The Business of Fancydancing (2002)

Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Music, Theatrical

**½/****
starring Evan Adams, Michelle St. John, Gene Tagaban, Swil Kanim
written and directed by Sherman Alexie

by Walter Chaw Reading a little like an anguished autobiography of a certain kind of success and the ethnic price of it, Sherman Alexie’s The Business of Fancydancing demands an examination of the compulsion to use “Native American author” as a prefix to Alexie’s name. It’s not a success in a conventional sense and that’s actually somewhat to its credit–having made a living as a Native American author with a mostly white readership, Alexie’s aim here seems to be one of defying traditional Western narrative forms in favour of the liquidity of a more aboriginal oral tradition. If its performances are uneven and some of its characters and events completely superfluous, The Business of Fancydancing gets a great deal of leeway based solely on the raw intimacy of Alexie’s uncompromising point of view.

Lauryn Hill: MTV Unplugged No. 2.0 (2002) – DVD

Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD, Music

ZERO STARS/**** Image B+ Sound A+
directed by Joe De Maio

by Walter Chaw A seemingly endless series of repetitive, politically embarrassing diatribes, Lauryn Hill: MTV Unplugged No. 2.0 (since released on CD as the singer/songwriter’s follow-up to her acclaimed debut “The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill”) is extraordinarily hard to watch and even harder to listen to. Over the course of thirteen largely indistinguishable four-chord folk tracks, Ms. Hill proselytizes in ways so mindless and nasty that the cumulative effect of her (racist, adolescent, and naïve) ranting is one of ever-mounting shrillness: one-note and off-key.

The Starz Independent FilmCenter Project, Vol. 7

Posted in1980s, 2000s, Best Picture (Academy Awards), Biopic, Czechoslovakia, Drama, France, Italy, Music, Theatrical

by Walter Chaw

PETER SHAFFER'S AMADEUS: DIRECTOR'S CUT (1984/2002)
***/****
starring F. Murray Abraham, Tom Hulce, Elizabeth Berridge, Simon Callow
screenplay by Peter Shaffer, based on his play
directed by Milos Forman

Bringing the highbrow to the status-hungry middle and lowbrow in the same way as those "Bach's Greatest Hits" collections and the awful faux-llies of Andrew Lloyd Weber, Milos Forman's bawdy, jittery adaptation of Peter Shaffer's fanciful play "Amadeus" is not so much about Mozart as it is about genius and its burden on the mediocre. Mozart (Tom Hulce) is an adolescent boor touched by the hand of God. Emperor Joseph's (Jeffrey Jones) court composer Salieri (F. Murray Abraham) becomes obsessed and desperately jealous of Mozart's gift, leading him to the madhouse and confessions of murder. Amadeus works because of Forman's gift for the seedy (and portraying asylums–he directed One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest) and Abraham's deeply-felt performance.

The Great American Songbook (2002) – DVD

Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Documentary, DVD, Music, Television

***/**** Image A Sound A Extras C+
directed by Andrew J. Kuehn

by Walter Chaw Starting off fascinating and ending up feeling slightly overlong, the expansive musical travelogue The Great American Songbook traces the roots of “American” popular music from the War of 1812 through to the early Christy minstrel shows, Bessie Smith, Irving Berlin, George & Ira Gershwin, and beyond. If it’s true that things go in cycles on a grand scheme, it’s also true of an individual’s life: Reviewing The Great American Songbook for me coincides with my first reading of Griel Marcus’s brilliant Mystery Train; touches hands with my interview with Andrei Codrescu, who’s working on a documentary about the Mississippi blues; and follows fast my exposure to the brilliant Sarah Vowell’s brilliant piece on the “Battle Hymn of the Republic.” The piece found me, in other words, already on a journey into our heritage of American music, and if the picture is more travelogue than encyclopedia, its value is as timeline and supplement.

Film Freak Central does the Fifth Aurora Asian Film Festival

Posted 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.

Performance (1970) – DVD

Posted in1970s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, DVD, Esoterica, Gangster, Music, UK

Performancecap

***½/**** Image B+ Sound C Extras C
starring James Fox, Mick Jagger, Anita Pallenberg, Michele Breton
screenplay by Donald Cammell
directed by Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg

by Walter Chaw Emerging in the middle of one of the most experimental, challenging periods in cinematic history, Performance–completed in 1968 but shelved until 1970–is a product at once ahead of its time and two years too late. Had its trippy-dippy, anachronistic cross-cutting and madly-inappropriate scoring appeared in 1968 (the year of Rosemary’s Baby, Night of the Living Dead, If…, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and the film to which it perhaps owes its greatest allegiance, Once Upon a Time in the West), Performance would’ve found traction and good company as a foundational film for the American New Wave instead of as a picture that, for all its foment and formal revolution, seemed hysterical against a maturing, more sedate(d) mainstream avant-garde parade of stuff like El Topo, Zabriskie Point, MASH, and Five Easy Pieces.

Scratch (2002)

Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Documentary, Music, Theatrical

**/****
directed by Doug Pray

by Walter Chaw Doug Pray’s non-fiction Scratch, about the men behind the dual turntables digging new grooves into much-abused vinyl, presents a fitfully fascinating glimpse into the DJ music scene. The problem with the film is that it’s more of a performance piece than a documentary, spending too much time extolling the questionable and specific virtues of the music while giving little insight into what it is that makes said music attractive to a growing audience. The picture’s strength lies in the curious revelation that in resurrecting old and forgotten “breaks” (beats embedded in vintage tunes), these generally uneducated “turntable-ists” are engaged in the same process as T.S. Eliot was: the reclamation of art as it is filtered through the prism of artists who see themselves as the repository of the whole of a particular Western media.

The Five Heartbeats (1991) – DVD

Posted in1990s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Music

*/**** Image C Sound C Extras D
starring Robert Townsend, Michael Wright, Leon, Harry J. Lennix
screenplay by Robert Townsend & Keenan Ivory Wayans
directed by Robert Townsend

by Walter Chaw I remember when Robert Townsend was the Next Big Thing. An alum of Chicago comedy troupe Second City, he got eyed for A Soldier’s Story and got his self-styled break with Hollywood Shuffle, a fitfully funny sketch farce about a starving black actor autobiographically frustrated by the lack of dignified roles for African-American performers. Townsend made waves by funding the project with credit cards, shooting without permits, and having the audacity (circa 1986, recall) to bite the hand that feeds. It’s ironic, then, that with all his newfound greenlight sway, Townsend promptly made one really bad film (The Five Heartbeats) and another, somehow worse one (Meteor Man), both of which revealed this hyphenate of the moment for a mugging, self-obsessed, stage-bound monologist.

Crossroads (2002)

Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Music, Romance, Theatrical, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Britney Spears, Zoe Saldana, Anson Mount, Taryn Manning
screenplay by Shonda Rhimes
directed by Tamra Davis

Crossroadsby Walter Chaw Crossroads is appalling and noxious. Consider how it maturely teaches that a young girl’s choice to lose her virginity should be one based on careful consideration, and then has its heroine bed a tattooed ex-con she met five days previous; this is Smooth Talk without recognition of consequences. It stars Lolita mega-tart Britney Spears in her first movie, and the first scene we share with her is in her bedroom as she jumps up and down on the mattress in teeny underwear, quickly followed by a shot of Ms. Spears in tiny pink Victoria’s Secret attire hopping into bed with her dorky lab partner before reconsidering the big leap. We also get shots of Spears in a sleazy Louisiana nightclub, where she finally erases any line left between her act and a strip show, and after that a few weird angles of her posing on the hoods of cars and in motel rooms while clad in towels and bikinis. The only thing separating Crossroads from a Showtime soft porn (it has all the excrescent acting, bad soundtrack, and vaguely suggestive dialogue) is the lack of any actual nudity. Like its star, the film is just a highly inappropriate tease.

Rock Star (2001) – DVD

Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Music

**½/**** Image A Sound B+ Extras C+
starring Mark Wahlberg, Jennifer Aniston, Dominic West, Timothy Spall
screenplay by John Stockwell
directed by Stephen Herek

by Walter Chaw Stephen Herek’s return to the realm of dope-head fantasy (his second and perhaps most remembered film is Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure) gets off to a smashing start. For a brief, exhilarating time, he captures all the dim-witted exuberance, all the pathological pride, all the explosive machismo of long-haired, tight-leathered cock-rock bands and the symbiotic relationship they have with fans, who revere them as greasy, gyrating lizard kings. Once it becomes another tired cautionary tale of sex, drugs, and rock n’ roll, however, Rock Star turns off the amps and coasts home like a rusted-out DeSoto running on fumes.

Hedwig and the Angry Inch (2001) [Platinum Series] – DVD

Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Esoterica, Music, Musical

***/**** Image B Sound A Extras A+
starring John Cameron Mitchell, Michael Pitt, Miriam Shor, Stephen Trask
screenplay by John Cameron Mitchell, based on his play with Stephen Trask
directed by John Cameron Mitchell

by Walter Chaw A pretension-laden, soul-dissection opera crossed with the brooding musical chops that Pink Floyd all but defined in the late-Seventies, John Cameron Mitchell's Hedwig and the Angry Inch is Velvet Goldmine and All that Jazz by way of Pink Floyd The Wall–a bombastically endearing romp that is as infectious as it is (surprisingly) poignant. The anchor for the film is Mitchell's incendiary turn as the titular Hedwig, a transsexual/transvestite, Eastern Bloc rock diva on a national tour booked into Bilgewaters family restaurants in the same cities as flavour-of-the-month pop superstar Tommy Gnosis (Michael Pitt). Hedwig believes that Gnosis has stolen his songs from him, yet we sense the real theft was that of trust and the promise of love. Early on, we're shown a fantastically-conceived bleach-bypass/animation/performance piece set to a very nice Plato's Symposium-inspired tune ("The Origin of Love") that offers an explanation of the absent feeling that impels us all to find succour in a mate, a friend, or art. Hedwig and the Angry Inch never gets as good as this again, but it's almost impossible to imagine how it could: the sequence, lasting all of ten minutes, is one of the highlights of the year in cinema.

Almost Famous (2000) – DVD|Almost Famous: Untitled, The Bootleg Cut [Director’s Edition] – DVD

Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, Coming of Age, Drama, DVD, Music

ALMOST FAMOUS
***/**** Image A Sound A Extras C+
UNTITLED
***/**** Image A Sound A Extras A
starring Patrick Fugit, Billy Crudup, Frances McDormand, Kate Hudson
written and directed by Cameron Crowe

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Almost Famous is an odd bird. It wants to be about rock and roll but isn't, seeking every opportunity to hide from the spirit of the music that is its ostensible starting point. It strains for important insights it doesn't have, mostly centred on a teenage boy's predictable loss of innocence at the hands of a rock band. Worst of all is that it subsumes its massive subject into the flowering of a ROLLING STONE journalist, crushing both the purity of the music and the excess of its players beneath a career move for a media player. But as the film lurches from issue to dodged issue, the reasoning behind its omissions is as intriguing as the omissions themselves; as it accidentally uncovers the spaces between what gets done and how it gets done, it manages to be a revealing document of how much chicanery goes into the creation of celebrity–entirely in spite of itself.

Recording ‘The Producers’: A Musical Romp with Mel Brooks (2001) – DVD

Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Documentary, DVD, Music

***/**** Image B Sound A Extras B-
directed by Susan Froemke

by Walter Chaw Sort of a cross between a documentary and a musical concert DVD but without much in the way of either in-depth information or audience response, Recording ‘The Producers’: A Musical Romp with Mel Brooks is a look at the recording sessions leading to the creation of the cast album for the smash Broadway show The Producers, which was, of course, based on Mel Brooks’s classic film. Well composited by director Susan Froemke, the straight-to-DVD production veers from Brooks reacting to in-studio performances by Nathan Lane, Matthew Broderick, and company to a few rough patches that are overcome through coaching and a surprising degree of professionalism. Although I’m somewhat handicapped by not having seen the actual play, I was dutifully impressed by the prodigious talents of the stars (who knew that Ferris Bueller could croon?) and mostly charmed by the still-engaging personality of Brooks as the proud papa of the most-lauded play in Tony Award history (winning twelve).

Glitter (2001)

Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Music, Romance, Theatrical, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Mariah Carey, Max Beesley, Eric Benet, Vondie Curtis Hall
screenplay by Kate Lanier and John Wilder
directed by Vondie Curtis Hall

Glitterby Walter Chaw About halfway through Glitter’s bloated running time (105 minutes of unique hell), a foreign video director sagely complains: “The glitter can’t overpower the artist!” The two problems with Glitter are that the glitter does overpower the artist, and that the glitter itself is preposterous, dreary, and dull. Billie (Mariah Carey) is enlisted as the backup singer for an entirely talentless woman, and her voice is hijacked in a Singin’ in the Rain intrigue, natch. But even as I was resigning myself to a customary “VH1 Movies That Rock” piece of dreck about the girl singing behind the curtain getting rewarded for her saintliness on the opening night of a national tour, Dice the DJ (Max Beesley) swoops in and makes Glitter an interracial version of screenwriter Kate Lanier’s own What’s Love Got To Do With It?. Only Glitter‘s Ike is a pretty nice guy, despite his jealousy/management problems, and this Tina is as expressive as a person on a horse’s ration of Thorazine. When Billie told Dice, after some very chaste lovemaking, that she has trouble trusting people, I whispered to the screen, “Honey, you probably shouldn’t start at a guy named ‘Dice’ who sports a large gold pendant that says ‘DICE.'”

Dead Simple (2000) – DVD

Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, Crime, Drama, DVD, Music

Viva Las Nowhere
**/**** Image B+ Sound B Extras B
starring Daniel Stern, Patricia Richardson, Lacey Kohl, Sherry Stringfield
screenplay by Richard Uhlig and Steven Seitz
directed by Jason Bloom

by Walter Chaw A bizarre cross between Psycho, Something Wild and Tender Mercies, Jason Bloom’s Dead Simple is one of those derivatively named direct-to-video productions that attempts the black comedy genre with a reasonable amount of aplomb and wide-eyed enthusiasm. It’s a Very Bad Things farce of escalating atrocities, and though Dead Simple never achieves the kind of sustained comic brilliance and continual nastiness of that movie, it does manage a few edged moments and keen performances from a cast that includes legendary bug-eyed hambones Daniel Stern and James Caan.

The Caveman’s Valentine (2001) [Widescreen] – DVD

Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Crime, Drama, DVD, Music, Mystery, Superhero, Thriller

***½/**** Image A+ Sound A+ Extras B-
starring Samuel L. Jackson, Ann Magnuson, Aunjanue Ellis, Tamara Tunie
screenplay by George Dawes Green, based on his novel
directed by Kasi Lemmons

by Walter Chaw A strange mixture of Shine, Basquiat, Angel Heart, and Grant Morrison & Dave McKean’s graphic novel Arkham Asylum, The Caveman’s Valentine is a feverish tale of a homeless madman-cum-detective who, on the morning of February 14th, discovers a “valentine” just outside his New York cave: one of Ella Fitzgerald’s strange fruit, stuck in the crotch of a tree–a young male model murdered and frozen to a branch. Believing at first that his imagined nemesis Stuyvesant, who shoots evil rays into his mind from atop the Chrysler Building, is responsible for the murder, Romulus (Samuel L. Jackson) is put on the trail of an avant-garde photographer in the Mapplethorpe mold, David Leppenraub (Colm Feore). His minor sleuthing interrupted by the occasional delusional fit and bouts with an ecstasy of creation (Romulus was a brilliant Julliard-trained pianist prior to his psychosis), Romulus uncovers clues and harasses suspects on his way to convincing his police-woman daughter (Aunjanue Ellis) that even though he’s a nut, that doesn’t mean he can’t solve a high-profile society murder.

O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000) – DVD

Posted in2000s, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Coen Brothers, Comedy, Crime, DVD, France, Music, UK

**½/**** Image A+ Sound A
starring George Clooney, John Turturro, Time Blake Nelson, Charles Durning
screenplay by Ethan Coen & Joel Coen
directed by Joel Coen

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover We can start by making two things perfectly clear. One: despite an opening credit to the contrary, the new Coen Brothers opus, O Brother, Where Art Thou?, has almost nothing to do with Homer's Odyssey–a few episodes notwithstanding, the bulk of the film is radically different from the great classical work. Two: it bears only a passing resemblance to the films of Preston Sturges, whose Sullivan's Travels provides the title; a ridiculous deus ex machina ending aside, it has none of the affection–if all of the wildness–of that writer-director's memorable oeuvre. So, having been smokescreened by these red-herring references, you have to ask: If it has nothing to do with Homer or Sturges, what the heck does it have to do with?

Bamboozled (2000) [New Line Platinum Series] – DVD

Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, Directors: Spike Lee, Drama, DVD, Music, Satire

***½/**** Image B+ Sound A Extras A-
starring Damon Wayans, Savion Glover, Jada Pinkett-Smith, Tommy Davidson
written and directed by Spike Lee

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover I can see from the negative press surrounding Bamboozled that Spike Lee has supposedly overshot the mark. Nobody, they say, really likes the racist imagery of the minstrel show anymore, and they say that Lee’s insistence that people might pretty much disqualifies his film from serious attention. But I wonder. I remember being in a college-dorm common room watching a horribly racist production number in the Marx Brothers’ A Day at the Races, to hear one viewer shrug it off simply because the participants “looked happy,” and I remember having a roommate who owned a publicity knick-knack of a black baby bursting out of an orange who had no idea how it could be construed as offensive.

Sweet and Lowdown (1999) – DVD

Posted in1990s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Music

***½/**** Image A Sound C+
starring Woody Allen, Blythe Danner, Judy Davis, Mia Farrow
written and directed by Woody Allen

by Bill Chambers Woody Allen movies of late are eager to indict the creepy misanthrope who's been a staple of the writer-director-actor's oeuvre at least since Allen stepped into the shoes of Annie Hall's Alvy Singer. But in the final analysis, Allen has continued to pardon his alter egos, deflecting blame for their shortcomings by casting a negative light on everybody they know, too. If Sweet and Lowdown, the movie Deconstructing Harry wasn't ready to be, is any indication, the Woodman's work is, at last, becoming more nakedly confessional.

Music of the Heart (1999)

Posted in1990s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Biopic, Disability, Drama, Music, Theatrical, Wes Craven

**/****
starring Meryl Streep, Angela Bassett, Aidan Quinn, Jane Leeves
screenplay by Pamela Gray
directed by Wes Craven

by Bill Chambers I should start this review by telling you how much I hate the generic title Music of the Heart. Wes Craven's bid for prestige was more evocatively (and appropriately) called 50 Violins in development, and the switch only proves how far distributor Miramax has strayed from its edgier roots. Almost as infuriating is the positioning of an 'N Sync/Gloria Estafan duet as Music of the Heart's theme song: a nigh unlistenable ballad opens and closes a film about music appreciation.