Kaena: The Prophecy (2003) + The Lion King II: Simba’s Pride (1998) [2-Disc Special Edition] – DVDs

September 20, 2004Posted in1990s, 2000s, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Disney, Drama, DVD, Family, Fantasy, France, Musical, Romance, Sci-Fi

KAENA: THE PROPHECY
*/**** Image A Sound B Extras C
screenplay by Tarik Hamoine and Chris Delaporte
directed by Chris Delaporte

THE LION KING II: SIMBA'S PRIDE
½*/**** Image B Sound B- Extras C+
screenplay by Flip Kobler and Cindy Marcus
directed by Rob LaDuca & Darrell Rooney

by Walter Chaw There's a timorous, resonant quality to Kirsten Dunst's voice. It's amazing, really: it vibrates at a contralto as tense and lovely as a cello string drawn–I think it's her most attractive feature. She's tailor-made, then, to be a vocal performer, and finds herself as such in French filmmaker Chris Delaporte's plodding misfire of a movie Kaena: The Prophecy. Completely computer-animated, it's every bit as ugly and prosaic as its American cousin Ice Age (insomuch as it even includes a prehistoric-squirrel vignette towards the end) and obsessed with the jiggle dimensions of Kaena (or is that me, obsessed?), who must save her tree-world Axis from destruction at the hands of the evil Selenites (whose queen is voiced by Anjelica Huston). The story is so Joseph Campbell hero's journey-obsessed, so humourless and–how do I say it delicately?–Bakshi in its execution, that poor Dunst, in the title role, is wasted on plucky pronouncements and grunts of exertion as her .gif alter-ego leaps hither and yon.

Wimbledon (2004)

September 17, 2004Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, France, Romance, Sports, Theatrical, UK

*½/****
starring Kirsten Dunst, Paul Bettany, Kyle Hyde, Robert Lindsay
screenplay by Adam Brooks and Jennifer Flackett & Mark Levin
directed by Richard Loncraine

by Walter Chaw If you go see Wimbledon, the umpteenth edition of Tired Romantic Comedy Theater, it's only because you have a checklist in your head and aren't content with a film that doesn't satisfy every contrivance. There's the meet-cute, the unlikely match, the handsome rival, the gay best friend, the falling-in-love montage, the plot conflict (spouse, parents), the break-up montage, the public apology, the triumphant reunion. Director Richard Loncraine's tepid foray into Richard Curtis territory is rife with the kind of familiar hallmarks that lull throngs of lonesome Mia Farrows to the warm embrace of The Purple Rose of Cairo–a brief respite from the used paperback bookstores that rely on a steady trade of romance novels the way that independent movie stores rely on porn. In fact, there's not that much of a difference between Wimbledon and porn: plot is predictable and secondary to the performers, who provide whatever interest there might be in the enterprise. Everything else is plug and play, so to speak.

TIFF ’04: Saw

September 16, 2004Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Film Festivals, Horror, Mystery, TIFF
**/****starring Leigh Whannell, Cary Elwes, Danny Glover, Monica Potterscreenplay by Leigh Whannelldirected by James Wan by Bill Chambers Saw is ready and rarin' to be analyzed, opening as it does with the scholar-baiting tableau of a man (Leigh Whannell, also the film's screenwriter) waking in a bathtub, baptized or reborn. (It just so happens that his name is Adam.) And I swear to God the bad guy lives on "Stygian Street." Everything about Saw points to Whannell putting the cart before the horse: symbolism before context; set-pieces before bridges; revelations before mysteries... The movie's logic is at once unassailable and…

TIFF ’04: Palindromes

September 15, 2004Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Drama, Esoterica, Film Festivals, TIFF
*½/****starring Ellen Barkin, Stephen Adly Guirgis, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Richard Masurwritten and directed by Todd Solondz by Bill Chambers Preceded by the snarkiest, if also funniest, on-screen dedication since The War Zone's "For my father" ("In loving memory of Dawn Wiener"--Dawn being the pre-teen heroine of Todd Solondz's breakthrough feature Welcome to the Dollhouse), Solondz's fifth film, Palindromes, is a virtual sprinkler head oscillating back and forth to spritz everything in the director's purview with venom. (It's his idea of moral ambivalence.) A "palindrome" is something that reads the same forwards and backwards, and by casting several different actresses to…

TIFF ’04: Keane

September 14, 2004Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Drama, Film Festivals, Mystery, Thriller, TIFF
***½/****starring Damian Lewis, Abigail Breslin, Amy Ryanwritten and directed by Lodge Kerrigan by Bill Chambers It may seem as though Lodge Kerrigan is spinning his wheels by revisiting the territory of his directorial debut two pictures later, but this actually provides a means by which to judge Kerrigan's maturation as an auteur. Only slightly more prolific than Terrence Malick, Kerrigan quietly penetrated the indie scene with 1994's Clean, Shaven, which cast Peter Greene--in a role that brilliantly exploited the actor's own mercurial nature--as Peter Winter, a paranoid schizophrenic scoping out his only child and her new parents; the film furnishes…

The Mangler (1995) – DVD

September 13, 2004Posted in1990s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Directors: Tobe Hooper, DVD, Horror, Mystery, Sci-Fi, South Africa, Stephen King, Thriller, UK

*/**** Image A Sound B Extras C-
starring Robert Englund, Ted Levine, Daniel Matmor
screenplay by Tobe Hooper, Stephen Brooks and Peter Welbeck
directed by Tobe Hooper

by Walter Chaw I think there's probably profit in taking the tactic that Tobe Hooper's The Mangler is his shot at the lurid comic book genre and, more specifically, the weird self-abnegating prosthetics opera of Warren Beatty's Dick Tracy. But I'm not the guy to do it. Sufficed to say that Robert Englund appears in fright latex, affecting equal parts Dr. Strangelove and Lionel Barrymore's Mr. Potter as Mr. Gartley, the decrepit, despotic owner of an old industrial steam laundry that features as its centerpiece the massive, four-story long Hadley Watson Model-6 Steam Ironer & Folder, which sits in the middle of his brick sweatshop belching steam like the boiler in The Overlook Hotel.

TIFF ’04: p.s.

September 13, 2004Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Drama, Film Festivals, Romance, TIFF
P.S.**½/****starring Laura Linney, Topher Grace, Gabriel Byrne, Marcia Gay Hardenscreenplay by Helen Schulman and Dylan Kidd, based on the novel by Helen Schulmandirected by Dylan Kidd by Bill Chambers Curious that Dylan Kidd, the mind behind the revelatory Roger Dodger, felt compelled to include a "director's statement" in the pressbook for his sophomore feature, p.s., but it's nonetheless an essential read in that it gives the lie to artist intentionality. "From Aristotle to Joseph Campbell to Robert McKee," Kidd writes, "everyone's in agreement: you can't have drama without obstacles...The idea behind p.s. was to tell a story where nothing stands…

TIFF ’04: Sideways

September 12, 2004Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Drama, Film Festivals, TIFF
***/****starring Paul Giamatti, Thomas Haden Church, Virginia Madsen, Sandra Ohscreenplay by Alexander Payne & Jim Taylor, based on the novel by Rex Pickettdirected by Alexander Payne by Bill Chambers Alexander Payne has a gift for wry humour, of course, and in Sideways, there's a nice, sardonic hold on a bathroom door's sign--"MEN"--after Jack (Thomas Haden Church), having learned nothing from a sour indiscretion that netted him a broken nose, starts hitting on a waitress. By the same token, the curlicue noted above is typical of the level of organization, for lack of a better word, in Payne's work, which always…

TIFF ’04: I ♥ Huckabees

September 11, 2004Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Esoterica, Film Festivals, Germany, TIFF, UK
i ♥ huckabeesI Heart Huckabees**/****starring Dustin Hoffman, Isabelle Huppert, Jude Law, Jason Schwartzmanscreenplay by David O. Russell & Jeff Baenadirected by David O. Russell by Bill Chambers David O. Russell's debut feature Spanking the Monkey now bears the mark of Kane. (Citizen, that is.) A funny, caustic mood-piece that heralded the Second Coming of Hal Ashby, it was also an impossible thing to live up to--or down, for that matter, Spanking the Monkey's mother-son incest plot in some ways a modern correlative to Citizen Kane's taboo-shattering demystification of William Randolph Hearst. Russell's work since (Flirting with Disaster, Three Kings) has…

Cellular (2004)

September 10, 2004Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Germany, Theatrical, Thriller

*/****
starring Kim Basinger, Chris Evans, Eric Christian Olsen, Jessica Biel
screenplay by Chris Morgan
directed by David R. Ellis

Cellularby Walter Chaw At last, a film for all the yahoos with a cell phone soldered onto their ears–a giant eighty-minute billboard for Nokia with characters constantly extolling the virtues of what the Chinese call their hand-engines: "Amazing thing these new cell phones. They take digital video, remember the last fifty numbers that call it…" Stuntman-turned-director David Ellis follows up Final Destination 2 with Cellular, its top-heavy gimmick flick dreamed up by the king of high-concept, one-trick ponies, Larry Cohen, who cobbles together the story at the heart of the thing from the odds-and-ends of his last telecommunications thriller, Phone Booth. It's Strange Days married to Nick of Time, Falling Down, and Ferris Bueller's Day Off, where Asians are still Orientals (and boy, are they stupid) and black people are sassy back-talkers working at impound lots. Yet, understand that it's not so much racist as it is prehistoric–ossified and bone-weary.

TIFF ’04: White Skin

September 10, 2004Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Canada, Drama, Film Festivals, Horror, Mystery, Thriller, TIFF
La Peau blanche**/****starring Marc Paquet, Marianne Farley, Frédéric Pierre, Jessica Malkascreenplay by Joël Champetier, Daniel Roby, based on the novel by Joël Champetierdirected by Daniel Roby by Bill Chambers I had a pretty good idea of where White Skin (La Peau blanche) was headed, and although I was more tickled that it had the French-word-for-chutzpah to go to those ludicrous extremes than disappointed that the outcome was vaguely predictable (if movies never failed to surprise me, it would only mean that I watch as many as I do in vain (besides which, no film uses a clip from Rabid indiscriminately)),…

The Ladykillers (2004) [Widescreen] – DVD

September 9, 2004Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Coen Brothers, Comedy, Crime, DVD, Thriller

**/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B-
starring Tom Hanks, Irma P. Hall, Marlon Wayans, J.K. Simmons
written for the screen and directed by Joel Coen & Ethan Coen

Ladykillerscapby Walter Chaw There's a great line in the Coen Brothers' The Ladykillers: The General (Tzi Ma), asked for his Buddhist perspective on a caper gone awry, offers, "Be as leaf floating down river. Kill old lady." Still, it's a poor blueprint for a film, as the picture locates its narrative rhythm in a desultory, listless noodle that ends right when it threatens to begin. With Tom Hanks playing the Alec Guinness role of affected cad with larceny–eventually murder–on his mind, The Ladykillers feels like an inside joke. (A slapstick gag featured prominently in the previews, for instance, sees Hanks plucking bills from the air in what has become the defining image of his career, from Forrest Gump's feather inanity to Hanratty's dollar bill futility in Catch Me If You Can.) Returning in a way to more familiar ground after the screwball shrine of Intolerable Cruelty, it's nice to see the Coens, credited as co-directors for the first time in their twenty-year collaboration, tackling another caper noir, but it feels more than a little stale this time around, contrived in the way that genius starts to feel when inspiration flags.

TIFF ’04: Tarnation

September 8, 2004Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Documentary, Film Festivals, TIFF
***/****written and directed by Jonathan Caouette by Bill Chambers Stylistically falling somewhere between avant-garde and dog's-breakfast, Jonathan Caouette's Tarnation invents an ethos to go along with the name of the editing software, "iMovie," used to assemble it, giving us what feels like the world's first "I" movie. The film doesn't so much defy description as resist it (Frank Zappa's "dancing about architecture" maxim applies here), but clearly a summary shouldn't be discouraged, as the more subjective the work, the greater the chance it stands of becoming the salvation of some disenfranchised individual. (Caouette himself says he was relieved to find…

The Martian Chronicles (1980) – DVD

September 8, 2004Posted in1980s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Television, UK

½*/**** Image B- Sound B-
starring Rock Hudson, Gayle Hunnicutt, Bernie Casey, Roddy McDowell
screenplay by Richard Matheson, based on the novel by Ray Bradbury
directed by Michael Anderson

by Walter Chaw There is and probably always will be a warm place in my heart for Ray Bradbury. The author of my childhood in many ways, Bradbury taught me about poetry in "April Witch," about fear in The Dark Carnival and Something Wicked This Way Comes, about dry irony in "A Sound of Thunder" and "There Will Come Soft Rains," and about vengeance reptilian and cold in "The Veldt." His only real work of science-fiction, Fahrenheit 451, remains an interesting touchstone of unintentional messages couched in seriomythic terminologies, but his output is moored deep, intractably deep, in the literary. Bradbury doesn't transpose well to different mediums (and a book of poetry, When Elephants Last in the Dooryard Bloomed, was somehow even more disastrous than the multiple attempts to export the author to television and film)–he's too purple, his philosophies too immature, his worldview embarrassingly simplistic and only really current for children or the childish. I'll never be able to exactly express the thrill, the horror, of my first reading of "Mars is Heaven" when I was in third grade. Nor have I been able to replicate it by reading it again since.

Stage Fright (1950) – DVD

September 7, 2004Posted in1950s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Directors: Alfred Hitchcock, DVD, Thriller

Stagefrighthitch

**½/**** Image C+ Sound C+ Extras B-
starring Jane Wyman, Marlene Dietrich, Michael Wilding, Richard Todd
screenplay by Whitfield Cook; adaptation by Alma Reville; additional dialogue by James Bridie, based on a novel by Selwyn Jepson
directed by Alfred Hitchcock

by Walter Chaw Blame it on the subject matter: Stage Fright, especially for postwar Hitchcock, is all elbows. Its technique is its narrative, plot, character, and motive–something that's a relative rarity in the master's oeuvre despite his notoriously stringent preparation and acumen. And though it works pretty well as an academic inquiry into how the artificiality of the stage can comment with eloquence, "Hamlet"-like, on the bigger picture, the film stumbles along in fits and starts, pulled forward by its mechanism instead of anything like momentum or logic. In truth, I wonder if the "play-within-a-play" trope doesn't work better as either microcosm (as in the final confession of I Confess) or leitmotif (as in the numerous references to performance in North by Northwest, which most likely owes its title to a line about pretending to be crazy from "Hamlet"). Of particular issue is one of Marlene Dietrich's mannered turns, which is potentially excusable (given the staginess of the piece), and a horrible score by Leighton Lucas, which isn't. Still a Hitchcock film in his middle-period, however, Stage Fright, no doubt owing to its nature, is particularly focused in on disguises, perceptions, mirrors, eyeglasses, and cigarettes–finding our hero, Eve (Jane Wyman, fantastic), taking on the guise of a Dorothy Parker-esque reporter at one moment and a maid infiltrating a fatale's lair at another, all for the cause of a suspect flashback from an unreliable narrator.

TIFF ’04: Blood

September 7, 2004Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Canada, Drama, Film Festivals, TIFF
*½/****starring Emily Hampshire, Jacob Tierneyscreenplay by Jerry Ciccoritti, based on the play by Tom Walmsleydirected by Jerry Ciccoritti by Bill Chambers Just the other day I watched Dial M for Murder, a single-set movie faithfully adapted from a stage play that never quite becomes theatre-on-film because, let's face it, we're talking about Alfred Hitchcock here. Jerry Ciccoritti is no Alfred Hitchcock--not that Ciccoritti's Blood wants or tries to be Dial M for Murder, but its Mike Figgis, let's-see-what-this-button-does aesthetic so reeks of overcompensation as to end up not only preserving the material's stage roots in amber, but also lulling us…

Foreign Correspondent (1940) – DVD

September 7, 2004Posted in1940s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: Alfred Hitchcock, DVD, Romance, Thriller, War

Foreigncorrespondent

***/**** Image B Sound B Extras B-
starring Joel McCrea, Laraine Day, Herbert Marshall, George Sanders
screenplay by Charles Bennett, Joan Harrison; dialogue by James Hilton, Robert Benchley
directed by Alfred Hitchcock

by Walter Chaw Largely dismissed as a jingoistic anomaly in the generally anti-establishment Hitchcock canon (and dwarfed by the meatier fort/da of the same year's Rebecca), Foreign Correspondent is arguably a superior representation of the screwball genre to which the later Mr. and Mrs. Smith aspired. That it has political undertones is undeniable (its spies and hunters plot a throwback to Hitch's Gaumont years), but most conspicuous is the kind of macabre visual wit that would define the bulk of Hitchcock's early American output. Consider a haunting sequence with titular journalist Huntley Haverstock (Joel McCrea) trying to find a missing getaway car in a Dutch field dotted with windmills that begins with a gust of wind blowing off his hat (a castration metaphor–the film is full of them) as his girl-Friday Carol Fisher (Laraine Day) laughs uncontrollably, proceeds to the inside of a false mill where Haverstock is nearly discovered when he gets his coat caught in gears, and ends with an exchange with non-English speaking Dutch police resolved by one of Hitch's precocious little-girl characters. With an intimidating self-possession, an already mature Hitchcock presents in fast fashion a dizzying series of technical gags (the suspicious windmill suspicious because it's turning in the wrong direction–compare to the tennis crowd of Strangers on a Train and this film's own chase beneath a canopy of umbrellas); a preoccupation with birds as representatives of the corruption of social order (introduced in Young and Innocent, it became a central throughline in Hitchcock's career); a serio-comic scene of near-discovery; and a slapstick vignette that makes asses of the police, Hitch's favourite target.

Suspicion (1941) – DVD

September 7, 2004Posted in1940s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: Alfred Hitchcock, DVD, Mystery, Thriller

Suspicion

**½/**** Image A Sound B Extras B
starring Cary Grant, Joan Fontaine, Sir Cedric Hardwicke, Nigel Bruce
screenplay by Samson Raphaelson, Joan Harrison and Alma Reville
directed by Alfred Hitchcock

by Walter Chaw In truth, watching any of Alfred Hitchcock’s American films is like hearing the voice of your master. So it is even with 1941’s Suspicion: Probably the most compromised of Hitchcock’s major pictures, it nevertheless sports a trio of sequences that rank among his best. An early flirtation between Cary Grant’s layabout playboy Johnnie Aysgarth and Joan Fontaine’s unlikely take on a dowdy spinster, for instance, looking for all the world like a rape and featuring brilliant, Lubitsch-esque purse-play, is as dense a five minutes as whole pictures. (The second virtuoso sequence involves a staircase and a glass of milk lit from inside the liquid while the third is a fantasy that transforms laughter into the howls of a dying man.) So coy and hesitating that it’s a lot like courting a eunuch, Suspicion is not easy to like, but it does offer a glimpse of what’s possible within a studio system that won’t allow one of its marquee players to play a villain. The picture gives lie to the idea that creative people suddenly lose their creativity when they move to Hollywood: It’s still there, it just goes (in this case, deep) underground.

The Vanishing (1993) + Hardcore (1979) – DVDs

September 6, 2004Posted in1970s, 1980s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Crime, Directors: Paul Schrader, Drama, DVD, Horror, Mystery, Thriller

THE VANISHING
**½/**** Image A Sound B+
starring Jeff Bridges, Kiefer Sutherland, Nancy Travis, Sandra Bullock
screenplay by Todd Graff, based on the novel The Golden Egg by Tim Krabbé
directed by George Sluizer

HARDCORE
***/**** Image A- Sound B
starring George C. Scott, Peter Boyle, Season Hubley, Ilah Davis
written and directed by Paul Schrader

by Bill Chambers 1993 was the year that American remakes of two estimable foreign thrillers became instant poster boys for Hollywood condescension. While John Badham’s Point of No Return is every bit as egregious as they said it was (although I prefer its “Cleaner” sequence with Harvey Keitel to Nikita‘s field test of Jean Reno’s Léon persona), George Sluizer’s The Vanishing, an Americanization of his own Spoorloos, often stands shoulder-to-shoulder with its forerunner–or is at the very least too provocative in its departures to dismiss out of hand. A lot of people wondered how Sluizer could desecrate what had been the crowning achievement of his career in this way, but what artist wouldn’t jump at the chance to view a piece of work through the looking glass without physically altering the original? (A kindred impulse drives novelists to sell the screen rights to their books.) All I can say is that the end result is more seductive than, say, Vanilla Sky, or Christopher Nolan’s Insomnia.

TIFF ’04: 5×2 – Five Times Two

September 6, 2004Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Drama, Film Festivals, France, Romance, TIFF
Cinq fois deux**/****starring Valérie Bruni-Tedeschi, Stéphane Freiss, Géraldine Pailhas, Françoise Fabianscreenplay by François Ozon & Emmanuèle Bernheimdirected by François Ozon by Bill Chambers Racking up an unorthodox number of short films before tackling his first feature, 1998's lead balloon Sitcom, the prolific François Ozon returns to his roots in a way with 5x2 - Five Times Two (5x2 - Cinq fois deux), a collection of five vignettes that charts an ill-fated marriage--backwards. As the picture opens, Marion (archetypal Ozon blonde Valérie Bruni-Tedeschi) and Gilles (Stéphane Freiss) are being read the terms of their divorce agreement; as the picture closes, the…