Zebra Lounge (2001) – DVD

Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Canada, Crime, Drama, DVD, Thriller

*/**** Image B Sound B
starring Kristy Swanson, Brandy Ledford, Cameron Daddo, Stephen Baldwin
screenplay by Claire Montgomery & Monte Montgomery
directed by Kari Skogland

by Bill Chambers

“He is the straightest and most law-abiding citizen…in the world!”
-Wendy Barnet (Brandy Ledford), assessing her husband’s degree of innocence to a police detective

Zebra Lounge zippers shut the body bag around Stephen Baldwin’s career and confirms that Canadian filmmakers are no longer capable of good trash (director Kari Skogland is a veteran of the Saltine-dry Canuck TV show “Nothing Too Good for a Cowboy”), but most of all, it’s suffocatingly dull. This film should have a “do not operate heavy machinery” warning-label superimposed on it at all times. The made-for-cable movie marks not only the first time I have fallen asleep during a sex scene but also the first time I have fallen asleep during two consecutive sex scenes, neither of which takes place in the rarely-mentioned titular night spot. Zebra Lounge could’ve been called anything, so phenomenally generic are its subject matter, dialogue, and execution. Even the score, by someone named John McCarthy, sounds like it came out of a can.

West is Best: FFC Interviews Shane West

Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Interviews

WestisbesttitleJanuary 11, 2002|Shane West loves horror movies–explanation, perhaps, for his participation in the Wes Craven-produced Dracula 2000. And he has a knowledge of them that belies his relatively tender age of twenty-three. It’s an undercurrent of the slightly wicked (with his horror jones and his punk band Average Jo) that fuels his persona across various heartthrob fansites dedicated to celebrating the young, the pretty, the slightly dangerous. Mr. West’s knowledge of film, his respect for his craft, and his politeness and obvious decency are qualities each that seem all too rare in any walk much less Tinsel Town. It’s early yet in Mr. West’s career, the upcoming adaptation of Nicholas Sparks’s A Walk to Remember is only his second leading role, but it’s his performance as the soulful Eli Sammler on ABC’s well-regarded drama “Once and Again” that has been the key to his rising popularity and critical recognition.

Orange County (2002)

Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Teen, Theatrical
**½/****
starring Colin Hanks, Schuyler Fisk, Catherine O’Hara, Jack Black
screenplay by Michael White
directed by Jake Kasdan

Orangecountyby Walter Chaw The director of five episodes of the late, lamented television series “Freaks and Geeks”, Jake Kasdan, with screenwriter Mike White (a scribbler on that same show), produces a surprisingly (or, perhaps, not so surprisingly) tender and observant commencement comedy with Orange County. It’s After Hours as filtered through the sensibility of a young, pre-suckage Cameron Crowe, and though it’s extremely uneven and clearly hacked to bits (the film feels clipped at 86 minutes), the end result is a cameo-laden piece that for the most part resists the cheap, exploitive garbage that indicates most of the teen comedy genre. While I expected more from the young man who debuted as writer-director of the brilliant Zero Effect (and from White, half of the creative team behind the overrated but intriguing Chuck and Buck), Orange County is a good film–particularly, I suspect, for those anticipating just another teen movie.

Tackle Happy (2000) – DVD

Posted in2000s, Australia, Authors: Bill Chambers, Documentary, DVD, Esoterica

Tackle Happy (The Origins of “Puppetry of the Penis”)
**½/**** Image B Sound B- Extras C-
directed by Mick Molloy

by Bill Chambers A name actor once dropped trou’ in front of me, under non-sexual circumstances I dare not elaborate. I buried my face in my hands and this only inspired him to taunt me further with his manhood. “What’s the matter? It’s just a dick,” he said. The more I think about it (not that I’ve been dwelling on it), the more sage his plea of innocence becomes. Penises are obnoxious, and sometimes none too innocuous, but all in all, they’re not the least bit sacred. Compare the Western cultural reputations of the vagina and the penis: on stage, the former gets a pretentious monologue performed by everyone from Glenn Close to Alanis Morissette; the latter gets a puppet show.

Deep Water (2000) – DVD

Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Thriller, ZERO STARS

Intrepid
ZERO STARS/**** Image C- Sound C-
starring James Coburn, Costas Mandylor, Finola Hughes, Alex Hyde-White
screenplay by J. Everitt Morley and Keoni Waxman
directed by John Putch

by Walter Chaw A freakish hunk of mismatched celluloid offal that hews together the already ripe (and continuously ripening) corpses of The Poseidon Adventure and Speed II, schlock-meister John Putch’s Deep Water (formerly Intrepid) is so wilfully bad that calling it such would be a self-defeating waste of time. It’s also an appalling waste of time to note that Deep Water rips off The Impostors and Deep Blue Sea, too, while doing next to nothing to justify tonal and thematic shifts that occur with the frequency and severity of Dick Cheney’s heart attacks. The way to approach a criticism of Deep Water is to relate something of my personal experience.

Summer Catch (2001) – DVD

Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Romance, Sports, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/**** Image A- Sound B Extras C
starring Freddie Prinze Jr., Courtney Driver, Jessica Biel, Matthew Lillard
screenplay by Kevin Falls and John Gatins
directed by Michael Tollin

by Walter Chaw Summer Catch bulges the already-overcrowded shelves reserved for appalling Freddie Prinze Jr. vehicles that no one saw in theatres and, predictably, no one is renting given a second chance. Determining which of Prinze’s performances and films is the worst is an exercise both diverting and daunting; to that end, I’d have to say that Summer Catch falls squarely in the middle: it’s physically impossible to sit through the whole thing without a lengthy break or some sort of medium-bore narcotic, thus making it inferior to the stolid water-torture of I Know What You Did Last Summer (that film’s relative enjoyability no doubt owing a great deal to Jennifer Love Hewitt’s oft-invoked bustline). Still, it has going for it that it doesn’t cause your eyes and ears to bleed with the consistency and volume of Down to You or Wing Commander.

Speak of “The Devil’s Backbone”: FFC Interviews Guillermo Del Toro

Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Horror, Interviews, Mexico

SpeakofthedevilsbackbonerevisedJanuary 6, 2002|Guillermo Del Toro’s films resonate with the weight of archetype: They find their thorniness down among the insects, the religious martyrs, the sexually infertile (including the aged and the very young), and the Stygian underside of the fairytale. It might have something to do with the gothic fact that the director read Frankenstein at the age of nine and fell asleep on his mother’s lap while watching Wuthering Heights. The victim of a horrific Catholic upbringing that at one point involved bottle caps in the shoes as a means to mortify the flesh, it’s clear that the well where many of Del Toro’s demons live is deep and Byzantine.

American Pie 2 (2001) [Unrated – Widescreen Collector’s Edition] – DVD

Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, DVD, Romance

**/**** Image B Sound B+ Extras B
starring Jason Biggs, Shannon Elizabeth, Alyson Hannigan, Chris Klein
screenplay by Adam Herz
directed by J.B. Rogers

by Bill Chambers If American Pie was the Nineties’ answer to the teen genre of Eighties cinema, then American Pie 2 revives the sitcom format of that same decade. It starts and it finishes, logging hours but not progress. That made the film awfully discomforting on the big screen: When I saw American Pie 2 in theatres, I felt similar to how I did the time I endured Close Encounters of the Third Kind on a 13″ television; movies, like people, have proportions, and some clothing just doesn’t fit. Part of me wishes I’d watched American Pie 2 on DVD first, because although I slightly preferred my home viewing to the one at the gigaplex, I knew where the jokes were, and they ain’t built for repetition, nor is the film’s malnourished narrative.

Kiss of the Dragon (2001) – DVD

Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, DVD, France, Martial Arts, Thriller

**½/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Jet Li, Bridget Fonda, Tcheky Karyo, Ric Young
screenplay by Luc Besson & Robert Mark Kamen
directed by Chris Nahon

by Walter Chaw There are not ten consecutive minutes of Kiss of the Dragon that make sense and there are at least three completely disconnected scenes, but the real litmus test occurs about thirty minutes into the festivities, whereupon Jet Li kicks a billiard ball into the forehead of a Jim Broadbent-esque bad guy. Coming at the end of much mayhem, that’s where you either start playing pool with Kiss of the Dragon or leave the parlour altogether. It’s also an event that happens before Bridget Fonda has had a chance to do the Cybill Shepherd enjoyment-vortex schtick she’s been perfecting for a decade or so. To her credit, she’s getting pretty damned good at it, though she’s still no Helen Hunt.

Impostor (2002)

Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller

*/****
starring Gary Sinise, Madeleine Stowe, Vincent D’Onofrio, Tony Shalhoub
screenplay by Scott Rosenberg, Caroline Case and Ehren Kruger and David Twohy
directed by Gary Fleder

Impostorby Walter Chaw Mouldering in a can for over a year (the film would smell pretty stale regardless past 1980), Impostor is the umpteenth adaptation of a Philip K. Dick story (whether directly or indirectly), a fable of identity that pales in comparison to an acknowledged classic like Blade Runner, an ambitious blockbuster like Total Recall, and an under-seen sleeper like Screamers. Overseen by professional bad director Gary Fleder, Impostor would I suspect most like to invite comparisons to two Harrison Ford films–Blade Runner and The Fugitive–but ends up best resembling, in its dour overreaching and intimations of future-shock resonance, the late, unlamented Dylan McDermott/Iggy Pop vehicle Hardware. Although the increasingly reptilian Gary Sinise seems game with all of his Steppenwolf method in tendon-popping tow, his sickly earnestness seems misplaced in an exercise that is essentially a strobe-lit pseudo-philosophical sci-fi opera that a major studio wisely declined to release for twelve full months. Future employers of actor Mekhi Phifer take note: with this and O, it appears that hiring the lad is all but inviting a lengthy release delay.

Silent Trigger (1996) – DVD

Posted in1990s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Drama, DVD, Thriller, UK

*/**** Image D Sound D+
starring Dolph Lundgren, Gina Bellman, George Jenesky, Christopher Heyerdahl
screenplay by Sergio Altieri
directed by Russell Mulcahy

by Walter Chaw There was a time, ’round about the cheap thrills of Razorback, that I thought director Russell Mulcahy had a future as an action director. Seventeen years later, the Aussie has proven me wrong by peaking with the intentionally campy The Shadow and the unintentionally campy Highlander. And while Silent Trigger isn’t the worst of Mulcahy’s missteps (Highlander II: The Quickening has a hammerlock on several “worst” titles), it’s not for lack of trying. Still, I can’t completely dislike both Dolph Lundgren and Mulcahy’s latest direct-to-video disaster because I feel as though watching it has taught me a few things.

The Glass House (2001) – DVD

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

*/**** Image A Sound B+ Extras C
starring Leelee Sobieski, Stellan Skarsgård, Diane Lane, Bruce Dern
screenplay by Wesley Strick
directed by Daniel Sackheim

BUY @ AMAZON

by Bill Chambers In The Glass House, the picture-perfect legal guardians of an orphaned teenage girl and her little brother turn out to be Gomez and Morticia. (Actually, that's overstating their appeal.) The trouble with this set-up is that it has the pretense of a moral but revolves around a character in Leelee Sobieski's Ruby who hasn't done anything to place herself in her precarious situation except obey the law and her elders. By the time she gains agency and the film puts her in the driver's seat (quite literally, as it happens), The Glass House seems to be apologizing to young adults on screen and off for suggesting they're not always in control. It could be said to, like Home Alone or The Rugrats Movie, spread a false sense of security to its target demographic.

Film Freak Central’s Top 10 of 2001

Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Best-of Lists, Blog

Top102001

THE YEAR THAT WAS…
by Walter Chaw

Even though 2001 began like 2000 ended (poorly) and had a summer that could only count as its highlights a film so bad it became a handy satire of summer movies (The Mummy Returns) and two silly anachronistic pieces that got points for using David Bowie songs well (A Knight's Tale, Moulin Rouge!), the cinematic year resolved itself by the end as one of the strongest in memory.

American Outlaws (2001) – DVD

Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD, Western

*½/**** Image A- Sound A Extras A
starring Colin Farrell, Scott Caan, Ali Larter, Gabriel Macht
screenplay by Roderick Taylor and John Rogers
directed by Les Mayfield

by Walter Chaw Thinking that Oscar-winner Kathy Bates had reached a career nadir as a Bible-thumpin’ mama in Adam Sandler’s deplorable The Waterboy, colour me surprised to note that Ms. Bates actually plumbs a new depth in reprising that performance for Les Mayfield’s painful American Outlaws. The “Dawson’s Creek” Western also marks the second time that Terry O’Quinn has been in Young Guns and Timothy Dalton in The Rocketeer, leading me to conclude that I have wasted altogether too much of my life watching terrible movies.

Bruiser (2001) – DVD

Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Directors: George A. Romero, DVD, France, Horror, Mystery, Thriller

***/**** Image B- Sound B Extras B-
starring Jason Flemyng, Peter Stormare, Leslie Hope, Nina Garbiras
written and directed by George A. Romero

by Walter Chaw A comic-book morality play along the lines of his Creepshow, horror legend George A. Romero’s Bruiser is rife with ideas and the kind of broad audacity that foments disquiet in rough strokes and bleak epiphanies. While it doesn’t hold together and is too self-conscious by the end to be anything but a little tedious and a lot predictable, the film’s first hour is possessed. Furious and marked by a sense of impending doom, Bruiser begins as exciting and risky an angst-ridden passion play as nearly anything produced in a yuppie-unrest genre that includes dissident films like Wolf, Fight Club, and American Psycho. It opens as a series of castrations for our milquetoast hero, Henry (Jason Flemyng)–humiliated at work, cheated by his friend, cuckolded by his wife (Leslie Hope)–until one day he wakes to find himself the protagonist in a Kafka parable. His face wiped clean of his identity, Henry becomes an amalgam of Ellison’s and Wells’s invisible men: ignored by society and ironically destroyed by the power bestowed upon him by his own anonymity.

The Shipping News (2001)

Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Drama, Theatrical

**/****
starring Kevin Spacey, Julianne Moore, Judi Dench, Scott Glenn
screenplay by Robert Nelson Jacobs, based on the novel by E. Annie Proulx
directed by Lasse Hallström

Shippingnewsby Walter Chaw In 1994, E. Annie Proulx was plucked from obscurity to win both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for The Shipping News, her second novel. The story of “large, white, stumbling along, going nowhere” Quoyle struck a nerve with its combination of lyricism and evocation of the provincial “foreignness” of Newfoundland, Canada. Personally, though I found Proulx’s prose intoxicating, the book’s final thirty pages seemed discordant and atonal to me–they betray the mood with a kind of desperate urge towards resolution that feels contrary to the quirky, steady melancholy Proulx had established. (It comes as little surprise that the end of the novel was written before the rest of it.)

In the Bedroom (2001)

Posted 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

Posted 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

Posted 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)

Posted 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).