Secretary (2002) – DVD

March 14, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Romance

***/**** Image B- Sound B- Extras C
starring James Spader, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Jeremy Davies, Patrick Bauchau
screenplay by Erin Cressida Wilson, based on the short story by Mary Gaitskill
directed by Steven Shainberg

by Walter Chaw Pleasantville for the sadomasochism set, Steven Shainberg’s Secretary is a gentle sexual-awakening fable set in a peculiar fairytale hyper-reality reminiscent of the saturated inward-gazing milieu of David Cronenberg’s Spider. Featuring a courageous, social-convention-shattering performance by Maggie Gyllenhaal, the picture is The Graduate by way of humiliation and water sports–the hallmark pool scenes feature Gyllenhaal’s Benjamin Braddock character Lee Holloway festooned with water-wings, her position just on the surface the mordant reflexivity of Sunset Blvd.‘s doomed Joe Gillis rather than of Braddock’s bottom-of-the-drink disconnection. Between Secretary and the Jake Gyllenhaal starrer Moonlight Mile, the Gyllenhaal siblings seem intent on tackling their generation’s particular alienations by way of Mike Nichols’s counterculture classic, but where Jake takes a conventional route in Moonlight Mile, Maggie’s exploration of plastics-vs.-individualized happiness embraces the essential shadows of our nasty sexual ids in a Solondz-lite waltz with seething suburbia.

Moonlight Mile (2002) – DVD

March 10, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Romance

**½/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras A-
starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Dustin Hoffman, Susan Sarandon, Holly Hunter
written and directed by Brad Silberling

by Walter Chaw There is a delicacy to the dusk of the early-Seventies, poised as those years were on the lip of paranoia and disquiet as the psychic scars of the Sixties assassinations, Watergate, and Vietnam worked like rough puberty on an infant nation's whored naiveté. Capturing that space in the disintegration of individuals, traditions, hopes, faiths, is something best left in the hands of casualties of war (Tim O'Brien) and outsider perspectives (Ang Lee and his The Ice Storm). That Brad Silberling, writer-director of Moonlight Mile, appears to be making the death-by-stalker of his actress fiancé Rebecca Schaeffer the metaphor for that twilight time is cause for some concern.

Irreversible (2002)

March 7, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Crime, Drama, Esoterica, France, Mystery, Romance, Theatrical, Thriller

Irréversible
**½/****
starring Monica Bellucci, Vincent Cassel, Albert Dupontel, Philippe Nahon
written and directed by Gaspar Noé

“You know what? Time destroys all things.”

Irreversibleby Bill Chambers SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. That’s the opening line of dialogue in Irréversible, meaning it comes after the closing titles, which scroll down the screen backwards and are followed by back-to-front names in block letters. Each word lands with a percussive thud (“Bellucci!” “Noé!”) echoed in the sound produced by a fire extinguisher in one of the two scenes everybody’s talking about: Director Gaspar Noé’s secondary conceit (the primary we’ll discuss momentarily) is a kind of reverse foreshadowing, with disturbing noises and gestures recontextualized elsewhere, invoking the standby “Hindsight is 20/20.” A film that appeals to the pessimist in us, Irréversible may make you think of Memento, but where Memento was about destiny, Irréversible is cynicially hopeful (if there is such a thing), illustrating the human impulse to look to the past for happy endings–Bogey’s bogus reassurance that “we’ll always have Paris.”

Asunder (1998) – DVD

March 3, 2003Posted in1990s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Romance, Thriller

*½/**** Image A- Sound A-
starring Blair Underwood, Debbi Morgan, Michael Beach
screenplay by Eric Lee Bowers
directed by Tim Reid

by Walter Chaw A courageously unpleasant role for “L.A. Law” heartthrob Blair Underwood, Tim “Venus Flytrap” Reid’s derivative Asunder is only otherwise brave for its remorseless abuse of otherwise innocent pregnant women–crossing a seldom-crossed line of taboo in American film unless it’s to punish a heroine (see: High Crimes, Crossroads, and so on) for having the child of a bad man. Billing itself as “In The Suspenseful Style Of Fatal Attraction And Unfaithful,” Asunder is every bit the rushed, formula production moldering on a shelf somewhere until either one of its stars hits it big (see: Ordinary Decent Criminal and Colin Farrell) or, as in this case, a higher-profile film with a similar theme makes an impact, thus giving the folks in marketing a hook.

Open Hearts (2002)

February 28, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Denmark, Drama, Romance, Theatrical

Elsker dig for evigt
***½/****
starring Sonja Richter, Mads Mikkelsen, Paprika Steen, Nikolaj Lie Kaas
screenplay by Susanne Bier & Anders Thomas Jensen
directed by Susanne Bier

by Walter Chaw Susanne Bier’s first Dogme 95 film Open Hearts (Elsker dig for evigt) is the Danish movement’s twenty-eighth and the second by a female director after last year’s Italian for Beginners. It reveals the austere, half-snooty/half-tongue-in-cheek manifesto as a surprisingly effective platform for a reinvention of the woman’s picture–a resurrection of the estrogen melodramas circa Mildred Pierce, the legitimizing of the soap opera genre fallen on disrepute since the invention of soaring violins and Julia Roberts. The limiting constraints of Dogme 95, most of them aimed at stripping filmmaking of all artifice, seem to purify the emotionalism latent in stories of paralyzed lovers and star-crossed priests–perhaps the least expected offshoot of a movement that is not only extremely distracting, but probably began life as something of a joke.

From Here to Eternity (1953) [Superbit] – DVD

February 18, 2003Posted in1950s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Best Picture (Academy Awards), Drama, DVD, Romance, War

***/**** Image B+ Sound B+
starring Burt Lancaster, Montgomery Clift, Deborah Kerr, Donna Reed
screenplay by Daniel Taradash, based on the novel by James Jones
directed by Fred Zinnemann

by Bill Chambers Lovelorn soldiers stationed in Hawaii have their romantic lives torn asunder when the Japanese bomb Pearl Harbor: You can add remaking Fred Zinnemann’s Oscar-winning From Here to Eternity without due credit to the tally of Pearl Harbor‘s sins, although a picture as cool and sensitive–the two qualities exactly lacking from Pearl Harbor–as From Here to Eternity would hardly want the acknowledgment. Based on the novel by James Jones, a veteran wounded at Guadalcanal who also wrote the book on which Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line is based, the film finds the director of High Noon following his didactic muse into an allegory that is considerably less paint-by-numbers, even arcane. From Here to Eternity is a sudser, ultimately, albeit one that may be of more significance to those who’ve served. That’s a step up from Pearl Harbor, at least, which will most directly appeal to chimpanzees.

Brown Sugar (2002) – DVD

February 15, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Music, Romance

**/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras C
starring Taye Diggs, Sanaa Lathan, Mos Def, Nicole Ari Parker
screenplay by Michael Elliot and Rick Famuyiwa
directed by Rick Famuyiwa

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover There's a lot of talk of integrity in Brown Sugar, and a lot more of the defiant nature of good hip-hop; if the film embodied either of those traits in its words or pictures it would be a perfect ten. Alas, for all of Brown Sugar's hue and cry over the mainstreaming of the music, the film is tediously commonplace in its attitudes; director/co-writer Rick Famuyiwa treats hip-hop mania like the sedate cream-coloured furniture his protagonists seem to enjoy–just another tony item to be collected. He simply isn't smart or passionate enough to evoke an obsessive love for anything, be it musical or human, and both his romance plot and his professing of musical devotion are borrowings from other movies and conversations overheard. While it's too low-key and oblivious to be offensive (and the furniture does have its qualities), it makes no impression at all beyond the miracle one fluky, inspired performance that belongs in a better movie.

O (2001) [Signature Series] – DVD

February 12, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Romance, Shakespeare, Teen, Thriller

**½/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras B
starring Mekhi Phifer, Josh Hartnett, Julia Stiles, Elden Henson
screenplay by Brad Kaaya, based on the play “Othello” by William Shakespeare
directed by Tim Blake Nelson

by Walter Chaw Tim Blake Nelson’s updating of Shakespeare’s “Othello” is hamstrung by a deficient script that hastily neglects motivation and character depth in favour of a dependence on our familiarity with the source material to lend O its tragic gravity. It overuses animalism and the specious equation of high school basketball with military conquests and prowess, and it unforgivably consigns the Desdemona character to a haughty afterthought and a series of shrill, shallow pronouncements. Another fatal misjudgment of the hackneyed and over-complicated plot (which actually seems to contradict itself right at its conclusion) reduces Iago’s wickedness to his need to earn daddy’s approval. Admittedly, though, O‘s transplanting of “Othello”‘s insular Venetian political setting to an exclusive upper-class prep school is a wry and excellent decision, offering any number of opportunities for satirizing the glowering atmosphere and claustrophobic in-fighting of high school at its most advantaged.

How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days (2003)

February 7, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Romance, Theatrical

*½/****
starring Kate Hudson, Matthew McConaughey, Adam Goldberg, Michael Michele
screenplay by Kristen Buckley & Brian Regan and Burr Steers, based on the book by Michele Alexander and Jeannie Long
directed by Donald Petrie

Howtoloseaguyin10daysby Walter Chaw In the rush to anoint Gore Vidal blood relation Burr Steers the next Dylan Kidd (writer-director of Roger Dodger), I wonder how many people suspected that Steers’s follow-up act to Igby Goes Down would be the conceptual lollapalooza of habitual bad director Donald Petrie’s How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days. Only one of three scribes to blame for this mess, Steers seems to have contributed a certain smug misanthropy to the picture of the variety that fuelled the overpraised Salinger ape Igby, with Brian Regan and Kristen Buckley, the brain trust behind 102 Dalmatians, apparently responsible for the sentimental slapstick garbage that comprises the rest of the piece. What emerges is a shrunken chimera of a movie, hobbled by a pair of competing mainstream romantic movie contrivances (“One of them is lying. So is the other,” assures the tagline), a self-knowledge of its own crapulence coupled with an inability to do anything about it, and a middle that, surprisingly, doesn’t totally stink.

Monster’s Ball (2001) – DVD|Monster’s Ball [Lions Gate Signature Series] – DVD

February 2, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Romance

***½/****
DVD – Image A+ Sound A Extras A-
DVD (SIGNATURE SERIES) – Image A+ Sound A Extras A-
starring Billy Bob Thornton, Halle Berry, Peter Boyle, Heath Ledger
screenplay by Milo Addica & Will Rokos
directed by Marc Forster

by Walter Chaw Two men tell poor Leticia Musgrove (Halle Berry) that she’s beautiful during the course of Marc Forster’s pitch-black Monster’s Ball. The first is her condemned husband Lawrence (Sean Combs), and the second is Hank (Billy Bob Thornton), the head of the death-row guard team responsible for bringing Lawrence to the electric chair. The circumstances and timing of their compliments, separated by almost the entire body of the film, says a great deal about where Monster’s Ball has gone in the interim. Lawrence says it as his last words to his wife during their last time together on the last day of his life. Hank says it over a pint of ice cream, just after an important revelation has been claimed without his knowledge. In both instances, there is a simple, fated truth to the words: the first utterance represents the realization that there’s nothing left to say, the second the recognition that some things are best left unspoken.

Swept Away (2002) – DVD

January 30, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Italy, Romance, UK

**/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Madonna, Adriano Giannini, Jeanne Tripplehorn, Bruce Greenwood
screenplay by Guy Ritchie, based on the screenplay by Lina Wertmüller
directed by Guy Ritchie

by Bill Chambers No, it's not a masterpiece, but the deck was already stacked against Guy Ritchie's Swept Away long before anyone saw the picture. That it was a remake (of Lina Wertmüller's squirm-inducing Swept Away… by an Unusual Destiny in the Blue Sea of August) was strike one; that it starred Madonna, a lousy film actress considered box-office poison, strike two; that Ritchie is married to Madonna, marking Swept Away as the kind of vanity project that power couples make to spend more time together than their private life allows, strike three. And every review you read of Swept Away–that I read, at least–parroted these three strikes, sizing them to fit a column's allotment; there's no doubt in my mind that, even though it became the whipping-boy of late-night talk-show hosts and assured its victory at the 2003 Golden Raspberrys with near-universal placement on year-end worst-of lists, you haven't any meaningful clue as to what's actually wrong with Swept Away.

Sweet Home Alabama (2002) – DVD

January 29, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD, Romance

½*/**** Image A Sound A- Extras C+
starring Reese Witherspoon, Josh Lucas, Patrick Dempsey, Fred Ward
screenplay by C. Jay Cox
directed by Andy Tennant

by Walter Chaw The first clue as to the vileness of Andy Tennant's Sweet Home Alabama is that it's named after a Lynyrd Skynrd song (paving the way, one supposes, for Freebird: The Movie and Smokestack Lightning); the second clue is that it's the first Reese Witherspoon picture in a while to find a way to squander her almost preternatural ability to salvage terrible scripts and spent concepts floating her way post-Election. Extraordinarily boring and unfunny while redolent with the sort of bad behaviour-made-cutesy that made stars of Julia Roberts and Ashley Judd, Sweet Home Alabama at least has the unlikely distinction of rendering Witherspoon shrill, dull, and during one ugly drunken tirade, irredeemable.

Blue Crush (2002) [Collector’s Edition] (Widescreen) – DVD

January 27, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Germany, Romance, Sports

***/**** Image A- Sound A+ Extras B-
starring Kate Bosworth, Michelle Rodriguez, Matthew Davis, Sanoe Lake
screenplay by Lizzy Weiss & John Stockwell, based on the article "Surf Girls of Maui" by Susan Orlean
directed by John Stockwell

by Walter Chaw Bob Marley sings "Could You Be Loved" as a quartet of surf girls in a finned vintage powder-blue ride, yellow surfboards strapped to its roof, chase the dawn to catch the perfect pipe breaking over Hawaii's sand bars and coral reefs. There is possibly no finer capsule of the adrenaline of early morning and youth in recent memory, and while Blue Crush, the movie surrounding this moment, can't sustain that feeling of hope springing eternal, what it manages is an estrogen opera so intensely feminine that it serves as the antidote (and cannier doppelgänger) to Diesel's xXx flex-a-thon.

My Big Fat Greek Wedding (2002) – DVD

January 26, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Drama, DVD, Romance

**/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras C
starring Nia Vardalos, John Corbett, Michael Constantine, Lainie Kazan
screenplay by Nia Vardalos
directed by Joel Zwick

by Walter Chaw Destined to be one of those much-touted Hollywood discovery stories, Nia Vardalos's one-woman play "My Big Fat Greek Wedding" was seen by Rita Wilson (Mrs. Tom Hanks) and ultimately conceived as a film for veteran bad-TV director Joel Zwick (Hanks's "bosom buddy," as it were). The results are predictably sloppy: all expansive gestures, big emotions, and ethnic sitcom generalities that were handled with more intelligence and wit by Moonstruck. The sad reality of My Big Fat Greek Wedding's stultifying predictability and stand-up sensibility–what plays well as a monologue translates clumsily as film narrative–is that there are enough broad stabs at overbearing mothers and in-law tensions that folks will come away from the film mistaking a warmth for their own experiences with an overabundance of affection for My Big Fat Greek Wedding.

Shampoo (1975) – DVD

January 18, 2003Posted in1970s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Romance

***½/**** Image B- Sound B
starring Warren Beatty, Julie Christie, Goldie Hawn, Lee Grant
screenplay by Robert Towne and Warren Beatty
directed by Hal Ashby

by Bill Chambers SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. To put things in perspective, Tootsie is, arguably, a remake of Hal Ashby’s carefully cultivated 1975 classic Shampoo, except that it goes one step farther in feminizing the lead by putting him in drag–and takes a step backward in deciding the fallout of his deceptions. Making fantasy out of Tootsie‘s ending, Shampoo comes to terms with the reality of a lothario getting his foot caught in his own trap by giving the last word to The Beach Boys: “You know it seems the more we talk about it,” they sing of unfeasible marital bliss in the film’s closing song (“Wouldn’t It Be Nice”), “it only makes it worse to live without it.”

About a Boy (2002) [Widescreen] – DVD

January 17, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD, France, Germany, Romance, UK

**½/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B
starring Hugh Grant, Toni Collette, Rachel Weisz, Isabel Brook
screenplay by Peter Hedges and Chris Weitz & Paul Weitz, based on the novel by Nick Hornby
directed by Paul Weitz & Chris Weitz

by Walter Chaw Will Freeman (Hugh Grant) is a philanderer and a playboy. Independently wealthy because of residuals from his father’s authorship of an inexplicably successful Christmas tune, he spends his feckless days in carefully scheduled thirty-minute “units.” (One unit for taking a bath; three for lunch.) Finally feeling a void in the middle of his rootless life at the tender age of thirty-eight, Will–after a scheme to feign single-parentage backfires roughly–finds himself involved with a mordant thirteen-year-old named Marcus (Nicholas Hoult) and Marcus’s suicidally-depressed mother, Fiona (Toni Collette). Rachel Weisz plays the girl too good for the pre-evolution rapscallion, her late appearance ultimately best described as the plot point that drives act three.

Secret Admirer (1985) – DVD

January 15, 2003Posted in1980s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, DVD, Romance, Teen

***/**** Image B+ Sound B
starring C. Thomas Howell, Lori Loughlin, Kelly Preston, Fred Ward
screenplay by Jim Kouf & David Greenwalt
directed by David Greenwalt

by Bill Chambers Blessed with one of the best non-Tangerine Dream synth scores of the 1980s, Secret Admirer arrives on DVD this month to remind such movies as Just Married and Kangaroo Jack just how a formulaic laff riot with a risqué slant is done. I confess I still adore this seminal film of my youth while conceding that its machinations seemed far more clever to me at the age of ten. On the other hand, when was the last time you saw a teen-targeted comedy that aspired to any cleverness? Or that opened with a piece as alternately mysterious and wistful as Jan “Miami Vice” Hammer’s lyrical main theme?

My Wife is an Actress (2001) – DVD

January 4, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD, France, Romance

Ma femme est une actrice
*/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B
starring Charlotte Gainsbourg, Yvan Attal, Terence Stamp, Noémie Lvovsky
written and directed by Yvan Attal

by Walter Chaw Yvan (Yvan Attal) is a sports writer (Yvan Attal is an actor) married to Charlotte (Charlotte Gainsbourg), who is a movie star (Charlotte Gainsbourg is also an actor, like her mother Jane Birkin–who was married to musician Serge Gainsbourg). Yvan Attal’s first film as writer-director, My Wife is an Actress (Ma femme est une actrice), is about–as its title would suggest–the somewhat predictable trials of being married to a successful actress. The film is not, however, as Attal will adamantly attest, autobiographical. This is evidenced by the fact that Terence Stamp plays an actor named “John” rather than an actor named “Terence.” In a wholly unrelated story (that is sadly in the same film), Noémie Lvovsky plays Yvan’s sister Nathalie, a woman demanding that her unborn son be circumcised upon delivery, much to the chagrin of her equally unpleasant husband Vincent (Laurent Bateau).

The Hours (2002)

December 27, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Drama, Esoterica, France, Germany, Romance, Theatrical, UK

**/****
starring Meryl Streep Julianne Moore, Nicole Kidman, Eileen Atkins
screenplay by David Hare, based on the novel by Michael Cunningham
directed by Stephen Daldry

Hoursby Walter Chaw Nicole Kidman is a wonderful Virginia Woolf–a distracted mess in a film that is a literalization of that description. The only real problem with Kidman’s performance is her prosthetic nose–it’s a no-win situation in which The Hours finds itself: allow Kidman to look like Kidman as Woolf and there will arise such a clamour of voices; make Kidman look like Woolf and not only is it impossible to stop looking for the line at the bridge, there will still arise such a clamour of voices. The problematical manipulations and presumptions of the rest of the film are as difficult to overlook as the nose stuck on Nicole’s face: The Hours is mannered to no good purpose, glowering with no good justification, and the sort of artificial construct that presents life lessons writ large by a cadre of talented performers who recognize a mainstream prestige piece when it presents itself. The only thing that separates The Hours from garbage like A Beautiful Mind (last year’s odds-on favourite to disappoint people who care while pleasing people who don’t really give a damn and don’t remember the morning after anyway) is that its marquee disability is being a woman and, apparently, being a lesbian.

Personal Velocity (2002)

December 20, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Romance, Theatrical

Personal Velocity: Three Portraits
**½/****
starring Kyra Sedgwick, Parker Posey, Fairuza Balk, John Ventimiglia
written and directed by Rebecca Miller

Personalvelocityby Walter Chaw Three short films about three women and the men who mistreat them, Rebecca Miller’s DV triptych Personal Velocity: Three Portraits is a fine-looking film that plays a little like Catherine Breillat-lite–a series of iterations of Yeats’s “Leda and the Swan” that suggest the evil that men do to women only makes women stronger. Emancipation for Delia (Kyra Sedgwick), battered wife and renowned slut, comes in the form of a handjob given a grateful backwoods hokum in the front seat of his beater; for book editor Greta (Parker Posey), in the separation from the mediocrity of her milquetoast husband and pocket dictator boss; and for runaway Paula (Fairuza Balk), in the latent maternal instinct she discovers through the betrayal of a young hitchhiker.