Just Married (2003) – DVD

May 24, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Germany, Romance

½*/**** Image A Sound A- Extras C+
starring Ashton Kutcher, Brittany Murphy, Christian Kane, David Moscow
screenplay by Sam Harper
directed by Shawn Levy

by Walter Chaw Just as 2002 began with Orange County, a disappointing, somewhat lacklustre comedy (though certainly nowhere near as terrible as the film I’m here to review), 2003 begins with Just Married, a comedy so dedicatedly unfunny that the best way to approach it would be through the perspective that it’s actually meant to be disturbing. In fact, until the first line of dialogue about a minute in, the picture feels like a mordant, tongue-in-cheek, domestic-horror film–something along the lines of The War of the Roses. It doesn’t take long for optimism to give way to extreme predictability, unrelieved puerility, and the creepy realization that Cristophe Beck’s invasive score is a riff on Orff’s “Musica Poetica,” best known perhaps as the main theme to Terence Malick’s own black love story Badlands. There seems a realization, in other words, that a better, darker film about America’s fifty-percent divorce rate is waiting frustrated in Just Married‘s wings.

The In-Laws (2003)

May 22, 2003Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, Germany, Theatrical, Thriller

***/****
starring Michael Douglas, Albert Brooks, Ryan Reynolds, Lindsay Sloane
screenplay by Nat Mauldin and Ed Solomon, based on the screenplay by Andrew Bergman
directed by Andrew Fleming

Inlawsby Walter Chaw Casting Albert Brooks as the prototypical nebbish and Michael Douglas as a testosterone-geeked maniac is almost too easy, but given a vehicle like The In-Laws, with this much heat invested in its direction, the casting doesn’t seem so much lazy as inspired. Based on a 1979 film starring Alan Arkin and Peter Falk in the roles of put-upon father-of-the-bride and crazed father-of-the-groom, respectively, the remake doesn’t have a single scene as classic as the “serpentine” gag of the first but compensates with the sort of instant familiarity afforded by veteran personalities in comfortable roles. Douglas has been here before in another tale of familial dysfunction, The War of the Roses, and Brooks has never really been anywhere else; the picture, paced like a trip-hammer by director Andrew Fleming, only really fails in its drab newlywed couple and a passel of homosexual gags that are badly dated and bordering on unkind.

Better Luck Tomorrow (2003); Manic (2003); Cinemania (2003)

May 15, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Documentary, Drama, Germany, Romance, Theatrical

BETTER LUCK TOMORROW
***/****
starring Parry Shen, Jason J. Tobin, Sung Kang, Roger Fan
screenplay by Ernesto Foronda & Justin Lin & Fabian Marquez
directed by Justin Lin

MANIC
*½/****
starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Zooey Deschanel, Elden Henson, Don Cheadle
screenplay by Michael Bacall & Blayne Weaver
directed by Jordan Melamed

CINEMANIA
*½/****
directed by Angela Christlieb & Stephen Kijak

by Walter Chaw Justin Lin’s feature debut caused something of a minor firestorm at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, where it was charged that Asian-American stereotypes of the “model minority” were being indulged by Better Luck Tomorrow‘s tale of honor-roll gangsters amuck in SoCal. The truth is that the picture, for all its narrative faults, is a complicated exploration of what happens when the societal stereotypes imposed on any minority are bought into and manipulated by the minority itself–the sort of double-edged sword that marginalizes even as it shields. (With African-Americans, a possible opportunity to work beneath the radar of “white” society; with Asian-Americans, the possibility to deflect suspicion of criminal activity with straight “A”s and memberships to the all-geek extracurricular club pantheon.) A scene following a party crash and armed intimidation comes close to instant classic status as our quartet of first-generation ABC hoods pulls up alongside Hispanic gang members of a more traditional Southern California breed, the cultural tension erupting in a recognition of racial transference that borders on brilliant. It’s the traffic jam scene from Office Space transferred onto an urban crime drama.

Love Liza (2002) – DVD

April 27, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD, France, Germany

***½/**** Image B Sound A- Commentary B+
starring Philip Seymour Hoffman, Kathy Bates, Jack Kehler, Sarah Koskoff
screenplay by Gordy Hoffman
directed by Todd Louiso

by Walter Chaw Philip Seymour Hoffman is Dante and the slings and arrows of mendacity are his Virgil, chasing him through the inferno of his day-to-day. A remarkable actor at his frequent best when deserted by a lover, Hoffman in Love Liza is Wilson Joel, a man whose wife has just killed herself and left a sealed letter behind. It becomes his albatross, toted around unexamined, as Wilson descends on a spiral of juvenile addiction (gasoline huffing) and avoidance. He sleeps on the floor outside his bedroom and does his best to dodge his mother-in-law (Kathy Bates)–hiding the sharp odour of his addiction behind the lie of becoming a radio-controlled airplane pilot.

Hot Docs ’03: Bruno S. – Estrangement is Death

April 25, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Documentary, Film Festivals, Germany, Hot Docs
Bruno S. - Die Fremde ist der Tod***/****directed by Miron Zownir by Travis Mackenzie Hoover At the Cannes premiere of one of his films, Werner Herzog discovery Bruno S. decided to play his accordion outside the theatre; unfortunately, no one knew how to take this, and the police were called in to arrest him. That pretty much sums up the life of Bruno S., who, after two films with Herzog, faded into obscurity, never to catch the public eye again. But that wasn't the only rejection in his life: Not only was he the victim of neglectful parents, but his…

Hot Docs ’03: Wheel of Time

April 24, 2003Posted in2000s, Austria, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Directors: Werner Herzog, Documentary, Film Festivals, Germany, Hot Docs, Italy
*½/****directed by Werner Herzog by Travis Mackenzie Hoover I was initially bewildered by the substitution of this film for the cancelled Bus 174--how could a film by Werner Herzog, one of the big names of the German New Wave, have not been initially selected for a festival that could use the publicity? As it turns out, there is a reason: Despite some unusually good intentions (for Herzog, anyway), his documentary is disorganized and lacking in rigour. The film plays as sort of What I Did On My Spiritual Vacation, with Herzog visiting various Buddhist holy events as people pray, listen…

Red Dragon (2002) [2-Disc Director’s Edition] – DVD

April 6, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, DVD, Germany, Thriller

*/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B-
starring Anthony Hopkins, Edward Norton, Ralph Fiennes, Harvey Keitel
screenplay by Ted Tally, based on the novel by Thomas Harris
directed by Brett Ratner

by Walter Chaw Because Thomas Harris’s haunting novel of the same name is flawed in someone’s eye, Red Dragon hacks and slices the piece with a rude imprecision that would inspire pop icon Hannibal Lecter to sharpen his carving tools. The picture opens with a ridiculous and awkwardly-staged Lecter backstory (meaning it plays like the rest of the Lecter additions) that gives a self-parodying Anthony Hopkins a ponytail in place of the self-respect to which he can no longer lay claim, bringing to mind the unwieldy cameos of Cannonball Run.

A Man Apart (2003) + The Man Without a Past (2003)

April 4, 2003Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Drama, Finland, France, Germany, Romance, Theatrical, Thriller

A MAN APART
**/****
starring Vin Diesel, Larenz Tate, Steve Eastin, Timothy Olyphant
screenplay by Christian Gudegast & Paul Scheuring
directed by F. Gary Gray

Mies vailla menneisyyttä
***½/****
starring Markku Peltola, Kati Outinen, Annikki Tähti, Juhani Niemelä
written and directed by Aki Kaurismäki

Manapartwithoutapastby Walter Chaw The one an absurdist sketch, the other just absurd, both Aki Kaurismäki’s The Man Without a Past and F. Gary Gray’s A Man Apart use violence as a catalyst for existential introspection, but while Gray’s emetic excess deadens with its Death Wish-cum-The New Centurions wish-fulfillment fantasy, Kaurismäki’s gentle fable finds grace amongst society’s victims. Gifting their respective stars each with a hospital scene and subsequent resurrection and new lease on life, the two protagonists are paired with a lady love once back on the street–Kaurismäki’s hero with a Salvation Army matron (Kati Outinen), Gray’s with a ridiculously loyal partner (Larenz Tate) who discards his role as conscience to become an extension of a revenge plot that’s made more ludicrous with a heaping dose of morality and a Lethal Weapon graveside penance.

Evelyn (2002) [Special Edition] – DVD

April 2, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Family, Germany, Ireland, Netherlands, UK

*/**** Image C+ Sound B- Extras B+
starring Pierce Brosnan, Julianna Margulies, Aidan Quinn, Stephen Rea
screenplay by Paul Pender
directed by Bruce Beresford

by Walter Chaw It seems as though “inspired” in the phrase “inspired by a true story” is the operative word as the 2002 Christmas season presents to us a rotten couplet of films “inspired” by true stories that, in all likelihood, were pretty interesting prior to the whitewashed variety of “inspiration” dished out in most high profile biopics. Headliner Antwone Fisher (a rancid piece of garbage I like to refer to as “Good Antwone Fishing” or “Finding Fisher-er”) gains esteem just by the association of twinkly-eyed Denzel Washington behind the camera (and stentorian Denzel in front), while small foreign film Evelyn will probably gain esteem by dint of its small and foreign status. (Just like its cute-as-a-button titular waif.) Like so many horrible movies of this mongrel breed, however, both Antwone Fisher and Evelyn are so uncompromising in their saccharine manipulations that nurses should stand at theatre entrances, passing out hypodermics of insulin.

Nowhere in Africa (2001)

March 28, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Biopic, Drama, Germany, Theatrical

Nirgendwo in Afrika
**½/****
starring Juliane Köhler, Regine Zimmermann, Merab Ninidze, Matthias Habich
screenplay by Caroline Link, based on the novel by Stefanie Zweig
directed by Caroline Link

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover One wants very badly to condescend to a film like Nowhere in Africa (Nirgendwo in Afrika). Like a multitude of other middlebrow efforts, it has large ambitions it can’t fulfill, and it strains to say big things about a subject it hasn’t really thought through. But somehow, one can’t write the whole thing off. The subject matter is so suggestive on its own that it allows you to go on your own mental journey, riding over director Caroline Link’s visual and analytical deficiencies to find the material’s implications. True, that’s not as good as having a real director give you ideas that send you further, but it is enough to keep you watching with no real pain.

The Core (2003)

March 28, 2003Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Disaster Movie, France, Germany, Italy, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

**½/****
starring Aaron Eckhart, Hilary Swank, Delroy Lindo, Stanley Tucci
screenplay by Cooper Layne and John Rogers
directed by Jon Amiel

by Walter Chaw Jon Amiel’s poorly-timed disaster throwback The Core is a by-the-numbers affair that features the sort of special effects mayhem that folks will reference when terrorists blow-up the Acropolis–perhaps explaining in part why this bombastic summer film is being rushed into release in the late-winter doldrums: better to get it in movieplexes before it has to be delayed for a few months. But with unfortunate mentions of the Al Jazeera news agency and a botched shuttle landing that is exceedingly uncomfortable given its proximity to NASA’s recent tragedy, it could just be that The Core is a bad idea for any time, and releasing it when no one is likely to see it is just a cut-your-losses sort of thing. The Core is probably betting that people are more fatigued by the Riefenstahl-ian “embedded” live coverage of our troops in action than by their over-familiarity with this kind of Armageddon/Deep Impact/Poseidon Adventure falderal, when the truth is that it’s possible to be tired of both.

8 Mile (2002) [Widescreen w/Uncensored Bonus Features] – DVD

March 19, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Germany, Music

*/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras B-
starring Eminem, Kim Basinger, Brittany Murphy, Mekhi Phifer
screenplay by Scott Silver
directed by Curtis Hanson

by Walter Chaw I was of a mind once that Kim Basinger is pretty good at playing a milquetoast and a sexual victim (I liked her in 9½ Weeks, and she won the Oscar, after all, for L.A. Confidential), but I stand corrected. As a milquetoast sexual victim (not to Eminem, surprisingly) and mother to a steel worker-cum-rapper, Ms. Basinger’s every moment in Curtis Hanson’s 8 Mile is a moment that the film, an otherwise serviceable underdog Flashdance intrigue, grinds to a halt. In reprising her abominable cornpone accent from the aptly named No Mercy, she fails to understand that “country-fried bayou redneck” makes a lot less sense in the liminal “8 Mile” section of Michigan than it does in New Orleans.

Le6ion of the Dead (2001) – DVD

March 11, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD, Germany, Horror, Vampire, Zombie

Legion of the Dead
½*/**** Image B Sound B+ Extras B
starring Michael Carr, Russell Friedenberg, Kimberly Liebe, Matthias Hues
written and directed by Olaf Ittenbach

by Walter Chaw Sort of like how I imagine Samuel Beckett would read while huffing accelerant, Olaf Ittenbach’s Le6ion of the Dead rips off a couple of Tarantino screenplays en route to winning the title of the most arbitrary and impossible-to-follow film that isn’t composed primarily of stock footage. Though the director has tried to have his name removed from the picture, citing unapproved edits made in the struggle for an “R” rating, unless the studio wrote the screenplay, pointed the camera, and hired the actors…sufficed to say that there’s enough blame here to go around.

Ordinary Decent Criminal (2000) – DVD

February 24, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, DVD, Gangster, Germany, Ireland, UK

*/**** Image A- Sound B+
starring Kevin Spacey, Linda Fiorentino, Peter Mullan, Stephen Dillane
screenplay by Gerard Stembridge
directed by Thaddeus O’Sullivan

by Walter Chaw Completed about a year after John Boorman’s infinitely superior The General, Thaddeus O’Sullivan’s Ordinary Decent Criminal is a sporadic “fictionalizing” of the life of Irish crime boss Martin Cahill that dresses up Cahill’s exploits with slick visuals while attempting the unsavoury task of doing exactly what The General was accused of doing: making urban terrorism and torture whimsical caper fare. Recasting Cahill as a Keyser Soze with a sense of oily humour and renaming him Michael Lynch (Kevin Spacey), Ordinary Decent Criminal is extraordinarily lightweight blather free entirely of the sense of scale and place of Boorman’s film. The General is fantastic, Ordinary Decent Criminal: just fatuous.

Russian Ark (2003)

February 21, 2003Posted in****/****, 2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Canada, Denmark, Drama, Esoterica, Finland, Germany, Japan, Mystery, Russia, Theatrical

****/****
starring Sergei Dontsov, Mariya Kuznetsova, Leonid Mozgovoy, David Giorgobiani
screenplay by Boris Khaimsky & Anatoli Nikiforov & Svetlana Proskurina & Alexander Sokurov
directed by Alexander Sokurov

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Russian Ark is a film that hoists its middle finger high against the cultural practices of nearly a hundred years. Implicitly appalled by the twin forgettings of communist and free-market logic, director Alexander Sokurov retaliates by erecting a monument to the proceeding three centuries of image-making–one that marks the entrance to a crypt perhaps, as Sokurov knows that time is running out on its preservation. Surely there’s a heaping dose of snobbery in his approach, and a whole lot of wilful obscurity as well, but his expression of his thesis is so passionate, and his technical execution is so seamless and beautiful, that I could have forgiven him almost anything.

The Life of David Gale (2003)

February 21, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, Germany, Mystery, Spain, Theatrical, Thriller, UK, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Kevin Spacey, Kate Winslet, Laura Linney, Gabriel Mann
screenplay by Charles Randolph
directed by Alan Parker

Lifeofdavidgaleby Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. One wonders if there isn’t, after all, a subtle right-wing conspiracy at work in the entertainment industry, where ultra-liberal stumps are turned into the sort of ostensibly pro-leftist propaganda reel that does serious harm to the pro-leftist agenda. If it’s not the reprehensible The Contender, with its Ayn Rand-ian hypothetical, it’s I Am Sam and its bizarre vilification of the child welfare system–or worse, John Q, with its curiously misdirected lament against our obviously broken health-care state. Trumping them all in terms of muddle and melodrama, however, is The Life of David Gale, an anti-death penalty tirade that, by the end, feels like a life sentence the audience wishes hadn’t been commuted. The only way to make any sense of the film is to suspect it of darker motives: Its ultimate message–and it’s not a bad one–seems to be that the criminal justice system the film so actively vilifies is, in fact, the only honest (though imperfect) force in the entire mess.

Blue Crush (2002) [Collector’s Edition] (Widescreen) – DVD

January 27, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Germany, Romance, Sports

***/**** Image A- Sound A+ Extras B-
starring Kate Bosworth, Michelle Rodriguez, Matthew Davis, Sanoe Lake
screenplay by Lizzy Weiss & John Stockwell, based on the article "Surf Girls of Maui" by Susan Orlean
directed by John Stockwell

by Walter Chaw Bob Marley sings "Could You Be Loved" as a quartet of surf girls in a finned vintage powder-blue ride, yellow surfboards strapped to its roof, chase the dawn to catch the perfect pipe breaking over Hawaii's sand bars and coral reefs. There is possibly no finer capsule of the adrenaline of early morning and youth in recent memory, and while Blue Crush, the movie surrounding this moment, can't sustain that feeling of hope springing eternal, what it manages is an estrogen opera so intensely feminine that it serves as the antidote (and cannier doppelgänger) to Diesel's xXx flex-a-thon.

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.

Metropolis – 2002 Restoration (1927)

January 15, 2003Posted in1920s, 2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Drama, Germany, Sci-Fi, Theatrical

**½/****
starring Alfred Abel, Gustav Fröhlich, Brigitte Helm, Rudolf Klein-Rogge
screenplay by Fritz Lang and Thea von Harbou, based on her novel
directed by Fritz Lang

Metropolisby Travis Mackenzie Hoover Now it can be told: Despite its status as a cinema landmark, I’ve never been particularly enamoured with Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. Like its immediate descendant Blade Runner, it’s a film better designed than directed and better staged than thought through–a gorgeous white elephant that’s all dressed up with no place to go. Granted, that design and staging are hugely influential, making it essential viewing for students of the cinema, and on a level of simple eye candy it has few peers in all of cinema. But while the current restoration shows us a fuller and more substantial narrative, that doesn’t mean that it is, in fact, full or substantial, and Lang’s rigid camera set-ups lack the fluidity and lightness to truly make the film more than a notable museum piece.

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.