Corky Romano (2001) – DVD

May 14, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, DVD, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras C
starring Chris Kattan, Peter Falk, Peter Berg, Roger Fan
screenplay by David Garrett & Jason Ward
directed by Rob Pritts

by Walter Chaw There’s an apocryphal tale from the set of John Sturges’s The Magnificent Seven concerning Steve McQueen consistently upstaging Yul Brynner until the bald-pated thespian, fresh off his Oscar for The King and I, threatened to take off his hat during McQueen’s scenes. An amusing anecdote about Hollywood egos and the urge to steal the limelight, it enters into a discussion of the abominable Corky Romano because a very curious thing happens in the film to its star, Chris Kattan.

The Gambler (1974) – DVD

May 8, 2002Posted in1970s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Crime, Drama, DVD

**½/**** Image A- Sound B+
starring James Caan, Paul Sorvino, Lauren Hutton
screenplay by James Toback
directed by Karel Reisz

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Somewhere near the beginning of The Gambler, we see Axel Freed (James Caan) teaching a college course in literature. Taking his cues from Dostoevsky, he announces that any idiot can say that two plus two equals four, but the man who says that they equal five is riding on sheer will. Whether he knows that the declaration is false or not is irrelevant–he is transcending truth to make his own rules. This deliciously summarizes not only The Gambler itself, but also the whole shaky decade of art-pop that was the Seventies. This was the era in which cartoon heroes jousted improbably with literature and politics and when a torrent of homages created whole films piece by appropriated piece. The Gambler‘s Freed is all too typical of the type, with its literary pretensions mixed in with a helping of macho declarations that could only come from a lifetime of hero-worship at the movies.

High Heels and Low Lifes (2001) – DVD

May 6, 2002Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Drama, DVD, UK

½*/**** Image A Sound A Extras C+
starring Minnie Driver, Mary McCormack, Kevin McNally, Mark Williams
screenplay by Kim Fuller
directed by Mel Smith

by Walter Chaw Mel Smith’s feminist crime farce High Heels and Low Lifes blares Aretha Franklin and the Eurythmics‘ “Sisters are Doin’ It For Themselves” over its closing credits, always a bad sign. Trying desperately to combine the only two types of British films that have seen commercial success in the last decade (the gangster farce and the Jane Austen empowerment fable), this product from the director of Bean and the screenwriter of Spice World is so rote that its frantic attempts at good natured quirk come off as grotesque and uncomfortable.

Deuces Wild (2002)

May 3, 2002Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Theatrical

*½/****
starring Stephen Dorff, Brad Renfro, Fairuza Balk, Norman Reedus
screenplay by Paul Kimatian & Christopher Gambale
directed by Scott Kalvert

by Walter Chaw During the course of Deuces Wild, a bit of schizophrenic juvenilia (half nostalgic, half belittling) from director Scott Kalvert (The Basketball Diaries), there arises the uncomfortable realization that we are in the company of a “West Side Story” with trick-shots and graphic violence subbing for the Bernstein/Robbins book and staging. As mannered and artificial as the Neverland boroughs and lost-boy antagonists of Robert Wise’s film version of West Side Story, what Deuces Wild doesn’t have is the benefit of the traditional musical format to excuse its more gut-busting howlers. Kalvert’s film is of the sort that makes one wonder which version of history includes Debbie Harry as a zoned-out shut-in singing Christmas carols year-round while daughter Fairuza Balk laments, “Of course Santa exists, mommy, he just don’t come to Brooklyn no more.” Moreover, if such a history ever existed, it begs the question of why anyone would ever wish to revisit it, in art or otherwise.

Performance (1970) – DVD

April 26, 2002Posted in1970s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, DVD, Esoterica, Gangster, Music, UK

Performancecap

***½/**** Image B+ Sound C Extras C
starring James Fox, Mick Jagger, Anita Pallenberg, Michele Breton
screenplay by Donald Cammell
directed by Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg

by Walter Chaw Emerging in the middle of one of the most experimental, challenging periods in cinematic history, Performance–completed in 1968 but shelved until 1970–is a product at once ahead of its time and two years too late. Had its trippy-dippy, anachronistic cross-cutting and madly-inappropriate scoring appeared in 1968 (the year of Rosemary’s Baby, Night of the Living Dead, If…, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and the film to which it perhaps owes its greatest allegiance, Once Upon a Time in the West), Performance would’ve found traction and good company as a foundational film for the American New Wave instead of as a picture that, for all its foment and formal revolution, seemed hysterical against a maturing, more sedate(d) mainstream avant-garde parade of stuff like El Topo, Zabriskie Point, MASH, and Five Easy Pieces.

Ocean’s Eleven (2001) [Widescreen Edition] – DVD

April 20, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Directors: Steven Soderbergh, DVD, Thriller

**½/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B
starring George Clooney, Matt Damon, Andy Garcia, Brad Pitt
screenplay by Ted Griffin
directed by Steven Soderbergh

by Walter Chaw Impeccably-costumed and impossibly-handsome action figures are arranged in cool poses throughout Ocean's Eleven, Steven Soderbergh's updating of the same-named Rat Pack caper. A throwback to the star-driven cinema of the Fifties and a reflection of our own fanatical interest in cults of personality, the film features transparent performances (with the exception of Don Cheadle, each performer in Ocean's Eleven is playing his- or herself), and the same kind of sadistic voyeurism that impels us to simultaneously deify and find fault with our favourite actors keeps our peepers glued to the screen as George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Matt Damon, Elliot Gould, and Carl Reiner revolve around one another in a loose heist intrigue intended to relieve Andy Garcia of both his millions and his girlfriend.

Murder by Numbers (2002)

April 19, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Mystery, Theatrical, Thriller

*½/****
starring Sandra Bullock, Ryan Gosling, Michael Pitt, Agnes Bruckner
screenplay by Tony Gayton
directed by Barbet Schroeder

Murderbynumbersby Walter Chaw A shallow Leopold and Loeb riff crossed with a heaping helping of the kind of law-chick bullstuff made popular by the horrible novels of Patricia Cornwell, Murder by Numbers trudges along with its tired formula repertoire like a funeral procession for the genre. For a spell, it feels as if the film will transcend the unpromising irony of its title with a female protagonist painted as unflattering and tortured, but by the time the final credits roll after an unforgivable third act, Murder by Numbers washes out as just another imminently forgettable movie starring Sandra Bullock.

Burnt Money (2000)

April 18, 2002Posted inArgentina, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, Romance, Spain, Theatrical, Thriller, Uruguay

Plata quemada
**½/****
starring Eduardo Noriega, Leonardo Sbaraglia, Pablo Echarri, Leticia Brédice
screenplay by Marcelo Figueras, Marcelo Piñeyro, based on the novel Plata Quemada by Ricardo Piglia
directed by Marcelo Piñeyro

by Walter Chaw Pushing the submerged homoeroticism of Strangers on a Train to the surface, Burnt Money‘s homage begins with Jean-Pierre Melville’s genre cool and Hitchcock’s cigarettes and lighters at a carnival and ends with a certain Wellesian noir seediness (complete with The Lady From Shanghai‘s ill-fated passion, Touch of Evil‘s corrupt officials, and even Citizen Kane‘s totemic paperweight). Burnt Money is deliriously beautiful to look at–all pale greens and mute browns–but its overt politicism in the closing moments begins to dispel the film’s magic in favour of overheated parable. It’s an expert genre piece that tries to bear the brunt of all of Argentina’s national cynicism and economic corruption (a leaden socio-political platform reflected by its title), and despite his cineaste smarts, director Marcelo Piñeyro just isn’t up to the task.

Nine Queens (2000)

April 18, 2002Posted in2000s, Argentina, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, Theatrical, Thriller

Nueve reinas
***/****
starring Ricardo Darín, Gastón Pauls, Graciela Tenembaum, María Mercedes Villagra
written and directed by Fabián Bielinsky

by Walter Chaw What may be the best David Mamet film since House of Games, Argentine director Fabián Bielinsky’s debut Nine Queens is a mannered, serpentine caper thriller that places its trust in the able hands of a troika of talented performers. Baby-faced Juan (Gastón Pauls), ferocious Valeria (Leticia Brédice), and twitchy Marcos (the gifted Ricardo Darín) find themselves involved in a plot to sell a sheet of counterfeit stamps (the titular “Nine Queens”) to Spanish collector Gandalfo (Ignasi Abadal), himself on the lam for some sort of fraud. Delightfully ludicrous and self-contained in the way of The Sting, the picture is a Rube Goldberg/Spanish Prisoner device translated into small-time cons and sin-stained grifters as they grind and smash into each other like sharks in the green noir bucket of Buenos Aires.

Less Than Zero (1987) – DVD

April 13, 2002Posted in1980s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, DVD, Romance

***/**** Image A- Sound B-
starring Andrew McCarthy, Jami Gertz, Robert Downey Jr., James Spader
screenplay by Harley Peyton, based on the novel by Bret Easton Ellis
directed by Marek Kanievska

by Walter Chaw The quality of dislocation in Marek Kanievska’s Less Than Zero is startling and sinister. It creeps up on you after a confusing opening that skips forward six months from a high school graduation before flashing back a month and then reorienting itself again in Beverly Hills at Christmastime in 1987. But by the middle of the film, the temporal decisions made during its disorienting prologue suddenly make perfect sense: while Less Than Zero will never be as narratively jumpy again, the pervasive mood of the piece remains disconnected and frightened. It feels breathless in a way that movies about drug addiction must. Though Less Than Zero seems, despite its sterile apocalyptic blight, almost naïve in the wake of Aronofsky’s Requiem for a Dream, it retains (especially in retrospect, given the lost spirit of the Eighties and Robert Downey Jr.’s offscreen problems), something approaching the laden nostalgia of Romanticism. Something by Thomas de Quincey, no doubt.

The Starz Independent FilmCenter Project, Vol. 1

April 5, 2002Posted in****/****, 1950s, 1990s, 2000s, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Czech Republic, Drama, Fantasy, France, Horror, Japan, Mexico, Mystery, Netherlands, Satire, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

by Walter Chaw

BOB LE FLAMBEUR (1956)
***½/****
starring Isabelle Corey, Daniel Cauchy, Roger Duchesne, Guy Decomble
screenplay by Jean-Pierre Melville, dialogue by Auguste Le Breton
directed by Jean-Pierre Melville

With every minute of Henri Decaё’s cinematography looking like a Eugène Atget photograph, Jean-Pierre Melville’s Bob Le Flambeur is a visually stunning film from a director who influenced filmmakers as diverse as Jean-Luc Godard (who quotes Bob Le Flambeur at least twice in Breathless) and John Woo (whose The Killer takes its basic plot from Melville’s Le Samourai). It is film noir of the highest order, reminding in its ensemble intricacy of Kubrick’s The Killing (released a year later in 1956) and evoking the kind of chiaroscuro, gin-joint, smoke-drenched milieu where every ashtray has a name. It’s a love letter to the grim American gangster drama of the Forties that subverts the genre even as it reinvents it as a lyrical ballad to gamblers, losers, hoods, and wayward dames–a snapshot of the Montmarte district of Paris 47 years before Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s reinvention of the same.

Big Trouble (2002)

April 5, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Theatrical, Thriller

**½/****
starring Tim Allen, Omar Epps, Dennis Farina, Ben Foster
screenplay by Robert Ramsey & Matthew Stone, based on the novel by Dave Barry
directed by Barry Sonnenfeld

Bigtroubleby Walter Chaw My opinion of Dave Barry is that as an essayist, he’s no P.J. O’Rourke, and as a novelist, he’s no Carl Hiaasen–anyone who agrees to have Harry Anderson play him on a weekly sitcom is begging to have his work re-evaluated through that prism. And yet Barry Sonnenfeld’s Big Trouble, the long-delayed (because of 9/11) adaptation of Barry’s novel of the same name, is, despite a slow opening featuring just too much of Tim Allen, frenetic and often hilarious–facts likely obscured by an understandable squeamishness in this climate towards mocking airline security and the easy acquisition of weapons of mass destruction.

Bandits (2001) [Special Edition] – DVD

March 31, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Drama, DVD, Romance

**/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B+
starring Bruce Willis, Cate Blanchett, Billy Bob Thornton, Troy Garity
screenplay by Harley Peyton
directed by Barry Levinson

by Walter Chaw Joe (Bruce Willis) and Terry (Billy Bob Thornton) break out of an Oregon prison and begin robbing banks while making their way down the west coast to an idealized Acapulco. Along the way, they pick up Joe’s dimwit wannabe stuntman cousin Phil (Anthony Burch) to act as getaway driver, and Kate (Cate Blanchett), an unbalanced passerby who becomes intoxicated by life on the lam. Shunning the more usual tactic of ski masks and gun-waving, Joe and Terry take the banks’ presidents and their families hostage the night before heists, earning them the nickname “The Sleepover Bandits.” In the schizophrenically sprawling and tight script, these hold-ups share time with a developing love triangle between Joe, Terry, and Kate, and, less successfully, a framing story involving an “America’s Most Wanted”-like host.

Death to Smoochy (2002)

March 29, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Drama, Germany, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

**/****
starring Robin Williams, Edward Norton, Danny DeVito, Jon Stewart
screenplay by Adam Resnick
directed by Danny DeVito

Deathtosmoochyby Walter Chaw Demonstrating a wonderfully wry conversance with Hitchcock’s images, Danny DeVito as director made an interesting debut with the Strangers on a Train redux Throw Momma from the Train before crafting what is possibly the definitive Eighties comedy in the Stygian The War of the Roses. After a 13-year hiatus featuring strange detours into other genres (the uneven Hoffa and the shrill Matilda), DeVito returns to the dark comedy with Death to Smoochy, a disjointed, dull, and irritating film that provides a meagre helping of “comedy” while ladling on a heaping serving of disconnected “dark.” To say the least, the picture is a resounding disappointment and what can only be seen as a betrayal of Robin Williams’s newfound desire to be viewed as something other than America’s favourite velvet clown with the upcoming films Insomnia and One Hour Photo.

Panic Room (2002)

March 29, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Directors: David Fincher, Drama, Theatrical, Thriller

**½/****
starring Jodie Foster, Kristen Stewart, Forest Whitaker, Jared Leto
screenplay by David Koepp
directed by David Fincher

Panicroomby Walter Chaw Panic Room has a fancy premise stretched to and past the breaking point. It was a production beset by problems including the loss of star Nicole Kidman to an injury sustained during Moulin Rouge!, the departure of director of photography (DP) Darius Khondji, and a storyboard plan so devilishly complex that the film will probably be best remembered as a breakthrough in how burgeoning technologies can inform the DP's craft. The behind-the-scenes strain manifests itself in the nervous distractedness of the narrative and glaring and irritating plausibility gaps; the undeniably cool images (and Howard Shore's amazing score) only serve to illuminate the emptiness at Panic Room's core.

Spy Game (2001) [Collector’s Edition (Widescreen)] – DVD

March 28, 2002Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Directors: Tony Scott, DVD, Espionage, France, Germany, Japan, Thriller, UK

**/**** Image A+ Sound A+ Extras B+
starring Robert Redford, Brad Pitt, Catherine McCormack, Stephen Dillane
screenplay by Michael Frost Beckner and David Arata
directed by Tony Scott

Spygamecap

by Walter Chaw The defining moment of Spy Game, Tony Scott’s latest exercise in stylistic excess, occurs at about the midway point. Playing CIA spymaster Nathan Muir, Robert Redford debriefs his best agent Tom Bishop (Brad Pitt) atop a building in Cold War Berlin. After a tense exchange, an enraged Bishop throws his chair off the barren, windswept rooftop. The problem with the scene is neither the preposterous screenplay by Michael Frost Beckner and David Arata to which it belongs, nor Scott’s infatuation with the panoramic aerial shot, nor the way that Harry Gregson-Williams’s ubiquitous score threatens here and at every other moment to rupture your eardrums. It’s not even in the ridiculously out-of-place imagistic Xerox of Wings of Desire, Wim Wenders’s melancholy ode to love and Berlin.

Showtime (2002)

March 15, 2002Posted in2000s, Action, Australia, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Eddie Murphy, Robert De Niro, Theatrical, Will Smith

*/****
starring Robert De Niro, Eddie Murphy, Rene Russo, Ken Hudson Campbell
screenplay by Keith Sharon and Alfred Gough & Miles Millar
directed by Tom Dey

by Walter Chaw Shaping up as a spoof but neither smart enough to earn that label nor exciting enough to sustain interest otherwise, Tom Dey’s slick Showtime is an incoherent mess of a film that relies on explosions and volume to distract from its tin ear and flat pacing. It wants desperately to be a self-aware genre exercise in the Scream vein, but after its characters mention that there are “rules” to the buddy-cop flick, it chooses to demonstrate them rather than subvert them. Screenwriters-by-committee Keith Sharon, Alfred Gough, and Miles Millar, patching together an abominable iteration of the same old Lethal Weapon tropes, have conspired to get De Niro to immediately make 15 Minutes again (but as an alleged intentional comedy) and to continue Eddie Murphy’s typecasting as an animated jackass. Piling on the offenses, Showtime suffers from a few distracting plotholes, an obviously tacked-on prologue meant to elicit a Kindergarten Cop-esque brand of “isn’t it funny to scare children with a terrifying actor,” and a score by Alan Silvestri that actually approximates the feel of hammers to the brainpan.

Training Day (2001) – DVD

March 14, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, DVD, Thriller

**½/**** Image A Sound A Extras B+
starring Denzel Washington, Ethan Hawke, Scott Glenn, Eva Mendes
screenplay by David Ayer
directed by Antoine Fuqua

by Walter Chaw In Antoine Fuqua and Dominic Sena’s race to become David Fincher, Fuqua, with his colour-bleached urban noir Training Day, pulls slightly ahead. Essentially a feature-length version of the Fuqua-helmed video for Coolio’s “Gangsta’s Paradise,” Training Day is dankly lit, grim, and edited with a veteran music-video director’s need for speed (though there are considerably fewer cuts than those found in Fuqua’s previous efforts Bait and The Replacement Killers). So smooth and accomplished is the harsh vérité look of the piece that the sun-drenched streets of Los Angeles are as much a player in the film as its leads. But the striking cinematography, sharp screenplay by David Ayer, and undeniable chemistry between Denzel Washington and Ethan Hawke aren’t enough to disguise that Training Day is one bravura performance away from being the umpteenth rote grizzled vet/greenhorn rookie policier. (With a healthy dash of Casualties of War tossed in for that Captain Bligh/Mr. Christian dynamic.)

All About the Benjamins (2002)

March 8, 2002Posted in2000s, Action, Comedy, Crime, Germany, Theatrical, Thriller

**/****
starring Ice Cube, Mike Epps, Tommy Flanagan, Carmen Chaplin
screenplay by Ronald Lang and Ice Cube
directed by Kevin Bray

Allaboutthebenjaminsby Walter Chaw Blaxploitation without the sex, All About the Benjamins is a gratuitously violent film laudably free of the pretense of political correctness, but it’s so calamitously loud and arbitrary (and has a character who fits the same description) that it fritters away almost as much goodwill as it earns. The only things separating All About the Benjamins from other whip-edited, hard-action movies are Ice Cube’s joyfully offensive screenplay (co-written with Ronald Lang) and an opening set in a Confederate’s dream of a trailer park that does more for exploding the race issue in these United States than the past five Denzel Washington pulpits.

Heist (2001) – DVD

March 6, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, DVD, Thriller

**/**** Image B+ Sound B+
starring Gene Hackman, Danny DeVito, Delroy Lindo, Rebecca Pidgeon
written and directed by David Mamet

by Walter Chaw David Mamet the writer repeats himself in tight blobs of verbal noise, awkward turns of phrase, and staccato blasts. Mamet directs movies, I suspect, to preserve every beat of his favourite screenwriter’s (Mamet) careful, layered scripts. How he continues to lure big-name actors and producers to play in his exclusive little quicksand boxes of narrative dysfunction is a mystery. For as distinct as the celebrated playwright’s dialogue is, almost more so is the lamentable instinct to cast his largely talentless wives in pivotal roles (first Lindsay Crouse, now the consistently abominable Rebecca Pidgeon), not neglecting Mamet’s inability to transcend the mannered and under-populated staginess of the theatre in which he belongs.