Python II (2002) – DVD

January 23, 2003Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Bulgaria, DVD, Horror, Sci-Fi, Thriller

Python 2
*/**** Image C Sound A
starring William Zabka, Dana Ashbrook, Alex Jolig, Simmone Mackinnon
screenplay by Jeff Rank
directed by L.A. McConnell

by Walter Chaw Though I’ve never seen Python I, I had a surprisingly easy time following Python 2, a direct-to-Sci Fi Channel CGI worm-fest that at least has the distinction of featuring a terrible-looking monster no worse than the one in its higher-profile cousin, Anaconda. It seems that a huge snake (two of them, in fact, making the title “clever”) is running around in cheap-to-film-in faux Russia, chomping digital comrades to the accompaniment of mirth-inspiring crunchy sound effects as a heroic CIA agent (Billy Zabka, who appears to also have been in the first of the Python epic) is sent to capture the beastie.

One Hour Photo (2002) [Widescreen] – DVD

January 22, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Thriller

**/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B
starring Robin Williams, Connie Nielsen, Michael Vartan, Gary Cole
written and directed by Mark Romanek

by Walter Chaw There is a keystone moment in the middle of One Hour Photo where lonely SavMart photo-technician Sy (Robin Williams) mourns his impending layoff by providing uncanny approximations of the comedy and tragedy masks in fast succession. Long our weeping velvet-clown chronicler of the twee ironic comedy of life in balance with death (hence his affection for misusing cancer-riddled kids and turning every film, including this one, into a Jacko-esque kid-love pulpit), Williams isn’t stretching here to play a lonely and disturbed old guy who becomes fixated on a pretty family so much as he’s indulging yet again in an aspect of his persona always fluttering under the surface of his more frenetic characterizations.

X-Men (2000) + X-Men 1.5 – DVDs

January 21, 2003Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, DVD, Sci-Fi, Superhero

***½/****
X-MEN DVD – Image A Sound A- Extras B+
X-MEN 1.5 DVD – Image A Sound A+ (DTS)/A- (DD) Extras B+
starring Hugh Jackman, Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellen, Famke Janssen
screenplay by David Hayter
directed by Bryan Singer

by Bill Chambers While fans of the periodical on which it’s based carp away about the shade of Jean Grey’s hair colour and the composite personality of Rogue, I, not nearly as much a comic-book fan as I am a comic-book-movie fan, champion director Bryan Singer’s sober approach to potentially silly material. X-Men is respectful in tone when not letter-faithful to the Marvel legend, if I understand secondhand descriptions correctly.

Shampoo (1975) – DVD

January 18, 2003Posted in1970s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Romance

***½/**** Image B- Sound B
starring Warren Beatty, Julie Christie, Goldie Hawn, Lee Grant
screenplay by Robert Towne and Warren Beatty
directed by Hal Ashby

by Bill Chambers SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. To put things in perspective, Tootsie is, arguably, a remake of Hal Ashby’s carefully cultivated 1975 classic Shampoo, except that it goes one step farther in feminizing the lead by putting him in drag–and takes a step backward in deciding the fallout of his deceptions. Making fantasy out of Tootsie‘s ending, Shampoo comes to terms with the reality of a lothario getting his foot caught in his own trap by giving the last word to The Beach Boys: “You know it seems the more we talk about it,” they sing of unfeasible marital bliss in the film’s closing song (“Wouldn’t It Be Nice”), “it only makes it worse to live without it.”

Kangaroo Jack (2003)

January 17, 2003Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Australia, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Family, Theatrical, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Jerry O’Connell, Anthony Anderson, Estella Warren, Christopher Walken
screenplay by Steve Bing & Scott Rosenberg
directed by David McNally

by Walter Chaw Irresponsible to the extreme, Jerry Bruckheimer’s latest production is sleazy, violent, and packed with the sort of feckless, hateful messages that indicate an almost total disregard for an audience’s intelligence. Kangaroo Jack is, therefore, business as usual for a Bruckheimer production, save for the fact that it’s aimed at a very young audience. The picture is a malignance: it’s bad (for a film about a CGI kangaroo wearing a red “Brooklyn” jacket stealing fifty grand of the mob’s money, that much goes without saying), but what really impresses about the picture is its magnificent inappropriateness.

About a Boy (2002) [Widescreen] – DVD

January 17, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD, France, Germany, Romance, UK

**½/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B
starring Hugh Grant, Toni Collette, Rachel Weisz, Isabel Brook
screenplay by Peter Hedges and Chris Weitz & Paul Weitz, based on the novel by Nick Hornby
directed by Paul Weitz & Chris Weitz

by Walter Chaw Will Freeman (Hugh Grant) is a philanderer and a playboy. Independently wealthy because of residuals from his father’s authorship of an inexplicably successful Christmas tune, he spends his feckless days in carefully scheduled thirty-minute “units.” (One unit for taking a bath; three for lunch.) Finally feeling a void in the middle of his rootless life at the tender age of thirty-eight, Will–after a scheme to feign single-parentage backfires roughly–finds himself involved with a mordant thirteen-year-old named Marcus (Nicholas Hoult) and Marcus’s suicidally-depressed mother, Fiona (Toni Collette). Rachel Weisz plays the girl too good for the pre-evolution rapscallion, her late appearance ultimately best described as the plot point that drives act three.

Metropolis – 2002 Restoration (1927)

January 15, 2003Posted in1920s, 2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Drama, Germany, Sci-Fi, Theatrical

**½/****
starring Alfred Abel, Gustav Fröhlich, Brigitte Helm, Rudolf Klein-Rogge
screenplay by Fritz Lang and Thea von Harbou, based on her novel
directed by Fritz Lang

Metropolisby Travis Mackenzie Hoover Now it can be told: Despite its status as a cinema landmark, I’ve never been particularly enamoured with Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. Like its immediate descendant Blade Runner, it’s a film better designed than directed and better staged than thought through–a gorgeous white elephant that’s all dressed up with no place to go. Granted, that design and staging are hugely influential, making it essential viewing for students of the cinema, and on a level of simple eye candy it has few peers in all of cinema. But while the current restoration shows us a fuller and more substantial narrative, that doesn’t mean that it is, in fact, full or substantial, and Lang’s rigid camera set-ups lack the fluidity and lightness to truly make the film more than a notable museum piece.

The Bourne Identity (2002) – DVD

January 15, 2003Posted in****/****, 2000s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Czech Republic, DVD, FFC Must-Own, France, Germany, Mystery, Thriller

****/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B
starring Matt Damon, Franka Potente, Clive Owen, Chris Cooper
screenplay by Tony Gilroy and William Blake Herron, based on the novel by Robert Ludlum
directed by Doug Liman

Mustownby Walter Chaw The Bourne Identity is a composition of gestures stripped of romance and presented in their barest forms. It is the most cannily cinematic film of the year and one that, during its first half-hour, boasts blissfully of but one minute of dialogue. The picture recognizes that Matt Damon is best as an everyman with potential by presenting him as a character born at the age of thirty-three. And the Oedipal detective story that forms the centre of the tale (“Who am I?”) is so ripe for examination that it may flower in time to be as debated and revered a fantasy as Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (which likewise features the murder of The Father prior to a kind of manhood and subsequent mate choice). Very loosely based on Robert Ludlum’s novel of the same name, indie punk Doug Liman (director of Swingers) has constructed a parable of self-discovery that can as easily be read as a subversion of the conventions of the thriller genre, a discussion of the ways in which the audience participates in the process of genre fiction, or as a science-fiction piece in which strangely robotic über menschen run amuck in a technocratic world metropolis.

Secret Admirer (1985) – DVD

January 15, 2003Posted in1980s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, DVD, Romance, Teen

***/**** Image B+ Sound B
starring C. Thomas Howell, Lori Loughlin, Kelly Preston, Fred Ward
screenplay by Jim Kouf & David Greenwalt
directed by David Greenwalt

by Bill Chambers Blessed with one of the best non-Tangerine Dream synth scores of the 1980s, Secret Admirer arrives on DVD this month to remind such movies as Just Married and Kangaroo Jack just how a formulaic laff riot with a risqué slant is done. I confess I still adore this seminal film of my youth while conceding that its machinations seemed far more clever to me at the age of ten. On the other hand, when was the last time you saw a teen-targeted comedy that aspired to any cleverness? Or that opened with a piece as alternately mysterious and wistful as Jan “Miami Vice” Hammer’s lyrical main theme?

Freddy Vs. Jason (2003) [New Line Platinum Series] – DVD

January 14, 2003Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, DVD, Horror, Thriller

***/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras A+
starring Robert Englund, Monica Keena, Ken Kirzinger, Kelly Rowland
screenplay by Damian Shannon & Mark Swift
directed by Ronny Yu

by Walter Chaw Though it doesn’t work at all as a scary movie (with even its jump scares curiously tepid), there is the possibility with Freddy Vs. Jason to engage in an anagogical discussion as rich and fascinating as any offered before by the already meaty respective franchises, Friday the 13th and A Nightmare on Elm Street. Pitting Freddy Krueger–razor-fingered child murderer, victim of vigilante justice, and avatar of the sins of the literal fathers–against Jason Voorhees, hockey-masked victim of the cruelty of adolescence and the fear of sensuality, is amazingly fertile ground and handled herein with a seriousness that understands the death that post-modern cleverness represents for horror’s slasher subgenre. This is not to say that the film doesn’t make nods to Signs and 2001: A Space Odyssey, just to suggest that its story proper is firmly grounded in its own hermetic mythology, the curiously heady equation of its titular bogeys to some sort of modern holy pantheon.

The Banger Sisters (2002) – DVD

January 10, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, Drama, DVD

**½/**** Image C+ Sound B+ Extras C+
starring Susan Sarandon, Goldie Hawn, Geoffrey Rush, Erika Christensen
written and directed by Bob Dolman

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover By any rational standards, The Banger Sisters is a terrible film: it’s ugly to look at, riddled with inconsistencies, stuffed to bursting with hoary clichés, and completely unencumbered by anything resembling intellectual rigour. And yet, it’s so sweetly lacking in malice that I forgave a lot of its sins–not enough for me to recommend it as anything other than a rental, but enough to say that those who dread the thought of a heartwarmer starring Goldie Hawn are in for a pleasant surprise. You’ll roll your eyes at its unearned sentimentalities and impoverished mise-en-scène and mourn the real movie that lurks beneath its crossed wires, but in challenging the rule of irony that poisons even the most well-meaning of films (The Good Girl, anyone?), it stands proudly and defiantly alone.

Cherish (2002) – DVD

January 10, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Mystery, Thriller

**½/**** Image B Sound B Extras B
starring Robin Tunney, Tim Blake Nelson, Brad Hunt, Liz Phair
written and directed by Finn Taylor

by Walter Chaw A marked improvement over his sporadically interesting but ultimately flat Dream with the Fishes, indie wunderkind Finn Taylor’s Cherish is one-half a fantastic film tied to one-half a terrible film. It leaves plot threads hanging, has a great deal of uncertain character motivation, and transforms into a Tom Tykwer film near the end for no good reason. But Cherish is also home to what is easily Robin Tunney’s best performance to date, another smart and quirky turn by Tim Blake Nelson, a disabled person in a heroic and human role, and a premise that is sharp, intriguing, and original. That it features two Hall & Oates songs on the soundtrack only helps its cause.

My Wife is an Actress (2001) – DVD

January 4, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD, France, Romance

Ma femme est une actrice
*/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B
starring Charlotte Gainsbourg, Yvan Attal, Terence Stamp, Noémie Lvovsky
written and directed by Yvan Attal

by Walter Chaw Yvan (Yvan Attal) is a sports writer (Yvan Attal is an actor) married to Charlotte (Charlotte Gainsbourg), who is a movie star (Charlotte Gainsbourg is also an actor, like her mother Jane Birkin–who was married to musician Serge Gainsbourg). Yvan Attal’s first film as writer-director, My Wife is an Actress (Ma femme est une actrice), is about–as its title would suggest–the somewhat predictable trials of being married to a successful actress. The film is not, however, as Attal will adamantly attest, autobiographical. This is evidenced by the fact that Terence Stamp plays an actor named “John” rather than an actor named “Terence.” In a wholly unrelated story (that is sadly in the same film), Noémie Lvovsky plays Yvan’s sister Nathalie, a woman demanding that her unborn son be circumcised upon delivery, much to the chagrin of her equally unpleasant husband Vincent (Laurent Bateau).

Film Freak Central’s Top 10 of 2002

January 1, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Best-of Lists, Blog

Top102002

THE YEAR THAT WAS…
by Walter Chaw

Love stories were the rule of the day for the year that was 2002. Sprung love stories, twisted love stories, emotionally devastating love stories flavoured by entropy and nihilism. The films that seem to fall out of that purview, About Schmidt and Morvern Callar, show themselves ultimately to be pictures moved by the deaths of a loved one or, as with Wendigo, studies of the dynamics of family from surface ideal to subversive schism. Romance is the prism through which identity and normalcy are redefined–a certain celluloid co-dependency that made 2002 (and 2001) the best years for film, and American film in particular, since the heyday of American cinema in the 1970s.

Confessions of a Dangerous Mind (2002)

December 31, 2002Posted in****/****, 2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Charlie Kaufman, Espionage, Theatrical

****/****
starring Sam Rockwell, Drew Barrymore, George Clooney, Julia Roberts
screenplay by Charlie Kaufman, based on the book by Chuck Barris
directed by George Clooney

Confessionsofadangerousmindby Walter Chaw The second of two biographies of television personalities to make it to the cinema in 2002, George Clooney’s Confessions of a Dangerous Mind is almost the anti-Auto Focus, tying itself to the chaotic memoirs of game-show host Chuck Barris and locating its identity in anarchic precepts of post-modernism (in sharp contrast to Auto Focus‘ reductive realism). Curiously, both films find a climax of sorts in a dream–I should say “dementia”–sequence wherein the stars of the show find their fantasies acted out through their small-screen vehicles. Where Bob Crane’s bizarre personal life appears to be truth, however (the crux of familial challenges of the film seem to hinge on Crane not being moody and never having had a penile implant), Barris’s contention that he split time between “The Gong Show” and being a fulltime CIA assassin gives considerably more pause. The real distinguishing quality of Confessions of a Dangerous Mind is that it is a big-budget biopic that acts as simultaneously a satire of, and adherent to, the familiar progression of the genre–the layers of self-reflexivity so multi-foliate and rich that it comes as no surprise that screenwriter Charlie Kaufman (Adaptation., Being John Malkovich) is the scribe responsible for its slipperiness.

Chicago (2002)

December 27, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Best Picture (Academy Awards), Musical

**½/****
starring Catherine Zeta-Jones, Renée Zellweger, Richard Gere, John C. Reilly
screenplay by Bill Condon, based on the musical by Fred Ebb & Bob Fosse and the play by Maurine Dallas Watkins
directed by Rob Marshall

Chicagoby Walter Chaw As adaptations of stage musicals go, Rob Marshall’s film of the Bob Fosse revue Chicago is professional and slick, if lit too darkly and oddly flaccid. Its musical set-pieces are generally excellent, with a trio of performances from Renée Zellweger, Catherine Zeta-Jones, and Richard Gere that surprise with their versatility and verve, but the unevenness of Marshall’s direction lends the picture a sort of confused rhythm that threatens to stall it during every narrative stretch. Buoyed by Sam Mendes’s recent Broadway revival of another Kander and Ebb classic, “Cabaret”, “Chicago” suffers from a distinct slightness, its attack on the evils of media culture not so much current as battered to death by decades of same. Chicago offers no surprises, then, only really coming to life during a press-conference scene with Zellweger the dummy and lawyer Gere the ventriloquist and puppet master. It’s gorgeously shot and choreographed and throws the malaise of the rest of the picture into sharp relief.

The Hours (2002)

December 27, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Drama, Esoterica, France, Germany, Romance, Theatrical, UK

**/****
starring Meryl Streep Julianne Moore, Nicole Kidman, Eileen Atkins
screenplay by David Hare, based on the novel by Michael Cunningham
directed by Stephen Daldry

Hoursby Walter Chaw Nicole Kidman is a wonderful Virginia Woolf–a distracted mess in a film that is a literalization of that description. The only real problem with Kidman’s performance is her prosthetic nose–it’s a no-win situation in which The Hours finds itself: allow Kidman to look like Kidman as Woolf and there will arise such a clamour of voices; make Kidman look like Woolf and not only is it impossible to stop looking for the line at the bridge, there will still arise such a clamour of voices. The problematical manipulations and presumptions of the rest of the film are as difficult to overlook as the nose stuck on Nicole’s face: The Hours is mannered to no good purpose, glowering with no good justification, and the sort of artificial construct that presents life lessons writ large by a cadre of talented performers who recognize a mainstream prestige piece when it presents itself. The only thing that separates The Hours from garbage like A Beautiful Mind (last year’s odds-on favourite to disappoint people who care while pleasing people who don’t really give a damn and don’t remember the morning after anyway) is that its marquee disability is being a woman and, apparently, being a lesbian.

Catch Me If You Can (2002)

December 25, 2002Posted in****/****, 2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Comedy, Crime, Drama, Spielberg, Theatrical

****/****
starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Tom Hanks, Christopher Walken, Jennifer Garner
screenplay by Jeff Nathanson, based on the book by Frank W. Abagnale and Stan Redding
directed by Steven Spielberg

Catchmeifyoucanby Walter Chaw There’s an old Ray Bradbury story from 1948 called “Touch and Go” (since reprinted as “The Fruit at the Bottom of the Bowl”) that tells the tale of a burglar who surprises the homeowner in his house and accidentally kills him. Erasing his fingerprints from a few surfaces, the burglar panics and starts wiping objects in rooms he hadn’t visited and items, such as the fruit at the bottom of a bowl, he could not have handled. When the police find him hours later, he’s in the attic polishing old silverware. Like Bradbury’s thief, Spielberg is getting away with murder in most of his films post-Close Encounters of the Third Kind (particularly A.I., Minority Report, Schindler’s List, Empire of the Sun, and Saving Private Ryan) until self-doubt and paranoia consume him, seducing him to a fatal eleventh-hour appeal. Spielberg is the bad test-taker, changing his answers to damn his instincts.

Wendigo (2002) – DVD

December 21, 2002Posted in****/****, 2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD, FFC Must-Own, Horror, Mystery, Thriller

****/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B+
starring Patricia Clarkson, Jake Weber, Erik Per Sullivan, John Speredakos
written and directed by Larry Fessenden

mustown-1059860by Walter Chaw Larry Fessenden’s Wendigo plays like a chthonic rite: it’s terrifying in its brutal purity and delicious in its ability to pull domestic trauma into the well of archetype where it festers. The film is a further examination of what William Blake cajoles in his “Marriage of Heaven and Hell”–that “men forgot that all deities reside in the human breast,” and it justifies itself beautifully in a Romanticist discussion, a Jungian explication, even a socio-political and historical examination. Wendigo is an extraordinarily thorny film, no question; that it manages to be so without pretension while providing an experience that is terrifying and gorgeous is a remarkable achievement. It’s why we go to the cinema: to be fed through the eye, the heart, the mind.

Saint Monica (2002)

December 20, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Canada, Drama, Family, Theatrical

**½/****
starring Genevieve Buechner, Emanuel Arruda, Brigitte Bako, Krista Bridges
written and directed by Terrance Odette

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Saint Monica is a film with such an unshakeable belief in its naïve vision of the world that it somehow surpasses that vision’s obvious failure to reflect reality. While it would normally be hard to stomach its arbitrary and clichéd depiction of a “multicultural” milieu, to say nothing of its watered-down treatment of homelessness, director Terrance Odette’s total commitment to his vague assumptions and pseudo-politics makes the film an oddly touching experience. Odette has lavished such care and gentleness on his threadbare ideas that you don’t really mind its frequent lapses in judgement, and as it’s acted as well as can be expected with the often ludicrous material it just manages to squeak under the wire as a film that is “not without merit.”