Love, Death & Gambling: FFC Interviews Richard Kwietniowski

May 3, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Interviews, UK

RkwietniowskiinterviewtitleMay 4, 2003|Small and soft-spoken, director Richard Kwietniowski is quietly emerging as one of the most exciting new “serious humanist” filmmakers of the last ten years. His two feature films, Love and Death on Long Island and Owning Mahowny, his latest, tackle issues of love and obsession with a deft visual sense and a surprisingly gentle touch. In Love and Death on Long Island, Kwietniowski fashions one of the most enigmatic and charming characters since Chauncey Gardner with John Hurt’s reclusive author Giles De’Ath: after a humiliating radio interview, the technology-shy De’Ath finds himself in the wrong theatre watching a cheap teensploitation flick starring “Tiger Beat” idol Ronnie Bostock (Jason Priestley); smitten, De’Ath embarks upon an unlikely quest for beauty and completion that brings him into the modern age and too close an association with the truth behind the fantasy.

Hot Docs ’03: Driving Me Crazy (1988)

May 2, 2003Posted in1980s, 2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs, UK, West Germany
**½/****directed by Nick Broomfield by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Of interest to pupils of documentary--and no one else--is Driving Me Crazy, a film in which Nick Broomfield, for better and for worse, reveals his own machinations on camera and upstages his ostensible subject. Hired by producer friend Andrew Braunsberg to document an Austrian stage production on African-American music, the director shamelessly inserts himself into the scene, recording the financial and political transactions that allow him to continue with his work. In so doing, he antagonizes many who work on the production and doesn't seem to care, concerned only with continuing the…

Hot Docs ’03: Baader-Meinhof: In Love with Terror

May 1, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs, UK
**/****directed by Ben Lewis by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Or rather, Ben Lewis: In Love with Obviousness. This brief history of the ultra-left Red Army Faction, whose terrorism swept West Germany during the '70s, doesn't really deal with the issues that created it; the film is far more interested in the sensational aspects of their rampage than in any of the questions that it raised. Admittedly, some of the details depicted are fascinating: I didn't realize that Andreas Baader's squeeze Gudrun Ensselin was a sex-movie queen, or that the BMW, RAF getaway car of choice, became known as the "Baader-Meinhof Wagon."…

Hot Docs ’03: The Day I Will Never Forget

April 30, 2003Posted inAuthors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs, UK
***½/****directed by Kim Longinotto by Travis Mackenzie Hoover The co-director of Divorce Iranian Style is back with this intelligent and powerful documentary on female genital mutilation in Kenya. Not only does it show, in a chilling centrepiece sequence, the immediate and excruciating pain it causes the young girls subjected to the practice (as well as the health consequences of dirty instruments and heavy stitching), but it also explores the cultural mechanisms that ensure that people, even women, will continue it. The ears burn at hearing tribal leaders offer their explanations of the logic in its implementation, as well as at…

Hot Docs ’03: The Lost Boys (2002)

April 27, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Documentary, Film Festivals, UK
**/****directed by Clive Gordon by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Can a film have a wealth of new information and still be a failure? If the film is Clive Gordon's The Lost Boys, the answer is an unfortunate "yes." Dealing with the ultimate fate of some of the "lost boys" of the Sudan, who fled to northern Kenya when they were attacked by the Arab army, it shows a handful of the 3,500 who were selected for resettling in America. On the plus side, it shows a process that rarely is seen on film, that of people struggling to adjust to a…

Hot Docs ’03: Chicken Ranch (1982)

April 24, 2003Posted in1980s, 2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs, UK
***/****directed by Nick Broomfield and Sandi Sissel by Travis Mackenzie Hoover This is the story of a Nevada brothel--the transplanted inspiration for The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas--and it's not a particularly happy one. On the surface, everything runs like a well-oiled machine: the girls troop out for selection by the customers, they negotiate the price with the customers, and the proprietor beams for journalists about what a public service he's providing. But, at least according to this film, the job of being a prostitute is an aggravating one, and as the women complain about inconsiderate tricks and fears of…

Biggie & Tupac (2002) – DVD

April 13, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Crime, Documentary, DVD, Music, UK

***/**** Image B- Sound B Extras B+
directed by Nick Broomfield

by Bill Chambers A few days ago in THE HOT BUTTON, Dave Poland distinguished Nick Broomfield from his peers in the documentary field better–or, at least, more succinctly–than I’ve ever seen it done: “[Broomfield] creates an atmosphere in which you connect emotionally not with the characters in the film, but with his plight in trying to get his film made.” That’s certainly true of Broomfield’s Biggie & Tupac, in which almost every sequence carries the subtext of peril: A bona fide Dante in headphones, Broomfield latches onto a Virgil (ex-police officer Russell Poole) who escorts him, more or less, through circles of Hell (the gang-marked territories of Compton, the rap-music industry, and finally prison). An alarming number of the director’s interviews in Biggie & Tupac begin with a summary of attempts on the subject’s life, and in a deleted scenes section on the DVD, we see that Broomfield tried and failed to chat with the owner of L.A.’s notorious “Last Resort,” a bar at which gangbangers receive an ace-of-spades merit badge for their first killshot. A red ace means a flesh wound; a black ace means fatality.

What a Girl Wants (2003)

April 4, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Family, Romance, Theatrical, UK

*/****
starring Amanda Bynes, Colin Firth, Kelly Preston, Anna Chancellor
screenplay by Jenny Bicks and Elizabeth Chandler, based on the play “The Reluctant Debutante” by William Douglas Home
directed by Dennie Gordon

by Walter Chaw A cynical play for the babysitting money of a very particular demographic, What a Girl Wants is a by-the-numbers Cinderella story that’s not only a carbon copy of The Princess Diaries but also the umpteenth iteration of a distaff preteen fantasy that equates irreverent immaturity with being true to one’s own self. It takes potshots at the stuffiness of the British in the same way that urban comedies take aim at the stuffiness of white folks, seeking to loosen up the awkward unfortunates with a pathetic dance sequence. And it offers Nickelodeon phenom Amanda Bynes yet another opportunity to try on a bunch of outfits in not one, but two dress-up montages. The film believes that it knows what will please twelve-year-old girls (and their 35-year-old fathers), and it may well indeed, but the problem with What a Girl Wants is that there’s precious little honour in satisfying the basest needs of its audience with the equivalent of leftover porridge.

Evelyn (2002) [Special Edition] – DVD

April 2, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Family, Germany, Ireland, Netherlands, UK

*/**** Image C+ Sound B- Extras B+
starring Pierce Brosnan, Julianna Margulies, Aidan Quinn, Stephen Rea
screenplay by Paul Pender
directed by Bruce Beresford

by Walter Chaw It seems as though “inspired” in the phrase “inspired by a true story” is the operative word as the 2002 Christmas season presents to us a rotten couplet of films “inspired” by true stories that, in all likelihood, were pretty interesting prior to the whitewashed variety of “inspiration” dished out in most high profile biopics. Headliner Antwone Fisher (a rancid piece of garbage I like to refer to as “Good Antwone Fishing” or “Finding Fisher-er”) gains esteem just by the association of twinkly-eyed Denzel Washington behind the camera (and stentorian Denzel in front), while small foreign film Evelyn will probably gain esteem by dint of its small and foreign status. (Just like its cute-as-a-button titular waif.) Like so many horrible movies of this mongrel breed, however, both Antwone Fisher and Evelyn are so uncompromising in their saccharine manipulations that nurses should stand at theatre entrances, passing out hypodermics of insulin.

The Core (2003)

March 28, 2003Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Disaster Movie, France, Germany, Italy, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

**½/****
starring Aaron Eckhart, Hilary Swank, Delroy Lindo, Stanley Tucci
screenplay by Cooper Layne and John Rogers
directed by Jon Amiel

by Walter Chaw Jon Amiel’s poorly-timed disaster throwback The Core is a by-the-numbers affair that features the sort of special effects mayhem that folks will reference when terrorists blow-up the Acropolis–perhaps explaining in part why this bombastic summer film is being rushed into release in the late-winter doldrums: better to get it in movieplexes before it has to be delayed for a few months. But with unfortunate mentions of the Al Jazeera news agency and a botched shuttle landing that is exceedingly uncomfortable given its proximity to NASA’s recent tragedy, it could just be that The Core is a bad idea for any time, and releasing it when no one is likely to see it is just a cut-your-losses sort of thing. The Core is probably betting that people are more fatigued by the Riefenstahl-ian “embedded” live coverage of our troops in action than by their over-familiarity with this kind of Armageddon/Deep Impact/Poseidon Adventure falderal, when the truth is that it’s possible to be tired of both.

Jonah: A VeggieTales Movie (2002) [2-Disc Collector’s Edition] – DVD

March 22, 2003Posted in2000s, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Family, Musical, UK

***/**** Image A Sound A Extras A+
written and directed by Paul Vischer and Mike Nawrocki

by Walter Chaw Sort of Monty Python-lite with a Christian message, the VeggieTales direct-to-video series of didactic sketches is, I’m told, the top-selling home video series in history, speaking at once to the creepy rise of grotesquely hypocritical religiosity in the United States and the fact that VeggieTales, judging by its first feature-length film Jonah, is extremely clever and entertaining. Packed with visual gags and semi-subtle references (a “Moby Blaster” video game in a seafood reference recalls Melville’s fondness for the Jonah tale), Jonah: A VeggieTales Movie is a bouncy Christian animated musical with a handful of compulsively catchy tunes and some crisp computer-imaging work. It occurred to me a few times during the course of the picture that as far as Christian entertainment goes, this is the first product that didn’t disqualify the term as an oxymoron.

Labyrinth (1986) [Superbit] – DVD

March 5, 2003Posted in1980s, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD, Family, Fantasy, Muppets, Musical, UK

*½/**** Image A- Sound B+
starring David Bowie, Jennifer Connelly
screenplay by Terry Jones
directed by Jim Henson

by Walter Chaw As riffs on Alice in Wonderland and The Wizard of Oz go, Jim Henson’s Labyrinth is a painfully dated, shockingly un-magical romp through a fragmented netherworld populated by Ziggy Stardust and a horde of little people wearing giant papier-mâché heads. Following a wish by bratty Sarah (Jennifer Connelly) that her bratty kid brother be spirited away by the Goblin King (David Bowie) and Sarah’s inevitable lapse into unconsciousness and journey into the titular, Escher-inspired labyrinth, the picture unfolds at a laboured clip marked not so much by a sense of wonder, but rather a feeling of confused disinterest. While the film is a nostalgic hallmark for many (and so is Pete’s Dragon, it occurs), cinematically and artistically, better to revisit Henson’s flawed but alive The Dark Crystal.

Ordinary Decent Criminal (2000) – DVD

February 24, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, DVD, Gangster, Germany, Ireland, UK

*/**** Image A- Sound B+
starring Kevin Spacey, Linda Fiorentino, Peter Mullan, Stephen Dillane
screenplay by Gerard Stembridge
directed by Thaddeus O’Sullivan

by Walter Chaw Completed about a year after John Boorman’s infinitely superior The General, Thaddeus O’Sullivan’s Ordinary Decent Criminal is a sporadic “fictionalizing” of the life of Irish crime boss Martin Cahill that dresses up Cahill’s exploits with slick visuals while attempting the unsavoury task of doing exactly what The General was accused of doing: making urban terrorism and torture whimsical caper fare. Recasting Cahill as a Keyser Soze with a sense of oily humour and renaming him Michael Lynch (Kevin Spacey), Ordinary Decent Criminal is extraordinarily lightweight blather free entirely of the sense of scale and place of Boorman’s film. The General is fantastic, Ordinary Decent Criminal: just fatuous.

The Life of David Gale (2003)

February 21, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, Germany, Mystery, Spain, Theatrical, Thriller, UK, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Kevin Spacey, Kate Winslet, Laura Linney, Gabriel Mann
screenplay by Charles Randolph
directed by Alan Parker

Lifeofdavidgaleby Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. One wonders if there isn’t, after all, a subtle right-wing conspiracy at work in the entertainment industry, where ultra-liberal stumps are turned into the sort of ostensibly pro-leftist propaganda reel that does serious harm to the pro-leftist agenda. If it’s not the reprehensible The Contender, with its Ayn Rand-ian hypothetical, it’s I Am Sam and its bizarre vilification of the child welfare system–or worse, John Q, with its curiously misdirected lament against our obviously broken health-care state. Trumping them all in terms of muddle and melodrama, however, is The Life of David Gale, an anti-death penalty tirade that, by the end, feels like a life sentence the audience wishes hadn’t been commuted. The only way to make any sense of the film is to suspect it of darker motives: Its ultimate message–and it’s not a bad one–seems to be that the criminal justice system the film so actively vilifies is, in fact, the only honest (though imperfect) force in the entire mess.

The Magic Christian (1969) – DVD

February 15, 2003Posted in1960s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, DVD, Esoterica, UK

*½/**** Image A- Sound A-
starring Peter Sellers, Ringo Starr, Isabel Jeans, Caroline Blakiston
screenplay by Terry Southern & Joseph McGrath, based on Southern's novel
directed by Joseph McGrath

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover The worst thing about The Magic Christian is that it thinks it's good for you. Essentially a series of blackout sketches in which people are induced by cash to do embarrassing and/or unprincipled things, it comes on like it's revealing some hitherto concealed facet of "straight" society, the better to seem irreverent and "with-it" in that vaguely-defined Sixties kind of way. But a movie where a rich guy with a briefcase full of money delights in its power to destroy other people's self-image is more than a little cynical, and sure enough, The Magic Christian seems to like its self-appointed judge/jury/executioner roles too much for comfort. The more it tries to convince you that it's everyone else who's rotten and corrupt, the more the film reveals its own misanthropy–and its mean-spirited nature thwarts whatever meagre stabs at merriment it attempts.

Swept Away (2002) – DVD

January 30, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Italy, Romance, UK

**/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Madonna, Adriano Giannini, Jeanne Tripplehorn, Bruce Greenwood
screenplay by Guy Ritchie, based on the screenplay by Lina Wertmüller
directed by Guy Ritchie

by Bill Chambers No, it's not a masterpiece, but the deck was already stacked against Guy Ritchie's Swept Away long before anyone saw the picture. That it was a remake (of Lina Wertmüller's squirm-inducing Swept Away… by an Unusual Destiny in the Blue Sea of August) was strike one; that it starred Madonna, a lousy film actress considered box-office poison, strike two; that Ritchie is married to Madonna, marking Swept Away as the kind of vanity project that power couples make to spend more time together than their private life allows, strike three. And every review you read of Swept Away–that I read, at least–parroted these three strikes, sizing them to fit a column's allotment; there's no doubt in my mind that, even though it became the whipping-boy of late-night talk-show hosts and assured its victory at the 2003 Golden Raspberrys with near-universal placement on year-end worst-of lists, you haven't any meaningful clue as to what's actually wrong with Swept Away.

About a Boy (2002) [Widescreen] – DVD

January 17, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD, France, Germany, Romance, UK

**½/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B
starring Hugh Grant, Toni Collette, Rachel Weisz, Isabel Brook
screenplay by Peter Hedges and Chris Weitz & Paul Weitz, based on the novel by Nick Hornby
directed by Paul Weitz & Chris Weitz

by Walter Chaw Will Freeman (Hugh Grant) is a philanderer and a playboy. Independently wealthy because of residuals from his father’s authorship of an inexplicably successful Christmas tune, he spends his feckless days in carefully scheduled thirty-minute “units.” (One unit for taking a bath; three for lunch.) Finally feeling a void in the middle of his rootless life at the tender age of thirty-eight, Will–after a scheme to feign single-parentage backfires roughly–finds himself involved with a mordant thirteen-year-old named Marcus (Nicholas Hoult) and Marcus’s suicidally-depressed mother, Fiona (Toni Collette). Rachel Weisz plays the girl too good for the pre-evolution rapscallion, her late appearance ultimately best described as the plot point that drives act three.

The Hours (2002)

December 27, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Drama, Esoterica, France, Germany, Romance, Theatrical, UK

**/****
starring Meryl Streep Julianne Moore, Nicole Kidman, Eileen Atkins
screenplay by David Hare, based on the novel by Michael Cunningham
directed by Stephen Daldry

Hoursby Walter Chaw Nicole Kidman is a wonderful Virginia Woolf–a distracted mess in a film that is a literalization of that description. The only real problem with Kidman’s performance is her prosthetic nose–it’s a no-win situation in which The Hours finds itself: allow Kidman to look like Kidman as Woolf and there will arise such a clamour of voices; make Kidman look like Woolf and not only is it impossible to stop looking for the line at the bridge, there will still arise such a clamour of voices. The problematical manipulations and presumptions of the rest of the film are as difficult to overlook as the nose stuck on Nicole’s face: The Hours is mannered to no good purpose, glowering with no good justification, and the sort of artificial construct that presents life lessons writ large by a cadre of talented performers who recognize a mainstream prestige piece when it presents itself. The only thing that separates The Hours from garbage like A Beautiful Mind (last year’s odds-on favourite to disappoint people who care while pleasing people who don’t really give a damn and don’t remember the morning after anyway) is that its marquee disability is being a woman and, apparently, being a lesbian.

KylieFever2002 (2002) – DVD

December 9, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Concert Doc, DVD, Music, UK

Kylie Minogue: Kylie Fever 2002 in Concert – Live in Manchester
*/**** Image B Sound A Extras B-
directed by William Baker, Alan MacDonald

by Walter Chaw A quick glance at the back cover of the KylieFever2002 <In Concert – Live in Manchester> DVD divulges three questions I couldn't help but answer before actually indulging in the spectacle from start to finish. The answers are that "Fever" and "In Your Eyes" are not what you think they are, and that "Locomotion" and "The Crying Game" are indeed, exactly what you think they are. The exercise, in short, is a good news/bad news scenario.

The Quiet American (2002)

November 22, 2002Posted in2000s, Australia, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Drama, France, Germany, Romance, Theatrical, Thriller, UK, Vietnam, War

***/****
starring Michael Caine, Brendan Fraser, Do Thi Hai Yen, Rade Sherbedgia
screenplay by Christopher Hampton and Robert Schenkkan, based on the novel by Graham Greene
directed by Phillip Noyce

Quietamericanby Walter Chaw Walking a fine line between nostalgia and regret, irony and earnestness, Philip Noyce’s The Quiet American, adapted from the novel by Graham Greene, is a lovely film that captures, like Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, the delicate balance between romance in the immediate foreground and the backdrop of war and politics. Evoking the colonial decay of Greene’s work while evincing one of the best performances of Michael Caine’s career, The Quiet American stars Caine as a British journalist in Vietnam who falls in a hopeless kind of love with a beautiful girl a third his age. His subsequent desperation and jealousy feel real; take note of an anguished scene in a bathroom stall–Caine suddenly seems to be getting better with every role.