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.

The Starz Independent FilmCenter Project, Vol. 4

May 10, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, Cyprus, Drama, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Romance, Theatrical, UK

by Walter Chaw

THE CHERRY ORCHARD (2000)
*/****
starring Tushka Bergen, Frances de la Tour, Charlotte Rampling, Gerard Butler
screenplay by Michael Cacoyannis, based on the play by Anton Chekhov
directed by Michael Cacoyannis

Written at the end of his life in 1904, "The Cherry Orchard" is the last of Anton Chekhov's great masterpieces, so ethereal it verges on the surreal and so circular it approaches the ineffable and the serene. The work is as balanced between its condemnation as it is winsome in its distillation of a lifetime spent in observation. By turns, it is also humanistic and mordantly funny, capturing a period of time (just prior to the Russian Revolution of 1905) in a way that perhaps no other play ever has any other period. Produced under some duress from Moscow Art Theater co-founders Konstantin Stanislavsky and Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, Chekhov began work on "The Cherry Orchard" in 1903–putting off the MAT pair with vague promises of a new farce or vaudeville. What he finally presented was what Stanislavsky feared: "…Instead of a farce again we shall have a great big tragedy."

Film Freak Central Does Hot Docs 2002 Canadian International Documentary Festival – May 4

May 4, 2002Posted in1960s, 2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Canada, Documentary, Film Festivals, Germany, Hot Docs

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover

ABSOLUT WARHOLA (2001)
*½/****
directed by Stanislaw Mucha

There is, believe it or not, an Andy Warhol museum in the remote Slovenian town of Medzilaborce; sadly, director Stanislaw Mucha can't scare up much of a reason to know about it. Essentially a stomp-the-hicks number, his film takes great pains to mock the residents of Warhol's ancestral home, who, though not quite sure why these paintings are supposed to be important, are nevertheless pleased to have such a famous relative and native son. But as Absolut Warhola heavy-handedly contrasts the guileless and homey Warholas–who prattle on about everything from the television and the relative merits of Lenin and Stalin–with the ultra-urbane art objects enshrined in the leaky museum, the film backfires on itself: it makes Warhol seem less interesting by showing how little he matters to people who live outside an urban cultural elite.

Film Freak Central Does Hot Docs 2002 Canadian International Documentary Festival – May 2

May 2, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Documentary, Film Festivals, Germany, Hot Docs

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover

BLACK BOX GERMANY (2001)
Black Box BRD
***/****
directed by Andres Veiel

Dealing with the ultra-left terrorism that swept West Germany in the '70s and early '80s, Black Box Germany both examines and obscures the implications of its main subjects: Deutsche Bank executive Alfred Herrhausen, who was killed by a car bomb, and RAF member Wolfgang "Gaks" Gams, who died in mysterious circumstances while being pursued by police. The main event is the who-ya-gonna-believe question, pitting capitalist thug vs. terrorist hooligan; unfortunately, this blots out every political persuasion in-between (and beyond), with a maddening vagueness that keeps you from taking a position. One can't imagine either party being too thrilled with the film: the banker would be annoyed by the implied challenge to his authority and the radical would find its "ambiguity" and precious aestheticism irredeemably bourgeois.

Film Freak Central Does Hot Docs 2002 Canadian International Documentary Festival – April 30

April 30, 2002Posted in1990s, 2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Canada, Documentary, Film Festivals, Germany, Hot Docs

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover

THE LAST JUST MAN
***½/****
directed by Steven Silver

The Last Just Man is a conventional but engrossing account of the appalling UN SNAFU in Rwanda, told from the point of view of the scapegoat who tried to stop it. Canadian Lt. Gen. Roméo Dallaire had little field experience when he headed into Rwanda–he likened it to sending a fireman in prevention to a four-alarm blaze–and discovered, when the country was on the verge of erupting, that his superiors would refuse to get involved. Smarting from the debacle in Somalia, they were skittish about sending troops in, but as the ruling Hutus take out their historical animus against the Tutsis (manufactured decades before by brutal Belgian colonists), their self-protection left Dallaire and the Tutsis at the centre of the apocalypse.

Film Freak Central Does Hot Docs 2002 Canadian International Documentary Festival – April 27

April 27, 2002Posted in****/****, 2000s, Austria, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Czech Republic, Film Festivals, France, Germany, Hot Docs, Israel, Switzerland

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover

TREMBLING BEFORE G-D (2001)
****/****
directed by Sandi Simcha Dubowski

One doesn't normally expect a film about religion and homosexuality to come down affirming both, but that's exactly what's happened in this elegant and powerful documentary about gays and Orthodox Judaism. Trembling Before G-d shows how, against tremendous resistance and incomprehension by the religious community, gay Jews insist on staying with God and try all manner of counter-measures to make their families and community understand their plight. One man confronts the rabbi who sent him into aversion therapy years ago, demanding a better answer; two women serve as a support centre for Hasidic lesbians; and many fight an uphill battle in re-connecting with the families that rejected them.

The Starz Independent FilmCenter Project, Vol. 3

April 26, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Finland, Germany, Italy, Norway, Romance, Sweden, Theatrical

by Walter Chaw

FAITHLESS (2000)
Trolösa
***/****
starring Lena Endre, Erland Josephson, Krister Henriksson, Thomas Hanzon
screenplay by Ingmar Bergman
directed by Liv Ullman

It is perhaps most instructive to look back at the beginning of a life when contemplating the end of one. Swedish auteur Ingmar Bergman spent his nineteenth year in The Skerries (a Stockholm archipelago), a tumultuous period during which he lost the girl he loved, lost his faith in religion, and finally lost a close male friend to death. That year, when married with the all-pervasive influence of playwright Strindberg and a tireless love of the theatre, provides the root concerns shooting through Bergman's filmography: the idea that marriage is a constant negotiation of losses (abortions and suicides included in that mix) and that should God exist, He is grown apathetic.

Crush (2002)

April 19, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Germany, Romance, Theatrical, UK

*/****
starring Andie MacDowell, Imelda Staunton, Anna Chancellor, Kenny Doughty
written and directed by John McKay

Crushby Walter Chaw A punitive film that has one of the more unpleasant third acts of any film in recent memory, John McKay’s Crush is an atonal estrogen opera that demonizes feminism while gifting the most sympathetic male of the piece with a nice vomit bath at his wedding. It isn’t political but rather misanthropic, a film that begins genially but ends with enough open contempt for each of its three protagonists that Crush seems something of an anti-romantic comedy. That would not be a bad thing save for the fact that the film aims for frothy uplift on the one hand and a heart-wrenching Love Story twist of fate on the other, with nary a whiff of satire or self-awareness to be found in-between.