About a Boy (2002) [Widescreen] – DVD

January 17, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD, France, Germany, Romance, UK

**½/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B
starring Hugh Grant, Toni Collette, Rachel Weisz, Isabel Brook
screenplay by Peter Hedges and Chris Weitz & Paul Weitz, based on the novel by Nick Hornby
directed by Paul Weitz & Chris Weitz

by Walter Chaw Will Freeman (Hugh Grant) is a philanderer and a playboy. Independently wealthy because of residuals from his father’s authorship of an inexplicably successful Christmas tune, he spends his feckless days in carefully scheduled thirty-minute “units.” (One unit for taking a bath; three for lunch.) Finally feeling a void in the middle of his rootless life at the tender age of thirty-eight, Will–after a scheme to feign single-parentage backfires roughly–finds himself involved with a mordant thirteen-year-old named Marcus (Nicholas Hoult) and Marcus’s suicidally-depressed mother, Fiona (Toni Collette). Rachel Weisz plays the girl too good for the pre-evolution rapscallion, her late appearance ultimately best described as the plot point that drives act three.

Secret Admirer (1985) – DVD

January 15, 2003Posted in1980s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, DVD, Romance, Teen

***/**** Image B+ Sound B
starring C. Thomas Howell, Lori Loughlin, Kelly Preston, Fred Ward
screenplay by Jim Kouf & David Greenwalt
directed by David Greenwalt

by Bill Chambers Blessed with one of the best non-Tangerine Dream synth scores of the 1980s, Secret Admirer arrives on DVD this month to remind such movies as Just Married and Kangaroo Jack just how a formulaic laff riot with a risqué slant is done. I confess I still adore this seminal film of my youth while conceding that its machinations seemed far more clever to me at the age of ten. On the other hand, when was the last time you saw a teen-targeted comedy that aspired to any cleverness? Or that opened with a piece as alternately mysterious and wistful as Jan “Miami Vice” Hammer’s lyrical main theme?

The Bourne Identity (2002) – DVD

January 15, 2003Posted in****/****, 2000s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Czech Republic, DVD, FFC Must-Own, France, Germany, Mystery, Thriller

****/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B
starring Matt Damon, Franka Potente, Clive Owen, Chris Cooper
screenplay by Tony Gilroy and William Blake Herron, based on the novel by Robert Ludlum
directed by Doug Liman

Mustownby Walter Chaw The Bourne Identity is a composition of gestures stripped of romance and presented in their barest forms. It is the most cannily cinematic film of the year and one that, during its first half-hour, boasts blissfully of but one minute of dialogue. The picture recognizes that Matt Damon is best as an everyman with potential by presenting him as a character born at the age of thirty-three. And the Oedipal detective story that forms the centre of the tale (“Who am I?”) is so ripe for examination that it may flower in time to be as debated and revered a fantasy as Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (which likewise features the murder of The Father prior to a kind of manhood and subsequent mate choice). Very loosely based on Robert Ludlum’s novel of the same name, indie punk Doug Liman (director of Swingers) has constructed a parable of self-discovery that can as easily be read as a subversion of the conventions of the thriller genre, a discussion of the ways in which the audience participates in the process of genre fiction, or as a science-fiction piece in which strangely robotic über menschen run amuck in a technocratic world metropolis.

Freddy Vs. Jason (2003) [New Line Platinum Series] – DVD

January 14, 2003Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, DVD, Horror, Thriller

***/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras A+
starring Robert Englund, Monica Keena, Ken Kirzinger, Kelly Rowland
screenplay by Damian Shannon & Mark Swift
directed by Ronny Yu

by Walter Chaw Though it doesn’t work at all as a scary movie (with even its jump scares curiously tepid), there is the possibility with Freddy Vs. Jason to engage in an anagogical discussion as rich and fascinating as any offered before by the already meaty respective franchises, Friday the 13th and A Nightmare on Elm Street. Pitting Freddy Krueger–razor-fingered child murderer, victim of vigilante justice, and avatar of the sins of the literal fathers–against Jason Voorhees, hockey-masked victim of the cruelty of adolescence and the fear of sensuality, is amazingly fertile ground and handled herein with a seriousness that understands the death that post-modern cleverness represents for horror’s slasher subgenre. This is not to say that the film doesn’t make nods to Signs and 2001: A Space Odyssey, just to suggest that its story proper is firmly grounded in its own hermetic mythology, the curiously heady equation of its titular bogeys to some sort of modern holy pantheon.

The Banger Sisters (2002) – DVD

January 10, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, Drama, DVD

**½/**** Image C+ Sound B+ Extras C+
starring Susan Sarandon, Goldie Hawn, Geoffrey Rush, Erika Christensen
written and directed by Bob Dolman

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover By any rational standards, The Banger Sisters is a terrible film: it’s ugly to look at, riddled with inconsistencies, stuffed to bursting with hoary clichés, and completely unencumbered by anything resembling intellectual rigour. And yet, it’s so sweetly lacking in malice that I forgave a lot of its sins–not enough for me to recommend it as anything other than a rental, but enough to say that those who dread the thought of a heartwarmer starring Goldie Hawn are in for a pleasant surprise. You’ll roll your eyes at its unearned sentimentalities and impoverished mise-en-scène and mourn the real movie that lurks beneath its crossed wires, but in challenging the rule of irony that poisons even the most well-meaning of films (The Good Girl, anyone?), it stands proudly and defiantly alone.

Cherish (2002) – DVD

January 10, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Mystery, Thriller

**½/**** Image B Sound B Extras B
starring Robin Tunney, Tim Blake Nelson, Brad Hunt, Liz Phair
written and directed by Finn Taylor

by Walter Chaw A marked improvement over his sporadically interesting but ultimately flat Dream with the Fishes, indie wunderkind Finn Taylor’s Cherish is one-half a fantastic film tied to one-half a terrible film. It leaves plot threads hanging, has a great deal of uncertain character motivation, and transforms into a Tom Tykwer film near the end for no good reason. But Cherish is also home to what is easily Robin Tunney’s best performance to date, another smart and quirky turn by Tim Blake Nelson, a disabled person in a heroic and human role, and a premise that is sharp, intriguing, and original. That it features two Hall & Oates songs on the soundtrack only helps its cause.

My Wife is an Actress (2001) – DVD

January 4, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD, France, Romance

Ma femme est une actrice
*/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B
starring Charlotte Gainsbourg, Yvan Attal, Terence Stamp, Noémie Lvovsky
written and directed by Yvan Attal

by Walter Chaw Yvan (Yvan Attal) is a sports writer (Yvan Attal is an actor) married to Charlotte (Charlotte Gainsbourg), who is a movie star (Charlotte Gainsbourg is also an actor, like her mother Jane Birkin–who was married to musician Serge Gainsbourg). Yvan Attal’s first film as writer-director, My Wife is an Actress (Ma femme est une actrice), is about–as its title would suggest–the somewhat predictable trials of being married to a successful actress. The film is not, however, as Attal will adamantly attest, autobiographical. This is evidenced by the fact that Terence Stamp plays an actor named “John” rather than an actor named “Terence.” In a wholly unrelated story (that is sadly in the same film), Noémie Lvovsky plays Yvan’s sister Nathalie, a woman demanding that her unborn son be circumcised upon delivery, much to the chagrin of her equally unpleasant husband Vincent (Laurent Bateau).

Wendigo (2002) – DVD

December 21, 2002Posted in****/****, 2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD, FFC Must-Own, Horror, Mystery, Thriller

****/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B+
starring Patricia Clarkson, Jake Weber, Erik Per Sullivan, John Speredakos
written and directed by Larry Fessenden

mustown-1059860by Walter Chaw Larry Fessenden’s Wendigo plays like a chthonic rite: it’s terrifying in its brutal purity and delicious in its ability to pull domestic trauma into the well of archetype where it festers. The film is a further examination of what William Blake cajoles in his “Marriage of Heaven and Hell”–that “men forgot that all deities reside in the human breast,” and it justifies itself beautifully in a Romanticist discussion, a Jungian explication, even a socio-political and historical examination. Wendigo is an extraordinarily thorny film, no question; that it manages to be so without pretension while providing an experience that is terrifying and gorgeous is a remarkable achievement. It’s why we go to the cinema: to be fed through the eye, the heart, the mind.

Human Nature (2002) – DVD

December 18, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Charlie Kaufman, Comedy, DVD, Esoterica

½*/**** Image A Sound A-
starring Patricia Arquette, Rhys Ifans, Tim Robbins, Ken Magee
screenplay by Charlie Kaufman
directed by Michel Gondry

by Walter Chaw From the second screenplay by Charlie Kaufman, the ink-stained wretch behind Spike Jonze’s quirk classic Being John Malkovich, French music-video director Michel Gondry’s sadly misguided nature/nurture sex romp Human Nature scores once or twice but ultimately thuds like a brick zeppelin. It’s a film that thinks it a good idea for Rhys Ifans to appear either full monty or in a diaper for the majority of his performance, likewise that Patricia Arquette have a pelt of hair covering every curve of her Romanesque physique. (Though the latter is played for some surreal yuks as Ms. Arquette writhes on a miniature Empire State Building while a dwarf (Peter Dinklage) walks around in a biplane harness.) Human Nature, in short, isn’t nearly as funny as it thinks it is; neither is it as smart.

An Evening with Kevin Smith (2002) – DVD

December 17, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Concert Doc, DVD

***/**** Image A Sound B+
directed by J.M. Kenny

by Bill Chambers Love him or hate him, there are simply no two ways around the fact that An Evening with Kevin Smith is one of the most entertaining standup films, if it can indeed be called that, since the heyday of Richard Pryor. Well-shot footage–compiled by J.M. Kenny, showing better comic instincts than he did as producer of the Nancy Pimental mockumentary on The Sweetest Thing‘s DVD(s)–from Q&As in which the entrepreneurial Smith participated at various college campuses across the United States, this 225-minute presentation opens and closes with Smith discussing his on-screen alter ego Silent Bob, the rare idiot icon made famous by the performer rather than the other way around. (It’s why equating himself with such residents of the catchphrase graveyard as Pauly Shore is his least successful routine in An Evening with Kevin Smith–Silent Bob doesn’t epitomize Smith’s popularity.) Moreover, Smith is anything but bashful; you’ll only wish he was speechless as he describes open-sore intercourse with his wife-to-be.

Johnson County War (2002) – DVD

December 9, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD, Germany, Television, Western

*/**** Image C+ Sound B+
starring Tom Berenger, Luke Perry, Rachel Ward, Burt Reynolds
screenplay by Larry McMurtry & Diana Ossana, based on Riders of Judgment by Frederick Manfred
directed by David S. Cass, Sr.

by Walter Chaw The Hallmark Channel's epic remake of Heaven's Gate–based, like that film and Frederick Manfred's Riders of Judgment, on the Johnson County Range War of 1892–does the impossible by making Michael Cimino's legendary boondoggle gain esteem in memory and by comparison. Actually a remake in subject only, legendary stuntman-turned-really bad TV director David S. Cass, Sr.'s Johnson County War (clocking in at an inexcusable 180 minutes) is a dog's breakfast of hoary western clichés, appalling film craft, and wooden performances from B-list talent.

KylieFever2002 (2002) – DVD

December 9, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Concert Doc, DVD, Music, UK

Kylie Minogue: Kylie Fever 2002 in Concert – Live in Manchester
*/**** Image B Sound A Extras B-
directed by William Baker, Alan MacDonald

by Walter Chaw A quick glance at the back cover of the KylieFever2002 <In Concert – Live in Manchester> DVD divulges three questions I couldn't help but answer before actually indulging in the spectacle from start to finish. The answers are that "Fever" and "In Your Eyes" are not what you think they are, and that "Locomotion" and "The Crying Game" are indeed, exactly what you think they are. The exercise, in short, is a good news/bad news scenario.

‘R Xmas (2001) + Serpico (1973) – DVDs

December 7, 2002Posted in1970s, 2000s, Al Pacino, Authors: Bill Chambers, Biopic, Crime, Directors: Sidney Lumet, Drama, DVD, France, Italy, Thriller

‘R XMAS
***/**** Image A+ Sound A- Extras C
starring Drea De Matteo, Lillo Brancato, Jr., Ice-T, Victor Argo
screenplay by Scott Pardo, Abel Ferrara
directed by Abel Ferrara

SERPICO
**½/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras C+
starring Al Pacino, Jack Kehoe, John Randolph, Biff McGuire
screenplay by Waldo Salt and Norman Wexler, based on the book by Peter Maas
directed by Sidney Lumet

by Bill Chambers Arriving on DVD within a week of each other, Abel Ferrara’s ‘R Xmas and Sidney Lumet’s Serpico share a preoccupation with the fate of dirty money. Minimum-wagers are seen as honourable by Lumet, with Detective Frank Serpico proudly leading the starving-artist’s life from behind a cop’s badge, while in Ferrara’s view, there are few such romantic distinctions to be made between the haves and have-nots. But the corrupting influence of money defines the people we’re dealing with in both films, which, although they illustrate rather contained moral dilemmas, share a somewhat epic ambition despite rarely stepping outside their respective milieux. Watched back-to-back, they’re like Traffic pulled in two.

Goin’ Down the Road (1970) [Seville Signature Collection] – DVD

December 3, 2002Posted in1970s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Canada, Drama, DVD, Road Movie

***½/**** Image C Sound B Extras A
starring Doug McGrath, Paul Bradley, Jayne Eastwood, Cayle Chernin
screenplay by William Fruet & Donald Shebib
directed by Donald Shebib

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover As close to a classic as Canadian cinema gets, Donald Shebib's Goin' Down the Road touches greatness without really trying; its virtue lies in its refusal to force things, eschewing the jackhammer editing and hard-lined composition of traditional cinema in favour of a hazy, genial approach to its look and feel. Under regular Northern circumstances, this would be a liability: our country's inability to make conscious aesthetic choices has reduced more than a few films to a thin bland soup. But here it works like gangbusters, passively recording the protagonists' misadventures with a combination of helplessness and sympathy as they thrash about, trying to claim an American dream in the midst of a Canadian nightmare. It's simple, lovely, and heartbreaking, and it makes you wonder how Shebib could have somehow managed to disappear into obscurity.

Unfaithful (2002) [Widescreen Special Edition] – DVD

November 26, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, France, Germany, Romance, Thriller

**½/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras A-
starring Diane Lane, Richard Gere, Erik Per Sullivan, Olivier Martinez
screenplay by Alvin Sargent and William Broyles Jr., based on the screenplay for La Femme Infidele by Claude Chabrol
directed by Adrian Lyne

by Walter Chaw The designer’s eye and yen for the seedy of Adrian Lyne–sort of the Ridley Scott of soft-porn–manifest themselves in Unfaithful, the latest permutation of Lyne’s ongoing upper-middle-class angst cycle: blood-pounding eroticism into passionate bloodletting. The kind of Jacques Tati wind that carries off Kansas farm-girls sends Diane Lane’s Big Apple gal Connie into the brawny arms of book-dealing Frenchman Paul Martel (Olivier Martinez). Connie dabbles in adultery, though she is not exactly unhappily married to armoured car company owner Edward (Richard Gere); call it the milk-fed blues. She’s just bored enough to take an eleventh-year slackening of attention and a forgotten overcoat as an excuse to tryst in an impossible Soho loft.

Sunset Boulevard (1950) [Special Collector’s Edition] – DVD

November 26, 2002Posted in****/****, 1950s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD, FFC Must-Own

Sunset Blvd.
****/**** Image A Sound A Extras A
starring William Holden, Gloria Swanson, Erich Von Stroheim, Nancy Olson
screenplay by Charles Brackett & Billy Wilder and D.M. Marshman, Jr.
directed by Billy Wilder

by Walter Chaw Billy Wilder’s protagonists are interlopers, outsiders itching for acceptance in insular societies recognized as decadent but possessed of an irresistible allure for Wilder’s central characters–a lure that most often takes the form of sex, status, and money. Always self-aware and basically noble, Wilder’s comedies have his heroes confessing their sins and renouncing said corrupt society in favour of an appropriate love pairing (Fran and Baxter of The Apartment); in his tragedies, his heroes confess their sins as a last decent act undertaken too late. (Think Walter Neff of Double Indemnity.) The connection between The Apartment (arguably Wilder’s best film) and Sunset Blvd. (the film with which The Apartment has its argument) begins, fascinatingly, with pivotal scenes set on New Year’s Eve. In The Apartment, of course, Fran makes her decision to be with Baxter on New Year’s, while Joe Gillis decides to be with Norma Desmond that same hallowed night in Sunset Blvd.–and both moments, as they occur at the crux of historical and cultural demarcations, encompass Wilder’s flair for emotions at crosscurrent, and the dark of a dying era with the light of possible futures.

Lovely and Amazing (2002) – DVD

November 21, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Romance

Lovely & Amazing
***/**** Image A+ Sound A- Extras C-
starring Catherine Keener, Emily Mortimer, Brenda Blethyn, Raven Goodwin
written and directed by Nicole Holofcener

by Walter Chaw The best and highest praise I can offer Lovely and Amazing is that there aren’t any patently untrue moments in it. It’s a film that disdains the hysterical screeching of Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood in favour of pleasant understatement and measured response–the rare movie about women that respects them while offering some genuinely funny moments based on character rather than absurd situations. Yet the picture is so lightweight that it’s difficult to muster a great deal of enthusiasm in recommending it. It does what it does with an admirable level of professionalism but the whole of Lovely and Amazing is something a good deal less than the sum of its parts.

Time Out (2001) – DVD

November 19, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Drama, DVD, France

L’emploi du temps
***½/**** Image A- Sound A-
starring Aurélien Recoing, Karin Viard, Serge Livrozet, Jean-Pierre Mangeot
screenplay by Robin Campillo and Laurent Cantet
directed by Laurent Cantet

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Time Out is a film for everyone who hates the grind and hates those who hate the grind. A lightning rod for our mixed emotions about the work we do, it knows that we see our jobs as who we are as much as we hate them for stealing our lives. Thus, it gives us a hero for our times: an unemployed role-player who is either a cheap lazy bastard for evading honest work or a martyr to the anarchist cause for much the same reason. It’s a testament to the subtlety of the portrait that he can be either figure at various points in the film, forcing us to re-examine our identification with wage-slaving and wonder where our jobs end and our selves begin.

Austin Powers in Goldmember (2002) [infinifilm] – DVD

November 19, 2002Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD, Espionage, Sci-Fi, Tom Cruise

*½/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras B
starring Mike Myers, Beyoncé Knowles, Michael York, Michael Caine
screenplay by Mike Myers & Michael McCullers
directed by Jay Roach

by Walter Chaw In the grand tradition of Final Chapter – Walking Tall, the third film in the Austin Powers franchise, Austin Powers in Goldmember, begins and ends with our hero watching himself being portrayed by someone else in a movie of his life–a level of post-modern reflexivity that is taken to such grotesque heights by the film that what emerges is actually fascinating in a detached, unpleasant, deeply unfunny sort of way. Mike Myers’s obsession with body distortion and cannibalistic consumption and auto-consumption likewise reaches a macabre pinnacle in the picture’s best running gag–the preoccupation with Fred Savage’s mole with a mole–and with a new circus geek for the Myers pantheon (joining blue-eyed bald albino Dr. Evil and Shrekian Scot Fat Bastard), the Dutch villain Goldmember, who makes it a habit to eat giant flakes of his own skin. We meet Goldmember (so named for his prosthetic bullion bar and ingots) in another bit of multi-layered absurdity during a time-travel journey to New York circa 1975 and the fictional Studio 69, with Myers referencing his own most critically praised performance as Studio 54’s perverse Steve Rubell. A study of Myers’s Dick Tracy-like mania with latex appliances would no doubt fill volumes.

Vulgar (2002) – DVD

November 18, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, DVD, Thriller, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/**** Image C+ Sound B+ Extras A
starring Brian Christopher O’Halloran, Jerry Lewkowitz, Matthew Maher, Ethan Suplee
written and directed by Bryan Johnson

by Walter Chaw Beginning as Shakes the Clown and segueing into I Spit on Your Grave before finally settling on Death to Smoochy, the discordant, hideously unpleasant Vulgar is the kind of puerile vanity piece that gives exploitation and egotism bad names. Produced by Kevin Smith and seeking to be a creation mythology for Smith’s View Askew mascot (just another example of Smith overestimating the inherent interest in his cult of personality), the picture is the hyphenate debut for Smith crony Bryan Johnson, making Smith, along the way, just the next nepotistic “Happy Madison” pinhead king of diminished returns.