I Capture the Castle (2003)

July 18, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Romance, Theatrical, UK

**/****
starring Romola Garai, Rose Byrne, Henry Thomas, Marc Blucas
screenplay by Heidi Thomas, based on the novel by Dodie Smith
directed by Tim Fywell

by Walter Chaw A breezy light romantic caste-comedy in the vein of Cold Comfort Farm or any of a number of Jane Austens, Tim Fywell’s mannered comedy of manners I Capture the Castle is marked by some fine performances and hampered by a blueprint so threadbare that it has, by now, taken on something of its own unnatural half-life. Boasting one of the less revolting endlessly reproducible master-plots that needs only a new cast and crew to bring it shambling to Frankenstein-ian life, the heavy-booted I Capture the Castle lumbers from meet-cute to early-hate-into-blossoming-love to the idea of ‘marrying poetically’ that has been a staple of roundelay romance since Shakespeare and before. It’s a crowd-pleaser, then, in the sense that the word describes a film with no surprises, no controversy, a charming location, and a dangerous level of sweetness. Perhaps ‘crowd pacifier’ is a better term.

How to Deal (2003)

July 17, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Coming of Age, Drama, Romance, Teen, Theatrical, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Mandy Moore, Allison Janney, Alexandra Holden, Peter Gallagher
screenplay by Neena Beber, based on the novels Someone Like You and That Summer by Sarah Dessen
directed by Clare Kilner

Howtodealby Walter Chaw Based on a pair of Sarah Dessen novels that apparently deal with the tribulations of a particularly sour adolescent girl, Clare Kilner’s How to Deal is a disastrously twee Judy Blume knock-off that compacts every ill of growing up female into a hysterical parcel of over-reaching and hollow sanctimony. It’s the kind of movie that has its maudlin protagonist reading Madame Bovary to parse, I guess, some portion of romantic martyrdom when the irony of the reference is that at the root of Emma Bovary’s problems arguably lies her infatuation with mealy romance novels into which she might substitute herself for the heroines (not forgetting the role of Dessen’s books in the first place). Irony and incompetence being the two rules of the day as Kilner and her cinematographer Eric Alan Edwards (once Gus Van Sant’s DP, now relegated to stuff like this and Britney Spears’s Crossroads) make unforgivable decisions in lighting and camera placement that cast How to Deal as an unintentional horror film with at least three scenes loaded with tension and free-floating anxiety for no good reason save that the filmmakers don’t seem to know what the hell they’re doing.

Loving (1970) – DVD

July 14, 2003Posted in1970s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Drama, DVD

***½/**** Image B+ Sound B-
starring George Segal, Eva Marie Saint, Sterling Hayden, Keenan Wynn
screenplay by Don Devlin, based on a novel by J.M. Ryan
directed by Irvin Kershner

by Bill Chambers The top ten winners in TOTAL FILM’s recent poll on the cinema’s greatest “bastards” (that would be in front of the camera, not behind it) were a fairly stock bunch: old faithfuls like The Sweet Smell of Success‘ JJ Hunsecker (Burt Lancaster) and Get Carter‘s Carter (Michael Caine)–who placed first–joined such choices that pander to currency while feigning esoterica as Internal Affairs‘ Dennis Peck (Richard Gere) and As Good As It Gets‘ Melvin Udall (Jack Nicholson). But you will find few bigger bastards than the overlooked protagonist of Irvin Kershner’s Loving, Brooks Wilson (George Segal), a lousy husband and father who has to be among the most self-absorbed suburbanites ever to despoil the screen. In our introduction to him, he decides to have a smoke instead of watching his daughter perform in the school Christmas pageant–an event for which he was made late by a fight with his mistress. One of them, anyway.

Curly Sue (1991) – DVD

July 11, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Family, John Hughes, Romance, Spielberg

**/**** Image B Sound B+ Commentary B-
starring James Belushi, Kelly Lynch, Alisan Porter, John Getz
written and directed by John Hughes

by Bill Chambers John Hughes almost returned to directing with last year’s Maid in Manhattan, and Curly Sue, the last film with Hughes at the helm, perhaps offers some explanation beyond his reported displeasure with having to cast Jennifer Lopez as to why the torch was ultimately passed to Wayne Wang. In Curly Sue‘s best bit, the housekeeper (Viveka Davis, a genuine comic find) of an upscale Manhattan apartment gambles away her paycheck playing poker against the two derelicts who’ve mostly conned their way into staying there. Davis has everything that Lopez doesn’t in Maid in Manhattan: modesty, natural beauty, charisma, a wry sense of humour–you could watch a whole movie about this persona, which is probably what Hughes had in mind, and her one sequence ends with a joke that also happens to be a far more accurate representation of the subtle fear that aristocracy puts in the minimum-wager than any of the Cinderella markers you’ll find in Maid in Manhattan. Or anything else you’ll find in Curly Sue, for that matter.

The Sea (2002)

July 9, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, France, Iceland, Norway, Theatrical

Hafið
*/****
starring Gunnar Eyjólfsson, Hilmir Snær Guðnason, Hélène de Fougerolles, Kristbjörg Kjeld
screenplay by Baltasar Kormákur, based on the play by Olafur Haukur Símonarson
directed by Baltasar Kormákur

by Walter Chaw A family melodrama that’s a little like Chekhov but a lot more like Telemundo, Baltasar Kormákur’s The Sea (Hafið) takes the bare bones of “King Lear” and fashions from them the sort of bleeding hair-render that runs roughshod through the Altman/Bergman canon without the benefit of genius. Its use of foreground, of mannered close-ups and overlapping dialogue, of old men journaling their lives at the end of their lives, all feel at odds with the film’s weightless, familiar tale of an old man shackled to the ideal of a better era in opposition with subsequent generations of useless, snivelling bastard children trying to feed off the corpse of said better era, the irony of that Icelandic tradition including a sort of culturally institutionalized rape (the contention of which I find to be not merely shockingly reductive, but deeply suspect besides) mentioned but left unexamined for the most part. The problems of The Sea aren’t restricted to this reliance on reckless ascriptions of cultural archetype for irony or poignancy (an Ayn Rand-ian predilection for staging hypothetical, unwinnable arguments in their extreme), extending to issues as problematic as a script (adapted from a Olafur Haukur Símonarson play by Kormákur, a sometime-actor who appeared as the mad scientist in Hal Hartley’s No Such Thing) that is as repetitive in regards to dialogue as to scenario.

Spun (2003) – DVD (R-rated)

July 8, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Drama, DVD, Esoterica

*/**** Image A- Sound A Extras C
starring Jason Schwartzman, John Leguizamo, Mena Suvari, Patrick Fugit
screenplay by Creighton Vero & William De Los Santos
directed by Jonas Åkerlund

by Walter Chaw I don't have anything in particular against music-video directors making the transition to feature films, except that so often strobe-lighting and images-per-second are the only lessons about film craft they've ever learned. Swedish wunderkind Jonas Åkerlund, who cut his teeth as a chop-horse for Madonna and Moby, makes his feature film debut with jittery crystal meth opera Spun, a picture so misconstrued and haphazardly slapped together that it doesn't so much suggest the sensation of being "spun" on meth as it does getting thrown off a tall building in a washing machine. It strives for a sort of grimy realism but succeeds mainly in being Ken and Barbie Take a Shit-Bath: the young and the beautiful are covered in a patina of grotesquerie, it's true, but the filth isn't taking

Cowboy Bebop: The Movie (2001) [Special Edition] – DVD

July 6, 2003Posted in2000s, Action, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, DVD, Japan, Sci-Fi, Thriller

***/**** Image A Sound A Extras C
screenplay by Keiko Nobumoto
directed by Shinichiro Watanabe

by Walter Chaw Yôko Kanno’s soundtrack for Cowboy Bebop: The Movie (hereafter Cowboy Bebop) is a jubilant a blend of funk, jazz, blues, soul, and punk that soars even though it’s a pale shadow of the “bebop” innovated by Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, and Bud Powell (and Kenny Clarke and Max Roach) in Minton’s Playhouse in the early 1940s. It functions as something of a brilliantly mellifluous backbone to the film and the series that spawned it–chimeric and socially significant, again like Bird’s bebop, in that the 26-episode Japanese television series became one of the most recognized and revered crossovers in animated series history. The bebop idea of riffing on a melody to the extent that the melody becomes unrecognizable (with an attendant introduction of dozens of beats to the standard four-beat bar) carries through in the frenetic kineticism of series that also, by its format, mirrors jazz bebop’s compact agility (generally carried by quartet and quintet arrangements)–making a feature-length film, then, a strange place for the “Cowboy Bebop” franchise to go.

It’s My Party (1996) [Special Edition] – DVD

July 6, 2003Posted in1990s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Romance

*/**** Image B- Sound B Extras C
starring Eric Roberts, Margaret Cho, Lee Grant, Gregory Harrison
written and directed by Randal Kleiser

by Walter Chaw The only way to explain how disjointed and patchwork is Randal Kleiser’s It’s My Party, is by presuming out loud that the director is trying to simulate the vertiginous feel of a weekend of revelry culminating in the auto-euthanasia of a mortally ill man. As it is, the picture can only be taken in terms of theory and possibility–the piece, as it sits extant, is puerile in a self-obsessed sort of way, from performance to scripting to organization. The presence of Bruce Davison in a minor role serves mainly to remind that there are better films out there about the AIDS epidemic in its early days, recalling Longtime Companion (starring Davison) and the genuine emotions found therein that stand as sharp indictment of the dreadful, manufactured pathos of It’s My Party. Any movie trying this hard to get me misty is a lot more likely to make me angry.

The Guys (2003)

July 4, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Theatrical

½*/****
starring Sigourney Weaver, Anthony LaPaglia, Irene Walsh, Jim Simpson
 screenplay by Anne Nelson and Jim Simpson, based on the play by Nelson
directed by Jim Simpson

by Walter Chaw As it manifests itself in popular art, the instinct to revisit the sins of the past for the purposes of reconciliation will as often take the unbecoming forms of self-congratulation or exploitation. The same urge to couch criticism in terms of personal reminiscence (“It’s good because it reminds me of my cat”), the same compulsion that drives middlebrow cineastes to donate five bucks to the ARC after a screening of The Other Sister, informs this variety of salutary cinema. Very fond of taking the correct stance on issues that are not particularly controversial, films like Jim Simpson’s The Guys (based on a briefly-timely stage play by Anne Nelson) allow for simpering middle-class navel-gazers to feel as though they’re involved in some way with events outside the breakfast nook. When Joan (Sigourney Weaver) says that she feels impotent in the face of 9/11 because she’s merely a journalist (devaluing the amazing work of THE NEW YORK TIMES following the atrocity) and grieving fire captain Nick (Anthony LaPaglia) responds, “Well, that’s your tool,” we’re dealing with self-righteous self-aggrandizing. And when Joan marvels, “When was the last time someone needed a writer,” the only possible response is: right around the time someone decided to adapt “The Guys” for the screen.

Gasoline (2002)

July 3, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Crime, Drama, Italy, Road Movie, Romance, Theatrical

Benzina
**/****
starring Maya Sansa, Regina Orioli, Pietro Ragusa, Mariella Valentini
screenplay by Anne Riitta Ciccone & Monica Stambrini, based on the novel by Elena Stancanelli
directed by Monica Stambrini

Benzina

by Bill Chambers Scarlett Johansson-esque Regina Orioli stars in Monica Stambrini’s Gasoline (Benzina) (hereafter Benzina) as Lenni, a bespectacled loner who went looking for work at a coffee bar/gas station one day and found love with its proprietor, Stella (Maya Sansa). When Lenni’s mother (Mariella Valentini) comes to visit and tries to talk her once-presumed-straight daughter out of her gay lifestyle, a scuffle ensues between madre and Stella in which the former is inevitably accidentally killed; even more inevitably, Stella doesn’t think they should tell the police despite her innocence looking forensically sound; and most inevitably of all, Lenni’s mom had a fortune in her purse. If you’re playing the home game and guessed that Stella and Len go on the lam, give yourself ten points–twenty if you had it down that they would do so with a body in the trunk.

From the Terrace (1960) – DVD

June 30, 2003Posted in1960s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Romance

*/**** Image A Sound B Extras D+
starring Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward, Myrna Loy
screenplay by Ernest Lehman
directed by Mark Robson

by Walter Chaw The term “melodrama” comes from the Greek and the French, finding its literal meaning in something like “musical drama,” and Mark Robson’s From the Terrace (1960)–packed front to back with Elmer Bernstein’s gorgeous but intrusive and, in at least a few moments, hysterical orchestrations–fits the bill nicely. Adapted from a John O’Hara bodice-ripper by chronic adaptor Ernest Lehman and released during the gap between the Lehman-scripted marvels North by Northwest and West Side Story, the picture drips with the charged sexual innuendo of the former (and of Robson’s Peyton Place, come to think of it) while falling short of the caustic social commentary of the latter.

Ten (2002) + Lilya 4-Ever (2002)

June 27, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Coming of Age, Crime, Denmark, Drama, Esoterica, France, Iran, Sweden

Dah
**½/****
starring Mania Akbari, Amin Maher, Kamran Adl, Roya Arabashi
written and directed by Abbas Kiarostami

Lilja 4-Ever
***/****
starring Oksana Akinshina, Artyom Bogucharsky, Lyubov Agapova, Liliya Shinkaryova
written and directed by Lukas Moodysson

by Walter Chaw The plight of women in oppressive and/or emerging cultures, on film, is a slipstream metaphor for the travails of all the citizenry of that place and, from there, the existential struggle of modern man–a heavy burden, to be sure, and one that forever teeters on the precipice of trite to the one side, affected to the other. (With “condescending” the great beast, crouched and ready to pounce.) Women are too often grail repositories of fear and loathing–indicator species, much like children in film, to be examined for hints of what’s toxic in the spirit of the time. That two foreign films by male directors find their way to the United States in fast company of one another, dealing with the plight of women (all women, all society, all the world) in ways frank and raw, is arguably not so much coincidence, then, as a synchronicity that, no matter their relative success, represents a sharp spur and a whip to the collective flank.

The Hard Word (2002)

June 27, 2003Posted in2000s, Action, Australia, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Drama, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

*½/****
starring Guy Pearce, Rachel Griffiths, Robert Taylor, Joel Edgerton
written and directed by Scott Rogers

Hardwordby Walter Chaw You’d think that POME (“Prisoners of Mother England”) would be better at making a crime drama, but Scott Roberts’s hyphenate debut The Hard Word is a flaccid ripper of Kubrick’s The Killing thick in avuncular vernacular and notably thin of any real meat. Between a few funny throwaways (a character refers to Philip K. Dick’s A Scanner Darkly, Dick’s autobiographical survey of paranoia and drug psychosis, as a primer for modern marriage), and some decidedly David Lynch-ian violence, the picture feels a lot like a mish-mash of post-mod noir ideas (the butcher, the redeemed femme, cannibalism) arranged with little respect for rhyme and reason. Style over substance, the whole thing is delivered in accents so under-looped and thick that it occasionally falls out as a cast of Brad Pitt’s Snatch pikeys performing Tarantino outtakes.

The Wild Dogs (2003)

June 26, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Canada, Drama, Theatrical

***/****
starring Thom Fitzgerald, David Hayman, Alberta Watson, Rachel Blanchard
written and directed by Tom Fitzgerald

Wilddogsby Travis Mackenzie Hoover There’s a lot to be said against Thom Fitzgerald’s The Wild Dogs, a film that, when faced with abject poverty and suffering, doesn’t really know how to resolve its feelings and compensates by resorting to bad doom-laden metaphors. But as it flails wildly in the hopes of hitting a target, there’s no denying that the film occasionally does, and that when it does it often scores a direct hit. Even if Fitzgerald can’t solve the problems of a crumbling Bucharest, he evokes the state of wanting to extremely well, thus saving his film from the sanctimony that another director might have brought to the subject.

The Big Trail (1930) – DVD

June 24, 2003Posted in1930s, Adventure, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Drama, DVD, Romance, Western

**½/**** Image B Sound B
starring John Wayne, Marguerite Churchill, El Brendel, Tully Marshall
screenplay by Hal G. Evarts
directed by Raoul Walsh

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover The Big Trail is the kind of movie that comes wrapped in a big piece of butcher’s paper with the word WESTERN stamped on it. It offers the barest structural skeleton of the genre, with pioneers fulfilling their Manifest Destiny over terrain both harsh and unforgiving, and it sticks with its forward march to Oregon with only minor narrative flourishes to distract from the standard-issue myth of America. Later westerns would meditate on the nature of both the lone-wolf cowboy hero and the value of the westward expansion, but this early John Wayne vehicle is quaintly naïve in its taking it all for granted, making for great film-historical fascination when the drama and the intrigue flag.

Empire Records (1995) [Remix! Special Fan Edition] – DVD

June 22, 2003Posted in1990s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Music, Romance, Teen

Empire Records: Remix!
*½/**** Image B Sound A- Extras C-
starring Liv Tyler, Anthony LaPaglia, Renee Zellweger, Maxwell Caulfield
screenplay by Carol Heikkinen
directed by Allan Moyle

by Bill Chambers Allan Moyle’s Empire Records has defenders too staunch to disregard–and because I listened to them, I’m left with the sensation that I chewed a piece of bubblegum until well after its flavour ran dry. The Canadian Moyle, whose inauspicious directorial debut was the 1977 tax-shelter crime flick The Rubber Gun, discovered teenagers three years later with his oddity of a second film Times Square and has rarely looked back since. Yet although his cinematic beginnings predate those of John Hughes, Moyle’s Pump Up the Volume and Empire Records are eclipsed by even the lesser entries in Hughes’s teen canon, such as Sixteen Candles and the Hughes-produced Pretty in Pink.

Me Without You (2001) – DVD

June 20, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Coming of Age, Drama, DVD, Germany, UK

***/**** Image F Sound B-
starring Anna Friel, Michelle Williams, Oliver Milburn, Kyle MacLachlan
screenplay by Sandra Goldbacher and Laurence Coriat
directed by Sandra Goldbacher

by Walter Chaw Sandra Goldbacher’s Me Without You is feral and alive and home to two of the best performances of last year, courtesy Michelle Williams and Anna Friel. One of the more uncompromising films about the things women do to one another over the course of a long friendship, it becomes a bit repetitive by the end and a bit like a Jane Austen novel (“Emma, actually,” the film helpfully informs) transplanted to the England of the past three decades, but its conventions skate with the honesty of performances from its main trio of Williams, Friel, and Oliver Milburn as the prototypical rakish, misunderstood Austen hero.

Tycoon (2002); Under the Skin of the City (2001); Stone Reader (2003)

June 19, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Documentary, Drama, France, Germany, Iran, Russia, Theatrical

Oligarkh
Tycoon: A New Russian
*½/****
starring Vladimir Mashkov, Mariya Mironova, Levani Outchaneichvili, Aleksandr Baluyev
screenplay by Aleksandr Borodyansky, Pavel Lungin, Yuli Dubov, based on Dubov’s novel Bolshaya pajka
directed by Pavel Lungin

Zir-e poost-e shahr
Under the City’s Skin
***/****
starring Golab Adineh, Mohammad Reza Forutan, Baran Kosari, Ebrahin Sheibani
screenplay by Rakhshan Bani Etemad, Farid Mostafavi
directed by Rakhshan Bani Etemad

STONE READER
*/****
directed by Mark Moskowitz

by Walter Chaw The collapse of oppressive regimes is a double-edged sword for a country’s film industry. Official censors are out of work, but they take their government’s sponsorship of the film industry with them. Entertaining a stream of strange bedfellows from the United States and France, the Russian cinema in the age of Perestroika struggled to find a balance between artistry and commerce–the same instinct that promoted the creation of underground trades in fake Levi’s spawned, too, a steadily gathering horde of cheap knock-off films designed, like their Yankee brothers, for minimal but satisfactory fiscal return. Departing quickly from the early optimism of pictures like Alexander Sokurov’s Days of Eclipse and Pavel Lungin’s Taxi Blues, the “Russian New Wave” (led like the French nouvelle vague by a cadre of critics) has expressed itself lately through cultural remakes of classics of world (including early Russian) cinema. The S. Dobrotvorsky-scripted Nicotine, an interesting take on Godard’s Breathless, is the best of the cultural doppelgängers; Lungin’s Tycoon is among the worst.

Laurel Canyon (2003) – DVD

June 18, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Music

**½/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B-
starring Frances McDormand, Christian Bale, Kate Beckinsale, Natascha McElhone
written and directed by Lisa Cholodenko

by Walter Chaw Buoyed by a fantastic performance from Frances McDormand, Lisa Cholodenko’s follow-up to her deft, well-regarded High Art is the disappointing, sprawling, somewhat overreaching Laurel Canyon. In its ambition it resembles Rose Troche’s third film, The Safety of Objects–that picture also saddled with a large, veteran cast and a problem with focus, but most importantly with the responsibility of a young filmmaker given the opportunity, with a bigger budget and well-regarded performers, to produce a piece commensurate in scale to that perceived expectation. The problem with the situation is that more times than not it leads to the type of film that Laurel Canyon is: ostentatious in structure, but in that way also a departure from the succinct character observations that brought the young artist the opportunity in the first place.

The Incredible Hulk Returns (1988)/The Trial of the Incredible Hulk (1989) [2 Disc Set]; The Death of the Incredible Hulk (1990); The Incredible Hulk (1996) – DVDs

June 17, 2003Posted in1980s, 1990s, Action, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Espionage, Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Superhero

THE INCREDIBLE HULK RETURNS
**/**** Image B- Sound B Extras A+
starring Bill Bixby, Lou Ferrigno, Lee Purcell, Jack Colvin
written by Nicholas Corea
directed by Bill Bixby & Nicholas Corea

THE TRIAL OF THE INCREDIBLE HULK
*/**** Image B- Sound B Extras A+
starring Bill Bixby, Lou Ferrigno, Rex Smith, John Rhys-Davies
written by Gerald Di Pego
directed by Bill Bixby

by Walter Chaw It all comes back in a rush, the crosshairs fixing David Banner’s (Bill Bixby) face, the breathless narration summarizing the whole of the creation story in ninety seconds, the shots of long-haired Lou Ferrigno, in full body paint, embodying the rage and frustration of the flower-power generation in all its ripped-jean glory. Punked with a horse’s dose of gamma radiation, mild-mannered Dr. Banner turns into a ball of flexing id that gets most wroth until running across a kitten or something and calming down. Jekyll and Hyde for the “me” generation; that a research scientist disinterested in the particulars of cashing in turns into a giant green ball of type-A is one avenue for discussion, though a better one is the fact that Banner represents in a real way the idea of hope and compassion in a time more interested in “Hulk smash”–making the moldy Marvel hero a potentially good match for the reflective sensibilities of Ang Lee. That Banner’s pacifist nature is always defeated by his “anger” speaks volumes about the inevitability of the metamorphosis of hippie to yuppie, as well as the death of a dream that transformation encompasses.