Chicago (2002)

Posted 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)

Posted 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

by 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 problematic 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)

Posted 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

Wendigo (2002) – DVD

Posted 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

FFC Must-Ownby 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)

Posted 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.”

Antwone Fisher (2002)

Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Biopic, Drama, Theatrical

*½/****
starring Derek Luke, Joy Bryant, Denzel Washington, Salli Richardson
screenplay by Antwone Fisher
directed by Denzel Washington

Antwonefisherby Travis Mackenzie Hoover Taking one look at the cover of my press kit for Antwone Fisher, a critic friend of mine sneered and said simply, “Ah. Oprah meets Dr. Phil.” But he was more right than he could have ever imagined, because it’s the whole culture of obsessive therapy that gruesome twosome represents that poisons and kills what could have been a real movie. Instead of training its eye directly on the events that traumatized its eponymous lead (and real-life screenwriter), Antwone Fisher substitutes people talking about them in a therapy setting–a terrible mistake that robs the film of any dynamism and does little to distinguish it from the mountain of inspirational stories that pile up on daytime television.

Narc (2002)

Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, Mystery, Theatrical, Thriller

***/****
starring Ray Liotta, Jason Patric, Chi McBride, Busta Rhymes
written and directed by Joe Carnahan

Narcby Walter Chaw Anchored by a powerhouse performance from Ray Liotta, Joe Carnahan’s Narc is a police procedural buddy psychodrama that reminds a great deal of Sidney Lumet’s underappreciated Q&A. The first film mounted in part by Liotta’s new production company, the film is fond of the kind of fluid tracking shots popularized by Martin Scorsese (and Goodfellas, as it happens) and has a crackling ear for dialogue that sadly doesn’t translate into a gift for monologue. Still, there’s a rough intelligence and visceral edge to the film–hewn from its tough-talking vernacular and graphic violence–that feels great in an era where both sides of the ratings divide: PG and R, are hell-bent on edging into the grey PG-13 arena where mental adolescents and the easily-diverted play. Narc works largely because it’s a mature film for adults, smoothing over some of the rough spots where the film begins to lose itself in a labyrinth of flashbacks and surprise revelations.

Personal Velocity (2002)

Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Romance, Theatrical

Personal Velocity: Three Portraits
**½/****
starring Kyra Sedgwick, Parker Posey, Fairuza Balk, John Ventimiglia
written and directed by Rebecca Miller

Personalvelocityby Walter Chaw Three short films about three women and the men who mistreat them, Rebecca Miller’s DV triptych Personal Velocity: Three Portraits is a fine-looking film that plays a little like Catherine Breillat-lite–a series of iterations of Yeats’s “Leda and the Swan” that suggest the evil that men do to women only makes women stronger. Emancipation for Delia (Kyra Sedgwick), battered wife and renowned slut, comes in the form of a handjob given a grateful backwoods hokum in the front seat of his beater; for book editor Greta (Parker Posey), in the separation from the mediocrity of her milquetoast husband and pocket dictator boss; and for runaway Paula (Fairuza Balk), in the latent maternal instinct she discovers through the betrayal of a young hitchhiker.

Two Weeks Notice (2002)

Posted in2000s, Australia, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Romance, Theatrical

*½/****
starring Sandra Bullock, Hugh Grant, Mark Feuerstein, Dorian Missick
written and directed by Marc Lawrence

Twoweeksnoticeby Walter Chaw Nearly the same movie as last week’s Maid in Manhattan (only with more likeable stars and more believable chemistry between them), Sandra Bullock and Hugh Grant’s Two Weeks Notice (sic) is essentially just another opportunity for Bullock to play her wound-up, frumpy pratfall princess (recently hijacked by Nia Vardalos and her hard-to-stomach My Big Fat Greek Wedding), and for Grant to do his insufferable prat routine, both against the backdrop of the impossibly romantic golden Manhattan that is not to be confused with Spike Lee’s impossibly dour boilerplate Manhattan. Bullock is Lucy Kelson, Harvard-educated lawyer who has taken on the Birkenstock cause in her crusade against big business. Grant is George Wade, uneducated baron of big business who is so zealous to knock down historic landmarks that even his wrecking balls are emblazoned with Wade-Co’s giant “W.”

Gangs of New York (2002)

Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Directors: Martin Scorsese, Drama, Theatrical

*½/****
starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Daniel Day-Lewis, Cameron Diaz, Jim Broadbent
screenplay by Jay Cocks and Steven Zaillian and Kenneth Lonergan
directed by Martin Scorsese

Gangsofnewyorkby Walter Chaw Beginning as Martin Scorsese’s Apocalypse Now, Gangs of New York, at the end of the auteur’s thirty-year dream of it, more resembles his Titanic. Buoyed on a tsunami of dark rumours of behind-the-scenes clashes (the line “Please don’t make that sound again, Harvey” registering as either a jab or a plea to Miramax head Harvey Weinstein), eleventh-hour cuts, and release delays pushing the film nearly a year from its projected release date, the picture is a booming, period-exact mess: disinteresting, unbalanced, and burdened by the weight of too much ambition blinding an artist to his celluloid offspring’s congenital, mortal defects–hubris redefined for the postmodern age. Though sprawling, it reduces to a series of vaguely connected dramatic snippets that largely fail to anchor the film to any specific place (the exception being a visually, viscerally arresting stream of coffins unloaded from ships ferrying the dead from the frontlines of the Civil War). It’s a malady exacerbated by the fact that the same five or six characters–played, with one stunning exception, as tepid variations on banal–seem to be everywhere in New York at all times.

Human Nature (2002) – DVD

Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Charlie Kaufman, Comedy, DVD, Esoterica

½*/**** Image A Sound A-
starring Patricia Arquette, Rhys Ifans, Tim Robbins, Ken Magee
screenplay by Charlie Kaufman
directed by Michel Gondry

by Walter Chaw From the second screenplay by Charlie Kaufman, the ink-stained wretch behind Spike Jonze’s quirk classic Being John Malkovich, French music-video director Michel Gondry’s sadly misguided nature/nurture sex romp Human Nature scores once or twice but ultimately thuds like a brick zeppelin. It’s a film that thinks it a good idea for Rhys Ifans to appear either full monty or in a diaper for the majority of his performance, likewise that Patricia Arquette have a pelt of hair covering every curve of her Romanesque physique. (Though the latter is played for some surreal yuks as Ms. Arquette writhes on a miniature Empire State Building while a dwarf (Peter Dinklage) walks around in a biplane harness.) Human Nature, in short, isn’t nearly as funny as it thinks it is; neither is it as smart.

An Evening with Kevin Smith (2002) – DVD

Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Concert Doc, DVD

***/**** Image A Sound B+
directed by J.M. Kenny

by Bill Chambers Love him or hate him, there are simply no two ways around the fact that An Evening with Kevin Smith is one of the most entertaining standup films, if it can indeed be called that, since the heyday of Richard Pryor. Well-shot footage–compiled by J.M. Kenny, showing better comic instincts than he did as producer of the Nancy Pimental mockumentary on The Sweetest Thing‘s DVD(s)–from Q&As in which the entrepreneurial Smith participated at various college campuses across the United States, this 225-minute presentation opens and closes with Smith discussing his on-screen alter ego Silent Bob, the rare idiot icon made famous by the performer rather than the other way around. (It’s why equating himself with such residents of the catchphrase graveyard as Pauly Shore is his least successful routine in An Evening with Kevin Smith–Silent Bob doesn’t epitomize Smith’s popularity.) Moreover, Smith is anything but bashful; you’ll only wish he was speechless as he describes open-sore intercourse with his wife-to-be.

Focus Puller: FFC Interviews Paul Schrader

Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: Paul Schrader, Interviews

PschraderinterviewtitleDecember 17, 2002|A pivotal member of the small group of film-school 'brats' to single-handedly manufacture in 1970s America what is arguably the most important and vital decade in the history of the medium, Paul Schrader (screenwriter of such seminal texts as Taxi Driver and Raging Bull and writer-director of Hardcore, Blue Collar, and Light Sleeper, to name a few) follows up his brilliant Affliction and his disappointing Forever Mine with the new film Auto Focus. Another in a line of Schrader-helmed biopics (Mishima, Patty Hearst), Auto Focus follows the rise and mysterious murder of "Hogan's Heroes" star Bob Crane, locating the TV actor as a man discovering his masculinity in an ascetic, downbeat way reminiscent of the work of Schrader's hero, director Robert Bresson.

The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002)

Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Fantasy, New Zealand, Theatrical

***/****
starring Elijah Wood, Ian McKellen, Viggo Mortensen, Sean Astin
screenplay by Fran Walsh & Philippa Boyens & Peter Jackson, based on the novel by J.R.R. Tolkien
directed by Peter Jackson

Twotowersby Walter Chaw Suffering from the problems inherent in split narratives, Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (hereafter The Two Towers), at least for its first half, is disjointed and overreliant on a familiarity with not only the first film (which is essential), but also the Tolkien source material. Furthermore, the first cracks in Jackson’s conversance with CGI begin to show in the entirely animated Gollum character (a creature that bears an uncanny resemblance to Steve Buscemi), and too much time is given over to characters standing around looking at digital phantoms. Unlike its predecessor (The Fellowship of the Ring), The Two Towers feels too long by half despite the elision of key scenes from the source tome; the picture only picks up during its last ninety minutes, and then only as an unusually well-crafted action spectacle largely lacking in the nuance, pathos, and sharply-drawn characterizations of the first film.

Johnson County War (2002) – DVD

Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD, Germany, Television, Western

*/**** Image C+ Sound B+
starring Tom Berenger, Luke Perry, Rachel Ward, Burt Reynolds
screenplay by Larry McMurtry & Diana Ossana, based on Riders of Judgment by Frederick Manfred
directed by David S. Cass, Sr.

by Walter Chaw The Hallmark Channel's epic remake of Heaven's Gate–based, like that film and Frederick Manfred's Riders of Judgment, on the Johnson County Range War of 1892–does the impossible by making Michael Cimino's legendary boondoggle gain esteem in memory and by comparison. Actually a remake in subject only, legendary stuntman-turned-really bad TV director David S. Cass, Sr.'s Johnson County War (clocking in at an inexcusable 180 minutes) is a dog's breakfast of hoary western clichés, appalling film craft, and wooden performances from B-list talent.

KylieFever2002 (2002) – DVD

Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Concert Doc, DVD, Music, UK

Kylie Minogue: Kylie Fever 2002 in Concert – Live in Manchester
*/**** Image B Sound A Extras B-
directed by William Baker, Alan MacDonald

by Walter Chaw A quick glance at the back cover of the KylieFever2002 <In Concert – Live in Manchester> DVD divulges three questions I couldn't help but answer before actually indulging in the spectacle from start to finish. The answers are that "Fever" and "In Your Eyes" are not what you think they are, and that "Locomotion" and "The Crying Game" are indeed, exactly what you think they are. The exercise, in short, is a good news/bad news scenario.

‘R Xmas (2001) + Serpico (1973) – DVDs

Posted in1970s, 2000s, Al Pacino, Authors: Bill Chambers, Biopic, Crime, Directors: Sidney Lumet, Drama, DVD, France, Italy, Thriller

‘R XMAS
***/**** Image A+ Sound A- Extras C
starring Drea De Matteo, Lillo Brancato, Jr., Ice-T, Victor Argo
screenplay by Scott Pardo, Abel Ferrara
directed by Abel Ferrara

SERPICO
**½/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras C+
starring Al Pacino, Jack Kehoe, John Randolph, Biff McGuire
screenplay by Waldo Salt and Norman Wexler, based on the book by Peter Maas
directed by Sidney Lumet

by Bill Chambers Arriving on DVD within a week of each other, Abel Ferrara’s ‘R Xmas and Sidney Lumet’s Serpico share a preoccupation with the fate of dirty money. Minimum-wagers are seen as honourable by Lumet, with Detective Frank Serpico proudly leading the starving-artist’s life from behind a cop’s badge, while in Ferrara’s view, there are few such romantic distinctions to be made between the haves and have-nots. But the corrupting influence of money defines the people we’re dealing with in both films, which, although they illustrate rather contained moral dilemmas, share a somewhat epic ambition despite rarely stepping outside their respective milieux. Watched back-to-back, they’re like Traffic pulled in two.

Analyze That (2002)

Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Drama, Robert De Niro, Theatrical

*/****
starring Robert De Niro, Billy Crystal, Lisa Kudrow, Joe Viterelli
screenplay by Peter Steinfeld and Harold Ramis and Peter Tolan
directed by Harold Ramis

Analyzethatby Walter Chaw The first mistake that directors make with actors who need to get brought up sharply against the reins now and again is that they sometimes request of them to feign that which they already are. Case in point is asking Robin Williams to be a gibbering velvet clown, asking Melanie Griffith to be a side of beef with a Betsy-Wetsy voice, and now asking Robert De Niro to feign mental illness and sociopathic tendencies. De Niro jumping on a table and singing selections from West Side Story isn’t one of those cinematic moments for the ages, but rather one of the more tragic examples of self-delusion and career torpor.

Equilibrium (2002)

Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Christian Bale, Emily Watson, Taye Diggs, Angus MacFadyen
written and directed by Kurt Wimmer

Equilibriumby Walter Chaw After cutting his teeth as a director on the Brian Bosworth vehicle One Tough Bastard, Kurt Wimmer proves himself grotesquely unprepared for his hyphenate debut: the futuristic stink-fest Equilibrium, starring Christian Bale, Emily Watson, and Taye Diggs. Set in the post-apocalypse via a series of tired title cards and voice-overs, the film is immediately recognizable as an ironically illiterate rip-off of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 and George Lucas’s Aldous Huxley photocopy THX-1138. Pulling scenes entire from Blade Runner, Citizen Kane, and The Matrix while pulling philosophies entire from–yes, I was surprised, too–Gymkata, Equilibrium is another Dimension genre film made for no money that stinks a lot like Gary Fleder’s excrescent Impostor from earlier this year, though it somehow manages to be considerably funnier.

Goin’ Down the Road (1970) [Seville Signature Collection] – DVD

Posted in1970s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Canada, Drama, DVD, Road Movie

***½/**** Image C Sound B Extras A
starring Doug McGrath, Paul Bradley, Jayne Eastwood, Cayle Chernin
screenplay by William Fruet & Donald Shebib
directed by Donald Shebib

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover As close to a classic as Canadian cinema gets, Donald Shebib's Goin' Down the Road touches greatness without really trying; its virtue lies in its refusal to force things, eschewing the jackhammer editing and hard-lined composition of traditional cinema in favour of a hazy, genial approach to its look and feel. Under regular Northern circumstances, this would be a liability: our country's inability to make conscious aesthetic choices has reduced more than a few films to a thin bland soup. But here it works like gangbusters, passively recording the protagonists' misadventures with a combination of helplessness and sympathy as they thrash about, trying to claim an American dream in the midst of a Canadian nightmare. It's simple, lovely, and heartbreaking, and it makes you wonder how Shebib could have somehow managed to disappear into obscurity.