Summer Catch (2001) – DVD

January 7, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Romance, Sports, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/**** Image A- Sound B Extras C
starring Freddie Prinze Jr., Courtney Driver, Jessica Biel, Matthew Lillard
screenplay by Kevin Falls and John Gatins
directed by Michael Tollin

by Walter Chaw Summer Catch bulges the already-overcrowded shelves reserved for appalling Freddie Prinze Jr. vehicles that no one saw in theatres and, predictably, no one is renting given a second chance. Determining which of Prinze’s performances and films is the worst is an exercise both diverting and daunting; to that end, I’d have to say that Summer Catch falls squarely in the middle: it’s physically impossible to sit through the whole thing without a lengthy break or some sort of medium-bore narcotic, thus making it inferior to the stolid water-torture of I Know What You Did Last Summer (that film’s relative enjoyability no doubt owing a great deal to Jennifer Love Hewitt’s oft-invoked bustline). Still, it has going for it that it doesn’t cause your eyes and ears to bleed with the consistency and volume of Down to You or Wing Commander.

Impostor (2002)

January 4, 2002Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller

*/****
starring Gary Sinise, Madeleine Stowe, Vincent D’Onofrio, Tony Shalhoub
screenplay by Scott Rosenberg, Caroline Case and Ehren Kruger and David Twohy
directed by Gary Fleder

Impostorby Walter Chaw Mouldering in a can for over a year (the film would smell pretty stale regardless past 1980), Impostor is the umpteenth adaptation of a Philip K. Dick story (whether directly or indirectly), a fable of identity that pales in comparison to an acknowledged classic like Blade Runner, an ambitious blockbuster like Total Recall, and an under-seen sleeper like Screamers. Overseen by professional bad director Gary Fleder, Impostor would I suspect most like to invite comparisons to two Harrison Ford films–Blade Runner and The Fugitive–but ends up best resembling, in its dour overreaching and intimations of future-shock resonance, the late, unlamented Dylan McDermott/Iggy Pop vehicle Hardware. Although the increasingly reptilian Gary Sinise seems game with all of his Steppenwolf method in tendon-popping tow, his sickly earnestness seems misplaced in an exercise that is essentially a strobe-lit pseudo-philosophical sci-fi opera that a major studio wisely declined to release for twelve full months. Future employers of actor Mekhi Phifer take note: with this and O, it appears that hiring the lad is all but inviting a lengthy release delay.

Silent Trigger (1996) – DVD

January 3, 2002Posted in1990s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Drama, DVD, Thriller, UK

*/**** Image D Sound D+
starring Dolph Lundgren, Gina Bellman, George Jenesky, Christopher Heyerdahl
screenplay by Sergio Altieri
directed by Russell Mulcahy

by Walter Chaw There was a time, ’round about the cheap thrills of Razorback, that I thought director Russell Mulcahy had a future as an action director. Seventeen years later, the Aussie has proven me wrong by peaking with the intentionally campy The Shadow and the unintentionally campy Highlander. And while Silent Trigger isn’t the worst of Mulcahy’s missteps (Highlander II: The Quickening has a hammerlock on several “worst” titles), it’s not for lack of trying. Still, I can’t completely dislike both Dolph Lundgren and Mulcahy’s latest direct-to-video disaster because I feel as though watching it has taught me a few things.

The Glass House (2001) – DVD

January 3, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Crime, Drama, DVD, Mystery, Thriller

*/**** Image A Sound B+ Extras C
starring Leelee Sobieski, Stellan Skarsgård, Diane Lane, Bruce Dern
screenplay by Wesley Strick
directed by Daniel Sackheim

BUY @ AMAZON

by Bill Chambers In The Glass House, the picture-perfect legal guardians of an orphaned teenage girl and her little brother turn out to be Gomez and Morticia. (Actually, that's overstating their appeal.) The trouble with this set-up is that it has the pretense of a moral but revolves around a character in Leelee Sobieski's Ruby who hasn't done anything to place herself in her precarious situation except obey the law and her elders. By the time she gains agency and the film puts her in the driver's seat (quite literally, as it happens), The Glass House seems to be apologizing to young adults on screen and off for suggesting they're not always in control. It could be said to, like Home Alone or The Rugrats Movie, spread a false sense of security to its target demographic.

The Shipping News (2001)

December 26, 2001Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Drama, Theatrical

**/****
starring Kevin Spacey, Julianne Moore, Judi Dench, Scott Glenn
screenplay by Robert Nelson Jacobs, based on the novel by E. Annie Proulx
directed by Lasse Hallström

Shippingnewsby Walter Chaw In 1994, E. Annie Proulx was plucked from obscurity to win both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for The Shipping News, her second novel. The story of “large, white, stumbling along, going nowhere” Quoyle struck a nerve with its combination of lyricism and evocation of the provincial “foreignness” of Newfoundland, Canada. Personally, though I found Proulx’s prose intoxicating, the book’s final thirty pages seemed discordant and atonal to me–they betray the mood with a kind of desperate urge towards resolution that feels contrary to the quirky, steady melancholy Proulx had established. (It comes as little surprise that the end of the novel was written before the rest of it.)

In the Bedroom (2001)

December 26, 2001Posted in****/****, 2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, Theatrical

****/****
starring Tom Wilkinson, Sissy Spacek, Nick Stahl, Marisa Tomei
screenplay by Robert Festinger & Todd Field, based on a short story by Andre Dubus
directed by Todd Field

by Walter Chaw Based on the short story “Killings” by the late Andre Dubus, arguably the finest American short-story writer of the past fifty years, Todd Field’s In the Bedroom is an emotionally brutal and laudably ambiguous film that does justice to the sober restraint and taint of truth that informs the best of Dubus’s work. It’s like an Atom Egoyan or Sean Penn film in its austere chronicling of families tossed to entropy’s capricious tide, though a more complete work those filmmakers have yet to achieve. What Field captures, in fact, is a whiff of Terrence Malick’s genius–not only in he and cinematographer Antonio Calvache’s spacious plateaus but also in the thematic preoccupation with nature’s rhythms and how they imbue the patterns of human behaviour. That said, In the Bedroom largely avoids Malick’s philosophical metaphors, focusing on the far less ephemeral poetics of Dubus’s preoccupation with the minute interpersonal dynamics–the subterranean movements and precarious psychic negotiation–of a marriage.

Hedwig and the Angry Inch (2001) [Platinum Series] – DVD

December 26, 2001Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Esoterica, Music, Musical

***/**** Image B Sound A Extras A+
starring John Cameron Mitchell, Michael Pitt, Miriam Shor, Stephen Trask
screenplay by John Cameron Mitchell, based on his play with Stephen Trask
directed by John Cameron Mitchell

by Walter Chaw A pretension-laden, soul-dissection opera crossed with the brooding musical chops that Pink Floyd all but defined in the late-Seventies, John Cameron Mitchell's Hedwig and the Angry Inch is Velvet Goldmine and All that Jazz by way of Pink Floyd The Wall–a bombastically endearing romp that is as infectious as it is (surprisingly) poignant. The anchor for the film is Mitchell's incendiary turn as the titular Hedwig, a transsexual/transvestite, Eastern Bloc rock diva on a national tour booked into Bilgewaters family restaurants in the same cities as flavour-of-the-month pop superstar Tommy Gnosis (Michael Pitt). Hedwig believes that Gnosis has stolen his songs from him, yet we sense the real theft was that of trust and the promise of love. Early on, we're shown a fantastically-conceived bleach-bypass/animation/performance piece set to a very nice Plato's Symposium-inspired tune ("The Origin of Love") that offers an explanation of the absent feeling that impels us all to find succour in a mate, a friend, or art. Hedwig and the Angry Inch never gets as good as this again, but it's almost impossible to imagine how it could: the sequence, lasting all of ten minutes, is one of the highlights of the year in cinema.

Willow (1988) [Special Edition] – DVD

December 26, 2001Posted in1980s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Fantasy, Romance, UK

*/**** Image B+ Sound A- Extras B
starring Val Kilmer, Joanne Whalley, Warwick Davis, Jean Marsh
screenplay by Bob Dolman
directed by Ron Howard

by Walter Chaw It shouldn’t be surprising that Willow fails as it does considering that the creative forces behind it were George Lucas (who has never had a good idea of his own) and Ron Howard (who’s never met an opportunity for cleverness he didn’t miss), neither of whom should ever have been entrusted with a fantasy film as late as 1988, as their work since (and just before) will attest. It is shamelessly derivative, raping countless sources to come up with what is essentially a limp riff on the Tolkien quest married to things as divergent as The Living Daylights, all three original Star Wars films, all three Indiana Jones films, Gulliver’s Travels, The Bible, Masters of the Universe, and Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

The Royal Tenenbaums (2001)

December 26, 2001Posted in****/****, 2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Directors: Wes Anderson, Drama, Theatrical

****/****
starring Gene Hackman, Anjelica Huston, Ben Stiller, Gwyneth Paltrow
screenplay by Wes Anderson & Owen Wilson
directed by Wes Anderson

Royaltenenbaumsby Walter Chaw Royal Tenenbaum (Gene Hackman) is the estranged patriarch of the Tenenbaums, a family of child prodigies that, beset by a series of “accidents and disasters,” has never again attained the heights of its early glories. Chas (Ben Stiller), an economics wizard, Margot (Gwyneth Paltrow), a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, and Richie (Luke Wilson), a tennis star, return after years of fecklessness to the home of their mother, Etheline (Anjelica Huston), drawn there by the news that Royal is mortally afflicted with stomach cancer. In his words, he has “six weeks to set things right” with his disenchanted, wounded kin, trying all the while to undermine Etheline’s budding relationship with their accountant, Mr. Sherman (Danny Glover).

The Affair of the Necklace (2001)

December 26, 2001Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Romance, Theatrical

½/****
starring Hilary Swank, Simon Baker, Adrien Brody, Jonathan Pryce
screenplay by John Sweet
directed by Charles Shyer

Affairofthenecklaceby Walter Chaw Alternately boring and hilarious, The Affair of the Necklace is high cheese of the French Revolution variety, delighted by its own creamery version of ribaldry (there are more stifled titters in Affair than at an Oscar Wilde convention) and infatuated with the passion that ripping bodices has failed to imply for over two centuries. It is inadvertently self-critical (at various points in the film characters breathily intone, “It is amazing how quickly you have become tedious,” or “It is a monument to vanity,” or “The public found her guilty of excess”), and credit is due, I suppose, to poor, gaffed Hilary Swank for being either too daffy to see that irony or a better actress than she appears in concealing any self-aware mirth. The Swank of The Affair of the Necklace is the Swank of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which is of course the only Swank, her stunt turn in Boys Don’t Cry notwithstanding. The most astonishing thing about The Affair of the Necklace, though, is how with a cast that includes Brian Cox, Christopher Walken, and Jonathan Pryce, it manages to be jaw-droppingly awful; had I not squirmed in mute horror, transfixed before the film’s appalling majesty, I would not have believed it myself.

The Majestic (2001)

December 21, 2001Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Romance, Theatrical

*½/****
starring Jim Carrey, Martin Landau, Laurie Holden, Allen Garfield
screenplay by Michael Sloane
directed by Frank Darabont

Majesticby Walter Chaw The Majestic begins promisingly enough; I wondered for a while if it was riffing on the short story “Mars is Heaven” (from Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles), wherein Martians recreate a bucolic midsummer’s evening in Springfield for visiting astronauts, only to murder the terrestrial interlopers in their blissful sleep. I actually held out hope that the Rockwellian Lawson, CA of The Majestic was going to be like that for amnesiac screenwriter Peter Appleton (Jim Carrey), who washes ashore there after a whimsical bridge accident. If only The Majestic were some kind of Truman Show/“Twilight Zone” construct along these lines, but no such luck: Frank Darabont’s latest film, a creepily painstaking reproduction of Frank Capra’s Americana and Capra’s wide-eyed vision of American justice, betrays not a hint of invention. The Majestic is a manipulation so fearful of controversy that it inadvertently forgives both the film industry it apparently mocks and the witch hunters it seeks to excoriate.

Intimacy (2001)

December 7, 2001Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, France, Germany, Romance, Spain, Theatrical, UK

**½/****
starring Mark Rylance, Kerry Fox, Susannah Harker, Timothy Spall
screenplay by Patrice Chéreau, Hanif Kureishi, Anne-Louise Trividic
directed by Patrice Chéreau

Intimacyby Walter Chaw Jay (Mark Rylance) is a sour bar manager who, six years previous, walked out on his wife and two young boys. Claire (Kerry Fox) is a dour acting teacher and mother of one married to an oafish Cockney cabbie (Andy, played by Timothy Spall like the refugee from a Mike Leigh film he is). Every Wednesday at two in the afternoon, Jay and Claire couple in Jay’s austere, unfurnished flat. As a homosexual French bartender–the too-awkward representation of uninhibited sagacity–helpfully supplies, “It’s rare that two people meet one another who have the same needs.” But Jay appears to have needs different from Claire’s: Trailing her after they rendezvous, he watches her as she drops off her dry-cleaning, takes public transportation, and finally ends up at a hole-in-the-wall drama company to perform badly in a Tennessee Williams revival. Striking up a mine-strewn conversation with his lover’s husband over pints of bitter and a game of billiards, Intimacy seismically shifts from one powerful cinematic symbol (sex) to another (theatre), and in so doing demonstrates a remarkable courage in its nakedness; and an exasperating lack of focus in its thrust.

Moulin Rouge (2001) – DVD

December 4, 2001Posted in2000s, Australia, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Drama, DVD, Esoterica, Musical, Romance

Moulin Rouge!
***/**** Image A Sound A- (DD)/A+ (DTS) Extras A
starring Nicole Kidman, Ewan McGregor, John Leguizamo, Jim Broadbent
screenplay by Baz Luhrmann & Craig Pearce
directed by Baz Luhrmann

Moulinrougecap1by Travis Mackenzie Hoover It's been a long time since I've seen a mainstream film that tried to place its heart in the audience's hands. Nothing in recent memory is as direct and open in its pleasures as the classic Hollywood musicals were, having been replaced by the sideways glance of the ironist and all of the false snobbery that pretends nothing is as it appears. While this is supposed to be a bellwether of our superior sophistication, it really just means that we strike a different pose: we must be superior to the events on screen and stop up our emotions with an arched eyebrow and a swift kick to the object of our gaze. The fact is that any evidence of true feeling–or, more to the point, true yearning for release–is treated as ridiculous and something to be lamented, but one must admit the current climate makes an affirmation of what we want seem very vulnerable and the efforts of those who decide to work without the net of condescension seem daring, if not suicidal.

Almost Famous (2000) – DVD|Almost Famous: Untitled, The Bootleg Cut [Director’s Edition] – DVD

December 1, 2001Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, Coming of Age, Drama, DVD, Music

ALMOST FAMOUS
***/**** Image A Sound A Extras C+
UNTITLED
***/**** Image A Sound A Extras A
starring Patrick Fugit, Billy Crudup, Frances McDormand, Kate Hudson
written and directed by Cameron Crowe

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Almost Famous is an odd bird. It wants to be about rock and roll but isn't, seeking every opportunity to hide from the spirit of the music that is its ostensible starting point. It strains for important insights it doesn't have, mostly centred on a teenage boy's predictable loss of innocence at the hands of a rock band. Worst of all is that it subsumes its massive subject into the flowering of a ROLLING STONE journalist, crushing both the purity of the music and the excess of its players beneath a career move for a media player. But as the film lurches from issue to dodged issue, the reasoning behind its omissions is as intriguing as the omissions themselves; as it accidentally uncovers the spaces between what gets done and how it gets done, it manages to be a revealing document of how much chicanery goes into the creation of celebrity–entirely in spite of itself.

Made (2001) [Special Edition] – DVD

November 27, 2001Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Crime, Drama, DVD, Thriller

**/**** Image A Sound A- Extras A
starring Jon Favreau, Vince Vaughn, Sean Combs, Famke Janssen
written and directed by Jon Favreau

by Bill Chambers Even if Swingers were terrible, one would have to admire writer-star Jon Favreau for making a film about waiting around to be discovered instead of actually waiting around to be discovered. Made, his official follow-up effort (this time as full-on auteur), is not such a noble affair. A vanity project in the tradition of Under the Cherry Moon, Prince’s pretentious encore to his star-making Purple Rain, the film boasts of a more distinguished supporting cast, stronger tech credits, and a budget 20x that of its predecessor. And yet almost every scene lands with a resounding thud, due in large part to Made‘s alleged raison d’être: the anticipated reunion of Swinger Vince Vaughn with Favreau–who turns into a morose do-gooder whenever he’s in Vaughn’s radar. It’s like watching “The Odd Couple” starring a tooth and a root canal.

Little Women (1933) – DVD

November 25, 2001Posted in1930s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Family, Romance, War

**/**** Image B Sound C-
starring Katharine Hepburn, Joan Bennett, Paul Lukas, Edna May Oliver
screenplay by Sarah Y. Mason & Victor Heerman, based on the novel by Louisa May Alcott
directed by George Cukor

by Walter Chaw A scant six years after The Jazz Singer introduced talking to the motion picture, George Cukor’s Little Women came to the screen with the awkwardness of a foundling art form (silent-picture burlesque and stage melodrama) in tow. It’s extremely difficult to view the film unjaundiced by a modern opinion of performance, script, and direction: Although the adapted screenplay by Sarah Y. Mason and Victor Heerman won an Oscar that year, Little Women is impossibly dated and difficult to swallow. Part of the problem is the casting of actresses (each one at least a decade too old for her role), whose performances are such sweeping caricatures that it takes some effort to remind oneself that they were once acceptable simulacrums of reality.

Guadalcanal Diary (1943) + Wing and a Prayer (1944) – DVDs

November 13, 2001Posted in1940s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, War

GUADALCANAL DIARY
*/**** Image B Sound C+
starring Preston Foster, Lloyd Nolan, William Bendix, Richard Conte
screenplay by Jerry Cady, based on the book by Richard Tregaskis
directed by Lewis Seiler

Wing and a Prayer (The Story of Carrier X)
*½/**** Image B- Sound C+
starring Don Ameche, Dana Andrews, William Eythe, Charles Bickford
screenplay by Jerome Cady
directed by Henry Hathaway

by Walter Chaw Filmed just months after the actual invasion of Guadalcanal late in 1942 and based on Richard Tregaskis’s wildly popular (but excessively jingoistic and poorly-written) memoir of the same, Guadalcanal Diary is interesting for a glimpse at the Hollywood propaganda machine of WWII, if not for any other reason. With predictable inflammatory dialogue and plotting and broad burlesque performances by a gaggle of recognizable character actors in familiar stereotypes, Guadalcanal Diary is a rush job notable today for an early appearance by Anthony Quinn, in a role as the token ethnic fellow meant to inspire volunteerism in the barrio.

Halls of Montezuma (1950) – DVD

November 13, 2001Posted in1950s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, War

***½/**** Image A Sound B
starring Richard Widmark, Jack Palance, Reginald Gardiner, Neville Brand
screenplay by Michael Blankfort
directed by Lewis Milestone

by Walter Chaw Released in 1950, Lewis Milestone's Halls of Montezuma is gritty and fascinating, free of a good deal of the jingoism that flavoured earlier WWII studio productions and as influential as they come within the genre. A haunting sequence set during a nighttime rocket attack and lit only by occasional strobes while an unseen enemy screams out at frayed Marines recalls a similar one from Coppola's Apocalypse Now, while Richard Widmark's reluctant Lt. Anderson (a quiet former schoolteacher beset by doubt and anger) and Neville Brand's Sgt. Zelenko are clearly the prototypes for Tom Hanks's Capt. John Miller and Tom Sizemore's Sgt. Horvath, respectively, in Saving Private Ryan. The film's most impressive to the war-movie vocabulary is its ambiguous philosophy: Halls of Montezuma is alive with the creeping suspicion that war may not be all it's cracked up to be–that it might in fact be hell. While there's certainly nothing shocking about that sentiment in our post-Vietnam, post-Korea psyches, that kind of philosophical dissention was rare in the pre-Korea 1950s, and in regards to the unflagging "popularity" of WWII, uncommon even today.

Hostage High (1997) [Director’s Uncut Version] – DVD

November 1, 2001Posted in1990s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, DVD, Television, Thriller

Detention: The Siege at Johnson High
**/**** Image B Sound C+ Extras C
starring Rick Schroder, Henry Winkler, Freddie Prinze Jr., Ren Woods
screenplay by Larry Golin
directed by Michael W. Watkins

by Walter Chaw Kids who go to Columbine High School and don't compete in organized athletics are referred to as "no sports." It's not a kind term. On the weekends in Littleton, crowds of teenagers driving new model Dodge Rams, BMWs, and SUVs collect in area parking lots to make a lot of noise and hoot at people driving by until the police arrive to disperse them–if they bother to come at all. If you're African-American like a good friend of mine, they'll sometimes make monkey noises; if you're Asian like myself, they do the Mr. Miyagi crane pose and laugh like loons. From my personal experience in this community, having 15 of their fellow students die in a hail of bullets did not teach a significant population of Columbiners compassion, tolerance, and respect. Maybe just the opposite.

On the Waterfront (1954) [Special Edition] – DVD

October 29, 2001Posted in****/****, 1950s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Best Picture (Academy Awards), Crime, Directors: Elia Kazan, Drama, DVD, Thriller

****/**** Image A- Sound B Extras B
starring Marlon Brando, Karl Malden, Lee J. Cobb, Rod Steiger
screenplay by Budd Schulberg
directed by Elia Kazan

by Walter Chaw There is a moment in the middle of Elia Kazan’s On the Waterfront that stands out for me as one of the defining in my love of movies. Terry Malloy (Marlon Brando) confesses to his girlfriend Edie Doyle (Eva Marie Saint) that he was involved in the Union execution of her brother, but rather than listen to Terry rehash events with which we’re already familiar, a steam whistle drowns him out. The precise way that Terry moves his hands and the expression on Edie’s face, growing from a gentle concern to horror, is among the most cinematic moments in the history of the medium. It’s breathtaking in its simplicity and subtlety, revolutionary in its presentation and its eye, and exactly the right choice for the film at the right moment.