Monsoon Wedding (2001)

March 8, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, France, Germany, India, Italy, Romance, Theatrical

**½/****
starring Naseeruddin Shah, Lillete Dubey, Shefali Shetty, Vijay Raaz
screenplay by Sabrina Dhawan
directed by Mira Nair

by Walter Chaw Mira Nair’s Monsoon Wedding plays like an unedited wedding video, capturing peccadillo along with celebration and ugliness along with beauty. Slyly, a little in the manner of an Ousmane Sembene film, it weaves the troubling elements of its culture into the rituals of joy. (In the case of Monsoon Wedding, Nair explores India’s caste system, American cultural diffusion, the question of expatriated sons, and the inevitable death of tradition.) Yet Monsoon Wedding is also an exuberant Bollywood-lite soap opera with flat characterizations and badly telegraphed plot points punctuated periodically by bombastic sitar sing-alongs. What most separates Nair’s piece from Sembene’s masterpieces, however, is that ineffable sense of naturalism which better defines a culture than an abuse of its mad cinema’s mad archetypes.

All About the Benjamins (2002)

March 8, 2002Posted in2000s, Action, Comedy, Crime, Germany, Theatrical, Thriller

**/****
starring Ice Cube, Mike Epps, Tommy Flanagan, Carmen Chaplin
screenplay by Ronald Lang and Ice Cube
directed by Kevin Bray

Allaboutthebenjaminsby Walter Chaw Blaxploitation without the sex, All About the Benjamins is a gratuitously violent film laudably free of the pretense of political correctness, but it’s so calamitously loud and arbitrary (and has a character who fits the same description) that it fritters away almost as much goodwill as it earns. The only things separating All About the Benjamins from other whip-edited, hard-action movies are Ice Cube’s joyfully offensive screenplay (co-written with Ronald Lang) and an opening set in a Confederate’s dream of a trailer park that does more for exploding the race issue in these United States than the past five Denzel Washington pulpits.

Last Orders (2001)

March 1, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Germany, UK

**/****
starring Michael Caine, Tom Courtenay, David Hemmings, Bob Hoskins
written and directed by Fred Schepisi, based on the novel by Graham Swift

by Walter Chaw Jack’s (Michael Caine) in a box–more accurately, his ashes are in an urn. His “last orders” (a term used in London pubs to announce a “last call” that serves double duty here) are for his remains to be scattered off a pier in Margate, a day’s travel for his three mates and his car salesman son, Vince (Ray Winstone). Lucky (Bob Hoskins; Anatol Yusef as a young man) likes to play the horses, Vic (Tom Courtenay; Cameron Fitch) is a stone-faced and quiet undertaker, and Lenny (David Hemmings; Nolan Hemmings) is the blowhard. Together, they bicker, get toasted, bicker some more, and stagger off to get filmed in hangdog medium shots that serve as platforms for flashbacks. That it’s well performed seems unavoidable, especially after Helen Mirren gets tossed into the mix as Jack’s widow Amy (Kelly Reilly as a young woman), but Last Orders is a dirge of lazy plotting.

The Tunnel (2001)

February 7, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Drama, Germany, Theatrical, Thriller

Der Tunnel
**½/****
starring Heino Ferch, Nicolette Krebitz, Sebastian Koch, Alexandra Maria Lara
screenplay by Johannes W. Betz
directed by Roland Suso Richter

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover The Tunnel is a handsomely-mounted TV movie with a sideline in uplift. There’s nothing particularly wrong with it on a professional level, but its subject matter–a group of people who tunnelled under the Berlin Wall to save friends and family–has been drained of its ideological thrust: It’s so sure that we know the horrors of life in East Berlin that it never really goes into details, and in the process, it blunts its effectiveness as a piece of drama. The film may be nicely shot and well-acted, but it makes so many assumptions about what we think and how we should feel that it neither teaches us anything we didn’t already know nor makes us feel the urgency of that which we already do.

Intimacy (2001)

December 7, 2001Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, France, Germany, Romance, Spain, Theatrical, UK

**½/****
starring Mark Rylance, Kerry Fox, Susannah Harker, Timothy Spall
screenplay by Patrice Chéreau, Hanif Kureishi, Anne-Louise Trividic
directed by Patrice Chéreau

Intimacyby Walter Chaw Jay (Mark Rylance) is a sour bar manager who, six years previous, walked out on his wife and two young boys. Claire (Kerry Fox) is a dour acting teacher and mother of one married to an oafish Cockney cabbie (Andy, played by Timothy Spall like the refugee from a Mike Leigh film he is). Every Wednesday at two in the afternoon, Jay and Claire couple in Jay’s austere, unfurnished flat. As a homosexual French bartender–the too-awkward representation of uninhibited sagacity–helpfully supplies, “It’s rare that two people meet one another who have the same needs.” But Jay appears to have needs different from Claire’s: Trailing her after they rendezvous, he watches her as she drops off her dry-cleaning, takes public transportation, and finally ends up at a hole-in-the-wall drama company to perform badly in a Tennessee Williams revival. Striking up a mine-strewn conversation with his lover’s husband over pints of bitter and a game of billiards, Intimacy seismically shifts from one powerful cinematic symbol (sex) to another (theatre), and in so doing demonstrates a remarkable courage in its nakedness; and an exasperating lack of focus in its thrust.

Along for the Ride (2001) – DVD

November 26, 2001Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD, Germany, Romance, ZERO STARS

Forever Lulu
ZERO STARS/**** Image B- Sound B
starring Melanie Griffith, Patrick Swayze, Penelope Ann Miller, Joseph Gordon-Leavitt
written and directed by John Kaye

by Walter Chaw For as bad an actress as Melanie Griffith is (Night Moves and Another Day in Paradise notwithstanding), it’s not entirely her fault that John Kaye’s Forever Lulu (inexplicably renamed Along for the Ride for its DVD release) is unspeakably awful. True, her Betsy-Wetsy kewpie doll elocution and its attendant dead eyes–which wore out their welcome almost the second she trotted them out for an incredulous audience about twenty-six years ago–are in full-bore here, but what makes Along for the Ride, in which she plays the title role, so abominable are such exchanges as this one:

LULU
Did you know that sometimes I ask my pillow late at night, “How much sadness do I have to feel?” And did you know that love is the greatest painkiller and that Marilyn Monroe wore a mask of tragedy over her pubic hair?

CLAIRE
You’re right, I should go talk to Ben.

Weimar Cinema and After – Books

November 10, 2001Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Books About Movies, Germany

Weimar Cinema and After: Germany's Historical Imaginary
FFC rating: 9/10
by Thomas Elsaesser

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover All together now: German cinema between the wars irrationally reflected the fears of the times. It mirrored the decadence of the period and was closely linked with the irrationalism of German romanticism. It directly prefigured the rise of Hitler and the flight of the country's important directors during the Nazi era, which both condemned Germany to hack propaganda and gave America the gift of film noir.

The Calling (2000) – DVD

November 1, 2001Posted inAuthors: Walter Chaw, DVD, Germany, Horror, Thriller

**/**** Image C Sound C
starring Laura Harris, Richard Lintern, Francis Magee, Alice Krige
screenplay by John Rice & Rudy Gaines
directed by Richard Caesar

by Walter Chaw A retelling of Polanski’s creep classic Rosemary’s Baby that plays more like its high-profile carbon copy The Astronaut’s Wife, Richard Caesar’s direct-to-video The Calling most recalls the good-bad Richard Donner movie The Omen. While that speaks to a small measure of gritty genre credibility, it still doesn’t forgive The Calling‘s many failings (including the lack of a dynamic villain figure and a distended second act) by a long shot. But at the least, The Calling doesn’t spend any time trying to be something other than an apocalyptic demon spawn flick, and that honesty of modest intention forgives a multitude of sins.

DIFF ’01: Amélie (2001)

October 27, 2001Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DIFF/SDFF, Esoterica, Film Festivals, France, Germany, Romance

Le fabuleux destin d’Amélie Poulain
Amélie Poulain
***/****
starring Audrey Tautou, Mathieu Kassovitz, Rufus, Yolande Moreau
screenplay by Guillaume Laurant, Jean-Pierre Jeunet
directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet

by Walter Chaw Caught between an iceberg of a father (Rufus) and a nervous wreck of a mother (Lorella Cravotta), the very peculiar Amélie (Audrey Tautou) develops in her youth an active imagination to combat emotional starvation. When she’s 22, on the night of Lady Di’s death by paparazzi, Amélie accidentally discovers a tin of toys and photographs, a child’s treasure cache hidden away in her apartment some forty years previous. Resolving to return the artifacts to their rightful owner, Amélie discovers that acts of altruism serve as voyeuristic surrogates to her life’s social desolation. Taking its cue from the bare structure of Jane Austen’s Emma and–ironically, considering the ultra-stylistic character of Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s direction–the stark work of the Nouvelle Vague (Truffaut in particular), the strength of Amélie (Le Fabuleux destin d’Amélie Poulain) is in its imagery. Its weaknesses, alas, are a running time that is at least a half-hour too long and a resolution so predictable that the film’s problems of pacing and length meet in something resembling frustration.

My First Mister (2001)

October 22, 2001Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Coming of Age, Drama, Germany, Romance, Teen, Theatrical

*/****
starring Albert Brooks, Leelee Sobieski, John Goodman, Michael McKean
screenplay by Jill Franklyn
directed by Christine Lahti

Myfirstmisterby Walter Chaw Something’s fatally off about My First Mister, veteran character actor Christine Lahti’s feature-length directorial debut. Awkward and atonal, it appears to be some strange cross between a reverse-gendered Harold and Maude and a mainstream Ghost World, and despite its desperation to appear so, it’s neither as intelligent nor edgy as either. Jill Franklyn’s screenplay (her first produced) just doesn’t work. It’s hollow to the ear and disagreeable to the taste, only ringing true occasionally through the Herculean intervention of Albert Brooks, here in his most restrained and affecting performance since Broadcast News. That noise you hear when Leelee Sobieski’s weary (and wearying) voiceover confides, “My clothes are not all black. Some of them are blue. Sometimes I wear them together so I look like a bruise,” is an audience’s worth of eyeballs rolling skyward. The problems Franklyn’s script presents to the rest of the cast, however, particularly the Helen Hunt-ishly smug (and similarly limited) Sobieski and Carol Kane as another gnomish manic eccentric, are insurmountable. They’re crushed beneath the weight of convenience, contrivance, Lahti’s unfortunate impulse towards the cutesy, and a score that is as insulting and invasive as any to be found in a Chris Columbus film or from the recently-flaccid baton of the once-great John Williams.

DIFF ’01: Mortal Transfer

October 19, 2001Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, DIFF/SDFF, Film Festivals, France, Germany, Thriller

Mortel Transfert
***/****
starring Jean-Hugues Anglade, Helene de Forgerolles, Denis Podalydes
screenplay by Jean-Jacques Beineix, from the novel by Jean-Pierre Gattengo
directed by Jean-Jacques Beineix

by Walter Chaw Returning to the "nouvelle noir" grotesquery that marked his 1981 debut Diva, Jean-Jacques Beineix's Mortal Transfer is wickedly funny, visually stunning, and perverse in a malevolent way that, along with Bernard Rapp's Une affaire de gout, appears to be a Gallic specialty this festival season. Its highlight is a ghoulish, hilarious scene having to do with a corpse, an icy road to be crossed, and a rather unorthodox means of delivery; and though the film never quite seems at ease with its own black heart, its game cast is more than up to the task of the earnest deadpan that Stygian farces require.

DIFF ’01: Lantana

October 12, 2001Posted in2000s, Australia, Authors: Walter Chaw, DIFF/SDFF, Drama, Film Festivals, Germany, Mystery, Romance

***/****
starring Anthony LaPaglia, Geoffrey Rush, Barbara Hershey, Kerry Armstrong
screenplay by Andrew Bovell, based on his play
directed by Ray Lawrence

by Walter Chaw Leon Zat (Anthony LaPaglia) is a police officer suffering from low self-esteem and a dwindled passion in his marriage to Sonja (the incredible Kerry Armstrong). When we first meet Leon, in fact, we know him only as an adulterer, witness to the first of his two indiscretions with the newly-separated Jane (Rachael Blake). Suspecting that Leon may be straying, Sonja visits a therapist, Valerie (Barbara Hershey), confiding that, "It isn't that he's slept with another woman, it's that he's lied to me about it that's the betrayal." Lantana is obsessed with repression, of how one small secret kept for too long mutates and festers into insurmountable guilt and fear. Leon feels guilty about his adultery and is fearful of being discovered; later, Leon feels guilty for having been discovered, and is fearful that his wife no longer loves him. Sonja similarly worries that she doesn't love him anymore.

Va savoir (2001)

October 12, 2001Posted in****/****, 2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Drama, France, Germany, Italy, Romance, Theatrical

Who Knows?
****/****
starring Claude Berri, Catherine Rouvel, Hélène de Fougerolles, Jeanne Balibar
screenplay by Luigi Pirandello, Jacques Rivette, Pascal Bonitzer, Christine Laurent
directed by Jacques Rivette

by Walter Chaw

"I hate symbolic art in which the presentation loses all spontaneous movement in order to become a machine, an allegory – a vain and misconceived effort because the very fact of giving an allegorical sense to a presentation clearly shows that we have to do with a fable which by itself has no truth either fantastic or direct; it was made for the demonstration of some moral truth."
-Luigi Pirandello from Playwrights on Playwriting, ed. by Toby Cole, 1961

The Mists of Avalon (2001) – DVD

October 10, 2001Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Czech Republic, Drama, DVD, Fantasy, Germany, Television

**/**** Image A Sound B-
starring Anjelica Huston, Julianna Margulies, Joan Allen, Samantha Mathis
teleplay by Gavin Scott, based on the novel by Marion Zimmer Bradley
directed by Uli Edel

by Walter Chaw A lavish television adaptation of Marion Zimmer Bradley’s minor feminist classic, The Mists of Avalon is three hours of ripping bodices, slashing swords, ludicrous, DeMille-tinged fertility rites, and snarling, imperious heroines. It is a retelling of the Arthur myth through the eyes of Morgan le Fey (recast as “Morgaine” and played by the terrifying Julianna Margulies), diminishing Merlin’s (Michael Byrne) role to that of doddering secondary foil and Arthur’s (Edward Atterton) to a brooding cuckold cipher.

Liam (2001)

October 5, 2001Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Coming of Age, Drama, France, Germany, Italy, Theatrical, UK

**½/****
starring Ian Hart, Claire Hackett, Anthony Borrows, David Hart
screenplay by Jimmy McGovern
directed by Stephen Frears

by Walter Chaw Liam is an Irish coming-of-age story that has more in common with John Boorman’s The General and Hope and Glory than it does with Alan Parker’s Angela’s Ashes. It balances the deprivation and desperation of growing up with crippling unemployment, a peculiarly sadistic brand of Irish Catholicism, and rising anti-Semitism with a good sense of humour and a lively feeling for pace that better captures the seesawing emotion of childhood than unrelenting horror or unleavened bliss. The truth of childhood, after all, lies somewhere in the grey liminal spaces between William Blake’s songs of innocence and songs of experience, though liberal time is spent in both extremes. In other words, the true power of Liam is not in the now-familiar images of scrounging for bread and cigarettes while enduring whippings at the hand of Sadeian priests, but in the shame of a little boy who walks in on his mother bathing and the embarrassment of a stuttering child unable to say his own name.

The Musketeer (2001)

September 7, 2001Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Germany, Luxembourg, Romance, Theatrical, UK

ZERO STARS/****
starring Justin Chambers, Catherine Deneuve, Mena Suvari, Stephen Rea
screenplay by Gene Quintano
directed by Peter Hyams

by Walter Chaw There is a moment in the trailer for Peter Hyams’s absolutely abominable The Musketeer where a series of scenes are edited in such a way as to suggest that Justin Chambers’s dashing D’Artagnan is promising stunned-looking waif Francesca (Mena Suvari) he will return for her. In the film, in truth, D’Artagnan makes the promise to his fallen horse (it’s an easy mistake to make). I mention this to right an injustice, for the great beast lying there frothing in all its exhausted equine glory turns in what is easily the best performance of the whole catastrophe. I felt a lot of sympathy for that poor steed, the only character in the film with which I had even a moment’s identification: we’d both been ridden hard and put away wet.

15 Minutes (2001) [Infinifilm] – DVD

August 26, 2001Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, DVD, Germany, Thriller

*½/**** Image A Sound A Extras A-
starring Robert De Niro, Edward Burns, Kelsey Grammer, Avery Brooks
written and directed by John Herzfeld

by Walter Chaw There’s a thing that happens about an hour into John Herzfeld’s 15 Minutes that is as bald and shameless a foreshadowing device as any in the tired pantheon of movie-groaners. It’s as bad as telling someone that you’ll marry them just as soon as you get back from this trip to Africa; as bad as showing the guys a picture of your corn-fed sweetie right before you charge that machine gun embankment. It is a moment of stunning conventionality in the middle of a film that is otherwise engaging and, for a moment or two, even shocking and provocative. 15 Minutes is defined by this scene in a great many ways: It’s a Hollywood film struggling with a controversial topic that finds a comfort zone in a script that tries to soften some images by obfuscation and others by a timidity that ultimately undermines its subject. The last time a big-budget picture tried to tackle a media culture involved in exploitation of the darkest crannies of the human heart was Joel Schumacher’s reprehensible and simpering 8MM. Sharing that film’s ignominious demise at the box office, it can be no real surprise that 15 Minutes is almost as repugnantly apple-polishing an experience.

Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (2001)

June 15, 2001Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Fantasy, Germany, Japan, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

*½/****
starring Angelina Jolie, Daniel Craig, Leslie Phillips, Mark Collie
screenplay by Simon West and Patrick Massett & John Zinman
directed by Simon West

by Walter Chaw To say that Lara Croft: Tomb Raider is completely incomprehensible is not entirely accurate, for the basic plot appears to be pretty straightforward. The British Lara Croft (played by the American Angelina Jolie) is a sort of jet-setting archaeologist in the Indiana Jones mold who is extremely well outfitted by a gadget man in the James Bond mold, and who boasts of a loyal, shotgun-packing butler in the Batman mold. Her task is to discover two pieces of a triangular artifact before the Illuminati do on the day that a rare syzygy coincides with a solar eclipse, allowing the triangle-bearer to control time.

The House of Mirth (2000) – DVD

May 29, 2001Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, France, Germany, Romance, UK

**½/**** Image B- Sound B Extras C
starring Gillian Anderson, Dan Aykroyd, Eleanor Bron, Terry Kinney
screenplay by Terence Davies, based on the novel by Edith Wharton
directed by Terence Davies

by Walter Chaw Terence Davies's adaptation of an Edith Wharton novel, The House of Mirth is ultimately a languid and luxurious failure, though always a lavish and often a compelling one. Gillian Anderson and Eric Stoltz are vaguely miscast as the Titian leads, while an appearance by Dan Aykroyd in a distracting role as a lascivious cad nearly sinks the production with every moment of his Elwood Blues quick-talking shyster patter, yet Davies's ability to infuse each of his films with a charge of self-confessional mortification lends the piece an air of sad gravity and outrage. The almost unbearable claustrophobic weight of alienation that flavours his non-linear portfolio (Death and Transfiguration, Distant Voices Still Lives, The Long Day Closes) can be traced to Davies himself feeling

Wonder Boys (2000) – DVD

March 25, 2001Posted in****/****, 2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Christmas, Drama, DVD, FFC Must-Own, Germany, Japan, UK

****/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Michael Douglas, Tobey Maguire, Frances McDormand, Katie Holmes
screenplay by Steve Kloves, based on the novel by Michael Chabon
directed by Curtis Hanson

by Walter Chaw While safely cocooned in the lushly-padded walls of academia, I had as my advisor a Grady Tripp–a man I respected as a professor and as a friend. We exchanged books often, we talked a great deal about the obscure minutiae of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s life, and we argued over whether William and Dorothy Wordsworth were engaged in a seedy incestual entanglement. (Yes, Brad, they were.) I even suspect that there was a tattered, coffee-stained manuscript tucked in the top drawer of his desk. If you’ve ever had a professor who shaped your opinions and a good portion of your intellectual life, and if you were additionally lucky enough to call him a friend as well as a mentor, then you’re predisposed to liking Curtis Hanson’s Wonder Boys.