DIFF ’02: Gigantic: A Tale of Two Johns

October 22, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, DIFF/SDFF, Documentary, Film Festivals, Music
***/****directed by A.J. Schnack by Walter Chaw A.J. Schnack's Gigantic: A Tale of Two Johns has a title perfect for a withering exposé on the seedy underworld of prostitution and pornography but is instead a breezily enjoyable documentary on quirk-rock pioneers they might be giants. Its title referring to the name of the band and its two frontmen (John Flansburgh and John Linell), the piece succeeds as an introduction for the neophyte and a detailed retrospective for the long-time fan (some of whom are featured to great comic effect), even as it slightly overstays its welcome for the former. With a…

DIFF ’02: Sweet Ambition

October 20, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, DIFF/SDFF, Documentary, Film Festivals
*/****directed by Laura Wall-Mansfield by Walter Chaw A low-aspiring, semi-inspiring documentary about nine Latino teens vowing not to become a racial stereotype of underachievement, crime, and early dropout-ism, the Denver-based Sweet Ambition examines the effect of smaller class sizes on future success. With a soundtrack cribbing tracks from sources as varied as local Latino rap to Antonio Banderas, Willie Nelson, Santana, and loads of Ani DiFranco, the production looks and feels slick, but interviews with the youths (some wayward, some twice-mothers at the age of 16) are naïve and often redundant. Over it all hangs the spectre of "So what?"…

DIFF ’02: Chiefs

October 20, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, DIFF/SDFF, Documentary, Film Festivals, Sports
**/****directed by Daniel Junge by Walter Chaw Sports as empowerment as heady a trip as sports as oppression (Columbine's real villain, after all, is a virulent administration-sanctioned jock culture), Chiefs follows a Wyoming Native American High School basketball team through two consecutive seasons of state championship basketball. Indians perhaps the most marginalized minority in terms of insensitive sports mascot stereotype and caricature (The Cleveland Indians' unforgivable Chief Wahoo, anyone?), that the documentary chooses to champion a team self-named "The Chiefs" is both interesting and thorny. (Enough so that when a more interesting film fails to emerge, Chiefs at the end…

DIFF ’02: Bowling for Columbine (2002)

October 12, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, DIFF/SDFF, Documentary, Film Festivals, Germany

***/****
directed by Michael Moore

by Walter Chaw The most successfully provocative film of the year, Michael Moore’s Bowling for Columbine nonetheless hurts itself with its questionable tactics and Moore’s inability to leave certain pulpits alone, but the documentarian succeeds in providing a canny, often brilliant, examination of the root causes of America’s amazing propensity for gun violence. The picture goes beyond a condemnation of “gun nuts”–and beginning as it does with an extended interview with James Nichols (the nutball brother of nutball Terry Nichols, who, along with Timothy McVeigh, was convicted of the Oklahoma City Murrah Building bombing), it’s not always certain that it will.

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…

Trembling Before G-d (2001) + Satin Rouge (2002)

October 4, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Documentary, Drama, France, Israel, Musical, Theatrical, Tunisia

TREMBLING BEFORE G-D
**½/****
directed by Sandi Simcha Dubowski

Red Satin
**/****
starring Hiyam Abbas, Hend El Fahem, Maher Kammoun, Monia Hichri
written and directed by Raja Amari

by Walter Chaw “Leah” and “Malka” are a lesbian couple whose names have been changed and faces obscured (a fey conceit that begins to grate with the use of potted plants) to protect identities that appear, for all intents and purposes, to already be “outed”–at least before their families and their rabbi. David, after struggling for a dozen years with his homosexuality, returns to visit his childhood rabbi, a genuinely kind man whom we manage to forget once advised David to snap himself with rubber bands whenever he had a “gay” thought. Then you have Mark, HIV positive, English, and terminally unfocused, and Schlomo, so outspoken and demented that it’s surprising we still muster sympathy when he gets a pathetically dissociative telephone call from his two decades-estranged father.

Psst!: FFC Interviews Christian Frei

September 29, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Documentary, Film Festivals, Interviews, Switzerland

CfreiinterviewtitleSeptember 30, 2002|While flipping through a magazine on a flight to Chicago in April 1997, Swiss director Christian Frei became acquainted with the work of photojournalist James Nachtwey, one of the most decorated artists in his field and the subject of Frei's remarkable documentary War Photographer, which debuts this week in Denver at the Argus Human Rights Festival. A fascinating, almost Lacanian separation of observer and observed indicates the piece, a film shot with a specially designed camera-mounted camera that provides an intimate point of view of the photographer at work. I had the pleasure of speaking with Mr. Frei this morning on the telephone to Switzerland as the director, fresh from a trip to Kabul researching his newest project, The Giant Buddhas, spends the next week and a half in his homeland.

In Conversation with Arthur Dong

September 26, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Documentary, Film Festivals, Interviews

AdonginterviewtitleSeptember 27, 2002|The latest by a veteran and much-lauded documentary filmmaker based in the Los Angeles area, Arthur Dong's Family Fundamentals examines the toll that hatred and intolerance have taken on either side of the ideological divide separating fundamentally Christian families from their homosexual children. Following three families, Dong's picture is notable for its remarkable restraint–its amazing lack of stridency in the face of as insidious–and puzzling–a form of fanaticism as any in our cultural dystopia. Such objectivity graces all of Mr. Dong's late production–works such as the (twice-honoured at Sundance) documentary Licensed to Kill (in which murderers of gay men are interviewed in prison) and Outrage 69, which details, in part, the Stonewall riots of that incendiary summer of '69. I talked to Mr. Dong, a Chinese-American and an openly gay man raised in the Chinatown section of San Francisco, about getting started in film and growing up Chinese in the United States.

Three DVDs That Commemorate 9/11

September 17, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blog, Documentary, DVD, Television, ZERO STARS

by Walter Chaw Distilling raw viscera into heartbreaking stories at once the most dangerous thing that we as an American culture do and the thing at which we are the best, the first anniversary of the September 11th attacks on the United States finds three documentaries on DVD to go with the around-the-clock soft-milking of the events on what seems like every channel on the dial. While the endless cascade of now-familiar images continues to enrage and shock, too often the intention of the coverage is to find the "human" stories in the midst of the suggested carnage; to tug the heartstrings (and, truly, what human cannot be moved by orphaned children, widowed wives, widowed husbands, progeny-less parents, and martyred heroes) is fine so long as there is an accompanying resolve.

TIFF ’02: The Sweatbox

September 15, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Disney, Documentary, Film Festivals, TIFF, UK
**/****directed by John-Paul Davidson & Trudie Styler by Bill Chambers The makers of The Sweatbox--Trudie Styler (Mrs. Sting) and documentarian John-Paul Davidson--were granted unprecedented access behind the Iron Curtain of Walt Disney during the production of The Emperor's New Groove because Styler's husband was the studio's pop-star composer du jour. The results may embarrass Disney by catching them free of spin a time or two, but the movie doesn't seem to want to demythologize the Mouse House as a matter of course. (When it was over, audience members at my press screening could be heard to ask if the film…

TIFF ’02: Standing in the Shadows of Motown

September 3, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Documentary, Film Festivals, Music, TIFF
*½/****directed by Paul Justman by Bill Chambers They had more number-one hits than Elvis Presley, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, and The Beach Boys combined. They were...The Funk Brothers? That reversal of expectations, which occurs in the opening voice-over of Paul Justman's Standing in the Shadows of Motown, is one of the few clever touches that actually works in this documentary about the rotating panel of studio musicians who helped turn Berry Gordy's Detroit record company into a hit factory. In the film's first reel, producer/drummer Steve Jordan offers that it wouldn't matter if "Deputy Dog" had sung the songs…

Butler Did It: FFC Interviews George Butler

August 25, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Documentary, Interviews

GbutlertitleAugust 25, 2002|George Butler is perhaps best known as the maverick filmmaker behind 1977’s Pumping Iron, the benchmark bodybuilding documentary that almost single-handedly introduced a young Austrian fellow by the name of Arnold Schwarzenegger to American audiences. Each of Butler’s subsequent projects have been examinations of the urge for achievement in ages of relative leisure, from the groundbreaking female bodybuilders of Pumping Iron II, the big game hunting of the disaster- and controversy-ridden project In the Blood, and finally this year’s IMAX Shackleton’s Antarctic Adventure and companion feature-length documentary The Endurance: Shackleton’s Legendary Antarctic Expedition. Despite the similarity of Mr. Butler’s projects, the bonhomie growing between people during strife and outrageous circumstance, and the evolution (or lack thereof) of machismo, he frowns on discussions of intentionality in his work and choices of subject material. That’s something that I learned the hard way. (Please note: this interview was conducted during last winter’s awards season.)

The Endurance: Shackleton’s Legendary Antarctic Expedition (2001)

August 6, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Documentary, Germany, Sweden, Theatrical, UK

***½/****
screenplay by Caroline Alexander and Joseph Dorman, based on the book by Alexander
directed by George Butler

by Walter Chaw If there seems to be a glut of information lately on Sir Ernest Shackleton and his ill-fated voyage across Antarctica, thank Caroline Alexander, who almost single-handedly revived interest in Shackleton’s travails by unearthing Aussie photographer Frank Hurley’s astonishing archive of photographs and short films after eighty years. Inspired in part by the death of legendary polar explorer Robert Falcon Scott, Shackleton and his crew of 28 set sail in August of 1914 in a three-masted barkentine dubbed “The Endurance.” Their quest, the last great trek of the age of exploration, was to be the first to cross Antarctica on foot, but The Endurance was trapped by pack ice about one day’s sail from the continent.

Elvis: His Best Friend Remembers (2002) – DVD

July 27, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Documentary, DVD, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/**** Image B Sound B Extras D+
directed by Terry Moloney

by Walter Chaw Cynically timed to coincide with the twenty-fifth anniversary of The King’s August 16th death, Elvis: His Best Friend Remembers, the “video scrapbook” of Elvis’s best friend “Diamond Joe” Esposito, is a mawkish self-parody that plays like some weird Masterpiece Theater sketch with neither a point-of-view nor a compelling reason for being.

The Starz Independent FilmCenter Project, Vol. 9

July 20, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Crime, Documentary, Drama, France, Theatrical

by Walter Chaw

MURDEROUS MAIDS (2000)
Les Blessures assassines
***/****
starring Sylvie Testud, Julie-Marie Parmentier, Isabelle Renauld, Dominique Labourier
screenplay by Jean-Pierre Denis & Michèle Pétin, based on the novel L'affaire Papin by Paulette Houdyer
directed by Jean-Pierre Denis

Heavenly Creatures by way of Henry James, Jean-Pierre Denis's Murderous Maids–based on the true story of two sisters who, in 1933, murdered and mutilated the bodies of their employers in a small French town–is haunting and uncompromising. Denis proposes that taciturn Christine (Sylvie Testud) and open, elfin Léa (Julie-Marie Parmentier) were engaged in an incestuous relationship; that this relationship was founded on the basis of a deep resentment of a mother (Isabelle Renauld) who hired them out as housemaids and collected their salaries to fund her "love of life"; and that this relationship–arrested sexuality, repressed beneath a veneer of unbearable religiosity (a third sister, supposedly raped by a long-absent father, joins a convent) and the humiliations of the master/servant dynamic–eventually imploded into an orgy of bloodlust and madness. Denis's unwillingness to sensationalize (let alone explain) first incest and then murder results in a certain harshness that magnifies every bourgeoisie slight against the long-suffering proletariat into a potentially triggering event, yet also prevents very much in the way of suture with either the sisters or their eventual victims. The bloodletting made as sterile as the eroticism in an affectively airless chamber piece, Murderous Maids falls short of Claude Chabrol's brilliant La Cérémonie and Nancy Meckler's underseen Sister, My Sister, in that the same reserve that allows its actresses to shine (Testud, in particular) inhibits very much in the way of actual involvement or tension beyond a kind of clinical interest. Still, the weight of the piece, the unerring professionalism of the chilly production, and the fascination embedded in the lurid topic prove recommendation enough.

Clint Eastwood: Out of the Shadows (2000)

June 20, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Clint Eastwood, Documentary, DVD, Television

***/**** Image B Sound A
directed by Bruce Ricker

by Walter Chaw Directed by Bruce Ricker, Clint Eastwood: Out of the Shadows is a particularly good biographical account featuring clips from dozens of the titular subject’s work, interviews with former Eastwood co-stars as diverse as Meryl Streep and Richard Burton, and a smooth narration read by Morgan Freeman that links the periods of the actor’s professional life with grace and alacrity. Of particular interest are the moments in which such admirers as French director Bertrand Tavernier discuss Eastwood’s reception overseas. Blissfully lacking scrutiny into the actor’s personal life, the picture is more A&E than E!, choosing the road less travelled in tracing the actor’s evolution from studio stable hand to one of the most powerful directors in the United States.

The Great American Songbook (2002) – DVD

June 17, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Documentary, DVD, Music, Television

***/**** Image A Sound A Extras C+
directed by Andrew J. Kuehn

by Walter Chaw Starting off fascinating and ending up feeling slightly overlong, the expansive musical travelogue The Great American Songbook traces the roots of “American” popular music from the War of 1812 through to the early Christy minstrel shows, Bessie Smith, Irving Berlin, George & Ira Gershwin, and beyond. If it’s true that things go in cycles on a grand scheme, it’s also true of an individual’s life: Reviewing The Great American Songbook for me coincides with my first reading of Griel Marcus’s brilliant Mystery Train; touches hands with my interview with Andrei Codrescu, who’s working on a documentary about the Mississippi blues; and follows fast my exposure to the brilliant Sarah Vowell’s brilliant piece on the “Battle Hymn of the Republic.” The piece found me, in other words, already on a journey into our heritage of American music, and if the picture is more travelogue than encyclopedia, its value is as timeline and supplement.

Marlo’s America: FFC Interviews Marlo Poras

June 1, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Documentary, Interviews

MporasinterviewtitleJune 2, 2002|After working as an apprentice under Martin Scorsese's brilliant editor Thelma Schoonmaker, Marlo Poras decided that she needed a change of pace from the stress of mainstream film production and followed a friend to North Vietnam to make educational AIDS videos for national distribution there. Immersed in a foreign country, one that still holds their victory in "The American War" as a source of great pride, Ms. Poras became interested in a quartet of high-school exchange students preparing to spend their senior year in the United States, a place idealized and demonized in equal measure by the North Vietnamese. Armed with a Sony VX 1000 Mini-DV camera and nothing else in the way of crew or experience, Ms. Poras narrowed her focus to one subject, Mai, and to Mai's often-peculiar experiences in rural Meridian, Mississippi.

Film Freak Central does the Fifth Aurora Asian Film Festival

May 31, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Documentary, Film Festivals, Germany, Japan, Music, UK, Vietnam

AurorafestpagelogoMay 31, 2002|by Walter Chaw Now in its fifth incarnation, Denver’s Aurora Asian Film Festival has grown year by year to become one of the region’s most interesting cinematic events. Under the guidance of Denver Film Society program director Brit Withey, the decidedly small festival (twelve films are being screened over the course of four days) will feature eleven Denver-area debuts–including the much-lauded The Turandot Project and Tony Bui’s Green Dragon–as well as a restored 35mm print of Conrad Rooks’s 1972 film Siddhartha. It is a rare opportunity to see a largely-unknown film projected (an adaptation of Hermann Hesse’s novel of the same name, the picture features the cinematography of the great Sven Nykvist), and an example of the kind of value a festival this intimate can provide.