Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights (2004)

ZERO STARS/****
starring Romola Garai, Diego Luna, Mika Boorem, Jonathan Jackson
screenplay by Boaz Yakin and Victoria Arch
directed by Guy Ferland

Dirtydancing2by Walter Chaw A treacly clone in nearly every miserable, measurable aspect of the surprise hit of 1987, Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights' one point of deviation is that where the first film delicately pranced around the issue of race in its gentile/Jew Catskills confusion, its sequel stampedes over its own blue-eyed/brown-eyed intrigue roughshod with a plodder's grace. The decision to transport the insipid love story/underdog dance competition formula to the days leading up to the January 1, 1959 flight of Batista before Castro's rebels is already, by itself, an unspeakable contrivance in the Pearl Harbor tradition, although the decision to make another insipid love story/dance competition flick is certainly bad enough. This is garbage so misguided and poorly executed that in an act of self-defense, the mind spends long minutes contemplating other bad ideas that will probably one day find their way to the screen: Footloose 2: Khmer Rouge, for instance, or the inevitable remake of Hero set in Jersey and starring tireless Miramax pack-mule Ben Affleck.

The Other Side of the Bed (2002)

El Otro lado de la cama
**/****
starring Ernesto Alterio, Paz Vega, Guillermo Toledo, Natalia Verbeke
screenplay by David Serrano
directed by Emilio Martínez Lázaro

Othersideofthebedby Bill Chambers By the fifteen-minute mark of The Other Side of the Bed (El Otro lado de la cama), actresses Paz Vega and Natalia Verbeke have both doffed their clothes and bedded down the same man, but the movie, a musical, is–or wants to be–as sanitary as an Elvis vehicle. Director Emilio Martínez Lázaro labours to make promiscuity innocent again, if ever there was such a thing, and his sense of whimsy is quite seductive at first, since films about the self-interested are so often as shallow or tunnel-visioned as their protagonists (see: Thirteen). Lázaro risks, of course, glossing over his characters’ predicaments to the point of condescension by leeching the film of any gloom, but something possibly worse insinuates itself, a kind of apathy as it occurs that frothiness is being used to evade subjecitivity altogether. The Other Side of the Bed is colourfully sterile, if you will, an ensemble piece in the noncommittal sense of the term, and if you find yourself empathizing with anyone on screen, it’s generally because she’s not wearing pants at the time.

Welcome to Mooseport (2004) + EuroTrip (2004)

WELCOME TO MOOSEPORT
ZERO STARS/****

starring Gene Hackman, Ray Romano, Marcia Gay Harden, Maura Tierney
screenplay by Tom Schulman
directed by Donald Petrie

EUROTRIP
**½/****

starring Scott Mechlowicz, Jacob Pitts, Kristin Kreuk, Nial Iskhakov
screenplay by Alec Berg & David Mandel & Jeff Schaffer
directed by Jeff Schaffer

Welcometoeurotripby Walter Chaw Has there ever been a prospective leading man this self-immolating? Ray Romano on the big screen comes off as some kind of etherized cross between Jerry Lewis and Woody Allen: a nightmare auto-consumptive, allegedly comic offspring who, left alone for long enough, will eventually swallow his own face. I haven’t felt this much aggressive antipathy towards a personality since the heyday of George Raft. Romano’s performances in Ice Age and now Welcome to Mooseport deposit him square in the David Caruso/Sean Hayes school of engaging television performers whose charms are unique to the boob tube. They’re small-screen vampires, and 35mm is their sunlight.

Dying Young (1991) – DVD

½*/**** Image A Sound B
starring Julia Roberts, Campbell Scott, Vincent D’Onofrio, Colleen Dewhurst
screenplay by Richard Friedenberg
directed by Joel Schumacher

by Walter Chaw If you ever wondered, like I never did, what a movie scored by Kenny G (actually James Newton Howard–Kenny G is just the “featured saxophone performer”) would be like, director Joel Schumacher and star Julia Roberts, in the middle of her big-hair era, hold the answer. “Dying Young,” nothing–this thing was dead before it got there. Seems to me that while Schumacher’s films were always terrible, puerile ennoblement fantasies, there was a time–at least in the ’90s–when his titles had a bit of honesty about them: Flatliners, Falling Down, and the ironically-dubbed Flawless and Batman Forever.

The Republic of Love (2004)

***/****
starring Bruce Greenwood, Emilia Fox, Edward Fox, Connor Price
screenplay by Deepa Mehta and Esta Spalding, based on the novel by Carol Shields
directed by Deepa Mehta

Republicofloveby Travis Mackenzie Hoover Not long ago in these pages, I gave Ginger Snaps II: Unleashed a thumbs-up for leading us out of Canadian master-shot hell with a bold use of montage. Little did I know that the master shots would deliver a riposte so soon afterwards, but lo and behold, here is The Republic of Love, a movie that finds a way to use Canada's compositional rhythm of choice to fairly spectacular effect. True, it has some narrative deficiencies, and it builds to a climax that never really arrives, but Deepa Mehta's slick and stately use of cinematography and colour redeems what could have been another leaden exercise in choice-free Canadian aesthetics.

Against the Ropes (2004) + Catch That Kid (2004)

AGAINST THE ROPES
*/****
starring Meg Ryan, Omar Epps, Skye McCole Bartusiak, Tony Shalhoub
screenplay by Cheryl Edwards
directed by Charles Dutton

CATCH THAT KID
**/****
starring Kristen Stewart, Corbin Bleu, Max Thieriot, Jennifer Beals
screenplay by Michael Brandt & Derek Haas
directed by Bart Freundlich 

by Walter Chaw  AgainstthekidErin Brockovich with more boxing, Charles S. Dutton's Against the Ropes (released in the same time of year as Steven Soderbergh's surprise obliterating feminist uplift drama and likewise inspired by the true story of a crass woman from a blue-collar background making good) is interested in mythmaking in the way that boxing manager Jackie Kallen, the subject of this would-be biopic, was. Oddly enough, the film is also interested in marginalizing its minority "product" in the way that Kallen is portrayed to have been by the film. Ostensibly the story of Kallen (Meg Ryan) discovering middleweight James Toney on the streets and fashioning from such rough loam the stuff of a boxing hall of fame shoo-in, the film takes so many liberties with history that the "truth" resembles a Hallmark Hall of Fame production complete with a jaunty score by the late Michael Kamen that made me want to punch something. It's lowest-common-denominator filmmaking, a shake-and-bake Oprah Winfrey urban melodrama that hits all the Wildcats-meets-Rocky moments of saccharine populist uplift on its road to instant Palookaville.

Once Upon a Time in Mexico (2003) + Once Upon a Time in the Midlands (2002)|Once Upon a Time in Mexico – DVD

ONCE UPON A TIME IN MEXICO
*½/**** Image A Sound A- Extras A

starring Antonio Banderas, Salma Hayek, Johnny Depp, Rubén Blades
written and directed by Robert Rodriguez

ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE MIDLANDS
*/****
starring Robert Carlyle, Vanessa Feltz, Ricky Tomlinson, Kathy Burke
screenplay by Paul Fraser & Shane Meadows
directed by Shane Meadows

Onceuponatimeby Walter Chaw Ferociously patriotic but lacking in the epic scope suggested by its obvious debt to Sergio Leone's late masterpieces, pastiche-meister Robert Rodriguez's Once Upon a Time in Mexico is a magnification of John Woo in a lot of the same ways that Woo was a magnification of Leone–a post-post modern exercise bound together with a compelling sense of style but an alarming dearth of even the basics of sense. At the same time, if Leone understood the raucous humanism at the heart of Kurosawa, and Woo the insolent demystification of genre archetype of Leone, Rodriguez seems mainly to have ported the puerile macho fantasy of Woo while glancing off the deeper well of questions of honour and the mysterious bond between killers of men. I'm beginning to think that Rodriguez is a cheap filmmaker, interested in the mechanics of a piece more than the motivations of them. He can shoot a mean picture, he just can't set it up, pay it off, or explain it–and in replicating the best shoot-outs of Woo and Leone, he demonstrates that he's no Woo and most definitely no Leone.

Overrated/Underrated: Thirteen (2003) + Intolerable Cruelty (2003) [Widescreen] – DVDs

by Bill Chambers

OVERRATED
THIRTEEN
*½/****
Image B+, Sound A, Extras B-
starring Evan Rachel Wood, Holly Hunter, Nikki Reed, Jeremy Sisto
screenplay by Catherine Hardwicke & Nikki Reed
directed by Catherine Hardwicke

I wrote my first script at around the age that 16-year-old Nikki Reed was when she collaborated with her father's ex-girlfriend Catherine Hardwicke on the screenplay for Thirteen. In an attempt to shape a thesis about the almost-unwatchable film made from this memoir of Reed's pubescence, I browsed that script (something I haven't done in over a decade) looking for examples of didacticism; by page three, a character has died from smoking, with cigarettes themselves characterized outside passages of dialogue as "cancer sticks." This was of course written in tandem with my own misadventures in smoking, but do as I say, not as I do. (Call it Harmony Korine Syndrome.) Teenagers make exceptionally bad screenwriters because all teens are Catholic, in a sense–every rebellious action has an equal and opposite guilty reaction. Manifested in confessional writing, that hypocrisy can be deliriously egotistical.

The Big Bounce (2004)

½*/****
starring Owen Wilson, Morgan Freeman, Sara Foster, Charlie Sheen
screenplay by Sebastian Gutierrez, based on the novel by Elmore Leonard
directed by George Armitage

Bigbounceby Walter Chaw By the end of The Big Bounce, I was mildly surprised that it was still the same day I sat down to watch it. The film is aspiring to give Owen Wilson the role of the breezy, insouciant rake popularized by authors like Gregory MacDonald, Carl Hiaasen, and, more to the point, Elmore Leonard (who I guess wrote the source material, previously adapted into a vehicle for Ryan O'Neal), but succeeds mainly in making the likable Wilson tedious. More a mood piece than a heist flick, The Big Bounce also casts ex-MTV news anchorperson Sara Foster as some kind of femme fatale so vacuous, so bad an actress, that although she's stunning in a Nicolette Sheridan sort of way, she fails to convince that there's enough going on upstairs to be even vaguely dangerous. Foster's entire performance is a yellow bikini and a variety of lucky sheets used as impromptu wraps–an object who never convinces that she's an object on purpose.

Naked Killer (1992) – DVD

*/**** Image B+ Sound B Extras C
starring Chingmy Yau, Simon Yam, Carrie Ng, Kelly Yiu
screenplay by Wong Jing
directed by Fok Yiu Leung

by Walter Chaw Ah, 1992. What a year for Wong Jing, as no fewer than seven of his excrescent scripts were produced and Hong Kong's answer to Jess Franco found himself behind the camera on a staggering eight more pictures. It just can't come as any surprise that there's something like creative fatigue evidenced in the man's career, and though he didn't direct Naked Killer (that dishonour fell to Fok Yiu Leung, a.k.a. Clarence Fok), the picture is only marginally better than such Wong-helmed garbage as City Hunter and Royal Tramp–mainly because it's not quite as cartoonish. A case has been made for this film being an obliterating feminist picture along the lines of I Spit on Your Grave or Mother's Day, and indeed, a tale of a band of lesbian seductress assassins who practice their deadly arts on a basement-full of rapists has the potential to say smart things about an important topic. But the execution is so unwatchable and coy that it's hard to embrace Naked Killer as either political or tellingly exploitative.

Open Range (2003) + Northfork (2003)|Open Range – DVD

OPEN RANGE
**½/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras A-
starring Robert Duvall, Kevin Costner, Annette Bening, Michael Gambon
screenplay by Craig Storper, based on the novel The Open Range Men by Lauran Paine
directed by Kevin Costner

NORTHFORK
**½/****
starring James Woods, Nick Nolte, Claire Forlani, Duel Farnes
screenplay by Mark Polish & Michael Polish
directed by Michael Polish

Openrangeby Walter Chaw A little like Neil Diamond, Kevin Costner is an anachronism whose earnestness has landed him in Squaresville when the tragedy is that with a little tweaking in perspective, his peculiar brand of old-school earnestness might have his contemporaries looking upon him with more admiration than mirth. Costner is also the great American Gary Cooper hero archetype: tall, good-looking, dim-witted, and dull as dishwater–working almost exclusively in the realm of the sort of guileless red-blooded manifest determinism that loves mom, apple pie, horses, dogs, and guns. And why not? Costner has never stricken me, at least with his own projects, as the slightest bit condescending, his gift the reality or illusion that America's favourite simpleton is learning things at the same pace as his screenplays. His films, from Waterworld to Dances with Wolves to The Postman, are lovable for their complete lack of irony and self-reflection.

Le Divorce (2003) – DVD

The Divorce
*/**** Image A- Sound B+
starring Kate Hudson, Naomi Watts, Leslie Caron, Stockard Channing
screenplay by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala & James Ivory, based on the novel by Diane Johnson
directed by James Ivory

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Rejoice, America: now there's a movie that hates the French just as much as you do. Operating under the code name Le Divorce, it has infiltrated the ranks of the smelly Frogs, scrutinized their every failing and foible, and exposed them for the no-goodniks that recent events have proven them to be. Were the film only so good at keeping its own house in order; despite its ostentatious accusations of Gallic obtuseness, it fails to notice its own American brand of bourgeois superiority, which treats the continent and its culture as items to be collected when they're not being sold to the highest bidder. There's a lesson to be learned here, especially in these postwar times, about the nature of a certain country and its arrogance.

Touching the Void (2003) + Win a Date with Tad Hamilton! (2004)

TOUCHING THE VOID
**/****
starring Nicholas Aaron, Richard Hawking, Brendan Mackey, Joe Simpson
based on the book by Joe Simpson
directed by Kevin Macdonald

WIN A DATE WITH TAD HAMILTON!
*½/****
starring Kate Bosworth, Topher Grace, Josh Duhamel, Ginnifer Goodwin
screenplay by Victor Levin
directed by Robert Luketic

Touchingtadby Walter Chaw For those wondering what it would be like if one of those READER'S DIGEST "Drama in Real Life"s were ever made into a film, wonder no longer, for Touching the Void, packaged complete with suspense-shattering survivor testimonials and manageable tidbits of easily-digestible narrative, is a cunning simulacrum of the same. A feature-length dramatic re-creation in the television tabloid style, Touching the Void tells of a harrowing mountaineering cock-up that is, I guess, legendary in mountaineering circles for the same reason that dead NASCAR drivers are legendary in their sport. The problem though isn't with the ultimate banality of this account of one guy who crawls to safety down the bottom half a mountain he's already fallen down the top half of, but that the film of it mixes the victims of their own daredevil genes offering their perspective in front of a black backdrop with re-enactments featuring wheezy actors not entirely up to the task.

Along Came Polly (2004)

½*/****
starring Ben Stiller, Jennifer Aniston, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Bryan Brown
written and directed by John Hamburg

Alongcamepollyby Walter Chaw A half-baked, underfed comedy of body function that doesn't even manage the wit to successfully honour the threadbare conventions of its idiot slapstick sub-genre, Along Came Polly isn't offensive so much as apocalyptically tiresome. Even at an anaemic eighty-five minutes, the film drags somehow, limping across the finish line with an ass rimshot that isn't funny at the beginning of the picture with Hank Azaria and hasn't gotten any funnier by the end of it with Ben Stiller. How something so indebted to dozens upon dozens of other films can't get the imitation right buggers the imagination, providing a nation of yearning hacks that dulcet feeling of hope that results in a few more horrifically inept screenplays (produced and directed with commensurate incompetence) just like this one probably in the first half of 2004 alone. Bleak doesn't even begin to describe it.

Lucía, Lucía (2003) – DVD

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.

Overnight Delivery (1998) – DVD

½*/**** Image B- Sound B
starring Reese Witherspoon, Paul Rudd, Christine Taylor, Larry Drake
screenplay by Marc Sedaka and Steven Bloom
directed by Jason Bloom

by Bill Chambers A cult film without a cult, Overnight Delivery has gained a reputation, if not a following, for being the uncredited inspiration behind slippery documentarian Todd Phillips’s official fiction debut, Road Trip. And, of course, it stars the Reese Witherspoon who had not yet been body-snatched by the species that also got Ashley Judd, although it’s worth noting that Overnight Delivery is a harbinger of Sweet Home Alabamas to come, with Witherspoon a conduit for one meet-cute cliché after another. I’ll admit that she’s adorable in the picture, but her character, a college student whose bad taste in men is made a virtue by the workhorse plot, is a cipher steadily depleting the goodwill she shamelessly earns in her introduction as a stripper in a Catholic school uniform named Ivy Von Trapp. In true Hollywood fashion, Ivy’s striptease is cut short before her Pointer Sisters get to do the Neutron Dance–she’s too busy squatting for the patrons stuffing bills into her skirt.

The Long, Hot Summer (1958) + Hud (1963) – DVD

THE LONG, HOT SUMMER
***/**** Image A Sound A Extras B+

starring Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward, Anthony Franciosa, Orson Welles
screenplay by Irving Ravetch and Harriet Frank, Jr., based on the William Faulkner stories "Barn Burning" and "The Spotted Horses"
directed by Martin Ritt

by Walter Chaw The Long, Hot Summer is a classic example of Hollywood trying to have it both ways: it combines the seriousness of a literary property and some young Method talent with the lurid garishness of a dime-store novel. Seizing upon the exploitable elements–all that decadent behaviour and sexual dysfunction–of William Faulkner's work, the film pushes them to the fore, giving the cast the opportunity to sex things up in bare-shirted, post-Brando fashion. As a result, the film resembles soapy melodrama much more than Faulkner ("NOT SINCE PEYTON PLACE!" screams the trailer), but it's melodrama with the strength of its fetid convictions that makes for lively entertainment, whatever its shortcomings.

So Close (2002) – DVD

*/**** Image A Sound A-
starring Shu Qi, Vicki Zhao, Karen Mok, Song Seung Hun
screenplay by Jeff Lau
directed by Corey Yuen

by Walter Chaw Frankly, So Close could suck a tennis ball through a keyhole. Directed by action choreographer Corey Yuen (whose The Transporter I actually sort of liked), the film, a head-scratching mix of elaborate camera angles and stultifying “Dragnet” editing, is so dedicated to trundling from one rigorously disinteresting action set-piece to the next that it’s fair to wonder why the filmmakers even bothered to provide exposition of any sort.

Assassination Tango (2003) – DVD

***/**** Image B Sound B Extras C
starring Robert Duvall, Ruben Blades, Kathy Baker, Luciana Pedraza
written and directed by Robert Duvall

by Walter Chaw In one of a series of largely-improvised exchanges about the mystical hold of the tango on the spirit of Argentines, a crusty veteran confides in enigmatic Yankee hitman John J. (Robert Duvall, also writer-director) that the tango, among absolutes such as love and hate, is life. In Assassination Tango, the titular dance is also the metaphor for the desire to find balance between the brutish and the sublime or, failing that, to provide a strict framework within which the brute can prowl. (A visit to a caged panther in a Buenos Aires zoo becomes the visual manifestation of the idea as well as oblique reference to Kafka's "The Hunger Artist," the hero of which searches, like J., for sustenance.) The tango is the urgent pull of ritual that binds animal sexuality into the meticulous structure of dance, working on the literal level as doppelgänger to John J.'s carefully-controlled, gradually encroaching chaos and on another level as metaphor for a filmmaker seeking equilibrium between personal crisis and professional ambition at the end of his career. It's rationale enough for a picture so often interested in frustrating narrative to the benefit of the richness of its palimpsest; if ever there were a film that lives entirely in its subtext, Assassination Tango (even its title a semantic conundrum) is it.

Peter Pan (2003)

***½/****
starring Jason Isaacs, Jeremy Sumpter, Rachel Hurd-Wood, Lynn Redgrave
screenplay by P.J. Hogan and Michael Goldenberg, based on the play by James M. Barrie
directed by P.J. Hogan

by Walter Chaw A perverse lollapalooza of loaded images and disquieting implications, P.J. Hogan’s live-action Peter Pan is this year’s most intriguing Freudian shipwreck, resurrecting the darkness and poetic pessimism of J.M. Barrie’s play–and Peter and Wendy, Barrie’s own novelization–that has been all but forgotten since Disney’s well-regarded 1953 treatment. (While nowhere near as saccharine as something as mendacious as Brother Bear, that animated version is still of a Disney tradition that washes dangerous source material mostly clean of credible malice.) At its heart, consider that the Pan story is about child seduction/abduction in the Yeatsian “Stolen Child” tradition and a colony of “lost boys” that have forgotten their parents and, crucially, been forgotten in turn. The mirror of a parent’s love discarded in this way renders the film’s heart-warming conclusion a touch bitter, with the spectre of the question “But what about their parents?” hanging over it.