sex scenes, neither of which takes place in the rarely-mentioned titular night spot. Zebra Lounge could’ve been called anything, so phenomenally generic are its subject matter, dialogue, and execution. Even the score, by someone named John McCarthy, sounds like it came out of a can.

Silent Trigger (1996) – DVD

January 3, 2002Posted in1990s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Drama, DVD, Thriller, UK

*/**** Image D Sound D+
starring Dolph Lundgren, Gina Bellman, George Jenesky, Christopher Heyerdahl
screenplay by Sergio Altieri
directed by Russell Mulcahy

by Walter Chaw There was a time, ’round about the cheap thrills of Razorback, that I thought director Russell Mulcahy had a future as an action director. Seventeen years later, the Aussie has proven me wrong by peaking with the intentionally campy The Shadow and the unintentionally campy Highlander. And while Silent Trigger isn’t the worst of Mulcahy’s missteps (Highlander II: The Quickening has a hammerlock on several “worst” titles), it’s not for lack of trying. Still, I can’t completely dislike both Dolph Lundgren and Mulcahy’s latest direct-to-video disaster because I feel as though watching it has taught me a few things.

Bruiser (2001) – DVD

December 29, 2001Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Directors: George A. Romero, DVD, France, Horror, Mystery, Thriller

***/**** Image B- Sound B Extras B-
starring Jason Flemyng, Peter Stormare, Leslie Hope, Nina Garbiras
written and directed by George A. Romero

by Walter Chaw A comic-book morality play along the lines of his Creepshow, horror legend George A. Romero’s Bruiser is rife with ideas and the kind of broad audacity that foments disquiet in rough strokes and bleak epiphanies. While it doesn’t hold together and is too self-conscious by the end to be anything but a little tedious and a lot predictable, the film’s first hour is possessed. Furious and marked by a sense of impending doom, Bruiser begins as exciting and risky an angst-ridden passion play as nearly anything produced in a yuppie-unrest genre that includes dissident films like Wolf, Fight Club, and American Psycho. It opens as a series of castrations for our milquetoast hero, Henry (Jason Flemyng)–humiliated at work, cheated by his friend, cuckolded by his wife (Leslie Hope)–until one day he wakes to find himself the protagonist in a Kafka parable. His face wiped clean of his identity, Henry becomes an amalgam of Ellison’s and Wells’s invisible men: ignored by society and ironically destroyed by the power bestowed upon him by his own anonymity.

The Shipping News (2001)

December 26, 2001Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Drama, Theatrical

**/****
starring Kevin Spacey, Julianne Moore, Judi Dench, Scott Glenn
screenplay by Robert Nelson Jacobs, based on the novel by E. Annie Proulx
directed by Lasse Hallström

Shippingnewsby Walter Chaw In 1994, E. Annie Proulx was plucked from obscurity to win both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for The Shipping News, her second novel. The story of “large, white, stumbling along, going nowhere” Quoyle struck a nerve with its combination of lyricism and evocation of the provincial “foreignness” of Newfoundland, Canada. Personally, though I found Proulx’s prose intoxicating, the book’s final thirty pages seemed discordant and atonal to me–they betray the mood with a kind of desperate urge towards resolution that feels contrary to the quirky, steady melancholy Proulx had established. (It comes as little surprise that the end of the novel was written before the rest of it.)

Wishmaster 3: Beyond the Gates of Hell (2001) – DVD

November 18, 2001Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, DVD, Fantasy, Horror, Thriller

½*/**** Image A- Sound B- Extras A-
starring Jason Connery, A.J. Cook, Tobias Mehler, John Novak
screenplay by Alex Wright
directed by Chris Angel

by Walter Chaw The most interesting thing about the train wreck Wishmaster 3: Beyond the Gates of Hell is that it’s actually bookended by two car wrecks. The first is a dream our heroine Diana (A. J. Cook) has of her parents being killed in a collision for which she feels responsible; the second involves the Archangel Michael (Tobias Mehler, who also plays Diana’s boyfriend, Greg–don’t ask), for some reason incapable of freeing his ethereal self from a shoulder restraint without the intervention of the redemption-seeking Diana. Knowing that Wishmaster is a series of films dealing with an evil wish-granting Djinn, I had hope from the first accident that Wishmaster 3 would be an updating of W.W. Jacobs’s marvellous short story “The Monkey’s Paw”, with poor, bereaved Diana foolhardily resurrecting her deceased parents. By the time the second (literally) rolled around, I had hope only that the extreme suckitude of the film didn’t somehow damage my DVD player. Wishmaster 3 is simply abominable–a horror film free of fear and the two things that made the series worthwhile in the first place: genre writer Peter Atkins, absent since the first instalment, and Andrew Divoff as the titular bogey.

Ginger Snaps (2001) [Collector’s Edition] – DVD

October 8, 2001Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Canada, Drama, DVD, Horror, Teen, Werewolf

**/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B+
starring Emily Perkins, Katharine Isabelle, Kris Lemche, Mimi Rogers
screenplay by Karen Walton
directed by John Fawcett

by Bill Chambers Ginger Snaps is so eager to have its double meanings understood, like a kid with a secret, that the text upon its subtext becomes transparent–and when you can see through a film, it's just not as much fun. About a month ago, I watched John Landis's An American Werewolf in London for the first time in years and gradually came to understand how and why I'd identified with it as an adolescent: After being inflicted with the werewolf's curse, David, the hero, goes through a second adolescence. Ginger Snaps makes David into a literal teenager–and a girl, a Carrie White-esque late-bloomer named Ginger (Katharine Isabelle) who survives a werewolf attack only to misinterpret the next 30 days as a particularly harsh growth spurt.

Serendipity (2001)

October 5, 2001Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, Romance, Theatrical

***/****
starring John Cusack, Kate Beckinsale, Molly Shannon, Jeremy Piven
screenplay by Marc Klein
directed by Peter Chelsom

by Walter Chaw Dense with the hip references and list-making that have become trademarks of John Cusack’s films, Serendipity is a sweet confection just smart enough to be considered tasteful and just dumb enough to be forgotten. Set in the same New York as every bad Nora Ephron film (which is all of Nora Ephron’s films), Serendipity is awash in a twinkling yuletide cheer and the kind of magical realism that South American authors have made their stock in trade. Perhaps not so peculiarly, then, it appears to be very loosely based on Gabriel García Márquez’s star-crossed temporal love song Love in the Time of Cholera, a first edition of which plays a crucial role in the film. The book details a pair of young people who fall in love with each other over passionate letters and coded telegrams, but part when the woman falls ill upon their first meeting. Seeing it as an act of destiny, she marries a man within her own social caste, only coming back to her true love years after their initial opportunity was lost.

Dead Simple (2000) – DVD

August 20, 2001Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, Crime, Drama, DVD, Music

Viva Las Nowhere
**/**** Image B+ Sound B Extras B
starring Daniel Stern, Patricia Richardson, Lacey Kohl, Sherry Stringfield
screenplay by Richard Uhlig and Steven Seitz
directed by Jason Bloom

by Walter Chaw A bizarre cross between Psycho, Something Wild and Tender Mercies, Jason Bloom’s Dead Simple is one of those derivatively named direct-to-video productions that attempts the black comedy genre with a reasonable amount of aplomb and wide-eyed enthusiasm. It’s a Very Bad Things farce of escalating atrocities, and though Dead Simple never achieves the kind of sustained comic brilliance and continual nastiness of that movie, it does manage a few edged moments and keen performances from a cast that includes legendary bug-eyed hambones Daniel Stern and James Caan.

Second Skin (2000) – DVD

August 13, 2001Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Canada, DVD, Mystery, South Africa, Thriller, UK

**½/**** Image B+ Sound C
starring Natasha Henstridge, Angus MacFadyen, Liam Waite, Peter Fonda
screenplay by John Lau
directed by Darrell James Roodt

by Bill Chambers Second Skin is centred in and around a used bookshop where owner Sam Kane (Angus MacFadyen) cares more about indulging in the dog-eared pulp than making a living. Crystal (Natasha Henstridge) wanders in looking for a job, though, and while Sam doesn’t get enough customers to warrant an employee, he could use a tall blonde woman in his life, and tentatively hires her. Satisfied, she walks backwards out the door, bidding adieu, and is thwacked by a car in a hit-and-run. When Crystal comes to, in a hospital bed, she’s amnesiac. In what must be a rare act of altruism for him, Sam volunteers to assist Crystal in a rummage for her forgotten past.

The Caveman’s Valentine (2001) [Widescreen] – DVD

July 25, 2001Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Crime, Drama, DVD, Music, Mystery, Superhero, Thriller

***½/**** Image A+ Sound A+ Extras B-
starring Samuel L. Jackson, Ann Magnuson, Aunjanue Ellis, Tamara Tunie
screenplay by George Dawes Green, based on his novel
directed by Kasi Lemmons

by Walter Chaw A strange mixture of Shine, Basquiat, Angel Heart, and Grant Morrison & Dave McKean’s graphic novel Arkham Asylum, The Caveman’s Valentine is a feverish tale of a homeless madman-cum-detective who, on the morning of February 14th, discovers a “valentine” just outside his New York cave: one of Ella Fitzgerald’s strange fruit, stuck in the crotch of a tree–a young male model murdered and frozen to a branch. Believing at first that his imagined nemesis Stuyvesant, who shoots evil rays into his mind from atop the Chrysler Building, is responsible for the murder, Romulus (Samuel L. Jackson) is put on the trail of an avant-garde photographer in the Mapplethorpe mold, David Leppenraub (Colm Feore). His minor sleuthing interrupted by the occasional delusional fit and bouts with an ecstasy of creation (Romulus was a brilliant Julliard-trained pianist prior to his psychosis), Romulus uncovers clues and harasses suspects on his way to convincing his police-woman daughter (Aunjanue Ellis) that even though he’s a nut, that doesn’t mean he can’t solve a high-profile society murder.

Valentine (2001) – DVD

July 22, 2001Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Canada, DVD, Horror, Mystery, Thriller

**/**** Image A Sound B Extras C+
starring David Boreanaz, Denise Richards, Marley Shelton, Katherine Heigl
screenplay by Donna Powers & Wayne Powers and Gretchen J. Berg & Aaron Harberts, based on the novel by Tom Savage
directed by Jamie Blanks

by Bill Chambers There was a time in my life, not necessarily a proud one, when I based my video-rental selections on whether the box pictured some configuration of pointy knife, mask, and bug-eyed victim. Call it my 'boo' period; without it, I may never have seen Prom Night, and therefore not understood just how banal Valentine, its unofficial remake, really is. Prom Night is brain food by comparison, and it stars Leslie Nielsen! Still, I'd sooner watch Valentine again before much of today's quickie horror, if only to re-experience Denise Richards's eyebrow-raising performance. She suggests here an understudy for the understudy–the custodian who's been around long enough to pick up the lines but not necessarily the context in which they belong. In the words of Radiohead, she's like a detuned radio, but she's easily the most compelling thing in the film.

The Claim (2000) – DVD

July 14, 2001Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Drama, DVD, France, Romance, UK, Western

***½/**** Image A Sound A
starring Wes Bentley, Milla Jovovich, Nastassia Kinski, Peter Mullan
screenplay by Frank Cottrell Boyce
directed by Michael Winterbottom

by Walter Chaw Cold and barren as the winter’s landscape it inhabits, Michael Winterbottom’s exceptional retelling of Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge is the delicate and maddening The Claim. It’s told in undertones and sidelong glances, gathering its strength from the inexorable tides of fate and the offhand caprices of nature that reflect the essential chaos at the centre of every man’s character. Hardy stated about The Mayor of Casterbridge that “it is not improbabilities of incident but improbabilities of character that matter,” and the subtitle of the novel is, consequently, “A Man of Character.” Though it’s possible to take the subtitle as ironic seeing as the titular main character is guilty in the first chapter (an incident related in the film as a flashback) of an act that is at the very least heinous, both novel and film are earnest in exploring the sticky gradations of morality without value judgment.

The Pledge (2001) – DVD

June 23, 2001Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Canada, Crime, Drama, DVD, Jack Nicholson, Mystery, Thriller

***½/**** Image A- Sound A-
starring Jack Nicholson, Benicio Del Toro, Aaron Eckhart, Helen Mirren
screenplay by Jerzy Kromolowski & Mary Olson Kromolowski, based on the novel by Fredrich Durrenmatt
directed by Sean Penn

by Bill Chambers The Pledge implicates anyone and everyone, especially its viewers. There are critics who like to remain situated on a high horse looking down at the movies: that group loathed The Pledge, because it knocked the saddle out from under them. Their reviews are full of defensive posturing, refusing to deal with the film head-on, denouncing exploitation before deciding on whom or what is being exploited. It’s easy to call The Pledge “sick,” for instance, because of the moment where Jack Nicholson’s Jerry Black sifts through crime-scene photographs of slain children and, because the camera is over his shoulder, so do we.