Film Freak Central

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

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 barber shop while trying to sneak a peak at the PLAYBOYs under the mirror.

Psst!: FFC Interviews Christian Frei

September 30, 2002|While flipping through a magazine on a flight to Chicago in April 1997, Swiss director Christian Frei became acquainted with the work of photojournalist James Nachtwey, one of the most decorated artists in his field and the subject of Frei's remarkable documentary War Photographer, which debuts this week in Denver at the Argus Human Rights Festival. A fascinating, almost Lacanian separation of observer and observed indicates the piece, a film shot with a specially designed camera-mounted camera that provides an intimate point of view of the photographer at work. I had the pleasure of speaking with Mr. Frei this morning on the telephone to Switzerland as the director, fresh from a trip to Kabul researching his newest project, The Giant Buddhas, spends the next week and a half in his homeland.

Last Action Hero: FFC Interviews Steven Silver

September 29, 2002|At once a startling exposé on the horror of Rwanda's 1994 genocide and a stirring portrait of heroism, Steven Silver's fantastic documentary The Last Just Man is a balanced, provocative film that demonstrates a steady hand at the rudder and an educator's philosophy at the helm. It is wrenching and difficult to consider one's own life from the same perspective once watched--thus it fulfills the noblest aspirations of the medium: to move, to inspire, to edify, all so professionally composed that it manages to disguise its mechanism. Finding the right balance between history and irony, outrage and careful consideration, is a devilishly tricky thing, and Mr. Silver carries it off with a surplus of apparent ease. I was honoured to chat with Mr. Silver on the telephone from Toronto this morning preparatory to the Colorado debut of The Last Just Man at the Argus Human Rights Festival.

Skins (2002)

*/****
starring Eric Schweig, Graham Greene, Gary Farmer, Noah Watts
screenplay by Jennifer D. Lyne, based on the novel by Adrian C. Louis
directed by Chris Eyre

by Walter Chaw There is palpable desperation in Skins, director Chris Eyre's broad follow-up to his well-received Smoke Signals, but that desperation is not so much a reflection of the plight of the film's Native American characters as a result of Eyre's yen to expose the tragedy of the Native American experience. Skins is far from an effective exposé of the calamity of the Ogallala Sioux--it founders badly as a pulpit-pounding vanity piece, playing its cards loose and proselytizing. A picture this badly written, transparently directed, and--save a pair of decent performances in its two main roles--dreadfully acted is a tune best received and appreciated by a very specific choir and likely no other. While a nearly all-Native American cast and crew is certainly a refreshing accomplishment, one is left to wonder if the picture needed to be so much specifically for an all-Native American audience--and a limited one at that. Skins, in other words, is a pretty good rant, but a pretty bad movie.

In Conversation with Arthur Dong

September 27, 2002|The latest by a veteran and much-lauded documentary filmmaker based in the Los Angeles area, Arthur Dong's Family Fundamentals examines the toll that hatred and intolerance have taken on either side of the ideological divide separating fundamentally Christian families from their homosexual children. Following three families, Dong's picture is notable for its remarkable restraint--its amazing lack of stridency in the face of as insidious--and puzzling--a form of fanaticism as any in our cultural dystopia. Such objectivity graces all of Mr. Dong's late production--works such as the (twice-honoured at Sundance) documentary Licensed to Kill (in which murderers of gay men are interviewed in prison) and Outrage 69, which details, in part, the Stonewall riots of that incendiary summer of '69. I talked to Mr. Dong, a Chinese-American and an openly gay man raised in the Chinatown section of San Francisco, about getting started in film and growing up Chinese in the United States.

The Tuxedo (2002)

*/****
starring Jackie Chan, Jennifer Love Hewitt, Jason Isaacs, Debi Mazar
screenplay by Michael J. Wilson and Michael Leeson
directed by Kevin Donovan

by Walter Chaw Between watching Jennifer Love Hewitt's breasts consistently upstage her (and be commented upon constantly, besides) and Jackie Chan try hard to erase his legacy as the best physical comedian of the talkies, it's tempting to declare that The Tuxedo is a bankrupt entertainment and a remorseless time pit. Tempting and not entirely inaccurate, but in truth The Tuxedo is more than just cheerfully misogynistic (and most of Chan's films are, in one way or another, woman-hating), cartoonish, and even racist in a Green Hornet/Kato sort of way--The Tuxedo is a symptom of a far deeper concern involving the inability of the West to ever make proper use of hijacked foreign commodities or construct an action film anymore that doesn't resort to slapstick childishness and/or grotesque violence.

Igby Goes Down (2002)

**/****
starring Kieran Culkin, Susan Sarandon, Jeff Goldblum, Claire Danes
written and directed by Burr Steers

by Walter Chaw A battle between bug-eye theatre and dead-eye matinee, Igby Goes Down represents another post-Rushmore neo-Salinger debut (from hyphenate Burr Steers, nephew of Gore Vidal) that places an anti-establishment fish in a prep-school pond and surrounds him with a florid panoply of castrating mothers, Oedipal complexities, and evil schoolmates. In attempting to find new material in a genre that seems mostly played out (and played better by Wes Anderson and Alexander Payne), Igby Goes Down is another desperately overwritten Stygian coming-of-age melodrama à la another recent Kieran Culkin angst flick, The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys.

When There's No More Room in Britain: FFC Interviews "Shaun of the Dead" Filmmakers Edgar Wright, Simon Pegg, and Nick Frost

The makers of Shaun of the Dead on building a better zombie movie

September 26, 2002 | I met up with Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, and Edgar Wright, the creative team behind the Britcom "Spaced" and now the brilliant zombie rom-com Shaun of the Dead, right before I was scheduled to host a Q&A after a free screening of the film (comprised mainly of Romero fanatics and genre geeks) at Denver's Pavilions Theater. As the movie unspooled, the four of us retired to a Planet Hollywood where they were playing, of all things, an old, unknown FIXX song from the '80s. There was something pleasantly right about that, chatting with these blokes--who had made a half-assed record collection in Shaun of the Dead into an arsenal to irritate the legions of the shambling undead--as the detritus of our glossiest, Teflon age pounded the corners of one of the most soulless prefab eateries in the world.

Mickey's House of Villains (2001) - DVD

**½/**** Image A Sound A Extras C-
directed by VARIOUS

by Walter Chaw Just in time for Halloween, Mickey's House of Villains collects eight animated shorts spanning sixty-some years while illustrating the creative flatline that Disney has experienced from its heyday to well into its current decline. The Mouse demonstrates, too, a tiresome reliance of late on loosely framed anthologies for their direct-to-video releases and this one is no exception, as a gallery of Disney rogues collect in a nightclub to plot the demise of proprietors Mickey, Minnie, Donald, Goofy, et al.

Blade II (2002) [New Line Platinum Series] - DVD

***½/**** Image A+ Sound A+ Extras A+
starring Wesley Snipes, Kris Kristofferson, Ron Perlman, Luke Goss
screenplay by David S. Goyer
directed by Guillermo Del Toro

by Walter Chaw Detailing the uncomfortable alliance of Blade and his arch-enemy vampires against a mutant "crack-addict" form of vampire called "Reapers," Blade II introduces the hints of a twice-illicit romance between Blade (Wesley Snipes) and a succubus princess Nyssa (Leonor Varela) that blossoms after a meet-cute involving the threat of beheading and castration (awww), as well as an unusually pithy look at strange bedfellows in a mutually beneficial conflagration.

Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever (2002)

ZERO STARS/****
starring Antonio Banderas, Lucy Liu, Roger R. Cross, Ray Park
screenplay by Peter M. Lenkov and Alan B. McElroy
directed by Kaos

by Walter Chaw Walking away with the title of Most Incomprehensible Film of 2002 (walking away is also, incidentally, what you should do when presented with the prospect of seeing this film), Wych Kaosayananda's ponderously branded Ballistic: Ecks Vs. Sever is a collection of puzzling explosions married to a series of alternately stunning and hilarious line deliveries of, to be fair, unspeakable exposition. It hopes to obscure its awfulness with its volume or, failing that, to dress up its stupidity with backlit shots of a woman communing with a captive manatee.

The Château (2002)

**/****
starring Paul Rudd, Romany Malco, Didier Flamand, Sylvie Testud
written and directed by Jesse Peretz

by Walter Chaw A comedy of manners and the almighty malapropism, Jesse Peretz's grainy DV picture The Château could almost be a dogme95 flick. The picture relies on acres of improvisation and that slapdash feeling of the seat-of-the-pants production hanging from a Jonathan Edwards-ian string over the abyss of self-indulgence and clattering dreariness--and succeeds, when it succeeds, based entirely on the timing and brilliance of its cast and the extent to which we remain disarmed by the incongruity of the setting with the subject. When that feeling of surprise and delight fades (and it fades midway), The Château's rough edges begin to show.

Mostly Martha (2002)

Bella Martha
**½/****
starring Martina Gedeck, Maxime Foerste, Sergio Castellitto, August Zirner
written and directed by Sandra Nettelbeck

by Walter Chaw A Bavarian Big Night, Sandra Nettelbeck's Mostly Martha joins a romantic-comedy premise with a lost-child scenario, setting it all to a leisurely pace and framing it with an eye for the handsome. Its sightlines as crisp and clean as the dishes chef Martha creates in her immaculate kitchen, the picture is as relaxed a viewing experience as any this year--a dish without many exotic ingredients (like a good Salmon dish, the film tells us), but just enough substance to forgive the froth.

The Four Feathers (2002)

*½/****
starring Heath Ledger, Wes Bentley, Kate Hudson, Djimon Hounsou
screenplay by Michael Schiffer and Hossein Amini, based on the novel by A.E.W. Mason
directed by Shekhar Kapur

by Walter Chaw An old-fashioned epic of the type only Bombay attempts anymore, The Four Feathers (directed by a Bollywood ex-pat, natch: Shekhar Kapur)--the fifth film version of A.E.W. Mason's turn-of-the-century, Count of Monte Cristo-flavoured tale of valour, redemption, and derring-do--is indicated by a feather-lightness at its heart that undermines the sweeping, operatic pretensions of the piece. The picture just doesn't possess the kind of gravity that would hold together its broad strokes and gaping panoramas; all that remains is youngsters playing at dress-up, Kate Hudson cycling through both of her expressions, and one war set-piece that is very simply breathtaking while succumbing to nearly every "arrogant officer folds, religious soldier freaks, valiant soldier tragically wounded" cliché in the travel-worn war-movie book.

Kissing Jessica Stein (2002) - DVD

**½/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B+
starring Jennifer Westfeldt, Heather Juergensen, Tovah Feldshuh, Esther Wurmfeld
screenplay by Jennifer Westfeldt & Heather Juergensen
directed by Charles Herman-Wurmfeld

by Walter Chaw New Yorker Jessica Stein, referred to at one point in Kissing Jessica Stein as the Jewish Sandra Dee, is looking for love in the brack of the late-twentysomething dating pool. This means that we'll get a dating montage during which we sample the poor object choices available to the intrepid, sensitive, modern urban woman about town. A devout reader of Rilke (pegging her as both dreamy and pretentious, which also describes the film at hand), Jessica perks up when she hears a favourite passage quoted in a singles ad--only slightly tortured by the fact that the ad has been placed by another woman, Helen (Heather Juergensen). Helen runs a small art gallery, Jessica is an artist; Helen knows Rilke, Jennifer knows Rilke; and though Jennifer is almost pathologically incapable of falling headlong into lesbian sexuality, through the tender, Color Purple ministrations of Helen, she does come around in time.

Cory McAbee in Black and White: FFC Interviews Cory McAbee

September 18, 2002|Cory McAbee's The Billy Nayer Show is a brilliant aural assault of a band that just so happens to be involved in the process of filmmaking. The American Astronaut--written, directed, and starring McAbee--is an amalgamation of traditional 35mm cinematography, still photographs, paintings, and in one particularly disquieting scene, sculpture. In many ways, the film is the logical end to years of celluloid experimentation from McAbee, beginning with 1993's The Billy Nayer Show, a 150-second animated short film created with house paint and paper; continuing through 1994's twenty-minute Pixelvision-wrought The Man on the Moon, which details a cuckolded husband who takes his cat to the moon, where he broadcasts something of a radio show back to Earth; and reaching something of an anti-climactic pinnacle with 1995's thirty-minute The Ketchup and Mustard Man, essentially a discomfiting performance art concert (complete with a bizarre sculpted application) edited in such a way as to suggest that it's the fever dream of a demented mind (which may not, after all, be far off).

American Psycho 2 (2002) - DVD

American Psycho II: All American Girl
*/**** Image B- Sound B Extras B
starring Mila Kunis, Geraint Wyn Davies, William Shatner, Robin Dunne
screenplay by Alex Sanger and Karen Craig
directed by Morgan J. Freeman

by Walter Chaw That William Shatner is the best actor in Morgan J. Freeman's direct-to-video American Psycho 2 (a.k.a. American Psycho II: All American Girl), as easy a barnside to strike as almost any in popular culture, is one of those things that is taken with ironic mirth when it should be taken as a stern warning. Rachel (an overmatched Mila Kunis) as a little girl kills Patrick Bateman--the anti-hero of Mary Harron's sometimes-brilliant '80s exposé American Psycho--while he's in the act of murdering her babysitter. That Bateman is not actually a killer doesn't seem all that important to the makers of this picture, a moronic cross between Murder 101 and Heathers with none of the camp value of the former and none of the intelligence of either.

Three DVDs That Commemorate 9/11

by Walter Chaw Distilling raw viscera into heartbreaking stories at once the most dangerous thing that we as an American culture do and the thing at which we are the best, the first anniversary of the September 11^th attacks on the United States finds three documentaries on DVD to go with the around-the-clock soft-milking of the events on what seems like every channel on the dial. While the endless cascade of now-familiar images continues to enrage and shock, too often the intention of the coverage is to find the "human" stories in the midst of the suggested carnage; to tug the heartstrings (and, truly, what human cannot be moved by orphaned children, widowed wives, widowed husbands, progeny-less parents, and martyred heroes) is fine so long as there is an accompanying resolve.

TIFF '02: The Sweatbox

**/****
directed by John-Paul Davidson & Trudie Styler

by Bill Chambers The makers of The Sweatbox--Trudie Styler (Mrs. Sting) and documentarian John-Paul Davidson--were granted unprecedented access behind the Iron Curtain of Walt Disney during the production of The Emperor's New Groove because Styler's husband was the studio's pop-star composer du jour. The results may embarrass Disney by catching them free of spin a time or two, but the movie doesn't seem to want to demythologize the Mouse House as a matter of course. (When it was over, audience members at my press screening could be heard to ask if the film had been sanctioned by Disney; British indie Xingu Films is the real culprit.) Originally hired to write and perform a song score for an Incan tale spun from "The Prince and the Pauper" called Kingdom of the Sun, Sting miraculously doesn't jump ship when the picture undergoes a conceptual overhaul so severe it drives The Lion King's Roger Allers out of the director's chair (and likely onto a therapist's couch). The titular "sweatbox" is the nickname for Disney's private screening room, which is more pressure-cooker than movie theatre, since that's where rough cuts are shown to executives looking to justify their salaries; Sting doesn't actually step foot inside the sweatbox himself, and that sort of sums up the proceedings: It never really has anything to lose. The film is sufficiently interesting when Sting, a serious artist at the mercy of commercial whim, becomes disillusioned with the production as it changes hands and genres, but he adapts, and The Sweatbox reveals that its true aim is to celebrate a certain can-do spirit. All told, it's not much more controversial or edifying than your average DVD featurette, though don't be surprised if Disney suppresses it anyway. PROGRAM: REAL TO REEL

TIFF '02: Dolls

***/****
starring Miho Kanno, Hidetoshi Nishijima, Tatsuya Mihashi, Chieko Matsubara
written and directed by Takeshi Kitano

by Bill Chambers The Yakuza doesn't rear its head until well into Dolls, a gripping, fractured ensemble piece written and directed by that down-and-dirty poet of Japanese cinema, Takeshi Kitano. I must confess to feeling ill-equipped to discuss the mechanics of the film--it's storytelling that gives you the impression of being steeped in oral tradition, and all I can say is that Dolls is accessible to monkey-brained North American viewers like myself all the same. Beginning with an elaborate puppet show shot with verve and affection, the film proceeds to fabricate a human backstory for these Bunraku dolls; intersecting the tale of the "chained beggars," a tranquil young couple leashed together by an orange rope, are subplots involving a "famous lady" who shows up with two lunches at a park every Saturday, sitting in wait for the boyfriend who left her fifty years before, and a pop star disfigured in a car accident unwilling to greet fans for that reason, leading to sick ingenuity among her stalkers. The perils of love, or is it obsession? Unfortunately for Dolls, its least captivating fable is front and centre (even though that orange rope metaphorically ties the film together), and anyone capable of sitting through the last ten minutes of the film without getting restless is a Kitano apologist. Those major quibbles aside, the picture burrows its way under the skin. PROGRAM: VISIONS

Bruce and Don Caught in the Act of Filmmaking: FFC Interviews Bruce Campbell & Don Coscarelli

September 14, 2002|When I purchased a copy of Bruce Campbell's memoir If Chins Could Kill: Confessions of a B Movie Actor, the cashier at Indigo told me, "You know, he's signing copies of this across the street tomorrow."

TIFF '02: Femme Fatale

**/****
starring Antonio Banderas, Rebecca Romijn-Stamos, Peter Coyote, Gregg Henry
written and directed by Brian De Palma

by Bill Chambers Given the genre affiliation of its title and that it opens with a clip from Double Indemnity, Brian De Palma's Femme Fatale is unapologetically a film noir--which is not to say the picture has nothing to apologize for. Oh, for a pair of Armond White's De Palma goggles to beautify Femme Fatale, a flat, trés familiar, idly tongue-in-cheek caper starring Rebecca Romijn-Stamos in a role she's not dangerous enough to play, that of a bisexual American thief who switches places with her suicidal identical twin, a French woman of no blood relation. Tempted though I am to blow the plot beyond that vaguest of summaries, it'd be kind of grinchy to do so: although the twists and turns are not substantially rewarding, the element of surprise might be the only thing Femme Fatale has going for it. De Palma has served up a frozen dinner with portions of his Mission: Impossible, Obsession, Body Double, and Blow Out. Reheating isn't cooking, alas. PROGRAM: GALAS

Stealing Harvard (2002)

*½/****
starring Jason Lee, Tom Green, Leslie Mann, Dennis Farina
screenplay by Peter Tolan
directed by Bruce McCulloch

by Walter Chaw A virtual clone of Jake Kasdan's Orange County, Bruce McCulloch's Stealing Harvard takes the same premise (low-aspiring kids get a chance at a prestigious school), the same quirky sensibility, and the same characters (Jason Lee fills in for Colin Hanks, Tom Green for Jack Black, and Leslie Mann (who is also in Orange County) for Schuyler Fisk), and does considerably less with them. Taken as bookends to 2002 up to the awards season or as a peculiarly precise comparison of how minor differences in screenplay, director, and cast can subtly push a somewhat dreary premise into a vaguely good film or a vaguely bad one, Stealing Harvard at its heart remains a picture that never finds a way to balance the laconic style of Lee with the erratic jitter of Green. Its inability to find any sort of cohesiveness (the same malady afflicting Albert Brooks's and Brendan Fraser's The Scout) dooms Stealing Harvard to long stretches of irritating torpor punctuated by the occasional line delivery that reminds, mainly, that Megan Mullally (as a character straight out of Drop Dead Gorgeous) has impeccable comic timing.

TIFF '02: Assassination Tango

**½/****
starring Robert Duvall, Rubén Blades, Frank Gio, Katherine Micheaux Miller
written and directed by Robert Duvall

by Bill Chambers As dawdling and peculiar as Robert Duvall's previous directorial outing, The Apostle, Assassination Tango has many checks in its 'pro' column, not the least of which a lead performance from writer-director Duvall that finds common ground between his character's two modes: volatile sociopath and lovestruck romantic. Duvall plays John J., a ponytailed hitman sent to Buenos Aires on a high-stakes job for his potential to camouflage with the locals. Once settled in, he discovers he can't carry out his execution for another three months but must remain in the country, and so he takes up the tango--moreover, he takes up a flirtation with prominent tango dancer Manuela (Luciana Pedraza), increasingly perplexed the closer they get that this pretty lady half his age even gives him the time of day. Produced by Francis Ford Coppola, the film evokes The Godfather's Sicily section in John J.'s gradual assimilation into the local colour, and one is reminded of Gordon Willis's shadowy lighting scheme for the Corleones in a kitchen scene featuring John J. and his Argentinean hosts. Assassination Tango sheds its pretense of genre as it progresses, which is exciting to witness when we get to a blatantly improvised first date between Duvall and Pedraza at a café but not so much thereafter; the picture's loss of momentum presents too much opportunity to contemplate that very thing. PROGRAM: SPECIAL PRESENTATIONS

TIFF '02: Punch-Drunk Love

***½/****
starring Adam Sandler, Emily Watson, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Luis Guzmán
written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson

by Bill Chambers Punch-Drunk Love or, Un Redemption de Adam Sandler. Paul Thomas Anderson's latest film finds him at both his most experimental (dig those Scopitone interludes) and least windy--the tip-off is a running time of well under two hours. But first: Adam Sandler. When you hear Oscar buzz around a popular comedian, it generally means they've repressed everything that made them popular. (Jim Carrey in The Majestic, for example: Carrey may do a mean James Stewart impersonation, but he's no Jimmy himself.) Sandler has not been cast against type as the mercurial Barry in Punch-Drunk Love, he's simply been repurposed; after Barry's first sudden outburst, you'll find it difficult to imagine anyone else in the role, since Anderson needed someone who could go from 0-90 in a flash, a basset hound with a rabid streak. (Sandler's excellent, if that isn't clear.) Barry runs a wholesale plunger business but it's an unfulfilling life and he can do better--and so he tries, by simultaneously purchasing pudding in bulk to exploit a loophole in an Air Miles promotion; standing up to the penny-ante extortionists running a phone-sex line (run by Philip Seymour Hoffman, in a standout cameo-length role); and accepting an invitation to know the enigmatic, ethereal Lena Leonard (Emily Watson). Watson has never looked as luminous as she does through Punch-Drunk Love cinematographer Robert Elswit's lens, nor are there any cracks in her veneer that lead us to doubt her attraction to this wayward soul. A sequence in which she is in physical jeopardy is among the more difficult things to watch in movies, she's just so precious. The combination of Watson, the onset of autumn, and Anderson's totally idiosyncratic style left me more euphoric than I can suggest with words, and isn't that the foundation of so-called punch-drunk love? PROGRAM: SPECIAL PRESENTATIONS

TIFF '02: Ken Park

***½/****
starring Tiffany Limos, James Ransone, Stephen Jasso, James Bullard
screenplay by Harmony Korine
directed by Larry Clark & Ed Lachman

by Bill Chambers Making Happiness look like Dumbo, Ken Park does not push the envelope--Ken Park runs the envelope through a paper shredder, douses it in lighter fluid, and sets it aflame. And then urinates on the ashes. The latest from Larry Clark, the film was co-directed by veteran cinematographer and frequent Steven Soderbergh collaborator Ed Lachman, and if you're worried that this Zaphod Beeblebrox would result in the muting of Clark's voice, think again. If anything, we sense the pair playing a wicked game of one-upmanship. Just who or what is a Ken Park? He's the Big Chill figure uniting several mixed-up youths, however incidentally. The people in the photograph that Shawn (James Bullard) illuminates for us in opening narration are all acquaintances of "Crap Neck" ("Ken Park spelled backwards"), though they socialize together only rarely on-screen, for too busy is Shawn performing oral sex on a much older woman, Claude (Stephen Jasso) averting his physically abusive father (Wade Andrew Williams), Peaches (Tiffany Limos, far less irritating than she was in Clark's Teenage Caveman) averting her psychologically abusive pop (Julio Oscar Mechoso), and Tate (James Ransome) averting his grandparents, whose crime seems to be their elderliness. Each sequence in Ken Park--a sex-themed anthology, more or less--builds to an orgasm, but the climax becomes less an occasion of joy as the film wears on. Unlike Clark's Kids, Ken Park takes the pleasure out of intercourse without preaching against promiscuity. Rather, it's an anti-family picture that reaches an almost Reefer Madness level of hysteria towards parental figures in its dogged march of dysfunction. (Wait 'til you get a load of the last line of the picture.) Clark's voyeuristic grit and Lachman's candy-coated visual sense are an odd but happy marriage--it's the slickest kiddie-porno the former has made yet, almost functioning as the next step in Britney Spears. While Clark and Lachman will be taking heat for Ken Park's explicitness for years to come, their first priority is to exploit our collective squeamishness. With this one X-worthy, ultimately heartbreaking black comedy, they become Catherine Breillat's American soulmates. Bless ya, Larry. PROGRAM: SPECIAL PRESENTATIONS

TIFF '02: Max

***/****
starring John Cusack, Noah Taylor, Leelee Sobieski, Molly Parker
written and directed by Menno Meyjes

by Bill Chambers This portrait of an Angry Young Man posits Hitler as a starving artist. Living in squalor at an army outpost, feeling burned by the Treaty of Versailles, he befriends the fictional composite Max Rothman (John Cusack), the dashing, one-armed Jewish gentleman who runs the local art gallery--an abandoned warehouse with a leaky roof. (Working conditions are tough in postwar Munich, even for the upper class.) The result is an exercise in dramatic ironies, as well as the kind of thing you watch with your hands over your eyes but peeking between your fingers: Hitler (Noah Taylor) is determined to prove to Rothman that "I'm not an anti-Semite," partly because he's desperate for Max to exhibit his expressionistic pencil sketches. What I can't wrap my head around--and what I appreciate--about Max is its sticky conclusion, a misreading of which could easily find acclaimed screenwriter Menno Meyjes, making his directorial debut here, blaming his title character for the existence of the Third Reich. With said ending, Meyjes also follows Billy Wilder's final rule of screenwriting--"Don't hang around"--to striking effect. John Cusack is likeable as Max, but the role adapts to his tiresome persona; while the normally droll Taylor finds little humour in Hitler, playing him like the self-serious nerd with aspirations to student-body president. Max avoids historical smugness if not reams of somewhat dull exposition, though any film that can be said to feature a sequence in which teddy bears are fed to a meat grinder definitely brushes up against greatness. PROGRAM: SPECIAL PRESENTATIONS

Circus Vargas: FFC Interviews Peter Sollett

September 10, 2002|Peter Sollett had been judged by his cover in most of the interviews preceding mine at this year's Toronto International Film Festival. As I was packing up to leave his hotel room, he thanked me for not asking, to put it in no uncertain terms, What the hell's an upper-middle-class white guy doing make a movie about a Latino neighbourhood on the lower east side of Manhattan? The truth is, I couldn't care less--been pigeonholed a time or two myself based on appearances. The beauty of NYU film-school grad Sollett's feature-length writing and directing debut Raising Victor Vargas (an expansion of his like-themed short film Five Feet High and Rising) is that he could've set it anywhere. The milieu is all but incidental (he picked the film's central location based on the Latino community's enthusiastic response to an open casting call), though it does lend verisimilitude to the boy-meets-girl story basic. Call it apolitically political.

TIFF '02: Rabbit-Proof Fence

***/****
starring Everlyn Sampi, Tianna Sansbury, Laura Monaghan, David Gulpilil
screenplay by Christine Olsen, based on the book by Doris Pilkington
directed by Phillip Noyce

by Bill Chambers As much as I don't mind Phillip Noyce's Jack Ryan films, they failed to live up to the artistic promise held by Dead Calm, the claustrophobic Aussie thriller that brought both Noyce and star Nicole Kidman to the attention of U.S. audiences. After a decade or so of marginal filmmaking in Hollywood (and in the Hollywood style), Noyce has returned to his homeland--and reminds us that he can be a pretty effective filmmaker--with Rabbit-Proof Fence, a movie that will grab your attention immediately with Peter Gabriel's world-beat score. The picture covers the early part of a dark, sick, and too-long period in Australia's history, when the "half-caste" children of Aborigines were taken from their parents and placed in Catholic reformation camps in an attempt to discourage the mixing of white settlers with indigenous peoples and, ultimately, to phase out the non-pure breeds of either race. Three industrious little girls (Everlyn Sampi, Tianna Sansbury, and Laura Monaghan) escape one such institution, finding their way back to their mothers by following along the rabbit-proof fence that bisects the countryside--a 1200-mile journey they're committed to making on foot. Noyce is suddenly overreliant on the Dutch angle, but he maintains visual interest in the repetitious outback setting through some inspired compositions, and the human drama is innately compelling. In the tradition of early works by Peter Weir and Nicholas Roeg, Rabbit-Proof Fence no doubt lacks subtlety, probably as a by-product of Noyce's prolonged exposure to American cinema. It gets us politically riled-up, though, and that matters. Featuring a charismatic performance by "Crocodile" Dundee's David Gulpilil as a tracker. PROGRAM: SPECIAL PRESENTATIONS

TIFF '02: Auto Focus

**/****
starring Greg Kinnear, Willem Dafoe, Rita Wilson, Maria Bello
screenplay by Michael Gerbosi, based on The Murder of Bob Crane by Robert Graysmith
directed by Paul Schrader

by Bill Chambers I find it curious that, in my experience, TIFF-goers keep mishearing or misspeaking Auto Focus as "Out of Focus," what with either title applying to some degree. The former speaks to the self-centredness of the movie's subject, "Hogan's Heroes" star Bob Crane, the latter the shambles his life became, and aye, there's the rub: it's too easy to tie a bow on Auto Focus. Greg Kinnear is affable as Crane, who used his fame and fortune to get laid as often as possible, documenting it all with a newfangled technology called videotape supplied him by bottom-feeder John "Carpy" Carpenter (Willem Dafoe, sparkling as usual). In the latest issue of CREATIVE SCREENWRITING, script doctors Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski (self-appointed kings of the biopic as the writers of Ed Wood, The People vs. Larry Flynt, and Man on the Moon) touch on a difference in philosophy they had with Auto Focus director Paul Schrader that boils down to Schrader's controversial belief that addicts are born not made. By imposing this thinking on Michael Gerbosi's screenplay (adapted from the Robert Graysmith book The Murder of Bob Crane), Schrader imbues the early frames of Auto Focus with a sad inevitability: Chided by his highschool-sweetheart wife (Rita Wilson) for keeping a collection of skin mags in the garage, he makes excuses as desperate as those of an alcoholic, and we intuit that the celebrity he'll achieve through "Hogan's Heroes" will just enable his compulsions on a much grander scale. But once the fall from grace comes to pass, Auto Focus bears out as your typical junkie opera with tits instead of needles, right down to the proverbial pledges of going straight. Though sociopathic, Carpy emerges as the real tragic figure here--a wingman whose thirsts aren't quite so easily quenched. One pines for a glimpse of his life post-Crane as a parasite without a host, but it's prohibited by the picture's abrupt ending. Auto Focus, too, is only interested in the star. PROGRAM: SPECIAL PRESENTATIONS

TIFF '02: Love Liza

***½/****
starring Philip Seymour Hoffman, Kathy Bates, Jack Kehler, Sarah Koskoff
screenplay by Gordy Hoffman
directed by Todd Louiso

by Bill Chambers Love Liza is a potent movie about compulsive behaviour I'm growing fonder of by the hour; the film rises above some hoary tropes to become almost peerlessly unsettling. As a new widower who can't bring himself to read his wife's suicide note, Philip Seymour Hoffman once again dissolves before our eyes into a sweaty, ticcy mess stuck between sleep and awake. But here, without the reprieves you get from his strange behaviour in the ensemble pieces the actor seems to favour (Boogie Nights, Happiness), Hoffman's performance becomes truly confrontational--we're forced to do our best to not only tolerate him, but also empathize with him. Hoffman's Wilson Joel reduces himself to human pudding through a sudden, overwhelming addiction to huffing gasoline, an arduous habit the film treats comically at first by having Wilson blame his sulphuric odour on a model-airplane hobby, which of course requires him to go out and actually buy a model airplane when a co-worker introduces him to R/C enthusiast Denny (Jack Kehler, in an impossibly sincere performance). Before we know it, we've been snookered into a cautionary tale far more disquieting than, say, Requiem for a Dream, because the film acknowledges, in an almost Hitchcockian manner, the treacherousness of the mundane. It's unfortunate that first-time director Todd Louiso (he played the meek record store employee in High Fidelity) and writer Gordy Hoffman (Philip Seymour's older brother) resort to romanticizing the dead spouse to a Hollywood degree (not only is she impossibly beautiful, but our only substantial glimpse of her is a nude one), though it appears the aim of the film's poetic conclusion to undercut, nay, humanize her. Depressing but rewarding, the experience of Love Liza is a difficult one to encapsulate. Or shake. PROGRAM: CONTEMPORARY WORLD CINEMA

City by the Sea (2002)

*/****
starring Robert De Niro, Frances McDormand, James Franco, Eliza Dushku
screenplay by Ken Hixon, based on an article by Michael McAlary
directed by Michael Caton-Jones

by Walter Chaw Leaden with mock gravitas and embarrassing aspirations to the Shakespearean, Michael Caton-Jones's aggressively uninteresting City by the Sea is a purported true story (based on an article by Michael McAlary) that proves to be just another by-the-numbers police procedural crunched with an abortive middle-age romance and a stultifying Oedipal complication. Opening with archive newsreel footage of Long Beach as a place of fun and hope before juxtaposing the burnt-out crack-house dead wonderland of the Long Beach of just a couple of years ago (a conceit carried out with far more grace in Stacy Peralta's Dogtown and Z-Boys), the picture quickly reveals itself to be infatuated with a certain kind of dramatic irony in which the stock characters are unaware that they are clumsy allegorical pawns in a metaphorical landscape.

TIFF '02: The Good Thief

***/****
starring Nick Nolte, Tcheky Karyo, Said Taghmaoui, Nutsa Kukhianidze
written and directed by Neil Jordan

by Bill Chambers A loose remake of Jean-Pierre Melville's Bob le Flambeur (director Neil Jordan seems to have cast Tcheky Karyo for the way "Bob le flambeur" rolls off his tongue), The Good Thief is a minor-ish work from Jordan that benefits mightily, as most movies would, from Chris Menges's cinematography. Nolte inherits Roger Duchesne's role as Bob Montagne, an expert gambler and larcenist who in this film is hooked on heroin out of what appears to be sheer boredom. (A hilarious scene finds him stumbling on a Narcotics Anonymous meeting while fleeing pursuers and saying, "I'm Bob, and I'm an addict" in passing.) Drying out to come out of retirement, he agrees to lead a gang of novice thieves in the heist of a Monte Carlo casino; as in the original, even the police can't help but root for him. Nolte's role fits him like a glove: All late-middle-age wear-and-tear, he's not a man who is broken-down--he's someone who has lived. (The actor claims to have used heroin to get in touch with the role.) Melville's characters blossom under Jordan's revisionism and his plot has evolved aesthetically: here, Bob sets out to rob a casino not of its money but its paintings. There's always something to watch in The Good Thief, and that includes the ludicrously appealing Nutsa Kukhianidze as a 17-year-old prostitute Bob takes under his wing. It's a shame the only female presence in the film is such a shameless male-fantasy figure somewhat rag-dolled between powerful men, but Bob not taking advantage of her advances strikes a peculiarly chivalrous note that reflects well on the filmmakers. PROGRAM: GALAS

TIFF '02: Ararat

**/****
starring David Alpay, Charles Aznavour, Eric Bogosian, Brent Carver
written and directed by Atom Egoyan

by Bill Chambers Shuffling the picture's sequences like a deck of cards, Atom Egoyan's signature postmodernism smacks of a diversionary tactic this time in Ararat. A film about the Armenian Genocide was Egoyan's dream project, yet he maintains an intellectual distance throughout, transparently terrified of the ostensible subject matter. Drawing from his well-stocked stable of actors while tossing a few fresh faces into the mix, Egoyan casts wife Arsinée Khanjian as an art history critic named Ani, newcomer David Alpay as her son, Raffi, bombshell Marie-Josée Croze as her stepdaughter (who happens to be Raffi's lover), and Exotica vets Bruce Greenwood and Elias Koteas (in the film's most compelling performance) as actors in a docudrama being directed by Edward (Charles Aznavour) and produced by Rouben (Eric Bogosian), for which Ani is the technical advisor. (Also recycled from Egoyan's Exotica are issues with customs in a hollow framing story co-starring Christopher Plummer.) The movie-within-the-movie depicts the Turkish government's mass murder of its Armenian citizens, and unfortunately, this is our only window into that atrocity: through scenes we know to be thus in a project continually criticized by Ani for taking poetic license and looks mockingly artificial besides. The French Lieutenant's Woman gimmick perhaps says more about the stench of Oscar bait--with Greenwood's American doctor character the typical white saviour in a foreign land--than it does about anything else, and it reduces the victims of a holocaust to extras on Stage 9. More crucially, even the depiction of what is explicitly "faked" violence lacks the visceral shock of Schindler's List; politeness is no way to raise our ire or even send us to the library. (Welcome to Canada, I suppose.) Too timid to bring a sense of closure to an ugly chapter in twentieth-century history, Ararat finds Egoyan up to his old tricks with nothing up his sleeve. PROGRAM: GALAS

The Cat's Meow (2002) - DVD

**/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B+
starring Kirsten Dunst, Edward Herrmann, Eddie Izzard, Cary Elwes
screenplay by Steven Peros, based on his play
directed by Peter Bogdanovich

by Walter Chaw The Cat's Meow is an impossibly distant snapshot of The Roaring Twenties and the mysterious death of movie mogul Thomas Ince, possibly the victim of sinister shenanigans aboard William Randolph Hearst's yacht "Oneida" in November of 1924. Orson Welles groupie/scholar Peter Bogdanovich took a long time to do it, but he's finally provided his own broadside at publishing giant William Randolph Hearst by restoring a subplot naturally elided from Citizen Kane.

TIFF '02: Standing in the Shadows of Motown

*½/****
directed by Paul Justman

by Bill Chambers They had more number-one hits than Elvis Presley, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, and The Beach Boys combined. They were...The Funk Brothers? That reversal of expectations, which occurs in the opening voice-over of Paul Justman's Standing in the Shadows of Motown, is one of the few clever touches that actually works in this documentary about the rotating panel of studio musicians who helped turn Berry Gordy's Detroit record company into a hit factory. In the film's first reel, producer/drummer Steve Jordan offers that it wouldn't matter if "Deputy Dog" had sung the songs on Gordy's label, they were unassailable compositions to begin with, and Justman's approach suggests a determination to prove him right, since he peppers Standing in the Shadows of Motown with new renditions of such old favourites as "Do You Love Me? (Now That I Can Dance)" by the spastic likes of Bootsy Collins--in substitution of any substantial vintage performance footage at that. Needless to say, one does not expect to hear current guitar-wielding R&B-gospel sensation Ben Harper butcher The Temptations (after delivering the most banal explanation of soul music conceivable, one hastens to add) in a movie that purports to tell the untold story of Motown. (Granted, it does, but at what price? Even the topic of Vietnam--a war The Funk Brothers practically scored--steps aside for a Chaka Khan number.) In addition to the youth-pandering cameos, a handful of the stories told by the Brothers Funk are re-enacted in sitcom-quality vignettes; either Justman took the adage "show don't tell" to literal heart or he doesn't realize how sufficiently telegenic his title subjects (among them Eddie Willis and Joe Hunter) are when they're reminiscing. From the rave reviews it's received thus far, it appears there are suckers out there for the picture's brand of shrink-wrapped nostalgia. I'm not one of them. PROGRAM: SPECIAL PRESENTATIONS

Dinotopia (2002) - DVD

*/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring David Thewlis, Katie Carr, Jim Carter, Alice Krige
screenplay by Simon Moore, based on the Dinotopia books by James Gurney
directed by Marco Brambilla

by Walter Chaw Dinotopia is not so much a remake of Sid and Marty Krofft's schlock-classic television show "Land of the Lost" as it is "Land of the Lost" with computer graphics imaging. The miniseries, which originally aired on ABC last spring, comes complete with mystical power stones, lost cities, an unforeseen disaster leading to the outsider discovery of the primeval setting, mysterious old technologies, talking beasties, and, of course, dinosaurs. It's not fair to say that Dinotopia is unwatchable, because four hours later, I'm shuddering proof that it is, technically, watchable--better to say it's improbable that anyone over the mental age of five will finish this miserable marathon unless it's their sad occupation to do so.

TIFF '02 Raising Victor Vargas

***½/****
starring Victor Rasuk, Judy Marte, Melonie Diaz, Altagracia Guzman
written and directed by Peter Sollett

by Bill Chambers The remarkable Raising Victor Vargas (formerly Long Way Home) stars soon-to-be somebody Victor Rasuk as the titular Victor, a 17-year-old raising the ire of his strict abuela (Altagracia Guzman) during the long, hot New York summer by virtue of having outgrown her idle threats. As the film opens, Victor asks out the beautiful Judy (Judy Marte) at a public pool in a pre-emptive bid to salvage his reputation for getting it on with a neighbourhood lass nicknamed "Fat Donna." When Judy shoots him down, she only stokes his attraction, and he devotes his waking life to the pursuit of her affection, which gives Victor's grandmother another hollow reason to believe he's a bad influence on his younger brother and sister (Silvestre Rasuk and Krystal Rodriguez)--though the reason Judy's ultimately drawn to him is that he projects safety and security. For the first couple of minutes of Raising Victor Vargas, you're worried--or maybe titillated--that Larry Clark might have sparked an imitator, but even though I'm a devout Clark fan, I feel the premier Peeping Tom of American youth could learn a thing or two from Peter Sollett, who makes his feature-length writing and directing debut here. Like Clark, he ekes transparent performances lacking in narcissism from inexperienced talent, but Sollett's characters are a kindler, gentler breed; Victor's 'make love, not war' attitude (some contentious debates with his elders notwithstanding) has a revolutionary quality, perhaps, given its milieu (which Tim Orr photographs with the same sepia brilliance he brought to George Washington). At the risk of hyperbole, I treasured every single scene of this film, especially the tender exchanges between the Vargas boys (played by brothers in real life). Ending on a low-key but by no means emotionally reserved note that induces goosebumps, Raising Victor Vargas is filled with truthful observations that add up to more than just another entry in another year's coming-of-age sweepstakes--much, much more. A goddamn poem, actually, one that transcends age, race, and finally genre. PROGRAM: CONTEMPORARY WORLD CINEMA