DIFF ’02: Far from Heaven (2002)

October 23, 2002Posted in****/****, 2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, DIFF/SDFF, Drama, Film Festivals, Romance, Theatrical

****/****
starring Julianne Moore, Dennis Quaid, Dennis Haysbert, Patricia Clarkson
written and directed by Todd Haynes

Farfromheavenby Walter Chaw Fascinating in its subversion of the conventions of the 1950s melodrama (Elmer Bernstein’s swooping score dead-solid in evoking that time and place), the halcyon euphoria of Todd Haynes’s Far from Heaven first surprises with its simplicity, then fascinates with its effectiveness. It is essentially a version of Douglas Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows (a title that itself speaks wryly about the Hays Code) that brings all of Sirk’s seething sexual subtext embarrassed to the front and centre. Taking that further, consider that if the subtext and text are flipped in Far from Heaven, then the artificiality of the film’s surfaces becomes the subtext to the sexual dysfunction. Haynes evokes Greek tragedy in the debunking of the fantasy of the golden, Golden Age nuclear family. He has crafted a pitch-black and hopeless picture, a torturous psychosexual exercise as played out by the Cleavers or Ozzie & Harriet.

Formula 51 (2001)

October 18, 2002Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

The 51st State
*/****
starring Samuel L. Jackson, Nigel Whitmey, Robert Jezek, Emily Mortimer
screenplay by Stel Pavlou
directed by Ronny Yu

by Walter Chaw Called The 51st State abroad, Formula 51‘s more redneck-friendly-sounding retitling can be read as an astonishing commentary on the Ronny Yu film itself. Astonishing because it implies not only that the picture is self-aware, but also that it has actually somehow identified which formula it adheres to by number–something that strikes me as terribly useful in a shorthand way.

Knockaround Guys (2002)

October 11, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, Theatrical, Thriller

**½/****
starring Barry Pepper, Vin Diesel, Seth Green, Andrew Davoli
written and directed by Brian Koppelman & David Levien

Knockaroundguysby Walter Chaw Counting on one’s desire to see a legendarily hammy actor–a pair of them in fact–unleashed without fetters onto the unsuspecting world with nary a warning, Knockaround Guys is a surprisingly likeable kitsch artifact that astounds for its casual pretension and dangerous level of cheese. The film has John Malkovich trying unsuccessfully to channel his Valmont through a Brooklyn-made Guido and Dennis Hopper still out of control in a role intended, I think, to be bookish. Gathering dust on the shelf for a year or so now, the picture is finding a release in the early-fall doldrums one presumes for the meteoric rise of Vin Diesel, but stealing the show, as he so often does, is veteran character actor Tom Noonan as a laconic, nowhere Montana sheriff.

The Rules of Attraction (2002)

October 11, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Esoterica, Germany, Romance, Theatrical

***½/****
starring James Van Der Beek, Shannyn Sossamon, Ian Somerhalder, Jessica Biel
screenplay by Roger Avary, based on the novel by Bret Easton Ellis
directed by Roger Avary

Rulesofattractionby Walter Chaw Roger Avary’s The Rules of Attraction jitters and grooves like a thing possessed. It’s a post-modern Less Than Zero based on a below-average book by nihilism wunderkind Bret Easton Ellis transformed by a pair of exceptional performances and the insouciant style of Avary (more, Avary’s one-time partner-in-crime Quentin Tarantino) into a portrait of college life feral and uncomfortable. It handles time and traditional narrative structures with an expert insolence and earns points besides for making a cunning pop cultural reference to Sheriff Buford Pusser and Walking Tall. It’s too smart to outsmart itself, then, juggling its in-references with a kind of casual offhandedness that allows the proscenium to be occupied by a surprisingly piquant trio of character sketches.

Trembling Before G-d (2001) + Satin Rouge (2002)

October 4, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Documentary, Drama, France, Israel, Musical, Theatrical, Tunisia

TREMBLING BEFORE G-D
**½/****
directed by Sandi Simcha Dubowski

Red Satin
**/****
starring Hiyam Abbas, Hend El Fahem, Maher Kammoun, Monia Hichri
written and directed by Raja Amari

by Walter Chaw “Leah” and “Malka” are a lesbian couple whose names have been changed and faces obscured (a fey conceit that begins to grate with the use of potted plants) to protect identities that appear, for all intents and purposes, to already be “outed”–at least before their families and their rabbi. David, after struggling for a dozen years with his homosexuality, returns to visit his childhood rabbi, a genuinely kind man whom we manage to forget once advised David to snap himself with rubber bands whenever he had a “gay” thought. Then you have Mark, HIV positive, English, and terminally unfocused, and Schlomo, so outspoken and demented that it’s surprising we still muster sympathy when he gets a pathetically dissociative telephone call from his two decades-estranged father.

Skins (2002)

September 27, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, Theatrical

*/****
starring Eric Schweig, Graham Greene, Gary Farmer, Noah Watts
screenplay by Jennifer D. Lyne, based on the novel by Adrian C. Louis
directed by Chris Eyre

by Walter Chaw There is palpable desperation in Skins, director Chris Eyre’s broad follow-up to his well-received Smoke Signals, but that desperation is not so much a reflection of the plight of the film’s Native American characters as a result of Eyre’s yen to expose the tragedy of the Native American experience. Skins is far from an effective exposé of the calamity of the Ogallala Sioux–it founders badly as a pulpit-pounding vanity piece, playing its cards loose and proselytizing. A picture this badly written, transparently directed, and–save a pair of decent performances in its two main roles–dreadfully acted is a tune best received and appreciated by a very specific choir and likely no other. While a nearly all-Native American cast and crew is certainly a refreshing accomplishment, one is left to wonder if the picture needed to be so much specifically for an all-Native American audience–and a limited one at that. Skins, in other words, is a pretty good rant, but a pretty bad movie.

Igby Goes Down (2002)

September 26, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Germany, Theatrical

**/****
starring Kieran Culkin, Susan Sarandon, Jeff Goldblum, Claire Danes
written and directed by Burr Steers

Igbygoesdownby Walter Chaw A battle between bug-eye theatre and dead-eye matinee, Igby Goes Down represents another post-Rushmore neo-Salinger debut (from hyphenate Burr Steers, nephew of Gore Vidal) that places an anti-establishment fish in a prep-school pond and surrounds him with a florid panoply of castrating mothers, Oedipal complexities, and evil schoolmates. In attempting to find new material in a genre that seems mostly played out (and played better by Wes Anderson and Alexander Payne), Igby Goes Down is another desperately overwritten Stygian coming-of-age melodrama à la another recent Kieran Culkin angst flick, The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys.

The Tuxedo (2002)

September 26, 2002Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Jackie Chan, Martial Arts, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller

*/****
starring Jackie Chan, Jennifer Love Hewitt, Jason Isaacs, Debi Mazar
screenplay by Michael J. Wilson and Michael Leeson
directed by Kevin Donovan

Tuxedoby Walter Chaw Between watching Jennifer Love Hewitt’s breasts consistently upstage her (and be constantly commented upon besides) and Jackie Chan try hard to erase his legacy as the best physical comedian of the talkies, it’s tempting to declare that The Tuxedo is a bankrupt entertainment and a remorseless time pit. Tempting and not entirely inaccurate, but in truth The Tuxedo is more than just cheerfully misogynistic (and most of Chan’s films are, in one way or another, woman-hating), cartoonish, and even racist in a Green Hornet/Kato sort of way–The Tuxedo is a symptom of a far deeper concern involving the inability of the West to ever make proper use of hijacked foreign commodities or construct an action film anymore that doesn’t resort to slapstick childishness and/or grotesque violence.

Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever (2002)

September 20, 2002Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Germany, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Antonio Banderas, Lucy Liu, Roger R. Cross, Ray Park
screenplay by Peter M. Lenkov and Alan B. McElroy
directed by Kaos

Ballisticby Walter Chaw Walking away with the title of Most Incomprehensible Film of 2002 (walking away is also, incidentally, what you should do when presented with the prospect of seeing this film), Wych Kaosayananda’s ponderously branded Ballistic: Ecks Vs. Sever is a collection of puzzling explosions married to a series of alternately stunning and hilarious line deliveries of, to be fair, unspeakable exposition. It hopes to obscure its awfulness with its volume or, failing that, to dress up its stupidity with backlit shots of a woman communing with a captive manatee.

The Château (2002)

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

**/****
starring Paul Rudd, Romany Malco, Didier Flamand, Sylvie Testud
written and directed by Jesse Peretz

by Walter Chaw A comedy of manners and the almighty malapropism, Jesse Peretz’s grainy DV picture The Château could almost be a dogme95 flick. The picture relies on acres of improvisation and that slapdash feeling of the seat-of-the-pants production hanging from a Jonathan Edwards-ian string over the abyss of self-indulgence and clattering dreariness–and succeeds, when it succeeds, based entirely on the timing and brilliance of its cast and the extent to which we remain disarmed by the incongruity of the setting with the subject. When that feeling of surprise and delight fades (and it fades midway), The Château‘s rough edges begin to show.

Mostly Martha (2002)

September 20, 2002Posted in2000s, Austria, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Germany, Italy, Romance, Switzerland, Theatrical

Bella Martha
**½/****
starring Martina Gedeck, Maxime Foerste, Sergio Castellitto, August Zirner
written and directed by Sandra Nettelbeck

by Walter Chaw A Bavarian Big Night, Sandra Nettelbeck’s Mostly Martha joins a romantic-comedy premise with a lost-child scenario, setting it all to a leisurely pace and framing it with an eye for the handsome. Its sightlines as crisp and clean as the dishes chef Martha creates in her immaculate kitchen, the picture is as relaxed a viewing experience as any this year–a dish without many exotic ingredients (like a good Salmon dish, the film tells us), but just enough substance to forgive the froth.

The Four Feathers (2002)

September 20, 2002Posted in2000s, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Romance, Theatrical, UK, War

*½/****
starring Heath Ledger, Wes Bentley, Kate Hudson, Djimon Hounsou
screenplay by Michael Schiffer and Hossein Amini, based on the novel by A.E.W. Mason
directed by Shekhar Kapur

Fourfeathers2002by Walter Chaw An old-fashioned epic of the type only Bombay attempts anymore, The Four Feathers (directed by a Bollywood ex-pat, natch: Shekhar Kapur)–the fifth film version of A.E.W. Mason’s turn-of-the-century, Count of Monte Cristo-flavoured tale of valour, redemption, and derring-do–is indicated by a feather-lightness at its heart that undermines the sweeping, operatic pretensions of the piece. The picture just doesn’t possess the kind of gravity that would hold together its broad strokes and gaping panoramas; all that remains is youngsters playing at dress-up, Kate Hudson cycling through both of her expressions, and one war set-piece that is very simply breathtaking while succumbing to nearly every “arrogant officer folds, religious soldier freaks, valiant soldier tragically wounded” cliché in the travel-worn war-movie book.

Stealing Harvard (2002)

September 13, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Theatrical

*½/****
starring Jason Lee, Tom Green, Leslie Mann, Dennis Farina
screenplay by Peter Tolan
directed by Bruce McCulloch

Stealingharvardby Walter Chaw A virtual clone of Jake Kasdan’s Orange County, Bruce McCulloch’s Stealing Harvard takes the same premise (low-aspiring kids get a chance at a prestigious school), the same quirky sensibility, and the same characters (Jason Lee fills in for Colin Hanks, Tom Green for Jack Black, and Leslie Mann (who is also in Orange County) for Schuyler Fisk), and does considerably less with them. Taken as bookends to 2002 up to the awards season or as a peculiarly precise comparison of how minor differences in screenplay, director, and cast can subtly push a somewhat dreary premise into a vaguely good film or a vaguely bad one, Stealing Harvard at its heart remains a picture that never finds a way to balance the laconic style of Lee with the erratic jitter of Green. Its inability to find any sort of cohesiveness (the same malady afflicting Albert Brooks’s and Brendan Fraser’s The Scout) dooms Stealing Harvard to long stretches of irritating torpor punctuated by the occasional line delivery that reminds, mainly, that Megan Mullally (as a character straight out of Drop Dead Gorgeous) has impeccable comic timing.

City by the Sea (2002)

September 6, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, Mystery, Robert De Niro, Theatrical, Thriller

*/****
starring Robert De Niro, Frances McDormand, James Franco, Eliza Dushku
screenplay by Ken Hixon, based on an article by Michael McAlary
directed by Michael Caton-Jones

by Walter Chaw Leaden with mock gravitas and embarrassing aspirations to the Shakespearean, Michael Caton-Jones’s aggressively uninteresting City by the Sea is a purported true story (based on an article by Michael McAlary) that proves to be just another by-the-numbers police procedural crunched with an abortive middle-age romance and a stultifying Oedipal complication. Opening with archive newsreel footage of Long Beach as a place of fun and hope before juxtaposing the burnt-out crack-house dead wonderland of the Long Beach of just a couple of years ago (a conceit carried out with far more grace in Stacy Peralta’s Dogtown and Z-Boys), the picture quickly reveals itself to be infatuated with a certain kind of dramatic irony in which the stock characters are unaware that they are clumsy allegorical pawns in a metaphorical landscape.

Little Secrets (2002)

August 23, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Family, Music, Theatrical

*/****
starring Evan Rachel Wood, Michael Angarano, David Gallagher, Vivica A. Fox
screenplay by Jessica Barondes
directed by Blair Treu

by Walter Chaw I fear that Blair Treu’s Little Secrets is the latest picture to fall victim to my predisposition against insipid and trite films. The problem with my bias in this instance is that there is a considerable segment of the middle-class population at large that seems particularly enamoured with such fare, particularly as it manifests under the aegis of “family entertainment” or Meg Ryan movies. It’s only a problem, I hasten to add, because I hate arguing with the upper-reaching bourgeoisie–there is no good way, after all, to explain to the fuzzily intractable why a self-pitying adopted girl who makes money like Lucy from the “Peanuts” strip while staying home to practice violin in anticipation of an orchestra tryout is more suited for the dinosaur prose of big-print Beverly Clearys than for the voluntary consumption of any self-respecting human being.

Serving Sara (2002)

August 23, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Germany, Romance, Theatrical, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Matthew Perry, Elizabeth Hurley, Vincent Pastore, Bruce Campbell
screenplay by Jay Scherick & David Ronn
directed by Reginald Hudlin

Servingsaraby Walter Chaw Reginald Hudlin’s Serving Sara is a miserable, listless, pathetic excuse for a movie. It’s already dreadful by the time Matthew Perry finds himself shoulder-deep in a bull’s rectum, after which it defies a few natural laws by somehow getting worse. There are no laughs to be found in the whole of this lugubrious shipwreck–even the sight of Perry getting the tar beaten out of him by a pair of Italian caricatures is a sour, joyless affair. Seeing as being physically humiliated is Perry’s sole silver-screen reason for being (see also: The Whole Nine Yards), that his getting kicked and punched is not ever at all amusing says a great deal about the relentless excrescence of this exercise. I would add that at least it’s better than the amazingly awful Perry vehicle Almost Heroes, except that it’s not.

24 Hour Party People (2002)

August 23, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Comedy, Drama, Music, Theatrical

***½/****
starring Steve Coogan, Keith Allen, Rob Brydon, Enzo Cilenti
screenplay by Frank Cottrell Boyce
directed by Michael Winterbottom

by Walter Chaw Inviting direct comparisons to Todd Haynes’s ebullient Velvet Goldmine with a flying saucer, Michael Winterbottom’s brilliant 24 Hour Party People apes, too, a great deal of the style and tone from that film: insouciant, arch, and invested in giving over the stage to the zeitgeist of an era through its youth culture and its music. 24 Hour Party People distinguishes itself, however, with a flip, post-modern absurdism that includes asides to the camera (“I’m being post-modern before it became popular”) and a certain self-awareness that somehow encapsulates the discursive, free-associative madness of Factory Records founder Tony Wilson (Steve Coogan). Beginning with The Sex Pistols‘ first performance in 1976 before a rapt crowd of 42 people, the picture takes on a dizzying kind of animal logic, stalking the fortunes of the “New Wave” Manchester ethos of Joy Division (into the band they became, New Order), Happy Mondays, the Hacienda dance club, and, most importantly, Wilson himself–part huckster, part savant. All along, Wilson cues us that the world is about to change and that this band of brothers, this group of bouncing, sullen, devotees to a new punk energy, are the men who will change it.

Possession (2002)

August 15, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Mystery, Romance, Theatrical

*/****
starring Gwyneth Paltrow, Aaron Eckhart, Jeremy Northam, Jennifer Ehle
screenplay by David Henry Hwang and Laura Jones and Neil LaBute, based on the novel by A.S. Byatt
directed by Neil LaBute

by Walter Chaw There’s the seed of an interesting idea in Neil LaBute’s Possession–something traceable to A.S. Byatt’s melodramatic novel of the same name: the film’s one clumsily extended trope that it is about keepsakes and the desire for memento mori and memento amor as it manifests amongst intellectuals. That this seed never germinates, limping along before being crushed beyond recognition by an unforgivable grave-robbing sequence is due to LaBute’s icy disconnection (badly misplaced here) and the horrific realization that Possession is two stultifying formulas vying for screentime.

Happy Times (2000)

August 15, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, China, Comedy, Drama, Theatrical

幸福时光
Happy Time
*½/****
starring Benshan Zhao, Jie Dong, Biao Fu, Xuejian Li
directed by Zhang Yimou

by Walter Chaw Titled in the same serio-ironic vein as Giuseppe Tornatore’s Everybody’s Fine, Zhang Yimou’s Happy Times aspires for the piquant but only really achieves a sort of ridiculous sourness. It’s a misunderstanding of irony taken to an Alanis Morrisetteian extreme; far from the eventuality being the opposite of the expected, the outcome of Happy Times is the worst kind of cliché, and its execution is so blunt compared to the sharp satirical barb of Yimou’s own Ju Dou that I wonder if Gong Li wasn’t the brains in that long lamented relationship. Still, what works in Happy Times is what has worked in this director’s best work (Shanghai Triad, Raise the Red Lantern, Red Sorghum): mordant social critique so far removed from realism that its status as political allegory is as subtle as a neon sign and a crack to the noggin.

xXx (2002)

August 9, 2002Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Theatrical, Thriller

**/****
starring Vin Diesel, Samuel L. Jackson, Asia Argento, Martin Csokas
screenplay by Rich Wilkes
directed by Rob Cohen

Xxxby Walter Chaw The first film of the summer to actually make my ears bleed, Rob Cohen’s xXx is a lightshow wrapped around an idiot plot that may or may not become a franchise based entirely on how hungry audiences are for another poorly-made boom-boom fest and how susceptible they are to a marketing machine intent on repackaging a cheap updating of Condorman as “the next James Bond.” Vin Diesel (apparently separated at birth from his sister, David Schwimmer) plays monosyllabic Neanderthal Xander “my friends call me ‘X'” Cage, an extreme-sports political activist who steals conservative senators’ cars and drives them off bridges with pal Tony Hawk. When a dapper tuxedoed NSA (don’t ask) agent is assassinated at an industrial concert in Prague, lone wolf spymaster Gus Gibbons (Samuel L. Jackson, in Batman supervillain Two-Face makeup) does a Dirty Dozen and recruits the shadowy agency’s next superagent from a pool of dangerous criminals.