DIFF ’03: Bright Future

October 19, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, DIFF/SDFF, Drama, Esoterica, Film Festivals, Japan
Akarui mirai***½/****written and directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa by Walter Chaw Like many of Kiyoshi Kurosawa's pictures, Bright Future is about the virulence of apathy, the way that malaise seeps into the cracks of character, infecting ambition into inaction or inspiring sudden, malevolent acts inspired not so much by violence, but by a lack of prevention of violence. The Yin to Takashi Miike's Yang, Kurosawa increasingly finds himself at the fringe of narrative, making this film a remarkable companion piece to Gus Van Sant's similarly haunted, lyrical, and allegorical Elephant. Yuji (Joh Odagiri) is a shiftless youth working in a towel…

The Ox-Bow Incident (1943) – DVD

October 17, 2003Posted in****/****, 1940s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Drama, DVD, FFC Must-Own, Western

****/**** Image A Sound B+ Extras A-
starring Henry Fonda, Dana Andrews, Mary Beth Hughes, Henry Morgan
screenplay by Lamar Trotti, based on the novel by Walter Van Tilburg Clark
directed by William A. Wellman

by Bill Chambers William A. Wellman's 1943 film The Ox-Bow Incident is so brave and piercing that you can overlook its gawky title. That star Henry Fonda had a knack for picking westerns goes without saying, but The Ox-Bow Incident has more gothic qualities than do most oaters made prior to the dawn of Europe staking its genre claim: it's the scene in cowboy flicks where a bunch of guys cheer on an unceremonious hanging expanded to feature-length. The movie has such definitive–and perhaps, given the climate, urgent–things to say about mob mentality, the sour side of fraternity, that the Navy-enlisted Fonda deferred his tour of duty in order to appear in it. What makes this doubly noble is that, despite his lead billing, he's really not The Ox-Bow Incident's leading man. With a cast of dozens granted comparable screen time, no one is.

Veronica Guerin (2003)

October 17, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Crime, Drama, Ireland, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

*/****
starring Cate Blanchett, Gerard McSorley, Ciarán Hinds, Brenda Fricker
screenplay by Carol Doyle and Mary Agnes Donoghue
directed by Joel Schumacher

Veronicaguerinby Walter Chaw By the end of the piece, the only thing missing is John Wayne in ill-fitting Centurion garb, drawling "I do believe she truly was the son of God" over the corpse of slain journalist Veronica Guerin (Cate Blanchett), so at pains is Joel Schumacher's tedious spectacle of a hagiography of Guerin to paint her as some sort of sainted martyr. Veronica Guerin is horrible, really, a passel of forced dramatic slow push-ins framing Blanchett's mannered performance (in a Princess Diana haircut, no less, to really ramp up that pathos) all of insouciantly arched eyebrows and saucy eyeballs and centred dead and soft-lit like a Giotto effigy. Much is made of Guerin's print peers looking down on her, then a closing title card offers a statistic on the number of journalists killed in the line of duty, the suggestion being that journalists are sniffy elitists who don't like someone who can't write, has no background or experience in journalism, and takes unnecessary risks with themselves and their families–and that journalists are heroes regularly martyred by their thirst for truth. You really can't have it both ways, and that lack of focus isn't ambiguity so much as confusion brought about by a mortal dose of self-righteousness.

L’auberge espagnole (2002)

October 17, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, Drama, France, Romance, Spain, Theatrical

***/****
starring Romain Duris, Judith Godrèche, Audrey Tautou, Cécile De France
written and directed by Cédric Klapisch

Laubergeespagnoleby Travis Mackenzie Hoover Cédric Klapisch is the director of a mid-'90s gem called When the Cat's Away; although it wasn't of great shattering importance, it understood that, and turned out to be enjoyably funky nonetheless. Alas, the intervening years have taken their toll on Klapisch's sense of self-importance, because now he's made L'auberge espagnole–a film with the potential to be another enjoyably funky little movie that instead pushes banal life lessons and shallow cultural observations. L'auberge espagnole might have squeaked by had its tale of a French student in a Barcelona rooming house just been a sex farce with low ambitions, but as it stands, it's a sex farce that thinks that it's actual drama, making for some serious head-slapping when it drags out the ersatz "importance."

Pieces of April (2003)

October 17, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Theatrical

**/****
starring Katie Holmes, Patricia Clarkson, Oliver Platt, Derek Luke
written and directed by Peter Hedges

Piecesofaprilby Walter Chaw Modest in its intentions and achievements, Peter Hedges's Pieces of April has an undercurrent of paternalistic racism that verges on the disturbing. April (Katie Holmes, great but wasted) and her boyfriend Bobby (Derek Luke) invite April's difficult family to Thanksgiving dinner. Because it's potentially, ominously, the "last" Thanksgiving, the estranged nuclear unit composed of mom Joy (Patricia Clarkson), dad Jim (Oliver Platt), grandma Dottie (professional grandma Alice Drummond), and their other two children Beth (Alison Pill) and Timmy (John Gallagher Jr.) pack themselves into the station wagon and head up the interstate. The picture cuts between April struggling to find someone in her tenement who'll lend her the use of an oven and the family doing their best to suffer the acerbic, often nasty Joy.

DIFF ’03: Off the Map

October 16, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, DIFF/SDFF, Drama, Film Festivals
***/****screenplay by Joan Ackerman, based on her playdirected by Campbell Scott by Walter Chaw Campbell Scott's Off the Map reminds me of some dimly-remembered authors I used to read when I was younger: Harper Lee, maybe Tony Hillerman in a contemplative mood--alien cultures and modes of thought set to soothing rhythms against a saguaro sunset. More to the point, the film resembles the book its characters read to each other by lamplight: Richard Henry Dana, Jr.'s wonderful Two Years Before the Mast, which I first read when a beloved professor recommended it as a corollary to Melville's Moby Dick and…

DIFF ’03: A Slipping-Down Life

October 15, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, DIFF/SDFF, Drama, Film Festivals, Music, Romance
**½/****screenplay by Toni Kalem, based on the novel by Anne Tylerdirected by Toni Kalem by Walter Chaw With an excellent first hour and a less impressive, almost sprawling second, Toni Kalem's hyphenate debut A Slipping-Down Life finds an excellent cast in the employ of a Southern Gothic about a young woman "awakened" by the "shout outs" of a small-time backwater singer/songwriter. With tunes by Peter Himmelman and nice performances from Guy Pearce and Lili Taylor (too pretty to play the overweight teen protagonist of the Anne Tyler novel on which the film is based), what starts out as unusual and…

DIFF ’03: Casa de los babys

October 15, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, DIFF/SDFF, Drama, Film Festivals, Mexico
*/****written and directed by John Sayles by Walter Chaw It feels increasingly as if John Sayles is a little sick of making John Sayles films. This dramatically inert ensemble piece about a group of American women in a South American limbo hoping to adopt babies feels curiously underwritten and stale despite the heaviness of the dialogue. Maggie Gyllenhaal makes the best impression as a woman of privilege who hopes a child will save her marriage, but like the rest of the cast (Daryl Hannah, Marcia Gay Harden, Lili Taylor, Susan Lynch, Rita Moreno, Mary Steenburgen), her character is composed of…

DIFF ’03: I’m Not Scared

October 14, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, DIFF/SDFF, Drama, Film Festivals, Italy, Mystery, Spain, Thriller, UK
Io non ho paura***/****written by Niccolò Ammaniti, Niccolò Ammaniti, Francesca Marcianodirected by Gabriele Salvatores by Walter Chaw An Italian version of Charles Laughton's Night of the Hunter in many respects, Gabriele Salvatores' I'm Not Scared (Io Non Ho Paura) is admirable in its ability to evoke the dreamy disconnection of childhood--the startling realization at some point along the way that your parents may not be merely flawed, but occasionally malicious. A young boy, Michele (Giuseppe Cristiano), finds a child imprisoned in a hole next to an abandoned house in the middle of an impossibly beautiful fall Tuscan landscape, all yellow…

DIFF ’03: Dallas 362

October 12, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, DIFF/SDFF, Drama, Film Festivals
***½/****written and directed by Scott Caan by Walter Chaw An extremely auspicious hyphenate debut from actor-director Scott Caan (son of James), Dallas 362 is a kinetic and visually literate film composed of Nan Goldin-inspired two-person tableaux that offer a startlingly clear-eyed balance to the force of transitional sequences. An opening montage reminds in the best way of the still-photo manipulation over the main titles of "The Rockford Files", an interesting photo-scoping technique seen in the recent documentary The Kid Stays in the Picture and revisited in the body of the film as a particularly interesting way to tell a flashback.…

Dawson’s Creek: The Series Finale (2003) – DVD

October 12, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Coming of Age, Drama, DVD, Teen, Television

**½/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras A-
starring James Van Der Beek, Katie Holmes, Michelle Williams, Joshua Jackson
screenplay by Kevin Williamson & Maggie Friedman
directed by James Whitmore, Jr. ("All Good Things…") and Greg Prange ("…Must Come to an End")

by Bill Chambers SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. When it first aired, I was fuming. But I've not only come to terms with the series finale of "Dawson's Creek", I've grown to appreciate it, too. What I realized on a second viewing (not as superfluous as you might think: the DVD that facilitated a reassessment restores 20 minutes of footage cut from the broadcast version) was that my own tenuous identification with the main character, a movie lover and amateur filmmaker prone to befriending unattainable hotties, was getting in the way of appreciating a perfectly laudable reversal of expectations. There's no sense beating around the bush: Joey (Katie Holmes) picked suave Pacey (Joshua Jackson). The first "Dawson's Creek" scripted by series creator Kevin Williamson since the second season's "…That Is the Question" (in tandem with which he announced he was stepping down as the show's Professor Marvel), the two-part capper–aired as a movie-of-the-week–leaves Dawson (James Van Der Beek) without a fallback girl, as Joey romantically rejects Dawson on the heels of the passing of her alternate: single-mother Jen (Michelle Williams), who dies from a rare heart condition.

DIFF ’03: What Alice Found

October 12, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, DIFF/SDFF, Drama, Film Festivals
½*/****written and directed by A. Dean Bell by Walter Chaw Petty to fixate on such things, but what to make of a heavy Boston accent that appears and disappears so randomly (in a character from New Hampshire, for God's sake) that it causes one to wonder why they even bothered in the first place? The performances in the digital cheapie What Alice Found are uniformly awful, but Emily Grace as titular trailer-park refugee Alice is a special case, trembling between Tori Spelling and Melanie Hutsell's SNL impersonation of Tori Spelling--all zombie stares, eye-rolling, and lop-sided sneers. Out of the park and…

DIFF ’03: Wilbur Wants to Kill Himself

October 11, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Denmark, DIFF/SDFF, Drama, Film Festivals, France, Sweden, UK
Wilbur Begar Selvmord***½/****written by Lone Scherfig, Anders Thomas Jensendirected by Lone Scherfig by Walter Chaw Uncompromising yet surprisingly gentle for all that, Lone Scherfig's Wilbur Wants to Kill Himself is an unmannered character drama about Wilbur (Jamie Sives), despondent and suicidal after the death of his father; Wilbur's older brother, Harbour (Adrian Rawlins), who's taking the family's loss much better; and Harbour's new wife, Alice (the self-swallowing, eternally imploding Shirley Henderson), who finds love for the first time only to find it again in her husband's mordant brother. A psychiatric support group is funny in predictably quirky ways (though its…

DIFF ’03: Dark Cities

October 9, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, DIFF/SDFF, Drama, Film Festivals, Mexico
Ciudades oscurasDark City½*/****written by Juan Madrid, Enrique Renteria, Fernando Sariñanadirected by Fernando Sariñana by Walter Chaw Fernando Sariñana's grimy Dark Cities (Ciudades oscuras) is essentially a series of hardboiled vignettes that criss-cross in perfunctory ways over the course of one miserable night. Infanticide, rape, castration, long chats with corpses, murder, graft, and a criminal amount of hysterical camera tricks combine in a stew so sour and unintentionally funny that it plays out like the love child of City of Hope and Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer--with hookers. Not enough can be said about the invasiveness of Sariñana's camera: it's…

DIFF ’03: Noi the Albino

October 9, 2003Posted in****/****, 2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Denmark, DIFF/SDFF, Drama, Esoterica, Film Festivals, Germany, Iceland, UK
Nói albinói****/****written and directed by Dagur Kári by Walter Chaw Dagur Kári's Noi the Albino (Nói Albinói) is a film about emptiness, really--a terrific picture crouched in the centre of a blasted Icelandic winter, with its titular hero, Nói (Tómas Lemarquis), too smart for the isolation. When the beautiful Iris (Elin Hansdóttir, wow) comes to work in the town-of-maybe-100-people's convenience store, Nói finds himself for perhaps the first time motivated for long enough to aspire to something larger. A Steve Earle song directed by Jim Jarmusch, the picture is deadpan hilarious and haunted by the oppressive power of dark and…

Sunday Bloody Sunday (1971) – DVD

October 9, 2003Posted in1970s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Drama, DVD, UK

**½/**** Image B Sound B+
starring Peter Finch, Glenda Jackson, Murray Hedd, Peggy Ashcroft
screenplay by Penelope Gilliatt
directed by John Schlesinger

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover "Are you bourgeois?" asks a child in Sunday Bloody Sunday, hoping to catch an adult in an awkward moment, and the question is crucial to your enjoyment of the film. If you are well-off enough to have good taste and fine things, and are somewhat guilty about the freedom and power that entails, then it will seem a sober and mature work about life and love in the post-hippie '70s. If, on the other hand, you are just scraping by and worrying about where your next meal is coming from, the film will seem a self-piteous soap opera in love with the idea of defeat. There's no denying the skill and professionalism at work here–it's what mid-period Woody Allen wishes it were, but it never quite licks the question of what to do with bourgie liberal guilt, and thus waffles towards an underwhelming conclusion.

DIFF ’03: Bought & Sold

October 8, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, DIFF/SDFF, Drama, Film Festivals
**/****written and directed by Michael Tolajian by Walter Chaw Michael Tolajian's Bought & Sold is a low-aspiring inner-city fairy tale featuring an Oscar De La Hoya-looking hoodlum protagonist named Ray Ray (Rafael Sardina) who dreams of buying DJ turntables from the local pawn shop while working part-time at a shoe store. He falls in with the wrong crowd, ends up going undercover for a local godfather in the pawn under kindly Armenian storekeeper (Isiah Whitlock Jr.), and gets twitterpated for the pawnshop owner's niece, Ruby (beautiful Marjan Neshat)--all of which unfolds in a herky-jerky kind of way as Tolajian's dialogue…

DIFF ’03: Assisted Living

October 7, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DIFF/SDFF, Drama, Film Festivals
**/****written and directed by Elliot Greenbaum by Walter Chaw Playing at times like a documentary (indeed, the film used the residents of its retirement-home setting as extras), Assisted Living is a troubling picture, balanced as it is midway between fiction and essay, with some actors feigning dementia and others clearly in its sway. Todd (Michael Bonsignore) is a pot-smoking twentysomething working at a nursing home--a kind-hearted soul, it seems, burned out in more ways than one and fixated on one of his charges, Mrs. Pearlman (Maggie Riley). Their relationship really not much more than a sketch, Todd's "rescue" of Mrs.…

DIFF ’03: The Station Agent (2003)

October 2, 2003Posted in****/****, 2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DIFF/SDFF, Drama, Film Festivals, Theatrical

****/****
starring Peter Dinklage, Patricia Clarkson, Bobby Cannavale, Raven Goodwin
written and directed by Thomas McCarthy

by Walter Chaw If there's a flaw to Thomas McCarthy's The Station Agent, it's that there are elements to the narrative that don't make a lot of literal sense–the question of why someone would set up a coffee cart in the middle of a remote train yard the most obvious one that springs to mind. But in a film shot through with the melancholy hue of Longfellow's "My Lost Youth," gaps in credibility should be seen as poetic device, perhaps, or metaphor. The picture is heartbreak, a diary of the million betrayals and disappointments that make up an over-examined life composed all of loneliness and solitude. At its best, The Station Agent captures the isolation of any soul too sensitive, too intelligent for the harsh inconsiderateness of a world more interested in brashness than subtlety.

Holes (2003) [Widescreen] – DVD

September 30, 2003Posted in2000s, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Disney, Drama, DVD, Family, Mystery

**/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
starring Sigourney Weaver, Jon Voight, Patricia Arquette, Shia LaBeouf
screenplay by Louis Sachar, based on his novel
directed by Andrew Davis

by Walter Chaw A certain level of grotesquerie in a children's entertainment is essential, but at some point grotesquerie just becomes grotesque. Holes, adapted by Louis Sachar from his award-winning children's novel, is a cheerless little melodrama, dusty and marooned in the middle of nowhere with what is essentially a pint-sized version of the time-tripping buffoonery of The Hours. Its tale of destiny and stroking the sins of the fathers rattles along its rails like a rusted-out mine cart, going to where it's going with a lot of noise and broken-down drama but without anything like surprise.