The Rules of Attraction (2002)

October 11, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Esoterica, Germany, Romance, Theatrical

***½/****
starring James Van Der Beek, Shannyn Sossamon, Ian Somerhalder, Jessica Biel
screenplay by Roger Avary, based on the novel by Bret Easton Ellis
directed by Roger Avary

Rulesofattractionby Walter Chaw Roger Avary’s The Rules of Attraction jitters and grooves like a thing possessed. It’s a post-modern Less Than Zero based on a below-average book by nihilism wunderkind Bret Easton Ellis transformed by a pair of exceptional performances and the insouciant style of Avary (more, Avary’s one-time partner-in-crime Quentin Tarantino) into a portrait of college life feral and uncomfortable. It handles time and traditional narrative structures with an expert insolence and earns points besides for making a cunning pop cultural reference to Sheriff Buford Pusser and Walking Tall. It’s too smart to outsmart itself, then, juggling its in-references with a kind of casual offhandedness that allows the proscenium to be occupied by a surprisingly piquant trio of character sketches.

DIFF ’02: Sweet Sixteen

October 7, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, DIFF/SDFF, Drama, Film Festivals, Germany, Spain, UK
***½/****starring Martin Compston, William Ruane, Annmarie Fulton, Michelle Abercrombyscreenplay by Paul Lavertydirected by Ken Loach by Walter Chaw Ken Loach returns to his blue-collar roots with the incendiary Sweet Sixteen, a fabulous evocation of place and the plight of the lower class in the mean streets of Glasgow. Supremely well-acted and marked by Loach's gift for an effortless transparency in setting and the performances he coaxes from inexperienced actors, the picture follows young Liam (Martin Compston) on the eve of his sixteenth birthday as he shuck-and-jives his way towards a better life for him and his soon-to-be-ex convict mother, Jean…

DIFF ’02: Roger Dodger

October 6, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Coming of Age, DIFF/SDFF, Drama, Film Festivals, Germany
***½/****starring Campbell Scott, Jesse Eisenberg, Isabella Rossellini, Elizabeth Berkleywritten and directed by Dylan Kidd by Walter Chaw Roger (Campbell Scott) is a fast-talking lothario with the usual laundry list of the insecurities, sexual or otherwise, that plague the modern man. But this far meaner and smarter version of The Tao of Steve--and what slight praise that is--takes a turn to the intriguing when Roger's 16-year-old nephew Nick (Jesse Eisenberg) appears for a few lessons on the art of pitching woo. In three brilliantly-scripted and wondrously paced sequences, Kidd points his Casanova Virgil and virginal Dante into the concentric circles of…

Hellchild: The World of Nick Lyon – DVD

October 4, 2002Posted in1990s, 2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD, Esoterica, Germany, Horror, Short Films

by Walter Chaw A DVD collection of short films written, directed, and edited by Idaho-born, German-based filmmaker Nick Lyon, Hellchild: The World of Nick Lyon is an often brilliant exercise in high John Waters trash augmented with actual filmmaking ability and an imagination as feverishly fecund and difficult to shake as a yeast infection. Lyon's work is equal parts deadpan and disgusting, a comic-book exercise in grotesquery that reminds a little of Sergio Aragones's "Mad Marginals" in its sprung logic (and sense of humour) and a little more of David Lynch (or Tim Burton) in its dark reflection of suburban America.

Igby Goes Down (2002)

September 26, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Germany, Theatrical

**/****
starring Kieran Culkin, Susan Sarandon, Jeff Goldblum, Claire Danes
written and directed by Burr Steers

Igbygoesdownby Walter Chaw A battle between bug-eye theatre and dead-eye matinee, Igby Goes Down represents another post-Rushmore neo-Salinger debut (from hyphenate Burr Steers, nephew of Gore Vidal) that places an anti-establishment fish in a prep-school pond and surrounds him with a florid panoply of castrating mothers, Oedipal complexities, and evil schoolmates. In attempting to find new material in a genre that seems mostly played out (and played better by Wes Anderson and Alexander Payne), Igby Goes Down is another desperately overwritten Stygian coming-of-age melodrama à la another recent Kieran Culkin angst flick, The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys.

Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever (2002)

September 20, 2002Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Germany, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Antonio Banderas, Lucy Liu, Roger R. Cross, Ray Park
screenplay by Peter M. Lenkov and Alan B. McElroy
directed by Kaos

Ballisticby Walter Chaw Walking away with the title of Most Incomprehensible Film of 2002 (walking away is also, incidentally, what you should do when presented with the prospect of seeing this film), Wych Kaosayananda’s ponderously branded Ballistic: Ecks Vs. Sever is a collection of puzzling explosions married to a series of alternately stunning and hilarious line deliveries of, to be fair, unspeakable exposition. It hopes to obscure its awfulness with its volume or, failing that, to dress up its stupidity with backlit shots of a woman communing with a captive manatee.

Mostly Martha (2002)

September 20, 2002Posted in2000s, Austria, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Germany, Italy, Romance, Switzerland, Theatrical

Bella Martha
**½/****
starring Martina Gedeck, Maxime Foerste, Sergio Castellitto, August Zirner
written and directed by Sandra Nettelbeck

by Walter Chaw A Bavarian Big Night, Sandra Nettelbeck’s Mostly Martha joins a romantic-comedy premise with a lost-child scenario, setting it all to a leisurely pace and framing it with an eye for the handsome. Its sightlines as crisp and clean as the dishes chef Martha creates in her immaculate kitchen, the picture is as relaxed a viewing experience as any this year–a dish without many exotic ingredients (like a good Salmon dish, the film tells us), but just enough substance to forgive the froth.

TIFF ’02: Love Liza

September 7, 2002Posted 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…

Dinotopia (2002) – DVD

September 2, 2002Posted in2000s, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD, Family, Germany, Television, UK

*/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring David Thewlis, Katie Carr, Jim Carter, Alice Krige
screenplay by Simon Moore, based on the Dinotopia books by James Gurney
directed by Marco Brambilla

by Walter Chaw Dinotopia is not so much a remake of Sid and Marty Krofft’s schlock-classic television show “Land of the Lost” as it is “Land of the Lost” with computer graphics imaging. The miniseries, which originally aired on ABC last spring, comes complete with mystical power stones, lost cities, an unforeseen disaster leading to the outsider discovery of the primeval setting, mysterious old technologies, talking beasties, and, of course, dinosaurs. It’s not fair to say that Dinotopia is unwatchable, because four hours later, I’m shuddering proof that it is, technically, watchable–better to say it’s improbable that anyone over the mental age of five will finish this miserable marathon unless it’s their sad occupation to do so.

TIFF ’02: L’Idole

August 30, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Drama, Film Festivals, France, Germany, Japan, Romance, TIFF
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…

Frailty (2002) – DVD

August 29, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, DVD, Germany, Thriller

***½/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B+
starring Bill Paxton, Matthew McConaughey, Powers Boothe, Matthew O’Leary
screenplay by Brent Hanley
directed by Bill Paxton

by Walter Chaw Dad (Bill Paxton) gets lists of demons from God. He has also provided Dad with three weapons with which to dispatch said demons: a pair of work gloves, a length of pipe, and an axe named “Otis.” Oldest boy Fenton (Matthew O’Leary) and his little brother Adam (Jeremy Sumpter) are left to decide whether Dad is indeed touched by divine hand or just another redneck serial killer in a white van.

Serving Sara (2002)

August 23, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Germany, Romance, Theatrical, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Matthew Perry, Elizabeth Hurley, Vincent Pastore, Bruce Campbell
screenplay by Jay Scherick & David Ronn
directed by Reginald Hudlin

Servingsaraby Walter Chaw Reginald Hudlin’s Serving Sara is a miserable, listless, pathetic excuse for a movie. It’s already dreadful by the time Matthew Perry finds himself shoulder-deep in a bull’s rectum, after which it defies a few natural laws by somehow getting worse. There are no laughs to be found in the whole of this lugubrious shipwreck–even the sight of Perry getting the tar beaten out of him by a pair of Italian caricatures is a sour, joyless affair. Seeing as being physically humiliated is Perry’s sole silver-screen reason for being (see also: The Whole Nine Yards), that his getting kicked and punched is not ever at all amusing says a great deal about the relentless excrescence of this exercise. I would add that at least it’s better than the amazingly awful Perry vehicle Almost Heroes, except that it’s not.

We Were Soldiers (2002) – DVD

August 17, 2002Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, France, Germany, War

***/**** Image A- Sound A+ Extras B
starring Mel Gibson, Madeleine Stowe, Sam Elliott, Greg Kinnear
screenplay by Randall Wallace, based on the memoir We Were Soldiers Once…and Young : Ia Drang–The Battle That Changed the War in Vietnam by Harold G. Moore, Joseph L. Galloway
directed by Randall Wallace

by Walter Chaw We Were Soldiers is a rousing war epic presented as the world’s most gruesome underdog sports intrigue, its carnage–fuelled by a brilliant attention to the decisions made in the heat of battle by a genius-level military mind–at once exploitive and orgasmic in its cathartic effectiveness. Concerning the bloodiest confrontation between the United States and North Vietnam, which took place in the infancy (November 14, 1965) of the doomed police action at LZ X-Ray in the Ia Drang Valley, the memoir of the battle We Were Soldiers Once…and Young (by battlefield commander Lt. Col. Hal Moore with war journalist Joseph Galloway) finds its way to the screen with Mel Gibson as Moore and his Braveheart scribe Randall Wallace at the typewriter and behind the camera.

The Good Girl (2002)

August 7, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, Drama, Germany, Netherlands, Romance, Theatrical

**/****
starring Jennifer Aniston, Jake Gyllenhaal, John C. Reilly, Tim Blake Nelson
screenplay by Mike White
directed by Miguel Arteta

Goodgirlby Travis Mackenzie Hoover The Good Girl is a sitcom that dreams of one day becoming an opera. Like its heroine, the film feels a great dissatisfaction with modern life, and like her eventual paramour, it goes to great lengths in order to articulate such a feeling. But also like these characters, The Good Girl is both too timid and too inarticulate to truly get its ideas across. Instead, the film resorts to “quirky” indie-film types armed to the teeth with wisecracks; offering none of the ambiguity that its narrative thrust seems to warrant, its flaws kill the movie’s aspirations and make sure that it stays in the generic backwater it so dearly wants to escape.

The Endurance: Shackleton’s Legendary Antarctic Expedition (2001)

August 6, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Documentary, Germany, Sweden, Theatrical, UK

***½/****
screenplay by Caroline Alexander and Joseph Dorman, based on the book by Alexander
directed by George Butler

by Walter Chaw If there seems to be a glut of information lately on Sir Ernest Shackleton and his ill-fated voyage across Antarctica, thank Caroline Alexander, who almost single-handedly revived interest in Shackleton’s travails by unearthing Aussie photographer Frank Hurley’s astonishing archive of photographs and short films after eighty years. Inspired in part by the death of legendary polar explorer Robert Falcon Scott, Shackleton and his crew of 28 set sail in August of 1914 in a three-masted barkentine dubbed “The Endurance.” Their quest, the last great trek of the age of exploration, was to be the first to cross Antarctica on foot, but The Endurance was trapped by pack ice about one day’s sail from the continent.

Dragonfly (2002) [Widescreen] – DVD

July 24, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Fantasy, Germany, Mystery, Romance, Thriller

*/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras B-
starring Kevin Costner, Joe Morton, Kathy Bates, Ron Rifkin
screenplay by David Seltzer and Brandon Camp & Mike Thompson
directed by Tom Shadyac

by Walter Chaw Emergency-room sawbones Joe Darrow (Kevin Costner) loses his do-gooder wife Emily (Susanna Thompson) when she’s killed in a rockslide in Venezuela. Soon he and his bald parrot believe that Emily has returned from the dead with a message about rainbows. I like Kevin Costner and his oeuvre. I find him to be a charming simpleton in the Gary Cooper mould. Until Dragonfly, his films never felt condescending to me, largely because Costner appears to be learning things at the same pace as his screenplay. His guileless wonder (‘Can you believe we did this to the Indians? Holy smokes!‘) sits well with me and makes him peculiarly suited to play the traditional American hero: good-looking, witless, and dull as dishwater. Casting Costner as a doctor is a mistake: the other person he played who had an advanced degree was New Orleans DA Jim Garrison in Oliver Stone’s JFK, and that character was clearly insane. Costner just doesn’t have the spark of erudition necessary to convince as a serious individual with letters after his name (not unless those letters are LHP), and his performance in Dragonfly is unconvincing, joyless, and scattershot.

Trouble Every Day (2001)

July 20, 2002Posted in****/****, 2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: Claire Denis, Drama, France, Germany, Horror, Japan, Theatrical, Thriller, Vampire

****/****
starring Vincent Gallo, Tricia Vessey, Béatrice Dalle, Alex Descas
screenplay by Claire Denis & Jean-Pol Fargeau
directed by Claire Denis

by Walter Chaw Plaintive and sad, Claire Denis’s remarkable Trouble Every Day is a rare combination of honesty, beauty, and maybe even genius. It isn’t enough to say that the picture captures the barbarism festering at the core of gender dynamics, nor is it sufficient to express my frank amazement at how Denis subverts genre in ways perverse and powerful. Here’s a canny director who knows the vocabulary of cinema as well as the cruel poetics of sexual anthropology; perhaps it’s enough to say that Trouble Every Day captures something ineffably true about the sex act with images vital, frank, and unshakable.

Rollerball (2002) [Special Edition] – DVD

June 15, 2002Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD, Germany, Japan, Sci-Fi, Sports

½*/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
starring Chris Klein, Jean Reno, LL Cool J, Rebecca Romijn-Stamos
screenplay by Larry Ferguson and John Pogue
directed by John McTiernan

by Walter Chaw When John McTiernan’s Rollerball was scheduled for the summer 2001 movie season, it boasted of a full-frontal Rebecca Romijn-Stamos and some graphic violence. What it didn’t have was the confidence of MGM, who pushed the release of the film into the doldrums of the new year and presided over the cutting of the only two possible reasons (the nudity and the gore) that anyone would have for seeing the film in the first place. Doubtless the rationale was to garner a PG-13 rating and the expanded pre-teen first-weekend box-office it confers; they’d better hope for a whopper opening, because no one is seeing this turkey twice. It strikes me as telling that a major studio would have so little confidence in a film that it is deemed somehow too prurient and also not “good” enough for a summer audience. Rollerball proves the truism that a studio often doesn’t know if it has a winner–but almost always knows when it has a stinker. Saying that Rollerball is better than the simultaneously released Collateral Damage is likely the only praise it will garner this weekend.

Film Freak Central does the Fifth Aurora Asian Film Festival

May 31, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Documentary, Film Festivals, Germany, Japan, Music, UK, Vietnam

AurorafestpagelogoMay 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.

Dark Blue World (2001) [Special Edition] – DVD

May 29, 2002Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Czech Republic, Denmark, Drama, DVD, France, Germany, Italy, Romance, UK, War

Tmavomodrý svet
**/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B+
starring Ondrej Vetchý, Krystof Hádek, Tara Fitzgerald, Charles Dance
screenplay by Zdenek Sverák
directed by Jan Sverák

by Walter Chaw Taking its name from a song sung during the course of the film, Oscar-winner (for 1996’s Best Foreign Language Film Kolya) Jan Sverák’s Dark Blue World is a historical melodrama set mostly in WWII-era Britain that’s notable because its elaborate battle sequences appear to have been carried off without the aid of CGI. The film is lacklustre and puzzlingly-paced–apologists would call it leisurely, I call it lugubrious–and though the story at its core is indeed compelling and rich for exploration, Sverák’s instinct towards sentimentality leads to one too many shots of sad-eyed dogs, exhausted under the weight of their status as beleaguered metaphors for loyalty and friendship. The picture could only have been salvaged by Dark Blue World focusing on the macrocosm of the plight of Czech pilots for which its tale of a doomed love triangle is the microcosm. As it is, Dark Blue World plays a good deal like Gregory Nava’s brooding A Time of Destiny: they mutually explore the bonds of friendship forged under war and tested by the crucible of love.