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.

The Matrix Reloaded (2003)

May 15, 2003Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Esoterica, Martial Arts, Sci-Fi, Theatrical

**½/****
starring Keanu Reeves, Carrie-Anne Moss, Laurence Fishburne, Hugo Weaving
written and directed by Lana Wachowski & Lilly Wachowski

by Walter Chaw In the middle of a scene where Keanu Reeves's trench-coated Neo fights dozens of Hugo Weaving's Mr. Smiths in a Brooklyn schoolyard, it occurred to me that, what with its wah-chuka-chuka soundtrack and meticulously choreographed (read: programmed) simulacrum of violence, The Matrix Reloaded is at this moment the nuttiest redux of West Side Story, in addition to the very definition of neo-blaxploitation. Cool vehicles, cool weapons, cool tunes, villains cast as endless iterations of The Man in monkey suits (and a set of albino kung fu twins), all with attitude to spare… Call it "techsploitation," perhaps–the hijacking of native cultures in the service of a Romanticist struggle against machine gods rendered, ironically, by mainframes and hackers.

Film Freak Central Does Film Forward

May 13, 2003Posted in****/****, 2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Chile, Comedy, Drama, Film Festivals, Horror, Romance, Thriller

MadstonefilmforwardlogoMay 13th, 2003|An interesting move from an interesting company, Madstone Theaters is releasing six undistributed films, each for a one-week alternating run called "Film Forward". The first thought that comes to mind is that undistributed films are most likely that way for a reason. There's an old Tinsel Town axiom that applies to most of the stuff that winds up shelved for a lengthy period of time (View from the Top, A Man Apart, The Weight of Water): studios often don't know when something's good, but they almost always know when something's bad. The idea of "Film Forward" should be appealing, at least intellectually, for the movie-savvy audience that Madstone is trying to cultivate; the question with currency is, as it always is, whether self-confessed movie snobs will put their money where their mouths are.

The Jimmy Show (2002) – DVD

May 12, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Drama, DVD

**/**** Image B- Sound B-
starring Frank Whaley, Carla Gugino, Ethan Hawke, Lynn Cohen
screenplay by Jonathan Marc Sherman, based on his play “Veins and Thumbtacks”
directed by Frank Whaley

by Bill Chambers There’s depressing and then there’s depressing. The Jimmy Show, actor Frank Whaley’s heartfelt follow-up to his nakedly personal hyphenate debut Joe the King, is so faithful to the doldrums of its lower-middle-class milieu as to have viewers recoiling from the reality check. It’s here that I become hypocritical, having championed my share of sad and perhaps discouraging films, yet one looks for their despair to be tempered by a sense of the romantic–even in the bleak Jude, the suffering is admittedly idealized by the setting, the weather, the period flavour. The Jimmy Show is no exaltation of the common man, but rather a snapshot of a tedious, miserable life–it could be called “The Sad State of Affairs,” though it’s actually based on a Jonathan Marc Sherman play entitled, rather evocatively, “Veins and Thumbtacks”.

The Ampersand Man: FFC Interviews Nick Broomfield

May 11, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Film Festivals, Hot Docs, Interviews, UK

Nbroomfieldinterviewtitleby Travis Mackenzie Hoover Say what you will about Nick Broomfield: that he's shallow, that he's an ambulance-chaser, that he is, as one reviewer put it, "the unobservant voyeur." But whatever else they are, his films are compulsive viewing. His modus operandi–collecting a group of arresting individuals surrounding other, more central and elusive (or dead) ones–sucks the viewer into their vortex as testimonial after testimonial reveals both the film's subject and, as Broomfield would put it, the "soul" of the interviewer. The tapestry he weaves out of these apparently disparate interviewees is often overwhelming, even when you're not sure about the director's motives, and it keeps you watching to the final frames.

The Mothman Prophecies (2002) [Special Edition] – DVD

May 10, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Drama, DVD, Horror, Mystery, Thriller

**½/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B+
starring Richard Gere, Laura Linney, Will Patton, Debra Messing
screenplay by Richard Hatem, based on the novel by John A. Keel
directed by Mark Pellington

by Walter Chaw Inviting comparisons to “The X-Files” (comparisons the series made inevitable by setting several of its episodes in rural West Virginia and making mention of the “Mothman” in an excellent fifth season episode called “Detour”), Mark Pellington’s The Mothman Prophecies has a peculiarly muted quality to it that suggests the entire piece is best seen as shrouded in a caul. Allied with that idea, The Mothman Prophecies is about knowing certain things of the future and exorcising the past, about accepting that there are things in life that can’t be prevented. It’s got heady messages for a film based on a cultish bit of crypto-zoology reportage by John Keel (documenting eerie events in Point Pleasant, WV that stretched thirteen months from November 15, 1966 to December 15, 1967), and ultimately the relatively lightweight genre bedrock of the piece is not strong enough to support its broad philosophizing.

The Shape of Things (2003)

May 8, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, France, Romance, Theatrical, UK

*½/****
starring Paul Rudd, Rachel Weisz, Gretchen Mol, Fred Weller
screenplay by Neil LaBute, based on his play
directed by Neil LaBute

by Walter Chaw Early in Neil LaBute’s The Shape of Things, a character mistakes “Medea” for “My Fair Lady”. Not an easy thing to do, for sure, it’s something that points to both LaBute’s instinct to proselytize and to his unpleasant air of smug intellectual superiority. LaBute’s films are science projects involved in the dissection of sexual politics; at their best, they illustrate the harshest salvos lobbed in the gender war, and at their worst, they serve mainly to confirm that LaBute has become so disdainful of his audience that first Possession and now The Shape of Things most resemble listless beasts over-burdened with broad symbol, churlishness, and portentous allusion. LaBute wants to hit you over the head and get away with something at the same time, his existential rage cooling in direct proportion to the self-pitying belief that no one understands him.

Daddy Day Care (2003)

May 8, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Family, Theatrical

½*/****
starring Eddie Murphy, Anjelica Huston, Jeff Garlin, Steve Zahn
screenplay by Geoff Rodkey
directed by Steve Carr

by Walter Chaw A little like a drowned earthworm, Daddy Day Care is less repulsive than pathetic, an anemic, flaccid little curiosity with nary a hint of life nor much resemblance to what it was when it was alive–or maybe now I’m talking about its star, Eddie Murphy. After the year Eddie just endured, however, with the elusive “legendary flop” hat trick of Showtime, The Adventures of Pluto Nash, and I Spy, I wouldn’t be all that spry either. Eddie’s first flop of the new year is, as unlikely as it seems, somehow more listless and boring than his previous three films, taking its inspiration from the Bush economy and our failed childcare system and making of it a saccharine puff-piece heavy on manufactured epiphanies and potty humour. It’s Kindergarten Cop without the gratuitous violence; who knew that gratuitous violence in what advertises itself as a children’s entertainment would be missed?

The Emperor’s Club (2002) [Widescreen] – DVD

May 4, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Coming of Age, Drama, DVD

*½/**** Image B- Sound B+ Extras B-
starring Kevin Kline, Emile Hirsch, Embeth Davidtz, Rob Morrow
screenplay by Neil Tolkin, based on the short story “The Palace Thief” by Ethan Canin
directed by Michael Hoffman

by Walter Chaw Saccharine, derivative, and overlong, Michael Hoffman’s often-painful The Emperor’s Club is remarkable only for the extremes to which it goes to avoid the clichéd ending–and the sad karmic (and ironic, given the film’s carpe diem, hakuna matata catchphrase) completeness with which it fails to do so. Set in the Sixties at an exclusive all-boys prep school, The Emperor’s Club is immediately recognizable as another iteration of Dead Poets Society, even more so when one realizes that the film features the same quartet of student types (the troubled one, the trickster, the bookish one, the gregarious one–also the same breakdown you’ll find in Stand By Me, come to think of it) and the same crinkly-eyed inspirational professor who finds a lesson for young lives in the heartening words of dead versifiers. That The Emperor’s Club spends its second half flashed-forward twenty-five years as said crinkly-eyed scholar discovers that his truest legacy is the success of his students reduces it to a variation of the miserable Mr. Holland’s Opus.

Love, Death & Gambling: FFC Interviews Richard Kwietniowski

May 3, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Interviews, UK

RkwietniowskiinterviewtitleMay 4, 2003|Small and soft-spoken, director Richard Kwietniowski is quietly emerging as one of the most exciting new “serious humanist” filmmakers of the last ten years. His two feature films, Love and Death on Long Island and Owning Mahowny, his latest, tackle issues of love and obsession with a deft visual sense and a surprisingly gentle touch. In Love and Death on Long Island, Kwietniowski fashions one of the most enigmatic and charming characters since Chauncey Gardner with John Hurt’s reclusive author Giles De’Ath: after a humiliating radio interview, the technology-shy De’Ath finds himself in the wrong theatre watching a cheap teensploitation flick starring “Tiger Beat” idol Ronnie Bostock (Jason Priestley); smitten, De’Ath embarks upon an unlikely quest for beauty and completion that brings him into the modern age and too close an association with the truth behind the fantasy.