DIFF ’02: Roger Dodger

October 6, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Coming of Age, DIFF/SDFF, Drama, Film Festivals, Germany
***½/****starring Campbell Scott, Jesse Eisenberg, Isabella Rossellini, Elizabeth Berkleywritten and directed by Dylan Kidd by Walter Chaw Roger (Campbell Scott) is a fast-talking lothario with the usual laundry list of the insecurities, sexual or otherwise, that plague the modern man. But this far meaner and smarter version of The Tao of Steve--and what slight praise that is--takes a turn to the intriguing when Roger's 16-year-old nephew Nick (Jesse Eisenberg) appears for a few lessons on the art of pitching woo. In three brilliantly-scripted and wondrously paced sequences, Kidd points his Casanova Virgil and virginal Dante into the concentric circles of…

DIFF ’02: 7 Days in September

October 6, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, DIFF/SDFF, Documentary, Film Festivals
***½/****directed by Steve Rosenbaum by Walter Chaw An often-harrowing collection of amateur video taken on the days in the immediate aftermath of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, 7 Days in September accomplishes what so many retrospectives since that day have failed at in its evocation of the immediacy of atrocity and outrage, fear and fury of a day that is already fading into the repository of memory and irony. Footage, seldom-seen in a dangerously squeamish United States, of a person jumping from a building shares time with the immediate reactions of people hiding from the smoke and debris.…

DIFF ’02: Mile High: A Tale of Two Stadiums

October 6, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, DIFF/SDFF, Documentary, Film Festivals, Sports
**½/****directed by Samuel A. Safarian, Dirk Olson by Walter Chaw One of my earliest memories is watching Haven Moses catch a touchdown pass from Craig Morton in the 1977 AFC Championship games against the hated Oakland Raiders; since that time, I've only missed a total of three Broncos games (preseason included). If there was ever a viewer to which a documentary was tailor-made, then, it is Dick Olson's Denver Center Media-produced Mile High: A Tale of Two Stadiums, a soft-sell documentary commissioned to ease the transition to a new football stadium in the Mile High City, my hometown. Comprising over…

DIFF ’02: Home Room

October 6, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, DIFF/SDFF, Drama, Film Festivals, Teen
*/****starring Busy Philipps, Erika Christensen, Victor Garber, Raphael Sbargewritten and directed by Paul F. Ryan by Walter Chaw A standard good girl-meets-bad girl formula wrapped around a gloss on high-school shooting (our own perverse millennial take on the fin-de-siècle phenomenon), Home Room presents its vision of post-traumatic stress disorder with such hamhandedness that it threatens to spawn the same in the viewer. Essentially an Afterschool Special complete with pre-packaged messages about the evil of cigarettes, the secret pain of goth chicks, the importance of not taking the Lord's name in vain, and the crass stupidity of well-meaning cops and school administrators,…

DIFF ’02: The Fabulous Stain (Introduction)

October 5, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blog, DIFF/SDFF, Film Festivals

Difftitle2002bby Walter Chaw The silver anniversary of the Denver International Film Festival (hereafter DIFF) came to town with rumours run-rampant and grand, but the reality is a mixture of raised eyebrows, surprise announcements, and last-minute acts of God. Hoping for more innovative programming in its key slots, I was disappointed to learn that White Oleander, the star-studded adaptation of Janet Fitch's "Oprah Book Club" selection, would occupy the opening-night stage with a gala presentation at the lovely Temple Buell Theater in the Performing Arts Complex. Premiering just a few hours before its regular theatrical run begins on October 11th, the film is a mainstream Oscar-grab vying amongst the glut of mainstream pictures for the increasingly devalued top honours during the fall and holiday "awards season" and, for my sensibilities, a poor choice to headline the 25th anniversary of the fest. Last year's darkly-hued Lantana was a far more daring and appropriate pick to commence festivities. A rule of thumb has been ignored: bigger is not always better–in fact, in the case of modern film, it's almost never better.

Brotherhood of the Wolf (2001) [Widescreen] + [3-Disc Collector’s Edition] – DVDs

October 1, 2002Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, DIFF/SDFF, DVD, Film Festivals, France, Horror, Mystery

Le Pacte des loups
***½/****
WIDESCREEN DVD – Image A Sound A+ Extras B
3-DISC COLLECTOR’S EDITION DVD – Image B Sound A+ Extras A+
starring Samuel Le Bihan, Mark Dacascos, Emilie Dequenne, Vincent Cassel
screenplay by Christophe Gans, Stephane Cabel
directed by Christophe Gans

by Walter Chaw A beautiful girl adrift in a vast natural expanse is set upon by an unseen menace and slammed against a solid object before being dragged away to her bloodily-masticated doom. Enter a famed naturalist (Samuel Le Bihan), considered the expert in the breed of beast that might be responsible for the heinous deed; his investigations mostly reveal that the culprit is larger than your average monster. Alas, no one in the isolated and picturesque community believes him, consoling themselves in an amateur hunt that bags a load of smaller members of the creature’s species. When the killing continues, the famed naturalist, his highly-trained sidekick (martial artist Mark Dacascos, here reunited with his Crying Freeman director), and a meek member of the ruling class along for the adventure, lay down a series of traps, gather hunting implements, and, after some derring-do, overcome their foe, incurring tremendous losses in the process.

The Business of Strangers (2001) – DVD

August 9, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, DIFF/SDFF, Drama, DVD, Film Festivals, Thriller

***/**** Image A- Sound A-
starring Stockard Channing, Julia Stiles, Frederick Weller
written and directed by Patrick Stettner

by Walter Chaw Julie (Stockard Channing) is a hardened businesswoman on a lecture trip who becomes certain that her last day on the job draws nigh. When young Paula (Julia Stiles) arrives to a presentation late, Julie unleashes all her fears and frustrations on the hapless girl. Written with an ear for dialogue and a wicked edge, Julie’s enthusiastic upbraiding of Paula sets the stage for three elements that drive The Business of Strangers to its conclusion. The first is the discomfort arising from Julie and Paula being stuck in the same hotel overnight due to grounded flights, the second is a possible explanation of the antagonism between the pair that culminates in a disturbingly open-ended finale, and the final is the idea that in Stettner’s interpersonal corporate nightmare, fear is the mechanism that catalyzes the characters towards generosity, friendship, and cruelty.

DIFF ’01: The Long Goodbye (Wrap-Up)

November 2, 2001Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blog, DIFF/SDFF, Film Festivals

Difflogo2by Walter Chaw It's bittersweet: my first time covering the Denver International Film Festival (DIFF) in a press capacity and the world was falling down around my ears. Personal epiphanies and collective calamities. Miramax decided to pull Piñero from the Festival because they rescheduled its theatrical release for sometime next year; In The Bedroom, another Miramax property–and my favourite film of 2001, thus far–didn't make it, period. The "mini-major" bought In the Bedroom, I am told, to foster a closer relationship with Ang Lee's production company–there's a lot of behind the scenes politicking going on about which I knew nothing prior to getting the ear of insiders and access to the proverbial horses' mouths.

DIFF ’01: Amélie (2001)

October 27, 2001Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DIFF/SDFF, Esoterica, Film Festivals, France, Germany, Romance

Le fabuleux destin d’Amélie Poulain
Amélie Poulain
***/****
starring Audrey Tautou, Mathieu Kassovitz, Rufus, Yolande Moreau
screenplay by Guillaume Laurant, Jean-Pierre Jeunet
directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet

by Walter Chaw Caught between an iceberg of a father (Rufus) and a nervous wreck of a mother (Lorella Cravotta), the very peculiar Amélie (Audrey Tautou) develops in her youth an active imagination to combat emotional starvation. When she’s 22, on the night of Lady Di’s death by paparazzi, Amélie accidentally discovers a tin of toys and photographs, a child’s treasure cache hidden away in her apartment some forty years previous. Resolving to return the artifacts to their rightful owner, Amélie discovers that acts of altruism serve as voyeuristic surrogates to her life’s social desolation. Taking its cue from the bare structure of Jane Austen’s Emma and–ironically, considering the ultra-stylistic character of Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s direction–the stark work of the Nouvelle Vague (Truffaut in particular), the strength of Amélie (Le Fabuleux destin d’Amélie Poulain) is in its imagery. Its weaknesses, alas, are a running time that is at least a half-hour too long and a resolution so predictable that the film’s problems of pacing and length meet in something resembling frustration.

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."

DIFF ’01: Haiku Tunnel

October 24, 2001Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DIFF/SDFF, Film Festivals

**½/****
starring Josh Kornbluth, Amy Resnick, June Lomena, Helen Shumaker
screenplay by Jacob Kornbluth & John Belluci & Josh Kornbluth
directed by Jacob & Joshua Kornbluth

by Walter Chaw Featuring the kind of humour made popular by those irritating sports improvisation dinner-theatre troupes, Haiku Tunnel opens inauspiciously: Josh Kornbluth (who co-directed with his brother and plays himself) stands in front of a chalkboard introducing the film as a made-up work set in the fictional town of…erm…"San Franclisco." His over-emoting and burlesque eye-rolling soon betray the fact that Haiku Tunnel began life as a series of stand-up monologues Kornbluth performed to small but appreciative venues in San Francisco. (Urban legends abound of entire secretarial pools going to his shows en masse and adopting catchphrases for inspirational memos.) Clearly a creature of the stage, Kornbluth's mugging and brother Jacob and John Bellucci's aside-laden script translate uneasily to the screen, aspiring to a kind of Woody Allen-esque fourth-wall breaking but only succeeding in being mildly embarrassing. Still, Josh Kornbluth's engaging warmth and egoless sense of humour portends a destiny for Haiku Tunnel as a cult classic and good things for the future of the fraternal auteurs behind it.

Tunnel Vision: FFC Interviews Jacob & Josh Kornbluth

October 23, 2001Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, DIFF/SDFF, Film Festivals, Interviews

TunneltitleOctober 24, 2001|Stricken with free-floating worry beneath a glowering sky, I was about fifteen minutes early for my interview with brothers Jacob and Josh Kornbluth at the swank Hotel Monaco in suddenly hip downtown Denver. I had spent most of the morning pounding espresso and dodging screaming fire trucks and ambulances chasing one another in a climate that made every peal of every siren an unpleasant reminder and a cause for concern. Walking up 17th Avenue, I was skittish and disquieted–hardly the appropriate frame of mind for a conversation with the writing/directing team responsible for the feather-light Haiku Tunnel, their debut feature, which is based on the office inferno monologues of older brother Josh. As it turns out, Josh, such a charming nebbish as the star of his own film, appeared as nervous as I, experiencing the very human anxiety of putting his work up for public scrutiny on an exhausting festival press junket.

DIFF ’01: Fat Girl

October 22, 2001Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, DIFF/SDFF, Drama, Esoterica, Film Festivals, France, Italy

À ma soeur!
***/****
starring Anais Reboux, Roxane Mesquida, Libero de Rienzo
written and directed by Catherine Breillat

by Walter Chaw

So mastered by the brute blood of the air,
Did she put on his knowledge with his power
Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?
"Leda and the Swan" (1928)–William Butler Yeats

Yeats caused a minor stir in 1928 by suggesting that the rape of Leda was an empowerment for a sexually wise woman whose ultimate revenge against manhood was the spawning of Helen of Troy–who, of course, had a key role in the fall of an entire nation. The idea of ill-gotten knowledge as it's tied to a woman's evolving sexuality is not a new one–Biblical and older, in fact. Still, Catherine Breillat throws a new acerbic barb into the psychosexual brew by projecting Freud's classic developmental framework (anal, oral, genital) onto the progression of the uncomfortable seduction of the impossibly young Elena (Roxane Mesquida) by a smooth-talking Italian lothario (Libero de Rienzo). It is only one, though perhaps the most subtle, of Breillat's incendiary yawps against man's barbarism to woman. As Anaïs (Anaïs Reboux), the titular fat girl, summarizes at one point: "All men are sick."

DIFF ’01: LaLee’s Kin: The Legacy of Cotton

October 20, 2001Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, DIFF/SDFF, Documentary, Film Festivals

***½/****
directed by Albert Maysles

by Walter Chaw Following four generations of women from LaLee Wallace's destitute family in the heart of the Mississippi delta's cotton country, legendary documentarian Albert Maysles's LaLee's Kin: The Legacy of Cotton is full of the quiet tragedy of being human. Poetic and demanding, it very subtly changes you as you watch it, shaming us for our petty concerns in the face of what LaLee bears on a daily basis. Entire African-American generations are ruined in the cotton country of the fertile Mississippi delta crescent–a cycle of illiteracy and poverty unexpectedly precipitated by the transition of the cotton industry from hand to machine. The documentary follows one of LaLee's grandchildren ("Granny") and one of her great-grandchildren ("Main") as they struggle to conjure up the pennies needed to purchase the paper and pencils that will gain them entrance into school. It simultaneously details the trials of that school as it tries to raise its Iowa Aptitude Exam Scores to a minimum standard, thus preventing the government from perhaps imposing a system that is unsympathetic to the plight of the locals.

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.

DIFF ’01: Mutant Aliens

October 19, 2001Posted in2000s, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DIFF/SDFF, Film Festivals, Sci-Fi

**/****
starring the voices of Dan McComas, Francine Lobis, Matthew Brown
written and directed by Bill Plympton

by Walter Chaw Oscar-winning animator Bill Plympton's full-length animated feature The Tune is among my all-time favourite films. It's perverse, hilarious–a whiff of brilliance, proving Einstein's contention that imagination is more powerful than science and the truism that the pen is sharper by far than the rapier wit. Detailing a jingle writer's search for the perfect commercial hymn, The Tune is 80 minutes of kinetic bliss sketched out in Plympton's distinctively rough style that nonetheless demonstrates the kind of pure artistry betrayed by, say, Bill Watterson. It is with great anticipation, then, that I entered Mr. Plympton's latest foray into squiggles for the cinema, Mutant Aliens–and it is with some disappointment that I left the auditorium 80-odd minutes later. Eighty very odd minutes, as it turns out, and more's to the benefit of the film and of no surprise to the illustrator's fans. What offsets Plympton's trademark lunacy this time around, however, is not a joy of creation, but rather a somewhat disturbing puerility that relies once too often on humping to further the plot or provide comic relief. Mutant Aliens plays a little like Harlan Ellison's short story "How's the Nightlife on Cissalda?": all xeno-erotica and bestiality. Except for a few moments involving how a man imagines his member (chainsaw, locomotive, erupting volcano, wild horses), the rampant sexuality of Mutant Aliens mostly falls embarrassingly flat.

DIFF ’01: Tape

October 19, 2001Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, DIFF/SDFF, Directors: Richard Linklater, Drama, Film Festivals

***/****
starring Robert Sean Leonard, Ethan Hawke, Uma Thurman
screenplay by Stephen Belber from his play
directed by Richard Linklater

by Walter Chaw Vincent (Ethan Hawke) is a volunteer fireman and sometime drug pusher who meets his best friend John (Robert Sean Leonard) at a seedy Michigan motor inn for a little beer, drugs, and conversation. Very quickly, what was a genial bout of male bonding devolves into hidden agendas, past hurts, and psychological manipulations, all geared towards resolving an event that may or may not have happened. When Amy (Uma Thurman), an old girlfriend of them both, shows up at the room, she functions as a catalyst to exploding the resentments that have bound them invisibly over the years.

DIFF ’01: Go Tigers!

October 18, 2001Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, DIFF/SDFF, Documentary, Film Festivals, Sports

*½/****
directed by Kenneth A. Carlson

by Walter Chaw Although it starts out well enough and detours in the middle with a vaguely interesting, if too-brief, look at how it must be for intellectuals to live in a place like Massillon, OH, Kenneth A. Carlson's documentary Go Tigers! is a repetitive and unenlightening piece whose attitude alternates between sympathy and scorn. The small town of Massillon, it seems, is obsessed with football–glimpses of other Ohio towns suggest that Massillon's fanatical fervour is perhaps the small-town Ohio norm. (Apocryphal tales suggest that Texas and Nebraska might be worse.) The revelation that rubes like their blood sports served rare is more than a trifle unsurprising; Go Tigers! very gradually amends our rooting for the high-school gridiron heroes to succeed, and we start to wish that the team bus would crash and save the world from a couple dozen illiterate, ill-bred, spoiled animals who dangerously reached their peak at the tender age of seventeen–er, nineteen.

DIFF ’01: Big Bad Love

October 18, 2001Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DIFF/SDFF, Drama, Film Festivals, Romance

½*/****
starring Arliss Howard, Debra Winger, Paul Le Mat, Rosanna Arquette
screenplay by James Howard & Arliss Howard, from stories by Larry Brown
directed by Arliss Howard

by Walter Chaw Arliss Howard's Big Bad Love (or, "Fear and Loathing in Appalachia") is both self-conscious and self-indulgent. It doesn't pass the sniff test in terms of truth and lack of pretense, malodorous with that peculiarly rank stink of hubris. Marking his auteur debut, veteran character actor Howard adapts a collection of Larry Brown short stories wearing three hats (star, director, and writer–co-writer, actually, with brother James), each of which fits uneasily if at all. As a director, Howard tosses so many gimmick shots and narrative tricks (dream sequences, fantasy sequences, magic realism, etc.) at the celluloid wall that it's almost a statistical impossibility for not a one of them to stick–but it happens. Gimmicks like fake voiceover news broadcasts are distracting and irritating at the best of times; when overused, as in Big Bad Love, they're screaming bores rather than endearing quirks. As an actor, Big Bad Love is evidently a vanity vehicle for Howard, and it's again something of a marvel that Howard is so consistently ineffective and emotionally flat. Onscreen for about 98% of the time, Howard's exercise in self-love backfires to the extent that every other performer he shares a scene with blows him off the screen. Finally, as screenwriters, the Brothers Howard prove themselves to lack a sense of grace in their symbolism and a sense of coherence in their narrative.

DIFF ’01: Margarita Happy Hour

October 18, 2001Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, DIFF/SDFF, Drama, Film Festivals

**½/****
starring Eleanor Hutchins, Larry Fessenden, Holly Ramos
written and directed by Ilya Chaiken

by Walter Chaw If a song by Maggie Estep, the original riot grrl, were ever made into a film, it would probably turn out like Ilya Chaiken's Margarita Happy Hour. Profane and invested in the underground scene of late-Eighties Greenwich Village and Brooklyn, the film carries on a certain gritty slice-of-street life storytelling tradition with an appropriately grim ethic, though its resolution is curiously upbeat. Margarita Happy Hour's tagline says a lot: "Hipsters, Single Moms, and the Cycles of Life." Essentially about being trapped in a miserable existence with few prospects for improvement, the film spends altogether too much time on extended metaphors concerning the ephemeral knot of existence and broken symbolism involving being isolated and adrift in a sea of sharks.