Undercover Brother (2002)

May 31, 2002Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Satire, Theatrical

**½/****
starring Eddie Griffin, James Brown, Chris Kattan, Denise Richards
screenplay by John Ridley and Michael McCullers
directed by Malcolm D. Lee

Undercoverbrotherby Walter Chaw A comedy with ideas, courage, and intelligence, Malcolm D. Lee’s follow-up to his surprisingly good The Best Man is the blaxploitation riff Undercover Brother–and man, when it’s right, it’s really right. Unfortunately, it’s only right about half of the time. Its digs at racial stereotypes and dedication to honouring the images and conceits of black cinema from the Seventies are dead on-target for the most part, while its attempts to marry it all into some sort of spy plot are subject to the same extended dull spots suffered by any dinosaur Bond flick. All is forgiven, though, when Eddie Griffin, as the titular afro-super-agent, splashes through a window like Dolemite, does a “white man’s” dance while singing a karaoke version of “Ebony and Ivory” (with über-bimbo Denise Richards, not in on the joke), and navigates his caddy through a tailspin without spilling a drop of his orange soda.

The Importance of Being Earnest (2002)

May 30, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Romance, Theatrical, UK

**/****
starring Rupert Everett, Colin Firth, Reese Witherspoon, Judi Dench
screenplay by Oliver Parker, based on the play by Oscar Wilde
directed by Oliver Parker

Importanceofbeingearnestby Walter Chaw In the always-risky practice of adaptating theatre for the silver screen, the first instinct usually has something to do with “expanding” a play by providing the characters backstory, followed fast by moving some of the dialogue into a different environment and/or pulling the source out of time to “modernize” it or to provide new resonance for a politicized piece. Richard Loncraine’s Richard III and Julie Taymor’s Titus are examples of affected adaptations that work; Michael Cacoyannis’s The Cherry Orchard and Oliver Parker’s The Importance of Being Earnest are examples that do not.

13 Conversations About One Thing (2002)

May 23, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Theatrical

**½/****
starring Alan Arkin, Clea DuVall, John Turturro, Amy Irving
screenplay by Jill Sprecher & Karen Sprecher
directed by Jill Sprecher

by Walter Chaw Jill Sprecher’s 13 Conversations About One Thing, her follow-up to she and sister Karen’s Clockwatchers, is an Armistead Maupin roundelay of intersecting stories tied together by circumstance and a basic investigation into why we can’t be happy. It explores happiness and satisfaction in the workplace (in the film’s best sections, which star Alan Arkin), in marriage (John Turturro and Amy Irving), morally (Matthew McConaughey), and existentially (Clea DuVall), and though it does so with a great deal of professionalism and mordant humour, the film never quite transcends its proximate resolutions for universal truths. Its failures are remarkably similar to those of Clockwatchers in that no matter the polish of the cast nor the professionalism of the narrative, there’s a decided lack of spontaneity in its execution and a dearth of real poignancy in its epiphanies.

Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron (2002)

May 23, 2002Posted in2000s, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Family, Theatrical, Western

**½/****
screenplay by John Fusco
directed by Kelly Asbury and Lorna Cook

Spiritby Walter Chaw Earning major points for its revisionist understanding of the impact the rail had on the spoiling of the West (briefly positing its equine hero as one part Burt Lancaster from The Train and one part William Blake), DreamWorks’ return to cel (albeit computer-assisted) animation is the surprisingly dark and unintentionally twisted Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron. The film is an endlessly disquieting Oedipal construct in which Spirit’s absent-from-pre-birth father is the former king of a herd of wild horses, the mantle of which the virile Spirit, with his mother doe-eyed at his side (!), assumes to the tune of a newly-penned anthem from dinosaur Canuck rocker Bryan Adams. I waited with baited breath to see how mama’s foal Spirit would break his new Oedipal split (hot filly Rain) to “Jocasta,” but the picture fumbles the potent moment with a coy mane flip and a sexy-quick gallop.

The Starz Independent FilmCenter Project, Vol. 5

May 17, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Coming of Age, Drama, New Zealand, Romance, Theatrical

by Walter Chaw

RAIN (2001)
***/****
starring Alicia Fulford-Wierzbicki, Sarah Peirse, Marton Csokas, Alistair Browning
screenplay by Christine Jeffs, based on the novel by Kirsty Gunn
directed by Christine Jeffs

Based on a Kirsty Gunn novel, Christine Jeffs's hyphenate debut Rain is a dulcet, haunting evocation of that moment of crisis in a young woman's life as she's poised on the precipice of sexual maturity. The film is golden and beautiful, edged in its understanding that a desire for sex almost always precedes an emotional or intellectual ability to cope with the fallout of the act itself. In honouring that concept, Rain makes no distinction between adults playing as children and children playing the grown-ups in scenes juxtaposed in ways whimsical and poignant. As much as it is a coming of age for a young woman, Rain is very much about the broader issue of power in gender politics as it defines family and relational dynamics.

Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones (2002)

May 13, 2002Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Sci-Fi, Star Wars, Theatrical

½*/****
starring Ewan McGregor, Natalie Portman, Hayden Christensen, Ian McDiarmid
screenplay by George Lucas and Jonathan Hales
directed by George Lucas

Episodeiiby Walter Chaw George Lucas and Jonathan Hales's screenplay for Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones is very close to the most inept piece of hubristic garbage I've ever had the alarming misfortune to see realized. The resultant film is 140 minutes of pure treacle: such words as "awkward swill" or "excrescence" do not begin to suggest the stink of it. While Lucas has always been a poor filmmaker (though THX 1138 at least displays directorial competence), his army of yes-men and his years of hermitage have led him to believe that his are the hands best-suited to guide the last three films of his Star Wars franchise–and that miscalculation will sadly only cost him the last lingering vestiges of his already miniscule credibility. In a way, though, I'm grateful to Lucas for making my job easier: Episode II is so atrocious that its screenplay–with lines like, "This is a nightmare! I want to go home!" and "You obviously have a great deal to learn about human behaviour"–serves as auto-critique, and its clumsiness as its own most damning censure.

The Starz Independent FilmCenter Project, Vol. 4

May 10, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, Cyprus, Drama, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Romance, Theatrical, UK

by Walter Chaw

THE CHERRY ORCHARD (2000)
*/****
starring Tushka Bergen, Frances de la Tour, Charlotte Rampling, Gerard Butler
screenplay by Michael Cacoyannis, based on the play by Anton Chekhov
directed by Michael Cacoyannis

Written at the end of his life in 1904, "The Cherry Orchard" is the last of Anton Chekhov's great masterpieces, so ethereal it verges on the surreal and so circular it approaches the ineffable and the serene. The work is as balanced between its condemnation as it is winsome in its distillation of a lifetime spent in observation. By turns, it is also humanistic and mordantly funny, capturing a period of time (just prior to the Russian Revolution of 1905) in a way that perhaps no other play ever has any other period. Produced under some duress from Moscow Art Theater co-founders Konstantin Stanislavsky and Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, Chekhov began work on "The Cherry Orchard" in 1903–putting off the MAT pair with vague promises of a new farce or vaudeville. What he finally presented was what Stanislavsky feared: "…Instead of a farce again we shall have a great big tragedy."

The New Guy (2002)

May 9, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Teen, Theatrical

*/****
starring DJ Qualls, Lyle Lovett, Eddie Griffin, Eliza Dushku
screenplay by David Kendall
directed by Ed Decter

by Walter Chaw What begins as a potentially subversive take on the inner-city school problem becomes the unlikely film that would be better with more Eddie Griffin. It’s a precipitous fall facilitated by the requisite defecation gag, by too many cameos from has-beens (Henry Rollins, Gene Simmons) and never-weres (Vanilla Ice, Tommy Lee, David Hasselhoff), and by the criminal misuse of Lyle Lovett and Illeana Douglas.

Hollywood Ending (2002)

May 3, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Romance, Satire, Theatrical

**/****
starring Woody Allen, George Hamilton, Téa Leoni, Debra Messing
written and directed by Woody Allen

Hollywoodendingby Walter Chaw Woody Allen’s pictures are exhausting things about absolutely nothing save Manhattan and Woody Allen–Allen’s fascination with the cinema and younger women, Allen’s disingenuous fear of writer’s block, and more recently, Allen’s desire to reconcile with his children. Sometimes any one of those is enough.

Deuces Wild (2002)

May 3, 2002Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Theatrical

*½/****
starring Stephen Dorff, Brad Renfro, Fairuza Balk, Norman Reedus
screenplay by Paul Kimatian & Christopher Gambale
directed by Scott Kalvert

by Walter Chaw During the course of Deuces Wild, a bit of schizophrenic juvenilia (half nostalgic, half belittling) from director Scott Kalvert (The Basketball Diaries), there arises the uncomfortable realization that we are in the company of a “West Side Story” with trick-shots and graphic violence subbing for the Bernstein/Robbins book and staging. As mannered and artificial as the Neverland boroughs and lost-boy antagonists of Robert Wise’s film version of West Side Story, what Deuces Wild doesn’t have is the benefit of the traditional musical format to excuse its more gut-busting howlers. Kalvert’s film is of the sort that makes one wonder which version of history includes Debbie Harry as a zoned-out shut-in singing Christmas carols year-round while daughter Fairuza Balk laments, “Of course Santa exists, mommy, he just don’t come to Brooklyn no more.” Moreover, if such a history ever existed, it begs the question of why anyone would ever wish to revisit it, in art or otherwise.

Late Marriage (2001)

May 3, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, Drama, France, Israel, Romance, Theatrical

Hatuna Meuheret
***/****
starring Lior Ashkenazi, Ronit Elkabetz, Moni Moshonov, Lili Koshashvili
written and directed by Dover Koshashvili

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover For those who have tired of funny family squabbles with magical reconciliations, relief is on the way. The new Israeli film Late Marriage (“Hatuna Meuheret”) takes the conventional pains of a hundred bad ethnic comedies and gives them added bite; instead of a traditional family causing “hilarious” havoc on their modernized progeny, we are given a nasty tug-of-war between a need to live one’s life and a desire for familial approval. Because there are no easy outs in its bitter turf battle for clashing sets of values, the film is surprisingly tense, uncomfortable, and refreshing in its serious examination of a situation that movies normally trivialize.

The Starz Independent FilmCenter Project, Vol. 3

April 26, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Finland, Germany, Italy, Norway, Romance, Sweden, Theatrical

by Walter Chaw

FAITHLESS (2000)
Trolösa
***/****
starring Lena Endre, Erland Josephson, Krister Henriksson, Thomas Hanzon
screenplay by Ingmar Bergman
directed by Liv Ullman

It is perhaps most instructive to look back at the beginning of a life when contemplating the end of one. Swedish auteur Ingmar Bergman spent his nineteenth year in The Skerries (a Stockholm archipelago), a tumultuous period during which he lost the girl he loved, lost his faith in religion, and finally lost a close male friend to death. That year, when married with the all-pervasive influence of playwright Strindberg and a tireless love of the theatre, provides the root concerns shooting through Bergman's filmography: the idea that marriage is a constant negotiation of losses (abortions and suicides included in that mix) and that should God exist, He is grown apathetic.

Jason X (2002)

April 24, 2002Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Horror, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller

*/****
starring Kane Hodder, Lexa Doig, Lisa Ryder, Chuck Campbell
screenplay by Todd Farmer
directed by James Isaac

by Walter Chaw Having apparently renounced the name given him by The Man, Jason X features inexorable slasher killer Jason Voorhees (Kane Hodder) cryogenically frozen at the “Crystal Lake Research Facility” in 2010 and picked up by a salvage spaceship (or something) called “Grendel” in 2455. When the bimbo Rowan (Lexa Doig), defrosted along with our invulnerable flesh golem (the Demolition Man possibilities remain untapped), perkily offers that this means she’s been cold and stiff for “455 years,” no one bothers to correct her. I’m not really sure why I bothered, come to think of it.

Crush (2002)

April 19, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Germany, Romance, Theatrical, UK

*/****
starring Andie MacDowell, Imelda Staunton, Anna Chancellor, Kenny Doughty
written and directed by John McKay

Crushby Walter Chaw A punitive film that has one of the more unpleasant third acts of any film in recent memory, John McKay’s Crush is an atonal estrogen opera that demonizes feminism while gifting the most sympathetic male of the piece with a nice vomit bath at his wedding. It isn’t political but rather misanthropic, a film that begins genially but ends with enough open contempt for each of its three protagonists that Crush seems something of an anti-romantic comedy. That would not be a bad thing save for the fact that the film aims for frothy uplift on the one hand and a heart-wrenching Love Story twist of fate on the other, with nary a whiff of satire or self-awareness to be found in-between.

Murder by Numbers (2002)

April 19, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Mystery, Theatrical, Thriller

*½/****
starring Sandra Bullock, Ryan Gosling, Michael Pitt, Agnes Bruckner
screenplay by Tony Gayton
directed by Barbet Schroeder

Murderbynumbersby Walter Chaw A shallow Leopold and Loeb riff crossed with a heaping helping of the kind of law-chick bullstuff made popular by the horrible novels of Patricia Cornwell, Murder by Numbers trudges along with its tired formula repertoire like a funeral procession for the genre. For a spell, it feels as if the film will transcend the unpromising irony of its title with a female protagonist painted as unflattering and tortured, but by the time the final credits roll after an unforgivable third act, Murder by Numbers washes out as just another imminently forgettable movie starring Sandra Bullock.

The Starz Independent FilmCenter Project, Vol. 2

April 19, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Norway, Romance, Sweden, Theatrical, UK

by Walter Chaw

ONE WEEK (2000)
*/****
starring Kenny Young, Saadiqa Muhammad, Eric Lane, Milauna Jackson
screenplay by Carl Seaton, Kenny Young
directed by Carl Seaton

One of the pleasures of junior high (towards the end of the year, once teachers have exhausted lesson plans and their patience) was the educational reel, that impossibly dated relic of the Fifties or Sixties that advised against, in the most stultifying terms possible, such sundry indiscretions as driving too fast or wandering around in the desert without extra water and a hat. The armed forces upped the ante with cautionary tales of green grunts succumbing to the wiles of Third-World call girls and the attendant itches of perdition. The only thing that separates Carl Seaton's zero-budget morality tirade One Week and scatological G.I. shock schlock is the fact that it's in colour (though the lighting in many scenes makes that distinction moot), and that it lacks a chiding talking condom.

Burnt Money (2000)

April 18, 2002Posted inArgentina, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, Romance, Spain, Theatrical, Thriller, Uruguay

Plata quemada
**½/****
starring Eduardo Noriega, Leonardo Sbaraglia, Pablo Echarri, Leticia Brédice
screenplay by Marcelo Figueras, Marcelo Piñeyro, based on the novel Plata Quemada by Ricardo Piglia
directed by Marcelo Piñeyro

by Walter Chaw Pushing the submerged homoeroticism of Strangers on a Train to the surface, Burnt Money‘s homage begins with Jean-Pierre Melville’s genre cool and Hitchcock’s cigarettes and lighters at a carnival and ends with a certain Wellesian noir seediness (complete with The Lady From Shanghai‘s ill-fated passion, Touch of Evil‘s corrupt officials, and even Citizen Kane‘s totemic paperweight). Burnt Money is deliriously beautiful to look at–all pale greens and mute browns–but its overt politicism in the closing moments begins to dispel the film’s magic in favour of overheated parable. It’s an expert genre piece that tries to bear the brunt of all of Argentina’s national cynicism and economic corruption (a leaden socio-political platform reflected by its title), and despite his cineaste smarts, director Marcelo Piñeyro just isn’t up to the task.

Nine Queens (2000)

April 18, 2002Posted in2000s, Argentina, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, Theatrical, Thriller

Nueve reinas
***/****
starring Ricardo Darín, Gastón Pauls, Graciela Tenembaum, María Mercedes Villagra
written and directed by Fabián Bielinsky

by Walter Chaw What may be the best David Mamet film since House of Games, Argentine director Fabián Bielinsky’s debut Nine Queens is a mannered, serpentine caper thriller that places its trust in the able hands of a troika of talented performers. Baby-faced Juan (Gastón Pauls), ferocious Valeria (Leticia Brédice), and twitchy Marcos (the gifted Ricardo Darín) find themselves involved in a plot to sell a sheet of counterfeit stamps (the titular “Nine Queens”) to Spanish collector Gandalfo (Ignasi Abadal), himself on the lam for some sort of fraud. Delightfully ludicrous and self-contained in the way of The Sting, the picture is a Rube Goldberg/Spanish Prisoner device translated into small-time cons and sin-stained grifters as they grind and smash into each other like sharks in the green noir bucket of Buenos Aires.

The Scorpion King (2002)

April 18, 2002Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Belgium, Comedy, Fantasy, Germany, Theatrical

*/****
starring The Rock, Steven Brand, Kelly Hu, Michael Clarke Duncan
screenplay by David Hayter and Wil Osborne and Stephen Sommers
directed by Chuck Russell

by Walter Chaw I stopped marking the rip-offs perpetrated in The Scorpion King once Kelly Hu’s jiggle priestess recreated a scene entire from Mike Hodges’s legendary craptavaganza Flash Gordon. Sadly, The Scorpion King doesn’t have the benefit of a Queen soundtrack to push the “just bad” into campy. It steals the rolling gong gag from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, the cave murders and human bow-hunting of Rambo III, the feral kid of The Road Warrior, and its overriding ethos, apparently unintentionally, from Sergio Aragonés’s comic book barbarian “Groo.” If you manage to stifle a chuckle when Dwayne Johnson (a.k.a. The Rock) suffers all manner of horrendous falls and physical mortifications with a confused expression that all but screams, “Did I err?”…well, you’re a better man than I.

Scratch (2002)

April 18, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Documentary, Music, Theatrical

**/****
directed by Doug Pray

by Walter Chaw Doug Pray’s non-fiction Scratch, about the men behind the dual turntables digging new grooves into much-abused vinyl, presents a fitfully fascinating glimpse into the DJ music scene. The problem with the film is that it’s more of a performance piece than a documentary, spending too much time extolling the questionable and specific virtues of the music while giving little insight into what it is that makes said music attractive to a growing audience. The picture’s strength lies in the curious revelation that in resurrecting old and forgotten “breaks” (beats embedded in vintage tunes), these generally uneducated “turntable-ists” are engaged in the same process as T.S. Eliot was: the reclamation of art as it is filtered through the prism of artists who see themselves as the repository of the whole of a particular Western media.