Storytelling (2002) [Unrated and R-rated Versions] – DVD

July 12, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Esoterica, Romance, Satire

**½/**** Image B+ Sound B+
starring Selma Blair, Leo Fitzpatrick, Robert Wisdom, Paul Giamatti
written and directed by Todd Solondz

by Walter Chaw The line between love and misanthropy is thin, and Todd Solondz is a cunning cartographer of that precarious divide. He sees political correctness as an insidious product of the kind of paternalistic racism that discards truth in favour of generally held truisms, a crutch for well-meaning racists who lack the wit to grasp that the basic misunderstanding of difference driving a desire to discriminate against minorities is identical to that which drives a desire to protect minorities. Solondz’s films are confrontational in the extreme, full-frontal assaults on the hypocrisy that fuels most relationships and stark dissections of the politics of cruelty.

The Starz Independent FilmCenter Project, Vol. 8

July 12, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, Mystery, Theatrical, Thriller
by Walter Chaw THE SALTON SEA (2002)**/****starring Val Kilmer, Vincent D'Onofrio, Doug Hutchison, Peter Sarsgaardscreenplay by Tony Gaytondirected by D.J. Caruso The Salton Sea opens with a trumpeter-in-Hell kind of thing, sort of a Chet Baker in Drugstore Cowboy image where Danny Parker (Val Kilmer) plays a mournful Miles in a cool hat while bundles of cold cash burn like little pyres to the bluesman's lost ideals. We know there'll be a dame he shouldn't have trusted (Deborah Kara Unger, beaten up on screen yet again) and a gallery of rogues fervid in their multiplicity of deformities (Vincent D'Onofrio's redneck…

Fathom (1967) – DVD

July 10, 2002Posted in1960s, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD, Espionage, Satire, UK

*/**** Image A- Sound B
starring Tony Franciosa, Raquel Welch, Ronald Fraser, Greta Chi
screenplay by Lorenzo Semple Jr.
directed by Leslie H. Martinson

by Walter Chaw There’s something desperately wrong with veteran television director Leslie H. Martinson’s spy spoof Fathom, and it took me the whole movie to figure it out: Raquel Welch, as the titular va-va-va-voom dental hygienist cum parachutist cum superspy spends the entire film running from symbols of aggressive virility. Clad fetchingly in a variety of swimsuits and tight shirts (but never pants), our Fathom is pursued by a man with a speargun, by a Russian paramour mistaking our heroine for a prostitute, through various tunnels, and through a train. In its barest form, Fathom appears to be a rape fantasy involving a helpless, screaming, occasionally castrating Welch (though, tellingly, the only person she kills is another woman), who plays a variation on her standard cocktease and–naturally–deserves getting prodded about by a bull while a collection of bad guys poke at her with phallic shunts.

Lola (1961)

July 8, 2002Posted in1960s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Drama, France, Italy, Romance, Theatrical

***½/****
starring Anouk Aimée, Marc Michel, Jacques Harden, Alan Scott
written and directed by Jacques Demy

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Lola is a film that makes froth do the work of genius. Like The Red Shoes and The Quiet Man, it’s one-hundred percent movie-movie horse manure, a series of contrived romantic adventures that elicits a velveteen agony no sensible adult could possibly mistake for the real thing. But just like those movies, it makes you think it’s doing more than its Leonard Maltin entry would otherwise suggest–and, in fact, does more than perhaps even creator Jacques Demy ever realized. In doting prettily on its collection of picturesque no-hopers, Lola manages to be profound in spite of itself; the film bestows a divine aesthetic light on people who would normally be passed over for attention, and in so doing gives their life a value that a social-realist film might degrade into a heap of misery.

Hart’s War (2002) – DVD

July 7, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, War

**½/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B-
starring Bruce Willis, Colin Farrell, Terrence Dashon Howard, Vicellous Reon Shannon
screenplay by Billy Ray and Terry George, based on the novel by John Katzenbach
directed by Gregory Hoblit

by Walter Chaw Director Gregory Hoblit’s fourth consecutive celluloid guilty pleasure, Hart’s War constantly dances the razor’s edge of offensively pat (equating Nazi Germany with Macon, GA circa 1944) while providing enough canned tension and studied theatricality to put A Few Good Men to shame. With Bruce Willis as a smirky secondary character and largely-untested Irishman Colin Farrell asked to shoulder the brunt of the courtroom hijinks, Hart’s War is an exceptionally well-done bad movie that hums along on its earnestness. Though if you think about the film at all after the lights come up, best not to contemplate the plot, which is littered with holes like P-51 rocket craters.

World Traveler: FFC Interviews John Sayles & Maggie Renzi

July 6, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Interviews

JohnsaylesinterviewtitleJuly 7, 2002|There are a great many similarities between John Sayles and Billy Wilder (save, obviously, Wilder’s affection for the Hollywood studio system). Both: are writers who became directors; exhibit a knack for developing strong characters and eliciting fine performances; are loyal to a small cadre of performers and technical crew; prefer simple shooting schemes that don’t obscure the primacy of the script; generally detail the infiltration of a corrupt society; are fond of sports metaphors and analogies; and, despite some auteur hallmarks, are unbound by genre. One of the great lost Wilder projects is a professional wrestling picture called The Masked Marvel, which was to star Charles Laughton, while Sayles once wrote a professional wrestling play called “Turnbuckle”–curiouser and curiouser.

Lagaan: Once Upon a Time in India (2001)

July 6, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, India, Musical, Sports, UK

***/****
starring Aamir Khan, Gracy Singh, Rachel Shelley, Paul Blackthorne
screenplay by Kumar Dave, Sanjay Dayma, Ashutosh Gowariker
directed by Ashutosh Gowariker

by Walter Chaw With the subtitle “Once Upon a Time in India,” Ashutosh Gowariker’s Lagaan holds a kinship to Tsui Hark’s Once Upon a Time in China in more than just appellation and an abiding dislike of the Colonial British. Other than substituting elaborate musical numbers–as is Bollywood’s wont–for Hong Kong’s martial arts features, Lagaan is in fact as interested in the sociology of enslavement before the rush of technology (embodied in cameras and firearms) as its farther-eastern brethren. The rather serious-minded attack of India’s own caste system and the ineffectualness of its Raj ruling structure lends additional layers to the picture’s surprising depths, yet all the politicized subtext in the world does little to suppress the essential exuberance of the gaudy visceral Bollywood experience.

The Films of John Sayles (1980-2002)

July 6, 2002Posted in****/****, 1980s, 1990s, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Disability, Drama, Family, Fantasy, Ireland, Mexico, Mystery, Romance, Sci-Fi, Sports, Thriller, Western

Filmsofjohnsayles

Return of the Secaucus Seven (1980)
**/****
Buy DVD at Amazon.com
John Sayles's directorial debut has taken on the aura of a folk tale, the details of its genesis are that well known: With a $40,000 budget raised largely from the quadruple-threat's (writer/editor/director/actor) work for the scripts for Roger Corman's Battle from Beyond the Stars, Piranha, and Alligator, Sayles shot a film at a rented lake house with friends possessed of neither experience nor know-how and redefined the American indie movie scene. Return of the Secaucus Seven had two separate New York runs, made appearances on several year-end lists, and became a cause célèbre for snobs "in the know" deriding Kasdan's The Big Chill as a Secaucus rip-off. Twenty-some years later and the bloom is off the rose, so to speak: Return of the Secaucus Seven reveals itself to be sloppily made, overwritten, and horrendously performed (with the exception of David Strathairn and Gordon Clapp). Still, there are moments of truth in the picture that are pure: an embarrassing interlude when two old friends pass on their way to an unfortunately placed bathroom, and another during a feverish pick-up basketball sequence that steadily develops a delicious subtext. Gathering for what might be an annual reunion, the titular seven reminisce about characters who never appear, discuss past indiscretions (legal and sexual), and locate themselves on the verge of their third decade unmoored from the virulent liberalism of their flower-powered youth. Stealing the show is nerdy "straight" man Chip (Clapp), demonstrating the kind of unaffected naturalism indicative of Sayles's later work but a naturalism buried for the most part here by oodles of hanging plots, mismanaged character moments, odd editing choices, and a peculiarly literate lack of focus indicative of a brilliant novelist moonlighting as a filmmaker. 104 minutes

The Starz Independent FilmCenter Project, Vol. 7

July 5, 2002Posted in1980s, 2000s, Best Picture (Academy Awards), Biopic, Czechoslovakia, Drama, France, Italy, Music, Theatrical

by Walter Chaw

PETER SHAFFER'S AMADEUS: DIRECTOR'S CUT (1984/2002)
***/****
starring F. Murray Abraham, Tom Hulce, Elizabeth Berridge, Simon Callow
screenplay by Peter Shaffer, based on his play
directed by Milos Forman

Bringing the highbrow to the status-hungry middle and lowbrow in the same way as those "Bach's Greatest Hits" collections and the awful faux-llies of Andrew Lloyd Weber, Milos Forman's bawdy, jittery adaptation of Peter Shaffer's fanciful play "Amadeus" is not so much about Mozart as it is about genius and its burden on the mediocre. Mozart (Tom Hulce) is an adolescent boor touched by the hand of God. Emperor Joseph's (Jeffrey Jones) court composer Salieri (F. Murray Abraham) becomes obsessed and desperately jealous of Mozart's gift, leading him to the madhouse and confessions of murder. Amadeus works because of Forman's gift for the seedy (and portraying asylums–he directed One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest) and Abraham's deeply-felt performance.

Diamond Men (2001)

July 4, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Theatrical, Thriller

**/****
starring Robert Forster, Donnie Wahlberg, Bess Armstrong, Jasmine Guy
written and directed by Dan Cohen

by Walter Chaw Much will be written about Robert Forster’s performance in Diamond Men, Dan Cohen’s sophomore hyphenate feature, and as Forster lands an executive producer credit (daughter Kate gets the “associate producer” tag), the veteran actor’s much-deserved critical buzz this time around is a product more of design than serendipity. That doesn’t lessen the picture as a nice vehicle for Forster’s hang-dog melancholia, the quality that Tarantino’s Jackie Brown used to magnificent effect (and the one with which David Lynch played in Forster’s tantalizing Mulholland Drive cameo), but what it does do is render Diamond Men unconvincing as a drama. It’s full of contrivances of the kind that cast a grimy patina over the rest of the film–a Things Change sort of deal where the line between positive senior characters and irritating grotesqueries makes the proceedings first unpleasant and then insufferable.

Men in Black II (2002)

July 4, 2002Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Spielberg, Theatrical

*/****
starring Tommy Lee Jones, Will Smith, Rip Torn, Rosario Dawson
screenplay by Robert Gordon and Barry Fanaro
directed by Barry Sonnenfeld

by Walter Chaw Coming in at just shy of eighty-five minutes, Barry Sonnenfeld’s Men in Black II is that breed of value-free summer entertainment–call it the “lacklustre blockbuster”–that gives mainstream movies a bad name. It’s all first act and no second or third, meaning everything that happens in the film would function as the set-up in a real film (see also: all of ‘Episodes‘ 1 and 2), and that its primary purpose is to act the whorish shill for product placement–never does the silver screen so resemble a bulletin board as when this variety of film drags itself into the googolplex. Special effects are asked to behave like character, motivation, and narrative while the actors paid exorbitant amounts to caper by themselves before a blue screen do their best not to cackle like Snidely Whiplash making off with burlap bags that have dollar signs painted on them. The audience is the damsel in distress in this flickering melodrama, tied to the railroad tracks as a great lumbering behemoth barrels down, the engineer asleep at the rudder.

Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius (2001) – DVD

July 3, 2002Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Jarrod Chambers, Comedy, DVD, Family, Sci-Fi

***/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
screenplay by John A. Davis and David N. Weiss & J. David Stem and Steve Oedekerk
directed by John A. Davis

by Jarrod Chambers There is a new innocence abroad. You can see it in movies such as Spider-Man and the Academy Award-nominated Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius, which feel no need to undercut the goodness of their heroes or the morality of the story with black irony. They tell us, in effect, that it is okay to be a nice guy whose heart is in the right place, who uses his abilities in the service of good, who makes mistakes and pays for them without becoming bitter or psychotic. I, for one, think it’s a breath of fresh air after the dark, depressing visions of the Tim Burton Batman era.

The Powerpuff Girls Movie (2002)

July 2, 2002Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Family, Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Theatrical

The Powerpuff Girls
**/****
screenplay by Craig McCracken, Charlie Bean, Lauren Faust, Paul Rudish, Don Shank
directed by Craig McCracken

by Walter Chaw I remember this Nora Dunn skit on “Saturday Night Live” where she plays a French chanteuse draped over a piano singing “Send in the Clowns” translated into French and then back into English again. The result was incomprehensible and funny–for a while. Craig McCracken’s The Powerpuff Girls Movie (based on his Cartoon Network series “Powerpuff Girls”, natch) is American animation translated into Japanese animé back into American animation: similarly incomprehensible, not quite so funny, and it overstays its welcome, too. Because the humour of the piece is reliant on the slow burn and the extended take, when a joke doesn’t work there’s a lot of downtime (Men in Black II suffers a similar malady), and because most of the jokes don’t work, even for the bib-and-diaper set, at around seventy minutes The Powerpuff Girls Movie is powerfully boring stuff.

Pearl Harbor (2001) [60th Anniversary Commemorative Edition]|Pearl Harbor: The Director’s Cut [VISTA Series] – DVDs

June 30, 2002Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Drama, DVD, Romance, War

*½/****
ACE DVD – Image A+ Sound A (DD) A+ (DTS) Extras C+
VISTA DVD – Image A+ Sound A+ Extras A+
starring Ben Affleck, Josh Hartnett, Cuba Gooding, Jr., Tom Sizemore
screenplay by Randall Wallace
directed by Michael Bay

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover I must shamefully admit that I greeted the approach of Pearl Harbor‘s release with a mixture of moral righteousness and secret anticipation. I knew that no good could come from the intersection of the WWII nostalgia wave and the craven instincts of producer Jerry Bruckheimer; anyone who had seen Top Gun, his earlier effort in military pornography, would have to surmise that his new film’s potential for right-wing jingoism was clearly off the scale. These suspicions were confirmed once I saw the trailer, its sickening combination of swelling music, explosions, dashing soldiers and the FDR “Day of Infamy” speech promising propaganda of Riefenstahlian proportions. Anyone who reads me would expect me to give it a good shellacking, and so I hoped for a total outrage to crucify without remorse–reaping me the happy side effect of securing me the moral high ground from which to preach.

Mr. Deeds (2002)

June 29, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Romance, Theatrical

½*/****
starring Adam Sandler, Winona Ryder, John Turturro, Steve Buscemi
screenplay by Tim Herlihy
directed by Steven Brill

Mrdeedsby Walter Chaw It isn't that Mr. Deeds is unfunny that nettles the most, it's that Mr. Deeds is smug and lazy and unfunny. The film is Adam Sandler not trying very hard anymore, a guy with a puerile and boorish sense of humour getting together with all his buddies to drink beer and tell jokes about dumb people and Spaniards. Except for the three scenes it recreates from Frank Capra's Mr. Deeds Goes to Town shot for shot, it has almost nothing to do with its source material, choosing instead to try to cash in again on Sandler's peculiar, lisping, psychopathic man-child persona. Judging by the declining box-office of Sandler's films (even though I sort of liked Little Nicky), the alleged comedian would probably do well not to rely upon the good graces of his dimwitted frat fanbase and start looking for inspiration in places other than his own films.

Spider (2002)

June 28, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Canada, Directors: David Cronenberg, Drama, Esoterica, France, Mystery, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

***½/****
starring Ralph Fiennes, Miranda Richardson, Gabriel Byrne, Bradley Hall
screenplay by Patrick McGrath and David Cronenberg, based on the novel by Patrick McGrath
directed by David Cronenberg

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover After a period of indifferent projects, declining audiences, and three years of disconcerting silence, the unthinkable has become reality: David Cronenberg is back on top. His new film Spider intensifies all of his past thematic concerns with a pictorial eloquence practically unheard of in his oeuvre–it’s like watching one of the sex slugs from Shivers turn into a beautiful, fragile butterfly. For once, the trials of his sexually confused lead resonate beyond the merely theoretical, and for once, you feel his pain instead of contemplating it from a distance. The antiseptic restraint of Crash and Naked Lunch has been replaced with a dread and sadness that overwhelm you with their emotionalism; Spider is easily the best film he’s made since Dead Ringers, possibly even since Videodrome. I hope that it marks a turning point in the career of Canada’s most conspicuous auteur.

Atanarjuat (2002)

June 28, 2002Posted in****/****, 2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Drama, Theatrical

Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner
The Fast Runner
****/****
starring Natar Ungalaaq, Sylvia Ivalu, Peter-Henry Arnatsiaq, Lucy Tulugarjuk
screenplay by Paul Apak Angilirq
directed by Zacharias Kunuk

by Walter Chaw Zacharias Kunuk’s Atanarjuat (The Fast Runner), the first motion picture presented entirely in the Inuit language Inutkikuk, is what it means to be transported by the cinema: taken to another place and another time on the flickering wings of film’s lunar art. It is the realization of the full possibility of the movies to present the alien as familiar while providing a vital anthropological connection through the naturalism and glorious universality of its characters and story. An Inuit legend passed through centuries of oral tradition that demonstrates a very particular peculiarity of world mythology, Atanarjuat, seen one way, is a classic banning fable–thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s wife and possessions, thou shalt not murder. Jung spoke of a common well of images and signifiers from which we draw our stories, and Atanarjuat, unfolding on a cold-blasted primeval arctic plain, has the quality of totem.

The Game of Wife: FFC Interviews Yvan Attal & Charlotte Gainsbourg

June 25, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, France, Interviews

MywifeasanactressinterviewtitleJune 26, 2002|A hot and smoky day in downtown Denver (approximately thirty miles and apparently downwind from the Hayman forest fire that at the time we didn’t know was started, somehow appropriately, by a lovelorn forest ranger) found me meeting Yvan Attal and Charlotte Gainsbourg at the café run by the Denver Art Museum. I was nervous about this interview, more so than most, mainly because I had nothing especially positive to say on the subject of My Wife is an Actress (Ma femme est une actrice), a seemingly autobiographical film–it’s Attal’s hyphenate debut–that is being praised for its romantic quirk but in which I could find neither joy nor connection. Its jokes too obvious, its characters unlikeable and shrill, and its conclusions too pat by far; I looked sadly over my unpromising notes on the ride over.

Fast Times: FFC Interviews Zacharias Kunuk & Norman Cohn

June 24, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Interviews

FastrunnerinterviewtitleJune 25, 2002|For all of George Lucas's frothing exhortations for exhibitors and filmmakers to wean themselves off celluloid, the most compelling argument for digital video exists in independent cinema–smaller productions have thus far benefited the greatest from DV's affordability, flexibility, and intimacy. Zacharias Kunuk and Norman Cohn's Atanarjuat (more commonly, The Fast Runner) (Kunuk is listed as director and Cohn as DP, but the reality is closer to their responsibilities being equal and the same), shot entirely on DV and then transferred to 35mm (much like Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones), is the kind of unique indie project that gives hope and reason to the format; without DV, The Fast Runner would have been too expensive and cumbersome to shoot. A stark and beautiful telling of an ancient Inuit banning fable, The Fast Runner is also the first major cinema product from the Inuit people, the first picture shot entirely in the Inutkikuk language, and the first picture to present Inuit people to a western audience free of Nanook of the North stereotypes. Besides being entertaining, The Fast Runner is an important film.

Gosford Park (2001) [Collector’s Edition] – DVD

June 24, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Directors: Robert Altman, Drama, DVD, Italy, Mystery, UK

***/**** Image B- Sound A- Extras B+
starring Kristin Scott Thomas, Stephen Fry, Emily Watson, Ryan Phillippe
screenplay by Julian Fellowes
directed by Robert Altman

by Walter Chaw A thematic continuation of The Player‘s violent iconoclasm, Robert Altman takes on the very British “Upstairs, Downstairs” class struggle in Gosford Park, a film that resolves itself as another full-frontal assault on the Hollywood studio system. Misanthropic, smug, and pessimistic, it behaves like an Agatha Christie chamber mystery, complete with secretive service staff, bumbling policemen, and the usual upper-crust suspects, but it’s ultimately little more than an unavoidable homage to Renoir’s The Rules of the Game and a dig at a system outside of which Altman eternally finds himself. Thankfully, Gosford Park more resembles the genre-bending Altman of Kansas City than the truculently proselytizing Altman of Dr. T & the Women.