Tough Enough: FFC Interviews Wes Studi
October 26, 2003|For all the praise afforded it in recent years, Michael Mann's 1992 The Last of the Mohicans is still an undervalued film of big emotions, boasting of a macho sensibility more bracing than any number of post-modern ruminations on the cult of manhood. Above all its technical achievements and ecstatic scripting, it offers Magua, perhaps the most important modern depiction of any minority character and one that arguably, single-handedly, made the casting of the Native American as the impossibly noble Child of the Earth suddenly déclassé. Wes Studi is much of the reason for the success of Mohicans, his portrayal of Magua revealing depths that reverberate with me still, offering hope that Asians in American cinema might one day be as difficult to minimize as Native Americans have become. Tied in with that respect, however, is of course the reality that roles for Indians have become relatively scarce in recent years.
The Singing Detective (2003)
***/****
starring Robert Downey Jr., Robin Wright Penn, Jeremy Northam, Mel Gibson
screenplay by Dennis Potter, based on his miniseries
directed by Keith Gordon
by Walter Chaw A film about transplants (UK to America, Michael Gambon to Robert Downey Jr., postwar-'40s English tunes to 1950s American doo-wop), The Singing Detective has as its most effective moments the parts transplanted whole from Dennis Potter's amazing six-hour BBC miniseries. Not to say that Keith Gordon's The Singing Detective isn't a frequently fascinating beast all by itself (the late Potter's own screenplay, shot nearly word-for-word by Gordon, assures a measure of quality almost deliriously high), but to say that the inevitable comparisons will be harsh and, frankly, unfair, given the author's hand in the adaptation and the strain of compression.
Scary Movie 3 (2003)
ZERO STARS/****
starring Anna Faris, Charlie Sheen, Regina Hall, Denise Richards
screenplay by Craig Mazin and Kevin Smith and David Zucker
directed by David Zucker
by Walter Chaw Even without the Wayans Brothers, the latest Scary Movie sequel is unspeakably bad. A disjointed series of set-piece recreations from popular films (Signs, The Matrix Reloaded, The Ring, 8 Mile) populated by idiots and scripted with a flat collection of obvious fall-down gags and scatology, the picture doesn't even respect the movies it mocks enough to understand what it is about them that fails. More, with the absence of the Wayans (who are replaced by David Zucker, one-third of the braintrust behind successful spoofs like Airplane! and The Naked Gun), the repeated shout-outs to heroes of hip-hop (an entire record label shows up in cameo bits) and attendant disrespect of the culture land with disturbing racial undertones. The film is aimed specifically at an African-American demographic: That's one thing when the filmmakers are African-American, another thing altogether when they're not.
Party Monster (2003)
***/****
starring Macaulay Culkin, Seth Green, Chloë Sevigny, Natasha Lyonne
screenplay by Fenton Bailey & Randy Barbato, based on the book Disco Bloodbath by James St. James
directed by Fenton Bailey & Randy Barbato
by Travis Mackenzie Hoover By all rights, Party Monster shouldn't work as well as it does. Not only is it flip about matters of grave seriousness (in this case, the murder of a Hispanic drug dealer by Club Kid impresario Michael Alig), but it hasn't got much on its mind beyond the endless debauchery afforded by its subject matter, and consequently gives all other matters the rhinestone-studded shaft. But despite all of this shallowness, the film is surprisingly engrossing; as Alig falls into his downward spiral, it becomes a harrowing reminder that, per the film's much-abused Blake quote, the road of excess can often lead to the path of destruction.
The Same River Twice (2003) + The Weather Underground (2003)
THE SAME RIVER TWICE
****/****
directed by Robb Moss
THE WEATHER UNDERGROUND
***/****
directed by Sam Green & Bill Siegel
by Walter Chaw I've just seen an episode of CNN's "Crossfire" that featured as one of its topics the proliferation of "Bush Bashing," which, for as scatologically intriguing as it sounds, refers to the growing popularity of pummelling our dimwit president for his dimwit philosophies and hilljack presentation. The verbal assault gratifying for what it is, what's missing in the new American dyspepsia is any real activism: The movies feel like-Sixties movies, and the government certainly feels like the late-Sixties government, but the level of outrage is something just north of "mild simmer." Students aren't massing, the National Guard isn't mobilizing, and there's no new Flower Power generation to oxymoronically stir the great, slobbering melting pot of American sex and politics. What there is, however, is a glut of underground documentaries finding their way into small theatres to smaller audiences but enough critical support to at least put the intelligentsia on record as suitably discomfited.
To Live and Die in LA (1985) [Special Edition] – DVD
To Live and Die in L.A.
***/**** Image B Sound A- Extras A
starring William L. Petersen, Willem Dafoe, John Pankow, Debra Feuer
screenplay by William Friedkin and Gerald Petievich, based on the novel by Petievich
directed by William Friedkin
by Bill Chambers William Friedkin's To Live and Die in L.A. sprang from the director's mid-'80s preoccupation with music-video nihilism, and as such has peaks and valleys depending on the degree of montage a sequence calls for. The tin-ear that Friedkin contracted sometime after the Seventies, which drove him to fatally second-guess Paul Brickman's Swiftian screenplay for Deal of the Century, imbues many an exchange in To Live and Die in L.A. with authenticity (only real people flounder this much trying to sound hard-boiled), but the stylish visuals in turn butt heads with the dialogue, prompting us to wish for a slicker whole. The silliest repartee also throws the symbolic-to-the-point-of-corny names of central figures Chance (William L. Petersen) and Masters (Willem Dafoe) into tautological relief: Chance is a Secret Service agent who thrives on risk (fittingly, a found poker chip decides him in pursuit of the bad guy), while Masters, who's like Patrick Bateman without the civility, is a painter who has mastered the art of making funny-money, as is demonstrated for us in a breathtaking collection of how-to shots that single-handedly justifies Friedkin's dabble in the MTV aesthetic.
Willard (2003) [New Line Platinum Series] – DVD
*½/**** Image A Sound A Extras A+
starring Crispin Glover, Laura Elena Harring, Jackie Burroughs, R. Lee Ermey
screenplay by Glen Morgan, based on the screenplay by Gilbert Ralston and Ralston's novel Ratman's Notebook
directed by Glen Morgan
by Walter Chaw If you're going to remake an Ernest Borgnine movie from the Seventies, I'd rather see a redux of The Devil's Rain. But Willard it is; for the blissfully uninitiated, Willard concerns the travails of a lonesome weirdo who makes friends with a bunch of rats, Phenomena-style (Argento not Travolta, which brings us back to The Devil's Rain, curiously), and sends them on a crusade against an evil boss who wants to buy Willard's house. Bruce Davison as the original Willard has a nice moment in that film where he implores his rat-kinder to "tear it up" good, but the film is probably best remembered for the theme song of its sequel, Ben, penned by Michael Jackson v.0.2. The theme song, and Davison, have stupid cameos in the new Willard.
Beyond Borders (2003) + Radio (2003)
BEYOND BORDERS
*/****
starring Angelina Jolie, Clive Owen, Linus Roache, Teri Polo
screenplay by Caspian Tredwell-Owen
directed by Martin Campbell
RADIO
*/****
starring Cuba Gooding Jr., Ed Harris, Riley Smith, Sarah Drew
screenplay by Mike Rich
directed by Michael Tollin
by Walter Chaw Some pharaohs spent their reign building mighty pyramid tributes to themselves, so in that respect we should feel lucky that Angelina Jolie and Cuba Gooding Jr. have only used up the latter part of their plummeting careers constructing towering monuments to their splendid ideological isolation. The real wonder of it all is that there's room enough in the universe for both of their dangerously inflated senses of self-satisfaction, simultaneously reaching their respective pinnacles in a pair of atrocious films that at least have the virtue of being really funny, albeit for all the wrong reasons. For Jolie, her desire to save the entire third world, one orphan at a time, manifests itself in a picture that poses the big-lipped beauty carefully as a fashion plate and a sainted martyr; a debutante with an amazing wardrobe and a UN worker with a streak of activism; and a figure in its way as ridiculous as Gooding Jr.'s caricature of a severely mentally-disabled man (James Robert Kennedy) that reminds, of all things, of that acorn-crazed, pre-verbal prehistoric squirrel from Ice Age.
DIFF ’03: Sam & Joe
½*/****written and directed by Jason Ruscio by Walter Chaw Amateurish and lit like a hospital ward, the extraordinarily unpromising feature debut of Jason Ruscio is bolstered a bit by a game cast (especially a luminous Petra Wright, who deserves better) but undermined by a determined lack of craft, a clumsy, over-burdened screenplay, and a surplus of mordant self-righteousness. A tale of a woman (Wright) who makes the mortal error of returning to her abusive husband (Michael T. Ringer), Sam & Joe is shot on jittery, ugly, handheld DV exacerbated by what appears to be an over-affection for Tarantino's whip-pans, time-skip…
DIFF ’03: Shattered Glass
***/****written and directed by Billy Ray by Walter Chaw The saga of disgraced NEW REPUBLIC journalist Stephen Glass is retraced in Billy Ray's hyphenate debut Shattered Glass, an unassuming walk across the crossed threads of deceptive webs fuelled by an interesting pair of performances from Hayden Christensen as Glass and Peter Sarsgaard as embattled editor Chuck Lane. Fascinatingly repetitive, the picture itself is something of a scam, portraying Glass's tall tales in straight flashback fashion before systematically debunking them, replicating, in a sense, the feeling of betrayal that Glass's readership, his audience, must have felt upon learning that they'd been…
The Whales of August (1987) – DVD
**½/**** Image A- Sound A-
starring Bette Davis, Lillian Gish, Vincent Price, Anne Sothern
screenplay by David Berry, based on his play
directed by Lindsay Anderson
by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Auteurists take note: sometimes, economic circumstances play hell with your theories. There is the example of Lindsay Anderson, who began in the '60s as a star of the new British realism (This Sporting Life, et al) and went surrealist with the celebrated Mick Travis trilogy. By the end of the '80s, his particular quirks were no longer commercial, and he was reduced to sausages like The Whales of August, which bears absolutely no resemblance to the work that made his reputation. Try as one might, the film won't fit the brash, cynical template of Anderson's best work and is instead polite and obsequious in ways that a free director would never be. The resulting film is workmanlike but hardly compelling and serves mainly as a showcase for a group of aged actors who deserved better material almost as much as their director.
DIFF ’03: The Wild Dogs
**/****written and directed by Thom Fitzgerald by Walter Chaw Thom Fitzgerald makes movies that celebrate the cult of himself. Carefully nourished by his sense of smug self-satisfaction like a private pleasure garden, his pictures, numbering five, are auteur in the sense that they're predictable now: one cannot fail to be scolded when sitting down to a Fitzgerald piece, and even his best work (The Hanging Garden) shows flashes of the pedantic sermonizer he's about to become. The topics into infinity are the holy trinity of the father, oppressed subcultures (especially homosexuals); the son, AIDS; and the holy ghost, Fitzgerald himself,…
DIFF ’03: The Event
*½/****screenplay by Tim Marback, Steven Hillyer and Thom Fitzgeralddirected by Thom Fitzgerald by Walter Chaw Thom Fitzgerald's rip-off of--of all things--It's My Party miscasts Parker Posey as a hard-nosed prosecutor intent on exposing the assisted suicide of a terminally AIDS-ridden man by his well-meaning coterie of family and quirky friends. While Olympia Dukakis doesn't entirely embarrass herself as the dead guy's mother, the same is impossible to say for Fitzgerald, who, by trying to ultimately equate the AIDS holocaust with the 9/11 atrocity, manages to be both distasteful and ideologically suspect. Tragedy aside, the equation, however tenuous, of a virus…
DIFF ’03: Bitter Jester
***/****directed by Maija DiGiorgio by Walter Chaw Bitter Jester is a hard-to-watch record of an irritating, dangerously self-destructive stand-up comedienne named Maija (director Maija DiGiorgio) who, with a video camera and goombah ex-boxer boyfriend Kenny in tow, imposed herself on the frighteningly neurotic underworld of stand-up performers. With the endorsement of Kenny's legend-in-the-stand-up-world pal Richard Belzer and Maija's dead therapist, the pair set out to make a documentary on the effectiveness of throwing oneself at the mercy of antagonistic comedy-club audiences as therapy for working out childhood trauma and pathological personality defects. What results is a surreal, Hunter S. Thompson-esque…
DIFF ’03: The Flower of Evil
*½/****screenplay by Caroline Eliacheff and Louise L. Lambrichs, adaptation by Claude Chabroldirected by Claude Chabrol by Walter Chaw Claude Chabrol, the master of the French thriller, is perhaps better described as the master of the French femme-fear film, making an art of women empowering themselves through the destruction of class and gender distinction. With The Flower of Evil (La Fleur du Mal) (no relation to the Baudelaire), Chabrol continues his slide into quaint, comfortable insignificance with his umpteenth treatment of a theme; he's become sort of a French Ozu, if you will, but with murder. This time around, the aging…
DIFF ’03: Bright Future
Akarui mirai***½/****written and directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa by Walter Chaw Like many of Kiyoshi Kurosawa's pictures, Bright Future is about the virulence of apathy, the way that malaise seeps into the cracks of character, infecting ambition into inaction or inspiring sudden, malevolent acts inspired not so much by violence, but by a lack of prevention of violence. The Yin to Takashi Miike's Yang, Kurosawa increasingly finds himself at the fringe of narrative, making this film a remarkable companion piece to Gus Van Sant's similarly haunted, lyrical, and allegorical Elephant. Yuji (Joh Odagiri) is a shiftless youth working in a towel…
Wrath of Caan: FFC Interviews Scott Caan
October 19, 2003|It's in a subterranean hotel breakfast nook with fountains and a tiny little glassed-in room for God knows what that I meet the manic Scott Caan, who wears a tight baseball t-shirt and demonstrates yo-yo tricks to the slight consternation of a publicist eyeing the glass enclosure, I thought, a little nervously. After showing me a trick of his own devising, the Caan Machine Gun, I asked him to repeat it so that I could photograph it:
DIFF ’03: Resist!: To Be with the Living
****/****directed by Dirk Szuszies by Walter Chaw I have long been sustained by the belief that film can change the world, and that the most interesting dialogues I have ever had about the medium (the idea that it is the logical child of the oral storytelling tradition--Lord Byron's seed and wind, both) are connectable some way to the larger issues of my, or any, day. Dirk Szuszies and Karin Kaper's Resist!: To Be with the Living draws a line of crystal purity from the cycles of Greek tragedy (the eternal fight for individuality, moral objection, and freedom of "Antigone") and…
The Ox-Bow Incident (1943) – DVD
****/**** Image A Sound B+ Extras A-
starring Henry Fonda, Dana Andrews, Mary Beth Hughes, Henry Morgan
screenplay by Lamar Trotti, based on the novel by Walter Van Tilburg Clark
directed by William A. Wellman
by Bill Chambers William A. Wellman's 1943 film The Ox-Bow Incident is so brave and piercing that you can overlook its gawky title. That star Henry Fonda had a knack for picking westerns goes without saying, but The Ox-Bow Incident has more gothic qualities than do most oaters made prior to the dawn of Europe staking its genre claim: it's the scene in cowboy flicks where a bunch of guys cheer on an unceremonious hanging expanded to feature-length. The movie has such definitive–and perhaps, given the climate, urgent–things to say about mob mentality, the sour side of fraternity, that the Navy-enlisted Fonda deferred his tour of duty in order to appear in it. What makes this doubly noble is that, despite his lead billing, he's really not The Ox-Bow Incident's leading man. With a cast of dozens granted comparable screen time, no one is.