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…

Life or Something Like It (2002) – DVD

Posted inAuthors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Romance

*½/**** Image C+ Sound B+ Commentary B-
starring Angelina Jolie, Edward Burns, Tony Shalhoub, Christian Kane
screenplay by John Scott Shepherd and Dana Stevens
directed by Stephen Herek

by Walter Chaw A little like Forces of Nature in its dreamy, forced artificiality, Life or Something Like It washes out as an unwise amalgam of Broadcast News and Vibes. A love story without warmth starring Angelina Jolie as an ice princess and Ed Burns as his ol' smugly insufferable self, the film is a laborious trudge through faux-mysticism, heatless romance, and shallow philosophy–100 minutes of "carpe diem" that, because they're missing grace and life, lack resonance and purpose as well. Preternaturally sunny and too gutless to honour its stupid premise, Life or Something Like It inspires only one disquieting existential thought and that is the realization that whatever that self-aggrandizing idiot Burns made on this film is no doubt going to fund another one of his indies somewhere down the road.

DIFF ’02: Interview with the Assassin

Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, DIFF/SDFF, Drama, Film Festivals, Pseudo-Documentary
***/****starring Raymond J. Barry, Dylan Haggerty, Jimmy Burke, Renee Faiawritten and directed by Neil Burger by Walter Chaw One of the truest children of The Blair Witch Project, Neil Burger's Interview with the Assassin is a mockumentary shot on digital video that mixes an urban myth and our current fascination (and ease) with digital imaging technologies. Voyeurism is touched upon, as are its attached issues of privacy and the loss thereof in our information dystopia; that the picture manages to juggle its points of view while remaining faithful to its one-camera pony is testament to the cleverness of Burger's debut…

DIFF ’02: Morvern Callar

Posted in****/****, 2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, DIFF/SDFF, Drama, Esoterica, Film Festivals, UK
****/****starring Samantha Morton, Kathleen McDermott, Raife Patrick Burchell, Dan Cadanscreenplay by Liana Dognini, Lynne Ramsay, based on the novel by Alan Warnerdirected by Lynne Ramsay by Walter Chaw Scottish director Lynne Ramsay's remarkable follow-up to her remarkable debut Ratcatcher, Morvern Callar edges into the ground ploughed by Claire Denis, fashioning a blend of the feminine travelogue of Chocolat (the 1988 version), the haunted monumentalism of Beau Travail, and the carnal suffering of Trouble Every Day, all merged by Alwin Küchler's brilliantly malleable cinematography. Anchoring Morvern Callar is a breathtaking and courageous performance from Samantha Morton (who, in addition to never…

DIFF ’02: Bloody Sunday

Posted in****/****, 2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, DIFF/SDFF, Drama, Film Festivals, Ireland, UK, War
****/****starring James Nesbitt, Tim Pigott-Smith, Nicholas Farrell, Gerard McSorleyscreenplay by Paul Greengrass, based on the novel Eyewitness Bloody Sunday by Don Mullandirected by Paul Greengrass by Walter Chaw With a fade-out/fade-in editing style that pulses like quickening breath, Paul Greengrass's harrowing, documentary-style recreation of the January 1972 Derry Massacre--immortalized in U2's song ("Sunday, Bloody Sunday") and about 30 years ("centuries" seems more appropriate) of violence between Irish separatists and the British army--is thick with an oppressive sense of inevitability. As Greengrass moves between the British troops readying for war and well-meaning Irish activist Ivan Cooper (James Nesbitt) stumping for a…

DIFF ’02: Roger Dodger

Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Coming of Age, DIFF/SDFF, Drama, Film Festivals, Germany
***½/****starring Campbell Scott, Jesse Eisenberg, Isabella Rossellini, Elizabeth Berkleywritten and directed by Dylan Kidd by Walter Chaw Roger (Campbell Scott) is a fast-talking lothario with the usual laundry list of the insecurities, sexual or otherwise, that plague the modern man. But this far meaner and smarter version of The Tao of Steve--and what slight praise that is--takes a turn to the intriguing when Roger's 16-year-old nephew Nick (Jesse Eisenberg) appears for a few lessons on the art of pitching woo. In three brilliantly-scripted and wondrously paced sequences, Kidd points his Casanova Virgil and virginal Dante into the concentric circles of…

DIFF ’02: 7 Days in September

Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, DIFF/SDFF, Documentary, Film Festivals
***½/****directed by Steve Rosenbaum by Walter Chaw An often-harrowing collection of amateur video taken on the days in the immediate aftermath of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, 7 Days in September accomplishes what so many retrospectives since that day have failed at in its evocation of the immediacy of atrocity and outrage, fear and fury of a day that is already fading into the repository of memory and irony. Footage, seldom-seen in a dangerously squeamish United States, of a person jumping from a building shares time with the immediate reactions of people hiding from the smoke and debris.…

DIFF ’02: Mile High: A Tale of Two Stadiums

Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, DIFF/SDFF, Documentary, Film Festivals, Sports
**½/****directed by Samuel A. Safarian, Dirk Olson by Walter Chaw One of my earliest memories is watching Haven Moses catch a touchdown pass from Craig Morton in the 1977 AFC Championship games against the hated Oakland Raiders; since that time, I've only missed a total of three Broncos games (preseason included). If there was ever a viewer to which a documentary was tailor-made, then, it is Dick Olson's Denver Center Media-produced Mile High: A Tale of Two Stadiums, a soft-sell documentary commissioned to ease the transition to a new football stadium in the Mile High City, my hometown. Comprising over…

DIFF ’02: Home Room

Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, DIFF/SDFF, Drama, Film Festivals, Teen
*/****starring Busy Philipps, Erika Christensen, Victor Garber, Raphael Sbargewritten and directed by Paul F. Ryan by Walter Chaw A standard good girl-meets-bad girl formula wrapped around a gloss on high-school shooting (our own perverse millennial take on the fin-de-siècle phenomenon), Home Room presents its vision of post-traumatic stress disorder with such hamhandedness that it threatens to spawn the same in the viewer. Essentially an Afterschool Special complete with pre-packaged messages about the evil of cigarettes, the secret pain of goth chicks, the importance of not taking the Lord's name in vain, and the crass stupidity of well-meaning cops and school administrators,…

The Mummy: Quest for the Lost Scrolls (2002) – DVD

Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD, Fantasy, Horror, Mystery, Television, Thriller

*/**** Image A Sound B- Extras C-

by Walter Chaw Universal and Kids’ WB present the abominable and derivative The Mummy: Quest for the Lost Scrolls, the first three episodes of a tragically bad action-adventure cartoon based on characters from Stephen Sommers’s live-action blockbuster The Mummy Returns. After Aryan-izing Fraser’s Rick O’Connell and his irritating moppet Alex (who is, predictably, the star of the show), the animators proceed to rip-off sources as disconcertingly varied as The Evil Dead, Star Wars, and Sommers’s Mummy saga, natch, all while perpetuating myths of the wilting femme and the foppish Brit that, shockingly, its adult counterparts never did.

DIFF ’02: The Fabulous Stain (Introduction)

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

Difftitle2002bby Walter Chaw The silver anniversary of the Denver International Film Festival (hereafter DIFF) came to town with rumours run-rampant and grand, but the reality is a mixture of raised eyebrows, surprise announcements, and last-minute acts of God. Hoping for more innovative programming in its key slots, I was disappointed to learn that White Oleander, the star-studded adaptation of Janet Fitch's "Oprah Book Club" selection, would occupy the opening-night stage with a gala presentation at the lovely Temple Buell Theater in the Performing Arts Complex. Premiering just a few hours before its regular theatrical run begins on October 11th, the film is a mainstream Oscar-grab vying amongst the glut of mainstream pictures for the increasingly devalued top honours during the fall and holiday "awards season" and, for my sensibilities, a poor choice to headline the 25th anniversary of the fest. Last year's darkly-hued Lantana was a far more daring and appropriate pick to commence festivities. A rule of thumb has been ignored: bigger is not always better–in fact, in the case of modern film, it's almost never better.

Scooby-Doo (2002) [Widescreen Edition] – DVD

Posted in2000s, Adventure, Australia, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD, Family, Mystery

**/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras B
starring Freddie Prinze Jr., Sarah Michelle Gellar, Matthew Lillard, Linda Cardellini
screenplay by James Gunn
directed by Raja Gosnell

Scoobydoovelmacapby Walter Chaw At one point in Raja Gosnell’s Scooby-Doo, Shaggy (Matthew Lillard) tells the titular pooch, “We’re like two trippin’ peas in a freaky pod, man”–and the counter-cultural freak flag just keeps on flyin’ in a live-action film more for the late-twentysomethings who grew up with the subversive Hanna-Barbera-Iwao Takamato cartoon than the kids of today being weaned on the much tamer, direct-to-video “Scooby” fare. I love that the reviled Scrappy-Doo is given a much-deserved vilification (“Puppy power! He’s not even a puppy–he’s got some kind of glandular thing”), that there’s a scene in which Shag and Scoob are unseen in the Mystery Machine–while smoke billows out of its sunroof to a reggae refrain Shaggy can be heard rapturously intoning, “So toasted, soooo toasted,” and that when Shaggy gets a girlfriend (the smokin’ Isla Fisher), her name is Mary Jane (“That’s, like, my favourite name!”). I love that Velma gets slyly “outed” (“I’m going on a journey of self-discovery”), and I love that one of the main villains is a Telemundo wrestler.

Hellchild: The World of Nick Lyon – DVD

Posted in1990s, 2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD, Esoterica, Germany, Horror, Short Films

by Walter Chaw A DVD collection of short films written, directed, and edited by Idaho-born, German-based filmmaker Nick Lyon, Hellchild: The World of Nick Lyon is an often brilliant exercise in high John Waters trash augmented with actual filmmaking ability and an imagination as feverishly fecund and difficult to shake as a yeast infection. Lyon's work is equal parts deadpan and disgusting, a comic-book exercise in grotesquery that reminds a little of Sergio Aragones's "Mad Marginals" in its sprung logic (and sense of humour) and a little more of David Lynch (or Tim Burton) in its dark reflection of suburban America.

Trembling Before G-d (2001) + Satin Rouge (2002)

Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Documentary, Drama, France, Israel, Musical, Theatrical, Tunisia

TREMBLING BEFORE G-D
**½/****
directed by Sandi Simcha Dubowski

Red Satin
**/****
starring Hiyam Abbas, Hend El Fahem, Maher Kammoun, Monia Hichri
written and directed by Raja Amari

by Walter Chaw “Leah” and “Malka” are a lesbian couple whose names have been changed and faces obscured (a fey conceit that begins to grate with the use of potted plants) to protect identities that appear, for all intents and purposes, to already be “outed”–at least before their families and their rabbi. David, after struggling for a dozen years with his homosexuality, returns to visit his childhood rabbi, a genuinely kind man whom we manage to forget once advised David to snap himself with rubber bands whenever he had a “gay” thought. Then you have Mark, HIV positive, English, and terminally unfocused, and Schlomo, so outspoken and demented that it’s surprising we still muster sympathy when he gets a pathetically dissociative telephone call from his two decades-estranged father.

Skins Game: FFC Interviews Chris Eyre

Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Interviews

CeyreinterviewtitleOctober 2, 2002|Striking a chord with his first film Smoke Signals (based on a collection of short stories by Sherman Alexie, who himself makes his directorial debut this year with The Business of Fancydancing), director Chris Eyre is now on the "Rolling Rez Tour" with his second film, Skins, travelling across the country in a giant semi-trailer equipped with, of all things, a 35mm projector and comfortable, air-conditioned stadium seating for ninety. There's even a popcorn machine.

Brotherhood of the Wolf (2001) [Widescreen] + [3-Disc Collector’s Edition] – DVDs

Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, DIFF/SDFF, DVD, Film Festivals, France, Horror, Mystery

Le Pacte des loups
***½/****
WIDESCREEN DVD – Image A Sound A+ Extras B
3-DISC COLLECTOR’S EDITION DVD – Image B Sound A+ Extras A+
starring Samuel Le Bihan, Mark Dacascos, Emilie Dequenne, Vincent Cassel
screenplay by Christophe Gans, Stephane Cabel
directed by Christophe Gans

by Walter Chaw A beautiful girl adrift in a vast natural expanse is set upon by an unseen menace and slammed against a solid object before being dragged away to her bloodily-masticated doom. Enter a famed naturalist (Samuel Le Bihan), considered the expert in the breed of beast that might be responsible for the heinous deed; his investigations mostly reveal that the culprit is larger than your average monster. Alas, no one in the isolated and picturesque community believes him, consoling themselves in an amateur hunt that bags a load of smaller members of the creature’s species. When the killing continues, the famed naturalist, his highly-trained sidekick (martial artist Mark Dacascos, here reunited with his Crying Freeman director), and a meek member of the ruling class along for the adventure, lay down a series of traps, gather hunting implements, and, after some derring-do, overcome their foe, incurring tremendous losses in the process.

Casper: A Spirited Beginning (1997) + Casper Meets Wendy (1998) – DVDs

Posted in1990s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD, Family, Horror, ZERO STARS

CASPER: A SPIRITED BEGINNING
ZERO STARS/****
starring Steve Guttenberg, Lori Loughlin, Rodney Dangerfield, Michael McKean
screenplay by Jymn Magon, Thomas Hart
directed by Sean McNamara

CASPER MEETS WENDY
½*/****
starring Cathy Moriarty, Shelley Duvall, Teri Garr, George Hamilton
screenplay by Jymn Magon
directed by Sean McNamara

by Walter Chaw Taking place in a scary netherworld where up is down, black is white, and Steve Guttenberg, Rodney Dangerfield, Lori Loughlin, Pauly Shore, and Richard Moll still have careers, Casper: A Spirited Beginning is one long spiritless harangue designed for the kid with the helmet and the drool cup. Shockingly awful computer animation coupled with simply appalling acting wrapped around a plot that rips off Beetlejuice at every turn (newly-deceased goes through the process of denial before finding a handbook and a sympathetic morbid kid to help him/them adapt to the afterlife), Casper: A Spirited Beginning at the least honours the quality of those Harvey comics you used to read in the barbershop while trying to sneak a peak at the PLAYBOYs under the mirror.