The Four Feathers (2002)

Posted 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)

Posted 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)

Posted 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)

Posted 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)

Posted 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)

Posted 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)

Posted 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)

Posted 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)

Posted 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.

Dahmer (2002)

Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Crime, Drama, Horror, Theatrical, Thriller

**½/****
starring Jeremy Renner, Bruce Davison, Artel Kayaru, Matt Newton
written and directed by David Jacobson

by Walter Chaw Well-acted but without a point-of-view, hyphenate David Jacobson’s sophomore feature Dahmer is less biopic than Arthouse Exploitation Lite, a curiously uninvolving glimpse into the banal life and times of a serial murderer. Rather than portray the stalking and vivisection of man as grotesquely vapid (like its more successful brothers Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer or The Untold Story), Dahmer chooses that same all-too-familiar docudrama frankness to illustrate a sick man’s loneliness and inability to make a true connection with another human being. It’s not attempting to humanize Dahmer so much as it’s attempting to elevate Dahmer to the level of great post-modern anti-hero: unromantic, unexceptional, and unmoored, utterly, from moral responsibility–Beavis playing frog baseball with a holy trinity of representative pretty-boy victims. Even its end title card, reporting (we infer “mournfully”) that the titular bogey was murdered just two years into his 1,070-year sentence by a fellow inmate, seems intended as an epitaph for a misunderstood prophet rather than a declaration of karma asserting itself, penitentiary-style.

The Good Girl (2002)

Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, Drama, Germany, Netherlands, Romance, Theatrical

**/****
starring Jennifer Aniston, Jake Gyllenhaal, John C. Reilly, Tim Blake Nelson
screenplay by Mike White
directed by Miguel Arteta

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover The Good Girl is a sitcom that dreams of one day becoming an opera. Like its heroine, the film feels a great dissatisfaction with modern life, and like her eventual paramour, it goes to great lengths in order to articulate such a feeling. But also like these characters, The Good Girl is both too timid and too inarticulate to truly get its ideas across. Instead, the film resorts to “quirky” indie-film types armed to the teeth with wisecracks; offering none of the ambiguity that its narrative thrust seems to warrant, its flaws kill the movie’s aspirations and make sure that it stays in the generic backwater it so dearly wants to escape.

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

Posted 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)

Posted 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.

Secret Ballot (2001)

Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, Iran, Italy, Switzerland, Theatrical

Raye makhfi
***½/****
starring Nassim Abdi, Cyrus Abidi, Youssef Habashi, Farrokh Shojaii
written and directed by Babak Payami

by Walter Chaw It begins and ends with waiting, while the middle of Babak Payami’s Secret Ballot (Raye makhfi) is invested in the Theatre of the Absurd–this is Samuel Beckett, in other words, applied to the Iranian voting process, as an unnamed election agent (Nassim Abdi) travels to a remote Persian island on a quest to gather votes from citizens who may not know that it’s election time, are probably unfamiliar with the candidates, and almost certainly aren’t affected by the outcome anyway. If anything, Payami’s picture confirms that things are the same all over.

Rocco and His Brothers (1960)

Posted 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

Posted 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)

Posted 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)

Posted 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

by 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)

Posted 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)

Posted 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.