It Came from Outer Space (1953) – DVD

May 20, 2002Posted in1950s, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD, Horror, Romance, Sci-Fi, Thriller

***/**** Image B+ Sound B Extras A+
starring Richard Carlson, Barbara Rush, Charles Drake, Russell Johnson
screenplay by Harry Essex, based on the story by Ray Bradbury
directed by Jack Arnold

by Walter Chaw The first Universal International science-fiction release, the first motion picture to be shot in 3-D “Nature Vision,” and the first genre film to primarily use the theremin in its score (by an unbilled Henry Mancini, Irving Gertz, and Herman Stein), Jack Arnold’s It Came From Outer Space is influential in so many ways that it would take twice and again the space allotted for this review to list them all. (A short list includes Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind and his statement to (again unbilled) screenwriter Ray Bradbury that it would not exist without this picture (Dreyfuss’s profession in that film pays homage to Russell Johnson’s profession in this one); The Abyss and its watery fish-eye point-of-view; and countless “desert” sci-fis, including such recent incarnations as Evolution and the opening sequence of Men In Black.) It Came from Outer Space is a prime example of how nuclear terror and the Red Scare informed the B-horror films of the Fifties, and that genre movies today would do well to take a few lessons from their predecessors.

Vanilla Sky (2001) – DVD

May 18, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD, Esoterica, Mystery, Romance, Sci-Fi, Spain, Thriller, Tom Cruise

*/**** Image A+ Sound A+ Extras B-
starring Tom Cruise, Penélope Cruz, Kurt Russell, Cameron Diaz
screenplay by Cameron Crowe, based on the screenplay for Abre Los Ojos by Alejandro Amenábar and Mateo Gil
directed by Cameron Crowe

by Walter Chaw Vanilla Sky is an unpleasant, incompetent, and laborious amalgam of Jacob’s Ladder and The Game, Joe Eszterhas doing Frank Herbert, if you will. It is profane to no good end, forcing Cameron Diaz to define her sexuality through roughly a dozen variations on “I swallowed your come,” and is otherwise so sloppily assembled that even the generally arresting Jason Lee is made irritating and superfluous. Cameron Crowe is rapidly becoming a self-indulgent, disingenuous disaster–his films grow more pretentious as his subjects shrink in consequence. After tackling a rose-coloured breed of aggrandizing nostalgia in the overlong Almost Famous, he’s decided to remake the mediocre Spanish film Open Your Eyes (“Abre Los Ojos”)by flavour of the month Alejandro Amenábar, paying alleged “homage” to about a dozen other directors, movies, and album covers while displaying exactly the same breed of star-deifying that he ostensibly deflated in Almost Famous. Crowe fans should prepare to be disheartened by the realization that the crown prince of weakling uplift has actually fallen down on the altar of the ultimate Kafkaesque Hollywood godhead: Tom Cruise.

The Temp (1993) – DVD

May 10, 2002Posted in1990s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Horror, Thriller

***/**** Image A- Sound B
starring Timothy Hutton, Lara Flynn Boyle, Dwight Schultz, Oliver Platt
screenplay by Kevin Falls
directed by Tom Holland

by Walter Chaw The Temp borders on brilliant. A thriller from director Tom Holland, he of the “better than they ought to be” Fright Night and Child’s Play, the picture plays with corporate and gender politics in a fashion similar to the first half of Mike Nichols’s Wolf. Similarly, neither can The Temp hold its centre through to the end, resorting to cheap genre tactics and fright gags where a more faithful treatment of its workplace paranoia would far better serve the rapier instincts and execution of the rest of the piece.

Watership Down (1978) – DVD

May 8, 2002Posted in1970s, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Esoterica, Thriller, UK

***/**** Image B Sound B
screenplay by Martin Rosen, based on the novel by Richard Adams
directed by Martin Rosen

by Walter Chaw Unsentimental and terrifying and set against lovely, John Constable-esque watercolour backgrounds, Martin Rosen’s adaptation of the Richard Adams novel Watership Down arose in that extended lull between Disney’s heyday and its late-Eighties resurrection. (This period also saw, in addition to Rosen’s film of Adams’s The Plague Dogs, Rankin & Bass’s The Last Unicorn and Ralph Bakshi’s most productive period, which included 1978’s The Lord of the Rings.) Watership Down points to the dwindled potential for American animation to evolve into what anime has become: a mature medium for artistic expression of serious issues. A shame that this flawed piece is possibly the pinnacle of animation’s ambition on these shores, Richard Linklater’s Waking Life notwithstanding.

From Hell (2001) [Director’s Limited Edition] – DVD

April 28, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Czechoslovakia, DVD, Horror, Mystery, Thriller, UK

***/**** Image A- Sound A+ Extras A
starring Johnny Depp, Heather Graham, Ian Holm, Paul Rhys
screenplay by Terry Hayes and Rafael Yglesias, based on the graphic novel by Alan Moore & Eddie Campbell
directed by Albert Hughes & Allen Hughes

by Walter Chaw Alan Moore’s brilliant graphic novel From Hell is first a work of Romanticism (in that it evolves from a mistrust of industry, a demonizing of all that the rail represents to the continued corruption of nature), then a nostalgia for a hopelessly idealized past. Once his Romantic roots are established, Moore clarifies the evolutionary link between British Romanticism and Modernism by lifting a quote from Jack the Ripper’s infamous letter: “One day, men will look back and say I gave birth to the twentieth century.” As it’s employed by Moore and in consideration of the author’s grasp of literary theory, this one quote eloquently juxtaposes the impact of Bloody Jack’s Grand Guignol rampage in London of 1888 with the fin de siècle (The French Revolution) that marked the actual birth of Romanticism in the Lake District of 1789. In simpler terms, From Hell is a work of incomparable incandescence–smart stuff for smart people and theoretically the easiest of Moore’s works to translate to the big screen.

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.

Metropolis (2001) – DVD

April 22, 2002Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Japan, Sci-Fi, Thriller

***½/**** Image A+ Sound A+ Extras A
screenplay by Katsuhiro Ôtomo, based on the comic book by Osamu Tezuka
directed by Rintaro

by Walter Chaw There is a sense of wonder inherent in the exploration of new mediums. A young Maxim Gorky’s 1896 review of one of the first Lumiére Cinématographe shows in Russia begins, “Last night I was in the Kingdom of Shadows.” As I began exploring the anime medium (not a “genre,” I am assured, and I have come to concur) a scant couple of years ago, I felt similarly the interloper in a dreamscape conjured by a culture steeped in tradition, mythology, and the sort of artistic sensibility that could only evolve from the only people victimized by the most terrible weapon of mass destruction humans have devised. Anime is–perhaps predictably, then–often-post-apocalyptic (its themes exploring the existential by way of William Gibson’s cyberpunk and Philip K. Dick’s identity crisis) finding elements of the rapture in such rapturous fantasies as the lyrical Princess Mononoke, the viscerally charged Ninja Scroll, and the ferocious yet delicate Nausicaä of the Valley of Wind.

Ocean’s Eleven (2001) [Widescreen Edition] – DVD

April 20, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Directors: Steven Soderbergh, DVD, Thriller

**½/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B
starring George Clooney, Matt Damon, Andy Garcia, Brad Pitt
screenplay by Ted Griffin
directed by Steven Soderbergh

by Walter Chaw Impeccably-costumed and impossibly-handsome action figures are arranged in cool poses throughout Ocean's Eleven, Steven Soderbergh's updating of the same-named Rat Pack caper. A throwback to the star-driven cinema of the Fifties and a reflection of our own fanatical interest in cults of personality, the film features transparent performances (with the exception of Don Cheadle, each performer in Ocean's Eleven is playing his- or herself), and the same kind of sadistic voyeurism that impels us to simultaneously deify and find fault with our favourite actors keeps our peepers glued to the screen as George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Matt Damon, Elliot Gould, and Carl Reiner revolve around one another in a loose heist intrigue intended to relieve Andy Garcia of both his millions and his girlfriend.

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.

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.

Mulholland Drive (2001) – DVD

April 14, 2002Posted in****/****, 2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: David Lynch, Drama, DVD, Esoterica, FFC Must-Own, France, Mystery, Thriller

Mulholland Dr.
****/**** Image A- Sound A
starring Justin Theroux, Naomi Watts, Laura Elena Harring, Ann Miller
written and directed by David Lynch

by Walter Chaw

Was it a vision, or a waking dream?
 Fled is that music — Do I wake or sleep?
– John Keats, Ode to a Nightingale

MustownDavid Lynch’s Mulholland Drive contends that the answer to the eternal struggle between what is real and what is fantasy comes in the form of a Keatsian confusion–it’s the difference between Adam’s dream and Eve rendered flesh, blurred in the mind of the creator and his audience. A film is a dream of the director made tangible, a conceit familiar from the fourth-wall-breaking in Ingmar Bergman’s Persona (banishing any mystery there might have been regarding the visual references to that film in Lynch’s piece), and a movie’s characters therefore become projections of its maker’s sublimated longing (clarifying too the auteur’s use of wardrobe and colour schemes from Hitchcock’s meditation on objectification, Vertigo, as well as those of his first collaboration with inamorata Tippi Hedren, The Birds).

The Starz Independent FilmCenter Project, Vol. 1

April 5, 2002Posted 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)

April 5, 2002Posted 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)

March 29, 2002Posted 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)

March 29, 2002Posted 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)

March 29, 2002Posted 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.

Spy Game (2001) [Collector’s Edition (Widescreen)] – DVD

March 28, 2002Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Directors: Tony Scott, DVD, Espionage, France, Germany, Japan, Thriller, UK

**/**** Image A+ Sound A+ Extras B+
starring Robert Redford, Brad Pitt, Catherine McCormack, Stephen Dillane
screenplay by Michael Frost Beckner and David Arata
directed by Tony Scott

by Walter Chaw The defining moment of Spy Game, Tony Scott’s latest exercise in stylistic excess, occurs at about the midway point. Playing CIA spymaster Nathan Muir, Robert Redford debriefs his best agent Tom Bishop (Brad Pitt) atop a building in Cold War Berlin. After a tense exchange, an enraged Bishop throws his chair off the barren, windswept rooftop. The problem with the scene is neither the preposterous screenplay by Michael Frost Beckner and David Arata to which it belongs, nor Scott’s infatuation with the panoramic aerial shot, nor the way that Harry Gregson-Williams’s ubiquitous score threatens here and at every other moment to rupture your eardrums. It’s not even in the ridiculously out-of-place imagistic Xerox of Wings of Desire, Wim Wenders’s melancholy ode to love and Berlin.

Behind Enemy Lines (2001) – DVD

March 26, 2002Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Thriller, War

*½/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B
starring Owen Wilson, Gene Hackman, Joaquim de Almeida, David Keith
screenplay by David Veloz and Zak Penn
directed by John Moore

by Walter Chaw John Moore makes his directorial debut with the high-volume, flag-waving Behind Enemy Lines, but the film so recalls the visual excesses of Top Gun and Enemy of the State (down to a satellite surveillance sequence) that I began to wonder halfway through if “John Moore” was a nom de plume for Tony Scott. Everything else about Behind Enemy Lines, after all, is basically a retread: the third Gene Hackman “not leaving a man behind” film after Bat 21 and Uncommon Valor, and the umpteenth time the veteran actor has been asked to play a snarling iconoclast, spitting in the face of an unfeeling establishment.

Sexual Predator (2001) – DVD

March 21, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD, Thriller, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/**** Image C- Sound C+
starring Angie Everhart, Richard Grieco, Kevin Fry, Elizabeth Barondes
screenplay by Ed Silverstein
directed by Robert Angelo

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Lacking the camp quality of Zandalee and the sleazy titillation of Wild Orchid, Robert Angelo’s neo-Zalman King/soft-porn/direct-to-video abomination Sexual Predator (a.k.a. Last Cry) is full of Richard Grieco moments like the one where he fondles straight razors, huskily droning, “This, this is my favourite,” as well as Angie Everhart showcasing her newfound, Mamie Van Doren-esque compulsion to get naked. It is a purported psychosexual thriller that establishes Grieco as the new Mickey Rourke and Everhart as the new Shannon Tweed while simultaneously verifying that both actors have given up.