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.

Shadow of the Vampire (2000)

January 26, 2001Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Drama, Esoterica, Horror, Luxembourg, Satire, Theatrical, UK, Vampire

**/****
starring John Malkovich, Willem Dafoe, Catherine McCormack, Eddie Izzard
screenplay by Steven Katz
directed by E. Elias Merhige

by Bill Chambers They certainly dressed the part in those days. As the pre-eminent German filmmaker F.W. Murnau, John Malkovich declares: “We are scientists engaged in the creation of memory.” On set, before the lamps are fired up and action is called, Murnau and his crew don tinted aviator goggles, looking as if they’re about to launch an atomic bomb. This was standard practice during cinema’s formative years, when it took an intense amount of light to satisfactorily expose an image. (It was not uncommon for those who didn’t take precautions to go blind later in life.) But Malkovich/Murnau is not describing costumes; he’s probably, in fact, speaking for the makers of the gothic comedy in which he appears as the catalyst, Shadow of the Vampire. Director E. Elias Merhige, working from a screenplay by Steven Katz, forges a new memoir of Nosferatu, Murnau’s unauthorized, silent-film-era take on Bram Stoker’s Dracula that was rumoured to star a real vampire.

When Harry Met Sally… (1989) [Special Edition] + Prelude to a Kiss (1992) – DVDs

January 8, 2001Posted in1980s, 1990s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Esoterica, Romance

WHEN HARRY MET SALLY…
***½/**** Image A Sound B Extras B+
starring Billy Crystal, Meg Ryan, Carrie Fisher, Bruno Kirby
screenplay by Nora Ephron
directed by Rob Reiner

PRELUDE TO A KISS
***/**** Image B Sound B
starring Alec Baldwin, Meg Ryan, Kathy Bates, Ned Beatty
screenplay by Craig Lucas, based on his play
directed by Norman Rene

by Bill Chambers Meg Ryan, the Princess of Perk, gets a makeshift career retrospective this month with the DVD releases of three high-profile gigs: When Harry Met Sally…, Prelude to a Kiss, and The Doors. I’m forsaking any further mention of The Doors to focus on the first two–delightful, whimsical films, unlike The Doors–and Ryan’s romantic-comedy stranglehold. Call it the curse of the button nose: the actress, who is more talented than anyone, myself included, is willing to admit, seems out of her element by a country mile in pictures that don’t require her to meet cute and kvetch over the subsequent courtship. And now that she’s pushing 40, Ryan is becoming to chick flicks what Stallone and Schwarzenegger were to actioners after Clinton got elected: we’re sick to death of seeing her in these Nora Ephron-type movies–yet, as Proof of Life, um, proved, we also don’t want to see her in anything but.

The Virgin Suicides (2000) – DVD

December 18, 2000Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Directors: Sofia Coppola, Drama, DVD, Esoterica, Romance

***/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras C+
starring James Woods, Kathleen Turner, Kirsten Dunst, Josh Hartnett
screenplay by Sofia Coppola, based on the novel by Jeffrey Eugenides
directed by Sofia Coppola

by Bill Chambers The Virgin Suicides is perverse, but I don't mean dirty. Everything about it is a little bit lopsided–James Woods, of all people, is cast as a henpecked husband, for instance. But its director, Sofia Coppola, doesn't play it as pop kink; instead, she strives for the reverie quality of David Lynch at his most suburban, which makes everything that's in principle out of the ordinary seem in tune, even unexotic. Watching The Virgin Suicides, a fractured nostalgia piece, is like trying to deduce the story of someone's life from a box of snapshots. It's wispy yet substantial (let's call it ethereal), and it stumbles upon a few great images and many more lasting ones.

Mother Night (1996) + Waking the Dead (2000) – DVDs

November 16, 2000Posted in****/****, 1990s, 2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Canada, Drama, DVD, Esoterica, FFC Must-Own, Mystery, Romance, Thriller, War

MOTHER NIGHT
***/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras A
starring Nick Nolte, Sheryl Lee, Alan Arkin, John Goodman
screenplay by Robert B. Weide, based on the novel by Kurt Vonnegut
directed by Keith Gordon

WAKING THE DEAD
****/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras A
starring Billy Crudup, Jennifer Connelly, Molly Parker, Janet McTeer
screenplay by Robert Dillon, based on the novel by Scott Spencer
directed by Keith Gordon

by Bill Chambers In Timequake, the most recent and arguably most flawed of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.’s novels (like many of his fans, I found it only intermittently readable), the author writes: “…I have never used semicolons. They don’t do anything, don’t support anything. They are transvestite hermaphrodites.” Perhaps Keith Gordon’s Mother Night is one of the few artistically successful cinematic adaptations of a Vonnegut work because Gordon avoids semicolons in his filmmaking–there is no straining to cohere, here.

Minnie and Moskowitz (1971) – DVD

June 7, 2000Posted in1970s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Esoterica, Romance

**/**** Image A- Sound B
starring Gena Rowlands, Seymour Cassel, Val Avery, Timothy Carey
written and directed by John Cassavetes

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover The experience of seeing Minnie and Moskowitz is like asking for a glass of milk and receiving a tequila shooter. Both might do good things for you in separate circumstances, but they are far from interchangeable. Similarly, the simple pleasures of a boy-meets-girl movie and the method bombast of John Cassavetes have their times and places, but they run on entirely different schedules. When the two actually collide, as they do in Minnie and Moskowitz, the cataclysm is so great it cancels out anything good that might have come from either one staying on their own turf: the wispy romance plot is mangled beyond all recognition and the soulful Cassavetes style is left pounding on the walls, resulting in a singularly unpleasant parade of standard cliché and acting overkill that leaves neither side standing by the end.