Gangs of New York (2002)

Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Directors: Martin Scorsese, Drama, Theatrical

*½/****
starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Daniel Day-Lewis, Cameron Diaz, Jim Broadbent
screenplay by Jay Cocks and Steven Zaillian and Kenneth Lonergan
directed by Martin Scorsese

Gangsofnewyorkby Walter Chaw Beginning as Martin Scorsese’s Apocalypse Now, Gangs of New York, at the end of the auteur’s thirty-year dream of it, more resembles his Titanic. Buoyed on a tsunami of dark rumours of behind-the-scenes clashes (the line “Please don’t make that sound again, Harvey” registering as either a jab or a plea to Miramax head Harvey Weinstein), eleventh-hour cuts, and release delays pushing the film nearly a year from its projected release date, the picture is a booming, period-exact mess: disinteresting, unbalanced, and burdened by the weight of too much ambition blinding an artist to his celluloid offspring’s congenital, mortal defects–hubris redefined for the postmodern age. Though sprawling, it reduces to a series of vaguely connected dramatic snippets that largely fail to anchor the film to any specific place (the exception being a visually, viscerally arresting stream of coffins unloaded from ships ferrying the dead from the frontlines of the Civil War). It’s a malady exacerbated by the fact that the same five or six characters–played, with one stunning exception, as tepid variations on banal–seem to be everywhere in New York at all times.

The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002)

Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Fantasy, New Zealand, Theatrical

***/****
starring Elijah Wood, Ian McKellen, Viggo Mortensen, Sean Astin
screenplay by Fran Walsh & Philippa Boyens & Peter Jackson, based on the novel by J.R.R. Tolkien
directed by Peter Jackson

Twotowersby Walter Chaw Suffering from the problems inherent in split narratives, Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (hereafter The Two Towers), at least for its first half, is disjointed and overreliant on a familiarity with not only the first film (which is essential), but also the Tolkien source material. Furthermore, the first cracks in Jackson’s conversance with CGI begin to show in the entirely animated Gollum character (a creature that bears an uncanny resemblance to Steve Buscemi), and too much time is given over to characters standing around looking at digital phantoms. Unlike its predecessor (The Fellowship of the Ring), The Two Towers feels too long by half despite the elision of key scenes from the source tome; the picture only picks up during its last ninety minutes, and then only as an unusually well-crafted action spectacle largely lacking in the nuance, pathos, and sharply-drawn characterizations of the first film.

Equilibrium (2002)

Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Christian Bale, Emily Watson, Taye Diggs, Angus MacFadyen
written and directed by Kurt Wimmer

Equilibriumby Walter Chaw After cutting his teeth as a director on the Brian Bosworth vehicle One Tough Bastard, Kurt Wimmer proves himself grotesquely unprepared for his hyphenate debut: the futuristic stink-fest Equilibrium, starring Christian Bale, Emily Watson, and Taye Diggs. Set in the post-apocalypse via a series of tired title cards and voice-overs, the film is immediately recognizable as an ironically illiterate rip-off of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 and George Lucas’s Aldous Huxley photocopy THX-1138. Pulling scenes entire from Blade Runner, Citizen Kane, and The Matrix while pulling philosophies entire from–yes, I was surprised, too–Gymkata, Equilibrium is another Dimension genre film made for no money that stinks a lot like Gary Fleder’s excrescent Impostor from earlier this year, though it somehow manages to be considerably funnier.

Analyze That (2002)

Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Drama, Robert De Niro, Theatrical

*/****
starring Robert De Niro, Billy Crystal, Lisa Kudrow, Joe Viterelli
screenplay by Peter Steinfeld and Harold Ramis and Peter Tolan
directed by Harold Ramis

Analyzethatby Walter Chaw The first mistake that directors make with actors who need to get brought up sharply against the reins now and again is that they sometimes request of them to feign that which they already are. Case in point is asking Robin Williams to be a gibbering velvet clown, asking Melanie Griffith to be a side of beef with a Betsy-Wetsy voice, and now asking Robert De Niro to feign mental illness and sociopathic tendencies. De Niro jumping on a table and singing selections from West Side Story isn’t one of those cinematic moments for the ages, but rather one of the more tragic examples of self-delusion and career torpor.

A Picture of Sam Jones Goes Here: FFC Interviews Sam Jones

Posted in****/****, 2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Documentary, Interviews, Music, Theatrical

December 1, 2002|An accomplished photographer whose work has been featured in ESQUIRE, GQ, VANITY FAIR, and ROLLING STONE, Sam Jones makes his directorial debut with the raw, fantastic music documentary I Am Trying to Break Your Heart, which follows alt-country band Wilco as they complete their album “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot.” Shot in Super16 and resembling such seminal rock-docs as Don’t Look Back, Jones’s debut is a superbly-crafted, expertly-paced piece that details the band as they’re dropped by their record label, lose a key member, and struggle through the agonies and ecstasies of creation and commerce. The picture impresses most with the universality of its themes, hitting narrative highs and lows that have nothing to do with a familiarity with the band in question. All the same, fans should be well pleased with Jones’s photographer’s eye as he captures the musicians at work in their small loft and from behind the mixing board.

A Grin Without a Cat (1977/1993)

Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Documentary, Esoterica, France, Theatrical

Le fond de l’air est rouge
***/****
directed by Chris Marker

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Chris Marker lays down the theme of A Grin Without a Cat fairly early on. As he intercuts the Odessa Steps sequence of Battleship Potemkin with more recent footage of police clashing with protesters, he centres on one of Eisenstein’s navy men calling out one word: “Brotherhood!” Brotherhood, unfortunately, is a tricky thing to achieve when you’re trying to pull together the left, and Marker’s three-hour quasi-documentary opus gives disappointed testimony on the revolution that almost happened in May of ’68, when it looked as though the old and new left were about to conquer France and the world until the movement collapsed in confusion and indifference.

Solaris (2002)

Posted in****/****, 2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: Steven Soderbergh, Drama, Esoterica, Mystery, Romance, Sci-Fi, Theatrical

****/****
starring George Clooney, Natascha McElhone, Jeremy Davies, Viola Davis
screenplay by Steven Soderbergh, based on the novel by Stanislaw Lem
directed by Steven Soderbergh

by Walter Chaw Steven Soderbergh's best film since sex, lies, and videotape (and the film most like it in theme and execution), Solaris is a moving, hypnotic adaptation of the classic Stanislaw Lem novel, which was first made into a film in 1972 by Andrei Tarkovsky. Co-produced by James Cameron's company Lightstorm, Solaris fits loosely into Ridley Scott's Alien future with its monolithic "Company" and the need for a specialist to infiltrate a corrupted interstellar outpost–a future Cameron plumbed in 1986 with his modern genre classic Aliens. But Solaris is less a science-fiction film than it is an existentialist melodrama that, by winnowing itself down to the fierce romanticism at the heart of Lem's novel (and Tarkovsky's trance-like adaptation), locates the core issues of identity and love that plague the dark hours.

Rabbit-Proof Fence (2002)

Posted in2000s, Adventure, Australia, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Drama, Road Movie, Theatrical

***/****
starring Everlyn Sampi, Tianna Sansbury, Laura Monaghan, David Gulpilil
screenplay by Christine Olsen, based on the book Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence by Doris Pilkington
directed by Phillip Noyce

by Walter Chaw A very small story set on a very large stage, Phillip Noyce’s affecting Rabbit-Proof Fence is perhaps the most visually beautiful film of the director’s career, proving between this and his other movie from this year, the Graham Greene adaptation The Quiet American, that not only is it possible to go home again (as in Noyce to Australia) but also that it’s often wise. Shot on a minimal budget (in the six-million dollar range) with a cast of largely non-professional actors (Kenneth Branagh the main exception), the picture is a tremendous hit among the self-congratulatory film festival/arthouse crowd, who, after all, like to feel as though they’re applauding the right things.

The Quiet American (2002)

Posted in2000s, Australia, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Drama, France, Germany, Romance, Theatrical, Thriller, UK, Vietnam, War

***/****
starring Michael Caine, Brendan Fraser, Do Thi Hai Yen, Rade Sherbedgia
screenplay by Christopher Hampton and Robert Schenkkan, based on the novel by Graham Greene
directed by Phillip Noyce

Quietamericanby Walter Chaw Walking a fine line between nostalgia and regret, irony and earnestness, Philip Noyce’s The Quiet American, adapted from the novel by Graham Greene, is a lovely film that captures, like Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, the delicate balance between romance in the immediate foreground and the backdrop of war and politics. Evoking the colonial decay of Greene’s work while evincing one of the best performances of Michael Caine’s career, The Quiet American stars Caine as a British journalist in Vietnam who falls in a hopeless kind of love with a beautiful girl a third his age. His subsequent desperation and jealousy feel real; take note of an anguished scene in a bathroom stall–Caine suddenly seems to be getting better with every role.

The Orphan of Anyang (2001)

Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, China, Drama, Theatrical

**½/****
starring Liu Tianhao, Miao Fuwen, Sun Guilin, Yue Sengyi
written and directed by Wang Chao

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover I feel pain when I have to pan movies like Wang Chao’s The Orphan of Anyang. It’s a film that has absolutely no bad faith on the part of the filmmaker–he wanted to show a slice of Chinese life the censors wouldn’t normally show, and that’s exactly what he does. But his conception is so sparse and so dour that it winds up capsizing these good intentions, resulting in an underwritten and acquiescent film in which we can’t identify the characters beyond their functions in the narrative. It’s not a film that makes you angry at having been cheated, it just makes you numb with anomie and disconnected from the action onscreen–surely not what was intended.

Friday After Next (2002)

Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Christmas, Comedy, Drama, Theatrical

½*/****
starring Ice Cube, Mike Epps, John Witherspoon, Don ‘D.C.’ Curry
screenplay by Ice Cube
directed by Marcus Raboy

by Walter Chaw Because there is no plot save the scrambling for rent money that has been stolen from the Abbot and Costello-ian pairing of Ice Cube and Michael Epps, the closest one might come to a description of Friday After Next‘s narrative would involve the running gag of a Santa Claus bandit who breaks into homes to steal presents and beat people with Christmas trees (maybe inspired by Eddie Murphy’s Mr. Robinson’s Neighborhood Christmas sketch). Rather than take the easy road and talk about how much Friday After Next hates women and homosexuals, it’s perhaps more fruitful to play along and regard the film, the long-awaited conclusion (?) to Ice Cube’s Friday trilogy, as an accurate reflection of the sensibilities of the African-American culture in regards to women and homosexuals.

Ararat (2002)

Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Canada, Directors: Atom Egoyan, Drama, France, Theatrical, War

**/****
starring David Alpay, Charles Aznavour, Eric Bogosian, Brent Carver
written and directed by Atom Egoyan

Araratby Travis Mackenzie Hoover The problem with Atom Egoyan’s Ararat is not that it takes a hard stance about the Armenian Genocide, but that it avoids taking a hard stance about what to do with that hard stance. While the writer-director takes great pains to show how various approaches to historical memory can be twisted through suspect convention or personal hurt, he neither offers a process that might actually do the job nor feels confident that anyone could–an impasse that ironically condemns his own film to be one more body on a pile of dangerous irrelevances. So frightened is Egoyan that he’ll make a mistake that he builds layer after layer of distanciation, trying to build a theoretical machine that will absolve him from the responsibility of mapping a position; the results backfire spectacularly, making the slaughter of a million-plus people, seen distantly through the film’s fish-eye lens, even more of a footnote than before.

Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (2002)

Posted in2000s, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Family, Fantasy, Mystery, Theatrical, UK

***½/****
starring Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint, Emma Watson, Kenneth Branagh
screenplay by Steven Kloves, based on the novel by J.K. Rowling
directed by Chris Columbus

Harrypotterchamberby Walter Chaw Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (hereafter Harry Potter 2) treats its audience with respect while comporting itself with intelligence, wit, and passion. The things missing from the first film have been satisfactorily addressed in the second: the crucial racial bullying subplot; the unfortunate attention on special effects as spectacle; and the lamentable lack of character development. Perhaps most importantly, the sense of darkness and fear endemic to any great children’s story has been honoured in the sequel. I completely expected to dislike Harry Potter 2 (as I disdain the films of Chris Columbus in general and Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s/Philosopher’s Stone in particular), but the picture is more winningly indicative of screenwriter Steve Kloves’s (The Fabulous Baker Boys, Flesh and Bone) dark character studies than of Columbus’s childish desire for frothy restorations of a nuclear order.

Glass Skies (1958) + Valley of the Bees (1968)

Posted in1950s, 1960s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Czechoslovakia, Drama, Short Films, Theatrical

Sklenená oblaka
Clouds of Glass
***½/****
directed by Frantisek Vlácil

Údolí vcel
***/****
starring Petr Cepek, Jan Kacer, Vera Galatíková, Zdenek Kryzánek
screenplay by Vladimír Körner and Frantisek Vlácil
directed by Frantisek Vlácil

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover I approach this review with trepidation. It’s hard to judge two films by a director when a) he’s completely unheard of in this country, and b) you’re shown different times and places in his career, but such is the issue of my having seen a short and a feature by Frantisek Vlácil in preparation for an upcoming Cinematheque Ontario retrospective. The lack of noted scholarship on the subject gives one no background to help understand him, and while one can relate him to his godfather status to the 1960s Czech New Wave, his smooth and chilly style relates little to the shaggy-dog feel of his cinematic descendants. So I must look over my shoulder and say that he’s a man of some talent, to be sure, but with some obvious ideas that weigh him down; while Vlácil’s good in a professional sense, he doesn’t know how to make images come alive with the same meaning as the narrative drive, giving his films a hard sheen that clamps down on sensuality. He’s more than a schlepper but less than a master, worth one look but hardly a second thought.

I Spy (2002)

Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Eddie Murphy, Hungary, Theatrical, Thriller

*/****
starring Eddie Murphy, Owen Wilson, Famke Janssen, Malcolm McDowell
screenplay by Marianne Sellek Wibberley & Cormac Wibberley and David Ronn & Jay Scherick
directed by Betty Thomas

Ispyby Walter Chaw The best bit of dialogue in Betty Thomas’s abysmal I Spy, a film saddled with a hack director and a too-many-cooks scenario that translates adroitly into the screenwriting process (the script is credited to Marianne Wibberley, Cormac Wibberley, Jay Scherick, and David Ronn), is a bit where Eddie Murphy “Cyranos” Owen Wilson to the tune of Marvin Gaye’s “Sexual Healing.” That out of a mercifully brief 90-minute film the best moment comes courtesy a cheap gag involving an R&B classic and a flash of panty is, really, statement enough about the wisdom and ingenuity of the entire enterprise. Proof positive, if more proof is needed of the fecklessness of this shipwreck, is the fact that Wilson, easily the most gifted screenwriter on set, was not among the many asked to put pen to paper for I Spy.

Heaven (2002)

Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, France, Germany, Italy, Romance, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

***½/****
starring Cate Blanchett, Giovanni Ribisi, Remo Girone, Stefania Rocca
screenplay by Krzysztof Kieslowski, Krzysztof Piesiewicz
directed by Tom Tykwer

Heavenby Walter Chaw There is something of the alchemical when two disparate talents discover that their collaboration is inspired. It is an inkling of the excitement at the promise of A.I. with Kubrick’s misanthropy and Spielberg’s cult of childhood–or the pop-cultural satisfaction embedded in the narrative genius of Stephen King mixing easily with the stiff overwriting of Peter Straub. Heaven is the product of a screenplay by the late Krzysztof Kieslowski (and writing partner Krzysztof Piesiewicz) and surprisingly sedate direction by previously hyperactive wunderkind director Tom Tykwer. The result is another of Tykwer’s unpredictable romances blending with another of Kieslowski’s carefully metered, studiously non-didactic discussions of morality and consequence. The result of their union is often amazing.

DIFF ’02: Far from Heaven (2002)

Posted 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)

Posted 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)

Posted 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)

Posted 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.