DIFF ’03: Shattered Glass

October 21, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Canada, DIFF/SDFF, Drama, Film Festivals
***/****written and directed by Billy Ray by Walter Chaw The saga of disgraced NEW REPUBLIC journalist Stephen Glass is retraced in Billy Ray's hyphenate debut Shattered Glass, an unassuming walk across the crossed threads of deceptive webs fuelled by an interesting pair of performances from Hayden Christensen as Glass and Peter Sarsgaard as embattled editor Chuck Lane. Fascinatingly repetitive, the picture itself is something of a scam, portraying Glass's tall tales in straight flashback fashion before systematically debunking them, replicating, in a sense, the feeling of betrayal that Glass's readership, his audience, must have felt upon learning that they'd been…

The Whales of August (1987) – DVD

October 20, 2003Posted in1980s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Drama, DVD

**½/**** Image A- Sound A-
starring Bette Davis, Lillian Gish, Vincent Price, Anne Sothern
screenplay by David Berry, based on his play
directed by Lindsay Anderson

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Auteurists take note: sometimes, economic circumstances play hell with your theories. There is the example of Lindsay Anderson, who began in the '60s as a star of the new British realism (This Sporting Life, et al) and went surrealist with the celebrated Mick Travis trilogy. By the end of the '80s, his particular quirks were no longer commercial, and he was reduced to sausages like The Whales of August, which bears absolutely no resemblance to the work that made his reputation. Try as one might, the film won't fit the brash, cynical template of Anderson's best work and is instead polite and obsequious in ways that a free director would never be. The resulting film is workmanlike but hardly compelling and serves mainly as a showcase for a group of aged actors who deserved better material almost as much as their director.

DIFF ’03: The Wild Dogs

October 20, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, DIFF/SDFF, Drama
**/****written and directed by Thom Fitzgerald by Walter Chaw Thom Fitzgerald makes movies that celebrate the cult of himself. Carefully nourished by his sense of smug self-satisfaction like a private pleasure garden, his pictures, numbering five, are auteur in the sense that they're predictable now: one cannot fail to be scolded when sitting down to a Fitzgerald piece, and even his best work (The Hanging Garden) shows flashes of the pedantic sermonizer he's about to become. The topics into infinity are the holy trinity of the father, oppressed subcultures (especially homosexuals); the son, AIDS; and the holy ghost, Fitzgerald himself,…

DIFF ’03: The Event

October 20, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, DIFF/SDFF, Drama, Film Festivals
*½/****screenplay by Tim Marback, Steven Hillyer and Thom Fitzgeralddirected by Thom Fitzgerald by Walter Chaw Thom Fitzgerald's rip-off of--of all things--It's My Party miscasts Parker Posey as a hard-nosed prosecutor intent on exposing the assisted suicide of a terminally AIDS-ridden man by his well-meaning coterie of family and quirky friends. While Olympia Dukakis doesn't entirely embarrass herself as the dead guy's mother, the same is impossible to say for Fitzgerald, who, by trying to ultimately equate the AIDS holocaust with the 9/11 atrocity, manages to be both distasteful and ideologically suspect. Tragedy aside, the equation, however tenuous, of a virus…

DIFF ’03: The Flower of Evil

October 19, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, DIFF/SDFF, Drama, Film Festivals, France, Thriller
*½/****screenplay by Caroline Eliacheff and Louise L. Lambrichs, adaptation by Claude Chabroldirected by Claude Chabrol by Walter Chaw Claude Chabrol, the master of the French thriller, is perhaps better described as the master of the French femme-fear film, making an art of women empowering themselves through the destruction of class and gender distinction. With The Flower of Evil (La Fleur du Mal) (no relation to the Baudelaire), Chabrol continues his slide into quaint, comfortable insignificance with his umpteenth treatment of a theme; he's become sort of a French Ozu, if you will, but with murder. This time around, the aging…

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…