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.

Bring It On Again (2004) [Widescreen] – DVD

Bring It On: Again
*½/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras C+

starring Anne Judson-Yager, Bree Turner, Kevin Cooney, Faune A. Chambers
screenplay by Claudia Grazioso and Mark Gunn & Brian Gunn
directed by Damon Santostefano

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover I'll say this much for Bring It On Again: it isn't nearly as bad as you might expect. Against all odds, the straight-to-video production shows traces of wit and a surfeit of good basic ideas in its tale of rival cheerleading squads, but alas, it was not to be: its core concept withers on the vine in favour of slapped-together aesthetics and teen-sitcom repartee. Par for the dtv course, its creators only seem interested in squeezing a few bucks out of the target demographic; the results, though far from painful, cruelly tantalize us with a glimmer of the film that might have been.

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.

Seabiscuit (2003) [Widescreen] – DVD

*/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras B-
starring Jeff Bridges, Chris Cooper, Tobey Maguire, Elizabeth Banks
screenplay by Gary Ross, based on the book by Laura Hillenbrand
directed by Gary Ross

by Walter Chaw In a summer redolent with superhero melodramas, Seabiscuit, a Golden Age bodice-twister about a plucky boy and his intrepid horse populated with a cast of good-looking cut-outs to fill out the good-looking backgrounds, isn't even the most interesting. All of it feels a little airless–a carefully-manipulated arrangement composed entirely of meticulously-preserved flowers that give the illusion of vitality when in truth, they're taken out of time and well past their prime. Seabiscuit could have been made in the 1940s–and it was, really, as My Friend Flicka: two untamed spirits tamed by one another while various authority figures wisely cheer them on. Like that film, writer-director Gary Ross's adaptation of Laura Hillenbrand's excellent non-fiction washes out as something creepily nostalgic, weightless, and unintentionally disturbing. There's something poetic about a scene in the middle of Seabiscuit when Charles Howard (Jeff Bridges, always good) leaves in the middle of a bloody bullfight when taken with a line later in the film when plucky boy jockey Red (Tobey Maguire) warns his replacement not to beat Seabiscuit on his left flank because "that's where he was beaten when he was young." Beat him on the right side, is the implication, and decades of conditioning from other films (particularly Disney's anthropomorphic films) have made driving animals to the brink of exhaustion and death at the end of whip a little hard to take with a blithe indifference.

Beyond Borders (2003) + Radio (2003)

BEYOND BORDERS
*/****
starring Angelina Jolie, Clive Owen, Linus Roache, Teri Polo
screenplay by Caspian Tredwell-Owen
directed by Martin Campbell

RADIO
*/****
starring Cuba Gooding Jr., Ed Harris, Riley Smith, Sarah Drew
screenplay by Mike Rich
directed by Michael Tollin

Beyondradioby Walter Chaw Some pharaohs spent their reign building mighty pyramid tributes to themselves, so in that respect we should feel lucky that Angelina Jolie and Cuba Gooding Jr. have only used up the latter part of their plummeting careers constructing towering monuments to their splendid ideological isolation. The real wonder of it all is that there's room enough in the universe for both of their dangerously inflated senses of self-satisfaction, simultaneously reaching their respective pinnacles in a pair of atrocious films that at least have the virtue of being really funny, albeit for all the wrong reasons. For Jolie, her desire to save the entire third world, one orphan at a time, manifests itself in a picture that poses the big-lipped beauty carefully as a fashion plate and a sainted martyr; a debutante with an amazing wardrobe and a UN worker with a streak of activism; and a figure in its way as ridiculous as Gooding Jr.'s caricature of a severely mentally-disabled man (James Robert Kennedy) that reminds, of all things, of that acorn-crazed, pre-verbal prehistoric squirrel from Ice Age.

Cobb (1994) – DVD

***½/**** Image A Sound B+ Extras B
starring Tommy Lee Jones, Robert Wuhl, Lolita Davidovich
written and directed by Ron Shelton

by Walter Chaw Completely uncompromising in a way that films, especially sports films, just aren’t, Ron Shelton’s Cobb is one of the most effective hagiographies in film history not for the way that it elevates its subject to sainthood, but for the way that it allows its subject to be one of history’s most notorious, relentless miscreants. A malcontent in every measurable way, Ty Cobb–habitual spousal abuser, virulent racist, sadist (Cobb sent twelve men to the hospital one season), alcoholic, braggart, trigger-happy pistol-brandisher, alleged murderer, and so on–also happens to be the best baseball player in the history of the game. (In a modern era where Barry Bonds is making a claim for the best the game’s produced while also being, hands down, its biggest jerk and public-relations nightmare, Cobb’s transgressions put all of Bonds’s childishness in perspective.) Accordingly, the picture is a beautifully lensed nightmare, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas shot as a road-trip horror film instead of an acid-enhanced carnival ride, where the villain is the devil in Cobb’s back pocket.

Bend It Like Beckham (2002) [Widescreen Edition] – DVD

**½/**** Image A- Sound A Extras A-
starring Parminder Nagra, Keira Knightley, Jonathan Rhys-Meyers, Anupam Kher
screenplay by Gurinder Chadha, Guljit Bindra, Paul Mayeda Berges
directed by Gurinder Chadha

by Bill Chambers This year's British-import-pre-sold-as-a-hit Bend It Like Beckham coasts on its similitude to John Badham's magnificent Saturday Night Fever, but when all a picture is doing is reminding you of a better one without embarrassing itself, it can hardly be called a triumph. I'm surprised that more critics haven't picked up on the film's debt to Saturday Night Fever, actually, which extends to the set design and placement of key props. It's this kind of popular coding that has, I suspect, buoyed Bend It Like Beckham aloft the market doldrums of other mainstream-pitched East-meets-West comedies (East Is East, Bollywood/Hollywood): the subliminal affiliation of one ethnicity (orthodox Sikh) with another (Italian-Americans) that was long ago embraced by the masses.

Speed Racer (1967) [Collector’s Edition] – DVD

Image C Sound C Extras C+
"The Great Plan, Parts 1 & 2", "Challenge of the Masked Racer, Parts 1 & 2", "The Secret Engine, Parts 1 & 2", "The Race Against the Mammoth Car, Parts 1 & 2", "The Most Dangerous Race, Parts 1, 2 & 3"

by Bill Chambers The theme song says he's a demon on wheels, and in one traumatizing, out-of-step dream sequence, Trixie, Speed Racer's Girl Friday, meets a version of Speed Racer with a face like the Green Goblin's and scaly arms capable of summoning hellfire. Unmotivated by anything other than the fact that Trixie has fallen asleep, the scene embodies half the charm of the Americanized "Speed Racer": we're only given exposition if it matches the lip movements mapped out for the original Japanese scripts, leading to dialogue so profoundly aimless (but synchronized!) that US producer and former child model turned dubbing impresario Peter Fernandez should've called his version of the show "Samuel Beckett's Speed Racer". While the narration occasionally attempts to bridge story points A and C (with B either overdubbed into oblivion or lying on a cutting-room floor somewhere), for the most part it refamiliarizes us ad nauseam with the origin of Racer X, Speed's-older-brother-who-ran-away-from-home-when-he-crashed-Pops'-racecar-and-now-wears-a-facemask-to-conceal-his-true-identity.

Bang the Drum Slowly (1973) – DVD

**/**** Image B- Sound C+
starring Robert De Niro, Michael Moriarty, Vincent Gardenia
screenplay by Mark Harris, based on his novel
directed by John Hancock

by Walter Chaw Almost fatally hamstrung by an appalling score by Stephen Lawrence, John D. Hancock’s Bang the Drum Slowly is a character-driven adaptation of Mick Harris’s novel (Harris also wrote the screenplay) that evokes the odd twilit detachment of professional sports in general and baseball in particular with a tale made suddenly popular in 1973 by the success of Brian’s Song. Its baseball scenes almost tertiary to the friendship between a pitcher and his catcher (and the catcher and his hooker girlfriend), the picture feels a little like Of Mice and Men (complete with Steinbeck’s low American primitivism) in the doomed relationship between a blue-collar man and his retarded friend. The film is riddled with pitfalls from the start: the potential for maudlin excess, the trap of overwriting, and the allure of some sort of overriding message for humanity. And though Bang the Drum Slowly dances along the edge of those pitfalls for a good portion of its running time, ultimately it’s just another one of those films better remembered than revisited.

Poolhall Junkies (2003)

*/****
starring Chazz Palminteri, Rick Schroder, Rod Steiger, Michael Rosenbaum
screenplay by Gregory ‘Mars’ Martin and Chris Corso
directed by Gregory ‘Mars’ Martin

by Walter Chaw Obviously the spawn of a post-Rounders discussion (“Hey, that was great, but wouldn’t it be better with pool instead of poker?”), Gregory ‘Mars’ Martin’s Poolhall Junkies also counts among its plunder victims The Hustler, The Color of Money, On the Waterfront, and–pick any David Mamet. With the late Rod Steiger as a crusty pool hall owner, Christopher Walken in his typical role as actor in an actor-less stew, and a law school student girlfriend (Alison Eastwood, similar to, but somehow more expressionless than, Bridget Fonda) in a plush pad who has a lot of morals except when it comes to nepotism and winning a job in a pool game, Poolhall Junkies is B-list, B-movie garbage that plows through its clockwork machinations with a kind of juvenile bluster that keens like a hammer to the brainpan.

Sports Night: The Complete Series Plus Pilot Episode (1992-1993) – DVD

Image B Sound B
SEASON 1 – “Pilot,” “The Apology,” “The Hungry and the Hunted,” “Intellectual Property,” “Mary Pat Shelby,” “*The Head Coach, Dinner and the Morning Mail,” “Dear Louise,” “Thespis,” “The Quality of Mercury at 29K,” “Shoe Money Tonight,” “The Six Southern Gentlemen of Tennessee,” “Smoky,” “Small Town,” “Rebecca,” “Dana and the Deep Blue Sea,” “Sally,” “How Are Things in Gloca Morra?,” “The Sword of Orion,” “Eli’s Coming,” “Ordnance Tactics,” “Ten Wickets,” “Napoleon’s Battle Plan,” “What Kind of Day Has it Been”
SEASON 2 – “Special Powers,” “When Something Wicked This Way Comes,” “Cliff Gardner,” “Louise Revisited,” “Kafelnikov,” “Shane,” “Kyle Whitaker’s Got Two Sacks,” “The Reunion,” “A Girl Named Pixley,” “The Giants Win the Pennant, the Giants Win the Pennant,” “The Cut Man Cometh,” “The Sweet Smell of Air,” “Dana Get Your Gun,” “And the Crowd Goes Wild,” “Celebrities,” “The Local Weather,” “Draft Day: Part I – It Can’t Rain at Indian Wells,” “Draft Day: Part II – The Fall of Ryan O’Brian,” “April is the Cruelest Month,” “Bells And A Siren,” “La Forza Del Destino,” “Quo Vadimus”

by Walter Chaw Taken as a whole, and a box set from Buena Vista allows one to do just that, Aaron Sorkin’s “Sports Night” takes on the character of an extended experiment that starts tentatively and ends as one of the genuinely valuable moments of television in the year before HBO and flagship show “The Sopranos” became the benchmark for quality boob-tubery in the post-post-modern age. Detailing the behind-the-scenes drama of producing an “ESPN SportsCenter”-esque news program, it draws inevitable comparison to James L. Brooks’s Broadcast News (and accordingly, during the first season, episode five, Felicity Huffman gets to knock over a production assistant à la Holly Hunter’s character in that film), but distinguishes itself with an understanding that in many ways, sports is an effective locus for the hot-button issues of modern society: misogyny, race, addiction, violence.

Ultimate X: The Movie (2002) – DVD

ESPN’s Ultimate X
**/**** Image B- Sound B Extras B
written and directed by Bruce Hendricks

by Bill Chambers Notoriously anti-sports (or at the very least sports-agnostic), I thought maybe the X-Games would win me over–so much colour, so much thunder, like Hal Needham’s rushes out of context. Alas, they’re yet another not-for-me athletics event. I was made painfully aware of this fact while watching ESPN’s Ultimate X, an IMAX production: In a sight fertile with joy, a man mounts a plastic shovel not much bigger than the one that comes with children’s sandpails and slides down a snowy hilltop; but then you find out that “Super Modified-Shovel Racing” besmirched the X-Games in the eyes of its organizers and has since been gonged. With it went a new sport’s sense of humour, and I am definitely the genre of film buff more entertained by the dancing mascots at half-time than by the repetitive “thrill” of competition.

Punch (2003)

***/****
starring Michael Riley, Sonja Bennett, Marcia Laskowski, Meredith McGeachie
written and directed by Guy Bennett

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover It may be a mess of an uncommon magnitude, but I walked out of Guy Bennett’s Punch swelling with national pride. Here is a Canadian film that tosses both Hollywood dramaturgy and home-grown obsequiousness out the window and ricochets madly off the walls; its astoundingly painful psychodrama flings caution to the wind and makes bizarre crossed-wire connections that only someone outside of the Californian system could possibly be allowed to make. Though far from perfect, it’s never boring, and if nothing else will change the way you view topless female boxing for all time.

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

***/**** 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.

Pumpkin (2002) – DVD

½*/**** Image B- Sound B+
starring Christina Ricci, Hank Harris, Brenda Blethyn, Dominique Swain
screenplay by Adam Larson Broder
directed by Adam Larson Broder and Tony R. Abrams

by Walter Chaw The best and only successful joke of Adam Larson Broder and Tony R. Abrams’s unspeakably bad Pumpkin is borrowed from another Christina Ricci film: the last primp that she performs on herself in Don Roos’s The Opposite of Sex is a quick pinch of her nipples to bring them into sharper relief; that’s pretty funny, and in Pumpkin, Ms. Ricci’s nipples in various sorority sweaters are an Anne Heche-ian running gag never commented upon. It’s fitting, I guess, that the one thing that works about this film is probably unintentional and derivative besides.

DIFF ’02: Chiefs

**/****directed by Daniel Junge by Walter Chaw Sports as empowerment as heady a trip as sports as oppression (Columbine's real villain, after all, is a virulent administration-sanctioned jock culture), Chiefs follows a Wyoming Native American High School basketball team through two consecutive seasons of state championship basketball. Indians perhaps the most marginalized minority in terms of insensitive sports mascot stereotype and caricature (The Cleveland Indians' unforgivable Chief Wahoo, anyone?), that the documentary chooses to champion a team self-named "The Chiefs" is both interesting and thorny. (Enough so that when a more interesting film fails to emerge, Chiefs at the end…

Men with Brooms (2002) – DVD

**½/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras C
starring Paul Gross, Molly Parker, Leslie Nielsen, Peter Outerbridge
written and directed by Paul Gross

by Walter Chaw Closer in spirit to Mystery, Alaska than to the similarly Olympics-inspired Cool Runnings, Men with Brooms is an underdog sports intrigue mashed together with a bedroom farce–and neither dog-eared formula is handled with very much originality, while uncomfortable subplots concerning adultery, alcoholism, and healing father/son rifts (see also: Hoosiers) vie for a level of pathos that always feels out of place in what is essentially The Bad News Bears (or The Replacements, or Slap Shot) for curling. Though it’s extremely tempting to lay out an endless stream of titles for films that are essentially identical to Men with Brooms, time is better served just saying that the picture, the directorial debut of Canuck star Paul Gross, is a low-aspiring bit of nonsense that fits as comfortably as a cozy pair of ratty sneakers while stinking a little all the same.

DIFF ’02: Mile High: A Tale of Two Stadiums

**½/****directed by Samuel A. Safarian, Dirk Olson by Walter Chaw One of my earliest memories is watching Haven Moses catch a touchdown pass from Craig Morton in the 1977 AFC Championship games against the hated Oakland Raiders; since that time, I've only missed a total of three Broncos games (preseason included). If there was ever a viewer to which a documentary was tailor-made, then, it is Dick Olson's Denver Center Media-produced Mile High: A Tale of Two Stadiums, a soft-sell documentary commissioned to ease the transition to a new football stadium in the Mile High City, my hometown. Comprising over…

Rocco and His Brothers (1960)

Rocco e i suoi fratelli
***/****
starring Alain Delon, Renato Salvatori, Annie Girardot, Katina Paxinou
screenplay by Luchino Visconti and Vasco Pratolini and Suso Cecchi d’Amico, based on the novel Il ponte della Ghisolfa by Giovanni Testori
ritten and directed by Luchino Visconti

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Once, decades ago, Luchino Visconti was a name to conjure with. Not only was his Ossessione recognized as a torrid precursor of Italian Neo-Realism, but his tragic characters on the cusp of societal change and fragmentation were greeted with the respect commonly afforded to what used to be known as high culture. Now, he’s barely remembered in North America, punished for the crime of quietly going about his business. La terra trema notwithstanding, he was less movement-defining than high neo-realists like DeSica or Rossellini; nor was he an inventor of modernist forms, like Antonioni and Resnais. And as his literary, aristocratic bent was less formally bracing than a nouvelle vague hotshot, Visconti’s films seem to the uninitiated too much like just movies–they didn’t change how you looked at the medium, they simply inhabited it, for good or for ill.

Lagaan: Once Upon a Time in India (2001)

***/****
starring Aamir Khan, Gracy Singh, Rachel Shelley, Paul Blackthorne
screenplay by Kumar Dave, Sanjay Dayma, Ashutosh Gowariker
directed by Ashutosh Gowariker

by Walter Chaw With the subtitle “Once Upon a Time in India,” Ashutosh Gowariker’s Lagaan holds a kinship to Tsui Hark’s Once Upon a Time in China in more than just appellation and an abiding dislike of the Colonial British. Other than substituting elaborate musical numbers–as is Bollywood’s wont–for Hong Kong’s martial arts features, Lagaan is in fact as interested in the sociology of enslavement before the rush of technology (embodied in cameras and firearms) as its farther-eastern brethren. The rather serious-minded attack of India’s own caste system and the ineffectualness of its Raj ruling structure lends additional layers to the picture’s surprising depths, yet all the politicized subtext in the world does little to suppress the essential exuberance of the gaudy visceral Bollywood experience.