Stealing Harvard (2002)

Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Theatrical

*½/****
starring Jason Lee, Tom Green, Leslie Mann, Dennis Farina
screenplay by Peter Tolan
directed by Bruce McCulloch

Stealingharvardby Walter Chaw A virtual clone of Jake Kasdan’s Orange County, Bruce McCulloch’s Stealing Harvard takes the same premise (low-aspiring kids get a chance at a prestigious school), the same quirky sensibility, and the same characters (Jason Lee fills in for Colin Hanks, Tom Green for Jack Black, and Leslie Mann (who is also in Orange County) for Schuyler Fisk), and does considerably less with them. Taken as bookends to 2002 up to the awards season or as a peculiarly precise comparison of how minor differences in screenplay, director, and cast can subtly push a somewhat dreary premise into a vaguely good film or a vaguely bad one, Stealing Harvard at its heart remains a picture that never finds a way to balance the laconic style of Lee with the erratic jitter of Green. Its inability to find any sort of cohesiveness (the same malady afflicting Albert Brooks’s and Brendan Fraser’s The Scout) dooms Stealing Harvard to long stretches of irritating torpor punctuated by the occasional line delivery that reminds, mainly, that Megan Mullally (as a character straight out of Drop Dead Gorgeous) has impeccable comic timing.

TIFF ’02: Punch-Drunk Love

Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Directors: Paul Thomas Anderson, Drama, Esoterica, Film Festivals, Romance, TIFF
***½/****starring Adam Sandler, Emily Watson, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Luis Guzmánwritten and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson by Bill Chambers Punch-Drunk Love or, Un Redemption de Adam Sandler. Paul Thomas Anderson's latest film finds him at both his most experimental (dig those Scopitone interludes) and least windy--the tip-off is a running time of well under two hours. But first: Adam Sandler. When you hear Oscar buzz around a popular comedian, it generally means they've repressed everything that made them popular. (Jim Carrey in The Majestic, for example: Carrey may do a mean James Stewart impersonation, but he's no Jimmy himself.) Sandler…

TIFF ’02: Ken Park

Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Drama, Esoterica, Film Festivals, France, Netherlands, Teen, TIFF
***½/****starring Tiffany Limos, James Ransone, Stephen Jasso, James Bullardscreenplay by Harmony Korinedirected by Larry Clark & Ed Lachman by Bill Chambers Making Happiness look like Dumbo, Ken Park does not push the envelope--Ken Park runs the envelope through a paper shredder, douses it in lighter fluid, and sets it aflame. And then urinates on the ashes. The latest from Larry Clark, the film was co-directed by veteran cinematographer and frequent Steven Soderbergh collaborator Ed Lachman, and if you're worried that this Zaphod Beeblebrox would result in the muting of Clark's voice, think again. If anything, we sense the pair playing…

TIFF ’02: Love Liza

Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Drama, Film Festivals, France, Germany, TIFF
***½/****starring Philip Seymour Hoffman, Kathy Bates, Jack Kehler, Sarah Koskoffscreenplay by Gordy Hoffmandirected by Todd Louiso by Bill Chambers Love Liza is a potent movie about compulsive behaviour I'm growing fonder of by the hour; the film rises above some hoary tropes to become almost peerlessly unsettling. As a new widower who can't bring himself to read his wife's suicide note, Philip Seymour Hoffman once again dissolves before our eyes into a sweaty, ticcy mess stuck between sleep and awake. But here, without the reprieves you get from his strange behaviour in the ensemble pieces the actor seems to favour (Boogie…

TIFF ’02: 8 Femmes

Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Crime, Esoterica, Film Festivals, France, Italy, Musical, Romance, TIFF
8 Women***/****starring Danielle Darrieux, Catherine Deneuve, Isabelle Huppert, Emmanuelle Béartscreenplay by François Ozon, Marina de Van, based on the play by Robert Thomasdirected by François Ozon by Bill Chambers Almost every French actress I can rhyme off without help from the audience is in the cast of François Ozon's 8 Femmes, a delightfully odd murder mystery with song-and-dance interludes. (Imagine if John Waters had directed Clue.) The film takes place during Christmastime in 1950s France at a country manor where various women have gathered to celebrate the holidays with Marcel, the only significant man in any of their lives. But…

Little Secrets (2002)

Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Family, Music, Theatrical

*/****
starring Evan Rachel Wood, Michael Angarano, David Gallagher, Vivica A. Fox
screenplay by Jessica Barondes
directed by Blair Treu

by Walter Chaw I fear that Blair Treu’s Little Secrets is the latest picture to fall victim to my predisposition against insipid and trite films. The problem with my bias in this instance is that there is a considerable segment of the middle-class population at large that seems particularly enamoured with such fare, particularly as it manifests under the aegis of “family entertainment” or Meg Ryan movies. It’s only a problem, I hasten to add, because I hate arguing with the upper-reaching bourgeoisie–there is no good way, after all, to explain to the fuzzily intractable why a self-pitying adopted girl who makes money like Lucy from the “Peanuts” strip while staying home to practice violin in anticipation of an orchestra tryout is more suited for the dinosaur prose of big-print Beverly Clearys than for the voluntary consumption of any self-respecting human being.

Serving Sara (2002)

Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Germany, Romance, Theatrical, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Matthew Perry, Elizabeth Hurley, Vincent Pastore, Bruce Campbell
screenplay by Jay Scherick & David Ronn
directed by Reginald Hudlin

Servingsaraby Walter Chaw Reginald Hudlin’s Serving Sara is a miserable, listless, pathetic excuse for a movie. It’s already dreadful by the time Matthew Perry finds himself shoulder-deep in a bull’s rectum, after which it defies a few natural laws by somehow getting worse. There are no laughs to be found in the whole of this lugubrious shipwreck–even the sight of Perry getting the tar beaten out of him by a pair of Italian caricatures is a sour, joyless affair. Seeing as being physically humiliated is Perry’s sole silver-screen reason for being (see also: The Whole Nine Yards), that his getting kicked and punched is not ever at all amusing says a great deal about the relentless excrescence of this exercise. I would add that at least it’s better than the amazingly awful Perry vehicle Almost Heroes, except that it’s not.

24 Hour Party People (2002)

Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Comedy, Drama, Music, Theatrical

***½/****
starring Steve Coogan, Keith Allen, Rob Brydon, Enzo Cilenti
screenplay by Frank Cottrell Boyce
directed by Michael Winterbottom

by Walter Chaw Inviting direct comparisons to Todd Haynes’s ebullient Velvet Goldmine with a flying saucer, Michael Winterbottom’s brilliant 24 Hour Party People apes, too, a great deal of the style and tone from that film: insouciant, arch, and invested in giving over the stage to the zeitgeist of an era through its youth culture and its music. 24 Hour Party People distinguishes itself, however, with a flip, post-modern absurdism that includes asides to the camera (“I’m being post-modern before it became popular”) and a certain self-awareness that somehow encapsulates the discursive, free-associative madness of Factory Records founder Tony Wilson (Steve Coogan). Beginning with The Sex Pistols‘ first performance in 1976 before a rapt crowd of 42 people, the picture takes on a dizzying kind of animal logic, stalking the fortunes of the “New Wave” Manchester ethos of Joy Division (into the band they became, New Order), Happy Mondays, the Hacienda dance club, and, most importantly, Wilson himself–part huckster, part savant. All along, Wilson cues us that the world is about to change and that this band of brothers, this group of bouncing, sullen, devotees to a new punk energy, are the men who will change it.

Happy Times (2000)

Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, China, Comedy, Drama, Theatrical

幸福时光
Happy Time
*½/****
starring Benshan Zhao, Jie Dong, Biao Fu, Xuejian Li
directed by Zhang Yimou

by Walter Chaw Titled in the same serio-ironic vein as Giuseppe Tornatore’s Everybody’s Fine, Zhang Yimou’s Happy Times aspires for the piquant but only really achieves a sort of ridiculous sourness. It’s a misunderstanding of irony taken to an Alanis Morrisetteian extreme; far from the eventuality being the opposite of the expected, the outcome of Happy Times is the worst kind of cliché, and its execution is so blunt compared to the sharp satirical barb of Yimou’s own Ju Dou that I wonder if Gong Li wasn’t the brains in that long lamented relationship. Still, what works in Happy Times is what has worked in this director’s best work (Shanghai Triad, Raise the Red Lantern, Red Sorghum): mordant social critique so far removed from realism that its status as political allegory is as subtle as a neon sign and a crack to the noggin.

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

Posted 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.

The Good Girl (2002)

Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, Drama, Germany, Netherlands, Romance, Theatrical

**/****
starring Jennifer Aniston, Jake Gyllenhaal, John C. Reilly, Tim Blake Nelson
screenplay by Mike White
directed by Miguel Arteta

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover The Good Girl is a sitcom that dreams of one day becoming an opera. Like its heroine, the film feels a great dissatisfaction with modern life, and like her eventual paramour, it goes to great lengths in order to articulate such a feeling. But also like these characters, The Good Girl is both too timid and too inarticulate to truly get its ideas across. Instead, the film resorts to “quirky” indie-film types armed to the teeth with wisecracks; offering none of the ambiguity that its narrative thrust seems to warrant, its flaws kill the movie’s aspirations and make sure that it stays in the generic backwater it so dearly wants to escape.

The Sweetest Thing (2002) [Unrated] – DVD

Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD, Romance, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/**** Image B+ Sound B Extras B-
starring Cameron Diaz, Christina Applegate, Thomas Jane, Selma Blair
screenplay by Nancy M. Pimental
directed by Roger Kumble

by Walter Chaw Roger Kumble’s The Sweetest Thing presents a good news/bad news situation. On the one hand, it’s barely eighty minutes long–on the other, for those eighty minutes it’s repugnant beyond words. On the one hand, the worst film of 2002 has already appeared with eight months to go, and on the other, I not only had to watch the benighted thing, I am now required by my vocation to relive it in detail. I am forced, for instance, to remember a scene in which the only Jewish Laundromat owner in all of San Francisco’s Chinatown tastes a semen stain to determine that it’s such; to recall the moment where a woman with a penis stuck in her throat mumbles Aerosmith‘s “I Don’t Wanna Miss a Thing” to clear her air passage. Yes, The Sweetest Thing is crass and moronic, this much goes without saying (that Cameron Diaz plays another emetic simpleton is also not much of a surprise). What is a shock is that Parker Posey cameos late in the game and even she’s not funny. If it takes a brilliant director to make a bad actor look good, the corollary holds, too.

Spy Kids 2: Island of Lost Dreams (2002)

Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Family, Sci-Fi, Theatrical

**½/****
starring Antonio Banderas, Carla Gugino, Alexa Vega, Daryl Sabara
written and directed by Robert Rodriguez

by Walter Chaw Owing to Robert Rodriguez’s infectious goodwill and delirious visual sensibility, Spy Kids 2: Island of Lost Dreams is the kind of children’s movie that respects a child’s imagination along with parental patience. Packed with invention from its opening theme park to its closing Island of Dr. Moreau, the picture is a three-pepper salsa that, for all its flashing gizmos and stop-motion monsters, suggests that the best gadget is a rubber band, and that the most important quest is one undertaken on behalf of a family member.

Secret Ballot (2001)

Posted 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

Posted 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.

Full Frontal (2002)

Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Directors: Steven Soderbergh, Esoterica, Romance, Theatrical

*/****
starring Blair Underwood, Julia Roberts, David Hyde Pierce, Catherine Keener
screenplay by Coleman Hough
directed by Steven Soderbergh

by Walter Chaw An experiment in perceptual distortion that questions the nature of viewership and the law of observation that states, in part, that the nature of the process of observation necessitates a change in the essential quality of the observed, Steven Soderbergh’s Full Frontal is a hyper-pretentious film-within-a-film-within-a-film conceit so gimmicky it hardly matters that by the end, gimmickry is its point. The picture begins with the opening of a fictional film called “Rendezvous” starring Calvin (Blair Underwood) and Francesca (Julia Roberts), written by Carl (David Hyde Pierce) and produced by Gus (David Duchovny), and as this “fake” film proceeds in perfectly acceptable 35mm, it is interrupted by long stretches of extremely grainy digital-video footage that purports to represent “reality.”

The Master of Disguise (2002)

Posted in2000s, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Family, Theatrical, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Dana Carvey, Mark Devine, Jennifer Esposito, Harold Gould
screenplay by Dana Carvey & Harris Goldberg
directed by Perry Andelin Blake

Masterofdisguiseby Walter Chaw Produced by Adam Sandler’s Happy Madison company and directed by one of Sandler’s sycophantic toadies (Perry Andelin Blake), The Master of Disguise is every bit as soul-sucking and painful as one of the comedian’s own plodding star vehicles. Graceless and dunderheaded, the film’s only message is that slapping people across the face is the best way to achieve empowerment, and its only reason for being is to serve as proof positive of the Peter Principle. Edited with a hacksaw and presenting an insipid child character (Austin Wolff) used for slapstick laughs before getting kicked to the curb, The Master of Disguise represents a lot of what’s wrong with movies in the United States today. That it happens to be the sequel-in-spirit of Dana Carvey’s “breakthrough” film Opportunity Knocks (1990) is what folks in the business call “sadistic.”

Martin Lawrence Live: Runteldat (2002)

Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Concert Doc, Theatrical

½*/****
directed by David Raynr

by Walter Chaw The funniest five minutes of Martin Lawrence’s embarrassing concert diatribe Martin Lawrence Live: Runteldat (trans: “Run, Tell That”) occur in an opening video montage that recounts the troubled comedian’s arrest for shouting at traffic while brandishing a firearm and the time he fell into a coma while jogging wrapped in plastic wrap yet somehow overlooks the sexual harassment suit filed against him by former television co-star Tisha Campbell. After an hour of deadening material that fails to elicit one cross-cultural laugh, Lawrence returns to the topic of how members of the evil media (and critics) have done him wrong and then proceeds to admit that he was shouting at traffic because he was high as a kite, did indeed have a gun (just for self-defense, he assures, though intentionality is hard to gauge when one is “high as a kite”), and passed out from heat exhaustion during a jogging on the hottest day of the year (a wool skullcap is confessed; not so the cling-wrap). His confessions lead one to wonder how exactly the comedian believes he’s been misrepresented by the media.

Innerspace (1987) – DVD

Posted in1980s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, DVD, Sci-Fi, Spielberg, Thriller

**½/**** Image A- Sound A- Commentary B+
starring Dennis Quaid, Martin Short, Meg Ryan, Kevin McCarthy
screenplay by Jeffrey Boam and Chip Proser
directed by Joe Dante

by Bill Chambers Fifties monster movies and grindhouse sludge bookended Joe Dante’s coming-of-age, and these twin species of B cinema–sisters in spirit if not in execution–often squish up against each other in his work as a director. The man who gave us the loving but danger-filled tribute to showman William Castle and Castle’s acolytes Matinee (a better Cuban Missile crisis picture, he said ducking tomatoes, than Thirteen Days) preceded his tenure with neo-Castle Roger Corman (for whom he made Piranha) by covering every last exploitation picture of the early-Seventies for THE FILM BULLETIN.

Joe Somebody (2001) – DVD

Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B-
starring Tim Allen, Julie Bowen, Kelly Lynch, Greg Germann
screenplay by John Scott Shepherd
directed by John Pasquin

by Walter Chaw There is no life to Joe Somebody; it is a rotting, derelict husk of a film that drifts anchorless in a sea of dead jokes and plot detritus. It has no excuse for existing, and should be held up as the prime example whenever conversation turns to what’s wrong with our culture in general and the movies in particular. Joe Somebody is so sloppily put together that when it comes time at last to end this cinematic thumbscrew, its moments of uplift make little, if any, sense because of the lack of care taken to establish a place for them. If you have a moment to which the entire film is supposedly building, I humbly offer that it’s probably not good when that epiphany appears with neither warning nor justification. It’s like having a story that is not otherwise about a playwright wrapping up with a playwright having her first play produced. Exactly like that, in fact.