Alexander (2004)

November 24, 2004Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Drama, France, Germany, Italy, Morocco, Netherlands, Romance, Thailand, Theatrical, UK

*/****
starring Colin Farrell, Angelina Jolie, Val Kilmer, Jared Leto
screenplay by Oliver Stone and Christopher Kyle and Laeta Kalogridis
directed by Oliver Stone

Alexanderby Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Oliver Stone's Alexander is packed tight to the girders with catchphrases like "By the sweet breath of Aphrodite" and "By Apollo's eye" and "By Dionysus yours is the very soul of Prometheus!" It's stuffed to the gills with sword-and-sandal histrionics and props that become kitsch artifacts the instant they're rolled out for display in this awards season's gaudiest rummage sale. If it's not going to set anybody's codpiece on fire, Alexander at least lays claim to being one of the funniest movies of the year. It would have worn the title Oliver! more comfortably, opening as it does with Virgil's "fortune favours the bold" and ending, after a ridiculously long time, with the not-stunning revelation that what Stone has done is imagine the travails of a fourth-century B.C. Macedonian king as his very own. Conspiracies abound, popularity in the court of public opinion fades, bottomless campaign budgets are squandered in faraway lands for mysterious personal reasons, Oedipus rears his travel-worn head, and gay subtext begins to feel a little homophobic because it's subtext. Rosario Dawson in all her animalized glory? No problem. Colin Farrell giving Jared Leto a little peck on the cheek? Not in this house, buddy.

Chastity (1969) – DVD

November 23, 2004Posted in1960s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Drama, DVD, Road Movie, Romance

½*/**** Image B Sound B
starring Cher, Barbara London, Stephen Whittaker, Tom Nolan
screenplay by Sonny Bono
directed by Alessio de Paola

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover There is nothing more dangerous than a cuddly celebrity with avant-garde pretensions. The idea of a cheesy popular entertainer pouring his heart into something "serious" and "artistic" is wrong on so many levels: not only does it usually show him up as ignorant of the good work in the field he wants to hijack, but it also denigrates the deflationary appeal of what he actually does well. Normally the result just falls flat on its face, but with a little flamboyance–as in the case of William Shatner's "Transformed Man" album–the effort can result in a camp howler of uncommon magnitude. That would likewise be the fate of Chastity, a Sonny Bono-penned opus meant to endow his then-paramour Cher with the gravitas she clearly lacked on their variety show. With every (drunken, staggering) motion it takes towards significance, Chastity gets further and further away from it. We're talking planets.

The Complete Gidget Collection – DVD

November 19, 2004Posted in1950s, 1960s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD, Romance

GIDGET (1959)
***/**** Image F Sound C
starring Sandra Dee, Cliff Robertson, James Darren, Arthur O'Connell
screenplay by Gabrielle Upton, based on the novel by Frederick Kohner
directed by Paul Wendkos

GIDGET GOES HAWAIIAN (1961)
*/**** Image D+ Sound C
starring James Darren, Michael Callan, Deborah Walley, Carl Reiner
screenplay by Ruth Brooks Flippen
directed by Paul Wendkos

GIDGET GOES TO ROME (1961)
**/**** Image D+ Sound C
starring James Darren, Jessie Royce Landis, Cesare Danova, Danielle De Metz
screenplay by Ruth Brooks Flippen, Katherine and Dale Eunson
directed by Paul Wendkos

by Walter Chaw Breaking the cresting wave of surf films that ran as counter-programming to the medium-cool cinema of the early Sixties, 1959's Gidget, despite finding itself as the bane of the real surf counterculture, is a surprisingly dark-hued entry into the evolution of generational rebellion that heralded the new-real of the coming decade. It works as a sunnier mirror to the next year's West Side Story, likewise spinning off from a tomboy's infiltration of an insular boys' club to examine some of the friction that exists between the staged artificiality of Old Hollywood and the grittier verisimilitude of the American new wave. As grizzled beach bum The Big Kahuna, for instance, Cliff Robertson has a thousand-yard stare, a couple of tours in Korea under his belt, and a disturbing rape/pedophilia moment wherein he realizes that his life of retreat is all of glittering sun-kissed surfaces and carefully-waxed emptiness. Kahuna's surrender to the bourgeois is more The Wild One and Rebel Without a Cause than it is Psycho and Hud, but therein lies the embryonic hint of the theme that drives Sixties films: acceding to Mrs. Bates makes you a psycho.

Dolls (2002) – DVD

November 18, 2004Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Japan, Romance

***/**** Image B+ Sound B
starring Miho Kanno, Hidetoshi Nishijima, Tatsuya Mihashi, Chieko Matsubara
written and directed by Takeshi Kitano

by Walter Chaw Dolls is beautiful–that much can be expected from Japanese director Takeshi Kitano. It's meticulously-framed, interested in theatre, obsessed with the ocean, and stately in a way that re-establishes Kitano as a bridge of sorts between the formalism of Japanese cinema's past and the lawlessness of its present. But the film, the rare Kitano-directed piece in which he does not also appear, dispenses with hinting around at his absurdist auteur tendencies and sublimates his subtext into the text. To that end, it opens with an extended Bunraku performance–shot with a devouring fascination that hints at the ningyo (doll worship) suggested by the title and set to follow–concerning two doomed lovers that parallels the three barely-intersecting couples whose stories comprise the body of this anthology. The decision to make a film that is all subtext, however, is seldom successful: such pictures tend towards the pretentious, for one; and in emptying the basement, logic follows, they leave the basement empty. So it is with Dolls, which says everything it has to say, leaving only the speculation upon a repeat viewing (if one is necessary or desired) for how personal a project this might have been for Kitano and ultimately what this film tells us about the rest of Kitano's films. Then again, there's something that nags about Dolls, opening the possibility for another possible eventuality for this kind of piece.

Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice (1969) + The Pickle (1993) – DVDs

November 15, 2004Posted in1960s, 1990s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Romance

BOB & CAROL & TED & ALICE
*/**** Image B Sound B+ Extras B
starring Natalie Wood, Robert Culp, Elliott Gould, Dyan Cannon
screenplay by Paul Mazursky and Larry Tucker
directed by Paul Mazursky

THE PICKLE
*/**** Image B+ Sound A- Extras B-
starring Danny Aiello, Dyan Cannon, Shelley Winters, Jerry Stiller
written and directed by Paul Mazursky

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover There are certain talented but minor directors–"second-rank," as opposed to "second-rate"–who sadly manage to outlive their moment. John Frankenheimer was one of them, Alan J. Pakula another: both made key popular films of their time and then had nowhere to go once the cultural ground shifted beneath them. Add to this list the name of Paul Mazursky. Watch his 1969 comedy Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice and his 1993 summation The Pickle and you'll see two completely different people at work: one bases his work on observation and the mood of his times, and the other is so far behind the curve that his characters hardly seem human. Though it's painful to retrace Mazursky's slide and ultimately impossible to connect Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice to The Pickle, the juxtaposition of the two films is instructive in terms of what not to do when you're no longer the hot young thing and the industry contradicts your every single move.

Finding Neverland (2004)

November 12, 2004Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Drama, Family, Romance, Theatrical, UK

**/****
starring Johnny Depp, Kate Winslet, Julie Christie, Radha Mitchell
screenplay by David Magee, based on the play "The Man Who Was Peter Pan" by Allan Knee
directed by Marc Forster

Findingneverlandby Walter Chaw Marc Forster's Finding Neverland is well-traveled territory: a historical melodrama that's been over-scored to the point of diabetes and overwritten to the point of retardation. The presumption isn't that we're unfamiliar with J.M. Barrie's play "Peter Pan", but that we're incapable of understanding that this adaptation of Alan Knee's play "The Man Who Was Peter Pan", now three degrees removed from history, lives and dies by its conveyance of the idea that the dagger of make-believe is mightier than the mundane sword of reality. How better, after all, to tell the tale of the man who created one of the darkest, most brilliantly subversive attacks on the status quo than to return him to the land of storytelling and mythmaking? Forster seems to get it–the film looks ravishing and the casting of sprightly, ethereal Johnny Depp as Barrie is a stroke of genius, but both actor and director are betrayed by a project that side-steps the disturbing issues at hand in its suggestion of this Barrie's suspected paedophilic tendencies and his inability to grow up. "Peter Pan" is the shadow; the tedious and evasive Finding Neverland is the candle. The J.M. Barrie estate is upset that the film isn't accurate. They should be upset that it isn't very good.

Mr. & Mrs. Smith (1941) – DVD

November 9, 2004Posted in1940s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Directors: Alfred Hitchcock, DVD, Romance

*½/**** Image B Sound B Extras C+
starring Carole Lombard, Robert Montgomery, Harry E. Edington, Gene Raymond
screenplay by Norman Krasna
directed by Alfred Hitchcock

by Walter Chaw Even a cursory glance at Alfred Hitchcock's favoured themes would find the idea of rules–particularly as they're expressed by written forms of communication–to be the ineffectual rein seeking to subdue the protean tumult of human identity, greed, and passion. The way that books hide the body in Rope, for instance; the newspaper headlines discovered too late in Shadow of a Doubt; the contracts and penny dreadfuls of Suspicion; Norman Bates's hotel book; the profession of Foreign Correspondent; Carlotta's engraved headstone and Mozart's mathematical structure in Vertigo; Melanie's birthday wishes in The Birds; the beckoning empty cages in Rutland's house in Marnie; or how the lines of a ledger page predict North by Northwest's astonishing play on humans reduced to numbers before a brilliant bit of business involving a message written inside a matchbook cover. In Mr. and Mrs. Smith, Hitchcock pairs with good friend Carole Lombard (on her second-to-last film before a plane crash ended her life), a prototypical Hitchcock blonde for whom the term "screwball comedy" was invented, to produce what's widely seen as an anomaly in Hitchcock's career: a slapstick romantic imbroglio. And indeed, the film is different from nearly anything Hitchcock ever did (though it shares a similar plot with Rich and Strange and a similar antic energy with The Trouble with Harry), but not because it deviates from his themes. Rather, Mr. and Mrs. Smith seems to be a film that outlines what it is exactly about rules and written communication that Hitchcock perceives to be so fundamentally unstable and misleading.

The Clearing (2004) + Before Sunset (2004) – DVDs

November 9, 2004Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: Richard Linklater, Drama, DVD, France, Germany, Mystery, Romance, Thriller, UK

THE CLEARING
*½/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras B-
starring Robert Redford, Helen Mirren, Willem Dafoe, Alessandro Nivola
screenplay by Justin Haythe
directed by Pieter Jan Brugge

BEFORE SUNSET
***½/**** Image A Sound B+ Extras B-
starring Ethan Hawke, Julie Delpy
screenplay by Richard Linklater & Julie Delpy & Ethan Hawke
directed by Richard Linklater

by Walter Chaw Nothing much happens in Pieter Jan Brugge's The Clearing–so little happens, in fact, that it's difficult to pinpoint what all the to-do was about by film's end. Laid-off everyman schlub Arnold Mack kidnaps car rental magnate Wayne Hayes (Robert Redford) from the front gate of his palatial estate. He leads Hayes through the woods to meet up with his partners-in-crime, having a heart-to-heart concerning the dissatisfactions of modern living along the way. Hayes's wife Eileen (Helen Mirren) and grown children (Alessandro Nivola and glassy-eyed Melissa Sagemiller) gather with disaffected FBI agent Fuller (Matt Craven) to field ransom demands and likewise have heart-to-hearts about the dissatisfactions of modern living. Brugge plays with time in interesting ways: the events of the first day with Wayne and Arnold are intercut with the events of several weeks with the Hayes clan. But the picture's biggest trick is making ninety minutes seem like an eternity.

Elf (2003) [Infinifilm] – DVD

November 8, 2004Posted in2000s, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Christmas, Comedy, DVD, Family, Fantasy, Romance

**/**** Image A Sound A- Extras A
starring Will Ferrell, James Caan, Zooey Deschanel, Mary Steenburgen
screenplay by David Berenbaum
directed by Jon Favreau

by Walter Chaw Some of the preview spots for Jon Favreau's Elf are hysterical, leading me to think that the film's failure to be very funny has a lot to do with bad direction, editing, or maybe both. It's a lightweight, unapologetically warm-hearted picture that earns a lot of respect for avoiding scatological humour en route to honouring nearly every other ingredient of the The Jerk bumpkin-out-of-water formula. Like Steve Martin, Will Ferrell announces himself with this film (and Old School) as a smart comedian unusually committed to effect and the directions his performance might take him. Ferrell isn't a chaotic jester. His clowning compels because it has the quality of internal logic, enough so that it's somehow possible to accept his man-raised-by-elves creation at face value.

Christmas in Connecticut (1992) + Jingle All the Way (1996) – DVDs

November 8, 2004Posted in1990s, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Christmas, Comedy, DVD, Family, Romance, Schwarzenegger, ZERO STARS

CHRISTMAS IN CONNECTICUT
ZERO STARS/**** Image C Sound C+
starring Dyan Cannon, Kris Kristofferson, Richard Roundtree, Tony Curtis
screenplay by Janet Brownell, based on the screenplay by Lionel Houser and Adele Comandini and story by Aileen Hamilton
directed by Arnold Schwarzenegger

JINGLE ALL THE WAY
ZERO STARS/**** Image B Sound C+
starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sinbad, Phil Hartman, Rita Wilson
screenplay by Randy Kornfield
directed by Brian Levant

by Walter Chaw A man of many talents (a jag-off of all trades, let’s say), the honourable Arnold A. Schwarzenegger made his directorial debut with the 1992 telefilm Christmas in Connecticut, a remake of a 1945 Barbara Stanwyck flick and the sort of unqualified failure that finds something like thirty dozen ways to redefine “fatuous.” Dyan Cannon, she of the toothy, shark-like grin, stars as Elizabeth Blane, a popular cooking-show host without any actual cooking skills who’s led around by her pert snoot by her queen of a producer, Alexander (Tony Curtis, playing Harvey Fierstein). When heroic Colorado park ranger Jefferson Jones (Kris Kristofferson, one definition of “fatuous” all by his own self) saves a kid from the wilderness, Alexander hatches the brilliant plan to capitalize on Grizzly Adams’s national hero status by inviting him to a live broadcast of a fake dinner at a fake house in Connecticut populated by a family of terrible actors and an unspeakable mammy stereotype. It’s hard to draw the line between fiction and reality sometimes, isn’t it?

Alfie (2004)

November 5, 2004Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Romance, Theatrical, UK

*½/****
starring Jude Law, Marisa Tomei, Omar Epps, Nia Long
screenplay by Elaine Pope & Charles Shyer, based on the play and screenplay by Bill Naughton
directed by Charles Shyer

Alfie2004by Walter Chaw I haven’t liked any of the six films that Charles Shyer directed before his remake of Lewis Gilbert’s Alfie, so I guess there’s something to the auteur theory after all. Minus one fab performance from the suddenly omnipresent Jude Law, Shyer’s Alfie is a toothless affair–not surprising given modern cinema’s propensity for turning out lifeless twaddle, but somewhat dismaying given that the film’s source material is one of the most scabrous flicks in the annals of misogyny captured on celluloid. Contrasting the 1966 and 2004 versions of Alfie would be like an essay on how the movies have lost their edge over the course of the past four decades: we’ve moved from the medium cool of Sixties films, with their yearning to break free from the oppression of the Fifties, to the stagnant pond of the now, with its films too scared to offend the priggish States, filthy as they are with the descendants of pilgrims and Puritans. Come to think of it, a comparison between the two pictures also functions as an examination of the general difference between Europe and America–or an overview of religiosity in all its florid and degenerative influences on art.

The Greatest Show on Earth (1952) – DVD

November 2, 2004Posted in1950s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Best Picture (Academy Awards), Drama, DVD, Family, Romance

***/**** Image A Sound B+
starring Betty Hutton, Cornel Wilde, Charlton Heston, Dorothy Lamour
screenplay by Fredric M. Frank, Barré Lyndon and Theodore St. John
directed by Cecil B. DeMille

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Cecil B. DeMille's The Greatest Show on Earth is pretty close to being the Biggest Crock on Film. A lame assortment of soapy intrigues, bloated set-pieces, and garish colours, it's calculated to alienate the highbrows and haunt Guy Debord's nightmares. Some allege that it's the worst film ever to win the Best Picture Oscar, a hard claim to challenge no matter how unquantifiable the distinction. But while The Greatest Show on Earth is aimed squarely at those loathsome people who speak of films as "rollercoaster thrill-rides," there's no denying that it was made with a zesty vulgarity and executed with loving care. It's professional in both senses of the word: too much of a static thing to have artistic merit, yet big fun to watch as a well-engineered Rube Goldberg vehicle captained by Jack Smith across a field of giant marshmallows.

Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (1994) – DVD

November 1, 2004Posted in1990s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, Directors: Gus Van Sant, Drama, DVD, Esoterica, Romance, Western

***/**** Image A- Sound A- (DD)/A (DTS)
starring Uma Thurman, Lorraine Bracco, Angie Dickinson, Noriyuki "Pat" Morita
screenplay by Gus Van Sant, based on the novel by Tom Robbins
directed by Gus Van Sant

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover From its disastrous premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival (which prompted a hasty re-edit) to the unanimous critical drubbing it received a short while later, few films have had harder luck than Gus Van Sant's Even Cowgirls Get the Blues. The reviews were at best vague, alluding to some thing in the theatre that defied description as much as it discouraged it, while those brave souls not scared off by the word-of-mouth–even fans of Tom Robbins's 1973 source novel, people who could at least be said to have known what they were in for–came away hostile and perplexed. But anything that inspires this kind of uncomprehending panic is a special sort of film–that's right, I'm one of those lonely few who actually liked Even Cowgirls Get the Blues. And analyzing its successful failure is hugely instructive, specifically in showing how certain social forces, then as now, unfairly shape what is considered aesthetic treason.

The Rose Tattoo (1955) – DVD

October 26, 2004Posted in1950s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Romance

**½/**** Image A- Sound A-
starring Burt Lancaster, Anna Magnani, Marisa Pavan, Ben Cooper
screenplay by Tennessee Williams, based on his play
directed by Daniel Mann

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Anna Magnani is the kind of actress people describe using all the wrong superlatives. Everybody talks about her “big” presence, about how she’s a “powerhouse” and a “force of nature,” as though she were the Italian Shelley Winters. This kind of blather hardly approximates the scope of Magnani’s talent. She’s big all right, but she’s more than the pyrotechnic scenery-chewer that “big” normally designates: she’s that rare combination of big and nuanced, a crushing blend of uninhibited physicality and the willingness to take every line, word, and punctuation mark personally. Technically, even a luminary like her has her work cut out for her in something like The Rose Tattoo, what with its middling Louisiana Peyton Place scenario by Tennessee Williams, the dry, emotionless direction of Daniel Mann, and a supporting cast of Hollywood phoneys conspiring to waste her talent. But Magnani never betrays the thought that her part might be less than worth her time, and in so doing, she makes it worth her time. Ours, too, more often than not.

Head in the Clouds (2004); Bright Young Things (2003); Vera Drake (2004)

October 22, 2004Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, Drama, France, Romance, UK, War

HEAD IN THE CLOUDS
*/****
starring Charlize Theron, Penélope Cruz, Stuart Townsend, Thomas Kretschmann
written and directed by John Duigan

BRIGHT YOUNG THINGS
**½/****
starring Emily Mortimer, Stephen Campbell Moore, James McAvoy, Michael Sheen
screenplay by Stephen Fry, based on the novel by Evelyn Waugh
directed by Stephen Fry

VERA DRAKE
***½/****
starring Imelda Staunton, Richard Graham, Eddie Marsan, Anna Keaveney
written and directed by Mike Leigh

Headyoungveraby Walter Chaw There's a certain fascination embedded in our images of wartime England. When a film comes birthing across the pond this time of year, dripping with prestige and a whiff of stuffiness, what can it be but awards fodder laden with lovely sets, sepia-stained cinematography, handsome wool and silk costumes, and largely European casts that remind of how venal American mainstream casts tend to be by comparison? Something about the Blitz still intoxicates–perhaps England's steadfast refusal to surrender their island sanctuary to the barbarians at the gate tickles at our national self-delusion, trading on the belief, once ironclad, that our borders were as sacrosanct, or that our intentions in establishing a New World Order were ever that noble. Now, without the comfort of our own inviolate island sanctuary (what was Manhattan pre-9/11 than that–and what was it after but the biggest metaphor for the irony of capitalist arrogance since The Titanic?), there's just that much more reason for moth-balled middlebrow arthouse audiences to snuffle up great pinches of mid-twentieth century British pluck and remember from the cloistered perspective of a cloth chair a when that never existed–at least never for them.

DIFF ’04: Kontroll

October 21, 2004Posted in****/****, 2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, DIFF/SDFF, Drama, Film Festivals, Hungary, Romance, Thriller
Control****/****starring Sándor Csányi, Zoltán Mucsi, Csaba Pindroch, Sándor Badárscreenplay by Jim Adler & Nimród Antaldirected by Nimród Antal by Walter Chaw A cross between Chris Noth and Clancy Brown's The Kurgan from Highlander, Bulcsú (Sándor Csányi) is the Oedipal anti-hero at the heart of Hungarian director Nimród Antal's drop-dead brilliant Kontroll. A ticket-taker and a rent-a-cop, he's assigned to a misfit crew at odds with every other misfit crew in their Orwellian transit agency. The film, a surprisingly violent and kinetic slapstick comedy reminiscent of Clive Barker's "Midnight Meat Train," begins with one character aping Harpo Marx's blowtorch lighter bit…

A Home at the End of the World (2004) – DVD

October 19, 2004Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Romance

*/**** Image A Sound A- Extras D
starring Colin Farrell, Dallas Roberts, Robin Wright Penn, Sissy Spacek
screenplay by Michael Cunningham, based on his novel
directed by Michael Mayer

by Walter Chaw Glib, facile, essentially misguided, and exhibiting a kind of misunderstanding about film craft that sends exactly the opposite of the intended message in every scene, Michael Mayer's directorial debut A Home at the End of the World is a trial from start to finish. It makes appalling soundtrack choices first in establishing period, then in demolishing mood, and finally in screwing up the chronology enough so that the viewer is left completely unmoored. If you're using a jovial Seventies soundtrack to place your film in the Seventies, it's a really bad idea to start using a classic Motown soundtrack when your picture actually moves forward in time. (Not even mentioning what a perverse boner it is to accompany the discovery of a dead father with "Me and Julio Down By the Schoolyard.") Add to that a screenplay by The Hours scribe Michael Cunningham that displays the same kind of top-heavy, more or less off-base pretension and disdain for such outmoded values as loyalty and generosity, and what you have is a recipe for a very particular kind of disaster.

DIFF ’04: Stage Beauty

October 16, 2004Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, DIFF/SDFF, Drama, Film Festivals, Germany, Romance, UK
**/****starring Billy Crudup, Claire Danes, Tom Wilkinson, Rupert Everettscreenplay by Jeffrey Hatcher, based on his play "Compleat Female Stage Beauty"directed by Richard Eyre by Walter Chaw A Samuel Pepys quotation opens Stage Beauty, something about how in the seventeenth century, Ned Kynaston was the most beautiful woman on a stage that forbade women from strutting and fretting their hours. Playing Desdemona in a mannered production of "Othello", Kynaston (Billy Crudup) is king of the roost, oblivious to the crush of his ahistorical assistant, Mrs. Margaret "Maria" Hughes (a sort of well-cast Claire Danes), the first lady of the theatre, who…

DIFF ’04: À Tout de Suite

October 15, 2004Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, DIFF/SDFF, Drama, Film Festivals, France, Romance, Thriller
**/****starring Isild Le Besco, Ouassini Embarek, Nicolas Duvauchelle, Laurence Cordierwritten and directed by Benoît Jacquot by Walter Chaw Benoît Jacquot's homage to the Nouvelle Vague has a weird, emotionally-detached feeling to it, something to do with the fact that paying tribute to the French New Wave is, at its essence, paying tribute to a tribute. (Something to do, too, with the nihilism that has infected world cinema in the new millennium.) The story proper concerns a young girl in the Anna Karina mold (Isild Le Besco) who, fashioning herself a bohemian, rebels against her bourgeois parents, beds down with a…

Shall We Dance (2004)

October 15, 2004Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Romance, Theatrical

½*/****
starring Richard Gere, Jennifer Lopez, Susan Sarandon, Stanley Tucci
screenplay by Audrey Wells, based on the screenplay by Masayuki Suo
directed by Peter Chelsom

Shallwedance2004by Walter Chaw Shall We Dance sits on the screen like an unwelcome dinner guest, or a corpulent toad. It's a remake of a mediocre-but-popular Japanese film that jettisons the question mark after "Dance" on its title screen, the inflectionless phrase squatting there as this movie's moniker a curiously apt description of the dismal marionette's-waltz to follow. The only thing more inscrutable than Jennifer Lopez's self-effacing slide into the territory of Melanie Griffith's mumbling kewpie doll career is the filmmakers' concept of Richard Gere as a comic actor capable of carrying off long takes and haughty deliveries. After all, it's hard enough to believe that the glowering, pinched vision of J.Lo staring fixedly out a dance-studio picture window at Chicago's hurtling elevated train would serve as an invitation instead of a dire warning. The romance of the El has gone decidedly downhill since Tom Cruise, Rebecca DeMornay, and Tangerine Dream took a ride in Risky Business.