Nine Queens (2000)

April 18, 2002Posted in2000s, Argentina, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, Theatrical, Thriller

Nueve reinas
***/****
starring Ricardo Darín, Gastón Pauls, Graciela Tenembaum, María Mercedes Villagra
written and directed by Fabián Bielinsky

by Walter Chaw What may be the best David Mamet film since House of Games, Argentine director Fabián Bielinsky’s debut Nine Queens is a mannered, serpentine caper thriller that places its trust in the able hands of a troika of talented performers. Baby-faced Juan (Gastón Pauls), ferocious Valeria (Leticia Brédice), and twitchy Marcos (the gifted Ricardo Darín) find themselves involved in a plot to sell a sheet of counterfeit stamps (the titular “Nine Queens”) to Spanish collector Gandalfo (Ignasi Abadal), himself on the lam for some sort of fraud. Delightfully ludicrous and self-contained in the way of The Sting, the picture is a Rube Goldberg/Spanish Prisoner device translated into small-time cons and sin-stained grifters as they grind and smash into each other like sharks in the green noir bucket of Buenos Aires.

Mulholland Drive (2001) – DVD

April 14, 2002Posted in****/****, 2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: David Lynch, Drama, DVD, Esoterica, FFC Must-Own, France, Mystery, Thriller

Mulholland Dr.
****/**** Image A- Sound A
starring Justin Theroux, Naomi Watts, Laura Elena Harring, Ann Miller
written and directed by David Lynch

by Walter Chaw

Was it a vision, or a waking dream?
 Fled is that music — Do I wake or sleep?
– John Keats, Ode to a Nightingale

MustownDavid Lynch’s Mulholland Drive contends that the answer to the eternal struggle between what is real and what is fantasy comes in the form of a Keatsian confusion–it’s the difference between Adam’s dream and Eve rendered flesh, blurred in the mind of the creator and his audience. A film is a dream of the director made tangible, a conceit familiar from the fourth-wall-breaking in Ingmar Bergman’s Persona (banishing any mystery there might have been regarding the visual references to that film in Lynch’s piece), and a movie’s characters therefore become projections of its maker’s sublimated longing (clarifying too the auteur’s use of wardrobe and colour schemes from Hitchcock’s meditation on objectification, Vertigo, as well as those of his first collaboration with inamorata Tippi Hedren, The Birds).

Less Than Zero (1987) – DVD

April 13, 2002Posted in1980s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, DVD, Romance

***/**** Image A- Sound B-
starring Andrew McCarthy, Jami Gertz, Robert Downey Jr., James Spader
screenplay by Harley Peyton, based on the novel by Bret Easton Ellis
directed by Marek Kanievska

by Walter Chaw The quality of dislocation in Marek Kanievska’s Less Than Zero is startling and sinister. It creeps up on you after a confusing opening that skips forward six months from a high school graduation before flashing back a month and then reorienting itself again in Beverly Hills at Christmastime in 1987. But by the middle of the film, the temporal decisions made during its disorienting prologue suddenly make perfect sense: while Less Than Zero will never be as narratively jumpy again, the pervasive mood of the piece remains disconnected and frightened. It feels breathless in a way that movies about drug addiction must. Though Less Than Zero seems, despite its sterile apocalyptic blight, almost naïve in the wake of Aronofsky’s Requiem for a Dream, it retains (especially in retrospect, given the lost spirit of the Eighties and Robert Downey Jr.’s offscreen problems), something approaching the laden nostalgia of Romanticism. Something by Thomas de Quincey, no doubt.

All the Right Moves (1983) – DVD

April 11, 2002Posted in1980s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Romance, Sports

½*/**** Image C Sound C-
starring Tom Cruise, Craig T. Nelson, Lea Thompson, Charles Cioffi
screenplay by Michael Kane
directed by Michael Chapman

by Walter Chaw Seedy in that ineffable Eighties way, Michael Chapman’s All the Right Moves is a star vehicle for a young Tom Cruise, following up his leading role in Risky Business with what is essentially a feature-length Steve Earle song about a downtrodden Pennsylvania steel town. Think Flashdance (released in the same year, strangely enough) with teenage boys instead of merely for them. Turmoil on a high-school football team (the Ampipe Bulldogs) functions as the microcosm for factory layoffs, teen pregnancy, and the existential angst embedded in the image of a horrible Lea Thompson playing a mournful saxophone on a street corner. Though there are a few moments of “was this ever cool” cheeseball nostalgia sprinkled here and again, All the Right Moves is teeth-clenchingly awful: half “The White Shadow”, half somehow more embarrassing and dated than even that popular TV series.

Suspicious River (2002)

April 7, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Canada, Drama, Theatrical

*½/****
starring Molly Parker, Callum Keith Rennie, Mary Kate Welsh, Joel Bissonnette
screenplay by Lynne Stopkewich, based on the novel by Laura Kasischke
directed by Lynne Stopkewich

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Suspicious River is the dying of the light against a rage. While it knows full well that its heroine is bored, damaged, and begging for some escape, it can’t bring itself to pull the protagonist out of her doldrums; instead, it leads her down a degrading primrose path until disaster drives her back into the arms of safe ennui. Though the film feigns interest in her mission to ditch her boring hometown and ugly past, it’s largely interested in demonstrating the futility of her efforts and leaves her with Margaret Atwood’s model of the Canadian condition: “Endurance, survival, but no victory.”

Maya (2001)

April 7, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Drama, India, Theatrical

***/****
starring Anant Nag, Mita Vasisht, Nitya Shetty, Nikhil Yadav
screenplay by Emmanuel Pappas and Digvijay Singh
directed by Digvijay Singh

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Maya is a surprisingly natural movie that could have easily degenerated into histrionics. Despite dealing with an outlawed but still-active Indian ceremony in which newly-pubescent girls are raped, it never resorts to sensationalistic horror. Instead, it sketches a portrait of a girl, her cousin, and a family that shows both the person about to be crushed and the mentality that allows it to happen. While it occasionally descends into obviousness and smoothes out some hard edges, it distinguishes itself from hand-wringing problem pictures by sketching the violation of a person instead of just a body.

The Starz Independent FilmCenter Project, Vol. 1

April 5, 2002Posted in****/****, 1950s, 1990s, 2000s, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Czech Republic, Drama, Fantasy, France, Horror, Japan, Mexico, Mystery, Netherlands, Satire, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

by Walter Chaw

BOB LE FLAMBEUR (1956)
***½/****
starring Isabelle Corey, Daniel Cauchy, Roger Duchesne, Guy Decomble
screenplay by Jean-Pierre Melville, dialogue by Auguste Le Breton
directed by Jean-Pierre Melville

With every minute of Henri Decaё’s cinematography looking like a Eugène Atget photograph, Jean-Pierre Melville’s Bob Le Flambeur is a visually stunning film from a director who influenced filmmakers as diverse as Jean-Luc Godard (who quotes Bob Le Flambeur at least twice in Breathless) and John Woo (whose The Killer takes its basic plot from Melville’s Le Samourai). It is film noir of the highest order, reminding in its ensemble intricacy of Kubrick’s The Killing (released a year later in 1956) and evoking the kind of chiaroscuro, gin-joint, smoke-drenched milieu where every ashtray has a name. It’s a love letter to the grim American gangster drama of the Forties that subverts the genre even as it reinvents it as a lyrical ballad to gamblers, losers, hoods, and wayward dames–a snapshot of the Montmarte district of Paris 47 years before Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s reinvention of the same.

Husbands and Wives (1992) – DVD

April 1, 2002Posted in1990s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Romance

***½/**** Image A Sound C+
starring Woody Allen, Blythe Danner, Judy Davis, Mia Farrow
written and directed by Woody Allen

by Bill Chambers Husbands and Wives is a rawer tapestry of couples in flux from Woody Allen than his paternalistic Hannah and Her Sisters. It's reasonable to consider this Woody's Cassavetes movie, just as the previous Shadows and Fog was his Fellini (the title sounds like a sequel to Cassavetes's Husbands)–although Cassavetes wouldn't have couched the film's scenario in a faux-documentary framework, as Allen has. That's closer to Bob Fosse's turf; one imagines that Woody sees more of himself in Fosse, the entertainer, than he does Cassavetes, the brute poet. Shot in vérité handheld with an urgency that perhaps feels contrived, the film begins with the break-up of long-time marrieds Jack (a brilliant Sydney Pollack) and Sally (Oscar-nominated Judy Davis) and goes on to measure the shockwaves this sends through the lives of their friends, Gabe Roth (Allen) and his wife Judy (Mia Farrow). Sexually frustrated Jack falls into a relationship with a woman many years his junior (the lissome Sam (Lysette Anthony)), planting the seed for Gabe to act on his attraction to one of his writing students (Juliette Lewis). Judy, meanwhile, hooks Sally up with a co-worker, Michael (Liam Neeson). It's Judy's way of dealing with her own feelings for the guy, and needless to say, she didn't think it through.

Bandits (2001) [Special Edition] – DVD

March 31, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Drama, DVD, Romance

**/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B+
starring Bruce Willis, Cate Blanchett, Billy Bob Thornton, Troy Garity
screenplay by Harley Peyton
directed by Barry Levinson

by Walter Chaw Joe (Bruce Willis) and Terry (Billy Bob Thornton) break out of an Oregon prison and begin robbing banks while making their way down the west coast to an idealized Acapulco. Along the way, they pick up Joe’s dimwit wannabe stuntman cousin Phil (Anthony Burch) to act as getaway driver, and Kate (Cate Blanchett), an unbalanced passerby who becomes intoxicated by life on the lam. Shunning the more usual tactic of ski masks and gun-waving, Joe and Terry take the banks’ presidents and their families hostage the night before heists, earning them the nickname “The Sleepover Bandits.” In the schizophrenically sprawling and tight script, these hold-ups share time with a developing love triangle between Joe, Terry, and Kate, and, less successfully, a framing story involving an “America’s Most Wanted”-like host.

Panic Room (2002)

March 29, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Directors: David Fincher, Drama, Theatrical, Thriller

**½/****
starring Jodie Foster, Kristen Stewart, Forest Whitaker, Jared Leto
screenplay by David Koepp
directed by David Fincher

Panicroomby Walter Chaw Panic Room has a fancy premise stretched to and past the breaking point. It was a production beset by problems including the loss of star Nicole Kidman to an injury sustained during Moulin Rouge!, the departure of director of photography (DP) Darius Khondji, and a storyboard plan so devilishly complex that the film will probably be best remembered as a breakthrough in how burgeoning technologies can inform the DP's craft. The behind-the-scenes strain manifests itself in the nervous distractedness of the narrative and glaring and irritating plausibility gaps; the undeniably cool images (and Howard Shore's amazing score) only serve to illuminate the emptiness at Panic Room's core.

Death to Smoochy (2002)

March 29, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Drama, Germany, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

**/****
starring Robin Williams, Edward Norton, Danny DeVito, Jon Stewart
screenplay by Adam Resnick
directed by Danny DeVito

Deathtosmoochyby Walter Chaw Demonstrating a wonderfully wry conversance with Hitchcock’s images, Danny DeVito as director made an interesting debut with the Strangers on a Train redux Throw Momma from the Train before crafting what is possibly the definitive Eighties comedy in the Stygian The War of the Roses. After a 13-year hiatus featuring strange detours into other genres (the uneven Hoffa and the shrill Matilda), DeVito returns to the dark comedy with Death to Smoochy, a disjointed, dull, and irritating film that provides a meagre helping of “comedy” while ladling on a heaping serving of disconnected “dark.” To say the least, the picture is a resounding disappointment and what can only be seen as a betrayal of Robin Williams’s newfound desire to be viewed as something other than America’s favourite velvet clown with the upcoming films Insomnia and One Hour Photo.

Ali (2001) – DVD

March 28, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Directors: Michael Mann, Drama, DVD, Sports, Will Smith

**½/**** Image A+ Sound A+
starring Will Smith, Jamie Foxx, Jon Voight, Mario Van Peebles
screenplay by Stephen J. Rivele & Christopher Wilkinson and Eric Roth & Michael Mann
directed by Michael Mann

by Walter Chaw The craft of Ali is every bit as dazzling as we’ve come to expect from its director, Michael Mann; the film is a loving coronation of fighter Muhammad Ali’s myth. But at the same time, Ali is too dependent on our familiarity with its subject’s life, and spends altogether too much time in slow-motion reveries of choice bouts public and personal. Reminding at times of Martin Scorsese’s rapturous Kundun, the film falls far short of that razor-fine, impressionistic masterwork by aspiring to be all things to all people (docudrama, tribute, demystification)–an impulse never indulged by “The Greatest” himself.

Behind Enemy Lines (2001) – DVD

March 26, 2002Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Thriller, War

*½/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B
starring Owen Wilson, Gene Hackman, Joaquim de Almeida, David Keith
screenplay by David Veloz and Zak Penn
directed by John Moore

by Walter Chaw John Moore makes his directorial debut with the high-volume, flag-waving Behind Enemy Lines, but the film so recalls the visual excesses of Top Gun and Enemy of the State (down to a satellite surveillance sequence) that I began to wonder halfway through if “John Moore” was a nom de plume for Tony Scott. Everything else about Behind Enemy Lines, after all, is basically a retread: the third Gene Hackman “not leaving a man behind” film after Bat 21 and Uncommon Valor, and the umpteenth time the veteran actor has been asked to play a snarling iconoclast, spitting in the face of an unfeeling establishment.

The Hunchback of Notre Dame II (2002) – DVD

March 25, 2002Posted in2000s, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Disney, Drama, DVD, Family, Musical, Romance

**/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
screenplay by Jule Selbo and Flip Kobler & Cindy Marcus
directed by Bradley Raymond

by Walter Chaw Although the animation is sloppy and the music is, to say the least, uninspiring, Disney’s direct-to-video sequel to 1996’s underestimated and genuinely disturbing The Hunchback of Notre Dame is bolstered by an astonishing voice cast (excepting Jennifer Love Hewitt), an interesting racial tension, and a storyline I haven’t encountered since Pete’s Dragon. Taking place about six years after the events of the first film (judging by the age of Phoebus (Kevin Kline) and Esmeralda’s (Demi Moore) suspiciously Caucasian son, Zephyr (Haley Joel Osment)), The Hunchback of Notre Dame II details another seemingly-doomed love affair between the hideous Quasimodo (Tom Hulce) and a beautiful lady love, this one named Madellaine (Hewitt).

Son of the Bride (2001)

March 22, 2002Posted in2000s, Argentina, Comedy, Drama, Spain, Theatrical

El hijo de la novia
**½/****
starring Ricardo Darín, Héctor Alterio, Norma Aleandro, Eduardo Blanco
screenplay by Juan José Campanella, Fernando Castets
directed by Juan José Campanella

by Walter Chaw Restaurateur Rafael (Ricardo Darín)–divorced, paunchy, successful–has a stress- and sweets-inspired heart attack at the age of forty-two, prompting him to reconcile with his estranged mother (Norma Aleandro) and consider selling the family restaurant, and forcing him into a reconsideration of the blasé attitude he has towards his beautiful girlfriend, Naty (Natalia Verbeke). An exhausted contrivance to push a selfish and unpleasant man towards a resuscitation of his wasted life, Juan José Campanella’s Son of the Bride (El Hijo de la novia) adds to the “cardiac arrest as a means to mid-life crisis” trope such overly manipulative and sentimental movements as an adorably Alzheimer’s afflicted mother, an impassioned monologue about the emptiness of organized religion in the lives of the truly pious, and the return of a childhood pal, Juan Carlos (Eduardo Blanco, doing his best Roberto Benigni), whose own misfortunes cast Rafael’s into stark relief.

E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial: 20th Anniversary Edition (1982/2002)

March 22, 2002Posted in1980s, 2000s, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Family, Sci-Fi, Spielberg, Theatrical

***½/****
starring Dee Wallace, Henry Thomas, Peter Coyote, Robert MacNaughton
screenplay by Melissa Mathison
directed by Steven Spielberg

by Walter Chaw Young Elliot (Henry Thomas) discovers an alien castaway in his garden shed and lures it into his closet with a trail of candy. He introduces it to his little sister, Gertie (Drew Barrymore), and his older brother, Michael (Robert MacNaughton), pledging them to the “most excellent” promise of secrecy to prevent his siblings from sharing the creature’s existence with their frazzled mother (Dee Wallace), recently divorced. Soon, government scientists, led by the starry-eyed Keys (Peter Coyote), catch the scent of Elliot’s discovery, necessitating a desperate race to return it to its kind.

Hearts in Atlantis (2001) – DVD

March 18, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Mystery, Stephen King

**/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B-
starring Anthony Hopkins, Anton Yelchin, Hope Davis, Mika Boorem
screenplay by William Goldman, based on the novel by Stephen King
directed by Scott Hicks

by Walter Chaw That there is a wistful framing device in Hearts in Atlantis announces from the beginning exactly the kind of Stephen King movie this is going to be. Directed by Scott Hicks, more of a visual stylist than a storyteller, Hearts in Atlantis is a hollow addition to the cottage sub-genre of non-horror adult contemporary King adaptations that includes The Shawshank Redemption, The Green Mile, and, most glaringly, Stand By Me. Scripted by two-time Oscar-winner William Goldman (who also adapted King’s Misery and the forthcoming screen version of his Dreamcatcher), Hearts in Atlantis is a clunky bit of period treacle. It covers the requisite bases of magic realism and bully intrigue without even satisfactorily following through on a major plotline concerning a really boss bicycle. Based on the novellas “Low Men in Yellow Coats” and “Heavenly Shades of Night are Falling” from 1999’s Hearts in Atlantis, the film of the same name is inferior to its sources in its aversion to addressing the darker elements of childhood.

Harrison’s Flowers (2001)

March 15, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Drama, France, Romance, Theatrical, War

Des fleurs pour Harrison
**/****
starring Andie MacDowell, David Strathairn, Elias Koteas, Adrien Brody
screenplay by Elie Chouraqui & Didier Le Pêcheur & Isabel Ellsen and Michael Katims, based on the novel by Ellsen
directed by Elie Chouraqui

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Movie logic has always dictated that any film about a strife-torn part of the world must be told from the point of view of an outsider who resembles a movie star. Thus Stephen Biko’s story was filtered through the eyes of white Donald Woods in Cry Freedom, a film about colonial subjugation of indigenous peoples (The Mission) centred on the methodological bickering of two priests, and many a current foreign affair has been recounted via the selfless acts of the American reporters who expose them (Salvador, Under Fire, etc.). Harrison’s Flowers falls into this latter category of journalistic brio: though its story of a search for a missing photographer looks great when compared to its appalling cousin Welcome to Sarajevo, it’s on the same self-serving moral plane, with the machinations of reporting hogging the camera while the events that need be covered are crowded far outside the frame.

Training Day (2001) – DVD

March 14, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, DVD, Thriller

**½/**** Image A Sound A Extras B+
starring Denzel Washington, Ethan Hawke, Scott Glenn, Eva Mendes
screenplay by David Ayer
directed by Antoine Fuqua

by Walter Chaw In Antoine Fuqua and Dominic Sena’s race to become David Fincher, Fuqua, with his colour-bleached urban noir Training Day, pulls slightly ahead. Essentially a feature-length version of the Fuqua-helmed video for Coolio’s “Gangsta’s Paradise,” Training Day is dankly lit, grim, and edited with a veteran music-video director’s need for speed (though there are considerably fewer cuts than those found in Fuqua’s previous efforts Bait and The Replacement Killers). So smooth and accomplished is the harsh vérité look of the piece that the sun-drenched streets of Los Angeles are as much a player in the film as its leads. But the striking cinematography, sharp screenplay by David Ayer, and undeniable chemistry between Denzel Washington and Ethan Hawke aren’t enough to disguise that Training Day is one bravura performance away from being the umpteenth rote grizzled vet/greenhorn rookie policier. (With a healthy dash of Casualties of War tossed in for that Captain Bligh/Mr. Christian dynamic.)

Breaking Away (1979) – DVD

March 12, 2002Posted in1970s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Romance, Sports

***/**** Image C- Sound C-
starring Dennis Christopher, Dannis Quaid, Daniel Stern, Jackie Earle Haley
screenplay by Steve Tesich
directed by Peter Yates

by Walter Chaw For me, Peter Yates’s Breaking Away is the logical precursor to the particular nostalgia of Bob Clark’s A Christmas Story. It details in its limpid, lissom way small-town life through the prism of quaint friendships and a family with a sympathetic mom (Barbara Barrie), a curmudgeonly pop (Paul Dooley), and David (Dennis Christopher), their stargazer son.