The Pagemaster (1994) – DVD

June 4, 2002Posted in1990s, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD, Family, Fantasy, Mystery, Romance

*½/**** Image B- Sound B- Extras B-
starring Macaulay Culkin, Christopher Lloyd, Ed Begley, Jr., Mel Harris
screenplay by David Casci, David Kirschner, Ernie Contreras
live-action director Joe Johnston, animation director Maurice Hunt

by Walter Chaw Tailor-made as a public service announcement for going to the library and reading the classics, The Pagemaster makes up for what it lacks in grace with an admirable and perhaps misplaced faith in its audience. Clearly intended as an introduction to discussion rather than a particularly entertaining animated film, it becomes the role of the parents with The Pagemaster to point out the references it makes along the way: Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Melville’s Moby Dick, Shelley’s Frankenstein, Verne’s 20,000 Leagues, Hugo’s Hunchback of Notre Dame, and Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. The extent to which a parent is able to fulfill this obligation is the extent to which The Pagemaster is worthwhile; using this film as an eighty-minute babysitter-cum-opiate negates any possible positive effect conferred by the picture–raising the question, clearly, of how best to approach criticism of the piece.

Vanilla Sky (2001) – DVD

May 18, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD, Esoterica, Mystery, Romance, Sci-Fi, Spain, Thriller, Tom Cruise

*/**** Image A+ Sound A+ Extras B-
starring Tom Cruise, Penélope Cruz, Kurt Russell, Cameron Diaz
screenplay by Cameron Crowe, based on the screenplay for Abre Los Ojos by Alejandro Amenábar and Mateo Gil
directed by Cameron Crowe

by Walter Chaw Vanilla Sky is an unpleasant, incompetent, and laborious amalgam of Jacob’s Ladder and The Game, Joe Eszterhas doing Frank Herbert, if you will. It is profane to no good end, forcing Cameron Diaz to define her sexuality through roughly a dozen variations on “I swallowed your come,” and is otherwise so sloppily assembled that even the generally arresting Jason Lee is made irritating and superfluous. Cameron Crowe is rapidly becoming a self-indulgent, disingenuous disaster–his films grow more pretentious as his subjects shrink in consequence. After tackling a rose-coloured breed of aggrandizing nostalgia in the overlong Almost Famous, he’s decided to remake the mediocre Spanish film Open Your Eyes (“Abre Los Ojos”)by flavour of the month Alejandro Amenábar, paying alleged “homage” to about a dozen other directors, movies, and album covers while displaying exactly the same breed of star-deifying that he ostensibly deflated in Almost Famous. Crowe fans should prepare to be disheartened by the realization that the crown prince of weakling uplift has actually fallen down on the altar of the ultimate Kafkaesque Hollywood godhead: Tom Cruise.

Flesh and Bone (1993) – DVD

April 28, 2002Posted in****/****, 1990s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Mystery, Romance

****/**** Image B Sound A-
starring Dennis Quaid, James Caan, Meg Ryan, Gwyneth Paltrow
written and directed by Steve Kloves

by Walter Chaw Steve Kloves’s follow-up to his exceptional The Fabulous Baker Boys is Flesh and Bone, a dark-hued journey through the Southern Gothic that represents career pinnacles for Meg Ryan and (until The Royal Tenenbaums) Gwyneth Paltrow. That Flesh and Bone–a doom-filled piece that glowers with malevolence from its horrifying opening sequence to its unsettling conclusion–never received a great deal of attention upon its initial release isn’t as much of a surprise as the fact that not even the passage of time has cemented it as a minor classic. There are few pictures more deserving of critical revisionism.

From Hell (2001) [Director’s Limited Edition] – DVD

April 28, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Czechoslovakia, DVD, Horror, Mystery, Thriller, UK

***/**** Image A- Sound A+ Extras A
starring Johnny Depp, Heather Graham, Ian Holm, Paul Rhys
screenplay by Terry Hayes and Rafael Yglesias, based on the graphic novel by Alan Moore & Eddie Campbell
directed by Albert Hughes & Allen Hughes

by Walter Chaw Alan Moore’s brilliant graphic novel From Hell is first a work of Romanticism (in that it evolves from a mistrust of industry, a demonizing of all that the rail represents to the continued corruption of nature), then a nostalgia for a hopelessly idealized past. Once his Romantic roots are established, Moore clarifies the evolutionary link between British Romanticism and Modernism by lifting a quote from Jack the Ripper’s infamous letter: “One day, men will look back and say I gave birth to the twentieth century.” As it’s employed by Moore and in consideration of the author’s grasp of literary theory, this one quote eloquently juxtaposes the impact of Bloody Jack’s Grand Guignol rampage in London of 1888 with the fin de siècle (The French Revolution) that marked the actual birth of Romanticism in the Lake District of 1789. In simpler terms, From Hell is a work of incomparable incandescence–smart stuff for smart people and theoretically the easiest of Moore’s works to translate to the big screen.

Murder by Numbers (2002)

April 19, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Mystery, Theatrical, Thriller

*½/****
starring Sandra Bullock, Ryan Gosling, Michael Pitt, Agnes Bruckner
screenplay by Tony Gayton
directed by Barbet Schroeder

Murderbynumbersby Walter Chaw A shallow Leopold and Loeb riff crossed with a heaping helping of the kind of law-chick bullstuff made popular by the horrible novels of Patricia Cornwell, Murder by Numbers trudges along with its tired formula repertoire like a funeral procession for the genre. For a spell, it feels as if the film will transcend the unpromising irony of its title with a female protagonist painted as unflattering and tortured, but by the time the final credits roll after an unforgivable third act, Murder by Numbers washes out as just another imminently forgettable movie starring Sandra Bullock.

Mulholland Drive (2001) – DVD

April 14, 2002Posted in****/****, 2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: David Lynch, Drama, DVD, Esoterica, FFC Must-Own, France, Mystery, Thriller

Mulholland Dr.
****/**** Image A- Sound A
starring Justin Theroux, Naomi Watts, Laura Elena Harring, Ann Miller
written and directed by David Lynch

by Walter Chaw

Was it a vision, or a waking dream?
 Fled is that music — Do I wake or sleep?
– John Keats, Ode to a Nightingale

MustownDavid Lynch’s Mulholland Drive contends that the answer to the eternal struggle between what is real and what is fantasy comes in the form of a Keatsian confusion–it’s the difference between Adam’s dream and Eve rendered flesh, blurred in the mind of the creator and his audience. A film is a dream of the director made tangible, a conceit familiar from the fourth-wall-breaking in Ingmar Bergman’s Persona (banishing any mystery there might have been regarding the visual references to that film in Lynch’s piece), and a movie’s characters therefore become projections of its maker’s sublimated longing (clarifying too the auteur’s use of wardrobe and colour schemes from Hitchcock’s meditation on objectification, Vertigo, as well as those of his first collaboration with inamorata Tippi Hedren, The Birds).

The Starz Independent FilmCenter Project, Vol. 1

April 5, 2002Posted 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.

Hearts in Atlantis (2001) – DVD

March 18, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Mystery, Stephen King

**/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B-
starring Anthony Hopkins, Anton Yelchin, Hope Davis, Mika Boorem
screenplay by William Goldman, based on the novel by Stephen King
directed by Scott Hicks

by Walter Chaw That there is a wistful framing device in Hearts in Atlantis announces from the beginning exactly the kind of Stephen King movie this is going to be. Directed by Scott Hicks, more of a visual stylist than a storyteller, Hearts in Atlantis is a hollow addition to the cottage sub-genre of non-horror adult contemporary King adaptations that includes The Shawshank Redemption, The Green Mile, and, most glaringly, Stand By Me. Scripted by two-time Oscar-winner William Goldman (who also adapted King’s Misery and the forthcoming screen version of his Dreamcatcher), Hearts in Atlantis is a clunky bit of period treacle. It covers the requisite bases of magic realism and bully intrigue without even satisfactorily following through on a major plotline concerning a really boss bicycle. Based on the novellas “Low Men in Yellow Coats” and “Heavenly Shades of Night are Falling” from 1999’s Hearts in Atlantis, the film of the same name is inferior to its sources in its aversion to addressing the darker elements of childhood.

The Hole (2001) [Deluxe Special Edition] – DVD

March 11, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Canada, Drama, DVD, France, Mystery, Thriller, UK

**½/**** Image A Sound B Extras B
starring Thora Birch, Desmond Harrington, Daniel Brocklebank, Laurence Fox
screenplay by Ben Cort & Caroline Ip, based on the novel After the Hole by Guy Burt
directed by Nick Hamm

BUY @ AMAZON CANADA

Holecapby Bill Chambers Sam Mendes, her American Beauty director, has called her the next Marlon Brando; indeed, I wrote in my list of the Top 10 Films of 2001 that I find Thora Birch the most captivating actress working, and I meant it. Her Ghost World performance struck me as a modern parallel to Brando in roles as disparate as Terry Malloy or Don Corleone, not for any more explicit reason than the way the film becomes a living, breathing animal when she's on screen and the fact that she looms large over scenes from which she's absent. The same is true for the British production The Hole, in which she is again the very convincing centre of gravity. She's dynamite, though the movie itself wants for an artist of Mendes's or Terry Zwigoff's calibre to pull it all together.

The Watcher in the Woods (1980) – DVD

March 10, 2002Posted in1980s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Disney, DVD, Family, Horror, Mystery, Thriller, UK

**/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras B
starring Bette Davis, Lynn-Holly Johnson, Kyle Richards, Carroll Baker
screenplay by Brian Clemens, Rosemary Anne Sisson, Harry Spalding, based on the novel by Florence Engel Randall
directed by John Hough

Watcherinthewoodscap

by Walter Chaw John Hough’s cult favourite The Watcher in the Woods is a movie about how a camera presents a point-of-view and how that point-of-view, if it’s not attached to a specific identity, can become menacingly voyeuristic; shame that The Watcher in the Woods isn’t also about a story with characters in whom you’re interested and performances that don’t set teeth on edge. One of the more unusual Disney productions of the late-Seventies, the film becomes yet another showcase for an aging Bette Davis’s hiccupping hag archetype and, sadly, an opportunity for figure-skater Lynn-Holly Johnson to demonstrate how good athletes seldom become good actors.

Klute (1971) – DVD

March 4, 2002Posted in1970s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Crime, DVD, Mystery, Romance, Thriller

***½/**** Image A Sound B
starring Jane Fonda, Donald Sutherland, Charles Cioffi, Nathan George
screenplay by Andy and Dave Lewis
directed by Alan J. Pakula

Klutecapby Travis Mackenzie Hoover Unexplained phenomenon of the 1970s: the non-stardom of Alan J. Pakula. Despite having helmed three of the decade's quintessential films (Klute, The Parallax View, and All the President's Men) and possessing a style that remains to this day sui generis, his name means less than that of directors far more craven. Perhaps he was too old to be ranked with the Movie Brats (though that didn't stop Robert Altman), or worked on studio films that might have seemed conformist at the time, but for my money, nothing–not even the more fashionable Blow Out and The Conversation–captured the strangled sense of betrayal and claustrophobic helplessness of the post-Vietnam/Watergate era better than the films of my man Alan J.. And his Klute serves as a reminder of what a director does, taking the raw material of a script and contextualizing it so that its events ring as more than a self-contained adventure.

Dragon and the Hawk (2001) – DVD

February 25, 2002Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, DVD, Martial Arts, Mystery

*½/**** Image D Sound D
starring Julian Jung Lee, Barbara Gehring, Trygve Lode
screenplay by Robert Gosnell
directed by Mark Steven Grove

by Walter Chaw I came to the startling and somewhat crushing realization midway through it that not only have I seen worse movies than Mark Steven Grove’s Dragon and the Hawk, I’ve seen worse movies today. Shot in and around Denver and Littleton, Colorado at locations where I’ve been tooling about for most of my life, Dragon and the Hawk is formula chop-socky involving martial arts master “Dragon” (Korean Tae Kwan Do expert Julian Lee) as a fish out of water looking for his missing sister (Gayle Galvez). The villain Therion (Trygve Lode) has abducted li’l sis and is injecting her with some kind of serum that turns innocent schoolgirls into goth hench-chicks. It’s up to Dragon and maverick cop “Hawk” (Barbara Gehring) to save the Denver metropolitan area from…goth hench-chicks, I guess.

Joy Ride (2001) [Special Edition] – DVD

February 24, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD, Horror, Mystery, Thriller

*½/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras B
starring Paul Walker, Steve Zahn, Leelee Sobieski, Matthew Kimbrough
screenplay by Clay Tarver & JJ Abrams
directed by John Dahl

by Walter Chaw John Dahl’s latest foray into knock-off B-movie territory is Joy Ride, a film that indulges an awkward dedication to hiding the face of its villain (which results in the biggest cheat of the film at its conclusion), presents predictably misogynistic victimizations for both of its female characters (followed by weak-wristed salvations), and demands an ironclad suspension of disbelief that the bad guy is omniscient, omnipresent, and only ruthless when there isn’t a long speech to be made. The joyless Joy Ride is a leaden collection of cheap thriller clichés redolent with the flop-sweat stench of stale desperation and clumsy sleight-of-hand, a stultifying series of promising set-ups with threadbare pay-offs. The film drives home its cautionary message against childishness with an increasing immaturity–it’s the equivalent of burying a toddler up to the neck for throwing a tantrum, and though it will predictably (and fairly) be compared against The Hitcher and Duel, the most telling stolen moment in Joy Ride is a cornfield intrigue that substitutes the evil crop duster from North by Northwest for a rumbling semi tractor-trailer that somehow locates its prey in the dead of night amongst concealing stalks.

Super Troopers (2002)

February 15, 2002Posted in2000s, Comedy, Crime, Mystery, Theatrical

½/****
starring Jay Chandrasekhar, Kevin Heffernan, Steve Lemme, Paul Soter
screenplay by Broken Lizard
directed by Jay Chandrasekhar

Supertroopersby Walter Chaw From the self-satisfied pens of LA/NY sketch comedy troupe “Broken Lizard” springs Super Troopers, fully formed like some Plutonian messenger from midnight-movie hell. The film is a series of skits involving a bumbling division of highway patrolmen more interested in pranking the unfortunates they pull over than in doing their jobs. Wrapped around a pathetic excuse for a plot, the vignettes vary wildly in quality from dull to slightly less dull, the lone exception being the opening sequence, which approaches the menacingly surreal. A film that debuted at last year’s Sundance Film Festival and sat on the shelf since for various reasons (not the least of which is a running gag involving “Afghanistan-imation” and some mocking pro-Taliban dialogue), what Super Troopers succeeds the most in doing is providing a disquiet world the long-dreaded completion of the Police Academy series.

Fatal Error (1999) – DVD

February 11, 2002Posted in1990s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller

ZERO STARS/**** Image C+ Sound C
starring Antonio Sabato Jr., Janine Turner, Robert Wagner, Jason Schombing
teleplay by Rockne S. O’Bannon, based on the novel Reaper by Ben Mezrich
directed by Armand Mastroianni

by Walter Chaw A fatal virus transmitted by an evil computer program enters via the eyes and turns people into chalk (neatly combining two plots of “The X Files”). It’s up to hunky Antonio Sabato Jr., as ex-Army virologist-cum-contract paramedic Nick, and the vacuous Janine Turner, as current Army virologist Dr. Samantha, to unravel the puzzle before millions die. That Robert Wagner plays the corporate villain without a hint of irony is just one of those sad lessons about wise investments that parents should tell their children.

Don’t Say a Word (2001) – DVD

February 10, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Mystery, Thriller

*½/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B+
starring Michael Douglas, Brittany Murphy, Famke Janssen, Sean Bean
screenplay by Anthony Peckham and Patrick Smith Kelly, based on the novel by Andrew Klavan
directed by Gary Fleder

by Walter Chaw It’s probably not at all surprising that lock-step director Gary Fleder’s Don’t Say a Word, based on a by-the-numbers novel by fiction hack Andrew Klavan (True Crime), has less original material than Michael Jackson. It opens on a heist scene that reminds of Point Break and Heat (plus a thousand other heist films), segues into a home invasion/child-snatching that recalls Michael Douglas’s own Fatal Attraction, proceeds into a cell phone cat-and-mouse like Ransom, ends with a cascade of particulate debris that brings to mind Witness, and touches base to varying degrees with Sliver, Nick of Time, Instinct, Nuts, and Awakenings in particular in its sloppy patient/doctor dynamic (and the naming of a secondary character “Dr. Sachs”). There’s even a bit concerning a stolen child, a mother, and a song familiar to them both taken whole from Hitchcock’s remake of his own The Man Who Knew Too Much. Sadly, Don’t Say a Word forgets to first establish that the tune is meaningful. It is a poignant omission that illustrates as well as any the problems of a lazy knock-off film that plays a lot of familiar notes but doesn’t once strike a chord nor find a melody of its own.

Impostor (2002)

January 4, 2002Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller

*/****
starring Gary Sinise, Madeleine Stowe, Vincent D’Onofrio, Tony Shalhoub
screenplay by Scott Rosenberg, Caroline Case and Ehren Kruger and David Twohy
directed by Gary Fleder

Impostorby Walter Chaw Mouldering in a can for over a year (the film would smell pretty stale regardless past 1980), Impostor is the umpteenth adaptation of a Philip K. Dick story (whether directly or indirectly), a fable of identity that pales in comparison to an acknowledged classic like Blade Runner, an ambitious blockbuster like Total Recall, and an under-seen sleeper like Screamers. Overseen by professional bad director Gary Fleder, Impostor would I suspect most like to invite comparisons to two Harrison Ford films–Blade Runner and The Fugitive–but ends up best resembling, in its dour overreaching and intimations of future-shock resonance, the late, unlamented Dylan McDermott/Iggy Pop vehicle Hardware. Although the increasingly reptilian Gary Sinise seems game with all of his Steppenwolf method in tendon-popping tow, his sickly earnestness seems misplaced in an exercise that is essentially a strobe-lit pseudo-philosophical sci-fi opera that a major studio wisely declined to release for twelve full months. Future employers of actor Mekhi Phifer take note: with this and O, it appears that hiring the lad is all but inviting a lengthy release delay.

The Glass House (2001) – DVD

January 3, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Crime, Drama, DVD, Mystery, Thriller

*/**** Image A Sound B+ Extras C
starring Leelee Sobieski, Stellan Skarsgård, Diane Lane, Bruce Dern
screenplay by Wesley Strick
directed by Daniel Sackheim

BUY @ AMAZON

by Bill Chambers In The Glass House, the picture-perfect legal guardians of an orphaned teenage girl and her little brother turn out to be Gomez and Morticia. (Actually, that's overstating their appeal.) The trouble with this set-up is that it has the pretense of a moral but revolves around a character in Leelee Sobieski's Ruby who hasn't done anything to place herself in her precarious situation except obey the law and her elders. By the time she gains agency and the film puts her in the driver's seat (quite literally, as it happens), The Glass House seems to be apologizing to young adults on screen and off for suggesting they're not always in control. It could be said to, like Home Alone or The Rugrats Movie, spread a false sense of security to its target demographic.

Bruiser (2001) – DVD

December 29, 2001Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Directors: George A. Romero, DVD, France, Horror, Mystery, Thriller

***/**** Image B- Sound B Extras B-
starring Jason Flemyng, Peter Stormare, Leslie Hope, Nina Garbiras
written and directed by George A. Romero

by Walter Chaw A comic-book morality play along the lines of his Creepshow, horror legend George A. Romero’s Bruiser is rife with ideas and the kind of broad audacity that foments disquiet in rough strokes and bleak epiphanies. While it doesn’t hold together and is too self-conscious by the end to be anything but a little tedious and a lot predictable, the film’s first hour is possessed. Furious and marked by a sense of impending doom, Bruiser begins as exciting and risky an angst-ridden passion play as nearly anything produced in a yuppie-unrest genre that includes dissident films like Wolf, Fight Club, and American Psycho. It opens as a series of castrations for our milquetoast hero, Henry (Jason Flemyng)–humiliated at work, cheated by his friend, cuckolded by his wife (Leslie Hope)–until one day he wakes to find himself the protagonist in a Kafka parable. His face wiped clean of his identity, Henry becomes an amalgam of Ellison’s and Wells’s invisible men: ignored by society and ironically destroyed by the power bestowed upon him by his own anonymity.

Rush Hour 2 (2002) [infinifilm] – DVD

November 19, 2001Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, DVD, Hong Kong, Jackie Chan, Martial Arts, Mystery, Thriller

**/**** Image A+ Sound A- Extras A-
starring Jackie Chan, Chris Tucker, John Lone, Zhang Ziyi
screenplay by Jeff Nathanson
directed by Brett Ratner

by Walter Chaw For as long as Jackie Chan has been the logical heir to Buster Keaton’s crown, it becomes apparent during the course of Brett Ratner’s Rush Hour 2 that he may also be the heir to Peter Sellers’s Inspector Clouseau/Pink Panther crown. Blithely mixing the broad racial humour with the broad slapstick theatrics that typify Sellers and Blake Edwards’s classic comedies of criminal bad taste, Rush Hour 2 even makes time for a couple of bombshell secret agents, a brief and largely inexplicable interlude involving breasts rendering a man amusingly mute, and a cheerfully inept sidekick who gets in the stray kick now and again. The tenor, then, is dedicatedly light, and the humour is predictably free of cleverness–mostly involving Asians eating dogs and killing chickens, and African-Americans preferring their chickens fried and their karaoke with a heaping helping of Jacko gesticulations. That Rush Hour 2 (and the Pink Panther saga, for that matter) is often so genial in its cheap humour and gratifying in its physical exertions speaks to an almost universal desire to see people get a pie in the face while inelegantly breaking societal taboos. Rush Hour 2 never once aspires to anything other than formula fluff and never once descends into the dangerous realm of superlative entertainment. It is the prototypical summer film: loud, cheap, exploitive, and forgotten almost as soon as it’s over.