John Q. (2002)

February 15, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, Theatrical, Thriller, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Denzel Washington, Robert Duvall, Kimberly Elise, Eddie Griffin
screenplay by James Kearns
directed by Nick Cassavetes

by Walter Chaw John Q’s (Denzel Washington) chosen nom de guerre is a tripartite signifier meant to evoke Kafka, Black Muslims, and the everyman (“John Q. Public”). It’s the kind of import-laden affectation that almost always indicates a screenwriter in over his head. It is, in other words, only the first hint that John Q. is going to be the kind of populist bullshit to which Oprah Winfrey will inevitably devote an hour of her terrifying television show. According to the film, though, anyone even approaching the big O’s income bracket is part of The Problem.

Super Troopers (2002)

February 15, 2002Posted in2000s, Comedy, Crime, Mystery, Theatrical

½/****
starring Jay Chandrasekhar, Kevin Heffernan, Steve Lemme, Paul Soter
screenplay by Broken Lizard
directed by Jay Chandrasekhar

Supertroopersby Walter Chaw From the self-satisfied pens of LA/NY sketch comedy troupe “Broken Lizard” springs Super Troopers, fully formed like some Plutonian messenger from midnight-movie hell. The film is a series of skits involving a bumbling division of highway patrolmen more interested in pranking the unfortunates they pull over than in doing their jobs. Wrapped around a pathetic excuse for a plot, the vignettes vary wildly in quality from dull to slightly less dull, the lone exception being the opening sequence, which approaches the menacingly surreal. A film that debuted at last year’s Sundance Film Festival and sat on the shelf since for various reasons (not the least of which is a running gag involving “Afghanistan-imation” and some mocking pro-Taliban dialogue), what Super Troopers succeeds the most in doing is providing a disquiet world the long-dreaded completion of the Police Academy series.

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.

Kiss of the Dragon (2001) – DVD

January 5, 2002Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, DVD, France, Martial Arts, Thriller

**½/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Jet Li, Bridget Fonda, Tcheky Karyo, Ric Young
screenplay by Luc Besson & Robert Mark Kamen
directed by Chris Nahon

by Walter Chaw There are not ten consecutive minutes of Kiss of the Dragon that make sense and there are at least three completely disconnected scenes, but the real litmus test occurs about thirty minutes into the festivities, whereupon Jet Li kicks a billiard ball into the forehead of a Jim Broadbent-esque bad guy. Coming at the end of much mayhem, that’s where you either start playing pool with Kiss of the Dragon or leave the parlour altogether. It’s also an event that happens before Bridget Fonda has had a chance to do the Cybill Shepherd enjoyment-vortex schtick she’s been perfecting for a decade or so. To her credit, she’s getting pretty damned good at it, though she’s still no Helen Hunt.

The Glass House (2001) – DVD

January 3, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Crime, Drama, DVD, Mystery, Thriller

*/**** Image A Sound B+ Extras C
starring Leelee Sobieski, Stellan Skarsgård, Diane Lane, Bruce Dern
screenplay by Wesley Strick
directed by Daniel Sackheim

BUY @ AMAZON

by Bill Chambers In The Glass House, the picture-perfect legal guardians of an orphaned teenage girl and her little brother turn out to be Gomez and Morticia. (Actually, that's overstating their appeal.) The trouble with this set-up is that it has the pretense of a moral but revolves around a character in Leelee Sobieski's Ruby who hasn't done anything to place herself in her precarious situation except obey the law and her elders. By the time she gains agency and the film puts her in the driver's seat (quite literally, as it happens), The Glass House seems to be apologizing to young adults on screen and off for suggesting they're not always in control. It could be said to, like Home Alone or The Rugrats Movie, spread a false sense of security to its target demographic.

In the Bedroom (2001)

December 26, 2001Posted in****/****, 2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, Theatrical

****/****
starring Tom Wilkinson, Sissy Spacek, Nick Stahl, Marisa Tomei
screenplay by Robert Festinger & Todd Field, based on a short story by Andre Dubus
directed by Todd Field

by Walter Chaw Based on the short story “Killings” by the late Andre Dubus, arguably the finest American short-story writer of the past fifty years, Todd Field’s In the Bedroom is an emotionally brutal and laudably ambiguous film that does justice to the sober restraint and taint of truth that informs the best of Dubus’s work. It’s like an Atom Egoyan or Sean Penn film in its austere chronicling of families tossed to entropy’s capricious tide, though a more complete work those filmmakers have yet to achieve. What Field captures, in fact, is a whiff of Terrence Malick’s genius–not only in he and cinematographer Antonio Calvache’s spacious plateaus but also in the thematic preoccupation with nature’s rhythms and how they imbue the patterns of human behaviour. That said, In the Bedroom largely avoids Malick’s philosophical metaphors, focusing on the far less ephemeral poetics of Dubus’s preoccupation with the minute interpersonal dynamics–the subterranean movements and precarious psychic negotiation–of a marriage.

Osmosis Jones (2001) – DVD

December 13, 2001Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Family

**½/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B
starring Bill Murray, Molly Shannon, Elena Franklin, Chris Elliott
screenplay by Marc Hyman
directed by Bobby Farrelly, Peter Farrelly, Piet Kroon and Tom Sito

by Walter Chaw If the devil is in the details, so, in Osmosis Jones, is most of the humour. It is one part Farrelly Brothers biological comedy and one part Piet Kroon and Tom Sito (late of The Iron Giant) animated genius; that the balance of the film is heavily in favour of the latter speaks to rare good thinkin’ from the Hollywood brain trust. The live-action part stars Bill Murray as the slovenly Frank–Murray out-repulses co-star Chris Elliot, which means that he is very possibly the most disgusting human ever captured on film. The animation side features the voice of Chris Rock as the titular Osmosis Jones, a white blood cell cop who, after a controversial stomach evacuation, is busted down to mouth duty. If you’re not sure what “mouth duty” entails–it’s bad. When Frank is invaded by an evil virus named Thrax (Laurence Fishburne), Osmosis gets one last chance to make good, paired with a blustering blunderbuss of a timed flu capsule named Drix (David Hyde Pierce).

Made (2001) [Special Edition] – DVD

November 27, 2001Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Crime, Drama, DVD, Thriller

**/**** Image A Sound A- Extras A
starring Jon Favreau, Vince Vaughn, Sean Combs, Famke Janssen
written and directed by Jon Favreau

by Bill Chambers Even if Swingers were terrible, one would have to admire writer-star Jon Favreau for making a film about waiting around to be discovered instead of actually waiting around to be discovered. Made, his official follow-up effort (this time as full-on auteur), is not such a noble affair. A vanity project in the tradition of Under the Cherry Moon, Prince’s pretentious encore to his star-making Purple Rain, the film boasts of a more distinguished supporting cast, stronger tech credits, and a budget 20x that of its predecessor. And yet almost every scene lands with a resounding thud, due in large part to Made‘s alleged raison d’être: the anticipated reunion of Swinger Vince Vaughn with Favreau–who turns into a morose do-gooder whenever he’s in Vaughn’s radar. It’s like watching “The Odd Couple” starring a tooth and a root canal.

Rush Hour 2 (2002) [infinifilm] – DVD

November 19, 2001Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, DVD, Hong Kong, Jackie Chan, Martial Arts, Mystery, Thriller

**/**** Image A+ Sound A- Extras A-
starring Jackie Chan, Chris Tucker, John Lone, Zhang Ziyi
screenplay by Jeff Nathanson
directed by Brett Ratner

by Walter Chaw For as long as Jackie Chan has been the logical heir to Buster Keaton’s crown, it becomes apparent during the course of Brett Ratner’s Rush Hour 2 that he may also be the heir to Peter Sellers’s Inspector Clouseau/Pink Panther crown. Blithely mixing the broad racial humour with the broad slapstick theatrics that typify Sellers and Blake Edwards’s classic comedies of criminal bad taste, Rush Hour 2 even makes time for a couple of bombshell secret agents, a brief and largely inexplicable interlude involving breasts rendering a man amusingly mute, and a cheerfully inept sidekick who gets in the stray kick now and again. The tenor, then, is dedicatedly light, and the humour is predictably free of cleverness–mostly involving Asians eating dogs and killing chickens, and African-Americans preferring their chickens fried and their karaoke with a heaping helping of Jacko gesticulations. That Rush Hour 2 (and the Pink Panther saga, for that matter) is often so genial in its cheap humour and gratifying in its physical exertions speaks to an almost universal desire to see people get a pie in the face while inelegantly breaking societal taboos. Rush Hour 2 never once aspires to anything other than formula fluff and never once descends into the dangerous realm of superlative entertainment. It is the prototypical summer film: loud, cheap, exploitive, and forgotten almost as soon as it’s over.

Hostage High (1997) [Director’s Uncut Version] – DVD

November 1, 2001Posted in1990s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, DVD, Television, Thriller

Detention: The Siege at Johnson High
**/**** Image B Sound C+ Extras C
starring Rick Schroder, Henry Winkler, Freddie Prinze Jr., Ren Woods
screenplay by Larry Golin
directed by Michael W. Watkins

by Walter Chaw Kids who go to Columbine High School and don't compete in organized athletics are referred to as "no sports." It's not a kind term. On the weekends in Littleton, crowds of teenagers driving new model Dodge Rams, BMWs, and SUVs collect in area parking lots to make a lot of noise and hoot at people driving by until the police arrive to disperse them–if they bother to come at all. If you're African-American like a good friend of mine, they'll sometimes make monkey noises; if you're Asian like myself, they do the Mr. Miyagi crane pose and laugh like loons. From my personal experience in this community, having 15 of their fellow students die in a hail of bullets did not teach a significant population of Columbiners compassion, tolerance, and respect. Maybe just the opposite.

Opera (1987) – DVD

October 31, 2001Posted in1980s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Directors: Dario Argento, DVD, Horror, Mystery, Thriller

***/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras A-
starring Cristina Marsillach, Ian Charleson, Urbano Barberini, Daria Nicolodi
screenplay by Dario Argento, Franco Ferreni
directed by Dario Argento

by Walter Chaw The best of Dario Argento’s films rework themes and images from Alfred Hitchcock with a level of flamboyance and twisted creativity that transform would-be genre knock-offs into something truly rare and valuable. Argento utilizes the constructions of Hitchcock as a framework for lurid, colour-drenched images and wickedly inventive death sequences that are among the most shocking and agonizing in the history of cinema. Often called “The Italian Hitchcock,” I find the term “The Italian De Palma” to be closer to the mark, for their obsessions, for their mastery of highly technical mimicries, and, extra-textually, for both auteurs’ decades-long slides into mere imitation and schlock. (Despite their similarities, Argento and De Palma to this day hate each other with a white-hot passion.)

On the Waterfront (1954) [Special Edition] – DVD

October 29, 2001Posted in****/****, 1950s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Best Picture (Academy Awards), Crime, Directors: Elia Kazan, Drama, DVD, Thriller

****/**** Image A- Sound B Extras B
starring Marlon Brando, Karl Malden, Lee J. Cobb, Rod Steiger
screenplay by Budd Schulberg
directed by Elia Kazan

by Walter Chaw There is a moment in the middle of Elia Kazan’s On the Waterfront that stands out for me as one of the defining in my love of movies. Terry Malloy (Marlon Brando) confesses to his girlfriend Edie Doyle (Eva Marie Saint) that he was involved in the Union execution of her brother, but rather than listen to Terry rehash events with which we’re already familiar, a steam whistle drowns him out. The precise way that Terry moves his hands and the expression on Edie’s face, growing from a gentle concern to horror, is among the most cinematic moments in the history of the medium. It’s breathtaking in its simplicity and subtlety, revolutionary in its presentation and its eye, and exactly the right choice for the film at the right moment.

DIFF ’01: Novocaine

October 27, 2001Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, DIFF/SDFF, Drama, Film Festivals, Thriller

*/****
starring Steve Martin, Helena Bonham Carter, Laura Dern, Scott Caan
written and directed by David Atkins

Novocaineby Walter Chaw An ill-fated hybrid of Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid and the dentist portions of Frank Oz's Little Shop of Horrors, Novocaine lacks a cohesive tone. It vacillates from dark comedy to Forties-style melodrama, from light-hearted slapstick to medium-heavy gore and nudity, and in one particularly inexplicable sequence, Novocaine attempts to be a post-modernist Lacanian thing involving a character's heightened self-awareness as a fictional construct. It's neither funny nor the slightest bit suspenseful, too jumbled and arbitrary to ever sustain much in the way of tension or interest. Even its central conceit–a plot to steal pharmaceuticals and the resultant chaos when the victim catches on to the scheme–is so essentially flawed that the revelation of the guilty party, which occurs after we've spent two desperate hours suspending increasingly leaden disbelief, isn't so much a shocker as a "shrugger."

Heathers (1989) – DVD

October 25, 2001Posted in****/****, 1980s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, DVD, Satire, Teen

****/**** Image A Sound B- Extras A-
starring Winona Ryder, Christian Slater, Shannen Doherty, Lisanne Falk
screenplay by Daniel Waters
directed by Michael Lehmann

Mustownby Walter Chaw Veronica Sawyer (Winona Ryder) is the only non-Heather "Heather," one of four girls in Westerberg High's most popular and fashionable clique. The conscience of a harridan quartet responsible for much of the insecurity and intimidation at their institution, Veronica confides to new kid J.D. (Christian Slater), "I don't really like my friends." Nor is there much to admire about Westerberg's other clusters, who spend their time destroying overweight students, tormenting the "geek squad," and placing themselves in humiliating situations for the sake of imagined boosts to their ill-gained status. J.D., a rebel with a cause, functions as the catalyst for Veronica's revenge fantasies: The two begin a killing spree of the beautiful people, getting away with it by playing on grown-ups' propensity to romanticize teenage suicide.

Bones (2001)

October 24, 2001Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Horror, Theatrical
*/****
starring Snoop Doggy Dogg, Pam Grier, Michael T. Weiss, Clifton Powell
screenplay by Adam Simon & Tim Metcalfe
directed by Ernest R. Dickerson

by Walter Chaw Bones, from Spike Lee’s former cinematographer Ernest Dickerson (director of the underestimated horror-comedy Tales from the Crypt: Demon Knight), is torpedoed first and foremost by rapper/felon Snoop Doggy Dogg’s monstrous ego and lack of anything resembling a sense of humour about himself. The result is a film that merely rip-offs Hellraiser (down to the reconstituted corpse), A Nightmare on Elm Street (down to the floppy-hat-wearing vengeful ghoul), and, most peculiarly of all, Dario Argento’s Inferno and Suspiria (burning hellmouth, rain of maggots, man-eating dog). Bones also borrows liberally from the blaxploitation flicks of the Seventies in Snoop’s period pimp outfit and the presence of Pam Grier in her Foxy Brown attire, yet it lacks the camp appeal that excuses miniscule budgets and a lack of craft. The one thing that separates Bones from all the films it’s trying to emulate is its noteworthy inability to muster either fear or fun.

DIFF ’01: Mortal Transfer

October 19, 2001Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, DIFF/SDFF, Film Festivals, France, Germany, Thriller

Mortel Transfert
***/****
starring Jean-Hugues Anglade, Helene de Forgerolles, Denis Podalydes
screenplay by Jean-Jacques Beineix, from the novel by Jean-Pierre Gattengo
directed by Jean-Jacques Beineix

by Walter Chaw Returning to the "nouvelle noir" grotesquery that marked his 1981 debut Diva, Jean-Jacques Beineix's Mortal Transfer is wickedly funny, visually stunning, and perverse in a malevolent way that, along with Bernard Rapp's Une affaire de gout, appears to be a Gallic specialty this festival season. Its highlight is a ghoulish, hilarious scene having to do with a corpse, an icy road to be crossed, and a rather unorthodox means of delivery; and though the film never quite seems at ease with its own black heart, its game cast is more than up to the task of the earnest deadpan that Stygian farces require.

Iron Monkey (1993)

October 12, 2001Posted in1990s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, Hong Kong, Martial Arts, Theatrical

***½/****
starring Yu Rong Guang, Donnie Yen, Jean Wang, Tsang Sze Man
screenplay by Tsui Hark, Elsa Tang, Lau Tai Mok
directed by Yuen Wo Ping

by Walter Chaw I first saw Yuen Woo-ping’s Iron Monkey on what must have been a third-generation bootleg: it was in unsubtitled Cantonese and fullscreen pan-and-scan, brought home unlabeled on a cheap Maxell videotape from a Vietnamese grocery down on South Federal. As a native Mandarin speaker, I didn’t understand a word of it, and the quality of the tape was such that it was impossible to decipher any shadow detail, but it was clear to me even then that Iron Monkey was something extremely special. Long a cult favourite in the United States (although it didn’t do particularly well when released theatrically in Asia), Iron Monkey received an extremely nice DVD transfer in 1998 from Media Asia; it is a disc that holds a place of honour in my personal collection. With the massive popularity of The Matrix and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (both choreographed by Woo-ping), as well as the surprising success of Americanized re-issues of Jackie Chan’s old Hong Kong films, Iron Monkey has been cleaned up, freshly subtitled, and booked in American moviehouses in an attempt to capitalize on the sudden popularity of wire-fu in particular and the dizzying HK cinema in general.

Va savoir (2001)

October 12, 2001Posted in****/****, 2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Drama, France, Germany, Italy, Romance, Theatrical

Who Knows?
****/****
starring Claude Berri, Catherine Rouvel, Hélène de Fougerolles, Jeanne Balibar
screenplay by Luigi Pirandello, Jacques Rivette, Pascal Bonitzer, Christine Laurent
directed by Jacques Rivette

by Walter Chaw

"I hate symbolic art in which the presentation loses all spontaneous movement in order to become a machine, an allegory – a vain and misconceived effort because the very fact of giving an allegorical sense to a presentation clearly shows that we have to do with a fable which by itself has no truth either fantastic or direct; it was made for the demonstration of some moral truth."
-Luigi Pirandello from Playwrights on Playwriting, ed. by Toby Cole, 1961

DIFF ’01: The Man Who Wasn’t There (2001)

October 11, 2001Posted in****/****, 2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Coen Brothers, Crime, DIFF/SDFF, Drama, Esoterica, Film Festivals, Scarlett Johansson, Thriller, UK

****/****
starring Billy Bob Thornton, Frances McDormand, Michael Badalucco, James Gandolfini
screenplay by Joel Coen & Ethan Coen
directed by Joel Coen

Manwhowasntthereby Walter Chaw The noir genre was born of discomfort with women in the workplace, the rise of cynicism, and a world polarized by international conflict (WWII). Its symbol, the hardboiled detective, became the projection of the collective paranoia about the ascent of globalism and the death of Pollyannaism. Women and foreigners are not to be trusted in the noir universe; information is slippery and expensive; and the solution of the puzzle more often than not points back to a rot at the heart of the detective. It is the Oedipus/identity trajectory, complete with a blasted plague land, a murder, its thinly veiled culprit (noir is typically invested in process, not mystery), the appearance of a femme fatale, and a solution involving mortal self-knowledge. The noir hero may save the day, but at the price of being betrayed by those he loves. He is impotent to avenge his fallen friends and lovers, and at the mercy of a larger corruption that is unalterable and serves only to further degrade individual confidence. Tellingly, a great many noir works in literature and film begin with the death of a best friend or a partner and end with the realization that any victory is a hollow one in light of society’s inexorable fall into chaos.

Our Lady of the Assassins (2000)

October 5, 2001Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Colombia, Crime, Drama, France, Spain, Theatrical

La virgen de los sicarios
**½/****
starring Germán Jaramillo, Anderson Ballesteros, Juan David Restrepo, Manuel Busquets
screenplay by Fernando Vallejo
directed by Barbet Schroeder

by Walter Chaw At his best (Barfly, Idi Amin Dada, Reversal of Fortune), Barbet Schroeder is mercilessly unblinking. He delves into the sundry with such a dedicated nihilism that it makes the horror of his situations palatable somehow. The same kind of thing Cronenberg does with grotesquery, Schroeder does with atrocity: we are led behind the curtain to where the real ugliness lies with a casual air that defuses sensationalism and murders prurience through protagonists–at least the best ones (Charles Bukowski, Idi Amin, Claus von Bulow)–drawn from the insipid impiety of real life. That’s perhaps the source of my discomfort with the anti-hero of Our Lady of the Assassins (La virgen de los sicarios“), an only semi-autobiographical writer first brought to life in Fernando Vallejo’s 1994 novel of the same name and now embodied in the lanky frame of Latin actor Germán Jaramillo. He is an existentialist philosopher torn by the eternal conflict between passion for life and passion for destruction, but he has no grounding in the mundane that would make the character something more than a wandering gadfly. If Vallejo, a jaded chronicler of a train-wreck who has no connection to the evolving horror, is the projection of a first-world consciousness observing the travails of a disintegrating third world, the greatest irony of the failure and success of the film is in its own triumphant disconnection.