Jet Lag (2002) – DVD

December 15, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD, France, Romance, UK

Décalage horaire
½*/**** Image B Sound A Extras N/A
starring Juliette Binoche, Jean Reno, Sergi López, Scali Delpeyrat
screenplay by Christopher Thompson & Danièle Thompson
directed by Danièle Thompson

by Walter Chaw A beautician (Rose (Juliette Binoche)) fleeing an abusive relationship and a frozen-food magnate (Félix (Jean Reno)) on his way to the funeral for an ex-in-law meet when Charles de Gaulle Airport is shut down during some kind of labour strike. Bonding over a constantly ringing cell phone (ah, what's more romantic than a goddamned cell phone?), the unlikely twosome decides to share a hotel room, where Félix browbeats Rose into taking off some of her makeup, and Rose decides that she's already ready to settle down into another abusive relationship. With the airport forever threatening to open, Binoche and Reno move around various sets in exact two-shot medium compositions that find them spouting their deadening monologues at one another in a failed attempt to convince that they are actually occupying the same space, head or heart or otherwise.

Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968) [Special Edition] – DVD

December 2, 2003Posted in1960s, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD, Family, Fantasy, Musical, UK

*/**** Image A Sound B Extras B-
starring Dick Van Dyke, Sally Ann Howes, Lionel Jeffries, Gert Frobe
screenplay by Roald Dahl and Ken Hughes
directed by Ken Hughes

by Walter Chaw Released the same year as the marginally less excrescent The Love Bug, Ken Hughes's Chitty Chitty Bang Bang helped mark 1968 as not only one of the most tumultuous years in American history, but also one of the most puzzling in regards to its mainstream kidsploitation fare. Why bad entertainment involving anthropomorphized automobiles erupts during corrupt regimes (see also: "My Mother the Car", from LBJ's term (1965), and Reagan's British Trans Am in "Knight Rider" (1982)) is one of those things someone should ponder someday.

Darling (1965) – DVD

November 21, 2003Posted in1960s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Drama, DVD, Romance, UK

*½/**** Image B Sound B+
starring Julie Christie, Laurence Harvey, Dirk Bogarde
screenplay by Frederic Raphael
directed by John Schlesinger

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Marking the point where Britain's realist directors turned from the proletariat to Swinging London, Darling is determined to show you all the depravity the latter milieu entails–and then make you suffer for it. The film is stultifying in its old-bourgeois disapproval of what used to be condescendingly referred to as "the younger generation," and as it ticks off the sins of its titular protagonist, Darling only makes you hate the filmmakers for being so high and mighty. There's no real analysis of what motivates the picture's aimless and amoral heroine, and no appreciation of the complexity of her plight; there is only smug moral judgment and a curt dismissal. The film is so self-consciously "serious" that it counts out any and all pleasure as shallow and destructive, leaving a grimy austerity that is as taken with surfaces as the woman it's supposed to be indicting.

Eloise at the Plaza (2003) – DVD

November 21, 2003Posted in2000s, Adventure, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, Disney, Drama, DVD, Family, UK

***/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras C
starring Julie Andrews, Jeffrey Tambor, Sofia Vassilieva, Christine Baranski
screenplay by Janet Brownell, based on the book written by Kay Thompson & illustrated by Hilary Knight
directed by Kevin Lima

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover I never thought I'd hear myself saying this, but Eloise at the Plaza is made with far greater skill and care than a Disney TV-movie would normally warrant. Derived from the much-loved children's books by Kay Thompson and Hilary Knight, the film goes out of its way to reproduce their junior-NEW YORKER tone, only in a heavily formalist, hyper-real manner that thrives on perfect shape and well-timed movement. So accomplished is the look of the film that it makes one forget the mealy-mouthed sentiment of some of the dialogue–the clockwork archness of the production transforms its clichés into pure narrative form, so that they might give pleasure in their deployment and execution. In short, it's much better than it had to be and not half bad on its own terms, even by the standards of devoted cynics like me.

The Christopher Lee Collection – DVD

November 10, 2003Posted in1960s, 1970s, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blue Underground, Crime, DVD, Germany, Horror, Italy, Liechtenstein, Mystery, Spain, Thriller, UK

CIRCUS OF FEAR (1966)
*½/**** Image B+ Sound B Extras B
starring Christopher Lee, Leo Genn, Anthony Newlands, Heinz Drache
screenplay by Peter Welbeck
directed by John Moxey

THE BLOOD OF FU MANCHU (1968)
*/**** Image B Sound B Extras A
starring Christopher Lee, Tsai Chin, Maria Rohm, Howard Marion Crawford
screenplay by Peter Welbeck
directed by Jess Franco

THE CASTLE OF FU MANCHU (1969)
*½/**** Image B Sound B Extras A
starring Christopher Lee, Tsai Chin, Maria Perschy, Richard Greene
screenplay by Peter Welbeck
directed by Jess Franco

THE BLOODY JUDGE
Il trono di fuoco (1970)
**/**** Image A Sound B Extras A
starring Christopher Lee, Maria Schell, Leo Genn, Maria Rohm
screenplay by Anthony Scott Veitch
directed by Jess Franco

by Walter Chaw The sort of box set that horror fans and film historians slaver over (though Sino-Western ambassadors probably aren't too pleased about), Blue Underground's exceptionally, reverently remastered four-disc "Christopher Lee Collection" gathers four obscure Lee pictures–The Blood of Fu Manchu, The Castle of Fu Manchu, Circus of Fear, and The Bloody Judge–in presentations so vibrant and beautiful that they're almost enough to distract from the uniform tediousness of the films themselves. A little like avant-garde cinema, these pictures–all but one (Circus of Fear) directed by the notoriously, appallingly untalented Jess Franco–function better as theory than fact, unfolding on staid soundstage environments with single camera set-ups, stock footage, and jump cuts, and squandering, for the most part, the magisterial presence and delivery of Lee. (For the record, a lethal drinking game could probably be devised around the number of times Franco zooms to different parts of the same shot to avoid the inconvenience of relighting or moving the camera around.)

Film Freak Central Does the 2003 New York City Horror Film Festival

November 5, 2003Posted in****/****, 2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, Crime, Drama, Fantasy, Film Festivals, Horror, Short Films, Thriller, UK, Zombie

Nychorrorlogo November 5, 2003|Held at the Tribeca Theater for the second year in a row, the New York City Horror Film Festival (NYCHFF) is a collection of low-budget feature and short genre films that, like the San Francisco Film Society's lamented Dark Wave festival (after two amazing years, there is no third instalment pending), gives weight to a much-deserved critical re-evaluation of horror film as an important artistic, sociological, academic endeavour. With special awards this year honouring Troma's Lloyd Kaufman, underestimated horror director Stuart Gordon, drive-in movie critic Joe Bob Briggs, my favourite independent horror director Larry Fessenden, and special effects legend Tom Savini, the 2nd NYCHFF is an emerging niche festival run by folks who care about the genre and, better, have an idea about how to present the material in a way as enthusiastic as it is savvy.

In the Cut (2003) + Sylvia (2003)

October 31, 2003Posted in****/****, 2000s, Australia, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Drama, Horror, Mystery, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

IN THE CUT
****/****
starring Meg Ryan, Mark Ruffalo, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Nick Damici
screenplay by Jane Campion & Susanna Moore, based on the novel by Moore
directed by Jane Campion

SYLVIA
*½/****
starring Gwyneth Paltrow, Daniel Craig, Jared Harris, Blythe Danner
screenplay by John Brownlow
directed by Christine Jeffs

"Come at last to this point
I look back on my passion
And realize that I
Have been like a blind man
Who is unafraid of the dark"
-Yosana Akiko

Inthecut

by Walter Chaw Frances Avery (Meg Ryan) is in love with words. She moves through life obscuring herself in a nimbus of them, passing through the world with poetry as her guiding principle. Director Jane Campion is no stranger to a life lived in thrall to poesy–her films An Angel at My Table and The Piano detailed the life of poet Janet Frame and the life of the mind, respectively, and In the Cut finds its meaning and rhythm in the words that Frannie collects, fragments of poems cut from books and collected from subway walls. The New York through which Frannie walks is festooned with ghosts of American flags, tattered and blown after two years of constant display, losing their meaning along with their colours fading up to the sky. Likewise, Frannie sees herself a phantom of unmentioned tragedies, haunting her own life, retreating to the comfort of words when a half-sister, Pauline (Jennifer Jason Leigh), pillories her chaste existence, or when Detective Malloy (Mark Ruffalo) interrogates her about a string of serial murders he's investigating. A scholar of words, Frannie is involved as the film opens in a project analyzing inner-city slang: language as organic and in transition.

Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (2003) [2-Disc Widescreen Edition] – DVD

October 29, 2003Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD, Germany, Schwarzenegger, Sci-Fi, UK

**½/**** Image A- Sound A+ Extras B
starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Nick Stahl, Claire Danes, Kristanna Loken
screenplay by John D. Brancato & Michael Ferris
directed by Jonathan Mostow

by Walter Chaw Where the first film banked on romantic melancholy, and the second on a literalization of both techno-paranoia and the Oedipal split, Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (hereafter T3)–the first in the Terminator trilogy to be directed by someone other than James Cameron (U-571‘s Jonathan Mostow)–is essentially a mega-budgeted slasher flick rematted as a hero mythology, but without the sociological significance of the genre. What T3 is, at its core, is a post-modern picture with a few agreeable moments of self-knowing humour that devolve into a self-worshipping reverence. With Arnold Schwarzenegger threatening to jettison his foundering movie career (something of a disaster since the last Terminator film) to pursue a terrifying career in politics, the picture plays like an Academy highlight reel, with Arnie delivering three variations of his “I’ll be back” as well as a quick “I lied” for the dozen or so people who still remember Commando. T3 never gets more clever than that, really (though a moment where Arnie’s killer robot dons a pair of Elton John sunglasses is a classic image only missing a quick refrain of “The Bitch is Back”), and the picture resolves itself as derivative (I should say “slavishly, worshipfully derivative”) of the other films in the trilogy while adding a lot of loud “nothing new.”

Veronica Guerin (2003)

October 17, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Crime, Drama, Ireland, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

*/****
starring Cate Blanchett, Gerard McSorley, Ciarán Hinds, Brenda Fricker
screenplay by Carol Doyle and Mary Agnes Donoghue
directed by Joel Schumacher

Veronicaguerinby Walter Chaw By the end of the piece, the only thing missing is John Wayne in ill-fitting Centurion garb, drawling "I do believe she truly was the son of God" over the corpse of slain journalist Veronica Guerin (Cate Blanchett), so at pains is Joel Schumacher's tedious spectacle of a hagiography of Guerin to paint her as some sort of sainted martyr. Veronica Guerin is horrible, really, a passel of forced dramatic slow push-ins framing Blanchett's mannered performance (in a Princess Diana haircut, no less, to really ramp up that pathos) all of insouciantly arched eyebrows and saucy eyeballs and centred dead and soft-lit like a Giotto effigy. Much is made of Guerin's print peers looking down on her, then a closing title card offers a statistic on the number of journalists killed in the line of duty, the suggestion being that journalists are sniffy elitists who don't like someone who can't write, has no background or experience in journalism, and takes unnecessary risks with themselves and their families–and that journalists are heroes regularly martyred by their thirst for truth. You really can't have it both ways, and that lack of focus isn't ambiguity so much as confusion brought about by a mortal dose of self-righteousness.

House of 1000 Corpses (2003) + Waxwork/Waxwork II: Lost in Time [Double Feature] – DVD

October 16, 2003Posted in1980s, 2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD, Fantasy, Horror, Sci-Fi, UK, West Germany, ZERO STARS

HOUSE OF 1000 CORPSES
**/**** Image A Sound A Extras A
starring Sid Haig, Bill Moseley, Sheri Moon, Karen Black
written and directed by Rob Zombie

WAXWORK (1988)
*/**** Image D Sound D
starring Zach Galligan, Deborah Foreman, Michelle Johnson, Dana Ashbrook
written and directed by Anthony Hickox

WAXWORK II: LOST IN TIME (1991)
ZERO STARS/**** Image C Sound C
starring Zach Galligan, Alexander Godunov, Monika Schnarre
written and directed by Anthony Hickox

by Walter Chaw Curiously, compulsively watchable in a grindhouse exploitation sort of way, neo-glam shock-rocker Rob Zombie follows in Twisted Sister Dee Snider’s capering footsteps with a derivative flick that mainly goes a long way towards demonstrating how hard it is to make a coherent movie. More Richard Donner’s The Goonies than Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, House of 1000 Corpses is a shoestring series of hyperactive camera movements and disjointed images culled from what seems too many films to count, from Bloodsucking Freaks to Near Dark to Maniac to The Serpent and the Rainbow to Halloween to Hellbound: Hellraiser 2 and so on, with no reason except to demonstrate how many horror movies Zombie has seen. The only thing missing from the picture–besides actual dread–is a helpful annotation so that youngsters intrigued can check out the real deal.

DIFF ’03: I’m Not Scared

October 14, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, DIFF/SDFF, Drama, Film Festivals, Italy, Mystery, Spain, Thriller, UK
Io non ho paura***/****written by Niccolò Ammaniti, Niccolò Ammaniti, Francesca Marcianodirected by Gabriele Salvatores by Walter Chaw An Italian version of Charles Laughton's Night of the Hunter in many respects, Gabriele Salvatores' I'm Not Scared (Io Non Ho Paura) is admirable in its ability to evoke the dreamy disconnection of childhood--the startling realization at some point along the way that your parents may not be merely flawed, but occasionally malicious. A young boy, Michele (Giuseppe Cristiano), finds a child imprisoned in a hole next to an abandoned house in the middle of an impossibly beautiful fall Tuscan landscape, all yellow…

DIFF ’03: Film as Subversive Art: Amos Vogel and Cinema 16

October 14, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, DIFF/SDFF, Documentary, Film Festivals, UK
***/****directed by Paul Cronin by Walter Chaw Documenting the rise and fall of New York International Film Festival director Amos Vogel, who got his start in the programming business as the mastermind behind the legendary "Cinema 16" film society, Film as a Subversive Art: Amos Vogel and Cinema 16 provides a traditional documentary treatment of an unconventional man. A refugee from Hitler's Germany, Vogel, a fierce antagonist of censorship, introduced the United States to folks as diverse and vital as Yasujiro Ozu and Stan Brakhage. The sort of thing dying in an America that embraces the mundane and the comfortable…

DIFF ’03: Wilbur Wants to Kill Himself

October 11, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Denmark, DIFF/SDFF, Drama, Film Festivals, France, Sweden, UK
Wilbur Begar Selvmord***½/****written by Lone Scherfig, Anders Thomas Jensendirected by Lone Scherfig by Walter Chaw Uncompromising yet surprisingly gentle for all that, Lone Scherfig's Wilbur Wants to Kill Himself is an unmannered character drama about Wilbur (Jamie Sives), despondent and suicidal after the death of his father; Wilbur's older brother, Harbour (Adrian Rawlins), who's taking the family's loss much better; and Harbour's new wife, Alice (the self-swallowing, eternally imploding Shirley Henderson), who finds love for the first time only to find it again in her husband's mordant brother. A psychiatric support group is funny in predictably quirky ways (though its…

DIFF ’03: Noi the Albino

October 9, 2003Posted in****/****, 2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Denmark, DIFF/SDFF, Drama, Esoterica, Film Festivals, Germany, Iceland, UK
Nói albinói****/****written and directed by Dagur Kári by Walter Chaw Dagur Kári's Noi the Albino (Nói Albinói) is a film about emptiness, really--a terrific picture crouched in the centre of a blasted Icelandic winter, with its titular hero, Nói (Tómas Lemarquis), too smart for the isolation. When the beautiful Iris (Elin Hansdóttir, wow) comes to work in the town-of-maybe-100-people's convenience store, Nói finds himself for perhaps the first time motivated for long enough to aspire to something larger. A Steve Earle song directed by Jim Jarmusch, the picture is deadpan hilarious and haunted by the oppressive power of dark and…

Sunday Bloody Sunday (1971) – DVD

October 9, 2003Posted in1970s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Drama, DVD, UK

**½/**** Image B Sound B+
starring Peter Finch, Glenda Jackson, Murray Hedd, Peggy Ashcroft
screenplay by Penelope Gilliatt
directed by John Schlesinger

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover "Are you bourgeois?" asks a child in Sunday Bloody Sunday, hoping to catch an adult in an awkward moment, and the question is crucial to your enjoyment of the film. If you are well-off enough to have good taste and fine things, and are somewhat guilty about the freedom and power that entails, then it will seem a sober and mature work about life and love in the post-hippie '70s. If, on the other hand, you are just scraping by and worrying about where your next meal is coming from, the film will seem a self-piteous soap opera in love with the idea of defeat. There's no denying the skill and professionalism at work here–it's what mid-period Woody Allen wishes it were, but it never quite licks the question of what to do with bourgie liberal guilt, and thus waffles towards an underwhelming conclusion.

28 Days Later (2002) [Widescreen Special Edition] – DVD

September 24, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Drama, DVD, Horror, Sci-Fi, Thriller, UK, Zombie

28 Days Later…
**½/**** Image B Sound A- Extras A
starring Cillian Murphy, Naomie Harris, Brendan Gleeson, Christopher Eccleston
screenplay by Alex Garland
directed by Danny Boyle

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover 28 Days Later… is a film that shoots for resonance but is too shortsighted to hit the target. Its tale of an England beset by rage-crazed zombies is clearly a metaphor for something–but what? Timing rules out certain international disasters (9/11 happened as the film was shooting), and a certain opacity of intent clouds the entire film, making you reach out for something that you're never sure is really there. There are compensatory pleasures (a general creepiness, one smashing performance), but the film lacks something beyond its grasp, leaving you with an adequate, reasonably entertaining picture, and nothing more.

Enigma (2001) [Special Edition] – DVD

September 23, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Espionage, Germany, Mystery, Netherlands, Romance, Thriller, UK, War

**½/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras A-
starring Dougray Scott, Kate Winslet, Jeremy Northam, Saffron Burrows
screenplay by Tom Stoppard, based on the novel by Robert Harris
directed by Michael Apted

by Walter Chaw The easy thing to say is that the Mick Jagger-produced Enigma is enigmatic–it's more difficult to pinpoint the exact reasons why. Stars Dougray Scott, Kate Winslet, and Jeremy Northam are fine, Tom Stoppard's screenplay would on the surface surely seem fine, and Michael Apted's polished, if unremarkable, direction is the very definition of just fine. So the onus must fall on the material adapted, Robert Harris's follow-up to his much-lauded Fatherland, which promised a Ken Follett romantic espionage page-burner while delivering a staid and occasionally incomprehensible period bodice-ripper crushed under the dual gorgons of the sophomore jinx and the Tom Clancy "guess I'm not very good at dialogue" bogey. Enigma's problems begin and end with its inability to overcome the essential faults of its inherited plot, its most interesting aspect–WWII cryptologists at London's Bletchley Park–subsumed by a run-of-the-mill mystery and a never-in-doubt love story. It appears the curse of many historical fictions that attempt to familiarize the "long ago" with a "universal" romantic story arc dooms Enigma's period and historical detail to function as mere decorative flourish.

Underworld (2003)

September 19, 2003Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Fantasy, Germany, Horror, Hungary, Theatrical, Thriller, UK, Vampire, Werewolf

*½/****
starring Kate Beckinsale, Scott Speedman, Shane Brolly, Michael Sheen
screenplay by Danny McBride
directed by Len Wiseman

Underworldby Walter Chaw Appearing to be based on two White Wolf role-playing games–"Vampire: The Masquerade" and "Werewolf: The Apocalypse"–introduced a while back (and indeed, the games company is suing Sony, Screen Gems, and Lakeshore for copyright infringement, citing no fewer than sixty points of unique similarity), Len Wiseman's Underworld may prove to be less "Romeo and Juliet" than much ado about nothing. The picture looks fantastic, Kate Beckinsale and Scott Speedman look fantastic, and that's pretty much all there is recommend about the piece, which is so boring, lifeless, and humourless that White Wolf would do well to distance itself from the thing toot sweet. This is gravid filmmaking at its worst, indulging in its twin cults' puerile wish-fulfillment fantasies with a sexless lust: the life of an immortal rock star in period garb thirsting for the blood of bullies for the one, of a raging man-beast thirsting for the blood of bullies for the other. In between are tons of rip-offs of everything from The Crow to The Matrix to the leather fetish and arms of Blade to the sweaty bodice-ripping of Anne Rice to the Alien3 wall-crawling monster views of David Fincher. Wiseman, in his hyphenate debut (he co-concocted the story), has scored big with a real-life engagement to the ethereally beautiful–and undernourished and anaemic–Kate Beckinsale, enough to take the sting out of the blah of Underworld, I'd surmise. And why not? Many would fail worse for less, but as a writer and director he proves himself to be a pretty good set designer.

Cleopatra (1963) [Five Star Collection]; Lawrence of Arabia (1962) [Exclusive Limited Edition|Superbit]; The Mummy (1999) [Ultimate Edition] – DVDs

September 17, 2003Posted in****/****, 1960s, 1990s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Best Picture (Academy Awards), Drama, DVD, FFC Must-Own, Romance, UK

CLEOPATRA
**/**** Image A Sound A Extras A+
starring Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, Rex Harrison, Pamela Brown
screenplay by Joseph L. Mankiewicz, Ranald MacDougall and Sidney Buchman
directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz

MustownLAWRENCE OF ARABIA
****/****
ELE DVD – Image A Sound A Extras B
Superbit DVD – Image A Sound A
starring Peter O'Toole, Alec Guinness, Anthony Quinn, Omar Sharif
screenplay by Robert Bolt and Michael Wilson
directed by David Lean

THE MUMMY
**/**** Image A Sound A (DD)/A+ (DTS) Extras A-
starring Brendan Fraser, Rachel Weisz, John Hannah, Arnold Vosloo
screenplay by Stephen Sommers
directed by Stephen Sommers

by Bill Chambers Cleopatra, meet T.E. Lawrence. Now allow me to introduce the two of you to…Rick O'Connell?

Bend It Like Beckham (2002) [Widescreen Edition] – DVD

August 26, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Germany, Romance, Sports, UK

**½/**** Image A- Sound A Extras A-
starring Parminder Nagra, Keira Knightley, Jonathan Rhys-Meyers, Anupam Kher
screenplay by Gurinder Chadha, Guljit Bindra, Paul Mayeda Berges
directed by Gurinder Chadha

by Bill Chambers This year's British-import-pre-sold-as-a-hit Bend It Like Beckham coasts on its similitude to John Badham's magnificent Saturday Night Fever, but when all a picture is doing is reminding you of a better one without embarrassing itself, it can hardly be called a triumph. I'm surprised that more critics haven't picked up on the film's debt to Saturday Night Fever, actually, which extends to the set design and placement of key props. It's this kind of popular coding that has, I suspect, buoyed Bend It Like Beckham aloft the market doldrums of other mainstream-pitched East-meets-West comedies (East Is East, Bollywood/Hollywood): the subliminal affiliation of one ethnicity (orthodox Sikh) with another (Italian-Americans) that was long ago embraced by the masses.