Felicity: Season One [The Complete First Season Plus Pilot Episode] (1998-1999) – DVD

November 2, 2002Posted in1990s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Coming of Age, Drama, DVD, Romance, Television

Image B Sound B+ Commentary A-
“Pilot”, “The Last Stand”, “Hot Objects”, “Boggled”, “Spooked”, “Cheating”, “Drawing the Line Part 1”, “Drawing the Line Part 2”, “Thanksgiving”, “Finally”, “Gimme an O!”, “Friends,” “Todd Mulcahy Part 1”, “Todd Mulcahy Part 2”, “Love and Marriage”, “The Fugue”, “Assassins”, “Happy Birthday”, “Docuventary”, “Connections”, “The Force”, “Felicity Was Here”

by Bill Chambers

“Starring Golden Globe Award-winning actress Keri Russell and today’s hottest young stars, Felicity introduces us to a wide-eyed college freshman and the most exhilarating journey of all–self-discovery. From co-creators and executive producers J.J. Abrams (Alias) and Matt Reeves, along with executive producer Brian Grazer, Ron Howard and Tony Krantz, comes to Felicity, which explores the excitement and uncertainty of living in New York City–a setting where anything goes and anything can happen.”
–DVD liner summary for “Felicity: The Complete First Season”

I had what I consider a pretty good excuse to watch the well-hyped pilot of “Felicity”, a show that is not necessarily mine to judge: A year before, I directed co-star Scott Speedman in a short film–I like to keep track of the Ursa Major alumni. But, and the name-dropping/bean-spilling ends after this indulgence, Scott does not belong on a teen soap, per se–as far as my experience with him goes, the format is too rigid for his improvisational methods, which happened to lean towards the profane. It was a bit like observing a caged tiger throughout “Felicity”‘s run, though I’d bet my bottom dollar that the first time his character, Ben Covington, called someone a “dick,” it was unscripted. The moment sparkles.

Film Freak Central Does San Franciso’s 2002 Dark Wave Film Festival

October 27, 2002Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Denmark, Drama, Film Festivals, Horror, Japan, Mystery, Romance, Sci-Fi, South Korea, Spain, Thriller, UK, Werewolf

Darkwavelogoby Walter Chaw The question, and it's a question with currency, is why anyone in their right mind would subject themselves (and their long-suffering editors) to coverage of two concurrent film festivals. A pair of answers: the obvious is that I'm not in my right mind, but as obvious is the fact that San Francisco's Dark Wave, which ran from October 18-20, is one of the most exciting "small" film festivals in the United States. I wouldn't pass up the opportunity to talk about it, in other words–ulcers be damned. Presented by the hale San Francisco Film Society evenings and midnights at the historic Roxie, last year's presentation included one of this year's best films (Larry Fessenden's superb Wendigo) as well as the finest example of retro euro-horror (Lionel Delplanque's Deep in the Woods) since Dario Argento lost his marbles.

The Santa Clause (1994) [Widescreen Special Edition] – DVD

October 27, 2002Posted in1990s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Christmas, Comedy, Disney, Drama, DVD, Family, Fantasy

½*/**** Image A Sound B+ Extras D+
starring Tim Allen, Judge Reinhold, Wendy Crewson, Eric Lloyd
screenplay by Leo Benvenuti & Steve Rudnick
directed by John Pasquin

by Bill Chambers Julia Roberts’s male equivalent in persecution vanity, if not box-office viability, Tim Allen has a ‘Cinderfella’ complex that vividly unveiled itself in the first big-screen vehicle built for the comedian-turned-sitcom star, The Santa Clause, a holiday stinker mysteriously elevated to instant-classic status after managing to outgross Speed, The Mask, Pulp Fiction, and Interview with the Vampire. That it spoke to the zeitgeist is just one of those things, ultimately beyond comprehension; why it actually sucks, that’s a little easier to break down.

Heaven (2002)

October 25, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, France, Germany, Italy, Romance, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

***½/****
starring Cate Blanchett, Giovanni Ribisi, Remo Girone, Stefania Rocca
screenplay by Krzysztof Kieslowski, Krzysztof Piesiewicz
directed by Tom Tykwer

Heavenby Walter Chaw There is something of the alchemical when two disparate talents discover that their collaboration is inspired. It is an inkling of the excitement at the promise of A.I. with Kubrick’s misanthropy and Spielberg’s cult of childhood–or the pop-cultural satisfaction embedded in the narrative genius of Stephen King mixing easily with the stiff overwriting of Peter Straub. Heaven is the product of a screenplay by the late Krzysztof Kieslowski (and writing partner Krzysztof Piesiewicz) and surprisingly sedate direction by previously hyperactive wunderkind director Tom Tykwer. The result is another of Tykwer’s unpredictable romances blending with another of Kieslowski’s carefully metered, studiously non-didactic discussions of morality and consequence. The result of their union is often amazing.

The Rats (2002) – DVD

October 24, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Horror, Sci-Fi, Thriller

*/**** Image C Sound C Extras C+
starring Vincent Spano, Mädchen Amick, Shawn Michael Howard, Daveigh Chase
screenplay by Frank Deasy
directed by John J. Lafia

by Walter Chaw In a peculiar case of “how much do I cop to,” I admit that I felt a surge of excitement upon first beholding the cover for the DVD release of The Rats, largely because it resembles a great deal the artwork for an edition of English horror author James Herbert’s Rats from many moons ago. After searching the credits diligently (and futilely) for any mention of the hale Brit’s stamp of approval, it was with considerably less excitement that I beheld proper the latest from poor Vincent Spano and Mädchen “Didn’t you used to be on ‘Twin Peaks’?” Amick. The Rats is fairly typical monster-/Seventies disaster-movie fare, also following in the faded footsteps of Willard and Ray Milland’s perverse cult classic Frogs. The main difference being that in our post-modern amusement park (Entropy! Get your tickets now!), the picture isn’t so much about even something so banal as eco-paranoia, but about itself and the genre that it simultaneously lampoons and aspires to.

DIFF ’02: Together

October 23, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, China, DIFF/SDFF, Drama, Film Festivals, Music, South Korea
Together with YouHe ni zai yi qi**/****starring Tang Yun, Chen Hong, Chen Kaige, Liu Peiqiscreenplay by Xue Lu Xiao, Chen Kaigedirected by Chen Kaige by Walter Chaw Sentimental and overlong if beautifully shot and carefully structured, Chen Kaige's latest film Together is, in most respects, very much like his other films despite a contemporary setting. Focusing on music as a metaphor for transcendence and release in a way that has become a recurring hallmark of his career (Life on a String, Farewell My Concubine), Together follows a gifted young violinist, Xiaochen (Tang Yun), who finds that music is his only…

DIFF ’02: Swing

October 23, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DIFF/SDFF, Drama, Film Festivals, France, Japan, Music
***/****starring Oscar Copp, Lou Rech, Tchavolo Schmitt, Mandino Reinhardtwritten and directed by Tony Gatlif by Walter Chaw An infectiously good-natured and bittersweet film about the Manouche Gypsy culture in France, Tony Gatlif's musical history Swing wraps a story of first love around the story of passion for the creation of music. A dream of flight scored by a haunting Gypsy lullaby marks the centre point of the film and defines as well the feeling of eternity that marks the picture and its threads of love, music, and place. (A burial at sea consists of the axe of a guitar sent…

DIFF ’02: Far from Heaven (2002)

October 23, 2002Posted in****/****, 2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, DIFF/SDFF, Drama, Film Festivals, Romance, Theatrical

****/****
starring Julianne Moore, Dennis Quaid, Dennis Haysbert, Patricia Clarkson
written and directed by Todd Haynes

Farfromheavenby Walter Chaw Fascinating in its subversion of the conventions of the 1950s melodrama (Elmer Bernstein’s swooping score dead-solid in evoking that time and place), the halcyon euphoria of Todd Haynes’s Far from Heaven first surprises with its simplicity, then fascinates with its effectiveness. It is essentially a version of Douglas Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows (a title that itself speaks wryly about the Hays Code) that brings all of Sirk’s seething sexual subtext embarrassed to the front and centre. Taking that further, consider that if the subtext and text are flipped in Far from Heaven, then the artificiality of the film’s surfaces becomes the subtext to the sexual dysfunction. Haynes evokes Greek tragedy in the debunking of the fantasy of the golden, Golden Age nuclear family. He has crafted a pitch-black and hopeless picture, a torturous psychosexual exercise as played out by the Cleavers or Ozzie & Harriet.

DIFF ’02: Safe Conduct

October 22, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, DIFF/SDFF, Drama, Film Festivals, France, Germany, Spain, War
Laissez-passer***/****starring Jacques Gamblin, Denis Podalydès, Charlotte Kady, Marie Desgrangesscreenplay by Jean Cosmos, Bertrand Tavernier, based on the book by Jean Devaivredirected by Bertrand Tavernier by Walter Chaw The best didacticism is one carried by a strong sense of humanism, and Bertrand Tavernier's oft-brilliant Safe Conduct ("Laissez-passer") wears its heart on its sleeve--a few inches sometimes from where a yellow star would have been sewn in the occupied Paris where it sets its scene. There is a reason to Tavernier's rambling madness (the film clocks in at just about three hours), found in the care taken in establishing a sense of…

DIFF ’02: Hejar

October 22, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, DIFF/SDFF, Drama, Film Festivals, Greece, Hungary, Turkey
Big Man, Little LoveBüyük adam küçük ask*/****starring Dilan Erçetin, Sükran Güngörwritten and directed by Handan Ipekçi by Walter Chaw An unintentionally creepy, relentlessly political diatribe, Turkish director Handan Ipekçi's Hejar intends to tell the plight of the minority Kurdish--who aren't even allowed to speak their own language--in Turkey, through the deep-set eyes of a little girl orphaned by the majority's inhumanity to the Kurd downtrodden. Sort of like The Professional with an aging barrister in place of a highly-trained assassin, or The Omen and The Exorcist (complete with a bizarre semi-public carpet urination) in its startling musical stings and unmotivated…

DIFF ’02: The Safety of Objects

October 22, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, DIFF/SDFF, Drama, Film Festivals, UK
**½/****starring Glenn Close, Dermot Mulroney, Joshua Jackson, Jessica Campbellwritten for the screen and directed by Rose Troche by Walter Chaw Deserving of notice if only for its loaded cast and some very fine editing work and cinematography (by Geraldine Peroni and Enrique Chediak, respectively) by turns revelatory and breathtaking, Rose Troche's The Safety of Objects is another take on American Beauty that, unfortunately, ends with the same broad shots at the same barn sides. Structured out-of-time around a car accident that left a teen (Joshua Jackson) in a coma, the picture marks the circular trajectories of a carousel of characters…

DIFF ’02: Streeters

October 22, 2002Posted in****/****, 2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, DIFF/SDFF, Drama, Film Festivals, Mexico
De la calle****/****starring Luis Fernando Peña, Maya Zapata, Armando Hernández, Mario Zaragozascreenplay by Marina Stavenhagen, based on the play by Jesús González Dáviladirected by Gerardo Tort by Walter Chaw Gerardo Tort's primal scream of a debut, Streeters is a sepia-soaked DV exploration of the teeming underbelly of Mexico City's sprung metropolis, as well as another in an ever-evolving Mexican cinema that, film-by-film, takes on the spirit and ferocity of the French Nouvelle Vague. This more a Godard than, say, Alfonso Cuarón's Truffaut-ian Y Tu Mamá También, Streeters follows every-urchin Rufino (Luis Fernando Peña) as he rips off a corrupt cop…

DIFF ’02: The Damned

October 22, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Czech Republic, DIFF/SDFF, Drama, Film Festivals, Netherlands, Thailand
Zatracení**½/****starring Jan Plouhar, Jan Révai, Isabela Bencová, Dana Vávrováwritten and directed by Dan Svátek by Walter Chaw The first drug-themed film to be shot in the Kingdom of Thailand, Czech director Dan Svátek's The Damned is a handheld, vérité version of Return to Paradise (or Brokedown Palace, or Midnight Express) as two Czech nationals find themselves adrift in an island nirvana before being spirited away to a third-world prison. A handful of gritty, genuinely affecting Blair Witch moments, aided immeasurably by a gorgeously vigorous performance from Czech star Jan Révai, lend the picture an H-tinted immediacy and, now and again,…

DIFF ’02: Springtime in a Small Town

October 20, 2002Posted in****/****, 2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, China, DIFF/SDFF, Drama, Film Festivals, France, Hong Kong, Netherlands, Romance
Xiao cheng zhi chun****/****starring Wu Jun, Bai Qing Xin, Hu Jingfan, Lu Si Siscreenplay by Ah Chengdirected by Tian Zhuangzhuang by Walter Chaw Something like a Renoir film or a Brontë novel, Tian Zhuangzhuang's first feature film in nearly a decade Springtime in a Small Town ("Xiao Cheng Zhi Chun"), a remake of the Fei Mu's 1948 classic, is painterly and patient--a map of the inner rhythms of love and jealousy and sacrifice drawn with a master's steady stroke. The film introduces its three main characters in the same gently swooping style: the sickly scholar in the antebellum ruins of…

DIFF ’02: War

October 20, 2002Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, DIFF/SDFF, Drama, Film Festivals, Russia, War
Vojna*½/****starring Aleksei Chadov, Ian Kelly, Sergei Bodrov Jr., Ingeborga Dapkunaitewritten and directed by Aleksei Balabanovby Walter Chaw War is a peculiar low-budget version of Proof of Life that opens like that episode of "The Twilight Zone" about dolls come to life in a Beckett-ian toy box before it falls into some all-too-familiar patterns of folks getting kidnapped for ransom in Chechnya as foreign governments remain powerless (or disinclined) to get them back. Pitched with feverish earnestness, The War is high melodrama told without much in the way of moderation nor ultimately interest, its story proper that of a British man…

DIFF ’02: Dragonflies

October 20, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, DIFF/SDFF, Drama, Film Festivals, Norway, Sweden, Thriller
DragonflyØyenstikker***½/****starring Maria Bonnevie, Kim Bodnia, Mikael Persbrandt, Tintin Anderzonscreenplay by Nikolaj Frobenius, based on the short story "Natt Til Mørk Morgen" by Ingvar Ambjørnsendirected by Marius Holst by Walter Chaw Marius Holst's haunted Dragonflies is weighted like a Terrence Malick film (or like Weir's Picnic at Hanging Rock) by the ominous, oppressive indifference of the Natural. Its drab Scandinavian landscapes as timeless and purposeless as the subterranean tides that govern human behaviour, it's a lovely, poetic thing then when we're introduced to Eddie (Kim Bodnia) floating on a lake and his lover Maria (Maria Bonnevie) wandering through high grass like Ruth…

DIFF ’02: Gossip

October 20, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DIFF/SDFF, Drama, Film Festivals, Sweden
*½/****starring Pernilla August, Helena Bergström, Lena Endre, Olsson-Frigårdhwritten and directed by Colin Nutley by Walter Chaw Colin Nutley's insufferable (and interminable) in-joke of a roundelay concerning nine aging Swedish actresses each vying for the coveted role of Queen Christina in a remake of the Garbo classic suffers from that peculiar malady of actors occasionally thinking it novel to pretend that their lives are as laden with the indignities of outrageous fortune as ours. While one wonders if the auto-fun-poking would be more trenchant were one more familiar with the reputations and peccadilloes of the actors in question (among them Pernilla…

DIFF ’02: The Marriage Certificate

October 17, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, China, Comedy, DIFF/SDFF, Drama, Film Festivals
Shui shuo wo bu zai hu*/****starring Gong Feng, Liping Luwritten and directed by JianXin Huang by Walter Chaw A miserable, over-directed bit of heated allegorical melodrama, JianXin Huang's The Marriage Certificate seeks to monumentalize the loss of the titular document and its disastrous effect on the marriage between a goofy shrink and his grasping wife into a jab at the rigidity of the communist Chinese bureaucracy. It succeeds in being cutesy in an Amélie sort of way (told from the point-of-view of an insipid little girl complete with bad voiceovers, double ponytail flips, and rough animated skits) while being a…

DIFF ’02: All or Nothing

October 17, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, DIFF/SDFF, Drama, Film Festivals, France, UK
***½/****starring Timothy Spall, Lesley Manville, Alison Garland, James Cordenwritten and directed by Mike Leigh by Walter Chaw Mike Leigh's return to the character-driven nihilism of his astonishingly raw Naked is All or Nothing, a story of an apartment barrio in London where three broken lower-class families struggle to find meaning and happiness in the midst of their dreadful lives. Phil (the always-great Timothy Spall) is a woebegone taxi driver living with mousy Penny (Lesley Manville) and their corpulent children: deeply troubled Rory (James Corden), and Rachel (Alison Garland), the most affecting role amongst a passel of affecting roles. Neighbour Maureen…

DIFF ’02: Frida

October 17, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, DIFF/SDFF, Drama, Film Festivals, Mexico, Romance
**/****starring Salma Hayek, Alfred Molina, Geoffrey Rush, Ashley Juddscreenplay by Diane Lake and Gregory Nava and Clancy Sigal and Anna Thomas, based on the book Frida: A Biography of Frida Kahlo by Hayden Herreradirected by Julie Taymor by Walter Chaw Wonderfully directed, beautifully shot, amazingly well production-designed, and yet dull, Julie Taymor's Frida is marked by an excellent performance from Alfred Molina and a screenplay (a collaboration of four writers--already a bad sign--with a shooting script ghost-written by its star's boyfriend, Edward Norton) that is a spider's breakfast of grandiloquent monologues, sweeping gestures, and tedious biopic conventions. Interesting for the…