Vanilla Sky (2001) – DVD

May 18, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD, Esoterica, Mystery, Romance, Sci-Fi, Spain, Thriller, Tom Cruise

*/**** Image A+ Sound A+ Extras B-
starring Tom Cruise, Penélope Cruz, Kurt Russell, Cameron Diaz
screenplay by Cameron Crowe, based on the screenplay for Abre Los Ojos by Alejandro Amenábar and Mateo Gil
directed by Cameron Crowe

by Walter Chaw Vanilla Sky is an unpleasant, incompetent, and laborious amalgam of Jacob’s Ladder and The Game, Joe Eszterhas doing Frank Herbert, if you will. It is profane to no good end, forcing Cameron Diaz to define her sexuality through roughly a dozen variations on “I swallowed your come,” and is otherwise so sloppily assembled that even the generally arresting Jason Lee is made irritating and superfluous. Cameron Crowe is rapidly becoming a self-indulgent, disingenuous disaster–his films grow more pretentious as his subjects shrink in consequence. After tackling a rose-coloured breed of aggrandizing nostalgia in the overlong Almost Famous, he’s decided to remake the mediocre Spanish film Open Your Eyes (“Abre Los Ojos”)by flavour of the month Alejandro Amenábar, paying alleged “homage” to about a dozen other directors, movies, and album covers while displaying exactly the same breed of star-deifying that he ostensibly deflated in Almost Famous. Crowe fans should prepare to be disheartened by the realization that the crown prince of weakling uplift has actually fallen down on the altar of the ultimate Kafkaesque Hollywood godhead: Tom Cruise.

Watership Down (1978) – DVD

May 8, 2002Posted in1970s, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Esoterica, Thriller, UK

***/**** Image B Sound B
screenplay by Martin Rosen, based on the novel by Richard Adams
directed by Martin Rosen

by Walter Chaw Unsentimental and terrifying and set against lovely, John Constable-esque watercolour backgrounds, Martin Rosen’s adaptation of the Richard Adams novel Watership Down arose in that extended lull between Disney’s heyday and its late-Eighties resurrection. (This period also saw, in addition to Rosen’s film of Adams’s The Plague Dogs, Rankin & Bass’s The Last Unicorn and Ralph Bakshi’s most productive period, which included 1978’s The Lord of the Rings.) Watership Down points to the dwindled potential for American animation to evolve into what anime has become: a mature medium for artistic expression of serious issues. A shame that this flawed piece is possibly the pinnacle of animation’s ambition on these shores, Richard Linklater’s Waking Life notwithstanding.

Waking Life (2001) – DVD

May 6, 2002Posted in****/****, 2000s, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: Richard Linklater, Drama, DVD, Esoterica, FFC Must-Own

****/**** Image A Sound A Extras A-
starring “Wiley Wiggins and an ensemble of 74 other actors”
written and directed by Richard Linklater

Mustownby Walter Chaw It begins with a child’s game that ends with the chilling premonition “Dream is destiny” and closes with what appears to be the fulfillment of that statement. Richard Linklater’s Waking Life is an anti-narrative with no discernible story arc: The film’s conflict arises between its characters’ varying cosmologies and the challenge that presents to the viewer’s own existential verities, such as Descartes’s dictum cogito ergo sum (“I think, therefore I am”). Waking Life is one of the most interesting and engaging films of a year that sports its fair share of complex, fascinating fare (Mulholland Drive, Va Savoir).

Performance (1970) – DVD

April 26, 2002Posted in1970s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, DVD, Esoterica, Gangster, Music, UK

Performancecap

***½/**** Image B+ Sound C Extras C
starring James Fox, Mick Jagger, Anita Pallenberg, Michele Breton
screenplay by Donald Cammell
directed by Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg

by Walter Chaw Emerging in the middle of one of the most experimental, challenging periods in cinematic history, Performance–completed in 1968 but shelved until 1970–is a product at once ahead of its time and two years too late. Had its trippy-dippy, anachronistic cross-cutting and madly-inappropriate scoring appeared in 1968 (the year of Rosemary’s Baby, Night of the Living Dead, If…, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and the film to which it perhaps owes its greatest allegiance, Once Upon a Time in the West), Performance would’ve found traction and good company as a foundational film for the American New Wave instead of as a picture that, for all its foment and formal revolution, seemed hysterical against a maturing, more sedate(d) mainstream avant-garde parade of stuff like El Topo, Zabriskie Point, MASH, and Five Easy Pieces.

Mulholland Drive (2001) – DVD

April 14, 2002Posted in****/****, 2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: David Lynch, Drama, DVD, Esoterica, FFC Must-Own, France, Mystery, Thriller

Mulholland Dr.
****/**** Image A- Sound A
starring Justin Theroux, Naomi Watts, Laura Elena Harring, Ann Miller
written and directed by David Lynch

by Walter Chaw

Was it a vision, or a waking dream?
 Fled is that music — Do I wake or sleep?
– John Keats, Ode to a Nightingale

MustownDavid Lynch’s Mulholland Drive contends that the answer to the eternal struggle between what is real and what is fantasy comes in the form of a Keatsian confusion–it’s the difference between Adam’s dream and Eve rendered flesh, blurred in the mind of the creator and his audience. A film is a dream of the director made tangible, a conceit familiar from the fourth-wall-breaking in Ingmar Bergman’s Persona (banishing any mystery there might have been regarding the visual references to that film in Lynch’s piece), and a movie’s characters therefore become projections of its maker’s sublimated longing (clarifying too the auteur’s use of wardrobe and colour schemes from Hitchcock’s meditation on objectification, Vertigo, as well as those of his first collaboration with inamorata Tippi Hedren, The Birds).

A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001) [Two-Disc Special Edition – Widescreen] – DVD

March 3, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Directors: Stanley Kubrick, Drama, DVD, Esoterica, Sci-Fi, Spielberg

***/**** Image A Sound A Extras A-
starring Haley Joel Osment, Jude Law, Frances O'Connor, Brendan Gleeson
screenplay by Steven Spielberg, based on the screen story by Ian Watson and the short story "Supertoys Last All Summer Long" by Brian Aldiss
directed by Steven Spielberg

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover It begins dreadfully and stays that way for ages. It fumbles for what it thinks it wants to say, often missing the objective completely. Its ending is too long and too confused, and it casts a pall over the good things that came before. It marries the efforts of two filmmakers in uncomfortable ways and often short-circuits them both. But for better or worse, it is A.I. Artificial Intelligence–the best, most resonant, and most disturbing film Steven Spielberg has made in years, and a movie that deserves far more respect than it's been getting.

Suspiria (1977) – DVD

January 19, 2002Posted in****/****, 1970s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: Dario Argento, DVD, Esoterica, Horror, Italy

****/**** Image A+ Sound A+ Extras D+
starring Jessica Harper, Stefania Casini, Flavio Bucci, Miguel Bosé
screenplay by Dario Argento and Daria Nicolodi
directed by Dario Argento

Mustownby Walter Chaw At their best, Dario Argento’s films are lurid splashes of Hitchcockian reinvention that bristle with audacity and a pornographer’s sensibility. He deconstructs the male gaze in the mutilation of beautiful women, taking a moment (as he does in Tenebre, Opera, and Suspiria) to make guerrilla art of their extravagant suffering. Argento’s films are generally split between two sub-genres of the slasher flick, each defined to a large extent by his contributions. The first is the giallo, films indicated by their impossibly convoluted mystery plots and elaborate set-piece murders; the second, of which Suspiria is one, is the “supernatural,” distinguished by their surreality and lack of a traditional narrative. Known as “The Italian Hitchcock,” Argento, as I’ve said before, is more accurately “The Italian DePalma,” in that Argento’s imitating reads as homage. And though he occasionally selects sources to ape badly (i.e. attempting to adapt Jeunet and Caro to “Phantom of the Opera”), when he finds the perfect source material to serve as foundation for his redux perversions (Psycho, Vertigo, The Birds, and Rebecca for Suspiria), the end result can be as original as it is discomfiting.

Tackle Happy (2000) – DVD

January 10, 2002Posted in2000s, Australia, Authors: Bill Chambers, Documentary, DVD, Esoterica

Tackle Happy (The Origins of “Puppetry of the Penis”)
**½/**** Image B Sound B- Extras C-
directed by Mick Molloy

by Bill Chambers A name actor once dropped trou’ in front of me, under non-sexual circumstances I dare not elaborate. I buried my face in my hands and this only inspired him to taunt me further with his manhood. “What’s the matter? It’s just a dick,” he said. The more I think about it (not that I’ve been dwelling on it), the more sage his plea of innocence becomes. Penises are obnoxious, and sometimes none too innocuous, but all in all, they’re not the least bit sacred. Compare the Western cultural reputations of the vagina and the penis: on stage, the former gets a pretentious monologue performed by everyone from Glenn Close to Alanis Morissette; the latter gets a puppet show.

Hedwig and the Angry Inch (2001) [Platinum Series] – DVD

December 26, 2001Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Esoterica, Music, Musical

***/**** Image B Sound A Extras A+
starring John Cameron Mitchell, Michael Pitt, Miriam Shor, Stephen Trask
screenplay by John Cameron Mitchell, based on his play with Stephen Trask
directed by John Cameron Mitchell

by Walter Chaw A pretension-laden, soul-dissection opera crossed with the brooding musical chops that Pink Floyd all but defined in the late-Seventies, John Cameron Mitchell's Hedwig and the Angry Inch is Velvet Goldmine and All that Jazz by way of Pink Floyd The Wall–a bombastically endearing romp that is as infectious as it is (surprisingly) poignant. The anchor for the film is Mitchell's incendiary turn as the titular Hedwig, a transsexual/transvestite, Eastern Bloc rock diva on a national tour booked into Bilgewaters family restaurants in the same cities as flavour-of-the-month pop superstar Tommy Gnosis (Michael Pitt). Hedwig believes that Gnosis has stolen his songs from him, yet we sense the real theft was that of trust and the promise of love. Early on, we're shown a fantastically-conceived bleach-bypass/animation/performance piece set to a very nice Plato's Symposium-inspired tune ("The Origin of Love") that offers an explanation of the absent feeling that impels us all to find succour in a mate, a friend, or art. Hedwig and the Angry Inch never gets as good as this again, but it's almost impossible to imagine how it could: the sequence, lasting all of ten minutes, is one of the highlights of the year in cinema.

Moulin Rouge (2001) – DVD

December 4, 2001Posted in2000s, Australia, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Drama, DVD, Esoterica, Musical, Romance

Moulin Rouge!
***/**** Image A Sound A- (DD)/A+ (DTS) Extras A
starring Nicole Kidman, Ewan McGregor, John Leguizamo, Jim Broadbent
screenplay by Baz Luhrmann & Craig Pearce
directed by Baz Luhrmann

Moulinrougecap1by Travis Mackenzie Hoover It's been a long time since I've seen a mainstream film that tried to place its heart in the audience's hands. Nothing in recent memory is as direct and open in its pleasures as the classic Hollywood musicals were, having been replaced by the sideways glance of the ironist and all of the false snobbery that pretends nothing is as it appears. While this is supposed to be a bellwether of our superior sophistication, it really just means that we strike a different pose: we must be superior to the events on screen and stop up our emotions with an arched eyebrow and a swift kick to the object of our gaze. The fact is that any evidence of true feeling–or, more to the point, true yearning for release–is treated as ridiculous and something to be lamented, but one must admit the current climate makes an affirmation of what we want seem very vulnerable and the efforts of those who decide to work without the net of condescension seem daring, if not suicidal.

Freddy Got Fingered (2001) – DVD

November 14, 2001Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD, Esoterica

**½/**** Image A Sound B Extras A
starring Tom Green, Rip Torn, Marisa Coughlan, Eddie Kaye Thomas
screenplay by Tom Green & Derek Harvie
directed by Tom Green

by Walter Chaw Tom Green’s Freddy Got Fingered is the most startling debut since Luis Buñuel’s Un chien andalou, with which it has a few things in common: both are constructed with a wilful disdain towards narrative; both are aimed at the outer limits of shocking imagery; both display an open hostility for the cultural status quo; and both joke on their audience’s entrenched preconceptions of film form. Even more admirably seditious, Freddy Got Fingered, unlike Un chien andalou, was actually backed and released by a major studio. (It’s extremely instructive to read Roger Ebert’s review of Un chien andalou as the definitive piece on Freddy Got Fingered, though I suspect Ebert would object to that notion.) The crucial of many differences between the two films is that Buñuel and Salvador Dali’s experiment in inciting an audience was only seventeen minutes long while Freddy Got Fingered is an excruciating eighty-seven. That said, it is destined for instant cult status and eventual critical respect.

DIFF ’01: Amélie (2001)

October 27, 2001Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DIFF/SDFF, Esoterica, Film Festivals, France, Germany, Romance

Le fabuleux destin d’Amélie Poulain
Amélie Poulain
***/****
starring Audrey Tautou, Mathieu Kassovitz, Rufus, Yolande Moreau
screenplay by Guillaume Laurant, Jean-Pierre Jeunet
directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet

by Walter Chaw Caught between an iceberg of a father (Rufus) and a nervous wreck of a mother (Lorella Cravotta), the very peculiar Amélie (Audrey Tautou) develops in her youth an active imagination to combat emotional starvation. When she’s 22, on the night of Lady Di’s death by paparazzi, Amélie accidentally discovers a tin of toys and photographs, a child’s treasure cache hidden away in her apartment some forty years previous. Resolving to return the artifacts to their rightful owner, Amélie discovers that acts of altruism serve as voyeuristic surrogates to her life’s social desolation. Taking its cue from the bare structure of Jane Austen’s Emma and–ironically, considering the ultra-stylistic character of Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s direction–the stark work of the Nouvelle Vague (Truffaut in particular), the strength of Amélie (Le Fabuleux destin d’Amélie Poulain) is in its imagery. Its weaknesses, alas, are a running time that is at least a half-hour too long and a resolution so predictable that the film’s problems of pacing and length meet in something resembling frustration.

DIFF ’01: Fat Girl

October 22, 2001Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, DIFF/SDFF, Drama, Esoterica, Film Festivals, France, Italy

À ma soeur!
***/****
starring Anais Reboux, Roxane Mesquida, Libero de Rienzo
written and directed by Catherine Breillat

by Walter Chaw

So mastered by the brute blood of the air,
Did she put on his knowledge with his power
Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?
"Leda and the Swan" (1928)–William Butler Yeats

Yeats caused a minor stir in 1928 by suggesting that the rape of Leda was an empowerment for a sexually wise woman whose ultimate revenge against manhood was the spawning of Helen of Troy–who, of course, had a key role in the fall of an entire nation. The idea of ill-gotten knowledge as it's tied to a woman's evolving sexuality is not a new one–Biblical and older, in fact. Still, Catherine Breillat throws a new acerbic barb into the psychosexual brew by projecting Freud's classic developmental framework (anal, oral, genital) onto the progression of the uncomfortable seduction of the impossibly young Elena (Roxane Mesquida) by a smooth-talking Italian lothario (Libero de Rienzo). It is only one, though perhaps the most subtle, of Breillat's incendiary yawps against man's barbarism to woman. As Anaïs (Anaïs Reboux), the titular fat girl, summarizes at one point: "All men are sick."

DIFF ’01: Hybrid

October 13, 2001Posted in****/****, 2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, DIFF/SDFF, Documentary, Esoterica, Film Festivals

****/****
directed by Monteith McCollum

by Walter Chaw Hybrid is an elegy for the passing of a man who fell in love early in his life and remained faithful until the day he died, two years past turning one-hundred. Presented in gritty blacks and whites, Monteith McCollum's six-year labour of love memorializing his grandfather Milford Beeghly is a stunning documentary that itself plays as a hybrid of something dreamed-up by Errol Morris and the Brothers Quay. Ostensibly about Beeghly's obsession with finding the perfect hybrid breed of corn as an industrial crop, the film somehow becomes a grand metaphor–for the rough grace of the American way of life, for the lingering death of the agrarian lifestyle, for the difficulties of balancing family with a calling, and even for the true meaning of happiness.

DIFF ’01: The Man Who Wasn’t There (2001)

October 11, 2001Posted in****/****, 2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Coen Brothers, Crime, DIFF/SDFF, Drama, Esoterica, Film Festivals, Scarlett Johansson, Thriller, UK

****/****
starring Billy Bob Thornton, Frances McDormand, Michael Badalucco, James Gandolfini
screenplay by Joel Coen & Ethan Coen
directed by Joel Coen

Manwhowasntthereby Walter Chaw The noir genre was born of discomfort with women in the workplace, the rise of cynicism, and a world polarized by international conflict (WWII). Its symbol, the hardboiled detective, became the projection of the collective paranoia about the ascent of globalism and the death of Pollyannaism. Women and foreigners are not to be trusted in the noir universe; information is slippery and expensive; and the solution of the puzzle more often than not points back to a rot at the heart of the detective. It is the Oedipus/identity trajectory, complete with a blasted plague land, a murder, its thinly veiled culprit (noir is typically invested in process, not mystery), the appearance of a femme fatale, and a solution involving mortal self-knowledge. The noir hero may save the day, but at the price of being betrayed by those he loves. He is impotent to avenge his fallen friends and lovers, and at the mercy of a larger corruption that is unalterable and serves only to further degrade individual confidence. Tellingly, a great many noir works in literature and film begin with the death of a best friend or a partner and end with the realization that any victory is a hollow one in light of society’s inexorable fall into chaos.

Memento (2001) – DVD

August 28, 2001Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Directors: Christopher Nolan, DVD, Esoterica, Mystery, Thriller

***/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
starring Guy Pearce, Carrie-Anne Moss, Joe Pantoliano
screenplay by Christopher Nolan, based on the short story by Jonathan Nolan
directed by Christopher Nolan

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Initially, I thought I had died and gone to indie hell: the first forty minutes of the highly-touted Memento lulled me into a false sense of security about the nature of its hero's problem; there was the familiar revenge plot (he must avenge his wife's death!), and the predictably unpredictable barrier to his goal (he has no short-term memory!), both of which led me to conclude that this was going to be one more shallow off-Hollywood neo-noir with a superficial twist. As the film soldiered on, I was rolling my eyes at the hero's frantic need to re-assert his maleness. Wounded as he was by the loss of his largely decorative wife and destabilized by his confusing affliction, it seemed as though his ability to walk tall as a man was what was at stake. This led me to assume that the remainder of the film would wallow in the tragic poignancy of a once-proud man robbed of the things that made him a credit to the patriarchy, and not only was this ideologically suspect, it was boring as hell. As the blandly-photographed images washed over me, I prepared myself to endure the repetition of this masculine panic until the lights came up.

Monkeybone (2001) [Special Edition] – DVD

July 11, 2001Posted in2000s, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD, Esoterica, Fantasy

*/**** Image B- Sound B Extras B
starring Brendan Fraser, Bridget Fonda, Chris Kattan, Giancarlo Esposito
screenplay by Sam Hamm
directed by Henry Selick

by Walter Chaw At long last someone decided to crossbreed Cool World, Beetlejuice, and All of Me. Stu Miley (Brendan Fraser) is a cartoonist in the John Kricfalusi tradition on the cusp of semi-stardom, with his own animated half-hour series impending on Comedy Central. His creation, the titular “Monkeybone” (voiced by John Turturro), is a dangerously sexualized simian that, we learn, is born from the shame of a pre-adolescent’s erection and a disturbed man’s sublimated aggression. Seminal, indeed. Plunged into a coma, Stu is dropped into a Freudian stew of elaborate set-design and partially-successful live-action integration called Downtown, helpless as Monkeybone takes over his flesh body, bangs his angelic gal Julie (Bridget Fonda), and parlays Stu’s modest cartoon into a marketing monolith bent on pushing nightmare-inducing toys (ushering Monkeybone into the poorly-attended “Club Halloween III“). Making matters somehow more unbearable, in Downtown Stephen King is literally a character, Giancarlo Esposito is a satyr, and–as box-office watchers of her last ten films will attest–Whoopi Goldberg is Death.

Hamlet (2000) – DVD

June 8, 2001Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Drama, DVD, Esoterica, Romance, Shakespeare, Thriller

***½/**** Image B+ Sound B+
starring Ethan Hawke, Kyle MacLachlan, Diane Venora, Liev Schrieber
screenplay by Michael Almereyda, based on the play by William Shakespeare
directed by Michael Almereyda

by Bill Chambers This review of Michael Almereyda’s Hamlet has long gestated, and the good thing is, the film does not suffer the ravages of memory. My expectations for this modern-dress Shakespeare adaptation were low enough that I presumed its impact would be short-term at best (the play will always transcend approach and performance to a certain degree), having been effectively show-stopped by Kenneth Branagh’s definitively faithful take of 1996. Prior to spinning the DVD, I also internally debated Almereyda’s talked-about corporate setting, a milieu that would seem a better fit for the political backstabbing of “Macbeth” or “Julius Caesar”.

julien donkey-boy (1999) – DVD

April 4, 2001Posted in1990s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Esoterica

**½/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Ewen Bremner, Chloe Sevigny, Werner Herzog, Evan Neumann
written and directed by Harmony Korine

by Walter Chaw Julien Bishop (Ewen Bremner, of Trainspotting) is schizophrenic, a stream-of-consciousness construct biding his time shambling along city streets, riding public transportation, and volunteering at a school for the blind. Aggressively disoriented and a sower of discomfort, Julien is not only a twisted Christ figure at the center of this most religious of Harmony Korine’s pictures, but a clear manifestation of Korine’s filmmaking philosophy.

Gummo (1997) – DVD

April 2, 2001Posted in1990s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Esoterica

***/**** Image A- Sound A Extras C
starring Linda Manz, Max Perlich, Jacob Reynolds, Chloe Sevigny
written and directed by Harmony Korine

by Walter Chaw Xenia, Ohio, America's middle-of-nowhere, is imagined by Harmony Korine (Kids) as the quintessence of Grant Wood's slightly canted take on the gothic at the heart of the mundane. It's a town out of step, recovering from a tornado which, an opening narration tells us, left people dead, cats and dogs dead, and houses ripped apart. In Gummo, his directorial debut, one of the tasks Korine sets for himself is detailing the psychological damage wrought on Xenia by two different forces of nature: the lingering emotional fallout from the almost-forgotten tornado; and the tragedy of being born with no advantageous DNA in an ever-diminishing gene pool.