In the Bedroom (2001)

December 26, 2001Posted in****/****, 2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, Theatrical

****/****
starring Tom Wilkinson, Sissy Spacek, Nick Stahl, Marisa Tomei
screenplay by Robert Festinger & Todd Field, based on a short story by Andre Dubus
directed by Todd Field

by Walter Chaw Based on the short story “Killings” by the late Andre Dubus, arguably the finest American short-story writer of the past fifty years, Todd Field’s In the Bedroom is an emotionally brutal and laudably ambiguous film that does justice to the sober restraint and taint of truth that informs the best of Dubus’s work. It’s like an Atom Egoyan or Sean Penn film in its austere chronicling of families tossed to entropy’s capricious tide, though a more complete work those filmmakers have yet to achieve. What Field captures, in fact, is a whiff of Terrence Malick’s genius–not only in he and cinematographer Antonio Calvache’s spacious plateaus but also in the thematic preoccupation with nature’s rhythms and how they imbue the patterns of human behaviour. That said, In the Bedroom largely avoids Malick’s philosophical metaphors, focusing on the far less ephemeral poetics of Dubus’s preoccupation with the minute interpersonal dynamics–the subterranean movements and precarious psychic negotiation–of a marriage.

Hedwig and the Angry Inch (2001) [Platinum Series] – DVD

December 26, 2001Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Esoterica, Music, Musical

***/**** Image B Sound A Extras A+
starring John Cameron Mitchell, Michael Pitt, Miriam Shor, Stephen Trask
screenplay by John Cameron Mitchell, based on his play with Stephen Trask
directed by John Cameron Mitchell

by Walter Chaw A pretension-laden, soul-dissection opera crossed with the brooding musical chops that Pink Floyd all but defined in the late-Seventies, John Cameron Mitchell's Hedwig and the Angry Inch is Velvet Goldmine and All that Jazz by way of Pink Floyd The Wall–a bombastically endearing romp that is as infectious as it is (surprisingly) poignant. The anchor for the film is Mitchell's incendiary turn as the titular Hedwig, a transsexual/transvestite, Eastern Bloc rock diva on a national tour booked into Bilgewaters family restaurants in the same cities as flavour-of-the-month pop superstar Tommy Gnosis (Michael Pitt). Hedwig believes that Gnosis has stolen his songs from him, yet we sense the real theft was that of trust and the promise of love. Early on, we're shown a fantastically-conceived bleach-bypass/animation/performance piece set to a very nice Plato's Symposium-inspired tune ("The Origin of Love") that offers an explanation of the absent feeling that impels us all to find succour in a mate, a friend, or art. Hedwig and the Angry Inch never gets as good as this again, but it's almost impossible to imagine how it could: the sequence, lasting all of ten minutes, is one of the highlights of the year in cinema.

Willow (1988) [Special Edition] – DVD

December 26, 2001Posted in1980s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Fantasy, Romance, UK

*/**** Image B+ Sound A- Extras B
starring Val Kilmer, Joanne Whalley, Warwick Davis, Jean Marsh
screenplay by Bob Dolman
directed by Ron Howard

by Walter Chaw It shouldn’t be surprising that Willow fails as it does considering that the creative forces behind it were George Lucas (who has never had a good idea of his own) and Ron Howard (who’s never met an opportunity for cleverness he didn’t miss), neither of whom should ever have been entrusted with a fantasy film as late as 1988, as their work since (and just before) will attest. It is shamelessly derivative, raping countless sources to come up with what is essentially a limp riff on the Tolkien quest married to things as divergent as The Living Daylights, all three original Star Wars films, all three Indiana Jones films, Gulliver’s Travels, The Bible, Masters of the Universe, and Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

The Royal Tenenbaums (2001)

December 26, 2001Posted in****/****, 2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Directors: Wes Anderson, Drama, Theatrical

****/****
starring Gene Hackman, Anjelica Huston, Ben Stiller, Gwyneth Paltrow
screenplay by Wes Anderson & Owen Wilson
directed by Wes Anderson

Royaltenenbaumsby Walter Chaw Royal Tenenbaum (Gene Hackman) is the estranged patriarch of the Tenenbaums, a family of child prodigies that, beset by a series of “accidents and disasters,” has never again attained the heights of its early glories. Chas (Ben Stiller), an economics wizard, Margot (Gwyneth Paltrow), a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, and Richie (Luke Wilson), a tennis star, return after years of fecklessness to the home of their mother, Etheline (Anjelica Huston), drawn there by the news that Royal is mortally afflicted with stomach cancer. In his words, he has “six weeks to set things right” with his disenchanted, wounded kin, trying all the while to undermine Etheline’s budding relationship with their accountant, Mr. Sherman (Danny Glover).

The Affair of the Necklace (2001)

December 26, 2001Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Romance, Theatrical

½/****
starring Hilary Swank, Simon Baker, Adrien Brody, Jonathan Pryce
screenplay by John Sweet
directed by Charles Shyer

Affairofthenecklaceby Walter Chaw Alternately boring and hilarious, The Affair of the Necklace is high cheese of the French Revolution variety, delighted by its own creamery version of ribaldry (there are more stifled titters in Affair than at an Oscar Wilde convention) and infatuated with the passion that ripping bodices has failed to imply for over two centuries. It is inadvertently self-critical (at various points in the film characters breathily intone, “It is amazing how quickly you have become tedious,” or “It is a monument to vanity,” or “The public found her guilty of excess”), and credit is due, I suppose, to poor, gaffed Hilary Swank for being either too daffy to see that irony or a better actress than she appears in concealing any self-aware mirth. The Swank of The Affair of the Necklace is the Swank of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which is of course the only Swank, her stunt turn in Boys Don’t Cry notwithstanding. The most astonishing thing about The Affair of the Necklace, though, is how with a cast that includes Brian Cox, Christopher Walken, and Jonathan Pryce, it manages to be jaw-droppingly awful; had I not squirmed in mute horror, transfixed before the film’s appalling majesty, I would not have believed it myself.

Kate & Leopold (2001)

December 21, 2001Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Romance, Theatrical, Time Travel

**½/****
starring Meg Ryan, Hugh Jackman, Liev Schreiber, Breckin Meyer
screenplay by James Mangold and Steven Rogers
directed by James Mangold

by Walter Chaw That the consistently grating Meg Ryan, now milking her second decade as a suspect princess of perk, stars in yet another variation on the When Harry Met Sally, “opposites in love against all odds” scenario augers ill, to be certain. But Kate & Leopold is a decent addition to the beleaguered and overcrowded romantic comedy genre (think Somewhere in Time meets Splash); look for an explanation in James Mangold’s steady direction, the clever, deconstructive screenplay he wrote with Steven Rogers, and a rock-steady performance by Hugh Jackman that is confident and unembarrassed.

The Majestic (2001)

December 21, 2001Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Romance, Theatrical

*½/****
starring Jim Carrey, Martin Landau, Laurie Holden, Allen Garfield
screenplay by Michael Sloane
directed by Frank Darabont

Majesticby Walter Chaw The Majestic begins promisingly enough; I wondered for a while if it was riffing on the short story “Mars is Heaven” (from Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles), wherein Martians recreate a bucolic midsummer’s evening in Springfield for visiting astronauts, only to murder the terrestrial interlopers in their blissful sleep. I actually held out hope that the Rockwellian Lawson, CA of The Majestic was going to be like that for amnesiac screenwriter Peter Appleton (Jim Carrey), who washes ashore there after a whimsical bridge accident. If only The Majestic were some kind of Truman Show/“Twilight Zone” construct along these lines, but no such luck: Frank Darabont’s latest film, a creepily painstaking reproduction of Frank Capra’s Americana and Capra’s wide-eyed vision of American justice, betrays not a hint of invention. The Majestic is a manipulation so fearful of controversy that it inadvertently forgives both the film industry it apparently mocks and the witch hunters it seeks to excoriate.

Evolution (2001) [Widescreen] – DVD

December 16, 2001Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD, Sci-Fi

½*/**** Image A- Sound A Extras C+
starring David Duchovny, Julianne Moore, Orlando Jones, Seann William Scott
screenplay by David Diamond & David Weissman and Don Jakoby
directed by Ivan Reitman

by Walter Chaw Ira Kane (David Duchovny) is a science teacher at a community college in Arizona. Not biology, not chemistry, not physics, but “science.” Uh-huh. His friend at the college is Harry Block (Orlando Jones), an honorary member of the United States Geological Society (not to be confused with the United States Geological Survey). When a meteorite smashes into Earth, totalling the vintage ’73 Riviera of complete moron Wayne (complete moron specialist Seann William Scott, late of Dude, Where’s My Car?), of course Harry and Ira are called in to collect “scientific” samples in the name of…um…”science.”

Osmosis Jones (2001) – DVD

December 13, 2001Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Family

**½/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B
starring Bill Murray, Molly Shannon, Elena Franklin, Chris Elliott
screenplay by Marc Hyman
directed by Bobby Farrelly, Peter Farrelly, Piet Kroon and Tom Sito

by Walter Chaw If the devil is in the details, so, in Osmosis Jones, is most of the humour. It is one part Farrelly Brothers biological comedy and one part Piet Kroon and Tom Sito (late of The Iron Giant) animated genius; that the balance of the film is heavily in favour of the latter speaks to rare good thinkin’ from the Hollywood brain trust. The live-action part stars Bill Murray as the slovenly Frank–Murray out-repulses co-star Chris Elliot, which means that he is very possibly the most disgusting human ever captured on film. The animation side features the voice of Chris Rock as the titular Osmosis Jones, a white blood cell cop who, after a controversial stomach evacuation, is busted down to mouth duty. If you’re not sure what “mouth duty” entails–it’s bad. When Frank is invaded by an evil virus named Thrax (Laurence Fishburne), Osmosis gets one last chance to make good, paired with a blustering blunderbuss of a timed flu capsule named Drix (David Hyde Pierce).

Intimacy (2001)

December 7, 2001Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, France, Germany, Romance, Spain, Theatrical, UK

**½/****
starring Mark Rylance, Kerry Fox, Susannah Harker, Timothy Spall
screenplay by Patrice Chéreau, Hanif Kureishi, Anne-Louise Trividic
directed by Patrice Chéreau

Intimacyby Walter Chaw Jay (Mark Rylance) is a sour bar manager who, six years previous, walked out on his wife and two young boys. Claire (Kerry Fox) is a dour acting teacher and mother of one married to an oafish Cockney cabbie (Andy, played by Timothy Spall like the refugee from a Mike Leigh film he is). Every Wednesday at two in the afternoon, Jay and Claire couple in Jay’s austere, unfurnished flat. As a homosexual French bartender–the too-awkward representation of uninhibited sagacity–helpfully supplies, “It’s rare that two people meet one another who have the same needs.” But Jay appears to have needs different from Claire’s: Trailing her after they rendezvous, he watches her as she drops off her dry-cleaning, takes public transportation, and finally ends up at a hole-in-the-wall drama company to perform badly in a Tennessee Williams revival. Striking up a mine-strewn conversation with his lover’s husband over pints of bitter and a game of billiards, Intimacy seismically shifts from one powerful cinematic symbol (sex) to another (theatre), and in so doing demonstrates a remarkable courage in its nakedness; and an exasperating lack of focus in its thrust.

The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001)

December 6, 2001Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Fantasy, Theatrical

***½/****
starring Elijah Wood, Ian McKellen, Viggo Mortensen, Sean Astin
screenplay by Fran Walsh & Philippa Boyens & Peter Jackson, based on the novel The Fellowship of the Ring by J.R.R. Tolkien
directed by Peter Jackson

Fellowshipoftheringby Walter Chaw At the heart of Peter Jackson’s brilliant The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring–the first of three cinematic adaptations of Tolkien’s beloved fantasy, shot simultaneously for release in consecutive years–is a favourable melancholy, a despair born of two things: the crucial feeling of desperation that infests a small band of heroes striving against an invincible evil; and the knowledge that this film will soon end, its sequel twelve months away. Jackson has translated nearly every element of Tolkien’s universe, from a vast, sprawling history implied in the language and the actions of its multi-specied characters, to a completely immersive fantasy realm with nary a seam to spoil the illusion, to a quest that’s worthy of epic attention. He’s captured the sadness and moral weight of Tolkien with the kind of deep reality that seems effortless but is born of a meticulous preparation and all-consuming vision. It takes a certain skill to make things look good; it takes genius to keep the pretty pictures from overwhelming the narrative of what is, in this case, a universally familiar story. Ridley Scott never quite got the hang of it.

Moulin Rouge (2001) – DVD

December 4, 2001Posted in2000s, Australia, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Drama, DVD, Esoterica, Musical, Romance

Moulin Rouge!
***/**** Image A Sound A- (DD)/A+ (DTS) Extras A
starring Nicole Kidman, Ewan McGregor, John Leguizamo, Jim Broadbent
screenplay by Baz Luhrmann & Craig Pearce
directed by Baz Luhrmann

Moulinrougecap1by Travis Mackenzie Hoover It's been a long time since I've seen a mainstream film that tried to place its heart in the audience's hands. Nothing in recent memory is as direct and open in its pleasures as the classic Hollywood musicals were, having been replaced by the sideways glance of the ironist and all of the false snobbery that pretends nothing is as it appears. While this is supposed to be a bellwether of our superior sophistication, it really just means that we strike a different pose: we must be superior to the events on screen and stop up our emotions with an arched eyebrow and a swift kick to the object of our gaze. The fact is that any evidence of true feeling–or, more to the point, true yearning for release–is treated as ridiculous and something to be lamented, but one must admit the current climate makes an affirmation of what we want seem very vulnerable and the efforts of those who decide to work without the net of condescension seem daring, if not suicidal.

Almost Famous (2000) – DVD|Almost Famous: Untitled, The Bootleg Cut [Director’s Edition] – DVD

December 1, 2001Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, Coming of Age, Drama, DVD, Music

ALMOST FAMOUS
***/**** Image A Sound A Extras C+
UNTITLED
***/**** Image A Sound A Extras A
starring Patrick Fugit, Billy Crudup, Frances McDormand, Kate Hudson
written and directed by Cameron Crowe

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Almost Famous is an odd bird. It wants to be about rock and roll but isn't, seeking every opportunity to hide from the spirit of the music that is its ostensible starting point. It strains for important insights it doesn't have, mostly centred on a teenage boy's predictable loss of innocence at the hands of a rock band. Worst of all is that it subsumes its massive subject into the flowering of a ROLLING STONE journalist, crushing both the purity of the music and the excess of its players beneath a career move for a media player. But as the film lurches from issue to dodged issue, the reasoning behind its omissions is as intriguing as the omissions themselves; as it accidentally uncovers the spaces between what gets done and how it gets done, it manages to be a revealing document of how much chicanery goes into the creation of celebrity–entirely in spite of itself.

Backyard Dogs (2000) – DVD

November 28, 2001Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD, Sports, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/**** Image B Sound C
starring Scott Hamm, Bree Turner, Walter Emanuel Jones, Roger Fan
written and directed by Robert Boris

by Walter Chaw A painfully amateurish reworking of Play It to the Bone set against the turgid, redneck world of backyard wrestling, Robert Boris’s Backyard Dogs is the kind of head-scratcher that makes filmmakers of folks who never realized that making a movie was this easy. See, using the template provided, all you need is a digital camera, a bimbo who doesn’t mind flashing the groceries a couple of times, and a rent-a-script that shows how an already terrible mainstream film might actually be made worse with a little effort. Backyard Dogs is so hideous that with only a little imagination it begins to function as something of a satire of both Kickboxer-type death sports movies and gay pornography. You know you’re in trouble when the highlight of your film is an opening montage comprising real footage of idiots trying to kill one another in their backyards; you know you’re in bigger trouble when the title of your movie comes from an early moment in which a character steps on a pile of dog excrement.

Made (2001) [Special Edition] – DVD

November 27, 2001Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Crime, Drama, DVD, Thriller

**/**** Image A Sound A- Extras A
starring Jon Favreau, Vince Vaughn, Sean Combs, Famke Janssen
written and directed by Jon Favreau

by Bill Chambers Even if Swingers were terrible, one would have to admire writer-star Jon Favreau for making a film about waiting around to be discovered instead of actually waiting around to be discovered. Made, his official follow-up effort (this time as full-on auteur), is not such a noble affair. A vanity project in the tradition of Under the Cherry Moon, Prince’s pretentious encore to his star-making Purple Rain, the film boasts of a more distinguished supporting cast, stronger tech credits, and a budget 20x that of its predecessor. And yet almost every scene lands with a resounding thud, due in large part to Made‘s alleged raison d’être: the anticipated reunion of Swinger Vince Vaughn with Favreau–who turns into a morose do-gooder whenever he’s in Vaughn’s radar. It’s like watching “The Odd Couple” starring a tooth and a root canal.

Children of the Living Dead (2001) – DVD

November 26, 2001Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD, Horror, Thriller, ZERO STARS, Zombie

ZERO STARS/**** Image D Sound C-
starring Tom Savini, Martin Schiff, Damien Luvara, Jamie McCoy
screenplay by Karen Lee Wolf
directed by Tor A. Ramsey

by Walter Chaw With the appearance of having been shot over a long weekend in someone’s backyard, Children of the Living Dead is a cynical attempt to cash in on George Romero’s zombie trilogy (and The Blair Witch Project) so stale and amateurish that it qualifies as a barely-releasable embarrassment to everyone involved, including gore-legend Tom Savini, who seems to have hit rock bottom in his extended cameo. The film starts just outside of the old house from Romero’s seminal Night of the Living Dead, with rednecks potting zombies in a field–a scene already familiar to fans of Dawn of the Dead, but robbed of all pathos and dread–and continues on through a series of disconnected vignettes that neglect genre imperatives like gore, nudity, and fear plus narrative film prerequisites like story, acting, directing, and script. Children of the Living Dead doesn’t even offer any puerile thrills.

Along for the Ride (2001) – DVD

November 26, 2001Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD, Germany, Romance, ZERO STARS

Forever Lulu
ZERO STARS/**** Image B- Sound B
starring Melanie Griffith, Patrick Swayze, Penelope Ann Miller, Joseph Gordon-Leavitt
written and directed by John Kaye

by Walter Chaw For as bad an actress as Melanie Griffith is (Night Moves and Another Day in Paradise notwithstanding), it’s not entirely her fault that John Kaye’s Forever Lulu (inexplicably renamed Along for the Ride for its DVD release) is unspeakably awful. True, her Betsy-Wetsy kewpie doll elocution and its attendant dead eyes–which wore out their welcome almost the second she trotted them out for an incredulous audience about twenty-six years ago–are in full-bore here, but what makes Along for the Ride, in which she plays the title role, so abominable are such exchanges as this one:

LULU
Did you know that sometimes I ask my pillow late at night, “How much sadness do I have to feel?” And did you know that love is the greatest painkiller and that Marilyn Monroe wore a mask of tragedy over her pubic hair?

CLAIRE
You’re right, I should go talk to Ben.

Little Women (1933) – DVD

November 25, 2001Posted in1930s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Family, Romance, War

**/**** Image B Sound C-
starring Katharine Hepburn, Joan Bennett, Paul Lukas, Edna May Oliver
screenplay by Sarah Y. Mason & Victor Heerman, based on the novel by Louisa May Alcott
directed by George Cukor

by Walter Chaw A scant six years after The Jazz Singer introduced talking to the motion picture, George Cukor’s Little Women came to the screen with the awkwardness of a foundling art form (silent-picture burlesque and stage melodrama) in tow. It’s extremely difficult to view the film unjaundiced by a modern opinion of performance, script, and direction: Although the adapted screenplay by Sarah Y. Mason and Victor Heerman won an Oscar that year, Little Women is impossibly dated and difficult to swallow. Part of the problem is the casting of actresses (each one at least a decade too old for her role), whose performances are such sweeping caricatures that it takes some effort to remind oneself that they were once acceptable simulacrums of reality.

Jurassic Park III (2001) [Collector’s Edition – Widescreen] – DVD

November 25, 2001Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD, Sci-Fi, Spielberg, Thriller

**/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Sam Neill, William H. Macy, Téa Leoni, Alessandro Nivola
screenplay by Peter Buchman and Alexander Payne & Jim Taylor
directed by Joe Johnston

by Walter Chaw Jurassic Park III is completely critic-proof, a smirking cash machine with its amplifiers turned up to “11.” That it happens to be an amazingly tight little film (every single element of its first half predicts a correlative in the second) doesn’t excuse its bratty attitude. If Jurassic Park III were the insolent snot-nosed little punk it most resembles, it’d be turning out its lower lip whilst jutting an insouciant chin at potential critics and naysayers: “Go ahead,” the pipsqueak would say, “hit me with your best shot.”

Okay, here goes.

Deep in the Woods (2000) – DVD

November 20, 2001Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD, France, Horror, Thriller

Promenons-nous dans les bois
***½/**** Image A- Sound A (French) C (English) Extras D+
starring Francois Berleand, Denis Lavant, Michel Muller, Thibault Truffert
screenplay by Annabelle Perrichon
directed by Lionel Delplanque

by Walter Chaw The newest generation of young Gallic filmmakers is involved in reinvigorating many of the thriller’s forms: the hybrid, HK-influenced actioner (Brotherhood of the Wolf); the Cronenbergian investigation of parasitic identification (A Matter of Taste); and the Hitchcockian psychosexual wrong-man intrigue (Mortal Transfer). Perhaps inspired by countryman Luc Besson’s La Femme Nikita, and Leon (a.k.a. The Professional), the abovementioned movies are bathed in frosty blues and greens, filmed and edited with a smooth professionalism–the latest wave to wash through the French cinema is all about a carefully calibrated cool.