The Next Big Thing (2002)

June 13, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Romance, Theatrical

*/****
starring Chris Eigeman, Jamie Harris, Connie Britton, Mike Starr
screenplay by Joel Posner & P.J. Posner
directed by P.J. Posner

by Walter Chaw A film that curiously reminds of Eric Schaeffer’s smug, unfunny If Lucy Fell, P.J. Posner’s badly-scored, clumsily-written, expansively-performed, and stodgily-paced The Next Big Thing is an exercise in elitism that sketches out its tedious premise in broad strokes. It takes broadsides at the snooty New York art world (an exercise akin to complaining about the media or engaging in a discussion on the ethics of politicians)–the ground for excoriation, in other words, isn’t so much fertile as it is in dire need of crop rotation. And like a hack artist before his hack art, The Next Big Thing lays on its easel in the benighted hope that it can be appreciated for a work of insight rather than the umpteenth riff on a strip-mined theme.

Bartleby (2002)

June 13, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Mystery, Theatrical

*/****
starring Crispin Glover, David Paymer, Glenne Headly, Maury Chaykin
screenplay by Jonathan Parker and Catherine DiNapoli, based on the novella Bartleby the Scrivener by Herman Melville
directed by Jonathan Parker

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Bartleby (Crispin Glover) is a former employee of the dead-letter office hired on by The Boss (David Paymer) to perform menial tasks in a nondescript public-works office. Joining a small crew of underpaid, rather dull people (mad Ernie (Maury Chaykin), belligerent Rocky (Matt Groening-sketched Joe Piscopo), and sexpot Vivian (Glenne Headly)), pallid and peculiar Bartleby makes waves when he begins to respond to any request outside the ordinary with a slightly apologetic, “I would prefer not to.”

The Believer (2001)

June 13, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Theatrical

*½/****
starring Ryan Gosling, Summer Phoenix, Theresa Russell, Billy Zane
written and directed by Henry Bean

by Walter Chaw It isn’t that Henry Bean’s provocative The Believer unintentionally glamorizes white supremacy, as has been written–it’s that The Believer doesn’t do enough to make a case for it. Based (“inspired by” the better term) on the 1965 story of Daniel Burros, a member of the American Nazi Party and the KKK who, after being “outed” as a Jew in a NEW YORK TIMES article, killed himself confessing equal parts loathing and self-loathing, The Believer is unabashedly philo-Semitic, presenting the case for Judaism in a way manipulative and simple-minded. It is an Ayn Rand argument, a fictional foil with serpent’s eloquence outmatched in the end by the light of right reason–literally, in this case. That it imagines the afterlife as a Sisyphusian debate is the closest it ever comes to poignancy; the rest of the picture’s dedicated to Philip Roth-lite: most of the anger, one quarter the savage. I’ve no problem with a biased dishonesty–my problem is with disguising that dishonesty in evenhanded reportage.

Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood (2002)

June 6, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Theatrical

*/****
starring Sandra Bullock, Ellen Burstyn, Fionnula Flanagan, James Garner
screenplay by Callie Khouri (with Mark Andrus), based on the novel by Rebecca Wells
directed by Callie Khouri

by Walter Chaw Tennessee Williams by way of Oprah’s Book Club, the only thing more intolerable than reading the hideously popular Rebecca Wells novel Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood is watching Callie Khouri’s equally shrill and unpleasant film of it. Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood makes assumptions about the stupidity (and cupidity) of women that are unjust and hateful while painting men as paternalistically indulgent, a roll of the eyes and a pat on the hand apparently the best and only way to deal with women when they’re being insane and abusive. It doesn’t even need to be said that in films of this type women are always being insane and abusive–that is when they aren’t being insipid and cutesy. It’s bad in the book; after the shorthand and the compressions, it’s infinitely worse in the film. It is, after all, now pure and unfiltered.

The Starz Independent FilmCenter Project, Vol. 6

June 6, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, France, Revenge, Theatrical, Thriller

BAISE-MOI (2000)
Rape Me
Fuck Me
*½/****
starring Raffaëla Anderson, Karen Bach
written and directed by Virginie Despentes and Coralie Trinh Thi, based on the novel by Despentes

by Walter Chaw Virginie Despentes and Coralie Trinh Thi’s Baise-moi (translated as “Rape Me” in the U.S., “Fuck Me” internationally) is a wallow in the murk of exploitation cinema not-cleverly disguised as a commentary on the evils of pornography and the violent objectification of women. Maybe it’s not disguised at all: Baise-moi subverts porn conventions with graphic (phallic) gun violence overlaying explicit, unsimulated penetration–the clumsy juxtaposition clearly intended to forward the idea that penetration and money shots in porn are the equivalent of getting shot and welters of gore. (The late Linda Lovelace described her legendary turn in seminal porno Deep Throat as a document of her rape.) Blood and semen, guns and dicks–the rationale behind the French phrase for orgasm meaning “a little death” is suddenly stripped of its more romantic lilt.

Platform (2000)

June 1, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, China, Drama, France, Hong Kong, Japan, Theatrical

***/****
starring Hong Wei Wang, Tao Zhao, Jing Dong Liang, Tian Yi Yang
written and directed by Jia Zhang-Ke

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover To recommend or not to recommend Jia Zhang-ke’s Platform? The question depends on who you are. For those with even a passing interest in Chinese cinema and culture, it’s virtually mandatory viewing: the film is one of the most dense and nuanced portraits of a society in transition from any nation I can think of, and for Westerners, it puts a face to events that we normally hear mentioned only in passing. Those seeking narrative thrills, however, had better look elsewhere, because Platform‘s glacial pace and oppressive mise-en-scène are calculated to test the patience of even the most sympathetic viewer. But even though the film is tough slogging at times (a circumstance I attribute to its having been re-edited for export), those with intellectual priorities are advised to get on this Platform and ride the train to the last stop.

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.