Whale Rider (2003) + Rivers and Tides (2002)

June 5, 2003Posted in****/****, 2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Documentary, Drama, Family, Finland, Germany, New Zealand, Theatrical, UK

WHALE RIDER
***½/****
starring Keisha Castle-Hughes, Rawiri Paratene, Vicky Haughton, Cliff Curtis
screenplay by Niki Caro, based on the novel by Witi Ihimaera
directed by Niki Caro

RIVERS AND TIDES
****/****
directed by Thomas Riedelsheimer

by Walter Chaw The images in Niki Caro’s second film, Whale Rider, are so heartbreakingly beautiful that at times the narrative diminishes its mythic gravity. It resembles John Sayles’s brilliant The Secret of Roan Inish not only in subject, but also in the understanding that film has the potential to be the most cogent extrapolation of the oral storytelling tradition. When the picture’s young protagonist sings an ancient Maori song to a dark ocean, there is an indescribable power to the film that springs from firelight–what we’ve lost in modernity as orphans to our collective past.

My Friend Flicka (1943) – DVD

June 4, 2003Posted in1940s, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD, Family, Western

**/**** Image A+ Sound B
starring Roddy McDowall, Preston Foster, Rita Johnson, James Bell
screenplay by Francis Edwards Faragon, based on the book by Mary O’Hara
directed by Harold Schuster

by Walter Chaw Revealing itself as a primary source for Spielberg’s E.T. (complete with scene in which a boy and his extra-species pal are found unconscious in a stream), Harold Schuster’s prototypical horse opera My Friend Flicka finds its locus in the relationship between a boy and his animal, its comic relief in a bratty little sister (Diana Hale) who can’t be trusted, and its antagonist in a stern but loving father (Preston Foster). Released to good success in 1943, the film (based on three novels by Mary O’Hara) fostered two sequels and a popular television show that banked on the syrupy good old-fashioned paterfamilias values that proliferated in TV’s late-’50s “Golden Age.” Accordingly, the film is burdened by a surplus of problem/solution climaxes and a perversely invasive score by Hollywood legend Alfred Newman that telegraphs every emotional response with a moldy insistence best described as “John Williams-y.”

The Other Side of Heaven (2002) – DVD

June 3, 2003Posted in2000s, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Disney, Drama, DVD, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/**** Image A Sound A Extras D
starring Christopher Gorham, Anne Hathaway, Nathaniel Lees, Joseph Folau
written and directed by Mitch Davis

by Walter Chaw To call The Other Side of Heaven “appalling” would be to underestimate just how dangerous entertainments like it can be. The film positions itself as “based on a true story” and “based on a memoir” without understanding that the two are often mutually exclusive. Then, without apology, it proceeds to manufacture scenes for maximum manipulation, everything from the messianic to the mundane. An opening dance sequence set in a Cleaver American Fifties features more stunt people, professional dancers, and trampolines than Cirque du Soleil, its artificiality setting the tone for the rest of the film, while the scene’s conclusion (with the picture’s hero trapping the celebrants in a giant dance hall, dooming them to death should a fire break out) serves as a pretty succinct summary of the film’s feckless themes and carelessness.

Giant (1956) [Two-Disc Special Edition] – DVD

June 2, 2003Posted in1950s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Drama, DVD

***/**** Image C+ Sound A- Extras A-
starring Rock Hudson, Elizabeth Taylor, James Dean, Carroll Baker
screenplay by Fred Guiol and Ivan Moffat, based on the novel by Edna Ferber
directed by George Stevens

by Bill Chambers Imperfect, cumbersome, George Stevens’s 1956 melodrama Giant indeed lives up to its title, ploughing through its protracted story with “fee-fi-fo-fum” grace. Released during a time when films were seriously vying for attention against television, Giant stands apart from the other consequences of dire studio measures besides gargantuan length (widescreen, quadraphonic sound, more location work) by devoting its two-hundred-and-one minutes not to religion (The Ten Commandments, also 1956) or war (The Bridge on the River Kwai), but to the lives of an extended family–an ensemble ethic that had gradually fallen out of vogue following 1946’s The Best Years of Our Lives. In a way, Giant ironically serves as a precursor for the sudsers and mini-series that would become small-screen mainstays, and it goes without saying that in this day and age, the cinema leeches off TV with reckless abandon.

Winged Migration (2001)

May 30, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Documentary, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Switzerland, Theatrical

**/****
directed by Jacques Perrin

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover The birds are coming, my friends, and you best take shelter before they bore you into a stupor. Not even Hitchcock himself made avian life seem as pervasive a threat as Jacques Perrin does in Winged Migration–though instead of being an active physical menace, it simply has the power to take your money and drive you to sleep or insanity. Alas, despite some super cinematography and generally good intentions, this record of birds sitting around and taking off gets very old very fast, for want of anything beyond an exclamation of, “Look at the pretty birdie!” There is, of course, an audience (nature enthusiasts without an intellectual bent, for starters, as well as those who would mistake impersonal, “professional” photography for art) that will not only gobble every shallow morsel of this film, but also think it a cultural advance.

Adaptation. (2002) [Superbit] – DVD

May 29, 2003Posted in****/****, 2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Charlie Kaufman, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Esoterica, FFC Must-Own, Nicolas Cage

****/**** Image A+ Sound A+
starring Nicolas Cage, Meryl Streep, Chris Cooper, Cara Seymour
screenplay by Charlie Kaufman and Donald Kaufman, semi-based on the novel The Orchid Thief by Susan Orlean
directed by Spike Jonze

by Walter Chaw A breathless map of the nervous play of axons and dendrites, Spike Jonze and Charlie Kaufman’s Adaptation. is an intimate cartography of the human animal in all its florid insecurity, ugliness, and potential for passionate pursuit. In relating its tale of screenwriter Kaufman’s existential wrestle with adapting Susan Orlean’s The Orchid Thief, the picture takes on a tangle of Lacanian meta-observation that begins with the nervy creation of a Kaufman-doppelgänger/id-projection and ends with a literal destruction of said phantom. A deceptively simple film given all its contortions and acrobatics, Adaptation. is concerned with the ways in which a man doubts himself, doubts his relationships (as well as the implicit lie of the social “professional smile”), and learns almost too late the damnably difficult (for the intelligent and the sensitive) ability to accept the simple and the obvious at face value. The picture suggests that to be genuinely adaptive is to give oneself over to entropy armed only with the knowledge of self; more than right, its journey is fantastic.

The Italian Job (2003)

May 29, 2003Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, France, Germany, Italy, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

**½/****
starring Mark Wahlberg, Charlize Theron, Edward Norton, Seth Green
screenplay by Donna Powers & Wayne Powers, based on the screenplay by Troy Kennedy Martin
directed by F. Gary Gray

by Walter Chaw The Italian Job may be the very definition of a perfunctory remake. There’s no arguing with its professionalism and, at times, it threatens to hear the music, but when its best moments are those in which Donald Sutherland–in Venice again after 1973’s Don’t Look Now–summons up the horrific ghosts of Nicolas Roeg films past, the picture reveals itself to be inspired only by movies that were first, and better. In that spirit, among the recent crop of heist films, The Italian Job is better than Frank Oz’s The Score and David Mamet’s Heist, but not nearly so good as James Foley’s Confidence. It finds itself at the mercy of the rhythms and images of pictures it seeks to ape, drumming out in the end an often flat, frequently limp product that seems to know, to its credit, the difference between “style” and “seizure.” But with a cast that is either predictably flat (Mark Wahlberg, Charlize Theron, Jason Statham) or convinced they’re too good for the movie (Ed Norton; only Seth Green seems like he’s having genuine fun), The Italian Job is just a prettified reflection glancing off the surface of a deep well.

The Pianist (2002) [Limited Soundtrack Edition] – DVD

May 26, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Drama, DVD, France, Germany, Music, Palme d'Or Winner, Poland, UK, War

***/**** Image C Sound A Extras B+
starring Adrien Brody, Daniel Caltagirone, Thomas Kretschmann, Frank Finlay
screenplay by Ronald Harwood, based on the book by Wladyslaw Szpilman
directed by Roman Polanski

by Walter Chaw It comes as little surprise that when the Nazis begin to build a wall around the Warsaw ghetto is also when Roman Polanski’s Holocaust drama The Pianist becomes distinctive, as the director is at his best bound by the endlessly symbolic edifices and crannies of architecture. The story of Polish pianist Wladyslaw Szpilman (Adrien Brody) and his survival under the auspices of the Polish underground, serendipity, and fear is almost anti-heroic, its central figure passive like the most memorable of Polanski’s heroes (Rosemary, Carol Ledoux, Trelkovsky, even Jake Gittes after a fashion), and its indignities more intimate than the grand tapestry of the Holocaust generally allows. The loss of Szpilman’s entire family to The Final Solution is less wrenching than the line that precedes it as Szpilman says to his sister, “I wish I knew you better,” and less difficult again as the musician’s inability to play a piano he’s imprisoned with in a tenement flat while in hiding. Far from insensitive, The Pianist is actually intensely humanist, focused as it is on the little indignities that bring a man from his comfortable environment to the furtive edge of capricious extinction.

Just Married (2003) – DVD

May 24, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Germany, Romance

½*/**** Image A Sound A- Extras C+
starring Ashton Kutcher, Brittany Murphy, Christian Kane, David Moscow
screenplay by Sam Harper
directed by Shawn Levy

by Walter Chaw Just as 2002 began with Orange County, a disappointing, somewhat lacklustre comedy (though certainly nowhere near as terrible as the film I’m here to review), 2003 begins with Just Married, a comedy so dedicatedly unfunny that the best way to approach it would be through the perspective that it’s actually meant to be disturbing. In fact, until the first line of dialogue about a minute in, the picture feels like a mordant, tongue-in-cheek, domestic-horror film–something along the lines of The War of the Roses. It doesn’t take long for optimism to give way to extreme predictability, unrelieved puerility, and the creepy realization that Cristophe Beck’s invasive score is a riff on Orff’s “Musica Poetica,” best known perhaps as the main theme to Terence Malick’s own black love story Badlands. There seems a realization, in other words, that a better, darker film about America’s fifty-percent divorce rate is waiting frustrated in Just Married‘s wings.

Viva Valeria!: FFC Interviews Valeria Golino

May 24, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Interviews, Italy

Vgolinointerviewtitlerevised

May 25, 2003|The decorations in the leather-lined bar of Denver's Panzano restaurant tend towards distressed dark wood and coloured glass; it's a new town's take on the old world and the perfect place to meet actress Valeria Golino. The daughter of an Italian scholar and a Greek painter, Ms. Golino is passionate about film as art, considers herself fortunate to have worked with so many strong auteur voices, and feels somewhat dissatisfied with her own contribution to the medium to this point.

Spellbound (2003)

May 23, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Documentary, Theatrical

**½/****
directed by Jeffrey Blitz

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover It doesn’t surprise me that Spellbound has been garnering more acclaim and attention than most documentaries: it’s a gentle and untaxing film whose drama is not so far removed from the flashy arena of “American Idol”. Despite collecting a disparate group of people in the same event (the 1999 National Spelling Bee held in Washington, DC), Spellbound doesn’t give enough detail to draw any conclusions about the participants’ involvement, nor does it place the whole notion of the competition in a historical context so that we might understand it better. In the end, the film is just a record of American striving that exists in a vacuum, offering the thrill of competition and the agony of defeat with only cursory glances towards things beyond the moment.

About Schmidt (2002) – DVD

May 22, 2003Posted in****/****, 2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD, FFC Must-Own, Jack Nicholson

****/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B-
starring Jack Nicholson, Hope Davis, Dermot Mulroney, June Squibb
screenplay by Alexander Payne & Jim Taylor, based on the book by Louis Begley
directed by Alexander Payne

Mustownby Walter Chaw Alexander Payne’s (Citizen Ruth, Election) third film is his best. He (like Wes Anderson and his third film, The Royal Tenenbaums) has come into his own as an auteur voice for a new American cinema that finds its underpinnings in David Lynch and John Cassavetes–in the Midwest grotesque and the elevation of the banal. In relating a Prufrockian tale of a man reassessing the ruin of his life upon the occasion of his retirement from a life-insurance firm, Payne strikes a balance between absurdity and pithiness, becoming in the process the sort of satire that exposes essential truths about the disintegrating spiral of life and the human condition. Married as it is to another wonderful late-career performance by Jack Nicholson, About Schmidt is heartbreaking and brilliant.

Respiro (2002)

May 22, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, France, Italy, Theatrical

***½/****
starring Valeria Golino, Vincenzo Amato, Francesco Casisa, Veronica D’Agostino
written and directed by Emanuele Crialese

by Walter Chaw Emanuele Crialese’s Respiro has the rhythm and the pulse of the southern Italian island on which it was filmed. It is all of breathtaking panoramas and impossible colours, and in the middle of it is Greek-Italian actress Valeria Golino evoking, in a career-defining performance, late countrywoman Gina Lollobrigida. (Golino would have been a far better choice than Penelope Cruz in the remake of Fanfan la Tulipe, currently not-wowing audiences at Cannes.) A film by turns savage and languid, for the first part it seems as though the film, with its clashing bands of shirtless youths, will be a reworking of The War, but then it becomes more a metaphor for grief and redemption in a feral environment fettered for too long by men and their illusions of cities.

The In-Laws (2003)

May 22, 2003Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, Germany, Theatrical, Thriller

***/****
starring Michael Douglas, Albert Brooks, Ryan Reynolds, Lindsay Sloane
screenplay by Nat Mauldin and Ed Solomon, based on the screenplay by Andrew Bergman
directed by Andrew Fleming

Inlawsby Walter Chaw Casting Albert Brooks as the prototypical nebbish and Michael Douglas as a testosterone-geeked maniac is almost too easy, but given a vehicle like The In-Laws, with this much heat invested in its direction, the casting doesn’t seem so much lazy as inspired. Based on a 1979 film starring Alan Arkin and Peter Falk in the roles of put-upon father-of-the-bride and crazed father-of-the-groom, respectively, the remake doesn’t have a single scene as classic as the “serpentine” gag of the first but compensates with the sort of instant familiarity afforded by veteran personalities in comfortable roles. Douglas has been here before in another tale of familial dysfunction, The War of the Roses, and Brooks has never really been anywhere else; the picture, paced like a trip-hammer by director Andrew Fleming, only really fails in its drab newlywed couple and a passel of homosexual gags that are badly dated and bordering on unkind.

Star Trek: Nemesis (2002) [Widescreen Collection] – DVD

May 21, 2003Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD, Sci-Fi, Star Trek, Thriller

*/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B-
starring Patrick Stewart, Jonathan Frakes, Brent Spiner, LeVar Burton
screenplay by John Logan
directed by Stuart Baird

by Walter Chaw For a film in a tired franchise trying to duplicate Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (inarguably the best of the cinematic “Trek” line) down to an articulate arch-villain, heroic sacrifice, and mind-meld cheat, the irony of having the central conflict revolve around a defective clone is delicious and hilarious. Star Trek: Nemesis (hereafter Nemesis) is abominable pretension draped in the sheep’s frock of sci-fi pulp–pap of the first water invested in undergraduate doubling subtexts and ridiculous stabs at existentialism reminding of the discovery of the wizard of God in the fifth Trek flick.

20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954) [Special Edition] + Atlantis: Milo’s Return (2003) – DVDs

May 20, 2003Posted in1950s, 2000s, Action, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Disney, DVD, Family, Fantasy, Sci-Fi

20,000 LEAGUES UNDER THE SEA
***/**** Image B- Sound A- Extras A+
starring Kirk Douglas, James Mason, Paul Lukas, Peter Lorre
screenplay by Earl Felton, based on the novel by Jules Verne
directed by Richard Fleischer

ATLANTIS: MILO’S RETURN
*½/**** Image C+ Sound A- Extras D+
screenplay by Thomas Hart & Henry Gilroy & Kevin Hopps & Tad Stones & Steve Englehart & Marty Isenberg
directed by Victor Cook, Toby Shelton, Tad Stones

“Climb aboard the Nautilus…and into a strange undersea world of spellbinding adventure! Kirk Douglas, Paul Lukas and Peter Lorre star as shipwrecked survivors taken captive by the mysterious Captain Nemo, brilliantly portrayed by James Mason. Wavering between genius and madness, Nemo has launched a deadly crusade across the seven seas. But can the captive crew expose his evil plan before he destroys the world?” –DVD liner summary for 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea

by Bill Chambers The trained seal is impressive, but enough about Kirk Douglas. Disney’s epic live-action adaptation of the Jules Verne novel, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea proves three things over the course of its thick running time: that director Richard Fleischer (the man who brought us Fantastic Voyage, the film that inspired Innerspace) was a gifted special-effects marshall–20,000 Leagues Under the Sea is still eye- popping/fooling 49 years after its release; that James Mason essayed the cinema’s definitive Bligh archetype; and that there’s always some asshole in a striped shirt in submarine movies. (Here it’s Douglas’s scurvy harpoonist Ned Land.) What’s surprising is how prosaic the film can be with so many assets in place, i.e., Mason, the Seussian interiors of the Nautilus, head-hunters, an enthralling killer squid, a seal with the charisma of Fred Astaire, and an especially vein-popping Douglas.

A Guy Thing (2003) [Special Edition] – DVD

May 18, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD, Romance

**½/**** Image B+ Sound A- Extras B
starring Jason Lee, Julia Stiles, Selma Blair, James Brolin
screenplay by Greg Glienna & Pete Schwaba and Matt Tarses & Bill Wrubel
directed by Chris Koch

by Walter Chaw Paul (Jason Lee) is a big-grinning milquetoast one week away from marrying chilly Karen (Selma Blair) when he wakes up next to free-spirit Tiki girl Becky (Julia Stiles) and begins to reassess his straight-arrow existence. Battling a case of the crabs, an excess of fantasy sequences, and the sort of embarrassing in-law situations that remind suspiciously of co-screenwriter Greg Glienna’s Meet the Parents, Paul takes about ninety minutes longer than the audience to realize that he belongs with Becky.

Fahrenheit 451 (1966) + The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976) (Anchor Bay) – DVDs

May 18, 2003Posted in****/****, 1960s, 1970s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Esoterica, FFC Must-Own, Satire, Sci-Fi, UK

FAHRENHEIT 451
****/**** Image A- Sound A Extras A
starring Julie Christie, Oskar Werner, Cyril Cusack, Anton Diffring
screenplay by Francois Truffaut and Jean-Louis Richard, based on the novel by Ray Bradbury
directed by Francois Truffaut

THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH
****/**** Image A- Sound A Extras A
starring David Bowie, Rip Torn, Candy Clark, Buck Henry
screenplay by Paul Mayersberg, based on the novel by Walter Tevis
directed by Nicolas Roeg

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. The second film of Francois Truffaut’s “Hitchcock Period” (and the Nouvelle Vague legend’s first English-language feature), Fahrenheit 451 is swathed in dread and melancholy–a sense belying cinematographer Nicolas Roeg’s bright, elemental colour scheme and simply blocked mise-en-scéne, though a sense completely in line with Roeg’s subsequent work as auteur. The weight of Roeg’s compositions–and arguably the genius of them–is the way in which he uses the weak side of the screen to introduce an element of disquiet into otherwise innocuous situations. The brilliance of the man’s eye in locating the menace and ineffable sadness in the midst of the bright and the mundane.

Xena: Warrior Princess – Season One (1995-1996) – DVD

May 17, 2003Posted in1990s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Fantasy, Television

Image C- Sound B- Extras A-
“Sins of the Past,” “Chariots of War,” “Dreamworker,” “Cradle of Hope,” “The Path Not Taken,” “The Reckoning,” “The Titans,” “Prometheus,” “Death in Chains,” “Hooves and Harlots,” “The Black Wolf,” “Beware of Greeks Bearing Gifts,” “Athens City Academy of the Performing Bards,” “A Fistful of Dinars,” “Warrior… Princess,” “Mortal Beloved,” “The Royal Couple of Thieves,” “The Prodigal,” “Altared States,” “Ties That Bind,” “The Greater Good,” “Callisto,” “Death Mask,” “Is There a Doctor in the House?”

by Walter Chaw With a show title that appears to mean “Alien: Warrior Princess,” what’s not to like about Sam Raimi’s and Rob Tapert’s foray into the realm of cheesecake camp cinema? The distaff queer version of “Highlander: The Series”, it occurs fairly early on that while there will be many aborted love affairs, the only consistent sexual tension will be between Xena (Lucy Lawless) and her talkative, Willow-esque geek sidekick Gabrielle (Reneé O’Connor). Tackling the series from the pink triangle is tempting, but fairly self-defeating: A scene in the second episode where a wounded Xena commands that a farmer stick his poker into the fire pretty much defeats a snarky approach to the material. That bridge has already been crossed–not to say that I’m above crossing it again.

Better Luck Tomorrow (2003); Manic (2003); Cinemania (2003)

May 15, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Documentary, Drama, Germany, Romance, Theatrical

BETTER LUCK TOMORROW
***/****
starring Parry Shen, Jason J. Tobin, Sung Kang, Roger Fan
screenplay by Ernesto Foronda & Justin Lin & Fabian Marquez
directed by Justin Lin

MANIC
*½/****
starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Zooey Deschanel, Elden Henson, Don Cheadle
screenplay by Michael Bacall & Blayne Weaver
directed by Jordan Melamed

CINEMANIA
*½/****
directed by Angela Christlieb & Stephen Kijak

by Walter Chaw Justin Lin’s feature debut caused something of a minor firestorm at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, where it was charged that Asian-American stereotypes of the “model minority” were being indulged by Better Luck Tomorrow‘s tale of honor-roll gangsters amuck in SoCal. The truth is that the picture, for all its narrative faults, is a complicated exploration of what happens when the societal stereotypes imposed on any minority are bought into and manipulated by the minority itself–the sort of double-edged sword that marginalizes even as it shields. (With African-Americans, a possible opportunity to work beneath the radar of “white” society; with Asian-Americans, the possibility to deflect suspicion of criminal activity with straight “A”s and memberships to the all-geek extracurricular club pantheon.) A scene following a party crash and armed intimidation comes close to instant classic status as our quartet of first-generation ABC hoods pulls up alongside Hispanic gang members of a more traditional Southern California breed, the cultural tension erupting in a recognition of racial transference that borders on brilliant. It’s the traffic jam scene from Office Space transferred onto an urban crime drama.