Black Swan (2002) – DVD

May 3, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, Disability, Drama, DVD, Mystery

½*/**** Image D Sound C Extras B
starring Melanie Doane, Janet Monid, Michael Riley, Ted Dykstra
screenplay by Wendy Ord and Matt John Evans
directed by Wendy Ord

by Walter Chaw Wendy Ord’s Black Swan had me at “I’m tellin’ you, there were traces of blood on that feather.” The film is a dedicatedly stupid murder-mystery/small-town hick opera featuring your standard collection of comely waitresses bound for better things, saucy diner matrons, scumbags with sidekicks, stolid policemen, preternaturally bright children, and literal idiot savants. Set in a tiny hamlet in the Great White North (“Hopeville,” natch), the picture opens with an indecipherable prologue that cuts between three separate storylines: a bunch of teens in a car; the titular black swan doing whatever it is that large waterfowl do at night; and a pair of scumbags going through their nocturnal rituals. The rest of the film follows suit by stuttering between two children playing hooky, a cute waitress (Melanie Doane) flirting with a drifter while dreaming, Steve Earle-like, of getting out of Dodge, and of an investigation of a possible serial killer who leaves black swan feathers at the scenes of his crimes.

Hot Docs ’03: The Last Round

May 3, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Canada, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs
The Last Round: Chuvalo vs Ali***/****directed by Joseph Blasioli by Travis Mackenzie Hoover A look at the crazy, labyrinthine ways of boxing as seen through the eyes of Canadian heavyweight George Chuvalo. Ostensibly about the day in 1966 when he went head-to-head with Muhammad Ali and managed to last the full 15 rounds, it follows the contours of his career as he strives for the world championship belt. A precocious, driven athlete, he becomes Canadian champion at an early age and sets his sights on the world--but the world has other ideas for him, and his yearning for a title…

Hot Docs ’03: Driving Me Crazy (1988)

May 2, 2003Posted in1980s, 2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs, UK, West Germany
**½/****directed by Nick Broomfield by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Of interest to pupils of documentary--and no one else--is Driving Me Crazy, a film in which Nick Broomfield, for better and for worse, reveals his own machinations on camera and upstages his ostensible subject. Hired by producer friend Andrew Braunsberg to document an Austrian stage production on African-American music, the director shamelessly inserts himself into the scene, recording the financial and political transactions that allow him to continue with his work. In so doing, he antagonizes many who work on the production and doesn't seem to care, concerned only with continuing the…

Speed Racer (1967) [Collector’s Edition] – DVD

May 2, 2003Posted in1960s, Action, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, DVD, Family, Japan, Sci-Fi, Sports, Television

Image C Sound C Extras C+
"The Great Plan, Parts 1 & 2", "Challenge of the Masked Racer, Parts 1 & 2", "The Secret Engine, Parts 1 & 2", "The Race Against the Mammoth Car, Parts 1 & 2", "The Most Dangerous Race, Parts 1, 2 & 3"

by Bill Chambers The theme song says he's a demon on wheels, and in one traumatizing, out-of-step dream sequence, Trixie, Speed Racer's Girl Friday, meets a version of Speed Racer with a face like the Green Goblin's and scaly arms capable of summoning hellfire. Unmotivated by anything other than the fact that Trixie has fallen asleep, the scene embodies half the charm of the Americanized "Speed Racer": we're only given exposition if it matches the lip movements mapped out for the original Japanese scripts, leading to dialogue so profoundly aimless (but synchronized!) that US producer and former child model turned dubbing impresario Peter Fernandez should've called his version of the show "Samuel Beckett's Speed Racer". While the narration occasionally attempts to bridge story points A and C (with B either overdubbed into oblivion or lying on a cutting-room floor somewhere), for the most part it refamiliarizes us ad nauseam with the origin of Racer X, Speed's-older-brother-who-ran-away-from-home-when-he-crashed-Pops'-racecar-and-now-wears-a-facemask-to-conceal-his-true-identity.

Treasure Planet (2002) – DVD

May 1, 2003Posted in2000s, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Disney, DVD, Family, Sci-Fi

**½/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B-
screenplay by Ron Clements & John Musker and Rob Edwards, based on the novel Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson
directed by John Musker & Ron Clements

by Walter Chaw Beginning as a clever updating of Robert Louis Stevenson’s kiddie adventure classic Treasure Island, by its end, Disney’s Treasure Planet washes out as another bombastic familial reconciliation fable that marks the flat trajectory of most Disney “boy” animations. Released just a few months removed from Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away in North America, Treasure Planet‘s narrative and character shortfalls are all the more glaring for their studied lack of depth and the picture’s general overreliance on excess, broad comic relief, and all of the stale portfolio of hackneyed Disneyisms. Treasure Planet even comes complete with that most irritating of cutesy crutches: an anthropomorphic globular whatzit created with what appears to be more of a concern for ease of holiday season polymer mass-reproduction than narrative foundation. The existence of one slapstick comic-relief gag not enough, enter Martin Short as homosexual robot B.E.N.–an animated caricature of Short’s Ed Grimley character whose appearance mid-film is as handy a signal as any that Treasure Planet, for all serious intents and aesthetic purposes, is over.

Hot Docs ’03: Baader-Meinhof: In Love with Terror

May 1, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs, UK
**/****directed by Ben Lewis by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Or rather, Ben Lewis: In Love with Obviousness. This brief history of the ultra-left Red Army Faction, whose terrorism swept West Germany during the '70s, doesn't really deal with the issues that created it; the film is far more interested in the sensational aspects of their rampage than in any of the questions that it raised. Admittedly, some of the details depicted are fascinating: I didn't realize that Andreas Baader's squeeze Gudrun Ensselin was a sex-movie queen, or that the BMW, RAF getaway car of choice, became known as the "Baader-Meinhof Wagon."…

Hot Docs ’03: Hush!

May 1, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs, Russia
***/****directed by Victor Kossakovsky by Travis Mackenzie Hoover By far the most original of this year's crop is Hush!, in which director Victor Kossakovsky turns his gaze through his apartment window and collects the goings-on outside. Lovers meet in the street, dogs are walked, street cleaners sweep up the curb, and public workers tear up the street to do... something. Seasons change, rain and snow fall, a police van has a close call at an intersection and the hole in the street gets bigger and bigger as the workers continue to do God-knows-what. Sometimes the action unfurls in real time,…

Owning Mahowny (2003)

May 1, 2003Posted in****/****, 2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Crime, Drama, Theatrical, Thriller

****/****
starring Philip Seymour Hoffman, Minnie Driver, Maury Chaykin, John Hurt
screenplay by Maurice Chauvet, based on the Gary Stephen Ross book Stung: The Incredible Obsession of Brian Molony
directed by Richard Kwietniowski

by Walter Chaw Richard Kwietniowski’s Owning Mahowny charts the mendacity of addiction with something like a poet’s lyrical melancholy. The director’s follow-up to his surprisingly gentle take on Thomas Mann, Love and Death on Long Island, finds another story of obsessive love that is itself obsessed with the importance of place in defining the accumulated essence of identity and desire. Kwietniowski’s films seem to be about secret outsiders finding themselves at some point swept out to proverbial sea, the land fading fast. While in Love and Death on Long Island that divorce illustrates the reach traversed by reclusive novelist Giles De’Ath (John Hurt) to claim his inamorata, in Owning Mahowny, the widening gyre is considerably (and deliciously) more complicated; the film marks Kwietniowski’s emergence as the most promising cartographer of self-confessional mortification since countryman Terence Davies. And Kwietniowski does it all with gentle, uncompromising humour.

The Dancer Upstairs (2002)

April 30, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Crime, Drama, Spain, Theatrical, Thriller

**/****
starring Javier Bardem, Laura Morante, Juan Diego Botto, Elvira Mínguez
screenplay by Nicholas Shakespeare, based on his novel
directed by John Malkovich

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Why do people insist on making movies as though all Latin-American countries are the same? How is it that they can get away with ignoring cultural differences and national identities as though they were nothing? The same first-world writers who set their scripts “somewhere in Latin America” would surely find an Ecuadorian or a Peruvian presumptuous for setting his or her own tale “somewhere in Western Europe.” But these jokers have no guilt about herding millions and millions of people into the same leaky boat, and defining the stretch from Mexico to Argentina as one big, ugly banana republic. The results are usually not pretty, and The Dancer Upstairs is no exception to the rule.

Hot Docs ’03: The Day I Will Never Forget

April 30, 2003Posted inAuthors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs, UK
***½/****directed by Kim Longinotto by Travis Mackenzie Hoover The co-director of Divorce Iranian Style is back with this intelligent and powerful documentary on female genital mutilation in Kenya. Not only does it show, in a chilling centrepiece sequence, the immediate and excruciating pain it causes the young girls subjected to the practice (as well as the health consequences of dirty instruments and heavy stitching), but it also explores the cultural mechanisms that ensure that people, even women, will continue it. The ears burn at hearing tribal leaders offer their explanations of the logic in its implementation, as well as at…

Hot Docs ’03: Rockets Redglare!

April 30, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs
***½/****directed by Luis Fernandez de la Reguera by Travis Mackenzie Hoover The lively but tragic saga of Michael Morra, a.k.a. Rockets Redglare, is explored in this somewhat crude but extremely moving documentary. Morra/Redglare lived a life that would be ennobled by the word "marginal": he was born a heroin-addicted baby, raised in grinding poverty, all but witnessed the murder of his mother, and bounced from needle to rehab to needle again in a titanic losing battle with addiction. But he was also an extremely creative individual, and rose in the '80s to become a character actor, comedian, and performance artist…

Hot Docs ’03: And Along Came a Spider

April 29, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs, Iran
Va ankaboot amad***/****directed by Maziar Bahari by Travis Mackenzie Hoover You'd think it would be clear-cut: a serial killer who murders 16 prostitutes should be treated with a maximum of scorn. But that's not how it happened in Iran, where the notorious Saeed Hanei dispatched members of society who were already believed to have been the scum of the earth. The sadistic "spider-killer," already high on killing from the Iran-Iraq war, believed that he was doing God's work, and interviews with his family reveal that they are proud that their son/husband/father was taking a stand on those who would corrupt…

Hot Docs ’03: Stupidity

April 29, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Canada, Film Festivals, Hot Docs
½*/**** directed by Albert Nerenberg by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Words fail me in describing this travesty, a hypocritical assault on the senses which traffics in the very imagery it pretends to deplore and leaves you drained, battered, and completely demoralized. Ostensibly, it's about the media events and herd behaviours that conspire to keep the stupid oppressed and the even dumber in power, but despite the presence of Noam Chomsky and scattered other intellectuals, Stupidity is an exercise in smug superiority that does nothing to fight the powers that be. It's more interested in looking smarter than the crowd instead of…

Hot Docs ’03: Kim’s Story (1997)

April 29, 2003Posted in1990s, 2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Canada, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs
**½/****directed by Shelley Saywell by Travis Mackenzie Hoover This is the story of Kim Phuc, who was napalmed during the Vietnam War and became the subject of an infamous photo that shocked the world. Her life is full enough of incident: Having become a symbol of America's brutality during the war, she was turned into a propaganda instrument by the Vietnamese government and subsequently defected to the west. She remains, however, a committed pacifist and continues to build bridges between herself and veterans--including, in the film's biggest surprise, the pilot who dropped the napalm on her. Alas, the crew that…

Hot Docs ’03: How High is the Mountain + How Deep is the Ocean

April 28, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs, Taiwan

HOW HIGH IS THE MOUNTAIN
***/****
directed by Shiang-Chu Tang

HOW DEEP IS THE OCEAN
***½/****
directed by Shiang-Chu Tang

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover These are two tangentially related films by the Taiwanese director Shiang-Chu Tang, and they're like nothing else in the Hot Docs festival. They're neither as overly schematic as so many socially-minded documentaries nor overly aestheticized like the school of Errol Morris. In fact, those poles don't really apply to these films, which record social processes through the examples of individuals and which have a formal beauty to them that is totally non-coercive. Watching them, you don't feel forced into taking a stance–you are provided with the stuff of peoples' lives to draw your own conclusions as to how they ended up the way they did.

Love Liza (2002) – DVD

April 27, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD, France, Germany

***½/**** Image B Sound A- Commentary B+
starring Philip Seymour Hoffman, Kathy Bates, Jack Kehler, Sarah Koskoff
screenplay by Gordy Hoffman
directed by Todd Louiso

by Walter Chaw Philip Seymour Hoffman is Dante and the slings and arrows of mendacity are his Virgil, chasing him through the inferno of his day-to-day. A remarkable actor at his frequent best when deserted by a lover, Hoffman in Love Liza is Wilson Joel, a man whose wife has just killed herself and left a sealed letter behind. It becomes his albatross, toted around unexamined, as Wilson descends on a spiral of juvenile addiction (gasoline huffing) and avoidance. He sleeps on the floor outside his bedroom and does his best to dodge his mother-in-law (Kathy Bates)–hiding the sharp odour of his addiction behind the lie of becoming a radio-controlled airplane pilot.

Hot Docs ’03: Generation of Hate

April 27, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Canada, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs
**/****directed by Shelley Saywell by Travis Mackenzie Hoover In Generation of Hate, Shelley Saywell goes to Iraq and doesn't come back with much you didn't already know. Apparently, the Iraqi people hate America for constantly attacking them and aren't allowed to speak about Saddam's oppression--shocker! Sure, it can't hurt to hear that one more time, but Saywell's primitive technique doesn't give the subject much urgency beyond the common liberal "tsk." Lacking in structure and confused in focus, the video ricochets from subject to subject, taking sound bites here and there and imposing frightfully obvious voice-overs that often repeat themselves. The…

Hot Docs ’03: The Lost Boys (2002)

April 27, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Documentary, Film Festivals, UK
**/****directed by Clive Gordon by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Can a film have a wealth of new information and still be a failure? If the film is Clive Gordon's The Lost Boys, the answer is an unfortunate "yes." Dealing with the ultimate fate of some of the "lost boys" of the Sudan, who fled to northern Kenya when they were attacked by the Arab army, it shows a handful of the 3,500 who were selected for resettling in America. On the plus side, it shows a process that rarely is seen on film, that of people struggling to adjust to a…

Mr. Intense: FFC Interviews James Foley

April 26, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Interviews

JfoleyinterviewtitleApril 27, 2003|Discovered at a student party by director Hal Ashby, one of the more tragic figures of the American New Wave of the ’70s, James Foley is at his best when detailing the brash social textures of the United States and the intricacies of male relationships (and, by extension, male relationships arrayed around dangerous women) in his canny shrines to the film noir genre. His new film Confidence returns Foley to the mean streets of his Glengarry Glen Ross in a caper film that defies the odds by not only being an entertaining and cohesive heist flick (after the high-profile flops that were David Mamet’s Heist and Frank Oz’s The Score), but also by finding a role for the aggressively unlikable Ed Burns that actually suits him. Foley’s best film, however, remains the brilliant After Dark, My Sweet–the only film, curiously, that he’s ever written, and the only screen adaptation of Jim Thompson that rings with the lewd authenticity of a Thompson novel.

Hot Docs ’03: Algeria: The Nameless War

April 26, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs, Sweden
***½/****directed by Agneiska Lukasiak by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Director Agneiska Lukasiak got more than she bargained for when she went to shoot in Algeria and fell in love with one of its countrymen, Habib. Not only was she in a country racked by civil conflict, she also had to face up to her culture shock at the country's radically different approaches to love. Despite her amour fou for Habib, his familial obligations make it impossible for her to marry without destroying his family's means of support. As she ponders her unhappy love, she wanders around Algiers illegally taping war zones,…