The Cave (2005)

Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Horror, Mexico, Romania, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller

**½/****
starring Cole Hauser, Morris Chestnut, Lena Headey, Piper Perabo
screenplay by Michael Steinberg & Tegan West
directed by Bruce Hunt

by Walter Chaw The comparisons are inevitable, but that’s mostly because The Cave is about 80% identical to Anacondas: The Hunt for the Blood Orchid: the same throat-talking white hero (Jack (Cole Hauser this time)), complementary women (Lena Headey as the smart one and Piper Perabo as the bikini), black guy (Morris Chestnut in both films), Asian (Daniel Dae Kim), and egghead (Marcel Iures); the same fall from a giant waterfall; and the same various other good-looking male-model types who serve as chum for the same blurrily-shot CGI beast. There’s even a cave in Anacondas, if you recall. But the 20% of The Cave that’s different (no fraidy-cat Stepin Fetchit in this one), most notably the major plot twist (already spoiled in a doctored image in the film’s trailers), make it the superior film. Not a good film, let’s not go crazy, but not a terrible one, either–and if you can get into the idea that what the picture’s really doing is rewriting the vampire mythos in biological/parasitical terms, you might even have a good time of the Reign of Fire variety.

William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice (2004) + The Assassination of Richard Nixon (2004) – DVDs

Posted in2000s, Al Pacino, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Crime, Drama, DVD, Italy, Luxembourg, Mexico, Romance, Shakespeare, Thriller, UK

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE’S THE MERCHANT OF VENICE
*½/**** Image A Sound A Extras B+
starring Al Pacino, Jeremy Irons, Joseph Fiennes, Lynn Collins
screenplay by Michael Radford, based on the play by William Shakespeare
directed by Michael Radford

THE ASSASSINATION OF RICHARD NIXON
**/**** Image B+ Sound B+
starring Sean Penn, Naomi Watts, Don Cheadle, Jack Thompson
screenplay by Niels Mueller & Kevin Kennedy
directed by Niels Mueller

by Walter Chaw As we comb through the continuing fallout of the Bush Jr. administration’s first term, themes begin to assert themselves on our movie screens as clear as the words of prophets written on tenement halls. Colorized misogyny and race-baiting spectacles share time with protest pictures that are oftentimes more strident and dogmatic than the party line–it’s the Eighties neo-Cleavers at war with postmodern B-pulpers, which many moons ago manifested themselves as one of the most fertile periods in the history of science-fiction and now resurface as part of a new wave of existential science-fiction. We’re all about Blade Runner these days, deep into Philip K. Dick territory where memories and dreams are manipulated and franchised for you dirt-cheap. Images have become the jealous currency traded in the underground of a land where one sad breast was flashed in the middle of our annual orgy of violence, sex (sometimes incestual, lesbian sex as sold by primogenetic neocon Pete Coors–“And twins!”), and unrestrained plea for/rewarding of mass consumption. It was enough to send my beloved nation’s vocal demographic of selectively pious idiots into paroxysms of…what? Outrage? Righteousness? I don’t know. What I do know is that in the United States, it ain’t the suggestion of sex, it’s the actual, pale, flaccid appendage that feeds the sometimes-joyous result of sex that offends. Women need to be protected from showing the outsides of their bodies in the same way they need to be protected from having a say in what happens to the insides of their bodies in the same way they need to be prevented from reading, voting, or holding a job. When a society gets really frightened, see, we must protect people from themselves. Let’s start at the girls and the darkies and work our way up.

Japón (2002) – DVD

Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Drama, DVD, Esoterica, Mexico, Spain

***/**** Image B+ Sound A Extras B
starring Alejandro Ferretis, Magdalena Flores, Yolanda Villa, Martin Serranos
written and directed by Carlos Reygadas

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover You are hereby warned: there's a sense in which Japón is long-winded, ponderous, and full of dead spots that go on forever. But there's also a sense that without those dead spots, the shining nuggets of value wouldn't mean nearly as much. It's not a story, it's a landscape, there to be explored as opposed to shuttled through in a hurry; if you lose your interest one moment, something will come along to pique it again. Though the keepcase of Japón's DVD release approvingly links it to that other natural wonder, Andrei Tarkovsky, the film is more carnal and less religious than his work: director Carlos Reygadas isn't into the music of the spheres so much as the beauty of the land and sweat trickling down your body. You get distracted, but don't worry: you'll be back.

Zachariah (1971) – DVD

Posted in1970s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Mexico, Musical, Western

**½/**** Image A- Sound A-
starring John Rubinstein, Pat Quinn, Don Johnson, Country Joe and the Fish
screenplay by Joe Massot and Philip Austin and Peter Bergman, David Ossman, Philip Proctor (known as Firesign Theatre)
directed by George Englund

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Think back with me, for a moment, to a bygone era when rock was strange: a hippie-descending, proto-glam period when the buzz was off the love generation but a bumbling mystic energy remained–when record producers were getting into bed with the likes of Alejandro Jodorowsky and Mick Jagger could be seen in the gender-bending gangster drama Performance. It was a self-aggrandizing, frequently ridiculous time, but it had a tolerance for eccentricity that's impossible to find in our Britneyfied MTV age and for which I can only be wistfully nostalgic. Lacking both the money and the conceptual force to fully realize its acid-western ambitions, Zachariah isn't even close to being the quintessential flashback to those days (it may in fact simply be cashing in on a trend), but its half-flubbed attempts at pop-surrealism seem a tonic now that the mainstream pop landscape is largely imagined by accountants.

demonlover (2002) – DVD

Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Drama, DVD, Esoterica, France, Mexico, Mystery, Thriller

***/**** Image D+ Sound D+
starring Connie Nielsen, Charles Berling, Chloë Sevigny, Gina Gershon
written and directed by Olivier Assayas

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Right now, I think I like Olivier Assayas's demonlover. I think. I don't always feel this way: after a couple of screenings and a lot of pondering, I have to say that this singularly dense and elliptical movie has a lot of things going against it. Like its lead, it's cold and austere to a fault, viewing its techno-financial milieu from a safe distance and attributing to it a number of traits that simply don't add up. But in the cold light of day, the film connects the dots about the business of cultural production that are normally hidden from view. Assayas may be grasping at straws in a number of instances, but his general framework is sound, and as he speaks of the disconnect of people from the industries that shape them, I'm inclined to look past demonlover's weaknesses. Right now, at least.

Lucía, Lucía (2003) – DVD

Posted in2000s, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, Crime, Drama, DVD, Mexico, Mystery, Romance, Spain, Thriller

La hija del caníbal
**/**** Image B Sound A- Extras C+
starring Cecilia Roth, Carlos Álvarez-Novoa, Kuno Becker, Manuel Blejerman
screenplay by Antonio Serrano, based on the novella Homónima by Rosa Montero
directed by Antonio Serrano

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover A critic at the CHICAGO READER once pointed out that movies often show events that would traumatize us if they happened in real life. But what happens when they cheat and fail to traumatize the characters to which they occur? That's the major problem with Lucía, Lucía (La hija del caníbal), a film that takes a threatened murder and a shocking betrayal and treats them as springboards for a character-building "adventure." In reality, the events swirling around the protagonist would crush her spirit and leave her a broken woman, but in Antonio Serrano's Learning Annex version, everything is a conduit to her self-actualization–a desperately naïve approach that so lowers the stakes of the film that it barely registers.

DIFF ’03: Casa de los babys

Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, DIFF/SDFF, Drama, Film Festivals, Mexico
*/****written and directed by John Sayles by Walter Chaw It feels increasingly as if John Sayles is a little sick of making John Sayles films. This dramatically inert ensemble piece about a group of American women in a South American limbo hoping to adopt babies feels curiously underwritten and stale despite the heaviness of the dialogue. Maggie Gyllenhaal makes the best impression as a woman of privilege who hopes a child will save her marriage, but like the rest of the cast (Daryl Hannah, Marcia Gay Harden, Lili Taylor, Susan Lynch, Rita Moreno, Mary Steenburgen), her character is composed of…

DIFF ’03: Dark Cities

Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, DIFF/SDFF, Drama, Film Festivals, Mexico
Ciudades oscurasDark City½*/****written by Juan Madrid, Enrique Renteria, Fernando Sariñanadirected by Fernando Sariñana by Walter Chaw Fernando Sariñana's grimy Dark Cities (Ciudades oscuras) is essentially a series of hardboiled vignettes that criss-cross in perfunctory ways over the course of one miserable night. Infanticide, rape, castration, long chats with corpses, murder, graft, and a criminal amount of hysterical camera tricks combine in a stew so sour and unintentionally funny that it plays out like the love child of City of Hope and Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer--with hookers. Not enough can be said about the invasiveness of Sariñana's camera: it's…

DIFF ’02: Streeters

Posted in****/****, 2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, DIFF/SDFF, Drama, Film Festivals, Mexico
De la calle****/****starring Luis Fernando Peña, Maya Zapata, Armando Hernández, Mario Zaragozascreenplay by Marina Stavenhagen, based on the play by Jesús González Dáviladirected by Gerardo Tort by Walter Chaw Gerardo Tort's primal scream of a debut, Streeters is a sepia-soaked DV exploration of the teeming underbelly of Mexico City's sprung metropolis, as well as another in an ever-evolving Mexican cinema that, film-by-film, takes on the spirit and ferocity of the French Nouvelle Vague. This more a Godard than, say, Alfonso Cuarón's Truffaut-ian Y Tu Mamá También, Streeters follows every-urchin Rufino (Luis Fernando Peña) as he rips off a corrupt cop…

DIFF ’02: Frida

Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, DIFF/SDFF, Drama, Film Festivals, Mexico, Romance
**/****starring Salma Hayek, Alfred Molina, Geoffrey Rush, Ashley Juddscreenplay by Diane Lake and Gregory Nava and Clancy Sigal and Anna Thomas, based on the book Frida: A Biography of Frida Kahlo by Hayden Herreradirected by Julie Taymor by Walter Chaw Wonderfully directed, beautifully shot, amazingly well production-designed, and yet dull, Julie Taymor's Frida is marked by an excellent performance from Alfred Molina and a screenplay (a collaboration of four writers--already a bad sign--with a shooting script ghost-written by its star's boyfriend, Edward Norton) that is a spider's breakfast of grandiloquent monologues, sweeping gestures, and tedious biopic conventions. Interesting for the…

The Films of John Sayles (1980-2002)

Posted in****/****, 1980s, 1990s, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Disability, Drama, Family, Fantasy, Ireland, Mexico, Mystery, Romance, Sci-Fi, Sports, Thriller, Western

Filmsofjohnsayles

Return of the Secaucus Seven (1980)
**/****
Buy DVD at Amazon.com
John Sayles's directorial debut has taken on the aura of a folk tale, the details of its genesis are that well known: With a $40,000 budget raised largely from the quadruple-threat's (writer/editor/director/actor) work for the scripts for Roger Corman's Battle from Beyond the Stars, Piranha, and Alligator, Sayles shot a film at a rented lake house with friends possessed of neither experience nor know-how and redefined the American indie movie scene. Return of the Secaucus Seven had two separate New York runs, made appearances on several year-end lists, and became a cause célèbre for snobs "in the know" deriding Kasdan's The Big Chill as a Secaucus rip-off. Twenty-some years later and the bloom is off the rose, so to speak: Return of the Secaucus Seven reveals itself to be sloppily made, overwritten, and horrendously performed (with the exception of David Strathairn and Gordon Clapp). Still, there are moments of truth in the picture that are pure: an embarrassing interlude when two old friends pass on their way to an unfortunately placed bathroom, and another during a feverish pick-up basketball sequence that steadily develops a delicious subtext. Gathering for what might be an annual reunion, the titular seven reminisce about characters who never appear, discuss past indiscretions (legal and sexual), and locate themselves on the verge of their third decade unmoored from the virulent liberalism of their flower-powered youth. Stealing the show is nerdy "straight" man Chip (Clapp), demonstrating the kind of unaffected naturalism indicative of Sayles's later work but a naturalism buried for the most part here by oodles of hanging plots, mismanaged character moments, odd editing choices, and a peculiarly literate lack of focus indicative of a brilliant novelist moonlighting as a filmmaker. 104 minutes

Y tu mamá también (2001)

Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Mexico

***/****
starring Maribel Verdú, Gael García Bernal, Diego Luna, Marta Aura
screenplay by Alfonso Cuarón & Carlos Cuarón
directed by Alfonso Cuarón

Ytumamaby Walter Chaw In the midst of their own kind of “Nouvelle vague,” the Mexican cinema seems invested in the creation of unmannered, free-floating humanist pieces that follow disenfranchised protagonists through the grim straits of their day-to-day. Alfonso Cuarón’s Y tu mamá también takes on the dimensions of a Truffaut film, or a hyper-sexualized Antoine Doniel film, perhaps–one that fits between the child of The 400 Blows and the eighteen-year-old of Antoine et Colette. Structurally, it most resembles another Truffaut, Jules et Jim, and while Y tu mamá también is also ostensibly about a woman whose freedom of spirit functions as a catalyst for the maturation of two young men (and while it has its share of non-sequitur conversations and undercurrents of political exposition), it takes a far more visceral tactic to its tale.

The Starz Independent FilmCenter Project, Vol. 1

Posted in****/****, 1950s, 1990s, 2000s, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Czech Republic, Drama, Fantasy, France, Horror, Japan, Mexico, Mystery, Netherlands, Satire, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

by Walter Chaw

BOB LE FLAMBEUR (1956)
***½/****
starring Isabelle Corey, Daniel Cauchy, Roger Duchesne, Guy Decomble
screenplay by Jean-Pierre Melville, dialogue by Auguste Le Breton
directed by Jean-Pierre Melville

With every minute of Henri Decaё’s cinematography looking like a Eugène Atget photograph, Jean-Pierre Melville’s Bob Le Flambeur is a visually stunning film from a director who influenced filmmakers as diverse as Jean-Luc Godard (who quotes Bob Le Flambeur at least twice in Breathless) and John Woo (whose The Killer takes its basic plot from Melville’s Le Samourai). It is film noir of the highest order, reminding in its ensemble intricacy of Kubrick’s The Killing (released a year later in 1956) and evoking the kind of chiaroscuro, gin-joint, smoke-drenched milieu where every ashtray has a name. It’s a love letter to the grim American gangster drama of the Forties that subverts the genre even as it reinvents it as a lyrical ballad to gamblers, losers, hoods, and wayward dames–a snapshot of the Montmarte district of Paris 47 years before Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s reinvention of the same.

Collateral Damage (2002)

Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Mexico, Schwarzenegger, Theatrical, Thriller, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Elias Koteas, Francesca Neri, Cliff Curtis
screenplay by David Griffiths & Peter Griffiths
directed by Andrew Davis

by Walter Chaw There is an inexplicable instinct in Hollywood to cast Arnold Schwarzenegger as an everyman when the Austrian Oak has only ever played a pre-Christian barbarian and post-apocalyptic robot convincingly. Perhaps sensing something awry in Arnold playing a mild-mannered Irish fireman named Gordon Brewer, the creators of Collateral Damage have made an effort to portray Schwarzenegger’s character as a comic book superhero–maybe one named “Fire Man.” Brewer irrationally favours the tools of his life-saving trade (a pair of axes and a serendipitously placed sliding pole) over the far more plentiful (and practical) guns, while a cleverly donned white Panama Hat (making Arnie look a little like Leon Redbone crossed with a bratwurst) somehow successfully disguises the 6’2″ goliath from seeking eyes. A pulp caped-crusader comic would at least have the decency to be lurid and exciting, though–all Collateral Damage manages to be is shatteringly dull.

Speak of “The Devil’s Backbone”: FFC Interviews Guillermo Del Toro

Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Horror, Interviews, Mexico

SpeakofthedevilsbackbonerevisedJanuary 6, 2002|Guillermo Del Toro’s films resonate with the weight of archetype: They find their thorniness down among the insects, the religious martyrs, the sexually infertile (including the aged and the very young), and the Stygian underside of the fairytale. It might have something to do with the gothic fact that the director read Frankenstein at the age of nine and fell asleep on his mother’s lap while watching Wuthering Heights. The victim of a horrific Catholic upbringing that at one point involved bottle caps in the shoes as a means to mortify the flesh, it’s clear that the well where many of Del Toro’s demons live is deep and Byzantine.

DIFF ’01: The Devil’s Backbone

Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, DIFF/SDFF, Drama, Film Festivals, Horror, Mexico, Spain

***/****
starring Federico Luppi, Marisa Paredes, Fernando Tielve
screenplay by Guillermo del Toro and Antonio Trashorros & David Munoz
directed by Guillermo del Toro

Devilsbackboneby Walter Chaw More of a sepia-stained Spanish fairy tale about the dehumanizing effects of war than a horror film, Guillermo del Toro's melancholy labour of love The Devil's Backbone (it's dedicated to his parents) is redolent with atmosphere and lacking in conventional fright payoffs, which aren't the point of the exercise, anyway. The Devil's Backbone centres around a colony of lost boys led by a stately Pan, Dr. Cásares (Argentine legend Federico Luppi). The head of a refuge for war orphans (we never know who's winning, and neither do the characters), Dr. Cásares and the one-legged matron Carmen (Marisa Paredes) share chaperone duties with the swarthy Jacinto (Eduardo Noriega) and the comely Alma (Berta Ojea). Look to each of the adult character's infirmities, strengths, and vanities for clues as to what they represent in the Guernican tragedy of the Spanish Civil War, specifically of how the doomed republican rallying cry of "No pasaran!" ("You will not pass!") becomes the hollow promise of ghosts defending an abandoned orphanage.

The Mexican (2001) [Widescreen] – DVD

Posted in2000s, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, Crime, DVD, Mexico, Romance

*½/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Brad Pitt, Julia Roberts, James Gandolfini, Bob Balaban
screenplay by J.H. Wyman
directed by Gore Verbinski

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover I don’t have an idea to start this review. This is in large part because The Mexican has no idea to start itself, or give itself a middle, or pay off nicely with a tense climax. It just rambles on, with no reason to live, justifying a few paychecks and leaving this reviewer simultaneously puzzled and bored. Puzzled, as to how such a vast array of professionals could have wanted to cobble together such a passionless and irrelevant film as this; and bored, at events meaningless and contrived. The Mexican isn’t even ambitious enough to be offensive: its conceptual hook is so weak and its follow-through so perfunctory that the film can’t rally the strength to be more than a petty nuisance, like a dinner disrupted by the noisy party the next table over.

Desperado (1995) [Deluxe Widescreen Presentation] – DVD

Posted in1990s, Action, Authors: Vincent Suarez, Crime, Drama, DVD, Mexico, Thriller, Western

**/**** Image A Sound A
starring Antonio Banderas, Salma Hayek, Joaquim de Almeida, Steve Buscemi
written and directed by Robert Rodriguez

by Vincent Suarez With 1993’s El Mariachi, director Robert Rodriguez wowed critics and arthouse audiences with his sheer talent and passion for filmmaking. Shot on a budget of merely $7,000 and with a cast and crew of Rodriguez’s friends, El Mariachi was a gleefully amateurish work of pure cinema. Upon garnering awards and praise at the Sundance Film Festival, Columbia Pictures agreed to distribute the film and finance Rodriguez’s Hollywood debut. Which prompted one to ask what Rodriguez could accomplish with a real budget and real talent at his disposal. Desperado (1995) provided the answer to that question: not much. Essentially a remake of El Mariachi, Desperado is full of the glitz and flashiness that one would expect of a visceral filmmaker like Rodriguez but has none of the heart or joy of El Mariachi. It’s a “cool” movie that leaves the viewer feeling…well, cold.