The Jimmy Show (2002) – DVD

Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Drama, DVD

**/**** Image B- Sound B-
starring Frank Whaley, Carla Gugino, Ethan Hawke, Lynn Cohen
screenplay by Jonathan Marc Sherman, based on his play “Veins and Thumbtacks”
directed by Frank Whaley

by Bill Chambers There’s depressing and then there’s depressing. The Jimmy Show, actor Frank Whaley’s heartfelt follow-up to his nakedly personal hyphenate debut Joe the King, is so faithful to the doldrums of its lower-middle-class milieu as to have viewers recoiling from the reality check. It’s here that I become hypocritical, having championed my share of sad and perhaps discouraging films, yet one looks for their despair to be tempered by a sense of the romantic–even in the bleak Jude, the suffering is admittedly idealized by the setting, the weather, the period flavour. The Jimmy Show is no exaltation of the common man, but rather a snapshot of a tedious, miserable life–it could be called “The Sad State of Affairs,” though it’s actually based on a Jonathan Marc Sherman play entitled, rather evocatively, “Veins and Thumbtacks”.

The Mothman Prophecies (2002) [Special Edition] – DVD

Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Drama, DVD, Horror, Mystery, Thriller

**½/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B+
starring Richard Gere, Laura Linney, Will Patton, Debra Messing
screenplay by Richard Hatem, based on the novel by John A. Keel
directed by Mark Pellington

by Walter Chaw Inviting comparisons to “The X-Files” (comparisons the series made inevitable by setting several of its episodes in rural West Virginia and making mention of the “Mothman” in an excellent fifth season episode called “Detour”), Mark Pellington’s The Mothman Prophecies has a peculiarly muted quality to it that suggests the entire piece is best seen as shrouded in a caul. Allied with that idea, The Mothman Prophecies is about knowing certain things of the future and exorcising the past, about accepting that there are things in life that can’t be prevented. It’s got heady messages for a film based on a cultish bit of crypto-zoology reportage by John Keel (documenting eerie events in Point Pleasant, WV that stretched thirteen months from November 15, 1966 to December 15, 1967), and ultimately the relatively lightweight genre bedrock of the piece is not strong enough to support its broad philosophizing.

The Shape of Things (2003)

Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, France, Romance, Theatrical, UK

*½/****
starring Paul Rudd, Rachel Weisz, Gretchen Mol, Fred Weller
screenplay by Neil LaBute, based on his play
directed by Neil LaBute

by Walter Chaw Early in Neil LaBute’s The Shape of Things, a character mistakes “Medea” for “My Fair Lady”. Not an easy thing to do, for sure, it’s something that points to both LaBute’s instinct to proselytize and to his unpleasant air of smug intellectual superiority. LaBute’s films are science projects involved in the dissection of sexual politics; at their best, they illustrate the harshest salvos lobbed in the gender war, and at their worst, they serve mainly to confirm that LaBute has become so disdainful of his audience that first Possession and now The Shape of Things most resemble listless beasts over-burdened with broad symbol, churlishness, and portentous allusion. LaBute wants to hit you over the head and get away with something at the same time, his existential rage cooling in direct proportion to the self-pitying belief that no one understands him.

The Emperor’s Club (2002) [Widescreen] – DVD

Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Coming of Age, Drama, DVD

*½/**** Image B- Sound B+ Extras B-
starring Kevin Kline, Emile Hirsch, Embeth Davidtz, Rob Morrow
screenplay by Neil Tolkin, based on the short story “The Palace Thief” by Ethan Canin
directed by Michael Hoffman

by Walter Chaw Saccharine, derivative, and overlong, Michael Hoffman’s often-painful The Emperor’s Club is remarkable only for the extremes to which it goes to avoid the clichéd ending–and the sad karmic (and ironic, given the film’s carpe diem, hakuna matata catchphrase) completeness with which it fails to do so. Set in the Sixties at an exclusive all-boys prep school, The Emperor’s Club is immediately recognizable as another iteration of Dead Poets Society, even more so when one realizes that the film features the same quartet of student types (the troubled one, the trickster, the bookish one, the gregarious one–also the same breakdown you’ll find in Stand By Me, come to think of it) and the same crinkly-eyed inspirational professor who finds a lesson for young lives in the heartening words of dead versifiers. That The Emperor’s Club spends its second half flashed-forward twenty-five years as said crinkly-eyed scholar discovers that his truest legacy is the success of his students reduces it to a variation of the miserable Mr. Holland’s Opus.

Black Swan (2002) – DVD

Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, Disability, Drama, DVD, Mystery

½*/**** Image D Sound C Extras B
starring Melanie Doane, Janet Monid, Michael Riley, Ted Dykstra
screenplay by Wendy Ord and Matt John Evans
directed by Wendy Ord

by Walter Chaw Wendy Ord’s Black Swan had me at “I’m tellin’ you, there were traces of blood on that feather.” The film is a dedicatedly stupid murder-mystery/small-town hick opera featuring your standard collection of comely waitresses bound for better things, saucy diner matrons, scumbags with sidekicks, stolid policemen, preternaturally bright children, and literal idiot savants. Set in a tiny hamlet in the Great White North (“Hopeville,” natch), the picture opens with an indecipherable prologue that cuts between three separate storylines: a bunch of teens in a car; the titular black swan doing whatever it is that large waterfowl do at night; and a pair of scumbags going through their nocturnal rituals. The rest of the film follows suit by stuttering between two children playing hooky, a cute waitress (Melanie Doane) flirting with a drifter while dreaming, Steve Earle-like, of getting out of Dodge, and of an investigation of a possible serial killer who leaves black swan feathers at the scenes of his crimes.

Owning Mahowny (2003)

Posted in****/****, 2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Crime, Drama, Theatrical, Thriller

****/****
starring Philip Seymour Hoffman, Minnie Driver, Maury Chaykin, John Hurt
screenplay by Maurice Chauvet, based on the Gary Stephen Ross book Stung: The Incredible Obsession of Brian Molony
directed by Richard Kwietniowski

by Walter Chaw Richard Kwietniowski’s Owning Mahowny charts the mendacity of addiction with something like a poet’s lyrical melancholy. The director’s follow-up to his surprisingly gentle take on Thomas Mann, Love and Death on Long Island, finds another story of obsessive love that is itself obsessed with the importance of place in defining the accumulated essence of identity and desire. Kwietniowski’s films seem to be about secret outsiders finding themselves at some point swept out to proverbial sea, the land fading fast. While in Love and Death on Long Island that divorce illustrates the reach traversed by reclusive novelist Giles De’Ath (John Hurt) to claim his inamorata, in Owning Mahowny, the widening gyre is considerably (and deliciously) more complicated; the film marks Kwietniowski’s emergence as the most promising cartographer of self-confessional mortification since countryman Terence Davies. And Kwietniowski does it all with gentle, uncompromising humour.

The Dancer Upstairs (2002)

Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Crime, Drama, Spain, Theatrical, Thriller

**/****
starring Javier Bardem, Laura Morante, Juan Diego Botto, Elvira Mínguez
screenplay by Nicholas Shakespeare, based on his novel
directed by John Malkovich

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Why do people insist on making movies as though all Latin-American countries are the same? How is it that they can get away with ignoring cultural differences and national identities as though they were nothing? The same first-world writers who set their scripts “somewhere in Latin America” would surely find an Ecuadorian or a Peruvian presumptuous for setting his or her own tale “somewhere in Western Europe.” But these jokers have no guilt about herding millions and millions of people into the same leaky boat, and defining the stretch from Mexico to Argentina as one big, ugly banana republic. The results are usually not pretty, and The Dancer Upstairs is no exception to the rule.

Love Liza (2002) – DVD

Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD, France, Germany

***½/**** Image B Sound A- Commentary B+
starring Philip Seymour Hoffman, Kathy Bates, Jack Kehler, Sarah Koskoff
screenplay by Gordy Hoffman
directed by Todd Louiso

by Walter Chaw Philip Seymour Hoffman is Dante and the slings and arrows of mendacity are his Virgil, chasing him through the inferno of his day-to-day. A remarkable actor at his frequent best when deserted by a lover, Hoffman in Love Liza is Wilson Joel, a man whose wife has just killed herself and left a sealed letter behind. It becomes his albatross, toted around unexamined, as Wilson descends on a spiral of juvenile addiction (gasoline huffing) and avoidance. He sleeps on the floor outside his bedroom and does his best to dodge his mother-in-law (Kathy Bates)–hiding the sharp odour of his addiction behind the lie of becoming a radio-controlled airplane pilot.

It Runs in the Family (2003)

Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Romance, Theatrical, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Michael Douglas, Kirk Douglas, Cameron Douglas, Diana Douglas
screenplay by Jesse Wigutow
directed by Fred Schepisi

Itrunsinthefamilyby Walter Chaw Appalling at its best, Fred Schepisi’s It Runs in the Family is a congenital disaster best described as an interminable episode of “Old People Say the Darndest Things”. Between this and Last Orders, Aussie director Schepisi seems to desire cornering the market on gravid meditations on decrepitude and death. He finds himself here a far cry from his Seventies output (The Devil’s Playground, The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith), which, much like countryman Bruce Beresford’s early work, announced an important filmmaker who has, in the intervening years, become a hired hand and a coin of considerably devalued worth. It Runs in the Family is so relentlessly mawkish that it does give insight into the state of mind that allows condescension to become comfortable status quo by habitually marginalizing the elderly and demented as adorable dispensers of quaint homilies and spunky vulgarity.

Marion Bridge (2003)

Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Canada, Drama, Theatrical

*/****
starring Molly Parker, Rebecca Jenkins, Stacy Smith, Marguerite McNeil
screenplay by Daniel MacIvor, based on his play
directed by Wiebke von Carolsfeld

Marionbridgeby Travis Mackenzie Hoover I’d like to go along with the chorus of approval that has greeted Marion Bridge, but the sad truth is that it nearly bored me into an early grave. Armed only with a series of family-drama clichés and a nuance-free visual style, the experience is roughly akin to staring into a fluorescent lamp for 90 minutes and is just as retina-dulling. If this is, as last year’s Toronto International Film Festival jury claimed, the best Canadian First Feature of 2002, it paints a chilly portrait of what the also-rans were like, as well as the state of film culture here in the Great White North.

Levity (2003)

Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, France, Theatrical

*½/****
starring Billy Bob Thornton, Morgan Freeman, Holly Hunter, Kirsten Dunst
written and directed by Ed Solomon

Levityby Walter Chaw Sort of Frank Capra without the subtlety, Levity is a relentlessly moralizing film that finds Billy Bob Thornton in his second role (Monster’s Ball) in three years as a man responsible for another man’s death who proceeds to woo a close relation of said victim as a means of atonement. The greatest irony of a film about forgiveness is that it’s destined to inspire the opposite in most viewers, but with a professionally underachieving cast of good actors (Morgan Freeman is now into his eighth year of not trying very hard), a master cinematographer (Roger Deakins), and the sort of story that attracts said actors like atoning moths to the mainstream arthouse flame, the picture is not altogether useless.

Red Dragon (2002) [2-Disc Director’s Edition] – DVD

Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, DVD, Germany, Thriller

*/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B-
starring Anthony Hopkins, Edward Norton, Ralph Fiennes, Harvey Keitel
screenplay by Ted Tally, based on the novel by Thomas Harris
directed by Brett Ratner

by Walter Chaw Because Thomas Harris’s haunting novel of the same name is flawed in someone’s eye, Red Dragon hacks and slices the piece with a rude imprecision that would inspire pop icon Hannibal Lecter to sharpen his carving tools. The picture opens with a ridiculous and awkwardly-staged Lecter backstory (meaning it plays like the rest of the Lecter additions) that gives a self-parodying Anthony Hopkins a ponytail in place of the self-respect to which he can no longer lay claim, bringing to mind the unwieldy cameos of Cannonball Run.

A Man Apart (2003) + The Man Without a Past (2003)

Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Drama, Finland, France, Germany, Romance, Theatrical, Thriller

A MAN APART
**/****
starring Vin Diesel, Larenz Tate, Steve Eastin, Timothy Olyphant
screenplay by Christian Gudegast & Paul Scheuring
directed by F. Gary Gray

Mies vailla menneisyyttä
***½/****
starring Markku Peltola, Kati Outinen, Annikki Tähti, Juhani Niemelä
written and directed by Aki Kaurismäki

Manapartwithoutapastby Walter Chaw The one an absurdist sketch, the other just absurd, both Aki Kaurismäki’s The Man Without a Past and F. Gary Gray’s A Man Apart use violence as a catalyst for existential introspection, but while Gray’s emetic excess deadens with its Death Wish-cum-The New Centurions wish-fulfillment fantasy, Kaurismäki’s gentle fable finds grace amongst society’s victims. Gifting their respective stars each with a hospital scene and subsequent resurrection and new lease on life, the two protagonists are paired with a lady love once back on the street–Kaurismäki’s hero with a Salvation Army matron (Kati Outinen), Gray’s with a ridiculously loyal partner (Larenz Tate) who discards his role as conscience to become an extension of a revenge plot that’s made more ludicrous with a heaping dose of morality and a Lethal Weapon graveside penance.

What a Girl Wants (2003)

Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Family, Romance, Theatrical, UK

*/****
starring Amanda Bynes, Colin Firth, Kelly Preston, Anna Chancellor
screenplay by Jenny Bicks and Elizabeth Chandler, based on the play “The Reluctant Debutante” by William Douglas Home
directed by Dennie Gordon

by Walter Chaw A cynical play for the babysitting money of a very particular demographic, What a Girl Wants is a by-the-numbers Cinderella story that’s not only a carbon copy of The Princess Diaries but also the umpteenth iteration of a distaff preteen fantasy that equates irreverent immaturity with being true to one’s own self. It takes potshots at the stuffiness of the British in the same way that urban comedies take aim at the stuffiness of white folks, seeking to loosen up the awkward unfortunates with a pathetic dance sequence. And it offers Nickelodeon phenom Amanda Bynes yet another opportunity to try on a bunch of outfits in not one, but two dress-up montages. The film believes that it knows what will please twelve-year-old girls (and their 35-year-old fathers), and it may well indeed, but the problem with What a Girl Wants is that there’s precious little honour in satisfying the basest needs of its audience with the equivalent of leftover porridge.

Evelyn (2002) [Special Edition] – DVD

Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Family, Germany, Ireland, Netherlands, UK

*/**** Image C+ Sound B- Extras B+
starring Pierce Brosnan, Julianna Margulies, Aidan Quinn, Stephen Rea
screenplay by Paul Pender
directed by Bruce Beresford

by Walter Chaw It seems as though “inspired” in the phrase “inspired by a true story” is the operative word as the 2002 Christmas season presents to us a rotten couplet of films “inspired” by true stories that, in all likelihood, were pretty interesting prior to the whitewashed variety of “inspiration” dished out in most high profile biopics. Headliner Antwone Fisher (a rancid piece of garbage I like to refer to as “Good Antwone Fishing” or “Finding Fisher-er”) gains esteem just by the association of twinkly-eyed Denzel Washington behind the camera (and stentorian Denzel in front), while small foreign film Evelyn will probably gain esteem by dint of its small and foreign status. (Just like its cute-as-a-button titular waif.) Like so many horrible movies of this mongrel breed, however, both Antwone Fisher and Evelyn are so uncompromising in their saccharine manipulations that nurses should stand at theatre entrances, passing out hypodermics of insulin.

Gentlemen’s Agreement (1947) [Studio Classics] – DVD

Posted in1940s, Best Picture (Academy Awards), Directors: Elia Kazan, Drama, DVD, Romance

*/**** Image A Sound B+ Extras C
starring Gregory Peck, Dorothy McGuire, John Garfield, Celeste Holm
screenplay by Moss Hart, based on the novel by Laura Z. Hobson
directed by Elia Kazan

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Gentleman’s Agreement is a painful film to sit through. Not only is its construction long-winded and lopsided, not only is its look only marginally more attractive than life insurance fine print, but it is part of that horrible genre of liberal “message” movies that haunts us to this day. I’d like to say that post-post-modern cynicism has rendered it obsolete, and thus quaint and unthreatening, but what angered me most about it was that its particular strain of self-satisfaction continues to ravage the Hollywood corpus. Rather than depict the cruelty of prejudice, the film is determined to give the audience untouched by prejudice something over which to feel superior, and it acts as a model for all the cynical do-gooding fools who have followed in its wake.

Nowhere in Africa (2001)

Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Biopic, Drama, Germany, Theatrical

Nirgendwo in Afrika
**½/****
starring Juliane Köhler, Regine Zimmermann, Merab Ninidze, Matthias Habich
screenplay by Caroline Link, based on the novel by Stefanie Zweig
directed by Caroline Link

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover One wants very badly to condescend to a film like Nowhere in Africa (Nirgendwo in Afrika). Like a multitude of other middlebrow efforts, it has large ambitions it can’t fulfill, and it strains to say big things about a subject it hasn’t really thought through. But somehow, one can’t write the whole thing off. The subject matter is so suggestive on its own that it allows you to go on your own mental journey, riding over director Caroline Link’s visual and analytical deficiencies to find the material’s implications. True, that’s not as good as having a real director give you ideas that send you further, but it is enough to keep you watching with no real pain.

Malevolent (2002) – DVD

Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, DVD, Thriller

½*/**** Image B- Sound C+
starring Lou Diamond Phillips, Kari Wuhrer, Edoardo Ballerini, Gwen McGee
screenplay by Dennis Shryack & Peter Bellwood
directed by John Terlesky

by Walter Chaw A castration/redemption picture with the most ineffectual central character in any film south of Polanski, direct-to-video thriller Malevolent casts Lou Diamond Phillips as an eternally-framed homicide detective and Kari Wuhrer as an ex-softcore goddess now reduced to acting badly in a variety of scoop-necked blouses.

Abandon (2003) + Dawson’s Creek: The Complete First Season (1998) – DVDs

Posted in1990s, 2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Coming of Age, Dawson's Creek, Drama, DVD, Teen, Television, Thriller

ABANDON
***½/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Katie Holmes, Benjamin Bratt, Charlie Hunnam, Zooey Deschanel
written and directed by Stephen Gaghan

DAWSON’S CREEK: THE COMPLETE FIRST SEASON
Image C+ Sound B- Extras B-
“Pilot,” “Dance,” “Kiss,” “Discovery,” “Hurricane,” “Baby,” “Detention,” “Boyfriend,” “Road Trip,” “The Scare,” “Double Date,” “Beauty Contest,” “Decisions”

by Bill Chambers Abandon is a damn good movie detested in some quarters because, he hypothesized, it’s not very comforting, because it subverts the entrenched John Landis approach to depicting college life, and because it’s determined to be meaningful within the framework of a supernatural potboiler. The film stars Katie Holmes, whose career has caught its second wind with the near-simultaneous DVD releases of Abandon and the first season of “Dawson’s Creek”, in addition to the title role in 2003’s Sundance favourite Pieces of April and upcoming appearances in Keith Gordon’s The Singing Detective and the Joel Schumacher thriller Phone Booth. She’s also seeing the end of her aforementioned TV series “Dawson’s Creek”, which sails into the sunset this May after five years on the air. It will leave her more time for movies, and with her remarkable taste in film projects (see also: The Gift, Go, and The Ice Storm), I’m anxious to see where that freedom takes her. Especially if it’s anywhere near the territory of her poised work in Abandon.

Bang the Drum Slowly (1973) – DVD

Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Robert De Niro, Sports

**/**** Image B- Sound C+
starring Robert De Niro, Michael Moriarty, Vincent Gardenia
screenplay by Mark Harris, based on his novel
directed by John Hancock

by Walter Chaw Almost fatally hamstrung by an appalling score by Stephen Lawrence, John D. Hancock’s Bang the Drum Slowly is a character-driven adaptation of Mick Harris’s novel (Harris also wrote the screenplay) that evokes the odd twilit detachment of professional sports in general and baseball in particular with a tale made suddenly popular in 1973 by the success of Brian’s Song. Its baseball scenes almost tertiary to the friendship between a pitcher and his catcher (and the catcher and his hooker girlfriend), the picture feels a little like Of Mice and Men (complete with Steinbeck’s low American primitivism) in the doomed relationship between a blue-collar man and his retarded friend. The film is riddled with pitfalls from the start: the potential for maudlin excess, the trap of overwriting, and the allure of some sort of overriding message for humanity. And though Bang the Drum Slowly dances along the edge of those pitfalls for a good portion of its running time, ultimately it’s just another one of those films better remembered than revisited.