Theatrical Archives - Page 51 of 65

Mona Lisa Smile (2003)

December 19, 20032000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Theatrical

*/****
starring Julia Roberts, Kirsten Dunst, Julia Stiles, Maggie Gyllenhaal
screenplay by Lawrence Konner & Mark Rosenthal
directed by Mike Newell

by Walter Chaw Julia Roberts films, by and large, seem to hate men. In a real way, her pictures are as objectionable as those films regularly pilloried for objectifying women (and those like the unforgivable Love Actually that somehow slip under the radar for doing the same), functioning as something of a reactionary version of feminism that seeks to denigrate the opposite gender as the sole means toward gender equality. The big secret about films like Mona Lisa Smile is that they're every bit the big-budget Hollywood spectacle film derided by a goodly portion of its audience as puerile, predictable, and thematically reprehensible. Because Mona Lisa Smile is so much the child of formula, it's difficult to muster much energy in condemning the film by itself–by itself, after all, it's handsomely mounted and well-performed. But as a symptom of that facile societal desire for superficial uplifts and comforting negative stereotypes, the smoothness of the coating for this bitter pill deserves some measure of profound distaste.

House of Sand and Fog (2003)

December 19, 20032000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Theatrical, Thriller

*½/****
starring Jennifer Connelly, Ben Kingsley, Ron Eldard, Frances Fisher
screenplay by Vadim Perelman and Shawn Lawrence Otto
directed by Vadim Perelman

by Walter Chaw Based on an award-winning novel by Andres Dubus III, son of Canadian novelist and short-story writer Andre Dubus, Vadim Perelman's hyphenate debut House of Sand and Fog is difficult to gauge on its own merits, given that the typically invasive grandiosity of another abominable James Horner score sinks the picture almost by itself. With no moment uncommented-upon by Horner's bank of weeping violins and no lovely Roger Deakins tableau unmarred by Horner's insatiable taste for schmaltz, the picture is a prime example of two things: the prestige picture/Oscar grab; and the film of grand emotions that decides to trust its composer over its cast and screenplay. The similarities between House of Sand and Fog and In the Bedroom (a film based on Dubus Sr.'s short story "Killings") are obvious, but where the latter allows its cast to breathe, House of Sand and Fog smothers Ben Kingsley and Jennifer Connelly in a fatal dose of Horner's saccharine ministrations. In Horner's defense, however, the extended climax during which a vein-popping Kingsley is allowed too much rein is awful without help.

Love Don’t Co$t a Thing (2003) + Something’s Gotta Give (2003)

December 17, 20032000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Jack Nicholson, Romance, Theatrical

LOVE DON'T CO$T A THING
½*/****
starring Nick Cannon, Jordan Burg, Jackie Benoit, George Cedar
screenplay by Troy Beyer and Michael Swerdlick, based on Swerdlick's screenplay Can't Buy Me Love
directed by Troy Beyer

SOMETHING'S GOTTA GIVE
*/****
starring Jack Nicholson, Diane Keaton, Amanda Peet, Keanu Reeves
written and directed by Nancy Meyers

by Walter Chaw The only thing stranger than an urban remake of the late-'80s Patrick Dempsey teensploitation flick Can't Buy Me Love is a blow-by-blow remake of 2000's What Women Want, the latter suddenly more understandable in light of the stultifying limitations John Gray-disciple Nancy Meyers brings to the table as writer-director of that unforgivable rom-com and the dedicatedly unremarkable Something's Gotta Give as well. The disturbing realization is that both Love Don't Co$t a Thing and Something's Gotta Give are products of women filmmakers, writing and directing films in an industry, at least in the United States, still dominated by men–and that both films are non-descript, fairly unflattering to women, definitively unkind to men, and ostensible comedies that wring the genre dry with great droughts of meet-cute, contrivance, bad direction, and enough predictable, twee dialogue to fill a dozen Ephron sisters pictures.

The Last Samurai (2003) + The Girl from Paris (2003)

December 5, 20032000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, France, Japan, New Zealand, Theatrical, Tom Cruise

THE LAST SAMURAI
**½/****
starring Tom Cruise, Billy Connolly, Tony Goldwyn, Shin Koyamada
screenplay by John Logan and Marshall Herskovitz & Edward Zwick
directed by Edward Zwick

Une hirondelle a fait le printemps
***/****
starring Michel Serrault, Mathilde Seigner, Jean-Paul Roussillon, Frédéric Pierrot
screenplay by Christian Carion and Eric Assous
directed by Christian Carion

by Walter Chaw Concerned with the encroachment of technology, spawned by the humanism of the French Revolution, Romanticism as a movement in poetry is involved in nostalgia for an idealized Natural history. On film, it occasionally manifests itself in period pieces that focus on the encroachment and proliferation of the railroad: its engines (as in King Vidor’s Duel in the Sun and Beyond the Forest, or the Hughes Brothers’ From Hell) the manifestation of the industrial revolution in terms of hellmouths and serpents–William Blake’s “Tyger” burning bright in the forests of a primordial night, all-consuming and inexorable. That loss of ritual to the march of time, tradition and heritage falling before the metal chimera of technology finds itself articulated in two very different films: Edward Zwick’s curious, derivative, workmanlike The Last Samurai, and Christian Carion’s bleak and affecting The Girl from Paris (Une hirondelle a fait le printemps).

Timeline (2003)

November 26, 20032000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Paul Walker, Frances O'Connor, Gerard Butler, Billy Connolly
screenplay by Jeff Maguire and George Nolfi, based on the novel by Michael Crichton
directed by Richard Donner

by Walter Chaw So it's come to this: "Renaissance Fair: The Movie." A costume thriller based on another terrible Michael Crichton potboiler, Timeline isn't so much disinterested in plausibility as it is interested in pitching itself to the stupidest kid in class. It takes pains to bring along a guy fluent in French on its time travel adventure to fourteenth century France when it would have behooved them to find someone fluent in Middle French or, for that matter, Middle English. Guys weren't talking like Black Adder in 1357, they were talking like Chaucer, and what bothers me isn't that the filmmakers either don't know or don't care about that, but that they've taken pains to illogically address the language barrier, this happy group of time-tripping scientists, and the filmmakers are confident that no one stupid enough to buy a ticket for this film will know the difference. On second thought, they may have a point there.

The Missing (2003)

November 21, 20032000s, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Theatrical, Thriller, Western

*½/****
starring Tommy Lee Jones, Cate Blanchett, Evan Rachel Wood, Jenna Boyd
screenplay by Ken Kaufman, based on the novel The Last Ride by Thomas Edison
directed by Ron Howard

by Walter Chaw Probably best described as Ron Howard's The Searchers, the really quite awful The Missing (the first clue is a James Horner score) and its tale of bad Indians vs. sacrificial Indians vs. white settlers unfolds during a frontier period that, the last time Howard dabbled, unleashed Far and Away. With Horner's help, Howard proves with The Missing that there's no source material too bleak (not schizophrenia, not reality television, not space mishaps) for him to shine his dimwitted, beatific smile upon. He transforms Thomas Eidson's bleak frontier western (The Last Ride) into a curious sort of faux-feminist uplift melodrama ("Mildred Pierce, Medicine Woman"), demonstrating, along the way, that he has no idea what issues he's raising, much less any idea how to honour them.

Bubba Ho-Tep (2003)

November 21, 20032000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Horror, Mystery, Theatrical, Western

***/****
starring Bruce Campbell, Ossie Davis, Reggie Bannister, Bob Ivy
screenplay by Don Coscarelli, based on the novel by Joe R. Lansdale
directed by Don Coscarelli

by Walter Chaw Joe R. Lansdale is best known for his tales of the "weird west," a genre mixing splatterpunk with alternate-history western almost entirely defined by the author in the early-Nineties. His work reads a little like the sort of folklore in which Mark Twain dabbled (or the gothic in which Flannery O'Connor was involved), but with zombies and gore, while Don Coscarelli's Bubba Ho-Tep, an adaptation of a Lansdale short story, is steeped in the same sort of bent sensibility that informs the author's work, performing something like a masterstroke in casting Bruce Campbell as Elvis and Ossie Davis as JFK–if ultimately falling a little short of the astonishing audacity of Lansdale's prose. (That very ballsiness what has kept any film prior to this one being made from Lansdale's work, methinks.) What distinguishes the picture, however, is what feels like a genuine concern for the difficulties of aging and the aged, a melancholy tone to the proceedings that, fascinatingly, equates a mummy unquiet for being buried nameless with a pair of American folk heroes declining, also anonymous, in a retirement facility in East Texas.

Metal and Melancholy (1994) + Crazy (1999)

November 14, 20031990s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Documentary, Netherlands, Theatrical

Metaal en melancholie
***½/****
directed by Heddy Honigmann

CRAZY
***½/****
directed by Heddy Honigmann

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Where has Heddy Honigmann been all my life? Hidden amongst the well-intentioned sheep and voyeuristic wolves that usually crowd my stays at the Hot Docs documentary festival is her ferocious intelligence and shattering compassion–which, when combined, results in wrenching, haunting films that stand alone and put most other documentarians to shame. Like no other filmmaker, she shows people caught in the crossfire of forces beyond their control, and like no other filmmaker, she captures the creative ways in which people adapt to the environment created by those forces. Furthermore, there isn't a shred of liberal self-congratulation anywhere to be found–there is no distance from the pain of her subjects, and there is no escaping the surge of confusion at the situations in which they find themselves. Her films are direct, unpretentious, and highly articulate in their evocation of the people and places they describe.

Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (2003)

November 14, 20032000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Theatrical, War

***½/****
starring Russell Crowe, Paul Bettany, James D’Arcy, Edward Woodall
screenplay by Peter Weir & John Collee, based on the novel by Patrick O’Brian
directed by Peter Weir

by Walter Chaw By turns brutal and majestic, Peter Weir’s Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (hereafter Master and Commander) reunites the antipodean director with Russell Boyd, the cinematographer with whom he shot The Last Wave, Gallipoli, and The Year of Living Dangerously, and the two have produced a picture on par with those films: historically aware, but more notable for its epic beauty and scope. The effect of Master and Commander is rapture–it engulfs with its detail, finding time to flirt with the secrets of the Galapagos as parallel to the unfolding mystery of technology that finds the HMS Surprise outclassed by the French Acheron, stealthy and peerless enough to inspire speculations of supernatural origin. Issues of the old at war with the new (superstition vs. science, instinct vs. calculation) are nothing new for Weir, who is, after all, at his best when examining the dangers of individuals at odds with tradition, and the rewards for modern men able to assimilate the ancient into the new.

My Brother Silk Road (2002); Swing (1993); Kairat (1992)

November 7, 20032000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Coming of Age, Drama, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Romance, Theatrical

Altyn Kyrghol
**½/****
starring Busurman Odurakaev, Tynar Abdrazaeva, Mukanbet Toktobaev, Kabatai Kyzy Elmira
written and directed by Marat Sarulu

Sel'kincek
**½/****
starring Mirlan Abdykalykov, Bakyt Toktokozhayev
written by Ernest Abdyjaparov, Talgat Asyrankulov, Aktan Arym Kubat
directed by Aktan Arym Kubat

KAIRAT
***/****
starring Talgat Assetov, Samat Beysenbin, Baljan Bisembekova, Indira Jeksembaeva
written and directed by Darezhan Omirbayev

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover It's impossible to understand an entire national cinema–or, for that matter, several national cinemas–through the prism of exactly three films. That's all I have by which to judge the Cinematheque Ontario's massive series Films From Along the Silk Road, which brings together films from five Central Asian countries–and so I offer my opinions with trepidation: I wouldn't want to turn you off of something magnificent that might be hiding within the schedule. Nevertheless, the selections offered to the press are/were of a fair-to-middling nature–pictorially accomplished despite extremely low budgets, but lacking a finished quality in themes and narratives. They're fascinating as cultural documents from a part of the world that never makes much of an impact in North America, but as cinema only one rates a proper recommendation.

The Matrix Revolutions (2003)

November 5, 20032000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Esoterica, Martial Arts, Sci-Fi, Theatrical

**½/****
starring Keanu Reeves, Carrie-Anne Moss, Laurence Fishburne, Hugo Weaving
written and directed by Lana Wachowski & Lilly Wachowski

by Walter Chaw Where The Matrix Reloaded works best as a kitschy send-up of West Side Story, The Matrix Revolutions is the funniest, most overblown re-telling of The Old Testament since The Ten Commandments. It should have been called "Revelations," truth be told, and indeed a sly wink to covenants and the Apocalypse comprises its final scenes. The film comes complete with martyred saints, crucified saviours, and enough murder and fireworks to keep Philistines attentive during the extended lore sequences, less boring here than in the last instalment, though those looking for mortal doses of faux philosophical pretension will find their goblets full to brimming. What saves this chapter, as it did the previous, is the idea that the arrogance required to pull off something this ponderous, this glowering and self-important, is in fact a valuable thing in a mainstream movie climate more interested in the comfortable affirmation of formula. Though it's likely that box office history will interpret the last two parts of The Matrix unkindly, it's all too possible that the trilogy may come to be seen as something like a classic of ambitious, hysterical overreaching. And why not? That's exactly what it is.

The Human Stain (2003)

October 31, 2003Drama, Germany, Ireland, Romance, Theatrical, Thriller

½*/****
starring Anthony Hopkins, Nicole Kidman, Ed Harris, Gary Sinise
screenplay by Nicholas Meyer, based on the novel by Philip Roth
directed by Robert Benton

by Walter Chaw A gravid piece of Oscar-baiting garbage, Robert Benton's dead-on-arrival The Human Stain plods along with the dedication of the dangerously bloated and the pathologically self-important. It's so woefully miscast that its awards-season intentions become transparent, honouring pedigree to mortify the material, and no matter how eternally topical issues of race in the United States might be, the whole production feels airless and badly dated–something like an Arthur Miller parable, lead balloons and rhetorical minefields and all. In fact, the picture is just on this side of camp classic as venerable whore Anthony Hopkins cuts a rug with Gary Sinise to a few Irving Berlin classics and game Nicole Kidman, going the Frankie and Johnny route with an entirely unsuccessful blue-collar turn indicated by a fake tattoo and cigarette, is outmatched by a Nicholas Meyer screenplay packed with head-slappers and incongruities. The sort of movie I tend to dismiss offhand, The Human Stain proves trickier to exorcise for its populist attack on the populist phenomena of political correctness. That doesn't mean the picture's interesting, it means that the picture's thumbing of a hot-button topic buys it a little analysis.

In the Cut (2003) + Sylvia (2003)

October 31, 2003****/****, 2000s, Australia, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Drama, Horror, Mystery, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

IN THE CUT
****/****
starring Meg Ryan, Mark Ruffalo, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Nick Damici
screenplay by Jane Campion & Susanna Moore, based on the novel by Moore
directed by Jane Campion

SYLVIA
*½/****
starring Gwyneth Paltrow, Daniel Craig, Jared Harris, Blythe Danner
screenplay by John Brownlow
directed by Christine Jeffs

"Come at last to this point
I look back on my passion
And realize that I
Have been like a blind man
Who is unafraid of the dark"
-Yosana Akiko

by Walter Chaw Frances Avery (Meg Ryan) is in love with words. She moves through life obscuring herself in a nimbus of them, passing through the world with poetry as her guiding principle. Director Jane Campion is no stranger to a life lived in thrall to poesy–her films An Angel at My Table and The Piano detailed the life of poet Janet Frame and the life of the mind, respectively, and In the Cut finds its meaning and rhythm in the words that Frannie collects, fragments of poems cut from books and collected from subway walls. The New York through which Frannie walks is festooned with ghosts of American flags, tattered and blown after two years of constant display, losing their meaning along with their colours fading up to the sky. Likewise, Frannie sees herself a phantom of unmentioned tragedies, haunting her own life, retreating to the comfort of words when a half-sister, Pauline (Jennifer Jason Leigh), pillories her chaste existence, or when Detective Malloy (Mark Ruffalo) interrogates her about a string of serial murders he's investigating. A scholar of words, Frannie is involved as the film opens in a project analyzing inner-city slang: language as organic and in transition.

Scary Movie 3 (2003)

October 24, 20032000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, Satire, Theatrical, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Anna Faris, Charlie Sheen, Regina Hall, Denise Richards
screenplay by Craig Mazin and Kevin Smith and David Zucker
directed by David Zucker

by Walter Chaw Even without the Wayans Brothers, the latest Scary Movie sequel is unspeakably bad. A disjointed series of set-piece recreations from popular films (Signs, The Matrix Reloaded, The Ring, 8 Mile) populated by idiots and scripted with a flat collection of obvious fall-down gags and scatology, the picture doesn't even respect the movies it mocks enough to understand what it is about them that fails. More, with the absence of the Wayans (who are replaced by David Zucker, one-third of the braintrust behind successful spoofs like Airplane! and The Naked Gun), the repeated shout-outs to heroes of hip-hop (an entire record label shows up in cameo bits) and attendant disrespect of the culture land with disturbing racial undertones. The film is aimed specifically at an African-American demographic: That's one thing when the filmmakers are African-American, another thing altogether when they're not.

Party Monster (2003)

October 24, 20032000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Biopic, Crime, Drama, Netherlands, Theatrical, Thriller

***/****
starring Macaulay Culkin, Seth Green, Chloë Sevigny, Natasha Lyonne
screenplay by Fenton Bailey & Randy Barbato, based on the book Disco Bloodbath by James St. James
directed by Fenton Bailey & Randy Barbato

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover By all rights, Party Monster shouldn't work as well as it does. Not only is it flip about matters of grave seriousness (in this case, the murder of a Hispanic drug dealer by Club Kid impresario Michael Alig), but it hasn't got much on its mind beyond the endless debauchery afforded by its subject matter, and consequently gives all other matters the rhinestone-studded shaft. But despite all of this shallowness, the film is surprisingly engrossing; as Alig falls into his downward spiral, it becomes a harrowing reminder that, per the film's much-abused Blake quote, the road of excess can often lead to the path of destruction.

The Same River Twice (2003) + The Weather Underground (2003)

October 24, 2003****/****, 2000s, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Documentary, Theatrical

THE SAME RIVER TWICE
****/****
directed by Robb Moss

THE WEATHER UNDERGROUND
***/****
directed by Sam Green & Bill Siegel

by Walter Chaw I've just seen an episode of CNN's "Crossfire" that featured as one of its topics the proliferation of "Bush Bashing," which, for as scatologically intriguing as it sounds, refers to the growing popularity of pummelling our dimwit president for his dimwit philosophies and hilljack presentation. The verbal assault gratifying for what it is, what's missing in the new American dyspepsia is any real activism: The movies feel like-Sixties movies, and the government certainly feels like the late-Sixties government, but the level of outrage is something just north of "mild simmer." Students aren't massing, the National Guard isn't mobilizing, and there's no new Flower Power generation to oxymoronically stir the great, slobbering melting pot of American sex and politics. What there is, however, is a glut of underground documentaries finding their way into small theatres to smaller audiences but enough critical support to at least put the intelligentsia on record as suitably discomfited.

Beyond Borders (2003) + Radio (2003)

October 22, 20032000s, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Drama, Germany, Romance, Sports, Theatrical, War

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

by 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.

Veronica Guerin (2003)

October 17, 20032000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Crime, Drama, Ireland, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

*/****
starring Cate Blanchett, Gerard McSorley, Ciarán Hinds, Brenda Fricker
screenplay by Carol Doyle and Mary Agnes Donoghue
directed by Joel Schumacher

by Walter Chaw By the end of the piece, the only thing missing is John Wayne in ill-fitting Centurion garb, drawling "I do believe she truly was the son of God" over the corpse of slain journalist Veronica Guerin (Cate Blanchett), so at pains is Joel Schumacher's tedious spectacle of a hagiography of Guerin to paint her as some sort of sainted martyr. Veronica Guerin is horrible, really, a passel of forced dramatic slow push-ins framing Blanchett's mannered performance (in a Princess Diana haircut, no less, to really ramp up that pathos) all of insouciantly arched eyebrows and saucy eyeballs and centred dead and soft-lit like a Giotto effigy. Much is made of Guerin's print peers looking down on her, then a closing title card offers a statistic on the number of journalists killed in the line of duty, the suggestion being that journalists are sniffy elitists who don't like someone who can't write, has no background or experience in journalism, and takes unnecessary risks with themselves and their families–and that journalists are heroes regularly martyred by their thirst for truth. You really can't have it both ways, and that lack of focus isn't ambiguity so much as confusion brought about by a mortal dose of self-righteousness.

L’auberge espagnole (2002)

October 17, 20032000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, Drama, France, Romance, Spain, Theatrical

***/****
starring Romain Duris, Judith Godrèche, Audrey Tautou, Cécile De France
written and directed by Cédric Klapisch

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Cédric Klapisch is the director of a mid-'90s gem called When the Cat's Away; although it wasn't of great shattering importance, it understood that, and turned out to be enjoyably funky nonetheless. Alas, the intervening years have taken their toll on Klapisch's sense of self-importance, because now he's made L'auberge espagnole–a film with the potential to be another enjoyably funky little movie that instead pushes banal life lessons and shallow cultural observations. L'auberge espagnole might have squeaked by had its tale of a French student in a Barcelona rooming house just been a sex farce with low ambitions, but as it stands, it's a sex farce that thinks that it's actual drama, making for some serious head-slapping when it drags out the ersatz "importance."

Pieces of April (2003)

October 17, 20032000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Theatrical

**/****
starring Katie Holmes, Patricia Clarkson, Oliver Platt, Derek Luke
written and directed by Peter Hedges

by Walter Chaw Modest in its intentions and achievements, Peter Hedges's Pieces of April has an undercurrent of paternalistic racism that verges on the disturbing. April (Katie Holmes, great but wasted) and her boyfriend Bobby (Derek Luke) invite April's difficult family to Thanksgiving dinner. Because it's potentially, ominously, the "last" Thanksgiving, the estranged nuclear unit composed of mom Joy (Patricia Clarkson), dad Jim (Oliver Platt), grandma Dottie (professional grandma Alice Drummond), and their other two children Beth (Alison Pill) and Timmy (John Gallagher Jr.) pack themselves into the station wagon and head up the interstate. The picture cuts between April struggling to find someone in her tenement who'll lend her the use of an oven and the family doing their best to suffer the acerbic, often nasty Joy.