Blind Spot: Hitler’s Secretary (2002)

February 28, 2003Posted in2000s, Austria, Authors: Bill Chambers, Documentary, Theatrical, War

Im Toten Winkel – Hitlers Sekretärin
Blind Spot. Hitler’s Secretary
***½/****
directed by André Heller & Othmar Schmiderer

by Bill Chambers A significant source of Blind Spot. Hitler’s Secretary‘s power is the au naturel form it takes. There are no re-enactments, there are no such visual cues as photographs or stock footage; there isn’t even any underscore–only the talking head of Traudl Junge, who, with her rotating cluster of sweaters and ascots, is the film’s aesthetic. Directors André Heller and Othmar Schmiderer (Heller interviewed, Schmiderer shot) either believe Junge to be so compelling a presence as to challenge the need for newsreel aids, or fundamentally appreciate that they risked depersonalizing Junge’s fresh, intimate perspective by going the History Channel route. I only skimmed the press notes (which are rather regrettably written: “Like Adolf Hitler, [Heller and Schmiderer] were also born and raised in Austria,” begins an introduction to the filmmakers) to keep from cheapening Blind Spot‘s enigmatic approach–that ambivalence–for myself: The film casts a spell as fragile as that of an ILM spectacle.

Russian Ark (2003)

February 21, 2003Posted in****/****, 2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Canada, Denmark, Drama, Esoterica, Finland, Germany, Japan, Mystery, Russia, Theatrical

****/****
starring Sergei Dontsov, Mariya Kuznetsova, Leonid Mozgovoy, David Giorgobiani
screenplay by Boris Khaimsky & Anatoli Nikiforov & Svetlana Proskurina & Alexander Sokurov
directed by Alexander Sokurov

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Russian Ark is a film that hoists its middle finger high against the cultural practices of nearly a hundred years. Implicitly appalled by the twin forgettings of communist and free-market logic, director Alexander Sokurov retaliates by erecting a monument to the proceeding three centuries of image-making–one that marks the entrance to a crypt perhaps, as Sokurov knows that time is running out on its preservation. Surely there’s a heaping dose of snobbery in his approach, and a whole lot of wilful obscurity as well, but his expression of his thesis is so passionate, and his technical execution is so seamless and beautiful, that I could have forgiven him almost anything.

Old School (2003)

February 21, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Theatrical

*½/****
starring Luke Wilson, Will Ferrell, Vince Vaughn, Ellen Pompeo
screenplay by Todd Phillips & Scot Armstrong
directed by Todd Phillips

by Walter Chaw Following in the tepid footsteps of National Lampoon’s Van Wilder‘s attempt to update Animal House for the new millennium, Todd Phillips’s Old School is better than it should be for a surprisingly funny Will Ferrell and another one of those laconic performances by a Wilson brother (Luke, this time) that just begs for a better vehicle. Less than John Landis’s landmark ode to anarchy, however, Old School most resembles Hart Bochner’s PCU–a film to which it pays unsubtle homage in the “ironic” casting of Jeremy Piven as that hale genre archetype: the button-down dean. (And PCU ultimately finds itself the superior campus clone comedy… For whatever that’s worth.) As diaries of arrested development go, Old School at least has the wit to tell a story of thirtysomethings seeking to recapture the halcyon days of binge-drinking and the joys of sexual objectification, making it something of a middle class/mid-life crisis tragedy and fitfully engaging in a distracted way as a result.

The Lady Killer of Rome (1961) + The Working Class Goes to Heaven (1971)

February 21, 2003Posted in1960s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Crime, France, Italy, Palme d'Or Winner, Theatrical, Thriller

L’Assassino
The Assassin
**½/****
starring Marcello Mastroianni, Micheline Presle, Cristina Gaioni, Salvo Randone
screenplay by Pasquale Festa Campanile & Massimo Franciosa & Tonino Guerra & Elio Petri
directed by Elio Petri

La Classe operaia va in paradiso
Lulu the Tool
***½/****
starring Mietta Albertini, Giovanni Bignamini, Flavio Bucci, Donato Castellaneta
screenplay by Elio Petri & Ugo Pirro
directed by Elio Petri

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover What a difference a decade makes: watching Elio Petri’s first film (1961’s The Lady Killer of Rome (L’Assassino)) and one of his most honoured (1971’s The Working Class Goes to Heaven (La Classe operaia va in paradiso)) reveals just how the march of history can change a director from distinguished craftsman to agent provocateur. One marvels at how the Left-inflected debut, made before the upheavals of the late-Sixties shook up film aesthetics, goes down easy and comfortably, while the Left-committed later film, made in the miasma after those upheavals failed, grabs the viewer by the lapels and shakes him or her until he or she cries uncle. And one is grateful that that sea change happened: it’s The Working Class Goes to Heaven which looks best from the present vantage point, because it makes its points with a desperate urgency that the earlier film, however pointed it might seem, can’t hope to match.

The Life of David Gale (2003)

February 21, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, Germany, Mystery, Spain, Theatrical, Thriller, UK, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Kevin Spacey, Kate Winslet, Laura Linney, Gabriel Mann
screenplay by Charles Randolph
directed by Alan Parker

Lifeofdavidgaleby Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. One wonders if there isn’t, after all, a subtle right-wing conspiracy at work in the entertainment industry, where ultra-liberal stumps are turned into the sort of ostensibly pro-leftist propaganda reel that does serious harm to the pro-leftist agenda. If it’s not the reprehensible The Contender, with its Ayn Rand-ian hypothetical, it’s I Am Sam and its bizarre vilification of the child welfare system–or worse, John Q, with its curiously misdirected lament against our obviously broken health-care state. Trumping them all in terms of muddle and melodrama, however, is The Life of David Gale, an anti-death penalty tirade that, by the end, feels like a life sentence the audience wishes hadn’t been commuted. The only way to make any sense of the film is to suspect it of darker motives: Its ultimate message–and it’s not a bad one–seems to be that the criminal justice system the film so actively vilifies is, in fact, the only honest (though imperfect) force in the entire mess.

Gods and Generals (2003)

February 21, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Drama, Theatrical, War

*/****
starring Chris Conner, Jeff Daniels, Stephen Lang, Robert Duvall
screenplay by Ronald F. Maxwell, based on the book by Jeffrey M. Shaara
directed by Ronald F. Maxwell

Godsandgeneralsby Walter Chaw Somewhere in the translation from Jeff Shaara’s only so-so novel Gods and Generals to Ronald F. Maxwell’s magnificently bad film Gods and Generals lies the mystery of why the younger Shaaras and the Maxwells of the world see fit to take a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel like Jeff Shaara’s The Killer Angels and make a country-fried trilogy out of it. Perhaps most of the blame should be laid at the ten-gallon feet of Ted Turner, Fortune 500’s Yosemite Sam/Ross Perot amalgam who seeks, it appears, to finally get the South to rise again, single-handedly, after about 150 years of threats. It seems odd, however, that The Ted would seek to get the bayonets a-rattlin’ again with almost four hours of awkward period speechifying punctuated occasionally by random recreations of random early Civil War battles (Manassas, Fredericksburg, and Chancellorsville), each of which leads to the events of Maxwell’s 1993 adaptation of The Killer Angels, Gettysburg.

Mala Noche (1988) + Gus Van Sant shorts

February 14, 2003Posted in1980s, 1990s, 2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Directors: Gus Van Sant, Drama, Short Films, Theatrical

***/****
starring Tim Streeter, Doug Cooeyate, Nyla McCarthy, Ray Monge
written and directed by Gus Van Sant

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover The most amazing thing about Gus Van Sant’s debut feature Mala Noche is that it was made in the midst of the ’80s. While mainstream cinema was building cruelly childish whirligigs and the arthouses were smugly preoccupied with the pastel nightmare of suburban life, Van Sant was in the skids, training his camera on the outcasts of society and judging no one. His hero, despite engaging in a one-sided amour fou with a Latino migrant worker that would normally raise some cultural hackles, is an understandable creature of misunderstood desire–the film refuses to denounce him even as it avoids backing up his obsession in toto. Like Van Sant’s Drugstore Cowboy and My Own Private Idaho, Mala Noche sets up shop in the space between the director’s camera and his subjects–a halfway-meeting that would never otherwise have made it in the distanced and vindictive climate of the ’80s.

Daredevil (2003)

February 14, 2003Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Sci-Fi, Superhero, Theatrical, Thriller

**/****
starring Ben Affleck, Jennifer Garner, Michael Clarke Duncan, Colin Farrell
written and directed by Mark Steven Johnson

Daredevilby Walter Chaw There’s a real grittiness to Mark Steven Johnson’s Daredevil–most of it attributable to Frank Miller’s “Daredevil: Born Again” comic-book series (penned just prior to the author’s seminal “The Dark Knight Returns”), from which the film borrows tone, religious iconography, and a certain washed-out colour scheme as reflected in Ericson Core’s moody cinematography (which is closer to his work on Payback than on The Fast and the Furious). The problem is that the film’s tenor and Catholic fetishism are moored to the light redemption of the titular hero, the bizarre stigmata and martyrdom of one villain (and forced genuflection of another), and perhaps the suggested rebirth of a femme fatale. Daredevil, then, is interesting for its borrowed elements, but it doesn’t have any real weight to justify the treatment.

Punch (2003)

February 7, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Canada, Drama, Sports, Theatrical

***/****
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.

How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days (2003)

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

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

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

The Burial Society (2003)

January 31, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Canada, Theatrical, Thriller

*½/****
starring Rob LaBelle, Jan Rubes, Allan Rich, Bill Meilen
written and directed by Nicholas Racz

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover The failure of The Burial Society is a subtle one. Initially, one is relieved to encounter a Canadian film made with technical proficiency: not only is it crisply and cleanly shot, but its director uses his lead actor’s iconic schlemiel-ness to good effect. You sit back and wait for it to develop into something from there, but alas, it never really does; its initial effects are the only ones it has, and its total lack of visual and performative variety ultimately drowns the film in a tidal wave of monotony. In the end, I was surprised at how much I disliked The Burial Society.

Kangaroo Jack (2003)

January 17, 2003Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Australia, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Family, Theatrical, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Jerry O’Connell, Anthony Anderson, Estella Warren, Christopher Walken
screenplay by Steve Bing & Scott Rosenberg
directed by David McNally

by Walter Chaw Irresponsible to the extreme, Jerry Bruckheimer’s latest production is sleazy, violent, and packed with the sort of feckless, hateful messages that indicate an almost total disregard for an audience’s intelligence. Kangaroo Jack is, therefore, business as usual for a Bruckheimer production, save for the fact that it’s aimed at a very young audience. The picture is a malignance: it’s bad (for a film about a CGI kangaroo wearing a red “Brooklyn” jacket stealing fifty grand of the mob’s money, that much goes without saying), but what really impresses about the picture is its magnificent inappropriateness.

Metropolis – 2002 Restoration (1927)

January 15, 2003Posted in1920s, 2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Drama, Germany, Sci-Fi, Theatrical

**½/****
starring Alfred Abel, Gustav Fröhlich, Brigitte Helm, Rudolf Klein-Rogge
screenplay by Fritz Lang and Thea von Harbou, based on her novel
directed by Fritz Lang

Metropolisby Travis Mackenzie Hoover Now it can be told: Despite its status as a cinema landmark, I’ve never been particularly enamoured with Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. Like its immediate descendant Blade Runner, it’s a film better designed than directed and better staged than thought through–a gorgeous white elephant that’s all dressed up with no place to go. Granted, that design and staging are hugely influential, making it essential viewing for students of the cinema, and on a level of simple eye candy it has few peers in all of cinema. But while the current restoration shows us a fuller and more substantial narrative, that doesn’t mean that it is, in fact, full or substantial, and Lang’s rigid camera set-ups lack the fluidity and lightness to truly make the film more than a notable museum piece.

Confessions of a Dangerous Mind (2002)

December 31, 2002Posted in****/****, 2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Charlie Kaufman, Espionage, Theatrical

****/****
starring Sam Rockwell, Drew Barrymore, George Clooney, Julia Roberts
screenplay by Charlie Kaufman, based on the book by Chuck Barris
directed by George Clooney

Confessionsofadangerousmindby Walter Chaw The second of two biographies of television personalities to make it to the cinema in 2002, George Clooney’s Confessions of a Dangerous Mind is almost the anti-Auto Focus, tying itself to the chaotic memoirs of game-show host Chuck Barris and locating its identity in anarchic precepts of post-modernism (in sharp contrast to Auto Focus‘ reductive realism). Curiously, both films find a climax of sorts in a dream–I should say “dementia”–sequence wherein the stars of the show find their fantasies acted out through their small-screen vehicles. Where Bob Crane’s bizarre personal life appears to be truth, however (the crux of familial challenges of the film seem to hinge on Crane not being moody and never having had a penile implant), Barris’s contention that he split time between “The Gong Show” and being a fulltime CIA assassin gives considerably more pause. The real distinguishing quality of Confessions of a Dangerous Mind is that it is a big-budget biopic that acts as simultaneously a satire of, and adherent to, the familiar progression of the genre–the layers of self-reflexivity so multi-foliate and rich that it comes as no surprise that screenwriter Charlie Kaufman (Adaptation., Being John Malkovich) is the scribe responsible for its slipperiness.

The Hours (2002)

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

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

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

Catch Me If You Can (2002)

December 25, 2002Posted in****/****, 2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Comedy, Crime, Drama, Spielberg, Theatrical

****/****
starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Tom Hanks, Christopher Walken, Jennifer Garner
screenplay by Jeff Nathanson, based on the book by Frank W. Abagnale and Stan Redding
directed by Steven Spielberg

Catchmeifyoucanby Walter Chaw There’s an old Ray Bradbury story from 1948 called “Touch and Go” (since reprinted as “The Fruit at the Bottom of the Bowl”) that tells the tale of a burglar who surprises the homeowner in his house and accidentally kills him. Erasing his fingerprints from a few surfaces, the burglar panics and starts wiping objects in rooms he hadn’t visited and items, such as the fruit at the bottom of a bowl, he could not have handled. When the police find him hours later, he’s in the attic polishing old silverware. Like Bradbury’s thief, Spielberg is getting away with murder in most of his films post-Close Encounters of the Third Kind (particularly A.I., Minority Report, Schindler’s List, Empire of the Sun, and Saving Private Ryan) until self-doubt and paranoia consume him, seducing him to a fatal eleventh-hour appeal. Spielberg is the bad test-taker, changing his answers to damn his instincts.

Saint Monica (2002)

December 20, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Canada, Drama, Family, Theatrical

**½/****
starring Genevieve Buechner, Emanuel Arruda, Brigitte Bako, Krista Bridges
written and directed by Terrance Odette

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Saint Monica is a film with such an unshakeable belief in its naïve vision of the world that it somehow surpasses that vision’s obvious failure to reflect reality. While it would normally be hard to stomach its arbitrary and clichéd depiction of a “multicultural” milieu, to say nothing of its watered-down treatment of homelessness, director Terrance Odette’s total commitment to his vague assumptions and pseudo-politics makes the film an oddly touching experience. Odette has lavished such care and gentleness on his threadbare ideas that you don’t really mind its frequent lapses in judgement, and as it’s acted as well as can be expected with the often ludicrous material it just manages to squeak under the wire as a film that is “not without merit.”

Antwone Fisher (2002)

December 20, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Biopic, Drama, Theatrical

*½/****
starring Derek Luke, Joy Bryant, Denzel Washington, Salli Richardson
screenplay by Antwone Fisher
directed by Denzel Washington

Antwonefisherby Travis Mackenzie Hoover Taking one look at the cover of my press kit for Antwone Fisher, a critic friend of mine sneered and said simply, “Ah. Oprah meets Dr. Phil.” But he was more right than he could have ever imagined, because it’s the whole culture of obsessive therapy that gruesome twosome represents that poisons and kills what could have been a real movie. Instead of training its eye directly on the events that traumatized its eponymous lead (and real-life screenwriter), Antwone Fisher substitutes people talking about them in a therapy setting–a terrible mistake that robs the film of any dynamism and does little to distinguish it from the mountain of inspirational stories that pile up on daytime television.

Narc (2002)

December 20, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, Mystery, Theatrical, Thriller

***/****
starring Ray Liotta, Jason Patric, Chi McBride, Busta Rhymes
written and directed by Joe Carnahan

Narcby Walter Chaw Anchored by a powerhouse performance from Ray Liotta, Joe Carnahan’s Narc is a police procedural buddy psychodrama that reminds a great deal of Sidney Lumet’s underappreciated Q&A. The first film mounted in part by Liotta’s new production company, the film is fond of the kind of fluid tracking shots popularized by Martin Scorsese (and Goodfellas, as it happens) and has a crackling ear for dialogue that sadly doesn’t translate into a gift for monologue. Still, there’s a rough intelligence and visceral edge to the film–hewn from its tough-talking vernacular and graphic violence–that feels great in an era where both sides of the ratings divide: PG and R, are hell-bent on edging into the grey PG-13 arena where mental adolescents and the easily-diverted play. Narc works largely because it’s a mature film for adults, smoothing over some of the rough spots where the film begins to lose itself in a labyrinth of flashbacks and surprise revelations.

Personal Velocity (2002)

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

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

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