Gasoline (2002)

July 3, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Crime, Drama, Italy, Road Movie, Romance, Theatrical

Benzina
**/****
starring Maya Sansa, Regina Orioli, Pietro Ragusa, Mariella Valentini
screenplay by Anne Riitta Ciccone & Monica Stambrini, based on the novel by Elena Stancanelli
directed by Monica Stambrini

Benzina

by Bill Chambers Scarlett Johansson-esque Regina Orioli stars in Monica Stambrini’s Gasoline (Benzina) (hereafter Benzina) as Lenni, a bespectacled loner who went looking for work at a coffee bar/gas station one day and found love with its proprietor, Stella (Maya Sansa). When Lenni’s mother (Mariella Valentini) comes to visit and tries to talk her once-presumed-straight daughter out of her gay lifestyle, a scuffle ensues between madre and Stella in which the former is inevitably accidentally killed; even more inevitably, Stella doesn’t think they should tell the police despite her innocence looking forensically sound; and most inevitably of all, Lenni’s mom had a fortune in her purse. If you’re playing the home game and guessed that Stella and Len go on the lam, give yourself ten points–twenty if you had it down that they would do so with a body in the trunk.

Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas (2003)

July 1, 2003Posted in2000s, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Family, Fantasy, France, Theatrical, UK

**/****
screenplay by John Logan
directed by Patrick Gilmore & Tim Johnson

by Walter Chaw Making almost no impression at all, DreamWorks’ latest animated flick is a lot like their last animated flick, Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron: an endlessly-reproducible light romantic cartoon heavy on the derring-do and gender slapstick, and light on anything that could possibly be construed as memorable. The most noteworthy thing about the picture, in fact, is that it exposes the surprising quickness with which DreamWorks’ has become that which it most disdains: Disney redux–its sixth animated feature satisfying the maxim of joining what can’t be beaten and getting as entrenched and boring as Treasure Planet in the process. As soon as it’s declared that the quest of the film is for the “Book of Peace,” it’s already past time to let the eye-rolling commence.

The Hard Word (2002)

June 27, 2003Posted in2000s, Action, Australia, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Drama, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

*½/****
starring Guy Pearce, Rachel Griffiths, Robert Taylor, Joel Edgerton
written and directed by Scott Rogers

Hardwordby Walter Chaw You’d think that POME (“Prisoners of Mother England”) would be better at making a crime drama, but Scott Roberts’s hyphenate debut The Hard Word is a flaccid ripper of Kubrick’s The Killing thick in avuncular vernacular and notably thin of any real meat. Between a few funny throwaways (a character refers to Philip K. Dick’s A Scanner Darkly, Dick’s autobiographical survey of paranoia and drug psychosis, as a primer for modern marriage), and some decidedly David Lynch-ian violence, the picture feels a lot like a mish-mash of post-mod noir ideas (the butcher, the redeemed femme, cannibalism) arranged with little respect for rhyme and reason. Style over substance, the whole thing is delivered in accents so under-looped and thick that it occasionally falls out as a cast of Brad Pitt’s Snatch pikeys performing Tarantino outtakes.

Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle (2003)

June 27, 2003Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Theatrical

½*/****
starring Cameron Diaz, Drew Barrymore, Lucy Liu, Demi Moore
screenplay by John August and Cormac Wibberley & Marianne Wibberley
directed by McG

Charliesangelsfullthrottleby Walter Chaw Even its subtitle an onanistic entendre, McG’s excrescent Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle takes self-awareness to the level of pornography in what boils down to one of the most queasily interesting trainwrecks in recent memory. It leaves the joyful goofiness of the first film in the dust of the “wanton slut” school of feminism, uncomfortable innuendo (incest just isn’t all that funny), and a parade of star cameos that would have derailed the film were it not already a mere series of references to other films. What the picture represents, in a very real way, is the death of cinema, swallowed whole by the same instinct that drives television: strobe cuts, shallow titillation, barely subsumed fetishism, gleeful stupidity… all fuelled entirely by a knowledge of medium. The picture doesn’t have any sort of meaning outside of the cinematic–it’s essentially a warm spasm of pop cultural goop, an extended succession of money shots with none of that distracting filler (plot, character, tension, purpose) that weighs down pictures exhibiting some measure of non-commercial ambition.

Capturing the Friedmans (2003)

June 26, 2003Posted in****/****, 2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Documentary, Theatrical

****/****
directed by Andrew Jarecki

“Only that which has no history is definable”
-Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals, 1887

by Walter Chaw The rare film to encapsulate the macro and the micro with eloquence and no little existential disquiet, Andrew Jarecki’s amazing documentary Capturing the Friedmans tackles issues like the nature of film, the slipperiness of memory, and the unreliability of identity in ways that are uncomfortable and prickly. The revelations in the film about modern cultural anthropology are indescribably delicious, speaking to pleasure in a way that Jonathan Rosenbaum once identified as including the sensations of fear and unbalance–as an experience, the picture is as exhilaratingly unnerving as only an illicit document can be. When, early in the piece, eldest son of the Friedman clan David addresses the camera directly in what he warns is a personal journal, Capturing the Friedmans subverts the exploitive voyeurism that defines cinema, particularly pornographic cinema, in a way that is as cannily, uniquely, ironically filmic as Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom. It’s something we feel we shouldn’t be watching–a realization that, once established (within the first minutes of the picture), finds the audience formulated helpless and naked before the film’s reptilian regard.

The Wild Dogs (2003)

June 26, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Canada, Drama, Theatrical

***/****
starring Thom Fitzgerald, David Hayman, Alberta Watson, Rachel Blanchard
written and directed by Tom Fitzgerald

Wilddogsby Travis Mackenzie Hoover There’s a lot to be said against Thom Fitzgerald’s The Wild Dogs, a film that, when faced with abject poverty and suffering, doesn’t really know how to resolve its feelings and compensates by resorting to bad doom-laden metaphors. But as it flails wildly in the hopes of hitting a target, there’s no denying that the film occasionally does, and that when it does it often scores a direct hit. Even if Fitzgerald can’t solve the problems of a crumbling Bucharest, he evokes the state of wanting to extremely well, thus saving his film from the sanctimony that another director might have brought to the subject.

Alex & Emma (2003)

June 20, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Romance, Theatrical

*/****
starring Luke Wilson, Kate Hudson, Rob Reiner, Sophie Marceau
screenplay by Jeremy Leven
directed by Rob Reiner

Alexandemmaby Walter Chaw We’ve been here with Rob Reiner before, the whimsical fantasy film manifesting in the pretty good (but pretty overrated) The Princess Bride (as well as the cheerfully awful North), while the romance between a prototypical thug and a difficult woman found shape in the Woody Allen film that everyone could agree on, When Harry Met Sally… (and the grotesquely unwatchable The Story of Us). Watching a Reiner film, then, at least post-’80s, is a little like playing Russian Roulette with a pair of eye-gouging forks–and, too often, playing to lose. Not so much an auteur as a bookmark and a warm body, Reiner is the Mantovani of movie directors, and the extent to which you like a tongue bath is a succinct barometer of how much you’ll appreciate his later films. With that in mind, Alex & Emma is so free of conflict and originality that watching it is actually a little like watching good avant-garde cinema: Freed from the constraints of narrative, one enters something like a fugue state, where the images flit by on screen in the simulacrum of sense, eliciting meanings in ironic counterpoint to traditional significance.

Tsui Hark’s Vampire Hunters (2003)

June 20, 2003Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Hong Kong, Horror, Japan, Netherlands, Theatrical, Vampire

The Era of Vampires
*/****
starring Chan Kwok Kwan, Ken Chang, Suet Lam, Michael Chow Man-Kin
screenplay by Tsui Hark
directed by Wellson Chin

by Walter Chaw An incomprehensible bit of garbage produced and written by legendary Hong Kong filmmaker Tsui Hark, Vampire Hunters juggles at least three plots and drops each of them repeatedly and egregiously. Its lore is confused and its heroes are unremarkable but for the unusual degree to which they’re inept and disinteresting. The promise inherent in a chop-socky wuxia opus concerning a quintet of fearless vampire hunters and a cadre of zombies is almost infinite, making the abject failure of the piece something almost awe-inspiring. Though it’s tempting to blame director Wellson Chin’s propensity to stage fight scenes in unrelieved murk, the real culprit of the piece may be a bad guy who looks and moves a lot like a mannequin on a string. William Castle, eat your heart out.

Tycoon (2002); Under the Skin of the City (2001); Stone Reader (2003)

June 19, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Documentary, Drama, France, Germany, Iran, Russia, Theatrical

Oligarkh
Tycoon: A New Russian
*½/****
starring Vladimir Mashkov, Mariya Mironova, Levani Outchaneichvili, Aleksandr Baluyev
screenplay by Aleksandr Borodyansky, Pavel Lungin, Yuli Dubov, based on Dubov’s novel Bolshaya pajka
directed by Pavel Lungin

Zir-e poost-e shahr
Under the City’s Skin
***/****
starring Golab Adineh, Mohammad Reza Forutan, Baran Kosari, Ebrahin Sheibani
screenplay by Rakhshan Bani Etemad, Farid Mostafavi
directed by Rakhshan Bani Etemad

STONE READER
*/****
directed by Mark Moskowitz

by Walter Chaw The collapse of oppressive regimes is a double-edged sword for a country’s film industry. Official censors are out of work, but they take their government’s sponsorship of the film industry with them. Entertaining a stream of strange bedfellows from the United States and France, the Russian cinema in the age of Perestroika struggled to find a balance between artistry and commerce–the same instinct that promoted the creation of underground trades in fake Levi’s spawned, too, a steadily gathering horde of cheap knock-off films designed, like their Yankee brothers, for minimal but satisfactory fiscal return. Departing quickly from the early optimism of pictures like Alexander Sokurov’s Days of Eclipse and Pavel Lungin’s Taxi Blues, the “Russian New Wave” (led like the French nouvelle vague by a cadre of critics) has expressed itself lately through cultural remakes of classics of world (including early Russian) cinema. The S. Dobrotvorsky-scripted Nicotine, an interesting take on Godard’s Breathless, is the best of the cultural doppelgängers; Lungin’s Tycoon is among the worst.

Hollywood Homicide (2003)

June 13, 2003Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Theatrical, Thriller

**/****
starring Harrison Ford, Josh Hartnett, Keith David, Lena Olin
screenplay by Robert Souza & Ron Shelton
directed by Ron Shelton

by Walter Chaw The kind of movie where a cop who calls himself “Smokey” is referring to Smokey Robinson (more to the point, the kind of movie where Smokey Robinson makes a cameo), Ron Shelton’s Hollywood Homicide is a diary of decline made by aging filmmakers and aimed at an aging audience. Shelton returns to the old guy/young guy/slut dynamic of Bull Durham while Harrison Ford turns in what is possibly the first “old guy” performance of his career–one that pings poignantly off his patented “weary bemusement” shtick before a finale (a comedy of humiliation) that functions as the only part of the film that really works. Sandwiched between the standard buddy/too-convenient-crime caper formula set-up and that deliriously good conclusion is a laboured exercise in forced bonhomie and a mysterious existential melancholy that feels a great deal like a tired exhalation. Hollywood Homicide is an extraordinarily average film that has something of a distinct, dark intimation nudging at its corners. A shame the Ron Shelton of today is not the Ron Shelton of Cobb.

Dumb and Dumberer: When Harry Met Lloyd (2003)

June 12, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Theatrical, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Eric Christian Olsen, Derek Richardson, Luis Guzmán, Eugene Levy
screenplay by Robert Brenner & Troy Miller
directed by Troy Miller

Dumbanddumbererby Walter Chaw Harry (Derek Richardson) and Lloyd (Eric Christian Olsen) are imbecile best friends played by two young actors doing their best (which is pretty good) Jeff Daniels and Jim Carrey impersonations. Meet-cute’ing in a high school being bilked by an evil administrator (Eugene Levy) and his lunch lady squeeze (Cheri Oteri), the pair tick off the litany of Farrelly-inspired gross-out gags with neither the heart nor the timing. Asians are made great sport of in an antiquated sort of way that isn’t so much offensive as slack, scat-like material is smeared all over a bathroom, Bob Saget gets a paycheck, and Mimi Rogers makes out with Rachel Nichols in a Hef grotto. On the plus side, its entendre-laden script isn’t actually worse than Down With Love‘s.

Whale Rider (2003) + Rivers and Tides (2002)

June 5, 2003Posted in****/****, 2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Documentary, Drama, Family, Finland, Germany, New Zealand, Theatrical, UK

WHALE RIDER
***½/****
starring Keisha Castle-Hughes, Rawiri Paratene, Vicky Haughton, Cliff Curtis
screenplay by Niki Caro, based on the novel by Witi Ihimaera
directed by Niki Caro

RIVERS AND TIDES
****/****
directed by Thomas Riedelsheimer

by Walter Chaw The images in Niki Caro’s second film, Whale Rider, are so heartbreakingly beautiful that at times the narrative diminishes its mythic gravity. It resembles John Sayles’s brilliant The Secret of Roan Inish not only in subject, but also in the understanding that film has the potential to be the most cogent extrapolation of the oral storytelling tradition. When the picture’s young protagonist sings an ancient Maori song to a dark ocean, there is an indescribable power to the film that springs from firelight–what we’ve lost in modernity as orphans to our collective past.

Man on the Train (2002); Chaos (2001); And Now… Ladies and Gentlemen… (2002); The Son (2002)

June 5, 2003Posted in****/****, 2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Belgium, Comedy, Crime, Directors: Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, Drama, France, Germany, Japan, Mystery, Romance, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

L’Homme du train
***/****
starring Jean Rochefort, Johnny Hallyday, Jean-François Stévenin, Charlie Nelson
screenplay by Claude Klotz
directed by Patrice Leconte

CHAOS
*/****
starring Catherine Frot, Vincent Lindon, Rachida Brakni, Line Renaud
written and directed by Coline Serreau

AND NOW… LADIES AND GENTLEMEN…
***½/****
starring Jeremy Irons, Patricia Kaas, Thierry Lhermitte, Alessandra Martines
screenplay by Claude Lelouch, Pierre Leroux & Pierre Uytterhoeven
directed by Claude Lelouch

Le fils
****/****
starring Olivier Gourmet, Morgan Marinne, Isabella Soupart, Nassim Hassaïni
written and directed by Jean-Pierre Dardenne & Luc Dardenne

by Walter Chaw After a brief period where French cinema seemed exclusively interested in the ugliness and violence festering in its anti-Semitic margins, what with pictures as variegated as Baise-moi, Trouble Every Day, My Wife is an Actress, and indeed, Gasper Noé’s sensationalistic Irréversible (which demonstrates a continuing fascination with a tumultuous French cinema in extremis), the old guard begins to reassert itself with its own tales of the underbelly of life displacing the façade of the comfortable upper class. Patrice Leconte’s new film Man on the Train (L’Homme du train) is reserved and slight while Chaos by Coline Serreau (who was born the same year as Leconte, as it happens) tries to soften the cruelty of much of modern French cinema by overlaying it with a patina of feminist uplift and misplaced social satire. Films like Rohmer’s The Lady and the Duke and Godard’s In Praise of Love attempt to draw a line between the nouvelle and the digital age (and Chaos is shot in ugly DV), and pictures like Rivette’s wonderful Va Savoir and now Claude Lelouch’s And Now... Ladies and Gentlemen… act as surveys and auto-critique of the medium itself. With these three pictures, the meta-critical instinct–something of a hallmark of French culture in general and cinema in particular–finds a new voice in, ironically, its older generation of directors. Somewhat apart from all of that is the Dardenne Brothers’ The Son (Le Fils), which is on its own stylistically but looks thematically for common ground in its own tale of obsession and reconciliation.

Winged Migration (2001)

May 30, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Documentary, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Switzerland, Theatrical

**/****
directed by Jacques Perrin

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover The birds are coming, my friends, and you best take shelter before they bore you into a stupor. Not even Hitchcock himself made avian life seem as pervasive a threat as Jacques Perrin does in Winged Migration–though instead of being an active physical menace, it simply has the power to take your money and drive you to sleep or insanity. Alas, despite some super cinematography and generally good intentions, this record of birds sitting around and taking off gets very old very fast, for want of anything beyond an exclamation of, “Look at the pretty birdie!” There is, of course, an audience (nature enthusiasts without an intellectual bent, for starters, as well as those who would mistake impersonal, “professional” photography for art) that will not only gobble every shallow morsel of this film, but also think it a cultural advance.

The Italian Job (2003)

May 29, 2003Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, France, Germany, Italy, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

**½/****
starring Mark Wahlberg, Charlize Theron, Edward Norton, Seth Green
screenplay by Donna Powers & Wayne Powers, based on the screenplay by Troy Kennedy Martin
directed by F. Gary Gray

by Walter Chaw The Italian Job may be the very definition of a perfunctory remake. There’s no arguing with its professionalism and, at times, it threatens to hear the music, but when its best moments are those in which Donald Sutherland–in Venice again after 1973’s Don’t Look Now–summons up the horrific ghosts of Nicolas Roeg films past, the picture reveals itself to be inspired only by movies that were first, and better. In that spirit, among the recent crop of heist films, The Italian Job is better than Frank Oz’s The Score and David Mamet’s Heist, but not nearly so good as James Foley’s Confidence. It finds itself at the mercy of the rhythms and images of pictures it seeks to ape, drumming out in the end an often flat, frequently limp product that seems to know, to its credit, the difference between “style” and “seizure.” But with a cast that is either predictably flat (Mark Wahlberg, Charlize Theron, Jason Statham) or convinced they’re too good for the movie (Ed Norton; only Seth Green seems like he’s having genuine fun), The Italian Job is just a prettified reflection glancing off the surface of a deep well.

Spellbound (2003)

May 23, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Documentary, Theatrical

**½/****
directed by Jeffrey Blitz

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover It doesn’t surprise me that Spellbound has been garnering more acclaim and attention than most documentaries: it’s a gentle and untaxing film whose drama is not so far removed from the flashy arena of “American Idol”. Despite collecting a disparate group of people in the same event (the 1999 National Spelling Bee held in Washington, DC), Spellbound doesn’t give enough detail to draw any conclusions about the participants’ involvement, nor does it place the whole notion of the competition in a historical context so that we might understand it better. In the end, the film is just a record of American striving that exists in a vacuum, offering the thrill of competition and the agony of defeat with only cursory glances towards things beyond the moment.

The In-Laws (2003)

May 22, 2003Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, Germany, Theatrical, Thriller

***/****
starring Michael Douglas, Albert Brooks, Ryan Reynolds, Lindsay Sloane
screenplay by Nat Mauldin and Ed Solomon, based on the screenplay by Andrew Bergman
directed by Andrew Fleming

Inlawsby Walter Chaw Casting Albert Brooks as the prototypical nebbish and Michael Douglas as a testosterone-geeked maniac is almost too easy, but given a vehicle like The In-Laws, with this much heat invested in its direction, the casting doesn’t seem so much lazy as inspired. Based on a 1979 film starring Alan Arkin and Peter Falk in the roles of put-upon father-of-the-bride and crazed father-of-the-groom, respectively, the remake doesn’t have a single scene as classic as the “serpentine” gag of the first but compensates with the sort of instant familiarity afforded by veteran personalities in comfortable roles. Douglas has been here before in another tale of familial dysfunction, The War of the Roses, and Brooks has never really been anywhere else; the picture, paced like a trip-hammer by director Andrew Fleming, only really fails in its drab newlywed couple and a passel of homosexual gags that are badly dated and bordering on unkind.

Respiro (2002)

May 22, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, France, Italy, Theatrical

***½/****
starring Valeria Golino, Vincenzo Amato, Francesco Casisa, Veronica D’Agostino
written and directed by Emanuele Crialese

by Walter Chaw Emanuele Crialese’s Respiro has the rhythm and the pulse of the southern Italian island on which it was filmed. It is all of breathtaking panoramas and impossible colours, and in the middle of it is Greek-Italian actress Valeria Golino evoking, in a career-defining performance, late countrywoman Gina Lollobrigida. (Golino would have been a far better choice than Penelope Cruz in the remake of Fanfan la Tulipe, currently not-wowing audiences at Cannes.) A film by turns savage and languid, for the first part it seems as though the film, with its clashing bands of shirtless youths, will be a reworking of The War, but then it becomes more a metaphor for grief and redemption in a feral environment fettered for too long by men and their illusions of cities.

Better Luck Tomorrow (2003); Manic (2003); Cinemania (2003)

May 15, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Documentary, Drama, Germany, Romance, Theatrical

BETTER LUCK TOMORROW
***/****
starring Parry Shen, Jason J. Tobin, Sung Kang, Roger Fan
screenplay by Ernesto Foronda & Justin Lin & Fabian Marquez
directed by Justin Lin

MANIC
*½/****
starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Zooey Deschanel, Elden Henson, Don Cheadle
screenplay by Michael Bacall & Blayne Weaver
directed by Jordan Melamed

CINEMANIA
*½/****
directed by Angela Christlieb & Stephen Kijak

by Walter Chaw Justin Lin’s feature debut caused something of a minor firestorm at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, where it was charged that Asian-American stereotypes of the “model minority” were being indulged by Better Luck Tomorrow‘s tale of honor-roll gangsters amuck in SoCal. The truth is that the picture, for all its narrative faults, is a complicated exploration of what happens when the societal stereotypes imposed on any minority are bought into and manipulated by the minority itself–the sort of double-edged sword that marginalizes even as it shields. (With African-Americans, a possible opportunity to work beneath the radar of “white” society; with Asian-Americans, the possibility to deflect suspicion of criminal activity with straight “A”s and memberships to the all-geek extracurricular club pantheon.) A scene following a party crash and armed intimidation comes close to instant classic status as our quartet of first-generation ABC hoods pulls up alongside Hispanic gang members of a more traditional Southern California breed, the cultural tension erupting in a recognition of racial transference that borders on brilliant. It’s the traffic jam scene from Office Space transferred onto an urban crime drama.

The Matrix Reloaded (2003)

May 15, 2003Posted in2000s, 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 In the middle of a scene where Keanu Reeves's trench-coated Neo fights dozens of Hugo Weaving's Mr. Smiths in a Brooklyn schoolyard, it occurred to me that, what with its wah-chuka-chuka soundtrack and meticulously choreographed (read: programmed) simulacrum of violence, The Matrix Reloaded is at this moment the nuttiest redux of West Side Story, in addition to the very definition of neo-blaxploitation. Cool vehicles, cool weapons, cool tunes, villains cast as endless iterations of The Man in monkey suits (and a set of albino kung fu twins), all with attitude to spare… Call it "techsploitation," perhaps–the hijacking of native cultures in the service of a Romanticist struggle against machine gods rendered, ironically, by mainframes and hackers.