Formula 51 (2001)

Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

The 51st State
*/****
starring Samuel L. Jackson, Nigel Whitmey, Robert Jezek, Emily Mortimer
screenplay by Stel Pavlou
directed by Ronny Yu

by Walter Chaw Called The 51st State abroad, Formula 51‘s more redneck-friendly-sounding retitling can be read as an astonishing commentary on the Ronny Yu film itself. Astonishing because it implies not only that the picture is self-aware, but also that it has actually somehow identified which formula it adheres to by number–something that strikes me as terribly useful in a shorthand way.

DIFF ’02: The Marriage Certificate

Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, China, Comedy, DIFF/SDFF, Drama, Film Festivals
Shui shuo wo bu zai hu*/****starring Gong Feng, Liping Luwritten and directed by JianXin Huang by Walter Chaw A miserable, over-directed bit of heated allegorical melodrama, JianXin Huang's The Marriage Certificate seeks to monumentalize the loss of the titular document and its disastrous effect on the marriage between a goofy shrink and his grasping wife into a jab at the rigidity of the communist Chinese bureaucracy. It succeeds in being cutesy in an Amélie sort of way (told from the point-of-view of an insipid little girl complete with bad voiceovers, double ponytail flips, and rough animated skits) while being a…

DIFF ’02: All or Nothing

Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, DIFF/SDFF, Drama, Film Festivals, France, UK
***½/****starring Timothy Spall, Lesley Manville, Alison Garland, James Cordenwritten and directed by Mike Leigh by Walter Chaw Mike Leigh's return to the character-driven nihilism of his astonishingly raw Naked is All or Nothing, a story of an apartment barrio in London where three broken lower-class families struggle to find meaning and happiness in the midst of their dreadful lives. Phil (the always-great Timothy Spall) is a woebegone taxi driver living with mousy Penny (Lesley Manville) and their corpulent children: deeply troubled Rory (James Corden), and Rachel (Alison Garland), the most affecting role amongst a passel of affecting roles. Neighbour Maureen…

DIFF ’02: Frida

Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, DIFF/SDFF, Drama, Film Festivals, Mexico, Romance
**/****starring Salma Hayek, Alfred Molina, Geoffrey Rush, Ashley Juddscreenplay by Diane Lake and Gregory Nava and Clancy Sigal and Anna Thomas, based on the book Frida: A Biography of Frida Kahlo by Hayden Herreradirected by Julie Taymor by Walter Chaw Wonderfully directed, beautifully shot, amazingly well production-designed, and yet dull, Julie Taymor's Frida is marked by an excellent performance from Alfred Molina and a screenplay (a collaboration of four writers--already a bad sign--with a shooting script ghost-written by its star's boyfriend, Edward Norton) that is a spider's breakfast of grandiloquent monologues, sweeping gestures, and tedious biopic conventions. Interesting for the…

DIFF ’02: Zero Day

Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, DIFF/SDFF, Drama, Film Festivals, Pseudo-Documentary, Teen, ZERO STARS
ZERO STARS/****starring Cal Robertson, Andre Keuck, Serataren Adragna , Melissa Bankswritten by Ben Coccio & Christopher Cocciodirected by Ben Coccio by Walter Chaw Obviously inspired by the discovery of videotapes made by Eric Harris and Dylan Kleibold, the grating and amateurish Zero Day is sensationalistic and prurient, offering nothing in the way of insight while falling uncomfortably into the exploitation camp. Shot on digital video in a style popularized by The Blair Witch Project, the picture makes weak-kneed attempts to address the media-makes-killers controversy, hoping to find poignancy in the pointed incineration of CDs, DVDs, and Lord of the Flies.…

Men with Brooms (2002) – DVD

Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Romance, Sports

**½/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras C
starring Paul Gross, Molly Parker, Leslie Nielsen, Peter Outerbridge
written and directed by Paul Gross

by Walter Chaw Closer in spirit to Mystery, Alaska than to the similarly Olympics-inspired Cool Runnings, Men with Brooms is an underdog sports intrigue mashed together with a bedroom farce–and neither dog-eared formula is handled with very much originality, while uncomfortable subplots concerning adultery, alcoholism, and healing father/son rifts (see also: Hoosiers) vie for a level of pathos that always feels out of place in what is essentially The Bad News Bears (or The Replacements, or Slap Shot) for curling. Though it’s extremely tempting to lay out an endless stream of titles for films that are essentially identical to Men with Brooms, time is better served just saying that the picture, the directorial debut of Canuck star Paul Gross, is a low-aspiring bit of nonsense that fits as comfortably as a cozy pair of ratty sneakers while stinking a little all the same.

DIFF ’02: Blue Car

Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Coming of Age, DIFF/SDFF, Drama, Film Festivals, Teen
*/****starring David Strathairn, Agnes Bruckner, Margaret Colin, Frances Fisherwritten and directed by Karen Moncrieff by Walter Chaw An object lesson in how Swimming could have turned out had Swimming been weepy and apparently based on a bunch of Carpenters songs, ex-soap star Karen Moncrieff's hyphenate debut Blue Car is a coming-of-sexual-age puberty melodrama that plays like a film written and directed by, well, an ex-soap star. Sayles-favourite David Strathairn plays crinkly-eyed poetry teacher Mr. Auster, who has a yen for quoting Yeats, Rilke, and of course Whitman with the kind of earnest evangelism that points to easy uplift in mainstream…

DIFF ’02: The Princess Blade

Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, DIFF/SDFF, Film Festivals, Japan, Sci-Fi
Shurayukihime***/****starring Hideaki Ito, Yumiko Shaku, Shirô Sano, Yoichi Numatascreenplay by Kei Kunii, Shinsuke Sato, based on the comic by Kazuo Kamimura and Kazuo Koikedirected by Shinsuke Sato by Walter Chaw An indescribably cool post-apocalyptic martial-arts fairy tale, Shinsuke Sato's The Princess Blade follows the saga of a young woman named Yuki (Yumiko Shaku, bearing a startling resemblance to Pat Benatar) who discovers that her adoptive band of assassin ronin might have killed her mother and stolen her birthright as the heir to a kingdom. With swordplay choreographed by Hong Kong master Donny Yen (Iron Monkey), Shurayuki-Hime has moments that defy description…

DIFF ’02: Come Drink with Me

Posted in1960s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, DIFF/SDFF, Film Festivals, Hong Kong, Martial Arts
Da zui xia***½/****starring Cheng Pei-pei, Yueh Huascreenplay by Yang Yedirected by Hu King by Walter Chaw Directed by Hu King for the legendary Shaw Brothers, 1966's Come Drink with Me, presented at the DIFF in a 35mm print newly minted for this year's Cannes Film Festival, is one of the obvious headwaters for Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, featuring the legendary Cheng Pei-pei (villain Jade Fox in Lee's picture) as swashbuckling Golden Swallow, sister to a kidnapped imperial official. Between this film and its sequel, Golden Swallow, Pei-pei established herself as a watershed action hero, while Hu's style, alternately…

The Fast and Furious Cole Hauser: FFC Interviews Cole Hauser

Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, DIFF/SDFF, Film Festivals, Interviews

ChauserinterviewtitleOctober 15, 2002|I met Cole Hauser, visiting Denver with his latest film, White Oleander, in tow (it opened the 25th Annual Denver Film Festival), at the press suite of the city's Hotel Teatro. A rising star, Hauser is along with Alison Lohman the best thing about the intensely mediocre White Oleander–he's the best thing, in fact, about a lot of films. With the virile presence of a young Brando (crossed with Jon Favreau) and a glacial mien, Hauser has escaped stardom only through his steadfast decision to take roles based on the quality of director or role rather than succumb to the bright lights of easy stardom. (Director John Singleton, with whom he worked on Higher Learning, is at least partly responsible for his upcoming appearance in The Fast and the Furious 2.) I asked Mr. Hauser about playing a skinhead, about the underestimated The Hi-Lo Country, and about his once-estranged father, actor Wings Hauser.

DIFF ’02: Other People’s Life

Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, DIFF/SDFF, Drama, Film Festivals, Gangster, Italy
La vita degli altri*/****starring Teresa Saponangelo, Renato Carpentieri, Maya Sansa, Rosa Pianetawritten and directed by Nicola de Rinaldo by Walter Chaw Ponderously employing a modern eruption of Vesuvius as a metaphor for what is essentially a Telemundo soaper about an aging gangster reaping a lifetime of bitter fruit, Italian director Nicola de Rinaldo's clumsily titled Other People's Life is melodramatic, unintentionally hilarious, and derivative to boot. Mariano (Renato Carpentieri) is a Camorra lifer who, stricken by the guilt of wrongly murdering his brother decades before, decides to become a completely passive presence in his own life, allowing through his inaction…

DIFF ’02: Bowling for Columbine (2002)

Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, DIFF/SDFF, Documentary, Film Festivals, Germany

***/****
directed by Michael Moore

by Walter Chaw The most successfully provocative film of the year, Michael Moore’s Bowling for Columbine nonetheless hurts itself with its questionable tactics and Moore’s inability to leave certain pulpits alone, but the documentarian succeeds in providing a canny, often brilliant, examination of the root causes of America’s amazing propensity for gun violence. The picture goes beyond a condemnation of “gun nuts”–and beginning as it does with an extended interview with James Nichols (the nutball brother of nutball Terry Nichols, who, along with Timothy McVeigh, was convicted of the Oklahoma City Murrah Building bombing), it’s not always certain that it will.

Enough (2002) – DVD

Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, DVD, Revenge, Thriller, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/**** Image A Sound A
starring Jennifer Lopez, Bill Campbell, Tessa Allen, Juliette Lewis
screenplay by Nicholas Kazan
directed by Michael Apted

by Walter Chaw So try this one on for size: a woman wronged by a world of evil men recuperates, studiously fails to call the police (too many men on the police force–men=bad; we’ll be returning to this equation often), and finally tracks down her tormentors with the express purpose of murdering them. This not only describes Michael Apted’s Enough, but also Meir Zarchi’s infamous exploitation flick I Spit on Your Grave, the main difference between the two being that Enough tries very hard to hide the fact that it’s an ugly bit of repugnant vigilantism masquerading as a feminist uplift drama.

DIFF ’02: American Gun

Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, DIFF/SDFF, Drama, Film Festivals
*½/****starring James Coburn, Virginia Madsen, Barbara Bain, Alexandra Holdenwritten and directed by Alan Jacobs by Walter Chaw "Dear Penny, I'm in Las Vegas tonight. It's hot, it's very very hot, but I'm close." So goes the tenor of James Coburn's narration in the mawkish, unfocused American Gun, an Alan Jacobs film that seeks to trace the history of a gun as a means to either indict the lack of regulation in gun sales, the way that Las Vegas is the city of sin, or the failure of almost all films to use flashbacks in different media separated by letters from…

Knockaround Guys (2002)

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

**½/****
starring Barry Pepper, Vin Diesel, Seth Green, Andrew Davoli
written and directed by Brian Koppelman & David Levien

Knockaroundguysby Walter Chaw Counting on one’s desire to see a legendarily hammy actor–a pair of them in fact–unleashed without fetters onto the unsuspecting world with nary a warning, Knockaround Guys is a surprisingly likeable kitsch artifact that astounds for its casual pretension and dangerous level of cheese. The film has John Malkovich trying unsuccessfully to channel his Valmont through a Brooklyn-made Guido and Dennis Hopper still out of control in a role intended, I think, to be bookish. Gathering dust on the shelf for a year or so now, the picture is finding a release in the early-fall doldrums one presumes for the meteoric rise of Vin Diesel, but stealing the show, as he so often does, is veteran character actor Tom Noonan as a laconic, nowhere Montana sheriff.

The Rules of Attraction (2002)

Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Esoterica, Germany, Romance, Theatrical

***½/****
starring James Van Der Beek, Shannyn Sossamon, Ian Somerhalder, Jessica Biel
screenplay by Roger Avary, based on the novel by Bret Easton Ellis
directed by Roger Avary

Rulesofattractionby Walter Chaw Roger Avary’s The Rules of Attraction jitters and grooves like a thing possessed. It’s a post-modern Less Than Zero based on a below-average book by nihilism wunderkind Bret Easton Ellis transformed by a pair of exceptional performances and the insouciant style of Avary (more, Avary’s one-time partner-in-crime Quentin Tarantino) into a portrait of college life feral and uncomfortable. It handles time and traditional narrative structures with an expert insolence and earns points besides for making a cunning pop cultural reference to Sheriff Buford Pusser and Walking Tall. It’s too smart to outsmart itself, then, juggling its in-references with a kind of casual offhandedness that allows the proscenium to be occupied by a surprisingly piquant trio of character sketches.

DIFF ’02: White Oleander

Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, DIFF/SDFF, Drama, Film Festivals

**/****
starring Alison Lohman, Robin Wright Penn, Michelle Pfeiffer, Renée Zellweger
screenplay by Mary Agnes Donoghue, based on the novel by Janet Fitch
directed by Peter Kosminsky

Whiteoleanderby Walter Chaw Anchored by an already-lauded (and justifiably so) performance from semi-newcomer Alison Lohman, veteran television director Peter Kosminsky's White Oleander manufactures a trio of unlikely neo-feminist empowerment workshops, loosely tying them together with an orphanage/prison trope and a ridiculous framing motif of sad dioramas in a row of suitcases. White oleander is a poisonous flower (we learn in one of many unforgivably scripted moments of wispy narration), and the film of that same name is a broad, melodramatic estrogen opera that's pretty toxic in its own right.

DIFF ’02: The Weight of Water

Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Crime, DIFF/SDFF, Drama, Film Festivals, France, Mystery, Thriller
*½/****starring Catherine McCormack, Sarah Polley, Sean Penn, Josh Lucasscreenplay by Alice Arlen and Christopher Kyle, based on the novel by Anita Shrevedirected by Kathryn Bigelow by Walter Chaw Sort of a "Crucible" of period repression and sexual hysteria tied uncomfortably to Roman Polanski's Bitter Moon, Kathryn Bigelow's unreleased and maybe unreleasable The Weight of Water looks to parallel two distinct genres by mining the sexual tension in both. The problem with such a conceit is not its ambition--the picture's sort of admirable in a soggy, pretentious way--but rather the essential misunderstanding of the disparateness of the sources of that tension:…

DIFF ’02: Sweet Sixteen

Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, DIFF/SDFF, Drama, Film Festivals, Germany, Spain, UK
***½/****starring Martin Compston, William Ruane, Annmarie Fulton, Michelle Abercrombyscreenplay by Paul Lavertydirected by Ken Loach by Walter Chaw Ken Loach returns to his blue-collar roots with the incendiary Sweet Sixteen, a fabulous evocation of place and the plight of the lower class in the mean streets of Glasgow. Supremely well-acted and marked by Loach's gift for an effortless transparency in setting and the performances he coaxes from inexperienced actors, the picture follows young Liam (Martin Compston) on the eve of his sixteenth birthday as he shuck-and-jives his way towards a better life for him and his soon-to-be-ex convict mother, Jean…

DIFF ’02: XX/XY

Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, DIFF/SDFF, Drama, Film Festivals, Romance
**/****starring Mark Ruffalo, Kathleen Robertson, Maya Stange, Petra Wrightwritten and directed by Austin Chick by Walter Chaw The problem with Austin Chick's hyphenate debut XX/XY is that despite an intervening decade in the storyline, the characters enjoy no appreciable evolution. It's possible the film is meant to be about a trio of arrested, knee-jerk reactionaries; it's also possible the film is about how these people are really bad for each other. But the aggregate effect is that XX/XY is devoid of much real tension and actual character development. Sam (Maya Stange) and Thea (Kathleen Robertson) are roommates who meet Coles…