DIFF ’04: Kinsey

October 14, 2004Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, DIFF/SDFF, Drama, Film Festivals, Germany, Romance
***/****starring Liam Neeson, Laura Linney, Chris O'Donnell, Peter Sarsgaardwritten and directed by Bill Condon by Walter Chaw Liam Neeson plays the venerable zoologist-turned-sex scientist Alfred Kinsey, who, buoyed by a supportive Indiana University Bloomington dean (Oliver Platt) and a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, single-handedly drew back the curtains on the human libido in the rigid 1950s (1948-1953). The picture (written/directed by Gods and Monsters' Bill Condon) covers Kinsey's contentious relationship with his stentorian father (John Lithgow, reprising his evil preacher performance from Footloose), his open relationship with wife Clara "Mac" Kinsey (Laura Linney), and his stewardship of young Clyde…

DIFF ’04: Unknown Soldier

October 14, 2004Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, DIFF/SDFF, Drama, Film Festivals
*½/****starring Carl Louis, Postell Pringle, Carl Garrison, Layla Edwardswritten and directed by Ferenc Tóth by Walter Chaw With Unknown Soldier, a film that militarizes the terminology for the plight of inner-city youth, debuting writer-director Ferenc Tóth demonstrates a nice touch behind the camera but an anvil's touch at the typewriter. The story of a young man (Ellison (Carl Louis)) who loses his father--then his mooring, then his home, then his girl--before being shamed back into respectability takes on all the tedious trappings of the new urban template for coming-of-age dramas. The digital video looks a touch over-sharp, even as the rest…

Raising Helen (2004) [Widescreen] – DVD

October 12, 2004Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Romance

½*/**** Image A Sound A- Extras C
starring Kate Hudson, John Corbett, Joan Cusack, Hayden Panettiere
screenplay by Jack Amiel & Michael Begler
directed by Garry Marshall

by Walter Chaw I made a promise to myself after The Other Sister to never watch another Garry Marshall film, but I guess I don't have enough self-respect. Raising Helen is repellent in the way of roadside carrion: it just sort of lies there stinking, making it hard to find the energy to attack it. (Something about beating dead horses and all that.) To endure Raising Helen is to surrender to the quintessence of that which is wrong with our culture, to the definition of a term like "disposable culture," and to the self-knowledge that what you really want from your entertainment is the comfortable affirmation of schmaltzy emotions provoked countless times before by countless identical romantic comedies. Going to this movie is the equivalent of giving up on an intellectual and emotional life. Raising Helen will only appeal to and attract people with pathologically little patience for films that challenge them in any way, that elicit genuine reactions and are thus threatening for their potential to penetrate the carefully constructed layers of numb denial that make unexamined lives liveable–films that provide anything like insight into any level of existential verity. It is the lowest rung on the escapist ladder, representative of some wholly self-contained fantasy world where the racial make-up of Queens is 99% WASP and 1% quirky East Indian, and where Kate Hudson's incandescent choppers are Leading Lady material.

Cannonball (1976) – DVD

October 11, 2004Posted in1970s, Action, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Blue Underground, Comedy, Crime, Drama, DVD, Hong Kong, Thriller

**/**** Image A Sound A- Extras A-
starring David Carradine, Bill McKinney, Veronica Hamel, Belinda Balaski
screenplay by Paul Bartel and Donald C. Simpson
directed by Paul Bartel

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover On paper, Cannonball is a no-brainer, with the thought of re-teaming Death Race 2000 director Paul Bartel and star David Carradine looking as tantalizing as it does obvious–the gravitas of the latter having so successfully anchored the satirical jabs of the former. Alas, Roger Corman's low threshold for resisting an easy buck seems to have saddled Cannonball with the thing that interested Bartel the least, forcing him to shoehorn his attempts at spoofery into a road-race format where they don't really belong. Thus the film is constantly at cross-purposes with itself, crushing the satire under the wheels of expediency and diluting the adrenaline rush with comedic asides that now lack relevance. The result jerks forward like a beginning driver trying to pop a wheelie. A few choice bits hint at a better movie, but that's it.

Primer (2004)

October 8, 2004Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller, Time Travel

*½/****
starring Shane Carruth, David Sullivan, Casey Gooden, Anand Upadhyaya
written and directed by Shane Carruth

Primerby Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. There's something of the word walls of Gertrude Stein or Eugene Ionesco about Primer, the indie Sundance sensation that would have been rode out of town on a rail if it weren't about time travel in addition to being obscure (thus garnering it nervous intellectual comparisons to La Jetée instead of a more accurate likening to David Mamet-cum-István Szabó). I suspect that a lot of people are afraid to admit they don't understand what's happening in the film, which talks too much in too stultifying a fashion, obscuring its heart of glass with blizzards of expositive candy in the faint hope that people are too dazzled by the rhetoric to ever consider the little guy behind the curtain. Whatever genre can do to fabulize lizard fears into metaphorical eurekas!, it can also lend a pre-emptive weight to flimsy pieces presented for the approval of audiences perhaps unaccustomed to science-fiction. In truth, Primer is more Theatre of the Absurd than sci-fi, with yuppie iterations of Vladimir and Estragon having an endless circular conversation while waiting for a Godot who never really comes. Taken as such, there arises the possibility of seeing the film as commentary on the essential listless, deconstructive jingo-babble of engineers and white-shirt-print-tie professions–though I suspect Primer has a lot more to do with a decision somewhere along the line to make a "what if?" time-travel flick as dense and protracted as possible.

Zachariah (1971) – DVD

October 6, 2004Posted in1970s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Mexico, Musical, Western

**½/**** Image A- Sound A-
starring John Rubinstein, Pat Quinn, Don Johnson, Country Joe and the Fish
screenplay by Joe Massot and Philip Austin and Peter Bergman, David Ossman, Philip Proctor (known as Firesign Theatre)
directed by George Englund

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Think back with me, for a moment, to a bygone era when rock was strange: a hippie-descending, proto-glam period when the buzz was off the love generation but a bumbling mystic energy remained–when record producers were getting into bed with the likes of Alejandro Jodorowsky and Mick Jagger could be seen in the gender-bending gangster drama Performance. It was a self-aggrandizing, frequently ridiculous time, but it had a tolerance for eccentricity that's impossible to find in our Britneyfied MTV age and for which I can only be wistfully nostalgic. Lacking both the money and the conceptual force to fully realize its acid-western ambitions, Zachariah isn't even close to being the quintessential flashback to those days (it may in fact simply be cashing in on a trend), but its half-flubbed attempts at pop-surrealism seem a tonic now that the mainstream pop landscape is largely imagined by accountants.

Ladder 49 (2004)

October 1, 2004Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Theatrical, Thriller

½*/****
starring Joaquin Phoenix, John Travolta, Jacinda Barrett, Morris Chestnut
screenplay by Lewis Colick
directed by Jay Russell

Ladder49by Walter Chaw I hate this film. It's shameless treacle with the maudlin dialled at near-lethal levels. It's Backdraft II: Post 9/11, a soap opera hagiography of firefighters that's as soft and sentimental as any sweeps-week episode of Oprah–and just as unforgivably self-aggrandizing and smug. Ladder 49 is a convention of Midwestern middle-school teachers' idea of a good time, a collection of fatigued contrivances and squeaky clean, buttermilk-scrubbed cardboard characters posed carefully for maximum schmaltz. It's a big plate of nachos: lots of corn, lots of cheese, easy to swallow, hard to digest. I have a lot of contempt for this film because it has a lot of contempt for its audience: Call it the self-defense school of taking aim at a piece of crap, or a losing battle to save the folks sobbing loudly into their hankies when the lights come up. In its insidious way, Ladder 49 is as dangerous as other middlebrow epics like Radio and The Other Sister, pictures in which edgeless noble savages teach us through their selfless examples about life and about what it means to avoid real responsibility and community involvement. Weeping in a back-patting sort of way over a film like Ladder 49 is, for many, the equivalent of giving at the office.

The Untouchables (1987) – DVD|[Special Collector’s Edition] – DVD

September 28, 2004Posted in1980s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Vincent Suarez, Crime, Directors: Brian De Palma, Drama, DVD, Gangster, Thriller

***½/****
DVD – Image A- Sound A-
SCE DVD – Image B+ Sound A- Extras B+
starring Kevin Costner, Charles Martin Smith, Andy Garcia, Sean Connery
screenplay by David Mamet
directed by Brian De Palma

by Vincent Suarez Will the real Brian De Palma please stand up?

The Motorcycle Diaries (2004)

September 24, 2004Posted in2000s, Adventure, Argentina, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Brazil, Chile, Drama, France, Germany, Peru, Theatrical, UK

***/****
starring Gael García Bernal, Rodrigo De la Serna, Mía Maestro, Mercedes Morán
screenplay by Jose Rivera, based on the books Notas de viaje by Ernesto Guevara and Con el Che por America Latina by Alberto Granado
directed by Walter Salles

Motorcyclediariesby Walter Chaw Adapting respective memoirs by then-young Cuban-by-way-of-Argentine revolutionary Ché Guevara (Gael García Bernal) and his best friend Alberto Granado (Rodrigo De la Serna) that documented their Kerouac-ian odyssey down the spine of South America to find the soul of their country, Walter Salles's The Motorcycle Diaries is difficult at best. It's a road movie and a good one, as far as it goes, but it lacks the fire of change of something like Easy Rider in its substitution of a picaresque travelogue lightly spiced with delightful romantic misunderstandings for Peter Fonda's swiftly tilting planet and deserts of the real. Easy Rider talks about the dying of the light; The Motorcycle Diaries talks about how doe-eyed Ernesto Guevara became Ché, the Hoffa of Latin America and eventually the most reproduced and mass-marketed image since Marilyn Monroe's.

September Tapes (2004)

September 22, 2004Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Pseudo-Documentary, Theatrical, Thriller, War, ZERO STARS

Septem8er Tapes
ZERO STARS/****
starring George Calil, Wali Razaqi
screenplay by Christian Johnston & Christian Van Gregg
directed by Christian Johnston

Septembertapesby Walter Chaw Exactly the kind of exploitative garbage that fellow post-9/11er The Guys was, September Tapes recasts The Blair Witch Project as a hunt for Osama Bin Laden in the wilderness of Afghanistan. It's this sort of film that takes collective tragedy and renders it something several degrees south of inconsequential, boiling horror down to soups and bones. The film is a vile, thick reduction, making a 9/11 victim's last cries the catalyst for a dimwitted first-person shooter with an unsympathetic protagonist and such stunning–and stunningly unsubstantiated–claims as, "America's not serious about tracking down Bin Laden." Maybe so, maybe not, but September Tapes isn't about politics, it's about bad filmmakers armed with a bad idea teaching an audience they imagine is less-informed than they are a lesson in seeking vengeance like a man. It's the "let's roll" school of Yankee machismo, the "bring it on" theory of diplomacy and warfare, and when the flick turns into the nightmare revisionist cartoon of Rambo, that susurration you hear isn't tension, it's resignation and maybe disgust. 9/11 has to be more than an excuse to make bad action/adventure flicks or (like The Guys) self-pitying chamber dramas.

Silver City (2004)

September 22, 2004Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Mystery, Satire, Theatrical, Thriller

*½/****
starring Chris Cooper, Richard Dreyfuss, Billy Zane, Danny Huston
written and directed by John Sayles

Silvercityby Walter Chaw The Summitville Mine Disaster in Colorado left over 20 miles of the Alamosa river "dead," so contaminated by waste materials (cyanide chief among them) that it very simply killed all the fish. A good thing, I guess, that there wasn't a sizable human population downstream. A superfund site now and fast becoming a sore election point in a Senate race between A.G. Ken Salazar and beer magnate Pete Coors as third-party interests begin a round of misleading, venomous attack ads, Summitville represents in a way a handy microcosm of the ugliness of the Kerry/Bush presidential election. There's a point when third-party interests and smear campaigns, on either side of the divide, start to demean all of us as a people, feeding on our worst instincts and treating us like dumb, mute animals. The political discourse in our country has devolved into a playground jibe match where it's easy to forget in the mud storm who's the rubber and who's the glue; no great surprise that the general death of conversation in our culture includes the whole spectrum of politics.

Saved! (2004) – DVD

September 20, 2004Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Satire

½*/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras B-
starring Jena Malone, Mandy Moore, Macaulay Culkin, Patrick Fugit
screenplay by Brian Dannelly & Michael Urban
directed by Brian Dannelly

Savedcap

Hot on the heels of Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen and Mean Girls, Saved! presents the same evil-girl-clique-victimizes-good-girl formula that is still defined by the wicked Machiavellian brilliance of Heathers, the last word on eloquence and intelligence in the bully sub-genre of teensploitation. In the wake of Columbine and the end-of-the-millennium spate of school mayhem, the greatest disappointment isn't the unabated gratification of the jock set, but the fact that school-based satires have yet to find the courage to address the absurdity of reaction post-atrocity while continuing to produce school-based satires at an unabated clip. If anything speaks to the ultimate triumph of the guilty bourgeoisie and the ineffectual leadership in charge of our nation's public schools, it's the glaring inadequacy of our cinema, that most agile and sensitive of our cultural barometers, in reproducing the voice of the oppressed. It's up to television's "Freaks and Geeks" (was, anyway) and NPR's stable of gifted monologists (Sarah Vowell, Dave Eggars, David Sedaris, and so on) to pick up the considerable slack.

Kaena: The Prophecy (2003) + The Lion King II: Simba’s Pride (1998) [2-Disc Special Edition] – DVDs

September 20, 2004Posted in1990s, 2000s, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Disney, Drama, DVD, Family, Fantasy, France, Musical, Romance, Sci-Fi

KAENA: THE PROPHECY
*/**** Image A Sound B Extras C
screenplay by Tarik Hamoine and Chris Delaporte
directed by Chris Delaporte

THE LION KING II: SIMBA'S PRIDE
½*/**** Image B Sound B- Extras C+
screenplay by Flip Kobler and Cindy Marcus
directed by Rob LaDuca & Darrell Rooney

by Walter Chaw There's a timorous, resonant quality to Kirsten Dunst's voice. It's amazing, really: it vibrates at a contralto as tense and lovely as a cello string drawn–I think it's her most attractive feature. She's tailor-made, then, to be a vocal performer, and finds herself as such in French filmmaker Chris Delaporte's plodding misfire of a movie Kaena: The Prophecy. Completely computer-animated, it's every bit as ugly and prosaic as its American cousin Ice Age (insomuch as it even includes a prehistoric-squirrel vignette towards the end) and obsessed with the jiggle dimensions of Kaena (or is that me, obsessed?), who must save her tree-world Axis from destruction at the hands of the evil Selenites (whose queen is voiced by Anjelica Huston). The story is so Joseph Campbell hero's journey-obsessed, so humourless and–how do I say it delicately?–Bakshi in its execution, that poor Dunst, in the title role, is wasted on plucky pronouncements and grunts of exertion as her .gif alter-ego leaps hither and yon.

TIFF ’04: Palindromes

September 15, 2004Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Drama, Esoterica, Film Festivals, TIFF
*½/****starring Ellen Barkin, Stephen Adly Guirgis, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Richard Masurwritten and directed by Todd Solondz by Bill Chambers Preceded by the snarkiest, if also funniest, on-screen dedication since The War Zone's "For my father" ("In loving memory of Dawn Wiener"--Dawn being the pre-teen heroine of Todd Solondz's breakthrough feature Welcome to the Dollhouse), Solondz's fifth film, Palindromes, is a virtual sprinkler head oscillating back and forth to spritz everything in the director's purview with venom. (It's his idea of moral ambivalence.) A "palindrome" is something that reads the same forwards and backwards, and by casting several different actresses to…

TIFF ’04: Keane

September 14, 2004Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Drama, Film Festivals, Mystery, Thriller, TIFF
***½/****starring Damian Lewis, Abigail Breslin, Amy Ryanwritten and directed by Lodge Kerrigan by Bill Chambers It may seem as though Lodge Kerrigan is spinning his wheels by revisiting the territory of his directorial debut two pictures later, but this actually provides a means by which to judge Kerrigan's maturation as an auteur. Only slightly more prolific than Terrence Malick, Kerrigan quietly penetrated the indie scene with 1994's Clean, Shaven, which cast Peter Greene--in a role that brilliantly exploited the actor's own mercurial nature--as Peter Winter, a paranoid schizophrenic scoping out his only child and her new parents; the film furnishes…

TIFF ’04: p.s.

September 13, 2004Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Drama, Film Festivals, Romance, TIFF
P.S.**½/****starring Laura Linney, Topher Grace, Gabriel Byrne, Marcia Gay Hardenscreenplay by Helen Schulman and Dylan Kidd, based on the novel by Helen Schulmandirected by Dylan Kidd by Bill Chambers Curious that Dylan Kidd, the mind behind the revelatory Roger Dodger, felt compelled to include a "director's statement" in the pressbook for his sophomore feature, p.s., but it's nonetheless an essential read in that it gives the lie to artist intentionality. "From Aristotle to Joseph Campbell to Robert McKee," Kidd writes, "everyone's in agreement: you can't have drama without obstacles...The idea behind p.s. was to tell a story where nothing stands…

TIFF ’04: Sideways

September 12, 2004Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Drama, Film Festivals, TIFF
***/****starring Paul Giamatti, Thomas Haden Church, Virginia Madsen, Sandra Ohscreenplay by Alexander Payne & Jim Taylor, based on the novel by Rex Pickettdirected by Alexander Payne by Bill Chambers Alexander Payne has a gift for wry humour, of course, and in Sideways, there's a nice, sardonic hold on a bathroom door's sign--"MEN"--after Jack (Thomas Haden Church), having learned nothing from a sour indiscretion that netted him a broken nose, starts hitting on a waitress. By the same token, the curlicue noted above is typical of the level of organization, for lack of a better word, in Payne's work, which always…

TIFF ’04: White Skin

September 10, 2004Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Canada, Drama, Film Festivals, Horror, Mystery, Thriller, TIFF
La Peau blanche**/****starring Marc Paquet, Marianne Farley, Frédéric Pierre, Jessica Malkascreenplay by Joël Champetier, Daniel Roby, based on the novel by Joël Champetierdirected by Daniel Roby by Bill Chambers I had a pretty good idea of where White Skin (La Peau blanche) was headed, and although I was more tickled that it had the French-word-for-chutzpah to go to those ludicrous extremes than disappointed that the outcome was vaguely predictable (if movies never failed to surprise me, it would only mean that I watch as many as I do in vain (besides which, no film uses a clip from Rabid indiscriminately)),…

The Martian Chronicles (1980) – DVD

September 8, 2004Posted in1980s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Television, UK

½*/**** Image B- Sound B-
starring Rock Hudson, Gayle Hunnicutt, Bernie Casey, Roddy McDowell
screenplay by Richard Matheson, based on the novel by Ray Bradbury
directed by Michael Anderson

by Walter Chaw There is and probably always will be a warm place in my heart for Ray Bradbury. The author of my childhood in many ways, Bradbury taught me about poetry in "April Witch," about fear in The Dark Carnival and Something Wicked This Way Comes, about dry irony in "A Sound of Thunder" and "There Will Come Soft Rains," and about vengeance reptilian and cold in "The Veldt." His only real work of science-fiction, Fahrenheit 451, remains an interesting touchstone of unintentional messages couched in seriomythic terminologies, but his output is moored deep, intractably deep, in the literary. Bradbury doesn't transpose well to different mediums (and a book of poetry, When Elephants Last in the Dooryard Bloomed, was somehow even more disastrous than the multiple attempts to export the author to television and film)–he's too purple, his philosophies too immature, his worldview embarrassingly simplistic and only really current for children or the childish. I'll never be able to exactly express the thrill, the horror, of my first reading of "Mars is Heaven" when I was in third grade. Nor have I been able to replicate it by reading it again since.

TIFF ’04: Blood

September 7, 2004Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Canada, Drama, Film Festivals, TIFF
*½/****starring Emily Hampshire, Jacob Tierneyscreenplay by Jerry Ciccoritti, based on the play by Tom Walmsleydirected by Jerry Ciccoritti by Bill Chambers Just the other day I watched Dial M for Murder, a single-set movie faithfully adapted from a stage play that never quite becomes theatre-on-film because, let's face it, we're talking about Alfred Hitchcock here. Jerry Ciccoritti is no Alfred Hitchcock--not that Ciccoritti's Blood wants or tries to be Dial M for Murder, but its Mike Figgis, let's-see-what-this-button-does aesthetic so reeks of overcompensation as to end up not only preserving the material's stage roots in amber, but also lulling us…