The Starz Independent FilmCenter Project, Vol. 5

May 17, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Coming of Age, Drama, New Zealand, Romance, Theatrical

by Walter Chaw

RAIN (2001)
***/****
starring Alicia Fulford-Wierzbicki, Sarah Peirse, Marton Csokas, Alistair Browning
screenplay by Christine Jeffs, based on the novel by Kirsty Gunn
directed by Christine Jeffs

Based on a Kirsty Gunn novel, Christine Jeffs's hyphenate debut Rain is a dulcet, haunting evocation of that moment of crisis in a young woman's life as she's poised on the precipice of sexual maturity. The film is golden and beautiful, edged in its understanding that a desire for sex almost always precedes an emotional or intellectual ability to cope with the fallout of the act itself. In honouring that concept, Rain makes no distinction between adults playing as children and children playing the grown-ups in scenes juxtaposed in ways whimsical and poignant. As much as it is a coming of age for a young woman, Rain is very much about the broader issue of power in gender politics as it defines family and relational dynamics.

Good Advice (2001) – DVD

May 16, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD, Romance

**/**** Image B+ Sound B Extras C-
starring Charlie Sheen, Angie Harmon, Denise Richards, Rosanna Arquette
screenplay by Daniel Margosis & Robert Horn
directed by Steve Rash

by Walter Chaw In the proud tradition of Straight Talk and Dr. Detroit (and Spellbound, I guess), Charlie Sheen digs at his own apex role in Wall Street before pretending to be an abusive advice columnist at a failing paper run by the lovely Angie Harmon in Good Advice. More Hot Shots! than The Front Page, the film–buoyed by a consistently light screwball tone unfortunately only occasionally matched by neo-screwball dialogue–nonetheless has a few unexpectedly funny moments. Denise Richards is suitably reptilian when typecast as an airhead bitch princess, and Sheen demonstrates the kind of comedic timing and Shatner-esque gift for self-effacement (he gets an enema bath at one point) that might extend his career despite being a boondoggle magnet, e.g., the Heidi Fleiss thing and, of course, the “I married Denise Richards” thing.

The Starz Independent FilmCenter Project, Vol. 4

May 10, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, Cyprus, Drama, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Romance, Theatrical, UK

by Walter Chaw

THE CHERRY ORCHARD (2000)
*/****
starring Tushka Bergen, Frances de la Tour, Charlotte Rampling, Gerard Butler
screenplay by Michael Cacoyannis, based on the play by Anton Chekhov
directed by Michael Cacoyannis

Written at the end of his life in 1904, "The Cherry Orchard" is the last of Anton Chekhov's great masterpieces, so ethereal it verges on the surreal and so circular it approaches the ineffable and the serene. The work is as balanced between its condemnation as it is winsome in its distillation of a lifetime spent in observation. By turns, it is also humanistic and mordantly funny, capturing a period of time (just prior to the Russian Revolution of 1905) in a way that perhaps no other play ever has any other period. Produced under some duress from Moscow Art Theater co-founders Konstantin Stanislavsky and Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, Chekhov began work on "The Cherry Orchard" in 1903–putting off the MAT pair with vague promises of a new farce or vaudeville. What he finally presented was what Stanislavsky feared: "…Instead of a farce again we shall have a great big tragedy."

Hollywood Ending (2002)

May 3, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Romance, Satire, Theatrical

**/****
starring Woody Allen, George Hamilton, Téa Leoni, Debra Messing
written and directed by Woody Allen

Hollywoodendingby Walter Chaw Woody Allen’s pictures are exhausting things about absolutely nothing save Manhattan and Woody Allen–Allen’s fascination with the cinema and younger women, Allen’s disingenuous fear of writer’s block, and more recently, Allen’s desire to reconcile with his children. Sometimes any one of those is enough.

Late Marriage (2001)

May 3, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, Drama, France, Israel, Romance, Theatrical

Hatuna Meuheret
***/****
starring Lior Ashkenazi, Ronit Elkabetz, Moni Moshonov, Lili Koshashvili
written and directed by Dover Koshashvili

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover For those who have tired of funny family squabbles with magical reconciliations, relief is on the way. The new Israeli film Late Marriage (“Hatuna Meuheret”) takes the conventional pains of a hundred bad ethnic comedies and gives them added bite; instead of a traditional family causing “hilarious” havoc on their modernized progeny, we are given a nasty tug-of-war between a need to live one’s life and a desire for familial approval. Because there are no easy outs in its bitter turf battle for clashing sets of values, the film is surprisingly tense, uncomfortable, and refreshing in its serious examination of a situation that movies normally trivialize.

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.

The Starz Independent FilmCenter Project, Vol. 3

April 26, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Finland, Germany, Italy, Norway, Romance, Sweden, Theatrical

by Walter Chaw

FAITHLESS (2000)
Trolösa
***/****
starring Lena Endre, Erland Josephson, Krister Henriksson, Thomas Hanzon
screenplay by Ingmar Bergman
directed by Liv Ullman

It is perhaps most instructive to look back at the beginning of a life when contemplating the end of one. Swedish auteur Ingmar Bergman spent his nineteenth year in The Skerries (a Stockholm archipelago), a tumultuous period during which he lost the girl he loved, lost his faith in religion, and finally lost a close male friend to death. That year, when married with the all-pervasive influence of playwright Strindberg and a tireless love of the theatre, provides the root concerns shooting through Bergman's filmography: the idea that marriage is a constant negotiation of losses (abortions and suicides included in that mix) and that should God exist, He is grown apathetic.

Crush (2002)

April 19, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Germany, Romance, Theatrical, UK

*/****
starring Andie MacDowell, Imelda Staunton, Anna Chancellor, Kenny Doughty
written and directed by John McKay

Crushby Walter Chaw A punitive film that has one of the more unpleasant third acts of any film in recent memory, John McKay’s Crush is an atonal estrogen opera that demonizes feminism while gifting the most sympathetic male of the piece with a nice vomit bath at his wedding. It isn’t political but rather misanthropic, a film that begins genially but ends with enough open contempt for each of its three protagonists that Crush seems something of an anti-romantic comedy. That would not be a bad thing save for the fact that the film aims for frothy uplift on the one hand and a heart-wrenching Love Story twist of fate on the other, with nary a whiff of satire or self-awareness to be found in-between.

The Starz Independent FilmCenter Project, Vol. 2

April 19, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Norway, Romance, Sweden, Theatrical, UK

by Walter Chaw

ONE WEEK (2000)
*/****
starring Kenny Young, Saadiqa Muhammad, Eric Lane, Milauna Jackson
screenplay by Carl Seaton, Kenny Young
directed by Carl Seaton

One of the pleasures of junior high (towards the end of the year, once teachers have exhausted lesson plans and their patience) was the educational reel, that impossibly dated relic of the Fifties or Sixties that advised against, in the most stultifying terms possible, such sundry indiscretions as driving too fast or wandering around in the desert without extra water and a hat. The armed forces upped the ante with cautionary tales of green grunts succumbing to the wiles of Third-World call girls and the attendant itches of perdition. The only thing that separates Carl Seaton's zero-budget morality tirade One Week and scatological G.I. shock schlock is the fact that it's in colour (though the lighting in many scenes makes that distinction moot), and that it lacks a chiding talking condom.

Burnt Money (2000)

April 18, 2002Posted inArgentina, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, Romance, Spain, Theatrical, Thriller, Uruguay

Plata quemada
**½/****
starring Eduardo Noriega, Leonardo Sbaraglia, Pablo Echarri, Leticia Brédice
screenplay by Marcelo Figueras, Marcelo Piñeyro, based on the novel Plata Quemada by Ricardo Piglia
directed by Marcelo Piñeyro

by Walter Chaw Pushing the submerged homoeroticism of Strangers on a Train to the surface, Burnt Money‘s homage begins with Jean-Pierre Melville’s genre cool and Hitchcock’s cigarettes and lighters at a carnival and ends with a certain Wellesian noir seediness (complete with The Lady From Shanghai‘s ill-fated passion, Touch of Evil‘s corrupt officials, and even Citizen Kane‘s totemic paperweight). Burnt Money is deliriously beautiful to look at–all pale greens and mute browns–but its overt politicism in the closing moments begins to dispel the film’s magic in favour of overheated parable. It’s an expert genre piece that tries to bear the brunt of all of Argentina’s national cynicism and economic corruption (a leaden socio-political platform reflected by its title), and despite his cineaste smarts, director Marcelo Piñeyro just isn’t up to the task.

Less Than Zero (1987) – DVD

April 13, 2002Posted in1980s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, DVD, Romance

***/**** Image A- Sound B-
starring Andrew McCarthy, Jami Gertz, Robert Downey Jr., James Spader
screenplay by Harley Peyton, based on the novel by Bret Easton Ellis
directed by Marek Kanievska

by Walter Chaw The quality of dislocation in Marek Kanievska’s Less Than Zero is startling and sinister. It creeps up on you after a confusing opening that skips forward six months from a high school graduation before flashing back a month and then reorienting itself again in Beverly Hills at Christmastime in 1987. But by the middle of the film, the temporal decisions made during its disorienting prologue suddenly make perfect sense: while Less Than Zero will never be as narratively jumpy again, the pervasive mood of the piece remains disconnected and frightened. It feels breathless in a way that movies about drug addiction must. Though Less Than Zero seems, despite its sterile apocalyptic blight, almost naïve in the wake of Aronofsky’s Requiem for a Dream, it retains (especially in retrospect, given the lost spirit of the Eighties and Robert Downey Jr.’s offscreen problems), something approaching the laden nostalgia of Romanticism. Something by Thomas de Quincey, no doubt.

All the Right Moves (1983) – DVD

April 11, 2002Posted in1980s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Romance, Sports

½*/**** Image C Sound C-
starring Tom Cruise, Craig T. Nelson, Lea Thompson, Charles Cioffi
screenplay by Michael Kane
directed by Michael Chapman

by Walter Chaw Seedy in that ineffable Eighties way, Michael Chapman’s All the Right Moves is a star vehicle for a young Tom Cruise, following up his leading role in Risky Business with what is essentially a feature-length Steve Earle song about a downtrodden Pennsylvania steel town. Think Flashdance (released in the same year, strangely enough) with teenage boys instead of merely for them. Turmoil on a high-school football team (the Ampipe Bulldogs) functions as the microcosm for factory layoffs, teen pregnancy, and the existential angst embedded in the image of a horrible Lea Thompson playing a mournful saxophone on a street corner. Though there are a few moments of “was this ever cool” cheeseball nostalgia sprinkled here and again, All the Right Moves is teeth-clenchingly awful: half “The White Shadow”, half somehow more embarrassing and dated than even that popular TV series.

Black Knight (2001) – DVD

April 9, 2002Posted in2000s, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD, Fantasy, Romance, Time Travel

**/**** Image B Sound A- Extras B
starring Martin Lawrence, Tom Wilkinson, Marsha Thomason, Vincent Regan
screenplay by Darryl J. Quarles and Peter Gaulke & Gerry Swallow
directed by Gil Junger

by Walter Chaw Jamal Walker (Martin Lawrence) is a groundskeeper at an all-black amusement park who, just prior to falling in a stagnant moat, is given a dressing down for being “selfish” and not community-minded enough. (“Community” referring to the African-American populace of South Central Los Angeles.) Sharp-eyed viewers should instantly recognize that Black Knight will at some point metastasize from a farce to a public service announcement. (Luckily, we’re given a solid first act and a few moments in the second before it does.) When Jamal goes into the moat in pursuit of a golden medallion, he surfaces from a fetid stew in a never-never land where the plain protagonist becomes the keystone in a kingdom-wide intrigue.

Husbands and Wives (1992) – DVD

April 1, 2002Posted in1990s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Romance

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

by Bill Chambers Husbands and Wives is a rawer tapestry of couples in flux from Woody Allen than his paternalistic Hannah and Her Sisters. It's reasonable to consider this Woody's Cassavetes movie, just as the previous Shadows and Fog was his Fellini (the title sounds like a sequel to Cassavetes's Husbands)–although Cassavetes wouldn't have couched the film's scenario in a faux-documentary framework, as Allen has. That's closer to Bob Fosse's turf; one imagines that Woody sees more of himself in Fosse, the entertainer, than he does Cassavetes, the brute poet. Shot in vérité handheld with an urgency that perhaps feels contrived, the film begins with the break-up of long-time marrieds Jack (a brilliant Sydney Pollack) and Sally (Oscar-nominated Judy Davis) and goes on to measure the shockwaves this sends through the lives of their friends, Gabe Roth (Allen) and his wife Judy (Mia Farrow). Sexually frustrated Jack falls into a relationship with a woman many years his junior (the lissome Sam (Lysette Anthony)), planting the seed for Gabe to act on his attraction to one of his writing students (Juliette Lewis). Judy, meanwhile, hooks Sally up with a co-worker, Michael (Liam Neeson). It's Judy's way of dealing with her own feelings for the guy, and needless to say, she didn't think it through.

Bandits (2001) [Special Edition] – DVD

March 31, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Drama, DVD, Romance

**/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B+
starring Bruce Willis, Cate Blanchett, Billy Bob Thornton, Troy Garity
screenplay by Harley Peyton
directed by Barry Levinson

by Walter Chaw Joe (Bruce Willis) and Terry (Billy Bob Thornton) break out of an Oregon prison and begin robbing banks while making their way down the west coast to an idealized Acapulco. Along the way, they pick up Joe’s dimwit wannabe stuntman cousin Phil (Anthony Burch) to act as getaway driver, and Kate (Cate Blanchett), an unbalanced passerby who becomes intoxicated by life on the lam. Shunning the more usual tactic of ski masks and gun-waving, Joe and Terry take the banks’ presidents and their families hostage the night before heists, earning them the nickname “The Sleepover Bandits.” In the schizophrenically sprawling and tight script, these hold-ups share time with a developing love triangle between Joe, Terry, and Kate, and, less successfully, a framing story involving an “America’s Most Wanted”-like host.

Wedding Night (2001) – DVD

March 31, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, DVD, Romance

Nuit de noces
½*/**** Image B- Sound B Extras D+
starring François Morency, Geneviève Brouillette, Pierrette Robitaille, Jacques Girard
screenplay by Marc Brunet, Émile Gaudreault
directed by Émile Gaudreault

by Walter Chaw A film so precious and insipid that it hurts, Émile Gaudreault’s screwball roundelay is an exercise in self-indulgence and cliché. Hailed as one of the best Canadian comedies in recent memory, Wedding Night (Nuit de noces) is a haphazard collection of slapstick, magic realism, sped-up Benny Hill interludes, dream sequences, absurdist wall-breaking, and terrifyingly trite musical cues (poor Bernard Herrmann is spinning in his grave). The film is a disaster, neither funny nor poignant nor observant of the poetics of love and marriage, a horror of malformed ideas and unearned moments. Who are these people? Why should we care about what happens to them?

The Hunchback of Notre Dame II (2002) – DVD

March 25, 2002Posted in2000s, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Disney, Drama, DVD, Family, Musical, Romance

**/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
screenplay by Jule Selbo and Flip Kobler & Cindy Marcus
directed by Bradley Raymond

by Walter Chaw Although the animation is sloppy and the music is, to say the least, uninspiring, Disney’s direct-to-video sequel to 1996’s underestimated and genuinely disturbing The Hunchback of Notre Dame is bolstered by an astonishing voice cast (excepting Jennifer Love Hewitt), an interesting racial tension, and a storyline I haven’t encountered since Pete’s Dragon. Taking place about six years after the events of the first film (judging by the age of Phoebus (Kevin Kline) and Esmeralda’s (Demi Moore) suspiciously Caucasian son, Zephyr (Haley Joel Osment)), The Hunchback of Notre Dame II details another seemingly-doomed love affair between the hideous Quasimodo (Tom Hulce) and a beautiful lady love, this one named Madellaine (Hewitt).

Cinderella II: Dreams Come True (2002) – DVD

March 17, 2002Posted in2000s, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Disney, DVD, Family, Fantasy, Romance

Cinderella 2: Dreams Come True
*½/**** Image A Sound A Extras D
written by Jill E. Blotevogel, Tom Rogers, Jule Selbo
directed by John Kafka

by Walter Chaw Split into three parts, aptly like the anthology horror films The Monsters Club and Trilogy of Terror, Disney’s own direct-to-video horrorshow Cinderella II: Dreams Come True reeks of corners cut and the kind of flaccid inspiration fuelled by the urge towards filthy lucre. The animation is an embarrassment to the Disney imprint, a half-step above the cut-and-paste style of Cartoon Network’s “Space Ghost”, and the writing is so lifeless, so feckless, it does nothing to forgive the paucity of attractive, liquid images. The backgrounds are static at all times, the characters move in stiff fits and starts (jittering and freezing just prior to edits), and the colours are lustreless. I would forgive a ballroom dance sequence, recycled no fewer than ten times over the course of the film (and serving as the DVD release’s menu motif), not to mention the multiple rancid “remixes” of “Bibbidy, Bobbidy, Boo,” if there were one moment in the enterprise that didn’t make me want to lie down in a dark room with something cool to my brow.

Harrison’s Flowers (2001)

March 15, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Drama, France, Romance, Theatrical, War

Des fleurs pour Harrison
**/****
starring Andie MacDowell, David Strathairn, Elias Koteas, Adrien Brody
screenplay by Elie Chouraqui & Didier Le Pêcheur & Isabel Ellsen and Michael Katims, based on the novel by Ellsen
directed by Elie Chouraqui

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Movie logic has always dictated that any film about a strife-torn part of the world must be told from the point of view of an outsider who resembles a movie star. Thus Stephen Biko’s story was filtered through the eyes of white Donald Woods in Cry Freedom, a film about colonial subjugation of indigenous peoples (The Mission) centred on the methodological bickering of two priests, and many a current foreign affair has been recounted via the selfless acts of the American reporters who expose them (Salvador, Under Fire, etc.). Harrison’s Flowers falls into this latter category of journalistic brio: though its story of a search for a missing photographer looks great when compared to its appalling cousin Welcome to Sarajevo, it’s on the same self-serving moral plane, with the machinations of reporting hogging the camera while the events that need be covered are crowded far outside the frame.

Breaking Away (1979) – DVD

March 12, 2002Posted in1970s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Romance, Sports

***/**** Image C- Sound C-
starring Dennis Christopher, Dannis Quaid, Daniel Stern, Jackie Earle Haley
screenplay by Steve Tesich
directed by Peter Yates

by Walter Chaw For me, Peter Yates’s Breaking Away is the logical precursor to the particular nostalgia of Bob Clark’s A Christmas Story. It details in its limpid, lissom way small-town life through the prism of quaint friendships and a family with a sympathetic mom (Barbara Barrie), a curmudgeonly pop (Paul Dooley), and David (Dennis Christopher), their stargazer son.