‘R Xmas (2001) + Serpico (1973) – DVDs

December 7, 2002Posted in1970s, 2000s, Al Pacino, Authors: Bill Chambers, Biopic, Crime, Directors: Sidney Lumet, Drama, DVD, France, Italy, Thriller

‘R XMAS
***/**** Image A+ Sound A- Extras C
starring Drea De Matteo, Lillo Brancato, Jr., Ice-T, Victor Argo
screenplay by Scott Pardo, Abel Ferrara
directed by Abel Ferrara

SERPICO
**½/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras C+
starring Al Pacino, Jack Kehoe, John Randolph, Biff McGuire
screenplay by Waldo Salt and Norman Wexler, based on the book by Peter Maas
directed by Sidney Lumet

by Bill Chambers Arriving on DVD within a week of each other, Abel Ferrara’s ‘R Xmas and Sidney Lumet’s Serpico share a preoccupation with the fate of dirty money. Minimum-wagers are seen as honourable by Lumet, with Detective Frank Serpico proudly leading the starving-artist’s life from behind a cop’s badge, while in Ferrara’s view, there are few such romantic distinctions to be made between the haves and have-nots. But the corrupting influence of money defines the people we’re dealing with in both films, which, although they illustrate rather contained moral dilemmas, share a somewhat epic ambition despite rarely stepping outside their respective milieux. Watched back-to-back, they’re like Traffic pulled in two.

Equilibrium (2002)

December 6, 2002Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Christian Bale, Emily Watson, Taye Diggs, Angus MacFadyen
written and directed by Kurt Wimmer

Equilibriumby Walter Chaw After cutting his teeth as a director on the Brian Bosworth vehicle One Tough Bastard, Kurt Wimmer proves himself grotesquely unprepared for his hyphenate debut: the futuristic stink-fest Equilibrium, starring Christian Bale, Emily Watson, and Taye Diggs. Set in the post-apocalypse via a series of tired title cards and voice-overs, the film is immediately recognizable as an ironically illiterate rip-off of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 and George Lucas’s Aldous Huxley photocopy THX-1138. Pulling scenes entire from Blade Runner, Citizen Kane, and The Matrix while pulling philosophies entire from–yes, I was surprised, too–Gymkata, Equilibrium is another Dimension genre film made for no money that stinks a lot like Gary Fleder’s excrescent Impostor from earlier this year, though it somehow manages to be considerably funnier.

Analyze That (2002)

December 6, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Drama, Robert De Niro, Theatrical

*/****
starring Robert De Niro, Billy Crystal, Lisa Kudrow, Joe Viterelli
screenplay by Peter Steinfeld and Harold Ramis and Peter Tolan
directed by Harold Ramis

Analyzethatby Walter Chaw The first mistake that directors make with actors who need to get brought up sharply against the reins now and again is that they sometimes request of them to feign that which they already are. Case in point is asking Robin Williams to be a gibbering velvet clown, asking Melanie Griffith to be a side of beef with a Betsy-Wetsy voice, and now asking Robert De Niro to feign mental illness and sociopathic tendencies. De Niro jumping on a table and singing selections from West Side Story isn’t one of those cinematic moments for the ages, but rather one of the more tragic examples of self-delusion and career torpor.

Goin’ Down the Road (1970) [Seville Signature Collection] – DVD

December 3, 2002Posted in1970s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Canada, Drama, DVD, Road Movie

***½/**** Image C Sound B Extras A
starring Doug McGrath, Paul Bradley, Jayne Eastwood, Cayle Chernin
screenplay by William Fruet & Donald Shebib
directed by Donald Shebib

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover As close to a classic as Canadian cinema gets, Donald Shebib's Goin' Down the Road touches greatness without really trying; its virtue lies in its refusal to force things, eschewing the jackhammer editing and hard-lined composition of traditional cinema in favour of a hazy, genial approach to its look and feel. Under regular Northern circumstances, this would be a liability: our country's inability to make conscious aesthetic choices has reduced more than a few films to a thin bland soup. But here it works like gangbusters, passively recording the protagonists' misadventures with a combination of helplessness and sympathy as they thrash about, trying to claim an American dream in the midst of a Canadian nightmare. It's simple, lovely, and heartbreaking, and it makes you wonder how Shebib could have somehow managed to disappear into obscurity.

Solaris (2002)

November 27, 2002Posted in****/****, 2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: Steven Soderbergh, Drama, Esoterica, Mystery, Romance, Sci-Fi, Theatrical

****/****
starring George Clooney, Natascha McElhone, Jeremy Davies, Viola Davis
screenplay by Steven Soderbergh, based on the novel by Stanislaw Lem
directed by Steven Soderbergh

by Walter Chaw Steven Soderbergh's best film since sex, lies, and videotape (and the film most like it in theme and execution), Solaris is a moving, hypnotic adaptation of the classic Stanislaw Lem novel, which was first made into a film in 1972 by Andrei Tarkovsky. Co-produced by James Cameron's company Lightstorm, Solaris fits loosely into Ridley Scott's Alien future with its monolithic "Company" and the need for a specialist to infiltrate a corrupted interstellar outpost–a future Cameron plumbed in 1986 with his modern genre classic Aliens. But Solaris is less a science-fiction film than it is an existentialist melodrama that, by winnowing itself down to the fierce romanticism at the heart of Lem's novel (and Tarkovsky's trance-like adaptation), locates the core issues of identity and love that plague the dark hours.

Rabbit-Proof Fence (2002)

November 27, 2002Posted in2000s, Adventure, Australia, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Drama, Road Movie, Theatrical

***/****
starring Everlyn Sampi, Tianna Sansbury, Laura Monaghan, David Gulpilil
screenplay by Christine Olsen, based on the book Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence by Doris Pilkington
directed by Phillip Noyce

by Walter Chaw A very small story set on a very large stage, Phillip Noyce’s affecting Rabbit-Proof Fence is perhaps the most visually beautiful film of the director’s career, proving between this and his other movie from this year, the Graham Greene adaptation The Quiet American, that not only is it possible to go home again (as in Noyce to Australia) but also that it’s often wise. Shot on a minimal budget (in the six-million dollar range) with a cast of largely non-professional actors (Kenneth Branagh the main exception), the picture is a tremendous hit among the self-congratulatory film festival/arthouse crowd, who, after all, like to feel as though they’re applauding the right things.

Unfaithful (2002) [Widescreen Special Edition] – DVD

November 26, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, France, Germany, Romance, Thriller

**½/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras A-
starring Diane Lane, Richard Gere, Erik Per Sullivan, Olivier Martinez
screenplay by Alvin Sargent and William Broyles Jr., based on the screenplay for La Femme Infidele by Claude Chabrol
directed by Adrian Lyne

by Walter Chaw The designer’s eye and yen for the seedy of Adrian Lyne–sort of the Ridley Scott of soft-porn–manifest themselves in Unfaithful, the latest permutation of Lyne’s ongoing upper-middle-class angst cycle: blood-pounding eroticism into passionate bloodletting. The kind of Jacques Tati wind that carries off Kansas farm-girls sends Diane Lane’s Big Apple gal Connie into the brawny arms of book-dealing Frenchman Paul Martel (Olivier Martinez). Connie dabbles in adultery, though she is not exactly unhappily married to armoured car company owner Edward (Richard Gere); call it the milk-fed blues. She’s just bored enough to take an eleventh-year slackening of attention and a forgotten overcoat as an excuse to tryst in an impossible Soho loft.

Sunset Boulevard (1950) [Special Collector’s Edition] – DVD

November 26, 2002Posted in****/****, 1950s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD, FFC Must-Own

Sunset Blvd.
****/**** Image A Sound A Extras A
starring William Holden, Gloria Swanson, Erich Von Stroheim, Nancy Olson
screenplay by Charles Brackett & Billy Wilder and D.M. Marshman, Jr.
directed by Billy Wilder

by Walter Chaw Billy Wilder’s protagonists are interlopers, outsiders itching for acceptance in insular societies recognized as decadent but possessed of an irresistible allure for Wilder’s central characters–a lure that most often takes the form of sex, status, and money. Always self-aware and basically noble, Wilder’s comedies have his heroes confessing their sins and renouncing said corrupt society in favour of an appropriate love pairing (Fran and Baxter of The Apartment); in his tragedies, his heroes confess their sins as a last decent act undertaken too late. (Think Walter Neff of Double Indemnity.) The connection between The Apartment (arguably Wilder’s best film) and Sunset Blvd. (the film with which The Apartment has its argument) begins, fascinatingly, with pivotal scenes set on New Year’s Eve. In The Apartment, of course, Fran makes her decision to be with Baxter on New Year’s, while Joe Gillis decides to be with Norma Desmond that same hallowed night in Sunset Blvd.–and both moments, as they occur at the crux of historical and cultural demarcations, encompass Wilder’s flair for emotions at crosscurrent, and the dark of a dying era with the light of possible futures.

The Quiet American (2002)

November 22, 2002Posted in2000s, Australia, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Drama, France, Germany, Romance, Theatrical, Thriller, UK, Vietnam, War

***/****
starring Michael Caine, Brendan Fraser, Do Thi Hai Yen, Rade Sherbedgia
screenplay by Christopher Hampton and Robert Schenkkan, based on the novel by Graham Greene
directed by Phillip Noyce

Quietamericanby Walter Chaw Walking a fine line between nostalgia and regret, irony and earnestness, Philip Noyce’s The Quiet American, adapted from the novel by Graham Greene, is a lovely film that captures, like Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, the delicate balance between romance in the immediate foreground and the backdrop of war and politics. Evoking the colonial decay of Greene’s work while evincing one of the best performances of Michael Caine’s career, The Quiet American stars Caine as a British journalist in Vietnam who falls in a hopeless kind of love with a beautiful girl a third his age. His subsequent desperation and jealousy feel real; take note of an anguished scene in a bathroom stall–Caine suddenly seems to be getting better with every role.

The Orphan of Anyang (2001)

November 22, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, China, Drama, Theatrical

**½/****
starring Liu Tianhao, Miao Fuwen, Sun Guilin, Yue Sengyi
written and directed by Wang Chao

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover I feel pain when I have to pan movies like Wang Chao’s The Orphan of Anyang. It’s a film that has absolutely no bad faith on the part of the filmmaker–he wanted to show a slice of Chinese life the censors wouldn’t normally show, and that’s exactly what he does. But his conception is so sparse and so dour that it winds up capsizing these good intentions, resulting in an underwritten and acquiescent film in which we can’t identify the characters beyond their functions in the narrative. It’s not a film that makes you angry at having been cheated, it just makes you numb with anomie and disconnected from the action onscreen–surely not what was intended.

Friday After Next (2002)

November 22, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Christmas, Comedy, Drama, Theatrical

½*/****
starring Ice Cube, Mike Epps, John Witherspoon, Don ‘D.C.’ Curry
screenplay by Ice Cube
directed by Marcus Raboy

by Walter Chaw Because there is no plot save the scrambling for rent money that has been stolen from the Abbot and Costello-ian pairing of Ice Cube and Michael Epps, the closest one might come to a description of Friday After Next‘s narrative would involve the running gag of a Santa Claus bandit who breaks into homes to steal presents and beat people with Christmas trees (maybe inspired by Eddie Murphy’s Mr. Robinson’s Neighborhood Christmas sketch). Rather than take the easy road and talk about how much Friday After Next hates women and homosexuals, it’s perhaps more fruitful to play along and regard the film, the long-awaited conclusion (?) to Ice Cube’s Friday trilogy, as an accurate reflection of the sensibilities of the African-American culture in regards to women and homosexuals.

Lovely and Amazing (2002) – DVD

November 21, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Romance

Lovely & Amazing
***/**** Image A+ Sound A- Extras C-
starring Catherine Keener, Emily Mortimer, Brenda Blethyn, Raven Goodwin
written and directed by Nicole Holofcener

by Walter Chaw The best and highest praise I can offer Lovely and Amazing is that there aren’t any patently untrue moments in it. It’s a film that disdains the hysterical screeching of Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood in favour of pleasant understatement and measured response–the rare movie about women that respects them while offering some genuinely funny moments based on character rather than absurd situations. Yet the picture is so lightweight that it’s difficult to muster a great deal of enthusiasm in recommending it. It does what it does with an admirable level of professionalism but the whole of Lovely and Amazing is something a good deal less than the sum of its parts.

Time Out (2001) – DVD

November 19, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Drama, DVD, France

L’emploi du temps
***½/**** Image A- Sound A-
starring Aurélien Recoing, Karin Viard, Serge Livrozet, Jean-Pierre Mangeot
screenplay by Robin Campillo and Laurent Cantet
directed by Laurent Cantet

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Time Out is a film for everyone who hates the grind and hates those who hate the grind. A lightning rod for our mixed emotions about the work we do, it knows that we see our jobs as who we are as much as we hate them for stealing our lives. Thus, it gives us a hero for our times: an unemployed role-player who is either a cheap lazy bastard for evading honest work or a martyr to the anarchist cause for much the same reason. It’s a testament to the subtlety of the portrait that he can be either figure at various points in the film, forcing us to re-examine our identification with wage-slaving and wonder where our jobs end and our selves begin.

Vulgar (2002) – DVD

November 18, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, DVD, Thriller, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/**** Image C+ Sound B+ Extras A
starring Brian Christopher O’Halloran, Jerry Lewkowitz, Matthew Maher, Ethan Suplee
written and directed by Bryan Johnson

by Walter Chaw Beginning as Shakes the Clown and segueing into I Spit on Your Grave before finally settling on Death to Smoochy, the discordant, hideously unpleasant Vulgar is the kind of puerile vanity piece that gives exploitation and egotism bad names. Produced by Kevin Smith and seeking to be a creation mythology for Smith’s View Askew mascot (just another example of Smith overestimating the inherent interest in his cult of personality), the picture is the hyphenate debut for Smith crony Bryan Johnson, making Smith, along the way, just the next nepotistic “Happy Madison” pinhead king of diminished returns.

Ararat (2002)

November 15, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Canada, Directors: Atom Egoyan, Drama, France, Theatrical, War

**/****
starring David Alpay, Charles Aznavour, Eric Bogosian, Brent Carver
written and directed by Atom Egoyan

Araratby Travis Mackenzie Hoover The problem with Atom Egoyan’s Ararat is not that it takes a hard stance about the Armenian Genocide, but that it avoids taking a hard stance about what to do with that hard stance. While the writer-director takes great pains to show how various approaches to historical memory can be twisted through suspect convention or personal hurt, he neither offers a process that might actually do the job nor feels confident that anyone could–an impasse that ironically condemns his own film to be one more body on a pile of dangerous irrelevances. So frightened is Egoyan that he’ll make a mistake that he builds layer after layer of distanciation, trying to build a theoretical machine that will absolve him from the responsibility of mapping a position; the results backfire spectacularly, making the slaughter of a million-plus people, seen distantly through the film’s fish-eye lens, even more of a footnote than before.

Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones (2002) [Widescreen] + The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001) – Extended Edition [Platinum Series] – DVDs

November 7, 2002Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Drama, DVD, Fantasy, New Zealand, Sci-Fi, Star Wars

STAR WARS: EPISODE II – ATTACK OF THE CLONES
*½/**** Image A+ Sound A+ Extras B+
starring Ewan McGregor, Natalie Portman, Hayden Christensen, Ian McDiarmid
screenplay by George Lucas and Jonathan Hales
directed by George Lucas

THE LORD OF THE RINGS: THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING – EXTENDED EDITION
***/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras A+
starring Elijah Wood, Ian McKellen, Viggo Mortensen, Sean Astin
screenplay by Fran Walsh & Philippa Boyens & Peter Jackson, based on the novel The Fellowship of the Ring by J.R.R. Tolkien
directed by Peter Jackson

by Bill Chambers In that period during which FILM FREAK CENTRAL was receiving 20 or 30 angry e-mails a day about Walter Chaw’s pan of Episode II, I was asked once or twice if I agreed with him. The answer is “yes,” though my reaction leans closer to apathetic than vitriolic. One thing I found, having just viewed Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones again on DVD, is that the small screen amplifies the picture’s weaknesses in reducing one of its core strengths: magnitude. Watching the film on TV, you reach all too instinctively for the game controller, and I felt violated this time out by Anakin’s scenes with Padmé (whereas before, one could somewhat blot out the bad thoughts with the movie’s marginalia)–not only are they like dramatizations of the wrong answer in a multiple choice COSMO quiz, they also unfairly paint Padmé (Natalie Portman) as one of the most superficial female characters in movie history.

One Last Score (2002) + The Shipment (2002) – DVDs

November 6, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, Crime, Drama, DVD, Thriller

If… Dog… Rabbit
*/**** Image C+ Sound C
starring Matthew Modine, John Hurt, Kevin O’Connor, David Keith
written and directed by Matthew Avery Modine

THE SHIPMENT
ZERO STARS/**** Image C Sound C-
starring Matthew Modine, Elizabeth Berkley, Nick Turturro, Paul Rodriguez
screenplay by Rich Steen
directed by Alex Wright

by Walter Chaw Matthew Modine has made a career of acting the idiosyncratic man of action–that scattershot chortle masking some unusual skill and the kind of laconic intelligence that Eric Stoltz has utilized to far different effect. Peaking early as Pvt. Joker in Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket (and scoring a couple times before that in the deceptively interesting Vision Quest and Alan Parker’s moody war idyll Birdy), Modine has treaded water ever since in stuff like Cutthroat Island and Bye Bye Love while actually appearing as himself in a couple of films (Notting Hill, Bamboozled)–an indulgence that’s never a good sign, with very few exceptions, for an actor still serious about his career.

Pumpkin (2002) – DVD

November 5, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Disability, Drama, DVD, Romance, Sports

½*/**** Image B- Sound B+
starring Christina Ricci, Hank Harris, Brenda Blethyn, Dominique Swain
screenplay by Adam Larson Broder
directed by Adam Larson Broder and Tony R. Abrams

by Walter Chaw The best and only successful joke of Adam Larson Broder and Tony R. Abrams’s unspeakably bad Pumpkin is borrowed from another Christina Ricci film: the last primp that she performs on herself in Don Roos’s The Opposite of Sex is a quick pinch of her nipples to bring them into sharper relief; that’s pretty funny, and in Pumpkin, Ms. Ricci’s nipples in various sorority sweaters are an Anne Heche-ian running gag never commented upon. It’s fitting, I guess, that the one thing that works about this film is probably unintentional and derivative besides.

Glass Skies (1958) + Valley of the Bees (1968)

November 3, 2002Posted in1950s, 1960s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Czechoslovakia, Drama, Short Films, Theatrical

Sklenená oblaka
Clouds of Glass
***½/****
directed by Frantisek Vlácil

Údolí vcel
***/****
starring Petr Cepek, Jan Kacer, Vera Galatíková, Zdenek Kryzánek
screenplay by Vladimír Körner and Frantisek Vlácil
directed by Frantisek Vlácil

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover I approach this review with trepidation. It’s hard to judge two films by a director when a) he’s completely unheard of in this country, and b) you’re shown different times and places in his career, but such is the issue of my having seen a short and a feature by Frantisek Vlácil in preparation for an upcoming Cinematheque Ontario retrospective. The lack of noted scholarship on the subject gives one no background to help understand him, and while one can relate him to his godfather status to the 1960s Czech New Wave, his smooth and chilly style relates little to the shaggy-dog feel of his cinematic descendants. So I must look over my shoulder and say that he’s a man of some talent, to be sure, but with some obvious ideas that weigh him down; while Vlácil’s good in a professional sense, he doesn’t know how to make images come alive with the same meaning as the narrative drive, giving his films a hard sheen that clamps down on sensuality. He’s more than a schlepper but less than a master, worth one look but hardly a second thought.

Wes Craven Presents Don’t Look Down (1998) – DVD

November 2, 2002Posted in1990s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Horror, Television, Wes Craven, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/**** Image C Sound C
starring Megan Ward, Billy Burke, Terry Kinney, Angela Moore
teleplay by Gregory Goodell
directed by Larry Shaw

by Walter Chaw The easy thing to do with the Wes Craven-produced tele-shocker Don’t Look Down is to add the addendum “because you’ll see this movie at the bottom” to its title. Broadcast on the Hallmark Channel as a zero-budget, zero-thrills bit of particularly fragrant, past-its-sell-by-date cheese, the plot involves TV-movie Ashley Judd-alike Megan Ward (and, indeed, the actress played Ashley in a TV-movie, Naomi & Wynonna: Love Can Build a Bridge) as Carla, a woman who’s lost her feral hippie sister (Tara Spencer-Nairn–see her now in Wishmaster: The Prophecy Fulfilled!) in a freak sight-seeing accident and so develops a bad case of acrophobia.