May (2003) – DVD

July 19, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Horror, Thriller

***/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B-
starring Angela Bettis, Jeremy Sisto, Anna Faris, James Duval
written and directed by Lucky McKee

by Walter Chaw Lucky McKee takes a look at the end of the world and it comes half-blinded before a student version of Claire Denis’s Trouble Every Day and a poster-shrine to Dario Argento’s Opera. The apocalypse in May is the end of cinema, a self-consuming contemplation of itself as the product of genre, and so its touchstones are films that consider the horror of unnatural progeny, inappropriate consumption, and, of course, the literariness of “Frankenstein”‘s exhumation and reconstitution tropes. When May (Angela Bettis) pleads at the picture’s conclusion to be seen, more than the plaintive cry of a child molded by fear into something strange, it’s an understanding that the life of cinema is like the span of any beast: naivety into optimism into cynicism into contemplation into, finally, a breed of facile irony fed by the mordancy of existence at its extremity.

Blood, Guts, Bullets & Octane (1998) – DVD

July 18, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, Crime, DVD, Thriller

Blood, Guts, Bullets and Octane
*/**** Image B+ Sound A-
starring Joe Carnahan, Dan Leis, Ken Rudolph, Dan Harlan
written and directed by Joe Carnahan

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover It’s not the band I hate, it’s their fans. The celebrated (if overrated) efforts of both David Mamet and Quentin Tarantino spawned a lot of half-baked imitators in their heyday in the ’90s, people who didn’t understand the masters’ cruel ironies or obsessive cinephilia, respectively, but sure thought that it was cool wear a suit while pointing a gun and saying “fuck.” Few of them, however, made films as dire and unpleasant as Joe Carnahan’s Blood, Guts, Bullets & Octane (hereafter Octane), which takes the male territorial-pissing formula of scores of Mamet-tino flicks and pushes it to an astonishingly crude extreme. There’s no wit to the dialogue, no style to the imagery and no grace in the performances–just eff this and eff that and oh-God-I’m-shot. If you needed a reason for the Nineties to end, here it is; the passing of this kind of cinema is ample incentive to enter the new century.

Miranda (2002) – DVD

July 17, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, DVD, Germany, Romance, Thriller, UK

**/**** Image B Sound A- Extras D+
starring Christina Ricci, John Simm, Kyle MacLachlan, John Hurt
screenplay by Rob Young
directed by Marc Munden

Mirandadvdcapby Travis Mackenzie Hoover There was a time (from the late-'70s to the late-'80s) when the UK cranked out tart, intelligent films that put their American counterparts to shame. People like Stephen Frears, Hanif Kureshi, Alan Clarke, Mike Leigh, Terence Davies, Neil Jordan, Derek Jarman, and Sally Potter could be counted on to raise hell in the name of motion pictures; whatever their relative merits, they were interested in cinema and not career opportunities, and their commitment to a reality outside of their aesthetics gave them soul and punch. (Even when they made a thriller, like John Mackenzie's The Long Good Friday, it was an anti-Thatcher thriller.) Then the '90s happened, and what was called "the multiplex generation" sprang up: suddenly we were doomed to the likes of Danny Boyle and Guy Ritchie, who made films with flashy visuals that failed to obscure their essential vacuity. And so it is with Marc Munden's Miranda, a well-shot, smartly-designed film with an empty space where its brain should be, leaving us with something that looks good, goes down easy, and is instantly forgotten.

Cowboy Bebop: The Movie (2001) [Special Edition] – DVD

July 6, 2003Posted in2000s, Action, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, DVD, Japan, Sci-Fi, Thriller

***/**** Image A Sound A Extras C
screenplay by Keiko Nobumoto
directed by Shinichiro Watanabe

by Walter Chaw Yôko Kanno’s soundtrack for Cowboy Bebop: The Movie (hereafter Cowboy Bebop) is a jubilant a blend of funk, jazz, blues, soul, and punk that soars even though it’s a pale shadow of the “bebop” innovated by Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, and Bud Powell (and Kenny Clarke and Max Roach) in Minton’s Playhouse in the early 1940s. It functions as something of a brilliantly mellifluous backbone to the film and the series that spawned it–chimeric and socially significant, again like Bird’s bebop, in that the 26-episode Japanese television series became one of the most recognized and revered crossovers in animated series history. The bebop idea of riffing on a melody to the extent that the melody becomes unrecognizable (with an attendant introduction of dozens of beats to the standard four-beat bar) carries through in the frenetic kineticism of series that also, by its format, mirrors jazz bebop’s compact agility (generally carried by quartet and quintet arrangements)–making a feature-length film, then, a strange place for the “Cowboy Bebop” franchise to go.

The Hard Word (2002)

June 27, 2003Posted in2000s, Action, Australia, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Drama, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

*½/****
starring Guy Pearce, Rachel Griffiths, Robert Taylor, Joel Edgerton
written and directed by Scott Rogers

Hardwordby Walter Chaw You’d think that POME (“Prisoners of Mother England”) would be better at making a crime drama, but Scott Roberts’s hyphenate debut The Hard Word is a flaccid ripper of Kubrick’s The Killing thick in avuncular vernacular and notably thin of any real meat. Between a few funny throwaways (a character refers to Philip K. Dick’s A Scanner Darkly, Dick’s autobiographical survey of paranoia and drug psychosis, as a primer for modern marriage), and some decidedly David Lynch-ian violence, the picture feels a lot like a mish-mash of post-mod noir ideas (the butcher, the redeemed femme, cannibalism) arranged with little respect for rhyme and reason. Style over substance, the whole thing is delivered in accents so under-looped and thick that it occasionally falls out as a cast of Brad Pitt’s Snatch pikeys performing Tarantino outtakes.

Phone Booth (2003) – DVD

June 22, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, DVD, Mystery, Thriller

**½/**** Image B+ Sound A Commentary A
starring Colin Farrell, Kiefer Sutherland, Forest Whitaker, Radha Mitchell
screenplay by Larry Cohen
directed by Joel Schumacher

by Walter Chaw Responsible for some of my favourite weirdo low-tech cult films (Q, God Told Me To, It’s Alive!), underground auteur Larry Cohen’s output is a lollapalooza of high-concept hokum invested equally in the Catholic and the apocalyptic. Joining forces with master hack Joel Schumacher (who’s made a mean schlock classic or two himself–Flatliners, The Lost Boys, The Incredible Shrinking Woman) on the unfortunately-timed sniper fantasy Phone Booth, Cohen’s script reveals the man up to his old tricks: a barely feature-length product (about seventy-five minutes without credits) set inside a confessional-cum-8th Avenue phone booth that mires an anti-hero in an old-school oasis amidst our sterile technological wasteland. What should have been an agreeable bit of nonsense, however, gets tangled up in Cohen’s desire to proselytize, transforming the potential for a paranoid piece of B-sociology into something empty and pretentious–a tale directed by an idiot, full of some admittedly innovative sound design and a surplus of Method fury.

Hollywood Homicide (2003)

June 13, 2003Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Theatrical, Thriller

**/****
starring Harrison Ford, Josh Hartnett, Keith David, Lena Olin
screenplay by Robert Souza & Ron Shelton
directed by Ron Shelton

by Walter Chaw The kind of movie where a cop who calls himself “Smokey” is referring to Smokey Robinson (more to the point, the kind of movie where Smokey Robinson makes a cameo), Ron Shelton’s Hollywood Homicide is a diary of decline made by aging filmmakers and aimed at an aging audience. Shelton returns to the old guy/young guy/slut dynamic of Bull Durham while Harrison Ford turns in what is possibly the first “old guy” performance of his career–one that pings poignantly off his patented “weary bemusement” shtick before a finale (a comedy of humiliation) that functions as the only part of the film that really works. Sandwiched between the standard buddy/too-convenient-crime caper formula set-up and that deliriously good conclusion is a laboured exercise in forced bonhomie and a mysterious existential melancholy that feels a great deal like a tired exhalation. Hollywood Homicide is an extraordinarily average film that has something of a distinct, dark intimation nudging at its corners. A shame the Ron Shelton of today is not the Ron Shelton of Cobb.

Basic (2003) – DVD

June 12, 2003Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, DVD, Mystery, Thriller

*½/**** Image B Sound A Extras B-
starring John Travolta, Connie Nielsen, Samuel L. Jackson, Brian Van Holt
screenplay by James Vanderbilt
directed by John McTiernan

by Walter Chaw It occurred to me about midway through Basic that director John McTiernan, having nowhere to go but up after last year’s amusingly noxious Rollerball, was taking a page from the Michael Bay book of filmmaking before realizing that Bay had the McTiernan school (the McTiernan of Die Hard and Predator) to thank for the whole of his austere career. The Hollywood shooting match is an incestual Moebius strip, it seems, and for who was once the best action director in the United States to find himself a hollow shade of not only his past glory, but also Bay, is depressing beyond words. Which is not to say that Basic doesn’t start out extremely well: For a full minute, the picture provides a brief history of the French attempt at digging a canal in Panama in the 1880s scored to Bizet’s Carmen; the problem is that by the end of Basic, the only justification for the Carmen cue is that it’s also packed to the gills with bull.

Dark Blue (2002) [Special Edition] – DVD

June 6, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, DVD, Germany, Thriller, UK

**/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B-
starring Kurt Russell, Scott Speedman, Ving Rhames, Brendan Gleeson
screenplay by David Ayer
directed by Ron Shelton

by Walter Chaw Lost in the familiarity of critics calling films combinations of two similar films is the truism that, in all likelihood, these films were pitched exactly the same way to stuffed wallets lacking in much imagination. In this spirit, Dark Blue is Training Day meets L.A. Confidential–to that end, Training Day scribe David Ayer wrote the screenplay from a story by James Ellroy, author of L.A. Confidential the novel. In other words, Dark Blue is a chimera composed of the worst parts of a pair of better films–a green rookie/corrupt grizzled vet police thriller set in Los Angeles (Training Day) that, banking on the borrowed gravity of historical events to lend itself a measure of importance, features an evil Irish mentor/supercop responsible for the picture’s central crime (L.A. Confidential) and a tired storyline riddled with exhausted characters (a showboat role, a thankless role) and racial conveniences. It’s by now fair to wonder if director Ron Shelton will make another Blaze, let alone another Bull Durham.

Man on the Train (2002); Chaos (2001); And Now… Ladies and Gentlemen… (2002); The Son (2002)

June 5, 2003Posted in****/****, 2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Belgium, Comedy, Crime, Directors: Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, Drama, France, Germany, Japan, Mystery, Romance, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

L’Homme du train
***/****
starring Jean Rochefort, Johnny Hallyday, Jean-François Stévenin, Charlie Nelson
screenplay by Claude Klotz
directed by Patrice Leconte

CHAOS
*/****
starring Catherine Frot, Vincent Lindon, Rachida Brakni, Line Renaud
written and directed by Coline Serreau

AND NOW… LADIES AND GENTLEMEN…
***½/****
starring Jeremy Irons, Patricia Kaas, Thierry Lhermitte, Alessandra Martines
screenplay by Claude Lelouch, Pierre Leroux & Pierre Uytterhoeven
directed by Claude Lelouch

Le fils
****/****
starring Olivier Gourmet, Morgan Marinne, Isabella Soupart, Nassim Hassaïni
written and directed by Jean-Pierre Dardenne & Luc Dardenne

by Walter Chaw After a brief period where French cinema seemed exclusively interested in the ugliness and violence festering in its anti-Semitic margins, what with pictures as variegated as Baise-moi, Trouble Every Day, My Wife is an Actress, and indeed, Gasper Noé’s sensationalistic Irréversible (which demonstrates a continuing fascination with a tumultuous French cinema in extremis), the old guard begins to reassert itself with its own tales of the underbelly of life displacing the façade of the comfortable upper class. Patrice Leconte’s new film Man on the Train (L’Homme du train) is reserved and slight while Chaos by Coline Serreau (who was born the same year as Leconte, as it happens) tries to soften the cruelty of much of modern French cinema by overlaying it with a patina of feminist uplift and misplaced social satire. Films like Rohmer’s The Lady and the Duke and Godard’s In Praise of Love attempt to draw a line between the nouvelle and the digital age (and Chaos is shot in ugly DV), and pictures like Rivette’s wonderful Va Savoir and now Claude Lelouch’s And Now... Ladies and Gentlemen… act as surveys and auto-critique of the medium itself. With these three pictures, the meta-critical instinct–something of a hallmark of French culture in general and cinema in particular–finds a new voice in, ironically, its older generation of directors. Somewhat apart from all of that is the Dardenne Brothers’ The Son (Le Fils), which is on its own stylistically but looks thematically for common ground in its own tale of obsession and reconciliation.

The Italian Job (2003)

May 29, 2003Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, France, Germany, Italy, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

**½/****
starring Mark Wahlberg, Charlize Theron, Edward Norton, Seth Green
screenplay by Donna Powers & Wayne Powers, based on the screenplay by Troy Kennedy Martin
directed by F. Gary Gray

by Walter Chaw The Italian Job may be the very definition of a perfunctory remake. There’s no arguing with its professionalism and, at times, it threatens to hear the music, but when its best moments are those in which Donald Sutherland–in Venice again after 1973’s Don’t Look Now–summons up the horrific ghosts of Nicolas Roeg films past, the picture reveals itself to be inspired only by movies that were first, and better. In that spirit, among the recent crop of heist films, The Italian Job is better than Frank Oz’s The Score and David Mamet’s Heist, but not nearly so good as James Foley’s Confidence. It finds itself at the mercy of the rhythms and images of pictures it seeks to ape, drumming out in the end an often flat, frequently limp product that seems to know, to its credit, the difference between “style” and “seizure.” But with a cast that is either predictably flat (Mark Wahlberg, Charlize Theron, Jason Statham) or convinced they’re too good for the movie (Ed Norton; only Seth Green seems like he’s having genuine fun), The Italian Job is just a prettified reflection glancing off the surface of a deep well.

The In-Laws (2003)

May 22, 2003Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, Germany, Theatrical, Thriller

***/****
starring Michael Douglas, Albert Brooks, Ryan Reynolds, Lindsay Sloane
screenplay by Nat Mauldin and Ed Solomon, based on the screenplay by Andrew Bergman
directed by Andrew Fleming

Inlawsby Walter Chaw Casting Albert Brooks as the prototypical nebbish and Michael Douglas as a testosterone-geeked maniac is almost too easy, but given a vehicle like The In-Laws, with this much heat invested in its direction, the casting doesn’t seem so much lazy as inspired. Based on a 1979 film starring Alan Arkin and Peter Falk in the roles of put-upon father-of-the-bride and crazed father-of-the-groom, respectively, the remake doesn’t have a single scene as classic as the “serpentine” gag of the first but compensates with the sort of instant familiarity afforded by veteran personalities in comfortable roles. Douglas has been here before in another tale of familial dysfunction, The War of the Roses, and Brooks has never really been anywhere else; the picture, paced like a trip-hammer by director Andrew Fleming, only really fails in its drab newlywed couple and a passel of homosexual gags that are badly dated and bordering on unkind.

Star Trek: Nemesis (2002) [Widescreen Collection] – DVD

May 21, 2003Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD, Sci-Fi, Star Trek, Thriller

*/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B-
starring Patrick Stewart, Jonathan Frakes, Brent Spiner, LeVar Burton
screenplay by John Logan
directed by Stuart Baird

by Walter Chaw For a film in a tired franchise trying to duplicate Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (inarguably the best of the cinematic “Trek” line) down to an articulate arch-villain, heroic sacrifice, and mind-meld cheat, the irony of having the central conflict revolve around a defective clone is delicious and hilarious. Star Trek: Nemesis (hereafter Nemesis) is abominable pretension draped in the sheep’s frock of sci-fi pulp–pap of the first water invested in undergraduate doubling subtexts and ridiculous stabs at existentialism reminding of the discovery of the wizard of God in the fifth Trek flick.

Film Freak Central Does Film Forward

May 13, 2003Posted in****/****, 2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Chile, Comedy, Drama, Film Festivals, Horror, Romance, Thriller

MadstonefilmforwardlogoMay 13th, 2003|An interesting move from an interesting company, Madstone Theaters is releasing six undistributed films, each for a one-week alternating run called "Film Forward". The first thought that comes to mind is that undistributed films are most likely that way for a reason. There's an old Tinsel Town axiom that applies to most of the stuff that winds up shelved for a lengthy period of time (View from the Top, A Man Apart, The Weight of Water): studios often don't know when something's good, but they almost always know when something's bad. The idea of "Film Forward" should be appealing, at least intellectually, for the movie-savvy audience that Madstone is trying to cultivate; the question with currency is, as it always is, whether self-confessed movie snobs will put their money where their mouths are.

The Mothman Prophecies (2002) [Special Edition] – DVD

May 10, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Drama, DVD, Horror, Mystery, Thriller

**½/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B+
starring Richard Gere, Laura Linney, Will Patton, Debra Messing
screenplay by Richard Hatem, based on the novel by John A. Keel
directed by Mark Pellington

by Walter Chaw Inviting comparisons to “The X-Files” (comparisons the series made inevitable by setting several of its episodes in rural West Virginia and making mention of the “Mothman” in an excellent fifth season episode called “Detour”), Mark Pellington’s The Mothman Prophecies has a peculiarly muted quality to it that suggests the entire piece is best seen as shrouded in a caul. Allied with that idea, The Mothman Prophecies is about knowing certain things of the future and exorcising the past, about accepting that there are things in life that can’t be prevented. It’s got heady messages for a film based on a cultish bit of crypto-zoology reportage by John Keel (documenting eerie events in Point Pleasant, WV that stretched thirteen months from November 15, 1966 to December 15, 1967), and ultimately the relatively lightweight genre bedrock of the piece is not strong enough to support its broad philosophizing.

Owning Mahowny (2003)

May 1, 2003Posted in****/****, 2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Crime, Drama, Theatrical, Thriller

****/****
starring Philip Seymour Hoffman, Minnie Driver, Maury Chaykin, John Hurt
screenplay by Maurice Chauvet, based on the Gary Stephen Ross book Stung: The Incredible Obsession of Brian Molony
directed by Richard Kwietniowski

by Walter Chaw Richard Kwietniowski’s Owning Mahowny charts the mendacity of addiction with something like a poet’s lyrical melancholy. The director’s follow-up to his surprisingly gentle take on Thomas Mann, Love and Death on Long Island, finds another story of obsessive love that is itself obsessed with the importance of place in defining the accumulated essence of identity and desire. Kwietniowski’s films seem to be about secret outsiders finding themselves at some point swept out to proverbial sea, the land fading fast. While in Love and Death on Long Island that divorce illustrates the reach traversed by reclusive novelist Giles De’Ath (John Hurt) to claim his inamorata, in Owning Mahowny, the widening gyre is considerably (and deliciously) more complicated; the film marks Kwietniowski’s emergence as the most promising cartographer of self-confessional mortification since countryman Terence Davies. And Kwietniowski does it all with gentle, uncompromising humour.

The Dancer Upstairs (2002)

April 30, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Crime, Drama, Spain, Theatrical, Thriller

**/****
starring Javier Bardem, Laura Morante, Juan Diego Botto, Elvira Mínguez
screenplay by Nicholas Shakespeare, based on his novel
directed by John Malkovich

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Why do people insist on making movies as though all Latin-American countries are the same? How is it that they can get away with ignoring cultural differences and national identities as though they were nothing? The same first-world writers who set their scripts “somewhere in Latin America” would surely find an Ecuadorian or a Peruvian presumptuous for setting his or her own tale “somewhere in Western Europe.” But these jokers have no guilt about herding millions and millions of people into the same leaky boat, and defining the stretch from Mexico to Argentina as one big, ugly banana republic. The results are usually not pretty, and The Dancer Upstairs is no exception to the rule.

Femme Fatale (2002) – DVD

April 10, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Directors: Brian De Palma, DVD, Romance, Satire, Thriller

*½/**** Image A Sound A- Extras C
starring Rebecca Romijn-Stamos, Antonio Banderas, Peter Coyote, Eriq Ebouaney
written and directed by Brian De Palma

FEMME_FATALE07by Walter Chaw The first script written solely by Brian De Palma since his 1992 film Raising Cain, Femme Fatale, like that film, rips off the famous murderer-reveal of Dario Argento’s Tenebre. Come to think of it, the picture is essentially a rehash in one way or another of every film De Palma’s ever written (the voyeurism and body switch of Body Double, the phallic film equipment of Blow Out, the steamy stall-sex of Dressed to Kill, the evil twin thing and split-screen of Sisters, the voyeurism again of Hi, Mom!, and so on)–and because De Palma’s best films and screenplays were iterations of Hitchcock (and sometimes Argento, the Italian Hitchcock), Femme Fatale is as stale and detached as the third-generation copy that it is.

Darkness Falls (2003) [Special Edition] – DVD

April 9, 2003Posted in2000s, Australia, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD, Horror, Mystery, Thriller

**/**** Image B- Sound A Extras B-
starring Chaney Kley, Emma Caulfield, Joshua Anderson, Andrew Bayly
screenplay by John Fasano and James Vanderbilt and Joe Harris
directed by Jonathan Liebesman

by Walter Chaw Two years removed from Victor Salva’s Jeepers Creepers (and on the eve of a sequel to that film), Darkness Falls whets cult appetites by being nearly a scene-for-scene recreation of that film’s inferior second half. Essentially a series of “I don’t believe your story–hey, why did the lights go out?” scenarios and unearned jump scares, the picture opens with a nice fairytale prologue and a nifty “12 years ago” introduction that hints at the promise of a murderous Tooth Fairy. As soon as the action jumps to the present day with a warbling youngster, her hot sister, and our troubled hero, however, any pretense of a creepy, coherent mythology flies out the window as the flick devolves into an inexorable killer flick amped-up to “11.”

Red Dragon (2002) [2-Disc Director’s Edition] – DVD

April 6, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, DVD, Germany, Thriller

*/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B-
starring Anthony Hopkins, Edward Norton, Ralph Fiennes, Harvey Keitel
screenplay by Ted Tally, based on the novel by Thomas Harris
directed by Brett Ratner

by Walter Chaw Because Thomas Harris’s haunting novel of the same name is flawed in someone’s eye, Red Dragon hacks and slices the piece with a rude imprecision that would inspire pop icon Hannibal Lecter to sharpen his carving tools. The picture opens with a ridiculous and awkwardly-staged Lecter backstory (meaning it plays like the rest of the Lecter additions) that gives a self-parodying Anthony Hopkins a ponytail in place of the self-respect to which he can no longer lay claim, bringing to mind the unwieldy cameos of Cannonball Run.