The Endurance: Shackleton’s Legendary Antarctic Expedition (2001)

August 6, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Documentary, Germany, Sweden, Theatrical, UK

***½/****
screenplay by Caroline Alexander and Joseph Dorman, based on the book by Alexander
directed by George Butler

by Walter Chaw If there seems to be a glut of information lately on Sir Ernest Shackleton and his ill-fated voyage across Antarctica, thank Caroline Alexander, who almost single-handedly revived interest in Shackleton’s travails by unearthing Aussie photographer Frank Hurley’s astonishing archive of photographs and short films after eighty years. Inspired in part by the death of legendary polar explorer Robert Falcon Scott, Shackleton and his crew of 28 set sail in August of 1914 in a three-masted barkentine dubbed “The Endurance.” Their quest, the last great trek of the age of exploration, was to be the first to cross Antarctica on foot, but The Endurance was trapped by pack ice about one day’s sail from the continent.

Spy Kids 2: Island of Lost Dreams (2002)

August 6, 2002Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Family, Sci-Fi, Theatrical

**½/****
starring Antonio Banderas, Carla Gugino, Alexa Vega, Daryl Sabara
written and directed by Robert Rodriguez

by Walter Chaw Owing to Robert Rodriguez’s infectious goodwill and delirious visual sensibility, Spy Kids 2: Island of Lost Dreams is the kind of children’s movie that respects a child’s imagination along with parental patience. Packed with invention from its opening theme park to its closing Island of Dr. Moreau, the picture is a three-pepper salsa that, for all its flashing gizmos and stop-motion monsters, suggests that the best gadget is a rubber band, and that the most important quest is one undertaken on behalf of a family member.

Rocco and His Brothers (1960)

August 2, 2002Posted in1960s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Crime, Drama, France, Italy, Sports, Theatrical

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

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

The Starz Independent FilmCenter Project, Vol. 11

August 2, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, Coming of Age, Crime, Drama, Teen, Theatrical

by Walter Chaw

SWIMMING (2002)
***/****
starring Lauren Ambrose, Jennifer Dundas Lowe, Joelle Carter, Josh Pais
screenplay by Lisa Bazadona, Robert J. Siegel, Grace Woodard
directed by Robert J. Siegel

An insightfully-written, delicately-performed coming-of-age piece that is good enough not to be cheapened by that genre appellation, Robert Siegel's Swimming captures one summer at tourist-filthy Myrtle Beach. (A film professor, Siegel directs his first feature here in some 20 years.) Frankie (Lauren Ambrose) works at her family's restaurant, right on the main drag next to childhood pal Nicola's (Jennifer Dundas) piercing parlour. Frankie's plain and pale, Nicola's brash and blonde; their banal day-to-day is interrupted by the introduction of floozy bombshell Josee (Joelle Carter), who begins as the standard catalytic plot device but ends as something complicated and possessed of unusual depth. The same could be said of the rest of the cast, from Dundas's volatility to Ambrose's amazingly transparent and tricky performance. Even-handedly negotiating the tricky shoals of hormone-addled actions and emotions, Swimming excels in presenting the sort of small-town yearning I most associate with Steve Earle's early production, the cruelty of teens on the make smartly presented with the same kind of nostalgic affection as the moment when a plain girl recognizes the strength of her decency and the inimitable quality of her difference. Observations of the ebbs and flows of adolescent angst are interesting in Swimming, though not interesting enough to make this charming adolescent melodrama resonate with the melancholia of Bogdanovich's similarly themed The Last Picture Show, and the picture runs out of steam with a goofy subplot involving a sweet-natured ganja-burner played by Jamie Harrold.

The Business of Fancydancing (2002)

August 2, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Music, Theatrical

**½/****
starring Evan Adams, Michelle St. John, Gene Tagaban, Swil Kanim
written and directed by Sherman Alexie

by Walter Chaw Reading a little like an anguished autobiography of a certain kind of success and the ethnic price of it, Sherman Alexie’s The Business of Fancydancing demands an examination of the compulsion to use “Native American author” as a prefix to Alexie’s name. It’s not a success in a conventional sense and that’s actually somewhat to its credit–having made a living as a Native American author with a mostly white readership, Alexie’s aim here seems to be one of defying traditional Western narrative forms in favour of the liquidity of a more aboriginal oral tradition. If its performances are uneven and some of its characters and events completely superfluous, The Business of Fancydancing gets a great deal of leeway based solely on the raw intimacy of Alexie’s uncompromising point of view.

Full Frontal (2002)

August 2, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Directors: Steven Soderbergh, Esoterica, Romance, Theatrical

*/****
starring Blair Underwood, Julia Roberts, David Hyde Pierce, Catherine Keener
screenplay by Coleman Hough
directed by Steven Soderbergh

Fullfrontalby Walter Chaw An experiment in perceptual distortion that questions the nature of viewership and the law of observation that states, in part, that the nature of the process of observation necessitates a change in the essential quality of the observed, Steven Soderbergh's Full Frontal is a hyper-pretentious film-within-a-film-within-a-film conceit so gimmicky it hardly matters that by the end gimmickry is its point. The picture begins with the opening of a fictional film called "Rendezvous" starring Calvin (Blair Underwood) and Francesca (Julia Roberts), written by Carl (David Hyde Pierce) and produced by Gus (David Duchovny), and as this "fake" film proceeds in perfectly acceptable 35mm, it is interrupted by long stretches of extremely grainy digital-video footage that purports to represent "reality."

The Master of Disguise (2002)

August 2, 2002Posted in2000s, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Family, Theatrical, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Dana Carvey, Mark Devine, Jennifer Esposito, Harold Gould
screenplay by Dana Carvey & Harris Goldberg
directed by Perry Andelin Blake

Masterofdisguiseby Walter Chaw Produced by Adam Sandler’s Happy Madison company and directed by one of Sandler’s sycophantic toadies (Perry Andelin Blake), The Master of Disguise is every bit as soul-sucking and painful as one of the comedian’s own plodding star vehicles. Graceless and dunderheaded, the film’s only message is that slapping people across the face is the best way to achieve empowerment, and its only reason for being is to serve as proof positive of the Peter Principle. Edited with a hacksaw and presenting an insipid child character (Austin Wolff) used for slapstick laughs before getting kicked to the curb, The Master of Disguise represents a lot of what’s wrong with movies in the United States today. That it happens to be the sequel-in-spirit of Dana Carvey’s “breakthrough” film Opportunity Knocks (1990) is what folks in the business call “sadistic.”

Martin Lawrence Live: Runteldat (2002)

August 2, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Concert Doc, Theatrical

½*/****
directed by David Raynr

by Walter Chaw The funniest five minutes of Martin Lawrence’s embarrassing concert diatribe Martin Lawrence Live: Runteldat (trans: “Run, Tell That”) occur in an opening video montage that recounts the troubled comedian’s arrest for shouting at traffic while brandishing a firearm and the time he fell into a coma while jogging wrapped in plastic wrap yet somehow overlooks the sexual harassment suit filed against him by former television co-star Tisha Campbell. After an hour of deadening material that fails to elicit one cross-cultural laugh, Lawrence returns to the topic of how members of the evil media (and critics) have done him wrong and then proceeds to admit that he was shouting at traffic because he was high as a kite, did indeed have a gun (just for self-defense, he assures, though intentionality is hard to gauge when one is “high as a kite”), and passed out from heat exhaustion during a jogging on the hottest day of the year (a wool skullcap is confessed; not so the cling-wrap). His confessions lead one to wonder how exactly the comedian believes he’s been misrepresented by the media.

The Starz Independent FilmCenter Project, Vol. 10

July 26, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, Romance, Theatrical, Thriller
by Walter Chaw READ MY LIPS (2001)Sur mes lèvres***½/****starring Vincent Cassel, Emmanuelle Devos, Olivier Gourmet, Olivia Bonamyscreenplay by Jacques Audiard and Tonino Benacquistadirected by Jacques Audiard Suffused with intelligence, courage, and the unmistakable taint of life, Jacques Audiard's remarkable Read My Lips is a brilliant picture with a few problems that, because they exist in so carefully structured a film, will probably iron themselves out under more careful reconsideration. At the bottom of a corporate jungle inhabited by wild boors, Carla (Emmanuelle Devos, winner of the 2001 Best Actress César for this film) is a kettle of repressed sexual desire…

Jan Dara (2001)

July 26, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Drama, Romance, Thailand, Theatrical

*½/****
starring Suwinit Panjamawat, Santisuk Promsiri, Christy Chung, Eakarat Sarsukh
screenplay by Nonzee Nimibutr, Sirapak Paoboonkerd, based on the novel The Story of Jan Dara by Utsana Phleungtham
directed by Nonzee Nimibutr

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover It’s a testament to the failure of Nonzee Nimibutr’s Jan Dara that it contains parental sex, adolescent sex, inter-generational sex, lesbian sex, light bondage sex, even ice-cube sex–and still manages to wear out its welcome. You’d think that with all that screwing, you couldn’t help but be a little titillated, but after half an hour of its melodramatic excesses, it wears on you so heavily that you may decide you have a headache and just go to bed. Sure, Jan Dara contains the sordid detail and shocking revelations that make for really good melodrama, but it turns them all on their head: Instead of releasing the madness that lurks beneath the surface, it chastely peels away the hysterical rind to suck on the virginal fruit beneath. For the sensualist likes of me, this is totally unacceptable, as it takes what could have been a rakish romp and makes it a hypocritical object lesson in the virtues of clean living.

Tadpole (2002)

July 25, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Coming of Age, Drama, Romance, Theatrical

**/****
starring Sigourney Weaver, Aaron Stanford, John Ritter, Bebe Neuwirth
screenplay by Heather McGowan & Neils Mueller
directed by Gary Winick

by Walter Chaw An underwritten indie The Graduate (a connection the film makes itself) that plays a little more like one of J.D. Salinger’s terrible short stories than like Wes Anderson’s dead brilliant Rushmore (which it aspires to be at every turn), Tadpole emerges as exactly the kind of self-conscious product that crowds equate, knee-jerk-like, with independent credibility. Buoyed at times by an occasional sweetness and Bebe Neuwirth’s fantastic performance as a hippie still flying her freak flag (or at least her free-love banner), Tadpole hints at what it might have been had it the courage to follow through on the ramifications of a fifteen-year-old boarding school Voltaire-quoting brat using the language of his absent mother to attempt to win his stepmother Eve (Sigourney Weaver) away from his ineffectual academic of a dad (John Ritter).

The Starz Independent FilmCenter Project, Vol. 9

July 20, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Crime, Documentary, Drama, France, Theatrical

by Walter Chaw

MURDEROUS MAIDS (2000)
Les Blessures assassines
***/****
starring Sylvie Testud, Julie-Marie Parmentier, Isabelle Renauld, Dominique Labourier
screenplay by Jean-Pierre Denis & Michèle Pétin, based on the novel L'affaire Papin by Paulette Houdyer
directed by Jean-Pierre Denis

Heavenly Creatures by way of Henry James, Jean-Pierre Denis's Murderous Maids–based on the true story of two sisters who, in 1933, murdered and mutilated the bodies of their employers in a small French town–is haunting and uncompromising. Denis proposes that taciturn Christine (Sylvie Testud) and open, elfin Léa (Julie-Marie Parmentier) were engaged in an incestuous relationship; that this relationship was founded on the basis of a deep resentment of a mother (Isabelle Renauld) who hired them out as housemaids and collected their salaries to fund her "love of life"; and that this relationship–arrested sexuality, repressed beneath a veneer of unbearable religiosity (a third sister, supposedly raped by a long-absent father, joins a convent) and the humiliations of the master/servant dynamic–eventually imploded into an orgy of bloodlust and madness. Denis's unwillingness to sensationalize (let alone explain) first incest and then murder results in a certain harshness that magnifies every bourgeoisie slight against the long-suffering proletariat into a potentially triggering event, yet also prevents very much in the way of suture with either the sisters or their eventual victims. The bloodletting made as sterile as the eroticism in an affectively airless chamber piece, Murderous Maids falls short of Claude Chabrol's brilliant La Cérémonie and Nancy Meckler's underseen Sister, My Sister, in that the same reserve that allows its actresses to shine (Testud, in particular) inhibits very much in the way of actual involvement or tension beyond a kind of clinical interest. Still, the weight of the piece, the unerring professionalism of the chilly production, and the fascination embedded in the lurid topic prove recommendation enough.

Trouble Every Day (2001)

July 20, 2002Posted in****/****, 2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: Claire Denis, Drama, France, Germany, Horror, Japan, Theatrical, Thriller, Vampire

****/****
starring Vincent Gallo, Tricia Vessey, Béatrice Dalle, Alex Descas
screenplay by Claire Denis & Jean-Pol Fargeau
directed by Claire Denis

by Walter Chaw Plaintive and sad, Claire Denis’s remarkable Trouble Every Day is a rare combination of honesty, beauty, and maybe even genius. It isn’t enough to say that the picture captures the barbarism festering at the core of gender dynamics, nor is it sufficient to express my frank amazement at how Denis subverts genre in ways perverse and powerful. Here’s a canny director who knows the vocabulary of cinema as well as the cruel poetics of sexual anthropology; perhaps it’s enough to say that Trouble Every Day captures something ineffably true about the sex act with images vital, frank, and unshakable.

Stuart Little 2 (2002)

July 19, 2002Posted in2000s, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Family, Theatrical

**/****
starring Michael J. Fox, Geena Davis, Hugh Laurie, Jonathan Lipnicki
screenplay by Bruce Joel Rubin
directed by Rob Minkoff

Stuartlittle2by Walter Chaw As boring as it is generally well-intentioned, Stuart Little 2 takes a page from the Hunchback of Notre Dame II playbook by presenting a wilting fatale with a heart of gold (Melanie Griffith voices a larcenous canary) adopted as an orphaned chick by an evil criminal mastermind (James Woods, speaking for a falcon) and infiltrating a kind family’s good graces for the purposes of pilfering. The family in question, based loosely on that described in E.B. White’s beloved Stuart Little, consists of a cheery mom (Geena Davis), a cheery dad (Hugh Laurie), an insipid kid with a giant head (Jonathan Lipnicki), and an adopted mouse named Stuart (voiced by Michael J. Fox), whom the Littles treat like one of their own. No wonder–Stuart can talk, wear clothes, walk upright, drive little toy cars and, in the standard sequel amplifications, fly a little toy airplane and fall in love with something outside his species.

The Starz Independent FilmCenter Project, Vol. 8

July 12, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, Mystery, Theatrical, Thriller
by Walter Chaw THE SALTON SEA (2002)**/****starring Val Kilmer, Vincent D'Onofrio, Doug Hutchison, Peter Sarsgaardscreenplay by Tony Gaytondirected by D.J. Caruso The Salton Sea opens with a trumpeter-in-Hell kind of thing, sort of a Chet Baker in Drugstore Cowboy image where Danny Parker (Val Kilmer) plays a mournful Miles in a cool hat while bundles of cold cash burn like little pyres to the bluesman's lost ideals. We know there'll be a dame he shouldn't have trusted (Deborah Kara Unger, beaten up on screen yet again) and a gallery of rogues fervid in their multiplicity of deformities (Vincent D'Onofrio's redneck…

Lola (1961)

July 8, 2002Posted in1960s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Drama, France, Italy, Romance, Theatrical

***½/****
starring Anouk Aimée, Marc Michel, Jacques Harden, Alan Scott
written and directed by Jacques Demy

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Lola is a film that makes froth do the work of genius. Like The Red Shoes and The Quiet Man, it’s one-hundred percent movie-movie horse manure, a series of contrived romantic adventures that elicits a velveteen agony no sensible adult could possibly mistake for the real thing. But just like those movies, it makes you think it’s doing more than its Leonard Maltin entry would otherwise suggest–and, in fact, does more than perhaps even creator Jacques Demy ever realized. In doting prettily on its collection of picturesque no-hopers, Lola manages to be profound in spite of itself; the film bestows a divine aesthetic light on people who would normally be passed over for attention, and in so doing gives their life a value that a social-realist film might degrade into a heap of misery.

The Starz Independent FilmCenter Project, Vol. 7

July 5, 2002Posted in1980s, 2000s, Best Picture (Academy Awards), Biopic, Czechoslovakia, Drama, France, Italy, Music, Theatrical

by Walter Chaw

PETER SHAFFER'S AMADEUS: DIRECTOR'S CUT (1984/2002)
***/****
starring F. Murray Abraham, Tom Hulce, Elizabeth Berridge, Simon Callow
screenplay by Peter Shaffer, based on his play
directed by Milos Forman

Bringing the highbrow to the status-hungry middle and lowbrow in the same way as those "Bach's Greatest Hits" collections and the awful faux-llies of Andrew Lloyd Weber, Milos Forman's bawdy, jittery adaptation of Peter Shaffer's fanciful play "Amadeus" is not so much about Mozart as it is about genius and its burden on the mediocre. Mozart (Tom Hulce) is an adolescent boor touched by the hand of God. Emperor Joseph's (Jeffrey Jones) court composer Salieri (F. Murray Abraham) becomes obsessed and desperately jealous of Mozart's gift, leading him to the madhouse and confessions of murder. Amadeus works because of Forman's gift for the seedy (and portraying asylums–he directed One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest) and Abraham's deeply-felt performance.

Diamond Men (2001)

July 4, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Theatrical, Thriller

**/****
starring Robert Forster, Donnie Wahlberg, Bess Armstrong, Jasmine Guy
written and directed by Dan Cohen

by Walter Chaw Much will be written about Robert Forster’s performance in Diamond Men, Dan Cohen’s sophomore hyphenate feature, and as Forster lands an executive producer credit (daughter Kate gets the “associate producer” tag), the veteran actor’s much-deserved critical buzz this time around is a product more of design than serendipity. That doesn’t lessen the picture as a nice vehicle for Forster’s hang-dog melancholia, the quality that Tarantino’s Jackie Brown used to magnificent effect (and the one with which David Lynch played in Forster’s tantalizing Mulholland Drive cameo), but what it does do is render Diamond Men unconvincing as a drama. It’s full of contrivances of the kind that cast a grimy patina over the rest of the film–a Things Change sort of deal where the line between positive senior characters and irritating grotesqueries makes the proceedings first unpleasant and then insufferable.

Men in Black II (2002)

July 4, 2002Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Spielberg, Theatrical, Will Smith

*/****
starring Tommy Lee Jones, Will Smith, Rip Torn, Rosario Dawson
screenplay by Robert Gordon and Barry Fanaro
directed by Barry Sonnenfeld

by Walter Chaw Coming in at just shy of eighty-five minutes, Barry Sonnenfeld’s Men in Black II is that breed of value-free summer entertainment–call it the “lacklustre blockbuster”–that gives mainstream movies a bad name. It’s all first act and no second or third, meaning everything that happens in the film would function as the set-up in a real film (see also: all of ‘Episodes‘ 1 and 2), and that its primary purpose is to act the whorish shill for product placement–never does the silver screen so resemble a bulletin board as when this variety of film drags itself into the googolplex. Special effects are asked to behave like character, motivation, and narrative while the actors paid exorbitant amounts to caper by themselves before a blue screen do their best not to cackle like Snidely Whiplash making off with burlap bags that have dollar signs painted on them. The audience is the damsel in distress in this flickering melodrama, tied to the railroad tracks as a great lumbering behemoth barrels down, the engineer asleep at the rudder.

The Powerpuff Girls Movie (2002)

July 2, 2002Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Family, Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Theatrical

The Powerpuff Girls
**/****
screenplay by Craig McCracken, Charlie Bean, Lauren Faust, Paul Rudish, Don Shank
directed by Craig McCracken

by Walter Chaw I remember this Nora Dunn skit on “Saturday Night Live” where she plays a French chanteuse draped over a piano singing “Send in the Clowns” translated into French and then back into English again. The result was incomprehensible and funny–for a while. Craig McCracken’s The Powerpuff Girls Movie (based on his Cartoon Network series “Powerpuff Girls”, natch) is American animation translated into Japanese animé back into American animation: similarly incomprehensible, not quite so funny, and it overstays its welcome, too. Because the humour of the piece is reliant on the slow burn and the extended take, when a joke doesn’t work there’s a lot of downtime (Men in Black II suffers a similar malady), and because most of the jokes don’t work, even for the bib-and-diaper set, at around seventy minutes The Powerpuff Girls Movie is powerfully boring stuff.