Death to Smoochy (2002)

Posted 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.

Panic Room (2002)

Posted 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.

Ali (2001) – DVD

Posted 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

Posted 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

Posted 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)

Posted 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)

Posted 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

Posted 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)

Posted 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.

The Perez Family (1995) – DVD

Posted in1990s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Romance

***/**** Image A Sound A
starring Marisa Tomei, Alfred Molina, Chazz Palminteri, Anjelica Huston
screenplay by Robin Swicord
directed by Mira Nair

by Walter Chaw Sensuous and lush with a hint of Isabel Allende’s magical realism in the bleeding of a man’s broken heart and a string of rose petals trailing a line along the belly of a new lover, Mira Nair’s lovely The Perez Family is all ripe colours, song, sex, honour, and dance. A long-lost father asks his wife upon their decades-long separation if their grown daughter remembers him: “She says she remembers dancing with you.” In The Perez Family, that’s only as it should be.

Training Day (2001) – DVD

Posted 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

Posted 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.

The Hole (2001) [Deluxe Special Edition] – DVD

The Hole (2001) [Deluxe Special Edition] – DVD

Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Canada, Drama, DVD, France, Mystery, Thriller, UK

**½/**** Image A Sound B Extras B
starring Thora Birch, Desmond Harrington, Daniel Brocklebank, Laurence Fox
screenplay by Ben Cort & Caroline Ip, based on the novel After the Hole by Guy Burt
directed by Nick Hamm

by Bill Chambers Sam Mendes, her American Beauty director, has called her the next Marlon Brando; indeed, I wrote in my list of the Top 10 Films of 2001 that I find Thora Birch the most captivating actress working, and I meant it. Her Ghost World performance struck me as a modern parallel to Brando in roles as disparate as Terry Malloy or Don Corleone, not for any more explicit reason than the way the film becomes a living, breathing animal when she’s on screen and the fact that she looms large over scenes from which she’s absent. The same is true for the British production The Hole, in which she is again the very convincing centre of gravity. She’s dynamite, though the movie itself wants for an artist of Mendes’s or Terry Zwigoff’s calibre to pull it all together.

97 Brooks (2002)

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

*½/****
starring Colleen Wainwright, Robert Beckwith, Jason Sales, J. Keith Butler
written and directed by Mikon A. Haaksman

by Walter Chaw In order to get someone to vomit, one character asks another if they’d like to eat at Long John Silver’s. It’s a bright comic moment in the midst of the otherwise awkwardly scripted 97 Brooks, the zero-budget digital video debut of Mikon A. Haaksman, who raised money for his project by soliciting contributions from friends and family. While the cast (largely composed of Haaksman’s friends) is game, the screenplay, direction, and editing betray them at every turn. 97 Brooks lacks pace and rhythm–that visual or thematic hallmark that would have guided the movie over its essential lack of ear and many a narrative leap and difficulty. It isn’t so much that 97 Brooks is a terrible film, it’s that it has neither the wit nor the special something to overcome its amateurish screenplay and production values.

Monsoon Wedding (2001)

Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, France, Germany, India, Italy, Romance, Theatrical

**½/****
starring Naseeruddin Shah, Lillete Dubey, Shefali Shetty, Vijay Raaz
screenplay by Sabrina Dhawan
directed by Mira Nair

by Walter Chaw Mira Nair’s Monsoon Wedding plays like an unedited wedding video, capturing peccadillo along with celebration and ugliness along with beauty. Slyly, a little in the manner of an Ousmane Sembene film, it weaves the troubling elements of its culture into the rituals of joy. (In the case of Monsoon Wedding, Nair explores India’s caste system, American cultural diffusion, the question of expatriated sons, and the inevitable death of tradition.) Yet Monsoon Wedding is also an exuberant Bollywood-lite soap opera with flat characterizations and badly telegraphed plot points punctuated periodically by bombastic sitar sing-alongs. What most separates Nair’s piece from Sembene’s masterpieces, however, is that ineffable sense of naturalism which better defines a culture than an abuse of its mad cinema’s mad archetypes.

The Anniversary Party (2001) – DVD

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

**½/**** Image A Sound A Extras A+
starring Jennifer Jason Leigh, Alan Cumming, Jane Adams, Jennifer Beals
written and directed by Alan Cumming/Jennifer Jason Leigh

by Walter Chaw The overriding feeling in and of The Anniversary Party is high anxiety. The film represents a study of the ways in which insecurities manifest themselves through a dazzling panoply of multifarious defense mechanisms: pretension, jealousy, aggression, bootlicking, hostility, inappropriate flirtation, and casual drug abuse. It’s telling that for a toast, someone recites the last stanza of Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach”*–telling not for the sentiment of steadfastness in the face of societal unkindness, but for the fact that the poem has already once received a revision (in 1922 as “The Dover Bitch” by Anthony Hecht) and clearly receives another in Alan Cumming and Jennifer Jason Leigh’s very personal hyphenate debut. Not content to point out that the world is an ugly place, The Anniversary Party dares to suggest that the world’s ugliness is very often a product of marauding hordes of neurotic internal demons.

Heist (2001) – DVD

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

**/**** Image B+ Sound B+
starring Gene Hackman, Danny DeVito, Delroy Lindo, Rebecca Pidgeon
written and directed by David Mamet

by Walter Chaw David Mamet the writer repeats himself in tight blobs of verbal noise, awkward turns of phrase, and staccato blasts. Mamet directs movies, I suspect, to preserve every beat of his favourite screenwriter’s (Mamet) careful, layered scripts. How he continues to lure big-name actors and producers to play in his exclusive little quicksand boxes of narrative dysfunction is a mystery. For as distinct as the celebrated playwright’s dialogue is, almost more so is the lamentable instinct to cast his largely talentless wives in pivotal roles (first Lindsay Crouse, now the consistently abominable Rebecca Pidgeon), not neglecting Mamet’s inability to transcend the mannered and under-populated staginess of the theatre in which he belongs.

Newsies (1992) [Collector’s Edition] – DVD

Newsies (1992) [Collector’s Edition] – DVD

Posted in1990s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Disney, Drama, DVD, Family, Musical

*½/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras B
starring Christian Bale, Bull Pullman, Ann-Margret, Robert Duvall
screenplay by Bob Tzudiker & Noni White
directed by Kenny Ortega

by Walter Chaw If the crick in my neck is any indication, I watched Kenny Ortega’s Newsies like a dog hears a new sound. Most probably, my eyebrow was also arched. I always marvel that a racist bit of juvenilia became The King and I, for instance, or when someone decides to turn a “Romeo and Juliet” into a West Side Story. So when I say that I am clueless as to how the newspaper-hawker strike of 1899 could make for a good musical, I might not be the best person to ask.

A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001) [Two-Disc Special Edition – Widescreen] – DVD

Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Directors: Stanley Kubrick, Drama, DVD, Esoterica, Sci-Fi, Spielberg

***/**** Image A Sound A Extras A-
starring Haley Joel Osment, Jude Law, Frances O'Connor, Brendan Gleeson
screenplay by Steven Spielberg, based on the screen story by Ian Watson and the short story "Supertoys Last All Summer Long" by Brian Aldiss
directed by Steven Spielberg

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover It begins dreadfully and stays that way for ages. It fumbles for what it thinks it wants to say, often missing the objective completely. Its ending is too long and too confused, and it casts a pall over the good things that came before. It marries the efforts of two filmmakers in uncomfortable ways and often short-circuits them both. But for better or worse, it is A.I. Artificial Intelligence–the best, most resonant, and most disturbing film Steven Spielberg has made in years, and a movie that deserves far more respect than it's been getting.

A Glimpse of Hell (2001) – DVD

Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Drama, DVD, Television

**/**** Image A Sound A-
starring James Caan, Robert Sean Leonard, Daniel Roebuck, Jamie Harrold
screenplay by David Freed
directed by Mikael Salomon

by Walter Chaw Apart from the satirical possibilities, it appears that the rationale behind the title A Glimpse of Hell is the graphic aftermath of an explosion in the gunnery chamber of the U.S.S. Iowa. A made-for-TV docudrama that breeds Edward Dmytryk’s The Caine Mutiny with Rob Reiner’s A Few Good Men, A Glimpse of Hell impresses only with its dedication to mediocrity. While the subject is topical, recounting the possible malfeasance aboard an aging battleship that resulted in a magazine explosion, the execution is theatrical and cardboard from direction (by Mikael Salomon, cinematographer of The Abyss) to performance.