Butler Did It: FFC Interviews George Butler

Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Documentary, Interviews

GbutlertitleAugust 25, 2002|George Butler is perhaps best known as the maverick filmmaker behind 1977’s Pumping Iron, the benchmark bodybuilding documentary that almost single-handedly introduced a young Austrian fellow by the name of Arnold Schwarzenegger to American audiences. Each of Butler’s subsequent projects have been examinations of the urge for achievement in ages of relative leisure, from the groundbreaking female bodybuilders of Pumping Iron II, the big game hunting of the disaster- and controversy-ridden project In the Blood, and finally this year’s IMAX Shackleton’s Antarctic Adventure and companion feature-length documentary The Endurance: Shackleton’s Legendary Antarctic Expedition. Despite the similarity of Mr. Butler’s projects, the bonhomie growing between people during strife and outrageous circumstance, and the evolution (or lack thereof) of machismo, he frowns on discussions of intentionality in his work and choices of subject material. That’s something that I learned the hard way. (Please note: this interview was conducted during last winter’s awards season.)

High Crimes (2002) – DVD

Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, DVD, Mystery, Thriller

½/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Ashley Judd, Morgan Freeman, James Caviezel, Adam Scott
screenplay by Yuri Zeltser & Cary Bickley, based on the novel by Joseph Finder
directed by Carl Franklin

by Walter Chaw Its title too easy a condemnation of the film itself, the otherwise-talented Carl Franklin’s High Crimes is a sickly, by-the-numbers member of a proud lineage of films that includes such abortive boondoggles as The Presidio, A Few Good Men, The General’s Daughter, True Crime, and eventually What Lies Beneath. It begs the question of whether Morgan Freeman, unquestionably the American actor with the most commanding presence and charisma, will ever get a film that’s truly worthy of him–and whether professional punching-bag Ashley Judd will meekly get the stuffing knocked out of her in the upcoming Catwoman as well. It confirms that Jim Caviezel should consider either a cup of coffee or a different career, that Amanda Peet was probably born sucking on a lollipop and wearing Daisy Dukes, and that after having seen some variation on High Crimes for the umpteenth uncountable time, I have grown, unquestionably, very weary of it.

Little Secrets (2002)

Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Family, Music, Theatrical

*/****
starring Evan Rachel Wood, Michael Angarano, David Gallagher, Vivica A. Fox
screenplay by Jessica Barondes
directed by Blair Treu

by Walter Chaw I fear that Blair Treu’s Little Secrets is the latest picture to fall victim to my predisposition against insipid and trite films. The problem with my bias in this instance is that there is a considerable segment of the middle-class population at large that seems particularly enamoured with such fare, particularly as it manifests under the aegis of “family entertainment” or Meg Ryan movies. It’s only a problem, I hasten to add, because I hate arguing with the upper-reaching bourgeoisie–there is no good way, after all, to explain to the fuzzily intractable why a self-pitying adopted girl who makes money like Lucy from the “Peanuts” strip while staying home to practice violin in anticipation of an orchestra tryout is more suited for the dinosaur prose of big-print Beverly Clearys than for the voluntary consumption of any self-respecting human being.

Return to Never Land (2002) – DVD

Posted in2000s, Adventure, Animation, Australia, Authors: Bill Chambers, Canada, Disney, DVD, Family

*/**** Image A Sound A Extras C+
screenplay by Temple Mathews and Carter Crocker
directed by Robin Budd, Donovan Cook

by Bill Chambers I can only assume that Disney buried Peter Pan in Stephen King’s pet sematary, for resurrected in the misbegotten Return to Never Land is one sour Fairy King. In the original Peter Pan, the title character lost his shadow; in the sequel, Peter is all shadow, a fascist dictator separated from the malicious Captain Hook by a single distinguishing feature: the hook. Return to Never Land pits the two in conflict once more, this time over the stolen treasure of Captain Hook, which Peter has stowed away for a rainy day. The movie gives no indication as to how Hook acquired the chest full of gold in the first place, thus our introduction to Peter is as a thief. And by the end of the picture, that’s the kindest thing I could think to call him.

Serving Sara (2002)

Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Germany, Romance, Theatrical, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Matthew Perry, Elizabeth Hurley, Vincent Pastore, Bruce Campbell
screenplay by Jay Scherick & David Ronn
directed by Reginald Hudlin

Servingsaraby Walter Chaw Reginald Hudlin’s Serving Sara is a miserable, listless, pathetic excuse for a movie. It’s already dreadful by the time Matthew Perry finds himself shoulder-deep in a bull’s rectum, after which it defies a few natural laws by somehow getting worse. There are no laughs to be found in the whole of this lugubrious shipwreck–even the sight of Perry getting the tar beaten out of him by a pair of Italian caricatures is a sour, joyless affair. Seeing as being physically humiliated is Perry’s sole silver-screen reason for being (see also: The Whole Nine Yards), that his getting kicked and punched is not ever at all amusing says a great deal about the relentless excrescence of this exercise. I would add that at least it’s better than the amazingly awful Perry vehicle Almost Heroes, except that it’s not.

24 Hour Party People (2002)

Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Comedy, Drama, Music, Theatrical

***½/****
starring Steve Coogan, Keith Allen, Rob Brydon, Enzo Cilenti
screenplay by Frank Cottrell Boyce
directed by Michael Winterbottom

by Walter Chaw Inviting direct comparisons to Todd Haynes’s ebullient Velvet Goldmine with a flying saucer, Michael Winterbottom’s brilliant 24 Hour Party People apes, too, a great deal of the style and tone from that film: insouciant, arch, and invested in giving over the stage to the zeitgeist of an era through its youth culture and its music. 24 Hour Party People distinguishes itself, however, with a flip, post-modern absurdism that includes asides to the camera (“I’m being post-modern before it became popular”) and a certain self-awareness that somehow encapsulates the discursive, free-associative madness of Factory Records founder Tony Wilson (Steve Coogan). Beginning with The Sex Pistols‘ first performance in 1976 before a rapt crowd of 42 people, the picture takes on a dizzying kind of animal logic, stalking the fortunes of the “New Wave” Manchester ethos of Joy Division (into the band they became, New Order), Happy Mondays, the Hacienda dance club, and, most importantly, Wilson himself–part huckster, part savant. All along, Wilson cues us that the world is about to change and that this band of brothers, this group of bouncing, sullen, devotees to a new punk energy, are the men who will change it.

Strictly Sinatra (2001) [Widescreen] – DVD

Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Romance, UK

Cocozza’s Way
**½/**** Image A Sound A-
starring Ian Hart, Kelly Macdonald, Brian Cox, Alun Armstrong
written and directed by Peter Capaldi

by Walter Chaw A smalltime flick in which a smalltime crooner accidentally becomes a smalltime hood, hyphenate Peter Capaldi’s sophomore feature Strictly Sinatra (a.k.a. Cocozza’s Way) is an enjoyable crime romance about a longtime loser with a bottom-shelf whiskey voice who falls for cigarette-girl Irene (Kelly Macdonald). A rendering of “In the Ghetto” leads to a bought drink to a favour paid to crime boss Chisolm (Brian Cox), followed fast by the slow sneaking realization that our little Toni Cocozza (Ian Hart) has been drawn into a spider’s den of organized crime.

Tarzan & Jane (2002) – DVD

Posted in2000s, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Disney, DVD, Family

½*/**** Image A Sound B Extras D
written by Bill Motz & Bob Roth and Mirith J. Colao and John Behnke & Rob Humphrey & Jim Peterson and Jess Winfield
directed by Steve Loter

by Walter Chaw Like most other Disney direct-to-video sequels, Tarzan & Jane was poorly scripted, looped in a tin can, and abominably animated. It’s not even up to the standard of a cheap Saturday-morning cartoon–we’re talking Nintendo64 here. The second Disney foray into the realm of everyone’s favourite late-Victorian bestiality fantasy, Tarzan & Jane takes a page out of the surreally bad Cinderella II by presenting an anthology format that breaks up the plotting responsibilities into stultifying and manageable chunks. Its framing story something to do with the approach of the odd couple’s first-year anniversary, the wise-cracking duo of gorilla Turk and elephant Tantor remind Jane of the tumult of T & J’s common-law existence.

Wild in the Country (1961) + The Razor’s Edge (1984) – DVDs

Posted in1960s, 1980s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Drama, DVD, Romance, UK, War

WILD IN THE COUNTRY
***/**** Image A- Sound B+
starring Elvis Presley, Hope Lange, Tuesday Weld, Millie Perkins
screenplay by Clifford Odets, based on the novel by J.R. Salamanca
directed by Philip Dunne

THE RAZOR’S EDGE
***/**** Image B- Sound B-
starring Bill Murray, Theresa Russell, Catherine Hicks, Denholm Elliot
screenplay by John Byrum & Bill Murray, based on the novel by W. Somerset Maugham
directed by John Byrum

by Bill Chambers It occurs to me that many of the most ungainly movies about love–and in the end, most movies are (about love, that is)–have gotten it right for their very awkwardness as cinematic constructs. This week, in the August funk that used to correspond with the encroaching schoolyear but is now some vague collegiate-nostalgia trip, I shook the salt of Wild in the Country, The Razor’s Edge, Pretty in Pink, and Some Kind of Wonderful (the latter two to be covered in a separate piece) on my reopened wounds and came away impressed not by the art of these films, but by their emotional complexity. What you see in all four of these pictures that you perhaps don’t often enough is that money tends to govern attraction.

We Were Soldiers (2002) – DVD

Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, France, Germany, War

***/**** Image A- Sound A+ Extras B
starring Mel Gibson, Madeleine Stowe, Sam Elliott, Greg Kinnear
screenplay by Randall Wallace, based on the memoir We Were Soldiers Once…and Young : Ia Drang–The Battle That Changed the War in Vietnam by Harold G. Moore, Joseph L. Galloway
directed by Randall Wallace

by Walter Chaw We Were Soldiers is a rousing war epic presented as the world’s most gruesome underdog sports intrigue, its carnage–fuelled by a brilliant attention to the decisions made in the heat of battle by a genius-level military mind–at once exploitive and orgasmic in its cathartic effectiveness. Concerning the bloodiest confrontation between the United States and North Vietnam, which took place in the infancy (November 14, 1965) of the doomed police action at LZ X-Ray in the Ia Drang Valley, the memoir of the battle We Were Soldiers Once…and Young (by battlefield commander Lt. Col. Hal Moore with war journalist Joseph Galloway) finds its way to the screen with Mel Gibson as Moore and his Braveheart scribe Randall Wallace at the typewriter and behind the camera.

Happy Times (2000)

Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, China, Comedy, Drama, Theatrical

幸福时光
Happy Time
*½/****
starring Benshan Zhao, Jie Dong, Biao Fu, Xuejian Li
directed by Zhang Yimou

by Walter Chaw Titled in the same serio-ironic vein as Giuseppe Tornatore’s Everybody’s Fine, Zhang Yimou’s Happy Times aspires for the piquant but only really achieves a sort of ridiculous sourness. It’s a misunderstanding of irony taken to an Alanis Morrisetteian extreme; far from the eventuality being the opposite of the expected, the outcome of Happy Times is the worst kind of cliché, and its execution is so blunt compared to the sharp satirical barb of Yimou’s own Ju Dou that I wonder if Gong Li wasn’t the brains in that long lamented relationship. Still, what works in Happy Times is what has worked in this director’s best work (Shanghai Triad, Raise the Red Lantern, Red Sorghum): mordant social critique so far removed from realism that its status as political allegory is as subtle as a neon sign and a crack to the noggin.

Possession (2002)

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

*/****
starring Gwyneth Paltrow, Aaron Eckhart, Jeremy Northam, Jennifer Ehle
screenplay by David Henry Hwang and Laura Jones and Neil LaBute, based on the novel by A.S. Byatt
directed by Neil LaBute

by Walter Chaw There’s the seed of an interesting idea in Neil LaBute’s Possession–something traceable to A.S. Byatt’s melodramatic novel of the same name: the film’s one clumsily extended trope that it is about keepsakes and the desire for memento mori and memento amor as it manifests amongst intellectuals. That this seed never germinates, limping along before being crushed beyond recognition by an unforgivable grave-robbing sequence is due to LaBute’s icy disconnection (badly misplaced here) and the horrific realization that Possession is two stultifying formulas vying for screentime.

Jacked Up (2001) – DVD

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

Jacked
**½/**** Image C Sound B Extras C
starring Ron Beaco Lee, Bizzy Bone, Alexis Fields, Anna Maria Horsford
written and directed by Timothy Wayne Folsome

by Walter Chaw Courageous and extremely well performed, Timothy Wayne Folsome’s zero-budget Jacked Up demonstrates a rare and surprising willingness to explore the moral consequences of a moment’s rash misadventure on victim and family alike. It is, in that sense, as unusual and compelling as Roger Michell’s brilliant Changing Lanes, even if the route that it takes to get to its revelations are circuitous at best and overly familiar at worst. Jacked Up is a showcase for a young filmmaker’s potential (otherwise missing from Folsome’s debut of a couple of years ago, An Uninvited Guest), but it also exposes Folsome as a bad visual stylist and a limited scenarist who depends too much upon the path most travelled. Good thing there are lots of flowers of interesting bouquet to sniff along the way.

Con Express (2001) – DVD

Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD

½*/**** Image D Sound C
starring Sean Patrick Flannery, Arnold Vosloo, Ursula Karven, Tim Thomerson
screenplay by Terry Cunningham, Paul Birkett
directed by Terry Cunningham

by Walter Chaw A mosaic of stock footage and terrible acting that makes Extreme Limits look decent, Con Express is a Jim Wynorski cheapie that happens to be directed this time around by a pretender to the “king of knock-off schlock” crown named “Terry Cunningham.” Titled with honesty, Con Express is a scam promising thrills that takes you for a stultifying ride. It’s a direct-to-video howler promising the guy who played The Mummy (Arnold Vosloo) playing Anton, a villain of the non-zombie variety (a rogue Russian general–as if there were any other kind) again bent on taking over the world. Arrayed against him are beautiful Slavic agent Natalya (Ursula Karven) and hunky customs agent Brooks (Sean Patrick Flannery), who (gasp) develop romantic feelings for one another even though they start out hating one another. Between South African Vosloo, German Karven, Enemy at the Gates, and K-19, I begin to wonder if there are any such things as actual Russians or if they’re just a mythological Hollywood bogey manufactured as a bottomless well of nostalgic Red menace-dom.

Reservoir Dogs (1992) [Ten Years – Special Edition] – DVD

Posted in1990s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Crime, Directors: Quentin Tarantino, Drama, DVD, Thriller

***½/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras A+
starring Harvey Keitel, Tim Roth, Chris Penn, Steve Buscemi
written and directed by Quentin Tarantino

by Bill Chambers

"They were perfect strangers, assembled to pull off the perfect crime. Then their simple robbery explodes into a bloody ambush, and the ruthless killers realize one of them is a police informer. But which one?"
–DVD liner summary for Reservoir Dogs

I came around to being a fan of Reservoir Dogs after Quentin Tarantino's standing had crested and the backlash was kicking in. It's impossible for me to see now why I didn't take to it initially–solid flick, as they say. Stylish, knowing, but not necessarily pretentious. Well-performed. And moving, in its macho way: Let us not forget that Reservoir Dogs ends in tears and an embrace.

Kids in the Hall: Brain Candy (1996) – DVD

Posted in1990s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Canada, Comedy, DVD, Satire

**½/**** Image B+ Sound B+
starring David Foley, Bruce McCulloch, Kevin McDonald, Mark McKinney, Scott Thompson
screenplay by Norm Hiscock & David Foley & Bruce McCulloch & Kevin McDonald & Mark McKinney & Scott Thompson
directed by Kelly Makin

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover The mad Scotsman John Grierson, documentary king and architect of Canada's National Film Board, often made the naïve assertion that those who wanted to make Canadian fiction films should go to Hollywood and make them there. He would have been pleased to learn that in 1996, the Kids in the Hall did just that: left without any pop-film infrastructure on their home turf, they made a bid for Yankee stardom with Kids in the Hall: Brain Candy, shooting a Hollywood film that's Canadian to the core–for good and for ill.

The Business of Strangers (2001) – DVD

Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, DIFF/SDFF, Drama, DVD, Film Festivals, Thriller

***/**** Image A- Sound A-
starring Stockard Channing, Julia Stiles, Frederick Weller
written and directed by Patrick Stettner

by Walter Chaw Julie (Stockard Channing) is a hardened businesswoman on a lecture trip who becomes certain that her last day on the job draws nigh. When young Paula (Julia Stiles) arrives to a presentation late, Julie unleashes all her fears and frustrations on the hapless girl. Written with an ear for dialogue and a wicked edge, Julie’s enthusiastic upbraiding of Paula sets the stage for three elements that drive The Business of Strangers to its conclusion. The first is the discomfort arising from Julie and Paula being stuck in the same hotel overnight due to grounded flights, the second is a possible explanation of the antagonism between the pair that culminates in a disturbingly open-ended finale, and the final is the idea that in Stettner’s interpersonal corporate nightmare, fear is the mechanism that catalyzes the characters towards generosity, friendship, and cruelty.

xXx (2002)

Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Theatrical, Thriller

**/****
starring Vin Diesel, Samuel L. Jackson, Asia Argento, Martin Csokas
screenplay by Rich Wilkes
directed by Rob Cohen

Xxxby Walter Chaw The first film of the summer to actually make my ears bleed, Rob Cohen’s xXx is a lightshow wrapped around an idiot plot that may or may not become a franchise based entirely on how hungry audiences are for another poorly-made boom-boom fest and how susceptible they are to a marketing machine intent on repackaging a cheap updating of Condorman as “the next James Bond.” Vin Diesel (apparently separated at birth from his sister, David Schwimmer) plays monosyllabic Neanderthal Xander “my friends call me ‘X'” Cage, an extreme-sports political activist who steals conservative senators’ cars and drives them off bridges with pal Tony Hawk. When a dapper tuxedoed NSA (don’t ask) agent is assassinated at an industrial concert in Prague, lone wolf spymaster Gus Gibbons (Samuel L. Jackson, in Batman supervillain Two-Face makeup) does a Dirty Dozen and recruits the shadowy agency’s next superagent from a pool of dangerous criminals.

Wolfen (1981) – DVD

Posted in1980s, Authors: Bill Chambers, DVD, Horror, Thriller, Werewolf

**½/**** Image A- Sound B-
starring Albert Finney, Diane Venora, Gregory Hines, Tom Noonan
screenplay by David Eyre and Michael Wadleigh, based on the novel by Whitley Strieber
directed by Michael Wadleigh

by Bill Chambers Wolfen goes through the paces of a typical detective thriller, but it’s far from conventional. I crave to understand this picture’s somewhat literal bleeding heart better and thought the DVD would be of more assistance–unfortunately, the advertised commentary track with actors Gregory Hines and Edward James Olmos and director/co-writer Michael Wadleigh is AWOL. My mother calls Wolfen “a werewolf movie from the werewolf’s point of view,” and that’s not a bad take on it, since the homicidal title creatures are in essence the good guys of the piece. Certainly, the film’s preponderance of “wolf P.O.V.” shots make it less than figuratively so.

Dahmer (2002)

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

**½/****
starring Jeremy Renner, Bruce Davison, Artel Kayaru, Matt Newton
written and directed by David Jacobson

by Walter Chaw Well-acted but without a point-of-view, hyphenate David Jacobson’s sophomore feature Dahmer is less biopic than Arthouse Exploitation Lite, a curiously uninvolving glimpse into the banal life and times of a serial murderer. Rather than portray the stalking and vivisection of man as grotesquely vapid (like its more successful brothers Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer or The Untold Story), Dahmer chooses that same all-too-familiar docudrama frankness to illustrate a sick man’s loneliness and inability to make a true connection with another human being. It’s not attempting to humanize Dahmer so much as it’s attempting to elevate Dahmer to the level of great post-modern anti-hero: unromantic, unexceptional, and unmoored, utterly, from moral responsibility–Beavis playing frog baseball with a holy trinity of representative pretty-boy victims. Even its end title card, reporting (we infer “mournfully”) that the titular bogey was murdered just two years into his 1,070-year sentence by a fellow inmate, seems intended as an epitaph for a misunderstood prophet rather than a declaration of karma asserting itself, penitentiary-style.