Wild in the Country (1961) + The Razor’s Edge (1984) – DVDs

Posted in1960s, 1980s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Drama, DVD, Romance, UK, War

WILD IN THE COUNTRY
***/**** Image A- Sound B+
starring Elvis Presley, Hope Lange, Tuesday Weld, Millie Perkins
screenplay by Clifford Odets, based on the novel by J.R. Salamanca
directed by Philip Dunne

THE RAZOR’S EDGE
***/**** Image B- Sound B-
starring Bill Murray, Theresa Russell, Catherine Hicks, Denholm Elliot
screenplay by John Byrum & Bill Murray, based on the novel by W. Somerset Maugham
directed by John Byrum

by Bill Chambers It occurs to me that many of the most ungainly movies about love–and in the end, most movies are (about love, that is)–have gotten it right for their very awkwardness as cinematic constructs. This week, in the August funk that used to correspond with the encroaching schoolyear but is now some vague collegiate-nostalgia trip, I shook the salt of Wild in the Country, The Razor’s Edge, Pretty in Pink, and Some Kind of Wonderful (the latter two to be covered in a separate piece) on my reopened wounds and came away impressed not by the art of these films, but by their emotional complexity. What you see in all four of these pictures that you perhaps don’t often enough is that money tends to govern attraction.

We Were Soldiers (2002) – DVD

Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, France, Germany, War

***/**** Image A- Sound A+ Extras B
starring Mel Gibson, Madeleine Stowe, Sam Elliott, Greg Kinnear
screenplay by Randall Wallace, based on the memoir We Were Soldiers Once…and Young : Ia Drang–The Battle That Changed the War in Vietnam by Harold G. Moore, Joseph L. Galloway
directed by Randall Wallace

by Walter Chaw We Were Soldiers is a rousing war epic presented as the world’s most gruesome underdog sports intrigue, its carnage–fuelled by a brilliant attention to the decisions made in the heat of battle by a genius-level military mind–at once exploitive and orgasmic in its cathartic effectiveness. Concerning the bloodiest confrontation between the United States and North Vietnam, which took place in the infancy (November 14, 1965) of the doomed police action at LZ X-Ray in the Ia Drang Valley, the memoir of the battle We Were Soldiers Once…and Young (by battlefield commander Lt. Col. Hal Moore with war journalist Joseph Galloway) finds its way to the screen with Mel Gibson as Moore and his Braveheart scribe Randall Wallace at the typewriter and behind the camera.

Possession (2002)

Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Mystery, Romance, Theatrical

*/****
starring Gwyneth Paltrow, Aaron Eckhart, Jeremy Northam, Jennifer Ehle
screenplay by David Henry Hwang and Laura Jones and Neil LaBute, based on the novel by A.S. Byatt
directed by Neil LaBute

by Walter Chaw There’s the seed of an interesting idea in Neil LaBute’s Possession–something traceable to A.S. Byatt’s melodramatic novel of the same name: the film’s one clumsily extended trope that it is about keepsakes and the desire for memento mori and memento amor as it manifests amongst intellectuals. That this seed never germinates, limping along before being crushed beyond recognition by an unforgivable grave-robbing sequence is due to LaBute’s icy disconnection (badly misplaced here) and the horrific realization that Possession is two stultifying formulas vying for screentime.

Happy Times (2000)

Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, China, Comedy, Drama, Theatrical

幸福时光
Happy Time
*½/****
starring Benshan Zhao, Jie Dong, Biao Fu, Xuejian Li
directed by Zhang Yimou

by Walter Chaw Titled in the same serio-ironic vein as Giuseppe Tornatore’s Everybody’s Fine, Zhang Yimou’s Happy Times aspires for the piquant but only really achieves a sort of ridiculous sourness. It’s a misunderstanding of irony taken to an Alanis Morrisetteian extreme; far from the eventuality being the opposite of the expected, the outcome of Happy Times is the worst kind of cliché, and its execution is so blunt compared to the sharp satirical barb of Yimou’s own Ju Dou that I wonder if Gong Li wasn’t the brains in that long lamented relationship. Still, what works in Happy Times is what has worked in this director’s best work (Shanghai Triad, Raise the Red Lantern, Red Sorghum): mordant social critique so far removed from realism that its status as political allegory is as subtle as a neon sign and a crack to the noggin.

Jacked Up (2001) – DVD

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

Jacked
**½/**** Image C Sound B Extras C
starring Ron Beaco Lee, Bizzy Bone, Alexis Fields, Anna Maria Horsford
written and directed by Timothy Wayne Folsome

by Walter Chaw Courageous and extremely well performed, Timothy Wayne Folsome’s zero-budget Jacked Up demonstrates a rare and surprising willingness to explore the moral consequences of a moment’s rash misadventure on victim and family alike. It is, in that sense, as unusual and compelling as Roger Michell’s brilliant Changing Lanes, even if the route that it takes to get to its revelations are circuitous at best and overly familiar at worst. Jacked Up is a showcase for a young filmmaker’s potential (otherwise missing from Folsome’s debut of a couple of years ago, An Uninvited Guest), but it also exposes Folsome as a bad visual stylist and a limited scenarist who depends too much upon the path most travelled. Good thing there are lots of flowers of interesting bouquet to sniff along the way.

Reservoir Dogs (1992) [Ten Years – Special Edition] – DVD

Posted in1990s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Crime, Directors: Quentin Tarantino, Drama, DVD, Thriller

***½/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras A+
starring Harvey Keitel, Tim Roth, Chris Penn, Steve Buscemi
written and directed by Quentin Tarantino

by Bill Chambers

"They were perfect strangers, assembled to pull off the perfect crime. Then their simple robbery explodes into a bloody ambush, and the ruthless killers realize one of them is a police informer. But which one?"
–DVD liner summary for Reservoir Dogs

I came around to being a fan of Reservoir Dogs after Quentin Tarantino's standing had crested and the backlash was kicking in. It's impossible for me to see now why I didn't take to it initially–solid flick, as they say. Stylish, knowing, but not necessarily pretentious. Well-performed. And moving, in its macho way: Let us not forget that Reservoir Dogs ends in tears and an embrace.

The Business of Strangers (2001) – DVD

Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, DIFF/SDFF, Drama, DVD, Film Festivals, Thriller

***/**** Image A- Sound A-
starring Stockard Channing, Julia Stiles, Frederick Weller
written and directed by Patrick Stettner

by Walter Chaw Julie (Stockard Channing) is a hardened businesswoman on a lecture trip who becomes certain that her last day on the job draws nigh. When young Paula (Julia Stiles) arrives to a presentation late, Julie unleashes all her fears and frustrations on the hapless girl. Written with an ear for dialogue and a wicked edge, Julie’s enthusiastic upbraiding of Paula sets the stage for three elements that drive The Business of Strangers to its conclusion. The first is the discomfort arising from Julie and Paula being stuck in the same hotel overnight due to grounded flights, the second is a possible explanation of the antagonism between the pair that culminates in a disturbingly open-ended finale, and the final is the idea that in Stettner’s interpersonal corporate nightmare, fear is the mechanism that catalyzes the characters towards generosity, friendship, and cruelty.

Dahmer (2002)

Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Crime, Drama, Horror, Theatrical, Thriller

**½/****
starring Jeremy Renner, Bruce Davison, Artel Kayaru, Matt Newton
written and directed by David Jacobson

by Walter Chaw Well-acted but without a point-of-view, hyphenate David Jacobson’s sophomore feature Dahmer is less biopic than Arthouse Exploitation Lite, a curiously uninvolving glimpse into the banal life and times of a serial murderer. Rather than portray the stalking and vivisection of man as grotesquely vapid (like its more successful brothers Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer or The Untold Story), Dahmer chooses that same all-too-familiar docudrama frankness to illustrate a sick man’s loneliness and inability to make a true connection with another human being. It’s not attempting to humanize Dahmer so much as it’s attempting to elevate Dahmer to the level of great post-modern anti-hero: unromantic, unexceptional, and unmoored, utterly, from moral responsibility–Beavis playing frog baseball with a holy trinity of representative pretty-boy victims. Even its end title card, reporting (we infer “mournfully”) that the titular bogey was murdered just two years into his 1,070-year sentence by a fellow inmate, seems intended as an epitaph for a misunderstood prophet rather than a declaration of karma asserting itself, penitentiary-style.

The Good Girl (2002)

Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, Drama, Germany, Netherlands, Romance, Theatrical

**/****
starring Jennifer Aniston, Jake Gyllenhaal, John C. Reilly, Tim Blake Nelson
screenplay by Mike White
directed by Miguel Arteta

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover The Good Girl is a sitcom that dreams of one day becoming an opera. Like its heroine, the film feels a great dissatisfaction with modern life, and like her eventual paramour, it goes to great lengths in order to articulate such a feeling. But also like these characters, The Good Girl is both too timid and too inarticulate to truly get its ideas across. Instead, the film resorts to “quirky” indie-film types armed to the teeth with wisecracks; offering none of the ambiguity that its narrative thrust seems to warrant, its flaws kill the movie’s aspirations and make sure that it stays in the generic backwater it so dearly wants to escape.

Rocco and His Brothers (1960)

Posted in1960s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Crime, Drama, France, Italy, Sports, Theatrical

Rocco e i suoi fratelli
***/****
starring Alain Delon, Renato Salvatori, Annie Girardot, Katina Paxinou
screenplay by Luchino Visconti and Vasco Pratolini and Suso Cecchi d’Amico, based on the novel Il ponte della Ghisolfa by Giovanni Testori
ritten and directed by Luchino Visconti

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Once, decades ago, Luchino Visconti was a name to conjure with. Not only was his Ossessione recognized as a torrid precursor of Italian Neo-Realism, but his tragic characters on the cusp of societal change and fragmentation were greeted with the respect commonly afforded to what used to be known as high culture. Now, he’s barely remembered in North America, punished for the crime of quietly going about his business. La terra trema notwithstanding, he was less movement-defining than high neo-realists like DeSica or Rossellini; nor was he an inventor of modernist forms, like Antonioni and Resnais. And as his literary, aristocratic bent was less formally bracing than a nouvelle vague hotshot, Visconti’s films seem to the uninitiated too much like just movies–they didn’t change how you looked at the medium, they simply inhabited it, for good or for ill.

The Starz Independent FilmCenter Project, Vol. 11

Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, Coming of Age, Crime, Drama, Teen, Theatrical

by Walter Chaw

SWIMMING (2002)
***/****
starring Lauren Ambrose, Jennifer Dundas Lowe, Joelle Carter, Josh Pais
screenplay by Lisa Bazadona, Robert J. Siegel, Grace Woodard
directed by Robert J. Siegel

An insightfully-written, delicately-performed coming-of-age piece that is good enough not to be cheapened by that genre appellation, Robert Siegel's Swimming captures one summer at tourist-filthy Myrtle Beach. (A film professor, Siegel directs his first feature here in some 20 years.) Frankie (Lauren Ambrose) works at her family's restaurant, right on the main drag next to childhood pal Nicola's (Jennifer Dundas) piercing parlour. Frankie's plain and pale, Nicola's brash and blonde; their banal day-to-day is interrupted by the introduction of floozy bombshell Josee (Joelle Carter), who begins as the standard catalytic plot device but ends as something complicated and possessed of unusual depth. The same could be said of the rest of the cast, from Dundas's volatility to Ambrose's amazingly transparent and tricky performance. Even-handedly negotiating the tricky shoals of hormone-addled actions and emotions, Swimming excels in presenting the sort of small-town yearning I most associate with Steve Earle's early production, the cruelty of teens on the make smartly presented with the same kind of nostalgic affection as the moment when a plain girl recognizes the strength of her decency and the inimitable quality of her difference. Observations of the ebbs and flows of adolescent angst are interesting in Swimming, though not interesting enough to make this charming adolescent melodrama resonate with the melancholia of Bogdanovich's similarly themed The Last Picture Show, and the picture runs out of steam with a goofy subplot involving a sweet-natured ganja-burner played by Jamie Harrold.

The Business of Fancydancing (2002)

Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Music, Theatrical

**½/****
starring Evan Adams, Michelle St. John, Gene Tagaban, Swil Kanim
written and directed by Sherman Alexie

by Walter Chaw Reading a little like an anguished autobiography of a certain kind of success and the ethnic price of it, Sherman Alexie’s The Business of Fancydancing demands an examination of the compulsion to use “Native American author” as a prefix to Alexie’s name. It’s not a success in a conventional sense and that’s actually somewhat to its credit–having made a living as a Native American author with a mostly white readership, Alexie’s aim here seems to be one of defying traditional Western narrative forms in favour of the liquidity of a more aboriginal oral tradition. If its performances are uneven and some of its characters and events completely superfluous, The Business of Fancydancing gets a great deal of leeway based solely on the raw intimacy of Alexie’s uncompromising point of view.

Joe Somebody (2001) – DVD

Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B-
starring Tim Allen, Julie Bowen, Kelly Lynch, Greg Germann
screenplay by John Scott Shepherd
directed by John Pasquin

by Walter Chaw There is no life to Joe Somebody; it is a rotting, derelict husk of a film that drifts anchorless in a sea of dead jokes and plot detritus. It has no excuse for existing, and should be held up as the prime example whenever conversation turns to what’s wrong with our culture in general and the movies in particular. Joe Somebody is so sloppily put together that when it comes time at last to end this cinematic thumbscrew, its moments of uplift make little, if any, sense because of the lack of care taken to establish a place for them. If you have a moment to which the entire film is supposedly building, I humbly offer that it’s probably not good when that epiphany appears with neither warning nor justification. It’s like having a story that is not otherwise about a playwright wrapping up with a playwright having her first play produced. Exactly like that, in fact.

The Starz Independent FilmCenter Project, Vol. 10

Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, Romance, Theatrical, Thriller
by Walter Chaw READ MY LIPS (2001)Sur mes lèvres***½/****starring Vincent Cassel, Emmanuelle Devos, Olivier Gourmet, Olivia Bonamyscreenplay by Jacques Audiard and Tonino Benacquistadirected by Jacques Audiard Suffused with intelligence, courage, and the unmistakable taint of life, Jacques Audiard's remarkable Read My Lips is a brilliant picture with a few problems that, because they exist in so carefully structured a film, will probably iron themselves out under more careful reconsideration. At the bottom of a corporate jungle inhabited by wild boors, Carla (Emmanuelle Devos, winner of the 2001 Best Actress César for this film) is a kettle of repressed sexual desire…

Jan Dara (2001)

Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Drama, Romance, Thailand, Theatrical

*½/****
starring Suwinit Panjamawat, Santisuk Promsiri, Christy Chung, Eakarat Sarsukh
screenplay by Nonzee Nimibutr, Sirapak Paoboonkerd, based on the novel The Story of Jan Dara by Utsana Phleungtham
directed by Nonzee Nimibutr

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover It’s a testament to the failure of Nonzee Nimibutr’s Jan Dara that it contains parental sex, adolescent sex, inter-generational sex, lesbian sex, light bondage sex, even ice-cube sex–and still manages to wear out its welcome. You’d think that with all that screwing, you couldn’t help but be a little titillated, but after half an hour of its melodramatic excesses, it wears on you so heavily that you may decide you have a headache and just go to bed. Sure, Jan Dara contains the sordid detail and shocking revelations that make for really good melodrama, but it turns them all on their head: Instead of releasing the madness that lurks beneath the surface, it chastely peels away the hysterical rind to suck on the virginal fruit beneath. For the sensualist likes of me, this is totally unacceptable, as it takes what could have been a rakish romp and makes it a hypocritical object lesson in the virtues of clean living.

Tadpole (2002)

Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Coming of Age, Drama, Romance, Theatrical

**/****
starring Sigourney Weaver, Aaron Stanford, John Ritter, Bebe Neuwirth
screenplay by Heather McGowan & Neils Mueller
directed by Gary Winick

by Walter Chaw An underwritten indie The Graduate (a connection the film makes itself) that plays a little more like one of J.D. Salinger’s terrible short stories than like Wes Anderson’s dead brilliant Rushmore (which it aspires to be at every turn), Tadpole emerges as exactly the kind of self-conscious product that crowds equate, knee-jerk-like, with independent credibility. Buoyed at times by an occasional sweetness and Bebe Neuwirth’s fantastic performance as a hippie still flying her freak flag (or at least her free-love banner), Tadpole hints at what it might have been had it the courage to follow through on the ramifications of a fifteen-year-old boarding school Voltaire-quoting brat using the language of his absent mother to attempt to win his stepmother Eve (Sigourney Weaver) away from his ineffectual academic of a dad (John Ritter).

Dragonfly (2002) [Widescreen] – DVD

Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Fantasy, Germany, Mystery, Romance, Thriller

*/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras B-
starring Kevin Costner, Joe Morton, Kathy Bates, Ron Rifkin
screenplay by David Seltzer and Brandon Camp & Mike Thompson
directed by Tom Shadyac

by Walter Chaw Emergency-room sawbones Joe Darrow (Kevin Costner) loses his do-gooder wife Emily (Susanna Thompson) when she’s killed in a rockslide in Venezuela. Soon he and his bald parrot believe that Emily has returned from the dead with a message about rainbows. I like Kevin Costner and his oeuvre. I find him to be a charming simpleton in the Gary Cooper mould. Until Dragonfly, his films never felt condescending to me, largely because Costner appears to be learning things at the same pace as his screenplay. His guileless wonder (‘Can you believe we did this to the Indians? Holy smokes!‘) sits well with me and makes him peculiarly suited to play the traditional American hero: good-looking, witless, and dull as dishwater. Casting Costner as a doctor is a mistake: the other person he played who had an advanced degree was New Orleans DA Jim Garrison in Oliver Stone’s JFK, and that character was clearly insane. Costner just doesn’t have the spark of erudition necessary to convince as a serious individual with letters after his name (not unless those letters are LHP), and his performance in Dragonfly is unconvincing, joyless, and scattershot.

The Starz Independent FilmCenter Project, Vol. 9

Posted 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.

Trouble Every Day (2001)

Posted in****/****, 2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: Claire Denis, Drama, France, Germany, Horror, Japan, Theatrical, Thriller, Vampire

****/****
starring Vincent Gallo, Tricia Vessey, Béatrice Dalle, Alex Descas
screenplay by Claire Denis & Jean-Pol Fargeau
directed by Claire Denis

by Walter Chaw Plaintive and sad, Claire Denis’s remarkable Trouble Every Day is a rare combination of honesty, beauty, and maybe even genius. It isn’t enough to say that the picture captures the barbarism festering at the core of gender dynamics, nor is it sufficient to express my frank amazement at how Denis subverts genre in ways perverse and powerful. Here’s a canny director who knows the vocabulary of cinema as well as the cruel poetics of sexual anthropology; perhaps it’s enough to say that Trouble Every Day captures something ineffably true about the sex act with images vital, frank, and unshakable.

The Final Hit (2001) – DVD

Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD

The Last Producer
½*/**** Image C Sound B+
starring Burt Reynolds, Lauren Holly, Sean Astin, Benjamin Bratt
screenplay by Clyde Hayes
directed by Burt Reynolds

by Walter Chaw Seeing himself as Hollywood’s last angry man (the film was originally and just as inexplicably called “The Last Producer”), Burt Reynolds, in the twilight of his benighted resurrection, jumps behind the camera to helm his self-starred anti-Hollywood tirade The Final Hit, which washes out as equal parts senior citizen grotesquery and unfocused satire. Wall-to-wall with Peter M. Robinson’s excrescent scatty woo-bop score, The Final Hit, in discussing how Tinsel Town disdains the older generation of actors, proceeds to give the stage back to that same older generation and, in the process, demonstrates exactly why these people aren’t getting much work.