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

Posted 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)

Posted 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

Posted 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

Posted 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)

Posted 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.

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.

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.

Mulholland Drive (2001) – DVD

Mulholland Drive (2001) – DVD

Posted 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

David 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

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.

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

Posted 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

Posted 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

Posted 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.

Training Day (2001) – DVD

Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, DVD, Thriller

**½/**** Image A Sound A Extras B+
starring Denzel Washington, Ethan Hawke, Scott Glenn, Eva Mendes
screenplay by David Ayer
directed by Antoine Fuqua

by Walter Chaw In Antoine Fuqua and Dominic Sena’s race to become David Fincher, Fuqua, with his colour-bleached urban noir Training Day, pulls slightly ahead. Essentially a feature-length version of the Fuqua-helmed video for Coolio’s “Gangsta’s Paradise,” Training Day is dankly lit, grim, and edited with a veteran music-video director’s need for speed (though there are considerably fewer cuts than those found in Fuqua’s previous efforts Bait and The Replacement Killers). So smooth and accomplished is the harsh vérité look of the piece that the sun-drenched streets of Los Angeles are as much a player in the film as its leads. But the striking cinematography, sharp screenplay by David Ayer, and undeniable chemistry between Denzel Washington and Ethan Hawke aren’t enough to disguise that Training Day is one bravura performance away from being the umpteenth rote grizzled vet/greenhorn rookie policier. (With a healthy dash of Casualties of War tossed in for that Captain Bligh/Mr. Christian dynamic.)

The Hole (2001) [Deluxe Special Edition] – DVD

The Hole (2001) [Deluxe Special Edition] – DVD

Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Canada, Drama, DVD, France, Mystery, Thriller, UK

**½/**** Image A Sound B Extras B
starring Thora Birch, Desmond Harrington, Daniel Brocklebank, Laurence Fox
screenplay by Ben Cort & Caroline Ip, based on the novel After the Hole by Guy Burt
directed by Nick Hamm

by Bill Chambers Sam Mendes, her American Beauty director, has called her the next Marlon Brando; indeed, I wrote in my list of the Top 10 Films of 2001 that I find Thora Birch the most captivating actress working, and I meant it. Her Ghost World performance struck me as a modern parallel to Brando in roles as disparate as Terry Malloy or Don Corleone, not for any more explicit reason than the way the film becomes a living, breathing animal when she’s on screen and the fact that she looms large over scenes from which she’s absent. The same is true for the British production The Hole, in which she is again the very convincing centre of gravity. She’s dynamite, though the movie itself wants for an artist of Mendes’s or Terry Zwigoff’s calibre to pull it all together.

The Watcher in the Woods (1980) – DVD

The Watcher in the Woods (1980) – DVD

Posted in1980s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Disney, DVD, Family, Horror, Mystery, Thriller, UK

**/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras B
starring Bette Davis, Lynn-Holly Johnson, Kyle Richards, Carroll Baker
screenplay by Brian Clemens, Rosemary Anne Sisson, Harry Spalding, based on the novel by Florence Engel Randall
directed by John Hough

by Walter Chaw John Hough’s cult favourite The Watcher in the Woods is a movie about how a camera presents a point-of-view and how that point-of-view, if it’s not attached to a specific identity, can become menacingly voyeuristic; shame that The Watcher in the Woods isn’t also about a story with characters in whom you’re interested and performances that don’t set teeth on edge. One of the more unusual Disney productions of the late 1970s, the film becomes yet another showcase for an aging Bette Davis’s hiccupping hag archetype and, sadly, an opportunity for figure skater Lynn-Holly Johnson to demonstrate how good athletes seldom become good actors.

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.