TIFF ’03: The Brown Bunny

September 13, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Drama, Esoterica, Film Festivals, Japan, TIFF
***/****starring Vincent Gallo, Chloe Sevigny, Cheryl Tiegswritten and directed by Vincent Gallo Editor's Note: Roger Ebert responded to this capsule in his print review when The Brown Bunny was finally released to theatres. It sicced his readers on me, which I deserved; I particularly regret my cheap shot at his weight. Fortunately, I met up with him at a TIFF screening of Saw a few weeks later and it was water under the bridge. (He even told a joke: when I asked if he was "seeing Saw," he said, "I thought I'd teeter-totter instead.") I often wonder if I actually…

TIFF ’03: Vodka Lemon

September 12, 2003Posted in2000s, Armenia, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Drama, Esoterica, Film Festivals, France, Italy, Switzerland, TIFF
***/****starring Lala Sarkissian, Romen Avinian, Ivan Franek, Armen Marouthianscreenplay by Hiner Saleem, Lei Dinety, Pauline Gouzennedirected by Hiner Saleem by Bill Chambers Discombobulating and deadly dull for its initial half-hour, Hiner Saleem's Vodka Lemon coalesces before it's too late into something by no means ineffectual. The first in an accumulation of vignettes finds an old man being schlepped in his bed through the Armenian tundra to a funeral site, where he promptly removes his dentures to pipe a dirge for the other mourners. The picture continues to lightly tread such surreal ground until the whimsical closing shot, in which music…

TIFF ’03: Gozu

September 10, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Crime, Drama, Esoterica, Film Festivals, Horror, Japan, Mystery, Thriller, TIFF
Yakuza Horror Theater: Gozu***½/****starring Hideki Sone, Sho Aikawa, Kimika Yoshino, Keiko Tomitascreenplay by Sakichi Sotodirected by Takashi Miike by Bill Chambers I've sat here staring at a flashing cursor, wondering what to write about Takashi Miike's Gozu--a picture whose spirit harks back to the David Lynch of Eraserhead--that could persuade you to see it: Though Gozu begs a viewing, any description likely to pique one's interest would force you to pre-emptively pass moral judgment on a film that a) explicitly requests to be taken as a joke, and b) is too fecund to truly offend. Gozu begins with the over-the-top…

TIFF ’03: The Five Obstructions

September 9, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Belgium, Denmark, Directors: Lars von Trier, Documentary, Esoterica, France, Switzerland, TIFF
De Fem Benspænd***½/****a film by Jørgen Leth & Lars von Trier by Bill Chambers Jørgen Leth struck a self-described "Faustian" deal with half-insane auteur Lars von Trier to remake his own experimental short film The Perfect Human five times according to "ruinous" changes mandated by von Trier. But the mouse repeatedly outwitted the cat with an incapacity for anything but quality product: The first four of the titular "obstructions" are up there with, well, early Leth, and the venture teaches von Trier--who thrives on unforeseen obstacles and how they lead to personal dissatisfaction with his work--that you can't make crap on…

TIFF ’03: Falling Angels

September 9, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Canada, Comedy, Coming of Age, Drama, Film Festivals, TIFF
*½/****starring Miranda Richardson, Callum Keith Rennie, Katharine Isabelle, Kristin Adamsscreenplay by Esta Spalding, based on the novel by Barbara Gowdydirected by Scott Smith by Bill Chambers Falling Angels has accumulated a lot of buzz over the past couple of days at the TIFF, but I don't mind telling you to ignore it. Basically a Sunday-funnies version of The Virgin Suicides, the film stars an already-typecast Katharine Isabelle as the most embittered of three daughters who live under the gun of a live-wire buffoon (Callum Keith Rennie) while tending to their catatonic mother (Miranda Richardson, doing a mean Joan Allen impersonation).…

TIFF ’03: The Cooler

September 8, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Drama, Film Festivals, Romance, TIFF
*½/****starring William H. Macy, Alec Baldwin, Maria Bello, Shawn Hatosyscreenplay by Frank Hannah & Wayne Kramerdirected by Wayne Kramer by Bill Chambers A lame exercise in Mamet posturing, The Cooler has been subject to inexplicable pre-release hype for both its tame (by post-Irréversible standards) sex scenes and, allegedly, for being good. William H. Macy plays another variation on his stock nebbish, this one employed by the Shangri-La Casino to "cool" gamblers on a hot streak with his contagious bad luck--a premise that contains the potential to expose the heart of the most superstitious city in America. But writers Frank Hannah…

TIFF ’03: Bon Voyage

September 7, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Drama, Film Festivals, France, Mystery, Romance, Thriller, TIFF, War
*½/****starring Isabelle Adjani, Gérard Depardieu, Virginie Ledoyen, Yvan Attalwritten and directed by Jean-Paul Rappeneau by Bill Chambers "And I'll huff, and I'll puff, and I'll boorrre the hell out of you." Jean-Paul Rappeneau's Bon Voyage labours harder than any film in recent memory to entertain, but the result is so draining I don't remember grooving with it once. In the opening scene, the latest vehicle for champagne starlet Viviane Denverts (Isabelle Adjani, who at 48 should be too old to play an ingénue, but looks at least half her age--it's quite miraculous, really) leaves rapt the attendees of a French…

There’s Only One Sharif in This Town: FFC Interviews Omar Sharif

September 7, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Egypt, Film Festivals, Interviews, TIFF

OmarshariftitleSeptember 7, 2003|He made one of the cinema's greatest (and lengthiest) entrances in Lawrence of Arabia, appearing as a heat-obscured speck of dust that gradually adopts the form of a black-swathed man on horseback, one Sherif Ali ibn el Kharish. Omar Sharif's regal stride into our appointed meeting place, a third-floor room within Toronto's Hotel Intercontinental, felt almost as dramatic to me, for his every step is weighted with a half-century of fame. Mr. Sharif is at the Toronto International Film Festival promoting a delicate French film in which he stars opposite young Pierre Boulanger, François Dupeyron's Monsieur Ibrahim et les fleurs du Coran. The picture works largely because of the legend-in-his-own-time baggage the actor brings to the title role of a neighbourhood grocer yearning to pass his considerable wisdom on. When I interviewed him, Mr. Sharif was, like his alter ego Ibrahim, pensive and forthcoming, with little patience for subtext. I found him both gracious and melancholy, and was heartbroken when our all-too-brief time together ran out.

The Experiment (2001) – DVD

September 6, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Germany, Thriller

Das Experiment
**/**** Image B+ Sound B+
starring Moritz Bleibtreu, Christian Berkel, Oliver Stokowski, Wotan Wilke
screenplay by Don Bohlinger, Christoph Darnstädt, Mario Giordano, based on the novel by Black Box by Giordano
directed by Oliver Hirschbiegel

by Walter Chaw Midnight Express with pretensions, Oliver Hirschbiegel's The Experiment is based loosely on Zimbardo, Haney, Banks, and Jaffe's "Stanford Prison Experiment," conducted in 1971 to test the reactions of twenty-four ordinary college students–some cast as prison guards, others incarcerated in a mock prison–paid fifteen dollars a day for their participation in the study. Having to end the experiment after only six days because of pathological prisoner reactions and sadistic guard reactions, the "Stanford Prison Experiment" remains one of the more ethically shaky mindfucks in Stanford's proud tradition of such things (my favourite of them being the one where experimenters tested men's "performance anxiety" while urinating in public restrooms)–a topic dramatic enough to merit a cinematic treatment, without question, but a treatment served poorly by the formula embellishments favoured by The Experiment.

TIFF ’03: Elephant

September 6, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Crime, Directors: Gus Van Sant, Drama, Film Festivals, Palme d'Or Winner, Teen, Thriller, TIFF
***½/****starring Alex Frost, Eric Deulen, John Robinson, Elias McConnellwritten and directed by Gus Van Sant by Bill Chambers Though it ultimately garnered Gus Van Sant the Best Director prize (in addition to the Palme d'or), Elephant's lukewarm reception among ink-slingers at last May's Cannes Film Festival confirms the dulled senses of the critical establishment--that a contemporary masterwork can practically blind with its colour scheme and still go unrecognized as such by cinema's ambassadors is more terrifying than anything in Van Sant's searing interpretation of the Columbine atrocity. The first film intended for theatrical exhibition to be screened in Academy ratio…

TIFF ’03: Monsieur Ibrahim et les fleurs du Coran

September 6, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Coming of Age, Drama, Film Festivals, France, TIFF
**½/****starring Omar Sharif, Pierre Boulanger, Gilbert Melki, Isabelle Renauldscreenplay by François Dupeyron, based on the novel by Eric-Emmanuel Schmittdirected by François Dupeyron by Bill Chambers Set, for the most part, against the backdrop of a Paris ghetto circa the early 1960s, Monsieur Ibrahim et les fleurs du Coran ("Coran" being the French spelling of the Qur'an) is an agreeable coming-of-age fable in the Tony Gatlif vein. Moses "Momo" Schmitt (Pierre Boulanger), an artless Jewish youth accustomed to holding down the fort while his father sweats away in an office for a piddling wage, regularly purloins items from the grocery run…

TIFF ’03: The Barbarian Invasions

September 4, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Canada, Comedy, Crime, Drama, Film Festivals, France, Mystery, Romance, TIFF
Les Invasions barbares**½/****starring Rémy Girard, Stéphane Rousseau, Marie-Josée Croze, Marina Handswritten and directed by Denys Arcand by Bill Chambers Denys Arcand's The Decline of the American Empire belongs to the homecoming genre of films like Lawrence Kasdan's The Big Chill and John Sayles's Return of the Secaucus Seven, but its quasi-sequel, twice honoured at this year's Cannes Film Festival (for Marie-Josée Croze's performance and Arcand's screenplay), is a Muppet movie with socialists. When embittered poli-sci professor Rémy (Rémy Girard) is diagnosed with untreatable cancer, his estranged, millionaire son Sébastien (David Duchovny look-alike Stéphane Rousseau) seeks out Rémy's Marxist friends of…

Burnt Offerings (1976) – DVD

September 3, 2003Posted in1970s, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD, Horror, Italy, Mystery, Thriller

**/**** Image C+ Sound D+ Extras C
starring Karen Black, Oliver Reed, Burgess Meredith, Eileen Heckart
screenplay by William F. Nolan and Dan Curtis, based on the novel by Robert Marasco
directed by Dan Curtis

by Walter Chaw Plodding, ugly, moribund, Burnt Offerings is bolstered by a few great campy turns from a game cast that includes Oliver Reed, Karen Black, and Bette Davis in a performance that runs counter to the self-loathing roles of her Baby Jane/Sweet Charlotte days. Finding its way to the DVD format just a couple of weeks before another haunted house flick (Cold Creek Manor) debuts on the big screen, veteran television director Dan Curtis's horror quickie is one of those comfortable relics that doesn't scare so much as mildly chill, offering countless opportunities to shout at the screen without any sort of discernible payoff–until the end, that is, but even that shocker of a conclusion has been telegraphed since at least the midway point of the first act, muffling its surprise.

Confidence (2003) – DVD

September 1, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, DVD, Thriller

***½/**** Image A Sound A Extras A
starring Edward Burns, Rachel Weisz, Andy Garcia, Dustin Hoffman
screenplay by Doug Jung
directed by James Foley

by Walter Chaw The urban surfaces of Americana are lent the sheen of Edward Hopper's neon isolationism by cinematographer Juan Ruiz Anchía in the appropriately named Confidence, which finds director James Foley back on noir ground, where his footing is firmest. It's the same effect generated by Foley/Anchía's Glengarry Glen Ross, here in Confidence used to mellifluous affect rather than staccato at the service of a caper flick if not the equal to Jules Dassin's seminal contributions to the genre, at least several times better than the slickified nonsense (The Score, the Ocean's Eleven remake) and sinkholes of talky illogic (Heist) of recent fare. A successful heist film as rare as a film that uses Edward Burns correctly in a sentence, Confidence is proof positive–if proof were needed–that James Foley, when he's at the top of his game, is at the top of the game.

The Ωmega Man (1971) – DVD

September 1, 2003Posted in1970s, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD, Horror, Sci-Fi

The Omega Man
*/**** Image A- Sound B Extras D
starring Charlton Heston, Anthony Zerbe, Rosalind Cash
screenplay by John William Corrington and Joyce H. Corrington, based on the novel I Am Legend by Richard Matheson
directed by Boris Sagal

by Walter Chaw Its dialogue and score at constant war with the tickle of poignancy threatening to justify The Ωmega Man‘s cult status, Boris Sagal’s at times astonishingly awful adaptation of Richard Matheson’s classic short novel I Am Legend is some kind of weird hippie elegy spiced with a few disturbing religious images and a lot of casual racism. The idea that Matheson’s vampires are now black-hooded (monastic and judicial) albino mutants living in an abandoned civic building, representative of not a new order but the oppressive old, is too clearly a lament for the doom of the flower-power generation. Frankly, the image of broken-down hippies trying to plant seeds in blasted earth in the middle of Easy Rider said it all with more elegance and brevity.

Out for a Kill (2003) – DVD

August 30, 2003Posted in2000s, Action, Aruba, Authors: Bill Chambers, Crime, DVD, Martial Arts, Thriller

*/**** Image A- Sound A-
starring Steven Seagal, Michelle Goh, Corey Johnson, Kata Dobó
screenplay by Dennis Dimster
directed by Michael Oblowitz

by Bill Chambers The other day, my friend and I were at the CNE, Toronto's annual expo of overpriced amusements, when we got a hankering for the raw sewage peddled inside its flea-market-sized food court. Where we wound up eating was at Kentucky Style Chicken, one of the many transient take-outs named for maximum copyright infringement and serving a synthetic mock-up of the already-inedible. Out for a Kill exists in the same spirit: Steven Seagal's first direct-to-video production in weeks, its designation combines the titles of his early pictures Hard to Kill and Out for Justice while mixing and matching nearly every trend, past and present, of the martial arts genre, on whose outskirts Seagal has toiled throughout his film career. Here, imitation isn't the sincerest form of flattery, it's a cloaking device–"Doesn't this remind you of something?" vs. "Boy, does this stink." You know something? Sometimes I get a hankering for movies I know I'll regret, too.

Like Looking Into a Mirror: FFC Interviews Mark & Michael Polish

August 30, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Interviews

PolishbrothersinterviewtitlAugust 31, 2003|I met Mark and Michael Polish in the Green Room of Denver's NBC affiliate just after the pair had appeared live on local television to banter with the indigenous fauna about their latest film–and last in a loose trilogy of Americana–Northfork. Garnering a great deal of national praise for their audacity-verging-on-pretension and collecting comparisons to filmmakers like Wim Wenders and Terrence Malick, the brothers, in person, have an air of something so rare it's like vintage from a forgotten cellar: they're grateful for where they are, excited for what the future may bring them. It's a lesson in thankfulness that found me at the right time, just before the crushing festival season, right at the tail end of the summer (and winter and spring) doldrums–questioning, truth be told, what it was again that I was supposed to be doing here when it just didn't seem that much fun anymore.

Never on Sunday (1960) + The Man from Elysian Fields (2002) – DVDs

August 28, 2003Posted in1960s, 2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Greece, Romance

Pote tin Kyriaki
***/**** Image A Sound B
starring Melina Mercouri, George Foundas, Titos Vandis
written and directed by Jules Dassin

THE MAN FROM ELYSIAN FIELDS
**½/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras C-
starring Andy Garcia, Mick Jagger, Julianna Margulies, Olivia Williams
screenplay by Phillip Jayson Lasker
directed by George Hickenlooper

by Walter Chaw They could be sisters in philosophy. The school of happy-go-lucky hookers perfected by Billy Wilder and his Irma La Douce (1963) also graduated Melina Mercouri’s Ilya three years previous in expatriated filmmaker Jules Dassin’s ebullient Never on Sunday (1960). Dassin and Wilder are involved in a perverse sort of mythmaking–fed by the artifice of classic theatre for Dassin, and for Wilder, more, the hysterical artifice of musical theatre, reclaiming the state of whore to the state of Madonna in what feels like a mania for order in a world without it. The whore as pacific nurturer, Rose of Sharon recast as Xaviera Hollander, represents a cynic’s compromise: the font of life and hearth nursed in the oft-fondled breast of a wanton woman. Mary Magdalene, unrepentant–ascendant.

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.

Four Faces West (1948) + Blood on the Sun (1945) – DVDs

August 26, 2003Posted in1940s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Drama, DVD, Romance, Thriller, War, Western

FOUR FACES WEST
*/**** Image B Sound B+
starring Joel McCrea, Frances Dee, Charles Bickford, Joseph Calleia
screenplay by C. Graham Baker, Teddi Sherman; adaptation: William Brent and Milarde Brent, based on the novel by Eugene Manlove Rhodes
directed by Alfred E. Green

BLOOD ON THE SUN
**½/**** Image F Sound B+
starring James Cagney, Sylvia Sidney, Porter Hall, John Emery
screenplay by Lester Cole, with additional scenes by Nathaniel Curtis
directed by Frank Lloyd

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Auteurism giveth, auteurism taketh away. It’s generally assumed that if we gravitate to the director with the greatest skill and the most obvious “personal” style, we will be doing ourselves a big cultural favour and putting ourselves on the side of the angels. And indeed, we generally strive for the power and aesthetic purity of those “originals,” as they give us the most pleasure. But if we declare–regardless of whether that personality has anything to say or says anything halfway coherent–that the only criterion of value in a film is a director’s personality, we will be shutting ourselves off from the other thing that artists do, which is interpreting the world for us. And sometimes lesser filmmakers take on subjects that great artists ignore–creating, if not brilliant analyses, something to stand for or against.