Austin Powers in Goldmember (2002) [infinifilm] – DVD

November 19, 2002Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD, Espionage, Sci-Fi, Tom Cruise

*½/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras B
starring Mike Myers, Beyoncé Knowles, Michael York, Michael Caine
screenplay by Mike Myers & Michael McCullers
directed by Jay Roach

by Walter Chaw In the grand tradition of Final Chapter – Walking Tall, the third film in the Austin Powers franchise, Austin Powers in Goldmember, begins and ends with our hero watching himself being portrayed by someone else in a movie of his life–a level of post-modern reflexivity that is taken to such grotesque heights by the film that what emerges is actually fascinating in a detached, unpleasant, deeply unfunny sort of way. Mike Myers’s obsession with body distortion and cannibalistic consumption and auto-consumption likewise reaches a macabre pinnacle in the picture’s best running gag–the preoccupation with Fred Savage’s mole with a mole–and with a new circus geek for the Myers pantheon (joining blue-eyed bald albino Dr. Evil and Shrekian Scot Fat Bastard), the Dutch villain Goldmember, who makes it a habit to eat giant flakes of his own skin. We meet Goldmember (so named for his prosthetic bullion bar and ingots) in another bit of multi-layered absurdity during a time-travel journey to New York circa 1975 and the fictional Studio 69, with Myers referencing his own most critically praised performance as Studio 54’s perverse Steve Rubell. A study of Myers’s Dick Tracy-like mania with latex appliances would no doubt fill volumes.

Vulgar (2002) – DVD

November 18, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, DVD, Thriller, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/**** Image C+ Sound B+ Extras A
starring Brian Christopher O’Halloran, Jerry Lewkowitz, Matthew Maher, Ethan Suplee
written and directed by Bryan Johnson

by Walter Chaw Beginning as Shakes the Clown and segueing into I Spit on Your Grave before finally settling on Death to Smoochy, the discordant, hideously unpleasant Vulgar is the kind of puerile vanity piece that gives exploitation and egotism bad names. Produced by Kevin Smith and seeking to be a creation mythology for Smith’s View Askew mascot (just another example of Smith overestimating the inherent interest in his cult of personality), the picture is the hyphenate debut for Smith crony Bryan Johnson, making Smith, along the way, just the next nepotistic “Happy Madison” pinhead king of diminished returns.

Highlander TV Series: Season One (1992-1993) – DVD

November 16, 2002Posted in1990s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, DVD, Fantasy, France, Mystery, Romance, Sci-Fi, Television

Image C – D+ Sound C Extras B
“The Gathering,” “Innocent Man,” “Road Not Taken,” “Bad Day in Building A,” “Free Fall,” “Deadly Medicine,” “Mountain Men,” “Revenge is Sweet,” “The Sea Witch,” “Eyewitness,” “Family Tree,” “See No Evil,” “Band of Brothers,” “For Evil’s Sake,” “For Tomorrow We Die,” “The Beast Below,” “Saving Grace,” “The Lady and the Tiger,” “Avenging Angel,” “Eye of the Beholder,” “Nowhere to Run,” “The Hunters”

by Walter Chaw It always struck me as the height of synergy that Queen would score a homoerotic cock opera involving swords and decapitations (and a first episode flat-of-the-blade ass-slap that would make Boy George blush), so, despite all of the things that are extravagantly wrong about the “Highlander” franchise moving to weekly television, the one thing that’s right about the transplant is the use of Freddie Mercury’s creepy ballad to immortal Scottish duellists as its theme song. Essentially a variation on that favourite fantasy of morbid teenagers–the vampire rock star mythos (live forever, fight clandestine battles with leather-horse foes, bed beautiful women and have a non-queer justification for not wanting to commit, pretend to have a cool accent, feel sorry for the small worries of mere mortals, look great)–the main difference in the “Highlander” universe is that the Highlanders aren’t capable of making new Highlanders. It’s as gay as a French holiday, is what I’m saying–not that there’s anything wrong with that.

Ararat (2002)

November 15, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Canada, Directors: Atom Egoyan, Drama, France, Theatrical, War

**/****
starring David Alpay, Charles Aznavour, Eric Bogosian, Brent Carver
written and directed by Atom Egoyan

Araratby Travis Mackenzie Hoover The problem with Atom Egoyan’s Ararat is not that it takes a hard stance about the Armenian Genocide, but that it avoids taking a hard stance about what to do with that hard stance. While the writer-director takes great pains to show how various approaches to historical memory can be twisted through suspect convention or personal hurt, he neither offers a process that might actually do the job nor feels confident that anyone could–an impasse that ironically condemns his own film to be one more body on a pile of dangerous irrelevances. So frightened is Egoyan that he’ll make a mistake that he builds layer after layer of distanciation, trying to build a theoretical machine that will absolve him from the responsibility of mapping a position; the results backfire spectacularly, making the slaughter of a million-plus people, seen distantly through the film’s fish-eye lens, even more of a footnote than before.

Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (2002)

November 15, 2002Posted in2000s, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Family, Fantasy, Mystery, Theatrical, UK

***½/****
starring Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint, Emma Watson, Kenneth Branagh
screenplay by Steven Kloves, based on the novel by J.K. Rowling
directed by Chris Columbus

Harrypotterchamberby Walter Chaw Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (hereafter Harry Potter 2) treats its audience with respect while comporting itself with intelligence, wit, and passion. The things missing from the first film have been satisfactorily addressed in the second: the crucial racial bullying subplot; the unfortunate attention on special effects as spectacle; and the lamentable lack of character development. Perhaps most importantly, the sense of darkness and fear endemic to any great children’s story has been honoured in the sequel. I completely expected to dislike Harry Potter 2 (as I disdain the films of Chris Columbus in general and Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s/Philosopher’s Stone in particular), but the picture is more winningly indicative of screenwriter Steve Kloves’s (The Fabulous Baker Boys, Flesh and Bone) dark character studies than of Columbus’s childish desire for frothy restorations of a nuclear order.

From Flies to Spiders: FFC Interviews David Cronenberg

November 15, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Directors: David Cronenberg, Horror, Interviews

DcronenberginterviewtitledesNovember 15, 2002|Of the many opportunities afforded to me by my association with FILM FREAK CENTRAL, the ones I treasure most are interviews with favourite filmmakers. Guillermo Del Toro, Cory McAbee, John Sayles, and now David Cronenberg–easily the most important Canadian auteur of the last thirty years, and one of the most vivid and innovative voices in a horror genre otherwise moribund since the early 1980s. Cronenberg’s films are obsessed with the twisting of the flesh by machineries and ambition, sexual perversion and insectile disassociation, and the blurring of lines between reality and the phantasms constructed by the Icarean aspirations of its doomed protagonists.

Reign of Fire (2002) – DVD

November 10, 2002Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD, Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Thriller

**/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B-
starring Matthew McConaughey, Christian Bale, Izabella Scorupco, Gerard Butler
screenplay by Gregg Chabot & Kevin Peterka and Matt Greenberg
directed by Rob Bowman

by Walter Chaw Opening concurrent to Sam Mendes’s Road to Perdition, it occurs to me that both it and Reign of Fire are grim, shadowy elegies to lost ages that rely upon gloomy landscapes to convey deeper resonances their stories basic fail to provide. The surprising difference is that Rob Bowman’s post-apocalyptic dragon opera actually has a cannier allegorical foundation. Where Road to Perdition is ultimately an empty broadside attempt at equating the semi-Rockwellian loss of innocence of a little boy to the semi-Rockwellian loss of innocence of the United States in the Twenties and Thirties, Reign of Fire appears to be a story of the Blitz and the first days of American involvement in WWII. The French even make a cameo to try to claim a little piece of “Berlin” during the otherwise incomprehensible epilogue.

Bad Company (2002)

November 9, 2002Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Czech Republic, DVD, Thriller, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/**** Image A Sound A-
starring Anthony Hopkins, Chris Rock, Gabriel Macht, Garcelle Beauvais
screenplay by Jason Richman and Michael Browning
directed by Joel Schumacher

by Walter Chaw Apparently named after a dinosaur rock band for no other reason than that it is a logy, prehistoric stillbirth imbued with the corpulent stench of excess (and probably a scattershot popularity attributable to a feeble-minded few), Bad Company would be the worst film I have seen this year had I not attended Cameron Diaz’s The Sweetest Thing. It’s professional hack extraordinaire Joel Schumacher’s latest sloppy bucket of pyrotechnic tripe, and not coincidentally the umpteenth summer skinny dip in Jerry Bruckheimer’s putrid pond of retread action twaddle. The collaboration of Schumacher and Bruckheimer, incidentally, should be warning enough to most sentient beings–the addition of Chris Rock and Anthony Hopkins, only overkill.

Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones (2002) [Widescreen] + The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001) – Extended Edition [Platinum Series] – DVDs

November 7, 2002Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Drama, DVD, Fantasy, New Zealand, Sci-Fi, Star Wars

STAR WARS: EPISODE II – ATTACK OF THE CLONES
*½/**** Image A+ Sound A+ Extras B+
starring Ewan McGregor, Natalie Portman, Hayden Christensen, Ian McDiarmid
screenplay by George Lucas and Jonathan Hales
directed by George Lucas

THE LORD OF THE RINGS: THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING – EXTENDED EDITION
***/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras A+
starring Elijah Wood, Ian McKellen, Viggo Mortensen, Sean Astin
screenplay by Fran Walsh & Philippa Boyens & Peter Jackson, based on the novel The Fellowship of the Ring by J.R.R. Tolkien
directed by Peter Jackson

by Bill Chambers In that period during which FILM FREAK CENTRAL was receiving 20 or 30 angry e-mails a day about Walter Chaw’s pan of Episode II, I was asked once or twice if I agreed with him. The answer is “yes,” though my reaction leans closer to apathetic than vitriolic. One thing I found, having just viewed Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones again on DVD, is that the small screen amplifies the picture’s weaknesses in reducing one of its core strengths: magnitude. Watching the film on TV, you reach all too instinctively for the game controller, and I felt violated this time out by Anakin’s scenes with Padmé (whereas before, one could somewhat blot out the bad thoughts with the movie’s marginalia)–not only are they like dramatizations of the wrong answer in a multiple choice COSMO quiz, they also unfairly paint Padmé (Natalie Portman) as one of the most superficial female characters in movie history.

One Last Score (2002) + The Shipment (2002) – DVDs

November 6, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, Crime, Drama, DVD, Thriller

If… Dog… Rabbit
*/**** Image C+ Sound C
starring Matthew Modine, John Hurt, Kevin O’Connor, David Keith
written and directed by Matthew Avery Modine

THE SHIPMENT
ZERO STARS/**** Image C Sound C-
starring Matthew Modine, Elizabeth Berkley, Nick Turturro, Paul Rodriguez
screenplay by Rich Steen
directed by Alex Wright

by Walter Chaw Matthew Modine has made a career of acting the idiosyncratic man of action–that scattershot chortle masking some unusual skill and the kind of laconic intelligence that Eric Stoltz has utilized to far different effect. Peaking early as Pvt. Joker in Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket (and scoring a couple times before that in the deceptively interesting Vision Quest and Alan Parker’s moody war idyll Birdy), Modine has treaded water ever since in stuff like Cutthroat Island and Bye Bye Love while actually appearing as himself in a couple of films (Notting Hill, Bamboozled)–an indulgence that’s never a good sign, with very few exceptions, for an actor still serious about his career.

Pumpkin (2002) – DVD

November 5, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Disability, Drama, DVD, Romance, Sports

½*/**** Image B- Sound B+
starring Christina Ricci, Hank Harris, Brenda Blethyn, Dominique Swain
screenplay by Adam Larson Broder
directed by Adam Larson Broder and Tony R. Abrams

by Walter Chaw The best and only successful joke of Adam Larson Broder and Tony R. Abrams’s unspeakably bad Pumpkin is borrowed from another Christina Ricci film: the last primp that she performs on herself in Don Roos’s The Opposite of Sex is a quick pinch of her nipples to bring them into sharper relief; that’s pretty funny, and in Pumpkin, Ms. Ricci’s nipples in various sorority sweaters are an Anne Heche-ian running gag never commented upon. It’s fitting, I guess, that the one thing that works about this film is probably unintentional and derivative besides.

Ray Liotta is One Cool Bastard: FFC Interviews Ray Liotta

November 4, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Interviews

RayliottainterviewtitleNovember 4, 2002|Taking notes in the lobby of Denver's Brown Palace Hotel, I was surprised to look up into the vaguely terrifying gaze of actor Ray Liotta, in town to promote his latest film and first foray into producing: the gritty, harrowing Narc. Unfailingly polite, Liotta impresses most with his candour and forthrightness–a breath of fresh air in a business that too often resembles a mutual admiration society of professional spin-doctors and overripe hucksters. I was disarmed more than once during our conversation (punctuated occasionally by his trademark laugh) by the careful attention Mr. Liotta afforded my questions. I'm far more accustomed to being a sounding board for folks with something to promote, questions be damned. I began by asking Mr. Liotta why he chose at this stage of his career to begin producing.

Glass Skies (1958) + Valley of the Bees (1968)

November 3, 2002Posted in1950s, 1960s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Czechoslovakia, Drama, Short Films, Theatrical

Sklenená oblaka
Clouds of Glass
***½/****
directed by Frantisek Vlácil

Údolí vcel
***/****
starring Petr Cepek, Jan Kacer, Vera Galatíková, Zdenek Kryzánek
screenplay by Vladimír Körner and Frantisek Vlácil
directed by Frantisek Vlácil

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover I approach this review with trepidation. It’s hard to judge two films by a director when a) he’s completely unheard of in this country, and b) you’re shown different times and places in his career, but such is the issue of my having seen a short and a feature by Frantisek Vlácil in preparation for an upcoming Cinematheque Ontario retrospective. The lack of noted scholarship on the subject gives one no background to help understand him, and while one can relate him to his godfather status to the 1960s Czech New Wave, his smooth and chilly style relates little to the shaggy-dog feel of his cinematic descendants. So I must look over my shoulder and say that he’s a man of some talent, to be sure, but with some obvious ideas that weigh him down; while Vlácil’s good in a professional sense, he doesn’t know how to make images come alive with the same meaning as the narrative drive, giving his films a hard sheen that clamps down on sensuality. He’s more than a schlepper but less than a master, worth one look but hardly a second thought.

Wes Craven Presents Don’t Look Down (1998) – DVD

November 2, 2002Posted in1990s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Horror, Television, Wes Craven, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/**** Image C Sound C
starring Megan Ward, Billy Burke, Terry Kinney, Angela Moore
teleplay by Gregory Goodell
directed by Larry Shaw

by Walter Chaw The easy thing to do with the Wes Craven-produced tele-shocker Don’t Look Down is to add the addendum “because you’ll see this movie at the bottom” to its title. Broadcast on the Hallmark Channel as a zero-budget, zero-thrills bit of particularly fragrant, past-its-sell-by-date cheese, the plot involves TV-movie Ashley Judd-alike Megan Ward (and, indeed, the actress played Ashley in a TV-movie, Naomi & Wynonna: Love Can Build a Bridge) as Carla, a woman who’s lost her feral hippie sister (Tara Spencer-Nairn–see her now in Wishmaster: The Prophecy Fulfilled!) in a freak sight-seeing accident and so develops a bad case of acrophobia.

Felicity: Season One [The Complete First Season Plus Pilot Episode] (1998-1999) – DVD

November 2, 2002Posted in1990s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Coming of Age, Drama, DVD, Romance, Television

Image B Sound B+ Commentary A-
“Pilot”, “The Last Stand”, “Hot Objects”, “Boggled”, “Spooked”, “Cheating”, “Drawing the Line Part 1”, “Drawing the Line Part 2”, “Thanksgiving”, “Finally”, “Gimme an O!”, “Friends,” “Todd Mulcahy Part 1”, “Todd Mulcahy Part 2”, “Love and Marriage”, “The Fugue”, “Assassins”, “Happy Birthday”, “Docuventary”, “Connections”, “The Force”, “Felicity Was Here”

by Bill Chambers

“Starring Golden Globe Award-winning actress Keri Russell and today’s hottest young stars, Felicity introduces us to a wide-eyed college freshman and the most exhilarating journey of all–self-discovery. From co-creators and executive producers J.J. Abrams (Alias) and Matt Reeves, along with executive producer Brian Grazer, Ron Howard and Tony Krantz, comes to Felicity, which explores the excitement and uncertainty of living in New York City–a setting where anything goes and anything can happen.”
–DVD liner summary for “Felicity: The Complete First Season”

I had what I consider a pretty good excuse to watch the well-hyped pilot of “Felicity”, a show that is not necessarily mine to judge: A year before, I directed co-star Scott Speedman in a short film–I like to keep track of the Ursa Major alumni. But, and the name-dropping/bean-spilling ends after this indulgence, Scott does not belong on a teen soap, per se–as far as my experience with him goes, the format is too rigid for his improvisational methods, which happened to lean towards the profane. It was a bit like observing a caged tiger throughout “Felicity”‘s run, though I’d bet my bottom dollar that the first time his character, Ben Covington, called someone a “dick,” it was unscripted. The moment sparkles.

I Spy (2002)

November 1, 2002Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Eddie Murphy, Hungary, Theatrical, Thriller

*/****
starring Eddie Murphy, Owen Wilson, Famke Janssen, Malcolm McDowell
screenplay by Marianne Sellek Wibberley & Cormac Wibberley and David Ronn & Jay Scherick
directed by Betty Thomas

Ispyby Walter Chaw The best bit of dialogue in Betty Thomas’s abysmal I Spy, a film saddled with a hack director and a too-many-cooks scenario that translates adroitly into the screenwriting process (the script is credited to Marianne Wibberley, Cormac Wibberley, Jay Scherick, and David Ronn), is a bit where Eddie Murphy “Cyranos” Owen Wilson to the tune of Marvin Gaye’s “Sexual Healing.” That out of a mercifully brief 90-minute film the best moment comes courtesy a cheap gag involving an R&B classic and a flash of panty is, really, statement enough about the wisdom and ingenuity of the entire enterprise. Proof positive, if more proof is needed of the fecklessness of this shipwreck, is the fact that Wilson, easily the most gifted screenwriter on set, was not among the many asked to put pen to paper for I Spy.

The Pool (2001) – DVD

October 30, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD, Germany, Horror, Mystery, Thriller, ZERO STARS

Swimming Pool – Der Tod feiert mit
ZERO STARS/**** Image B Sound B Extras D
starring Kristen Miller, Elena Uhlig, Thorsten Grasshoff, Cordelia Bugeja
screenplay by Lorenz Stassen and Boris Von Sychowski
directed by Boris Von Sychowski

by Walter Chaw In an ineffable way, Boris von Sychowski’s The Pool reminds of those old Eighties television teensploitation summer camp movies starring the butch from “Facts of Life” and the fascist from “Family Ties”: poor production values enslaved to the straitjacket of rigid formula filmmaking, wrapped around G-rated titillation that at least in The Pool recognizes is the result in some part of submerged menace. Cabin date rape and teen pregnancy are represented here by the rude insertion of phallic blades through water slides.

Eight Legged Freaks (2002) [Widescreen Edition] – DVD

October 29, 2002Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD, Horror, Scarlett Johansson, Sci-Fi, Thriller

**½/**** Image B Sound B+ Extras B
starring David Arquette, Kari Wuhrer, Scarlett Johansson, Scott Terra
screenplay by Jesse Alexander & Ellory Elkayem
directed by Ellory Elkayem

by Walter Chaw Ellory Elkayem’s Eight Legged Freaks (sic) is less a throwback to the giant-bug howlers of Gordon Douglas and Jack Arnold than just another post-modern fright comedy long on ironic genre in-references and short on any real thrills. In tone, it reminds a great deal of Joe Dante’s Gremlins II–more jokey than scary, in other words, and, like Gremlins II, Eight Legged Freaks works better than it ought to because of some fairly nifty special effects (I’ve seen worse CGI) and better-than-average performances from its B-list cast.

The Civil War (1990) – DVD

October 28, 2002Posted in****/****, 1990s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Documentary, DVD, FFC Must-Own, War

****/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras A
directed by Ken Burns

Logo: FFC MUST-OWNby Walter Chaw Almost forgotten amidst the lavish praise and hyperbole heaped on Ken Burns’s eleven-hour foray into the American Civil War is that the picture is among the finest of its kind ever produced. The Civil War is an indescribably informative, exhaustively researched and compiled work that particularly astonishes not for its depth of information, the audacity of its creation, or the logic of its organization, but for the amount of emotion it evokes in recounting familiar events.

Film Freak Central Does San Franciso’s 2002 Dark Wave Film Festival

October 27, 2002Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Denmark, Drama, Film Festivals, Horror, Japan, Mystery, Romance, Sci-Fi, South Korea, Spain, Thriller, UK, Werewolf

Darkwavelogoby Walter Chaw The question, and it's a question with currency, is why anyone in their right mind would subject themselves (and their long-suffering editors) to coverage of two concurrent film festivals. A pair of answers: the obvious is that I'm not in my right mind, but as obvious is the fact that San Francisco's Dark Wave, which ran from October 18-20, is one of the most exciting "small" film festivals in the United States. I wouldn't pass up the opportunity to talk about it, in other words–ulcers be damned. Presented by the hale San Francisco Film Society evenings and midnights at the historic Roxie, last year's presentation included one of this year's best films (Larry Fessenden's superb Wendigo) as well as the finest example of retro euro-horror (Lionel Delplanque's Deep in the Woods) since Dario Argento lost his marbles.