DIFF ’02: The Fabulous Stain (Introduction)

Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blog, DIFF/SDFF, Film Festivals

Difftitle2002bby Walter Chaw The silver anniversary of the Denver International Film Festival (hereafter DIFF) came to town with rumours run-rampant and grand, but the reality is a mixture of raised eyebrows, surprise announcements, and last-minute acts of God. Hoping for more innovative programming in its key slots, I was disappointed to learn that White Oleander, the star-studded adaptation of Janet Fitch's "Oprah Book Club" selection, would occupy the opening-night stage with a gala presentation at the lovely Temple Buell Theater in the Performing Arts Complex. Premiering just a few hours before its regular theatrical run begins on October 11th, the film is a mainstream Oscar-grab vying amongst the glut of mainstream pictures for the increasingly devalued top honours during the fall and holiday "awards season" and, for my sensibilities, a poor choice to headline the 25th anniversary of the fest. Last year's darkly-hued Lantana was a far more daring and appropriate pick to commence festivities. A rule of thumb has been ignored: bigger is not always better–in fact, in the case of modern film, it's almost never better.

Brotherhood of the Wolf (2001) [Widescreen] + [3-Disc Collector’s Edition] – DVDs

Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, DIFF/SDFF, DVD, Film Festivals, France, Horror, Mystery

Le Pacte des loups
***½/****
WIDESCREEN DVD – Image A Sound A+ Extras B
3-DISC COLLECTOR’S EDITION DVD – Image B Sound A+ Extras A+
starring Samuel Le Bihan, Mark Dacascos, Emilie Dequenne, Vincent Cassel
screenplay by Christophe Gans, Stephane Cabel
directed by Christophe Gans

by Walter Chaw A beautiful girl adrift in a vast natural expanse is set upon by an unseen menace and slammed against a solid object before being dragged away to her bloodily-masticated doom. Enter a famed naturalist (Samuel Le Bihan), considered the expert in the breed of beast that might be responsible for the heinous deed; his investigations mostly reveal that the culprit is larger than your average monster. Alas, no one in the isolated and picturesque community believes him, consoling themselves in an amateur hunt that bags a load of smaller members of the creature’s species. When the killing continues, the famed naturalist, his highly-trained sidekick (martial artist Mark Dacascos, here reunited with his Crying Freeman director), and a meek member of the ruling class along for the adventure, lay down a series of traps, gather hunting implements, and, after some derring-do, overcome their foe, incurring tremendous losses in the process.

Psst!: FFC Interviews Christian Frei

Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Documentary, Film Festivals, Interviews, Switzerland

CfreiinterviewtitleSeptember 30, 2002|While flipping through a magazine on a flight to Chicago in April 1997, Swiss director Christian Frei became acquainted with the work of photojournalist James Nachtwey, one of the most decorated artists in his field and the subject of Frei's remarkable documentary War Photographer, which debuts this week in Denver at the Argus Human Rights Festival. A fascinating, almost Lacanian separation of observer and observed indicates the piece, a film shot with a specially designed camera-mounted camera that provides an intimate point of view of the photographer at work. I had the pleasure of speaking with Mr. Frei this morning on the telephone to Switzerland as the director, fresh from a trip to Kabul researching his newest project, The Giant Buddhas, spends the next week and a half in his homeland.

Last Action Hero: FFC Interviews Steven Silver

Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Film Festivals, Interviews

SsilverinterviewtitleSeptember 29, 2002|At once a startling exposé on the horror of Rwanda's 1994 genocide and a stirring portrait of heroism, Steven Silver's fantastic documentary The Last Just Man is a balanced, provocative film that demonstrates a steady hand at the rudder and an educator's philosophy at the helm. It is wrenching and difficult to consider one's own life from the same perspective once watched–thus it fulfills the noblest aspirations of the medium: to move, to inspire, to edify, all so professionally composed that it manages to disguise its mechanism. Finding the right balance between history and irony, outrage and careful consideration, is a devilishly tricky thing, and Mr. Silver carries it off with a surplus of apparent ease. I was honoured to chat with Mr. Silver on the telephone from Toronto this morning preparatory to the Colorado debut of The Last Just Man at the Argus Human Rights Festival.

In Conversation with Arthur Dong

Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Documentary, Film Festivals, Interviews

AdonginterviewtitleSeptember 27, 2002|The latest by a veteran and much-lauded documentary filmmaker based in the Los Angeles area, Arthur Dong's Family Fundamentals examines the toll that hatred and intolerance have taken on either side of the ideological divide separating fundamentally Christian families from their homosexual children. Following three families, Dong's picture is notable for its remarkable restraint–its amazing lack of stridency in the face of as insidious–and puzzling–a form of fanaticism as any in our cultural dystopia. Such objectivity graces all of Mr. Dong's late production–works such as the (twice-honoured at Sundance) documentary Licensed to Kill (in which murderers of gay men are interviewed in prison) and Outrage 69, which details, in part, the Stonewall riots of that incendiary summer of '69. I talked to Mr. Dong, a Chinese-American and an openly gay man raised in the Chinatown section of San Francisco, about getting started in film and growing up Chinese in the United States.

TIFF ’02: The Sweatbox

Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Disney, Documentary, Film Festivals, TIFF, UK
**/****directed by John-Paul Davidson & Trudie Styler by Bill Chambers The makers of The Sweatbox--Trudie Styler (Mrs. Sting) and documentarian John-Paul Davidson--were granted unprecedented access behind the Iron Curtain of Walt Disney during the production of The Emperor's New Groove because Styler's husband was the studio's pop-star composer du jour. The results may embarrass Disney by catching them free of spin a time or two, but the movie doesn't seem to want to demythologize the Mouse House as a matter of course. (When it was over, audience members at my press screening could be heard to ask if the film…

TIFF ’02: Dolls

Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Drama, Film Festivals, Japan, Romance, TIFF
***/****starring Miho Kanno, Hidetoshi Nishijima, Tatsuya Mihashi, Chieko Matsubarawritten and directed by Takeshi Kitano by Bill Chambers The Yakuza doesn't rear its head until well into Dolls, a gripping, fractured ensemble piece written and directed by that down-and-dirty poet of Japanese cinema, Takeshi Kitano. I must confess to feeling ill-equipped to discuss the mechanics of the film--it's storytelling that gives you the impression of being steeped in oral tradition, and all I can say is that Dolls is accessible to monkey-brained North American viewers like myself all the same. Beginning with an elaborate puppet show shot with verve and affection,…

TIFF ’02: Femme Fatale

Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Crime, Directors: Brian De Palma, Drama, Film Festivals, France, Mystery, Thriller, TIFF
**/****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

Posted in2000s, Argentina, Authors: Bill Chambers, Crime, Drama, Film Festivals, Romance, Thriller, TIFF
**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

Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Directors: Paul Thomas Anderson, Drama, Esoterica, Film Festivals, Romance, TIFF
***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

Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Drama, Esoterica, Film Festivals, France, Netherlands, Teen, TIFF
***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

Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Canada, Drama, Film Festivals, Hungary, TIFF, UK, War
***/****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

Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Film Festivals, Interviews, TIFF

PsollettinterviewtitleSeptember 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

Posted in2000s, Adventure, Australia, Authors: Bill Chambers, Biopic, Drama, Film Festivals, TIFF
***/****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

Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Biopic, Crime, Directors: Paul Schrader, Drama, Film Festivals, TIFF
**/****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

Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Drama, Film Festivals, France, Germany, TIFF
***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

Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Canada, Crime, Drama, Film Festivals, France, Ireland, Romance, Thriller, TIFF, UK
***/**** starring Nick Nolte, Tcheky Karyo, Said Taghmaoui, Nutsa Kukhianidze written 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…

TIFF ’02: Ararat

Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Canada, Directors: Atom Egoyan, Drama, Film Festivals, TIFF, War
**/****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

Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Documentary, Film Festivals, Music, TIFF
*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…