The Perez Family (1995) – DVD

March 14, 2002Posted in1990s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Romance

***/**** Image A Sound A
starring Marisa Tomei, Alfred Molina, Chazz Palminteri, Anjelica Huston
screenplay by Robin Swicord
directed by Mira Nair

by Walter Chaw Sensuous and lush with a hint of Isabel Allende’s magical realism in the bleeding of a man’s broken heart and a string of rose petals trailing a line along the belly of a new lover, Mira Nair’s lovely The Perez Family is all ripe colours, song, sex, honour, and dance. A long-lost father asks his wife upon their decades-long separation if their grown daughter remembers him: “She says she remembers dancing with you.” In The Perez Family, that’s only as it should be.

Training Day (2001) – DVD

March 14, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, DVD, Thriller

**½/**** Image A Sound A Extras B+
starring Denzel Washington, Ethan Hawke, Scott Glenn, Eva Mendes
screenplay by David Ayer
directed by Antoine Fuqua

by Walter Chaw In Antoine Fuqua and Dominic Sena’s race to become David Fincher, Fuqua, with his colour-bleached urban noir Training Day, pulls slightly ahead. Essentially a feature-length version of the Fuqua-helmed video for Coolio’s “Gangsta’s Paradise,” Training Day is dankly lit, grim, and edited with a veteran music-video director’s need for speed (though there are considerably fewer cuts than those found in Fuqua’s previous efforts Bait and The Replacement Killers). So smooth and accomplished is the harsh vérité look of the piece that the sun-drenched streets of Los Angeles are as much a player in the film as its leads. But the striking cinematography, sharp screenplay by David Ayer, and undeniable chemistry between Denzel Washington and Ethan Hawke aren’t enough to disguise that Training Day is one bravura performance away from being the umpteenth rote grizzled vet/greenhorn rookie policier. (With a healthy dash of Casualties of War tossed in for that Captain Bligh/Mr. Christian dynamic.)

Breaking Away (1979) – DVD

March 12, 2002Posted in1970s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Romance, Sports

***/**** Image C- Sound C-
starring Dennis Christopher, Dannis Quaid, Daniel Stern, Jackie Earle Haley
screenplay by Steve Tesich
directed by Peter Yates

by Walter Chaw For me, Peter Yates’s Breaking Away is the logical precursor to the particular nostalgia of Bob Clark’s A Christmas Story. It details in its limpid, lissom way small-town life through the prism of quaint friendships and a family with a sympathetic mom (Barbara Barrie), a curmudgeonly pop (Paul Dooley), and David (Dennis Christopher), their stargazer son.

The Hole (2001) [Deluxe Special Edition] – DVD

March 11, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Canada, Drama, DVD, France, Mystery, Thriller, UK

**½/**** Image A Sound B Extras B
starring Thora Birch, Desmond Harrington, Daniel Brocklebank, Laurence Fox
screenplay by Ben Cort & Caroline Ip, based on the novel After the Hole by Guy Burt
directed by Nick Hamm

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Holecapby Bill Chambers Sam Mendes, her American Beauty director, has called her the next Marlon Brando; indeed, I wrote in my list of the Top 10 Films of 2001 that I find Thora Birch the most captivating actress working, and I meant it. Her Ghost World performance struck me as a modern parallel to Brando in roles as disparate as Terry Malloy or Don Corleone, not for any more explicit reason than the way the film becomes a living, breathing animal when she's on screen and the fact that she looms large over scenes from which she's absent. The same is true for the British production The Hole, in which she is again the very convincing centre of gravity. She's dynamite, though the movie itself wants for an artist of Mendes's or Terry Zwigoff's calibre to pull it all together.

The Watcher in the Woods (1980) – DVD

March 10, 2002Posted in1980s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Disney, DVD, Family, Horror, Mystery, Thriller, UK

**/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras B
starring Bette Davis, Lynn-Holly Johnson, Kyle Richards, Carroll Baker
screenplay by Brian Clemens, Rosemary Anne Sisson, Harry Spalding, based on the novel by Florence Engel Randall
directed by John Hough

Watcherinthewoodscap

by Walter Chaw John Hough’s cult favourite The Watcher in the Woods is a movie about how a camera presents a point-of-view and how that point-of-view, if it’s not attached to a specific identity, can become menacingly voyeuristic; shame that The Watcher in the Woods isn’t also about a story with characters in whom you’re interested and performances that don’t set teeth on edge. One of the more unusual Disney productions of the late-Seventies, the film becomes yet another showcase for an aging Bette Davis’s hiccupping hag archetype and, sadly, an opportunity for figure-skater Lynn-Holly Johnson to demonstrate how good athletes seldom become good actors.

A Troll in Central Park (1994) – DVD

March 10, 2002Posted in1990s, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD, Family, Fantasy, Musical

½*/**** Image D+ Sound B
screenplay by Stu Krieger
directed by Don Bluth, Gary Goldman

by Walter Chaw So Gnorga (voiced by Cloris Leachman), the queen of the trolls, hates flowers, outlawing them in her forsaken trolldom. Kindhearted simple-troll Stanley (Dom DeLuise) finds himself and his green thumb in quite the pickle: What’s a horticulturally inclined troll to do when everything his olive digit touches turns to a badly-animated flower? Get banished to Central Park in New York, of course–the only place in the universe more unpleasant (according to Gnorga) than Trolldom. Not content to be a worm in the Big Apple, fish-out-of-water intrigue, Don Bluth’s excrescent A Troll in Central Park also manages to shoehorn in a Mary Poppins, “parents too busy to fly a kite” bit of nonsense. It seems too much to wrap up in just under seventy-six minutes, but not only does it manage to do just that in its trundling, underdeveloped way, A Troll in Central Park also wastes what feels like hours on aimless and appalling musical numbers.

Thumbelina (1994) – DVD

March 10, 2002Posted in1990s, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD, Family, Fantasy, Musical, Romance

*/**** Image D Sound B
screenplay by Don Bluth
directed by Don Bluth, Gary Goldman

by Walter Chaw A predictably disturbing take on Hans Christian Andersen’s cautionary tale of the importance of conformity and the dangers of female sexual awakening, the diminutive heroine of Don Bluth and Gary Goldman’s Thumbelina arrives in the slow blossoming of a rose. After brief stops in which a hyper-sexualized, Charo-voiced frog teaches Thumbelina to shake her tiny money-maker, a sleazy moustachioed junebug (Gilbert Gottfried) abducts her to be its wife, and Bluth presents phallic stems and pregnant bulbs to the point of indecency, the message of “there’s someone for everyone” (or, closer to the mark, an “Eye of the Beholder”-like “stick with your kind, freak”) comes ham-fisting home.

97 Brooks (2002)

March 10, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Theatrical, Thriller

*½/****
starring Colleen Wainwright, Robert Beckwith, Jason Sales, J. Keith Butler
written and directed by Mikon A. Haaksman

by Walter Chaw In order to get someone to vomit, one character asks another if they’d like to eat at Long John Silver’s. It’s a bright comic moment in the midst of the otherwise awkwardly scripted 97 Brooks, the zero-budget digital video debut of Mikon A. Haaksman, who raised money for his project by soliciting contributions from friends and family. While the cast (largely composed of Haaksman’s friends) is game, the screenplay, direction, and editing betray them at every turn. 97 Brooks lacks pace and rhythm–that visual or thematic hallmark that would have guided the movie over its essential lack of ear and many a narrative leap and difficulty. It isn’t so much that 97 Brooks is a terrible film, it’s that it has neither the wit nor the special something to overcome its amateurish screenplay and production values.

Monsoon Wedding (2001)

March 8, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, France, Germany, India, Italy, Romance, Theatrical

**½/****
starring Naseeruddin Shah, Lillete Dubey, Shefali Shetty, Vijay Raaz
screenplay by Sabrina Dhawan
directed by Mira Nair

by Walter Chaw Mira Nair’s Monsoon Wedding plays like an unedited wedding video, capturing peccadillo along with celebration and ugliness along with beauty. Slyly, a little in the manner of an Ousmane Sembene film, it weaves the troubling elements of its culture into the rituals of joy. (In the case of Monsoon Wedding, Nair explores India’s caste system, American cultural diffusion, the question of expatriated sons, and the inevitable death of tradition.) Yet Monsoon Wedding is also an exuberant Bollywood-lite soap opera with flat characterizations and badly telegraphed plot points punctuated periodically by bombastic sitar sing-alongs. What most separates Nair’s piece from Sembene’s masterpieces, however, is that ineffable sense of naturalism which better defines a culture than an abuse of its mad cinema’s mad archetypes.

All About the Benjamins (2002)

March 8, 2002Posted in2000s, Action, Comedy, Crime, Germany, Theatrical, Thriller

**/****
starring Ice Cube, Mike Epps, Tommy Flanagan, Carmen Chaplin
screenplay by Ronald Lang and Ice Cube
directed by Kevin Bray

Allaboutthebenjaminsby Walter Chaw Blaxploitation without the sex, All About the Benjamins is a gratuitously violent film laudably free of the pretense of political correctness, but it’s so calamitously loud and arbitrary (and has a character who fits the same description) that it fritters away almost as much goodwill as it earns. The only things separating All About the Benjamins from other whip-edited, hard-action movies are Ice Cube’s joyfully offensive screenplay (co-written with Ronald Lang) and an opening set in a Confederate’s dream of a trailer park that does more for exploding the race issue in these United States than the past five Denzel Washington pulpits.

The Anniversary Party (2001) – DVD

March 7, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Romance

**½/**** Image A Sound A Extras A+
starring Jennifer Jason Leigh, Alan Cumming, Jane Adams, Jennifer Beals
written and directed by Alan Cumming/Jennifer Jason Leigh

by Walter Chaw The overriding feeling in and of The Anniversary Party is high anxiety. The film represents a study of the ways in which insecurities manifest themselves through a dazzling panoply of multifarious defense mechanisms: pretension, jealousy, aggression, bootlicking, hostility, inappropriate flirtation, and casual drug abuse. It’s telling that for a toast, someone recites the last stanza of Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach”*–telling not for the sentiment of steadfastness in the face of societal unkindness, but for the fact that the poem has already once received a revision (in 1922 as “The Dover Bitch” by Anthony Hecht) and clearly receives another in Alan Cumming and Jennifer Jason Leigh’s very personal hyphenate debut. Not content to point out that the world is an ugly place, The Anniversary Party dares to suggest that the world’s ugliness is very often a product of marauding hordes of neurotic internal demons.

Heist (2001) – DVD

March 6, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, DVD, Thriller

**/**** Image B+ Sound B+
starring Gene Hackman, Danny DeVito, Delroy Lindo, Rebecca Pidgeon
written and directed by David Mamet

by Walter Chaw David Mamet the writer repeats himself in tight blobs of verbal noise, awkward turns of phrase, and staccato blasts. Mamet directs movies, I suspect, to preserve every beat of his favourite screenwriter’s (Mamet) careful, layered scripts. How he continues to lure big-name actors and producers to play in his exclusive little quicksand boxes of narrative dysfunction is a mystery. For as distinct as the celebrated playwright’s dialogue is, almost more so is the lamentable instinct to cast his largely talentless wives in pivotal roles (first Lindsay Crouse, now the consistently abominable Rebecca Pidgeon), not neglecting Mamet’s inability to transcend the mannered and under-populated staginess of the theatre in which he belongs.

The Replacement Killers (1998) [Special Edition] – DVD

March 5, 2002Posted in1990s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Crime, DVD, Thriller

*½/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B+
starring Chow Yun-Fat, Mira Sorvino, Michael Rooker, Jurgen Prochnow
screenplay by Ken Sanzel
directed by Antoine Fuqua

by Bill Chambers Chow Yun-Fat, the Asian Cary Grant (even their jawlines are similar), is so suave that he wore a white tuxedo to last year’s Hong Kong Awards, a black-jacket affair akin to the Oscars. And did the ladies swoon! (I got a little flush myself.) Since catching said awards show on a multicultural TV station, it has been my desire to revisit The Replacement Killers, because an initial viewing challenged the Will Rogers philosophy I have about Chow Yun-Fat movies: I never met one in which he disappointed. This man at the podium was too cool to have ever earned my apathy, wasn’t he?

Klute (1971) – DVD

March 4, 2002Posted in1970s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Crime, DVD, Mystery, Romance, Thriller

***½/**** Image A Sound B
starring Jane Fonda, Donald Sutherland, Charles Cioffi, Nathan George
screenplay by Andy and Dave Lewis
directed by Alan J. Pakula

Klutecapby Travis Mackenzie Hoover Unexplained phenomenon of the 1970s: the non-stardom of Alan J. Pakula. Despite having helmed three of the decade's quintessential films (Klute, The Parallax View, and All the President's Men) and possessing a style that remains to this day sui generis, his name means less than that of directors far more craven. Perhaps he was too old to be ranked with the Movie Brats (though that didn't stop Robert Altman), or worked on studio films that might have seemed conformist at the time, but for my money, nothing–not even the more fashionable Blow Out and The Conversation–captured the strangled sense of betrayal and claustrophobic helplessness of the post-Vietnam/Watergate era better than the films of my man Alan J.. And his Klute serves as a reminder of what a director does, taking the raw material of a script and contextualizing it so that its events ring as more than a self-contained adventure.

Prophecy (1979) – DVD

March 4, 2002Posted in1970s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: John Frankenheimer, DVD, Horror, Sci-Fi, Thriller

½*/**** Image B Sound C-
starring Talia Shire, Robert Foxworth, Armand Assante, Richard Dysart
screenplay by David Seltzer
directed by John Frankenheimer

by Walter Chaw There is a moment in the middle of John Frankenheimer’s relentlessly campy (and prophecy-free) Prophecy when noble savage John Hawks (essayed by Irish-Italian Armand Assante), eluding the fuzz, runs through a forest clearing, into a cabin, and out a closed window. Why Hawks didn’t just take off into the woods is a mystery almost as great as what happened to Frankenheimer after the 1960s. I also liked a scene that finds professional weepy milquetoast Talia Shire with a mutant bear cub chewing on her throat.

Newsies (1992) [Collector’s Edition] – DVD

March 4, 2002Posted in1990s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Disney, Drama, DVD, Family, Musical

*½/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras B
starring Christian Bale, Bull Pullman, Ann-Margret, Robert Duvall
screenplay by Bob Tzudiker & Noni White
directed by Kenny Ortega

by Walter Chaw If the crick in my neck is any indication, I watched Kenny Ortega’s Newsies like a dog hears a new sound. Most probably, my eyebrow was also arched. I always marvel that a racist bit of juvenilia became The King and I, for instance, or when someone decides to turn a “Romeo and Juliet” into a West Side Story. So when I say that I am clueless as to how the newspaper-hawker strike of 1899 could make for a good musical, I might not be the best person to ask.

A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001) [Two-Disc Special Edition – Widescreen] – DVD

March 3, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Directors: Stanley Kubrick, Drama, DVD, Esoterica, Sci-Fi, Spielberg

***/**** Image A Sound A Extras A-
starring Haley Joel Osment, Jude Law, Frances O'Connor, Brendan Gleeson
screenplay by Steven Spielberg, based on the screen story by Ian Watson and the short story "Supertoys Last All Summer Long" by Brian Aldiss
directed by Steven Spielberg

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover It begins dreadfully and stays that way for ages. It fumbles for what it thinks it wants to say, often missing the objective completely. Its ending is too long and too confused, and it casts a pall over the good things that came before. It marries the efforts of two filmmakers in uncomfortable ways and often short-circuits them both. But for better or worse, it is A.I. Artificial Intelligence–the best, most resonant, and most disturbing film Steven Spielberg has made in years, and a movie that deserves far more respect than it's been getting.

A Glimpse of Hell (2001) – DVD

March 3, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Drama, DVD, Television

**/**** Image A Sound A-
starring James Caan, Robert Sean Leonard, Daniel Roebuck, Jamie Harrold
screenplay by David Freed
directed by Mikael Salomon

by Walter Chaw Apart from the satirical possibilities, it appears that the rationale behind the title A Glimpse of Hell is the graphic aftermath of an explosion in the gunnery chamber of the U.S.S. Iowa. A made-for-TV docudrama that breeds Edward Dmytryk’s The Caine Mutiny with Rob Reiner’s A Few Good Men, A Glimpse of Hell impresses only with its dedication to mediocrity. While the subject is topical, recounting the possible malfeasance aboard an aging battleship that resulted in a magazine explosion, the execution is theatrical and cardboard from direction (by Mikael Salomon, cinematographer of The Abyss) to performance.

Last Orders (2001)

March 1, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Germany, UK

**/****
starring Michael Caine, Tom Courtenay, David Hemmings, Bob Hoskins
written and directed by Fred Schepisi, based on the novel by Graham Swift

by Walter Chaw Jack’s (Michael Caine) in a box–more accurately, his ashes are in an urn. His “last orders” (a term used in London pubs to announce a “last call” that serves double duty here) are for his remains to be scattered off a pier in Margate, a day’s travel for his three mates and his car salesman son, Vince (Ray Winstone). Lucky (Bob Hoskins; Anatol Yusef as a young man) likes to play the horses, Vic (Tom Courtenay; Cameron Fitch) is a stone-faced and quiet undertaker, and Lenny (David Hemmings; Nolan Hemmings) is the blowhard. Together, they bicker, get toasted, bicker some more, and stagger off to get filmed in hangdog medium shots that serve as platforms for flashbacks. That it’s well performed seems unavoidable, especially after Helen Mirren gets tossed into the mix as Jack’s widow Amy (Kelly Reilly as a young woman), but Last Orders is a dirge of lazy plotting.

40 Days and 40 Nights (2002)

March 1, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Romance, Theatrical, UK

**½/****
starring Josh Hartnett, Shannyn Sossamon, Monet Mazur, Maggie Gyllenhaal
screenplay by Rob Perez
directed by Michael Lehmann

40daysand40nightsby Walter Chaw Matt (Josh Hartnett) is an oversexed young man in a sanitized San Francisco who, after suffering a tough split from man-eater Nicole (Vinessa Shaw), decides to follow his brother John (Adam Trese), an apprentice in the seminary, in the walk of celibacy. He gives up sex for Lent in all its myriad forms (neglecting, dishonestly, orchid-alingus in the film’s dumbest bit of “Penthouse Forum” erotica), and spawns an Internet culture of schadenfreudens waiting for Matt to fall off the wagon and into the hay. During that period, can it be any wonder that Matt meets Erica (Shannyn Sossamon), the girl of his dreams, in a Hopper-esque laundromat?