Scratch (2002)

Posted 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.

Burnt Money (2000)

Posted 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)

Posted 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.

Red Green’s Duct Tape Forever (2002)

Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Canada, Comedy, Theatrical

Duct Tape Forever
½*/****
starring Steve Smith, Patrick McKenna, Bob Bainborough, Wayne Robson
screenplay by Steve Smith
directed by Eric Till

Redgreensducttapeforeverby Travis Mackenzie Hoover Lord knows I don’t ask much of a Red Green film. Just a little mild guy humour with some obvious set-ups and payoffs, cliché riffs on tools and machinery, and a little Canadian self-deprecation to keep it from degenerating into macho head-slamming. Not too much to expect, is it? But while the Red Green show, modest though it is, understands precisely what can be done within its means, the atrocious Red Green movie is so clearly a cash-grabbing afterthought that it appears to have been shot and edited over a kegger weekend at Steve Smith’s cottage. I defy anyone to derive even mild amusement from its age-old plot, unfunny jokes, and astonishing technical ineptitude: not only are the gags from deep in the vaults, but their execution is so clumsy and their delivery so broad that they make Mack Sennett look like Noel Coward by comparison.

Suspicious River (2002)

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

*½/****
starring Molly Parker, Callum Keith Rennie, Mary Kate Welsh, Joel Bissonnette
screenplay by Lynne Stopkewich, based on the novel by Laura Kasischke
directed by Lynne Stopkewich

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Suspicious River is the dying of the light against a rage. While it knows full well that its heroine is bored, damaged, and begging for some escape, it can’t bring itself to pull the protagonist out of her doldrums; instead, it leads her down a degrading primrose path until disaster drives her back into the arms of safe ennui. Though the film feigns interest in her mission to ditch her boring hometown and ugly past, it’s largely interested in demonstrating the futility of her efforts and leaves her with Margaret Atwood’s model of the Canadian condition: “Endurance, survival, but no victory.”

Maya (2001)

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

***/****
starring Anant Nag, Mita Vasisht, Nitya Shetty, Nikhil Yadav
screenplay by Emmanuel Pappas and Digvijay Singh
directed by Digvijay Singh

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Maya is a surprisingly natural movie that could have easily degenerated into histrionics. Despite dealing with an outlawed but still-active Indian ceremony in which newly-pubescent girls are raped, it never resorts to sensationalistic horror. Instead, it sketches a portrait of a girl, her cousin, and a family that shows both the person about to be crushed and the mentality that allows it to happen. While it occasionally descends into obviousness and smoothes out some hard edges, it distinguishes itself from hand-wringing problem pictures by sketching the violation of a person instead of just a body.

The Starz Independent FilmCenter Project, Vol. 1

Posted in****/****, 1950s, 1990s, 2000s, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Czech Republic, Drama, Fantasy, France, Horror, Japan, Mexico, Mystery, Netherlands, Satire, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

by Walter Chaw

BOB LE FLAMBEUR (1956)
***½/****
starring Isabelle Corey, Daniel Cauchy, Roger Duchesne, Guy Decomble
screenplay by Jean-Pierre Melville, dialogue by Auguste Le Breton
directed by Jean-Pierre Melville

With every minute of Henri Decaё’s cinematography looking like a Eugène Atget photograph, Jean-Pierre Melville’s Bob Le Flambeur is a visually stunning film from a director who influenced filmmakers as diverse as Jean-Luc Godard (who quotes Bob Le Flambeur at least twice in Breathless) and John Woo (whose The Killer takes its basic plot from Melville’s Le Samourai). It is film noir of the highest order, reminding in its ensemble intricacy of Kubrick’s The Killing (released a year later in 1956) and evoking the kind of chiaroscuro, gin-joint, smoke-drenched milieu where every ashtray has a name. It’s a love letter to the grim American gangster drama of the Forties that subverts the genre even as it reinvents it as a lyrical ballad to gamblers, losers, hoods, and wayward dames–a snapshot of the Montmarte district of Paris 47 years before Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s reinvention of the same.

Big Trouble (2002)

Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Theatrical, Thriller

**½/****
starring Tim Allen, Omar Epps, Dennis Farina, Ben Foster
screenplay by Robert Ramsey & Matthew Stone, based on the novel by Dave Barry
directed by Barry Sonnenfeld

Bigtroubleby Walter Chaw My opinion of Dave Barry is that as an essayist, he’s no P.J. O’Rourke, and as a novelist, he’s no Carl Hiaasen–anyone who agrees to have Harry Anderson play him on a weekly sitcom is begging to have his work re-evaluated through that prism. And yet Barry Sonnenfeld’s Big Trouble, the long-delayed (because of 9/11) adaptation of Barry’s novel of the same name, is, despite a slow opening featuring just too much of Tim Allen, frenetic and often hilarious–facts likely obscured by an understandable squeamishness in this climate towards mocking airline security and the easy acquisition of weapons of mass destruction.

Clockstoppers (2002)

Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller

*/****
starring Jesse Bradford, French Stewart, Paula Garcés, Michael Biehn
screenplay by Rob Hedden and J. David Stem & David N. Weiss
directed by Jonathan Frakes

Clockstoppersby Walter Chaw Taking for granted that it won’t make any kind of scientific sense, Clockstoppers doesn’t even have internal coherence. It is a mess by committee listing no fewer than four writing credits and possessing at least that many logy regurgitated premises in its mercifully brief (but still bloated) running time. Clockstoppers is the offspring of a fifth season “Twilight Zone” episode called “A Kind of Stopwatch”, in addition to the mid-Eighties teen whiz kid romantic comedy adventures WarGames, The Philadelphia Experiment, Back to the Future, and Zapped!: it robs from each entire scenes while trying unsuccessfully to blend in a long sequence showcasing DJ’s and raves, the inexplicable teen movements du jour. The only thing that Clockstoppers doesn’t seem to have borrowed from its predecessors is a sense of humour and a kernel of intelligence.

Death to Smoochy (2002)

Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Drama, Germany, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

**/****
starring Robin Williams, Edward Norton, Danny DeVito, Jon Stewart
screenplay by Adam Resnick
directed by Danny DeVito

Deathtosmoochyby Walter Chaw Demonstrating a wonderfully wry conversance with Hitchcock’s images, Danny DeVito as director made an interesting debut with the Strangers on a Train redux Throw Momma from the Train before crafting what is possibly the definitive Eighties comedy in the Stygian The War of the Roses. After a 13-year hiatus featuring strange detours into other genres (the uneven Hoffa and the shrill Matilda), DeVito returns to the dark comedy with Death to Smoochy, a disjointed, dull, and irritating film that provides a meagre helping of “comedy” while ladling on a heaping serving of disconnected “dark.” To say the least, the picture is a resounding disappointment and what can only be seen as a betrayal of Robin Williams’s newfound desire to be viewed as something other than America’s favourite velvet clown with the upcoming films Insomnia and One Hour Photo.

Panic Room (2002)

Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Directors: David Fincher, Drama, Theatrical, Thriller

**½/****
starring Jodie Foster, Kristen Stewart, Forest Whitaker, Jared Leto
screenplay by David Koepp
directed by David Fincher

Panicroomby Walter Chaw Panic Room has a fancy premise stretched to and past the breaking point. It was a production beset by problems including the loss of star Nicole Kidman to an injury sustained during Moulin Rouge!, the departure of director of photography (DP) Darius Khondji, and a storyboard plan so devilishly complex that the film will probably be best remembered as a breakthrough in how burgeoning technologies can inform the DP's craft. The behind-the-scenes strain manifests itself in the nervous distractedness of the narrative and glaring and irritating plausibility gaps; the undeniably cool images (and Howard Shore's amazing score) only serve to illuminate the emptiness at Panic Room's core.

Son of the Bride (2001)

Posted in2000s, Argentina, Comedy, Drama, Spain, Theatrical

El hijo de la novia
**½/****
starring Ricardo Darín, Héctor Alterio, Norma Aleandro, Eduardo Blanco
screenplay by Juan José Campanella, Fernando Castets
directed by Juan José Campanella

by Walter Chaw Restaurateur Rafael (Ricardo Darín)–divorced, paunchy, successful–has a stress- and sweets-inspired heart attack at the age of forty-two, prompting him to reconcile with his estranged mother (Norma Aleandro) and consider selling the family restaurant, and forcing him into a reconsideration of the blasé attitude he has towards his beautiful girlfriend, Naty (Natalia Verbeke). An exhausted contrivance to push a selfish and unpleasant man towards a resuscitation of his wasted life, Juan José Campanella’s Son of the Bride (El Hijo de la novia) adds to the “cardiac arrest as a means to mid-life crisis” trope such overly manipulative and sentimental movements as an adorably Alzheimer’s afflicted mother, an impassioned monologue about the emptiness of organized religion in the lives of the truly pious, and the return of a childhood pal, Juan Carlos (Eduardo Blanco, doing his best Roberto Benigni), whose own misfortunes cast Rafael’s into stark relief.

E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial: 20th Anniversary Edition (1982/2002)

Posted in1980s, 2000s, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Family, Sci-Fi, Spielberg, Theatrical

***½/****
starring Dee Wallace, Henry Thomas, Peter Coyote, Robert MacNaughton
screenplay by Melissa Mathison
directed by Steven Spielberg

by Walter Chaw Young Elliot (Henry Thomas) discovers an alien castaway in his garden shed and lures it into his closet with a trail of candy. He introduces it to his little sister, Gertie (Drew Barrymore), and his older brother, Michael (Robert MacNaughton), pledging them to the “most excellent” promise of secrecy to prevent his siblings from sharing the creature’s existence with their frazzled mother (Dee Wallace), recently divorced. Soon, government scientists, led by the starry-eyed Keys (Peter Coyote), catch the scent of Elliot’s discovery, necessitating a desperate race to return it to its kind.

Resident Evil (2002)

Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Germany, Horror, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, UK, Zombie

*/****
starring Milla Jovovich, Michelle Rodriguez, Eric Mabius, James Purefoy
written and directed by Paul W.S. Anderson

Residentevilby Walter Chaw A group of highly-skilled soldiers infiltrates an abandoned facility where all the civilian workers of a multi-national corporation have mysteriously died. Suffering a holocaust themselves immediately thereafter, the surviving members of the squad break down into a cowardly tech-specialist (Eric Mabius); a covert agent of the corporation in question (James Purefoy); a tough-talking Latina with a big gun and a chip on her shoulder (Michelle Rodriguez); and a woman suffering from bad dreams who seems particularly adept at fighting the bad guys (Milla Jovovich). Discovering that the folks in the “hive” died during military research gone awry (thus unleashing hordes of nearly-indestructible villains), the foursome attempts to get out before a desperate time limit expires while also containing the evil to the site of infection.

Harrison’s Flowers (2001)

Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Drama, France, Romance, Theatrical, War

Des fleurs pour Harrison
**/****
starring Andie MacDowell, David Strathairn, Elias Koteas, Adrien Brody
screenplay by Elie Chouraqui & Didier Le Pêcheur & Isabel Ellsen and Michael Katims, based on the novel by Ellsen
directed by Elie Chouraqui

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Movie logic has always dictated that any film about a strife-torn part of the world must be told from the point of view of an outsider who resembles a movie star. Thus Stephen Biko’s story was filtered through the eyes of white Donald Woods in Cry Freedom, a film about colonial subjugation of indigenous peoples (The Mission) centred on the methodological bickering of two priests, and many a current foreign affair has been recounted via the selfless acts of the American reporters who expose them (Salvador, Under Fire, etc.). Harrison’s Flowers falls into this latter category of journalistic brio: though its story of a search for a missing photographer looks great when compared to its appalling cousin Welcome to Sarajevo, it’s on the same self-serving moral plane, with the machinations of reporting hogging the camera while the events that need be covered are crowded far outside the frame.

Showtime (2002)

Posted in2000s, Action, Australia, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Eddie Murphy, Robert De Niro, Theatrical, Will Smith

*/****
starring Robert De Niro, Eddie Murphy, Rene Russo, Ken Hudson Campbell
screenplay by Keith Sharon and Alfred Gough & Miles Millar
directed by Tom Dey

by Walter Chaw Shaping up as a spoof but neither smart enough to earn that label nor exciting enough to sustain interest otherwise, Tom Dey’s slick Showtime is an incoherent mess of a film that relies on explosions and volume to distract from its tin ear and flat pacing. It wants desperately to be a self-aware genre exercise in the Scream vein, but after its characters mention that there are “rules” to the buddy-cop flick, it chooses to demonstrate them rather than subvert them. Screenwriters-by-committee Keith Sharon, Alfred Gough, and Miles Millar, patching together an abominable iteration of the same old Lethal Weapon tropes, have conspired to get De Niro to immediately make 15 Minutes again (but as an alleged intentional comedy) and to continue Eddie Murphy’s typecasting as an animated jackass. Piling on the offenses, Showtime suffers from a few distracting plotholes, an obviously tacked-on prologue meant to elicit a Kindergarten Cop-esque brand of “isn’t it funny to scare children with a terrifying actor,” and a score by Alan Silvestri that actually approximates the feel of hammers to the brainpan.

Ice Age (2002)

Posted in2000s, Adventure, Animation, Australia, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Family, Theatrical, UK

*½/****
screenplay by Michael Berg and Peter Ackerman
directed by Chris Wedge

by Walter Chaw Borrowing heavily from Disney’s aimless and laggard Dinosaur, Fox and Blue Sky Animation’s Ice Age is burdened from the outset by the vaguely disturbing reality that the titular epoch spells doom for most of the heroes of this animated mistake. When our quartet of cuddly endangered animals saunters off into the sunset, it feels disturbingly melancholy–something director Chris Wedge tries to assuage with a tedious epilogue that beats a long-dead running gag into the loam of an increasingly belaboured film.

97 Brooks (2002)

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

*½/****
starring Colleen Wainwright, Robert Beckwith, Jason Sales, J. Keith Butler
written and directed by Mikon A. Haaksman

by Walter Chaw In order to get someone to vomit, one character asks another if they’d like to eat at Long John Silver’s. It’s a bright comic moment in the midst of the otherwise awkwardly scripted 97 Brooks, the zero-budget digital video debut of Mikon A. Haaksman, who raised money for his project by soliciting contributions from friends and family. While the cast (largely composed of Haaksman’s friends) is game, the screenplay, direction, and editing betray them at every turn. 97 Brooks lacks pace and rhythm–that visual or thematic hallmark that would have guided the movie over its essential lack of ear and many a narrative leap and difficulty. It isn’t so much that 97 Brooks is a terrible film, it’s that it has neither the wit nor the special something to overcome its amateurish screenplay and production values.

Monsoon Wedding (2001)

Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, France, Germany, India, Italy, Romance, Theatrical

**½/****
starring Naseeruddin Shah, Lillete Dubey, Shefali Shetty, Vijay Raaz
screenplay by Sabrina Dhawan
directed by Mira Nair

by Walter Chaw Mira Nair’s Monsoon Wedding plays like an unedited wedding video, capturing peccadillo along with celebration and ugliness along with beauty. Slyly, a little in the manner of an Ousmane Sembene film, it weaves the troubling elements of its culture into the rituals of joy. (In the case of Monsoon Wedding, Nair explores India’s caste system, American cultural diffusion, the question of expatriated sons, and the inevitable death of tradition.) Yet Monsoon Wedding is also an exuberant Bollywood-lite soap opera with flat characterizations and badly telegraphed plot points punctuated periodically by bombastic sitar sing-alongs. What most separates Nair’s piece from Sembene’s masterpieces, however, is that ineffable sense of naturalism which better defines a culture than an abuse of its mad cinema’s mad archetypes.

All About the Benjamins (2002)

Posted in2000s, Action, Comedy, Crime, Germany, Theatrical, Thriller

**/****
starring Ice Cube, Mike Epps, Tommy Flanagan, Carmen Chaplin
screenplay by Ronald Lang and Ice Cube
directed by Kevin Bray

Allaboutthebenjaminsby Walter Chaw Blaxploitation without the sex, All About the Benjamins is a gratuitously violent film laudably free of the pretense of political correctness, but it’s so calamitously loud and arbitrary (and has a character who fits the same description) that it fritters away almost as much goodwill as it earns. The only things separating All About the Benjamins from other whip-edited, hard-action movies are Ice Cube’s joyfully offensive screenplay (co-written with Ronald Lang) and an opening set in a Confederate’s dream of a trailer park that does more for exploding the race issue in these United States than the past five Denzel Washington pulpits.