TIFF ’02: Femme Fatale
**/****starring Antonio Banderas, Rebecca Romijn-Stamos, Peter Coyote, Gregg Henrywritten and directed by Brian De Palma by Bill Chambers Given the genre affiliation of its title and that it opens with a clip from Double Indemnity, Brian De Palma's Femme Fatale is unapologetically a film noir--which is not to say the picture has nothing to apologize for. Oh, for a pair of Armond White's De Palma goggles to beautify Femme Fatale, a flat, trés familiar, idly tongue-in-cheek caper starring Rebecca Romijn-Stamos in a role she's not dangerous enough to play, that of a bisexual American thief who switches places with her…
TIFF ’02: Assassination Tango
**½/****starring Robert Duvall, Rubén Blades, Frank Gio, Katherine Micheaux Millerwritten and directed by Robert Duvall by Bill Chambers As dawdling and peculiar as Robert Duvall's previous directorial outing, The Apostle, Assassination Tango has many checks in its 'pro' column, not the least of which a lead performance from writer-director Duvall that finds common ground between his character's two modes: volatile sociopath and lovestruck romantic. Duvall plays John J., a ponytailed hitman sent to Buenos Aires on a high-stakes job for his potential to camouflage with the locals. Once settled in, he discovers he can't carry out his execution for another…
TIFF ’02: Punch-Drunk Love
***½/****starring Adam Sandler, Emily Watson, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Luis Guzmánwritten and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson by Bill Chambers Punch-Drunk Love or, Un Redemption de Adam Sandler. Paul Thomas Anderson's latest film finds him at both his most experimental (dig those Scopitone interludes) and least windy--the tip-off is a running time of well under two hours. But first: Adam Sandler. When you hear Oscar buzz around a popular comedian, it generally means they've repressed everything that made them popular. (Jim Carrey in The Majestic, for example: Carrey may do a mean James Stewart impersonation, but he's no Jimmy himself.) Sandler…
TIFF ’02: Ken Park
***½/****starring Tiffany Limos, James Ransone, Stephen Jasso, James Bullardscreenplay by Harmony Korinedirected by Larry Clark & Ed Lachman by Bill Chambers Making Happiness look like Dumbo, Ken Park does not push the envelope--Ken Park runs the envelope through a paper shredder, douses it in lighter fluid, and sets it aflame. And then urinates on the ashes. The latest from Larry Clark, the film was co-directed by veteran cinematographer and frequent Steven Soderbergh collaborator Ed Lachman, and if you're worried that this Zaphod Beeblebrox would result in the muting of Clark's voice, think again. If anything, we sense the pair playing…
TIFF ’02: Max
***/****starring John Cusack, Noah Taylor, Leelee Sobieski, Molly Parkerwritten and directed by Menno Meyjes by Bill Chambers This portrait of an Angry Young Man posits Hitler as a starving artist. Living in squalor at an army outpost, feeling burned by the Treaty of Versailles, he befriends the fictional composite Max Rothman (John Cusack), the dashing, one-armed Jewish gentleman who runs the local art gallery--an abandoned warehouse with a leaky roof. (Working conditions are tough in postwar Munich, even for the upper class.) The result is an exercise in dramatic ironies, as well as the kind of thing you watch with…
Circus Vargas: FFC Interviews Peter Sollett
September 10, 2002|Peter Sollett had been judged by his cover in most of the interviews preceding mine at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival. As I was packing up to leave his hotel room, he thanked me for not asking, to put it in no uncertain terms, What the hell’s an upper-middle-class white guy doing make a movie about a Latino neighbourhood on the lower east side of Manhattan? The truth is, I couldn’t care less–been pigeonholed a time or two myself based on appearances. The beauty of NYU film-school grad Sollett’s feature-length writing and directing debut Raising Victor Vargas (an expansion of his like-themed short film Five Feet High and Rising) is that he could’ve set it anywhere. The milieu is all but incidental (he picked the film’s central location based on the Latino community’s enthusiastic response to an open casting call), though it does lend verisimilitude to the boy-meets-girl story basic. Call it apolitically political.
TIFF ’02: Rabbit-Proof Fence
***/****starring Everlyn Sampi, Tianna Sansbury, Laura Monaghan, David Gulpililscreenplay by Christine Olsen, based on the book by Doris Pilkingtondirected by Phillip Noyce by Bill Chambers As much as I don't mind Phillip Noyce's Jack Ryan films, they failed to live up to the artistic promise held by Dead Calm, the claustrophobic Aussie thriller that brought both Noyce and star Nicole Kidman to the attention of U.S. audiences. After a decade or so of marginal filmmaking in Hollywood (and in the Hollywood style), Noyce has returned to his homeland--and reminds us that he can be a pretty effective filmmaker--with Rabbit-Proof Fence,…
TIFF ’02: Auto Focus
**/****starring Greg Kinnear, Willem Dafoe, Rita Wilson, Maria Belloscreenplay by Michael Gerbosi, based on The Murder of Bob Crane by Robert Graysmithdirected by Paul Schrader by Bill Chambers I find it curious that, in my experience, TIFF-goers keep mishearing or misspeaking Auto Focus as "Out of Focus," what with either title applying to some degree. The former speaks to the self-centredness of the movie's subject, "Hogan's Heroes" star Bob Crane, the latter the shambles his life became, and aye, there's the rub: it's too easy to tie a bow on Auto Focus. Greg Kinnear is affable as Crane, who used…
TIFF ’02: Love Liza
***½/****starring Philip Seymour Hoffman, Kathy Bates, Jack Kehler, Sarah Koskoffscreenplay by Gordy Hoffmandirected by Todd Louiso by Bill Chambers Love Liza is a potent movie about compulsive behaviour I'm growing fonder of by the hour; the film rises above some hoary tropes to become almost peerlessly unsettling. As a new widower who can't bring himself to read his wife's suicide note, Philip Seymour Hoffman once again dissolves before our eyes into a sweaty, ticcy mess stuck between sleep and awake. But here, without the reprieves you get from his strange behaviour in the ensemble pieces the actor seems to favour (Boogie…
TIFF ’02: The Good Thief
***/****starring Nick Nolte, Tcheky Karyo, Said Taghmaoui, Nutsa Kukhianidzewritten and directed by Neil Jordan by Bill Chambers A loose remake of Jean-Pierre Melville's Bob le Flambeur (director Neil Jordan seems to have cast Tcheky Karyo for the way "Bob le flambeur" rolls off his tongue), The Good Thief is a minor-ish work from Jordan that benefits mightily, as most movies would, from Chris Menges's cinematography. Nolte inherits Roger Duchesne's role as Bob Montagne, an expert gambler and larcenist who in this film is hooked on heroin out of what appears to be sheer boredom. (A hilarious scene finds him stumbling…
TIFF ’02: Ararat
**/****starring David Alpay, Charles Aznavour, Eric Bogosian, Brent Carverwritten and directed by Atom Egoyan by Bill Chambers Shuffling the picture's sequences like a deck of cards, Atom Egoyan's signature postmodernism smacks of a diversionary tactic this time in Ararat. A film about the Armenian Genocide was Egoyan's dream project, yet he maintains an intellectual distance throughout, transparently terrified of the ostensible subject matter. Drawing from his well-stocked stable of actors while tossing a few fresh faces into the mix, Egoyan casts wife Arsinée Khanjian as an art history critic named Ani, newcomer David Alpay as her son, Raffi, bombshell Marie-Josée…
TIFF ’02: Standing in the Shadows of Motown
*½/****directed by Paul Justman by Bill Chambers They had more number-one hits than Elvis Presley, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, and The Beach Boys combined. They were...The Funk Brothers? That reversal of expectations, which occurs in the opening voice-over of Paul Justman's Standing in the Shadows of Motown, is one of the few clever touches that actually works in this documentary about the rotating panel of studio musicians who helped turn Berry Gordy's Detroit record company into a hit factory. In the film's first reel, producer/drummer Steve Jordan offers that it wouldn't matter if "Deputy Dog" had sung the songs…
TIFF ’02 Raising Victor Vargas
***½/****starring Victor Rasuk, Judy Marte, Melonie Diaz, Altagracia Guzmanwritten and directed by Peter Sollett by Bill Chambers The remarkable Raising Victor Vargas (formerly Long Way Home) stars soon-to-be somebody Victor Rasuk as the titular Victor, a 17-year-old raising the ire of his strict abuela (Altagracia Guzman) during the long, hot New York summer by virtue of having outgrown her idle threats. As the film opens, Victor asks out the beautiful Judy (Judy Marte) at a public pool in a pre-emptive bid to salvage his reputation for getting it on with a neighbourhood lass nicknamed "Fat Donna." When Judy shoots him…
TIFF ’02: 8 Femmes
8 Women***/****starring Danielle Darrieux, Catherine Deneuve, Isabelle Huppert, Emmanuelle Béartscreenplay by François Ozon, Marina de Van, based on the play by Robert Thomasdirected by François Ozon by Bill Chambers Almost every French actress I can rhyme off without help from the audience is in the cast of François Ozon's 8 Femmes, a delightfully odd murder mystery with song-and-dance interludes. (Imagine if John Waters had directed Clue.) The film takes place during Christmastime in 1950s France at a country manor where various women have gathered to celebrate the holidays with Marcel, the only significant man in any of their lives. But…
TIFF ’02: L’Idole
The Idol**½/****starring Leelee Sobieski, James Hong, Jean-Paul Roussillon, Jalil Lespertscreenplay by Gérard Brach, Samantha Lang, based on the novel À l'heure dite by Michelle Tourneurdirected by Samantha Lang by Bill Chambers I'm largely indifferent to L' Idole, a Gallic production directed by an Australian and co-starring two Americans of different ethnicities who admirably perform their parts in French. Leelee Sobieski's task is made more difficult by the role's requirement of her to deliver foreign-language dialogue in a tertiary accent, as the native New Yorker plays an Australian touring France with a theatre company. (I'm not enough of a linguist to…
The Business of Strangers (2001) – DVD
***/**** Image A- Sound A-
starring Stockard Channing, Julia Stiles, Frederick Weller
written and directed by Patrick Stettner
by Walter Chaw Julie (Stockard Channing) is a hardened businesswoman on a lecture trip who becomes certain that her last day on the job draws nigh. When young Paula (Julia Stiles) arrives to a presentation late, Julie unleashes all her fears and frustrations on the hapless girl. Written with an ear for dialogue and a wicked edge, Julie’s enthusiastic upbraiding of Paula sets the stage for three elements that drive The Business of Strangers to its conclusion. The first is the discomfort arising from Julie and Paula being stuck in the same hotel overnight due to grounded flights, the second is a possible explanation of the antagonism between the pair that culminates in a disturbingly open-ended finale, and the final is the idea that in Stettner’s interpersonal corporate nightmare, fear is the mechanism that catalyzes the characters towards generosity, friendship, and cruelty.
Film Freak Central does the Fifth Aurora Asian Film Festival
May 31, 2002|by Walter Chaw Now in its fifth incarnation, Denver’s Aurora Asian Film Festival has grown year by year to become one of the region’s most interesting cinematic events. Under the guidance of Denver Film Society program director Brit Withey, the decidedly small festival (twelve films are being screened over the course of four days) will feature eleven Denver-area debuts–including the much-lauded The Turandot Project and Tony Bui’s Green Dragon–as well as a restored 35mm print of Conrad Rooks’s 1972 film Siddhartha. It is a rare opportunity to see a largely-unknown film projected (an adaptation of Hermann Hesse’s novel of the same name, the picture features the cinematography of the great Sven Nykvist), and an example of the kind of value a festival this intimate can provide.
Film Freak Central Does Hot Docs 2002 Canadian International Documentary Festival – May 5
by Travis Mackenzie Hoover
BOLLYWOOD BOUND
***/****
directed by Nisha Pahuja
Bollywood Bound is a perfectly decent film about aspiring actors working in Bombay that would be even better without the cutesy editorializing of director Nisha Pahuja. There's a wealth of interesting information in this examination of Canadian expatriates trying to make it in Hindi filmmaking; Pointing out that Bollywood provides a place for East Indian descendants that Hollywood won't provide, it shows the various cultural distortions that several actors faced regarding India, Indian culture, and themselves. Previously known to their white schoolmates as "the Indian kids," they suddenly find themselves equally marginalized as "the Canadian actors," and discover that the pure "Indianness" they fought to protect in Canada is largely non-existent.
Film Freak Central Does Hot Docs 2002 Canadian International Documentary Festival – The Innovators: Frederick Wiseman
by Travis Mackenzie Hoover
The Revival, Toronto|After being lulled into a stupor by the sins and shortcomings of this week's panellists, today's Frederick Wiseman talk was like being slapped back into full consciousness. There was no "drama" and "truth" spouted by this man, there were no sweeping generalizations about the places and people he films. There was simply a desire to explore the things that interest him and widen the scope of institutional life. And with a refreshing blunt humour and low tolerance for bull, Wiseman cut through the pretensions and got to the point of how and why he works as he does.