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.

15 Minutes (2001) [Infinifilm] – DVD

August 26, 2001Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, DVD, Germany, Thriller

*½/**** Image A Sound A Extras A-
starring Robert De Niro, Edward Burns, Kelsey Grammer, Avery Brooks
written and directed by John Herzfeld

by Walter Chaw There’s a thing that happens about an hour into John Herzfeld’s 15 Minutes that is as bald and shameless a foreshadowing device as any in the tired pantheon of movie-groaners. It’s as bad as telling someone that you’ll marry them just as soon as you get back from this trip to Africa; as bad as showing the guys a picture of your corn-fed sweetie right before you charge that machine gun embankment. It is a moment of stunning conventionality in the middle of a film that is otherwise engaging and, for a moment or two, even shocking and provocative. 15 Minutes is defined by this scene in a great many ways: It’s a Hollywood film struggling with a controversial topic that finds a comfort zone in a script that tries to soften some images by obfuscation and others by a timidity that ultimately undermines its subject. The last time a big-budget picture tried to tackle a media culture involved in exploitation of the darkest crannies of the human heart was Joel Schumacher’s reprehensible and simpering 8MM. Sharing that film’s ignominious demise at the box office, it can be no real surprise that 15 Minutes is almost as repugnantly apple-polishing an experience.

Skeletons in the Closet (2001) – DVD

August 25, 2001Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, DVD, Mystery, Thriller

**/**** Image A Sound B Extras B
starring Treat Williams, Linda Hamilton, Jonathan Jackson, Gordon Clapp
screenplay by Donna Powers & Wayne Powers
directed by Wayne Powers

by Walter Chaw An example of the sort of generational paranoia film that cropped up following the flower-power strangeness of the late-Sixties, Skeletons in the Closet is a definite product of the post-Columbine cinematic zeitgeist: it all but demands a re-examination of our relationships with our disenfranchised youth. In a very real way, it plays as an interesting companion piece to McGehee and Siegel’s arthouse thriller The Deep End. Both are interested in how single parents deal with criminal delinquency (real or imagined) in their confused children, and both are showcases for actors who are either relatively unknown (Tilda Swinton in The Deep End), or sadly marginalized (Treat Williams).

L.I.E. (2001)

August 24, 2001Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Coming of Age, Crime, Drama, Theatrical

***½/****
starring Paul Franklin Dano, Billy Kay, Brian Cox, Bruce Altman
screenplay by Stephen M. Ryder and Michael Cuesta & Gerald Cuesta
directed by Michael Cuesta

by Walter Chaw A marriage of Harmony Korine and Larry Clark’s bleak suburban sensibilities and Michael Mann’s smooth visual sense, veteran commercial director Michael Cuesta’s debut film L.I.E. (“Long Island Expressway”) is a coming-of-age drama that includes a trio of knock-out performances, a gritty, wise screenplay, and directorial choices that are pitch perfect. It opens like Korine’s Gummo, with a child on an overpass and a voice-over providing brief backstory and mood. Like Gummo, L.I.E. betrays itself as a subversive literary piece: Korine’s work following the major tropes of John Keats’s Ode to a Grecian Urn and Cuesta’s film faithful to the philosophy and tone of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. Further, L.I.E. sets itself up as one of the most technically accomplished (and restrained) members of the dissident teen social genre, lending a direct thematic explication to the generational paranoia subtexts of 1970s cinema paid visual tribute by Korine/Clark and Todd Solondz.

The Deep End (2001)

August 21, 2001Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, Mystery, Romance, Theatrical, Thriller

**/****
starring Tilda Swinton, Goran Visnjic, Jonathan Tucker, Peter Donat
screenplay by Scott McGehee & David Siegel, based on the short story “The Blank Wall” by Elisabeth Sanxay Holding
directed by McGehee & Siegel

by Walter Chaw There is a moment at the very beginning of Scott McGehee and David Siegel’s The Deep End wherein our maternal heroine Margaret Hall (Tilda Swinton) fills in a crossword puzzle line with “glacier.” It is an early clue to Margaret’s glacial temperament, the cool blue colour suffusions that dominate the film’s lighting schemes, and, unfortunately, the feeling of icy detachment one experiences during the course of the film. The Deep End is neither a noir nor a Hitchcockian thriller, but rather a somewhat conventional, vaguely derivative Mildred Pierce-ian estrogen melodrama that plays a lot like a Lifetime bodice-ripper written by David Mamet. It is essentially a lifeless version of Blood Simple, complete with misunderstandings, extortion, and a hide-the-corpse intrigue inspired by the urge to protect a loved one. Not to say The Deep End is a bad film, exactly, rather it’s a forgettable one that is remarkable only for its almost complete lack of distinction.

Hannibal (2001) [Special Edition] – DVD

August 21, 2001Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Crime, Directors: Ridley Scott, Drama, DVD, Thriller, UK

**/**** Image A Sound A- Extras A-
starring Anthony Hopkins, Julianne Moore, Ray Liotta, Frankie R. Faison
screenplay by David Mamet and Steven Zaillian, based on the novel by Thomas Harris
directed by Ridley Scott

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover It is perhaps unfair to compare a sequel to its predecessor, especially one with as tenuous a connection to its predecessor as Hannibal has. With most of the original The Silence of the Lambs personnel having refused to sign on due to various creative differences, the sequel's total stylistic disconnection from its beloved 1991 precursor was probably inevitable. Couple that with the fact that the novel on which it draws can be charitably described as a desperate grasp for royalties and you have a no-win situation that would confound the most dedicated adaptor. Eager though he or she might be to remain faithful to the original's spirit, our hypothetical filmmakers would be forced to define something perfectly contrary to the parent film, something that would be its own picture–a rare enough commodity in the best of times.

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.

Greenfingers (2001)

August 7, 2001Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Romance, Theatrical, UK

*/****
starring Clive Owen, Helen Mirren, David Kelly, Natasha Little
written and directed by Joel Hershman

by Walter Chaw A disturbingly optimistic (and particularly unlikely) redemption fable from Britain that marries the bare blue-collar buttocks of The Full Monty with the spunky seniors of Waking Ned Devine and Saving Grace, Joel Hershman’s Greenfingers is less “inspired by a true story,” as its title cards suggest, than it is “slavishly devoted to formula.” Greenfingers is so entrenched in provincialism that it encourages American audiences to chuckle knowingly at the staid peculiarities of the English–and so dedicated to soft-pedalling dangerous criminals that it reveals itself as preachy and pernicious. It is the type of film that treats anyone with the audacity to question the wisdom of allowing murderers and rapists to serve out their sentences with no guards around and in the company of young women driving Rolls-Royces as the worst kind of close-minded fascist. By the twentieth time its simpleminded mantra (bringing a life into the world instead of taking one can change a hardened heart) is summoned literally and imagistically, culminating in a grotesque effigy of a fallen friend posed in the middle of an indistinct tableau, Greenfingers has lost all power to instruct and become something at once odious and unintentionally funny.

The Mexican (2001) [Widescreen] – DVD

August 5, 2001Posted in2000s, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, Crime, DVD, Mexico, Romance

*½/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Brad Pitt, Julia Roberts, James Gandolfini, Bob Balaban
screenplay by J.H. Wyman
directed by Gore Verbinski

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover I don’t have an idea to start this review. This is in large part because The Mexican has no idea to start itself, or give itself a middle, or pay off nicely with a tense climax. It just rambles on, with no reason to live, justifying a few paychecks and leaving this reviewer simultaneously puzzled and bored. Puzzled, as to how such a vast array of professionals could have wanted to cobble together such a passionless and irrelevant film as this; and bored, at events meaningless and contrived. The Mexican isn’t even ambitious enough to be offensive: its conceptual hook is so weak and its follow-through so perfunctory that the film can’t rally the strength to be more than a petty nuisance, like a dinner disrupted by the noisy party the next table over.

Time and Tide (2000) – DVD

August 4, 2001Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, China, Crime, Drama, DVD, Hong Kong, Thriller

***/**** Image B+ Sound A- Extras B-
starring Nicholas Tse, Wu Bai, Anthony Wong, Joventino Couto Remotigue
written by Koan Hui & Tsui Hark
directed by Tsui Hark

by Bill Chambers Director Tsui Hark stands apart from his Chinese contemporaries by committing to a tone and relative congruity. Having made a couple of English-language pictures starring a Belgian (the Jean-Claude Van Damme vehicles Double Team and Knock-Off) and been schooled at a Southern Methodist university in Dallas, Hark is formally acquainted with the American mainstream, thankyouverymuch. His (post-Van Damme) Hong Kong import Time and Tide, while still a reminder of why it’s easy for us westerners to become a fan of HK cinema yet a bit of a chore to stay one, seems a learned genre concentrate. Although its plot is by and large in the Asia pulp tradition–that is, of an elusive logic–the film wins us over with phenomenal artistry and energy, and its breathers from the mayhem don’t feel like conceptual U-turns.

City on Fire (1987) – DVD

July 28, 2001Posted in1980s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Crime, Drama, DVD, Hong Kong, Thriller

**½/**** Image B- Sound A-
starring Chow Yun-fat, Sun Yeuh, Lee Sau Yin Danny, Carrie Ng
written and directed by Ringo Lam

by Bill Chambers Although it inspired the quintessential U.S. crime picture of the past decade, Ringo Lam’s 1987 Hong Kong action-thriller City on Fire suffers in a freshly-Americanized form: Dubbed and revised dialogue does not Reservoir Dogs make it, and the few nods to western pop-culture induce groans. (One re-recorded villain exclaims, “Show me the money!”) This new version was overseen by Dimension Films, the Miramax subsidiary whose home-video division has carried on the proud tradition of importing Asian flicks of cult repute and turning them into unintentional laff riots. Since Hollywood rarely makes a decent action picture to save its life, this practice has transcended racism and is beginning to look like sour grapes.

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.

The Gift (2000) – DVD

July 19, 2001Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Crime, Directors: Sam Raimi, Drama, DVD, Horror, Mystery, Thriller

***/**** Image A Sound A Extras C
starring Cate Blanchett, Giovanni Ribisi, Keanu Reeves, Katie Holmes
screenplay by Billy Bob Thornton & Tom Epperson
directed by Sam Raimi

by Bill Chambers The Golden Razzies are the worst: Earlier this year, they (dis)honoured Keanu Reeves for one of the only decent performances he’s ever given, in Sam Raimi’s The Gift. With his horrendous turns in The Replacements and The Watcher also up for grabs, I can only say that these anti-Oscars would be more clever and thought-provoking if they quit aiming their guns at sitting hams (witness George C. Scott’s Raspberry for his outstanding work in The Exorcist III); they long ago became the spoof-awards equivalent of a male comedian cracking wise about his mother-in-law. But then, The Gift hasn’t garnered much respect at all, except from those who watched for the specific purpose of glimpsing “Dawson’s Creek”‘s Katie Holmes in the buff. She plays a society slut in this southern gothic, which failed to exceed genre expectations during its curiously staggered theatrical release last winter. Yet there are times when a film should be lauded for fulfilling a set of obligations, and this is one of them.

The Great Muppet Caper (1981) – DVD

July 17, 2001Posted in1980s, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Crime, DVD, Family, Muppets, Musical

***½/**** Image B Sound B-
starring Kermit the Frog, Miss Piggy, Fozzie Bear, Gonzo
screenplay by Tom Patchett & Jay Tarses and Jerry Juhl & Jack Rose
directed by Jim Henson

BUY @ AMAZON

by Bill Chambers Jim Henson said that The Great Muppet Caper was the Muppet movie nearest and dearest to his heart, and it’s little mystery why. For starters, it’s the only one of the original trilogy he officially directed. And it’s closer in execution to “The Muppet Show”, Henson’s surreal, Emmy-winning brainchild that ran on TV for five years, than either The Muppet Movie or The Muppets Take Manhattan in not only showcasing a wide variety of song styles and involving the human guest stars in the musical performances, but also framing itself as what it is: a movie. With tongue firmly in cheek, The Great Muppet Caper deconstructs itself all the while. The film taught me a lot about the cinema–conventions, techniques, genre–as a kid, for which I am grateful.

Two Family House (2000) + Panic (2001) – DVDs

June 30, 2001Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Crime, Drama, DVD, Romance

TWO FAMILY HOUSE
***/**** Image A- Sound B+
starring Michael Rispoli, Kelly Macdonald, Katherine Narducci, Kevin Conway
written and directed by Raymond De Felitta

PANIC
***½/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras B
starring William H. Macy, Neve Campbell, Tracey Ullman, John Ritter
written and directed by Henry Bromell

by Bill Chambers Two Family House and Panic, a pair of overlooked films hopefully not destined to become overlooked DVDs, have more in common than a passing glance suggests, and their joint failure to earn even a pittance sounds the death knell for independent cinema as we knew it in the early-’90s. These days, only the import indies get a shot at the big time, which would be quite the statement on an improved national tolerance of foreign-language entertainment were such hits as Billy Elliot and Life is Beautiful not as warm and fuzzy as a Care Bear’s behind. The market’s unresponsiveness to the winsome New York story Two Family House, in particular, generates the following theory: American moviegoers now feel guilty for seeing The Mummy Returns twice instead of something less promoted once; they take the least painful route of cultural redemption by buying tickets to the most domestic thing with accents available, thus developing a distrust of or distaste for the genuine article.

The Boys Next Door (1986)

June 27, 2001Posted in1980s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, DVD, Thriller

*½/**** Image B Sound C
starring Maxwell Caulfield, Charlie Sheen, Patti D’Arbanville
screenplay by Glen Morgan & James Wong
directed by Penelope Spheeris

by Walter Chaw Wearing the white undershirt and blue jeans popularized as the uniform of disenfranchised youth since James Dean, Charlie Sheen’s Bo Richards in The Boys Next Door dresses the dress, but doesn’t exactly walking the walk. The first thing that should spring to mind when Sheen the younger staggers in from stage right in a thriller-killer film is his father, Martin, playing the same role in Terence Malick’s middle-American masterpiece Badlands fourteen years previous. The key difference is that not only is there a decade in which Martin Sheen used to be able to act (not so, Charlie), but that where Martin’s Kit Carruthers is the proactive force behind his murderous rampage, Charlie plays more the wilting, Sissy Spacek tagalong.

Manhunter (1986) – DVD (THX)

June 26, 2001Posted in1980s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Directors: Michael Mann, DVD, Mystery, Thriller

***½/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring William L. Petersen, Kim Greist, Joan Allen, Brian Cox
screenplay by Michael Mann, based on the Thomas Harris novel Red Dragon
directed by Michael Mann

by Walter Chaw Director Michael Mann’s third film is the remarkable Manhunter, the second cinematic adaptation of a Thomas Harris novel (the first being 1977’s John Frankenheimer-helmed Black Sunday) and the first to feature Harris’s dark serial killer antihero, Hannibal Lecter (spelled “Lecktor” in Manhunter). It is visually lush and possessed of the attention to craft and detail that has become a hallmark of Mann’s work; to say that it’s superior in nearly every way to the much-lauded and wildly popular The Silence of the Lambs would be something of an understatement.

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.

O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000) – DVD

June 11, 2001Posted in2000s, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Coen Brothers, Comedy, Crime, DVD, France, Music, UK

**½/**** Image A+ Sound A
starring George Clooney, John Turturro, Time Blake Nelson, Charles Durning
screenplay by Ethan Coen & Joel Coen
directed by Joel Coen

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover We can start by making two things perfectly clear. One: despite an opening credit to the contrary, the new Coen Brothers opus, O Brother, Where Art Thou?, has almost nothing to do with Homer's Odyssey–a few episodes notwithstanding, the bulk of the film is radically different from the great classical work. Two: it bears only a passing resemblance to the films of Preston Sturges, whose Sullivan's Travels provides the title; a ridiculous deus ex machina ending aside, it has none of the affection–if all of the wildness–of that writer-director's memorable oeuvre. So, having been smokescreened by these red-herring references, you have to ask: If it has nothing to do with Homer or Sturges, what the heck does it have to do with?

Forever Mine (2000) – DVD

May 21, 2001Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Crime, Directors: Paul Schrader, Drama, DVD, Romance, Thriller

**/**** Image B Sound B- Commentary B+
starring Joseph Fiennes, Ray Liotta, Gretchen Mol
written and directed by Paul Schrader

by Bill Chambers Paul Schrader’s fragmented, risqué melodrama Forever Mine tells the tale of an exceptionally well-read Miami Beach cabana boy named Alan (Joseph Fiennes) who steals the heart of Ella (Gretchen Mol, an old-fashioned bombshell), the wife of councilman Mark Brice (Ray Liotta), and pays for it: first by being sent to jail an innocent, then with a bullet in the head. (The jealous husband does the deed.) But Alan survives and, unbeknownst to Brice and Ella, steals a new identity for himself, that of a Miami druglord called upon fourteen years later to act as the politico’s criminal liaison in New York. Haunted Ella finds herself compelled by this scarred stranger and his thoughtful glances.