Film Freak Central

The Dancer Upstairs (2002)

**/****
starring Javier Bardem, Laura Morante, Juan Diego Botto, Elvira Mínguez
screenplay by Nicholas Shakespeare, based on his novel
directed by John Malkovich

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Why do people insist on making movies as though all Latin-American countries are the same? How is it that they can get away with ignoring cultural differences and national identities as though they were nothing? The same first-world writers who set their scripts "somewhere in Latin America" would surely find an Ecuadorian or a Peruvian presumptuous for setting his or her own tale "somewhere in Western Europe." But these jokers have no guilt about herding millions and millions of people into the same leaky boat, and defining the stretch from Mexico to Argentina as one big, ugly banana republic. The results are usually not pretty, and The Dancer Upstairs is no exception to the rule.

Hot Docs '03: The Day I Will Never Forget

***½/****
directed by Kim Longinotto

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover The co-director of Divorce Iranian Style is back with this intelligent and powerful documentary on female genital mutilation in Kenya. Not only does it show, in a chilling centrepiece sequence, the immediate and excruciating pain it causes the young girls subjected to the practice (as well as the health consequences of dirty instruments and heavy stitching), but it also explores the cultural mechanisms that ensure that people, even women, will continue it. The ears burn at hearing tribal leaders offer their explanations of the logic in its implementation, as well as at the older women who encourage girls to not be "dirty" and submit. One gets a sense of how deeply entrenched is this particular rite of passage, and how difficult it is to get traditionalists to part with it. But the film's second purpose is to show the ways that it is being fought and the people who are fighting it. Various social outreach programs, including a school for runaway girls fleeing their parents' wishes, are explored, and we see the efforts of various medical professionals and social workers trying to wean people off the practice, culminating in a landmark court case where a girl sued and won the right not to be another victim. Longinotto's camera records all of this without punctuation and quotation marks, letting her subjects' own words hang them and letting the actions of individuals speak for themselves, resulting in a provocative film of great effect.

Hot Docs '03: Rockets Redglare!

***½/****
directed by Luis Fernandez de la Reguera

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover The lively but tragic saga of Michael Morra, a.k.a. Rockets Redglare, is explored in this somewhat crude but extremely moving documentary. Morra/Redglare lived a life that would be ennobled by the word "marginal": he was born a heroin-addicted baby, raised in grinding poverty, all but witnessed the murder of his mother, and bounced from needle to rehab to needle again in a titanic losing battle with addiction. But he was also an extremely creative individual, and rose in the '80s to become a character actor, comedian, and performance artist of some note. Famous friends (Jim Jarmusch, Steve Buscemi, Matt Dillon, Willem Dafoe) gather to sing his praises as both performer and friend, while his own drawling testimony on his life is offered as evidence of who he was. There's nothing particularly radical about director Luis Fernandez de la Reguera's interviews-clips-more interviews approach, but his subject is so fascinating and so full of surprises that you're not likely to notice. Redglare is riveting not only because of his chequered past, but as a defiant survivor and an extroverted bon vivant. His jokes will make you want to cry out of what informed them, his outrageous misfortunes will make you laugh at their slapstick enormity, and at the abrupt, sad end of both film and subject, you feel a huge sorrow for this man's passing.

Hot Docs '03: And Along Came a Spider

Va ankaboot amad
***/****
directed by Maziar Bahari

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover You'd think it would be clear-cut: a serial killer who murders 16 prostitutes should be treated with a maximum of scorn. But that's not how it happened in Iran, where the notorious Saeed Hanei dispatched members of society who were already believed to have been the scum of the earth. The sadistic "spider-killer," already high on killing from the Iran-Iraq war, believed that he was doing God's work, and interviews with his family reveal that they are proud that their son/husband/father was taking a stand on those who would corrupt the earth. Public opinion is hardly clear-cut, as revealed by the ambivalence of his co-workers in condemning his actions and by the approval of hardliners who applaud him. As a film about the killings, And Along Came a Spider does a fairly good job, exploring the messed-up religious upbringing that shaped Hanei's consciousness (as revealed through remorseless interviews with his family) and showing the impact of his actions by talking to the children of one of the victims. As a document of Iranian society's response, it's not quite as effective, relying on Hanei's co-workers and brief mentions in the press. But there's enough evidence here to indict at least a particular fundamentalist state of mind, and the film hammers the nails into its moral coffin with some skill.

Hot Docs '03: Stupidity

½*/****
directed by Albert Nerenberg

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Words fail me in describing this travesty, a hypocritical assault on the senses which traffics in the very imagery it pretends to deplore and leaves you drained, battered, and completely demoralized. Ostensibly, it's about the media events and herd behaviours that conspire to keep the stupid oppressed and the even dumber in power, but despite the presence of Noam Chomsky and scattered other intellectuals, Stupidity is an exercise in smug superiority that does nothing to fight the powers that be. It's more interested in looking smarter than the crowd instead of fighting for their rights, and to that end repeats ad nauseam the very images (Adam Sandler movies, Jackass stunts, fraternity-style gross-outs) that it should be opposing. Flashed over and over at Mach speed, these pictures simply grind you down, making you feel hopeless instead of angry, or simply angry with the twit who concocted the whole mess. The film gets half a star for threatening to have interesting content about 20 minutes in, when there's a potted history of intelligence testing showing the tenuous nature of the whole concept of intelligence and how the concept can be bent to a variety of whims. But then it's back to burning phone booths and people defecating on mattresses, and some disconnected conventional wisdom on how dumb it is to be stupid, or stupid to be dumb, and why do smart people do dumb things... Take it from me: you'd be stupid to spend time watching it.

Hot Docs '03: Kim's Story (1997)

**½/****
directed by Shelley Saywell

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover This is the story of Kim Phuc, who was napalmed during the Vietnam War and became the subject of an infamous photo that shocked the world. Her life is full enough of incident: Having become a symbol of America's brutality during the war, she was turned into a propaganda instrument by the Vietnamese government and subsequently defected to the west. She remains, however, a committed pacifist and continues to build bridges between herself and veterans--including, in the film's biggest surprise, the pilot who dropped the napalm on her. Alas, the crew that brings her to the screen gets only middling marks. I suppose the film is a passable introduction to Kim Phuc's life, but it lacks the force that a truly creative filmmaker would have brought to it; Shelley Saywell is adept at rattling off the facts but isn't very good at giving them resonance. She's made sort of an EPK for peace, in which we see Kim attend various pacifist and veterans' events but don't get much of a sense for her personality and her beliefs post-Vietnam. It's a skim across her life and actions as opposed to an in-depth study, and it does the job but not much more.

Hot Docs '03: How High is the Mountain + How Deep is the Ocean

HOW HIGH IS THE MOUNTAIN
***/****
directed by Shiang-Chu Tang

HOW DEEP IS THE OCEAN
***½/****
directed by Shiang-Chu Tang

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover These are two tangentially related films by the Taiwanese director Shiang-Chu Tang, and they're like nothing else in the Hot Docs festival. They're neither as overly schematic as so many socially-minded documentaries nor overly aestheticized like the school of Errol Morris. In fact, those poles don't really apply to these films, which record social processes through the examples of individuals and which have a formal beauty to them that is totally non-coercive. Watching them, you don't feel forced into taking a stance--you are provided with the stuff of peoples' lives to draw your own conclusions as to how they ended up the way they did.

Love Liza (2002) - DVD

***½/**** Image B Sound A- Commentary B+
starring Philip Seymour Hoffman, Kathy Bates, Jack Kehler, Sarah Koskoff
screenplay by Gordy Hoffman
directed by Todd Louiso

by Walter Chaw Philip Seymour Hoffman is Dante and the slings and arrows of mendacity are his Virgil, chasing him through the inferno of his day to day. A remarkable actor at his frequent best when deserted by a lover, Hoffman in Love Liza is Wilson Joel, a man whose wife has just killed herself and left a sealed letter behind. It becomes his albatross, toted around unexamined, as Wilson descends on a spiral of juvenile addiction (gasoline huffing) and avoidance. He sleeps on the floor outside his bedroom and does his best to dodge his mother-in-law (Kathy Bates)--hiding the sharp odour of his addiction behind the lie of becoming a radio-controlled airplane pilot.

Hot Docs '03: Generation of Hate

**/****
directed by Shelley Saywell

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover In Generation of Hate, Shelley Saywell goes to Iraq and doesn't come back with much you didn't already know. Apparently, the Iraqi people hate America for constantly attacking them and aren't allowed to speak about Saddam's oppression--shocker! Sure, it can't hurt to hear that one more time, but Saywell's primitive technique doesn't give the subject much urgency beyond the common liberal "tsk." Lacking in structure and confused in focus, the video ricochets from subject to subject, taking sound bites here and there and imposing frightfully obvious voice-overs that often repeat themselves. The Iraqi people deserve better than this clumsy and perfunctory gloss over their national agony.

Hot Docs '03: The Lost Boys (2002)

**/****
directed by Clive Gordon

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Can a film have a wealth of new information and still be a failure? If the film is Clive Gordon's The Lost Boys, the answer is an unfortunate "yes." Dealing with the ultimate fate of some of the "lost boys" of the Sudan, who fled to northern Kenya when they were attacked by the Arab army, it shows a handful of the 3,500 who were selected for resettling in America. On the plus side, it shows a process that rarely is seen on film, that of people struggling to adjust to a new culture: The "boys" have to adjust to the Byzantine ways of their new home and suffer the indignity of menial "entry-level" jobs at the bottom of the American dream. But the film never really investigates the opinions of its subjects. Subtly, it objectifies them, rarely asking them directly how they feel, instead simply staring at them as they mutely deal with the various helpers and the ridiculous harshness of American culture. The film cries out for some interviews where the young men can vent some steam, or at least give a personal viewpoint as to how things are going. It's simply not enough to offer admittedly impressive compositions and an incidental classical greatest-hits score as proper insight into how someone is thinking, and so The Lost Boys suppresses as much as it reveals.

Mr. Intense: FFC Interviews James Foley

April 27, 2003|Discovered at a student party by director Hal Ashby, one of the more tragic figures of the American New Wave of the '70s, James Foley is at his best when detailing the brash social textures of the United States and the intricacies of male relationships (and, by extension, male relationships arrayed around dangerous women) in his canny shrines to the film noir genre. His new film Confidence returns Foley to the mean streets of his Glengarry Glen Ross in a caper film that defies the odds by not only being an entertaining and cohesive heist flick (after the high-profile flops that were David Mamet's Heist and Frank Oz's The Score), but also by finding a role for the aggressively unlikable Ed Burns that actually suits him. Foley's best film, however, remains the brilliant After Dark, My Sweet--the only film, curiously, that he's ever written, and the only screen adaptation of Jim Thompson that rings with the lewd authenticity of a Thompson novel.

Hot Docs '03: Algeria: The Nameless War

***½/****
directed by Agneiska Lukasiak

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Director Agneiska Lukasiak got more than she bargained for when she went to shoot in Algeria and fell in love with one of its countrymen, Habib. Not only was she in a country racked by civil conflict, she also had to face up to her culture shock at the country's radically different approaches to love. Despite her amour fou for Habib, his familial obligations make it impossible for her to marry without destroying his family's means of support. As she ponders her unhappy love, she wanders around Algiers illegally taping war zones, her Algerian friends all the while fearing for her as well as for their own lives. This is a powerhouse documentary, made from the inside out and asking some hard questions about cross-cultural living. It's horrified at the misogyny and homophobia of mainstream Algerian life, appalled at the poor excuse for education her friends there receive, and disturbed by the intimidation that exists at every level of society. But through it all, Lukasiak maintains her love for Habib, wanting to bring him back to her native Sweden--until she is cruelly disappointed in the final reel. The film is brutal, searching, and hard to forget.

Hot Docs '03: Juchitan, Queer Paradise

Juchitán de las locas
**½/****
directed by Patricio Henriquez

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover This documentary has a honey of a subject: a Mexican Zapotec town with a high tolerance for homosexuality. Unfortunately, it blows it when it takes a personal angle that obscures the town's inner workings. At first, the film gets your hopes up by showing Juchitan's relaxed nature--gays and the transgendered are treated with respect, women are given a high rank in society, and the Zapotec language is still spoken in a country where native languages are quickly disappearing. But Juchitan quickly shifts gears to follow several residents of the town, all of whom are male and none of whom give a real sense of how Juchitan society works. Some of these interview subjects are fitfully interesting. There seems to be little agreement on how one should lead one's sexual life--a professor seems to think that monogamy is sexual servitude, while a beautician thinks it's simply a matter of respect. And there is some reflection on the death of a local celebrity at the hands of homophobes, as well as the Catholic church's mishandling of the situation. But one doesn't really get a sense of the society that surrounds them, and while it looks like it might be a great place to raise children, it's in dire need of some socio-historical fleshing-out.

Hot Docs '03: Strip Club DJs

***/****
directed by Derrick Beckles

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover One approaches a film on this topic with a sense of humour: surely it couldn't have anything other than good ribald laughs. But as Strip Club DJs inches ever closer to its conclusion, it becomes more and more disturbing, until you are choked-up with a combination of contempt and pity for those who would play the tunes at your local peeler bar. It turns out that the DJ is the nerve centre for the whole operation: not only must he spin the discs, he must also arrange who has the rights to certain songs, quell unrest amongst dancers, and act as security guard to ensure the VIP room hasn't turned into a bawdy house--unless, of course, he's being tipped to look the other way. But the film is more than the nuts-and-bolts of the operation. The interview subjects are uniformly jaded: they've seen too many disgusting goings-on (and maybe participated in them) to view the job as anything other than something to get away from, and their mixed emotions are palpable by film's end. The environment, with its easy sex and plentiful drugs, is conducive to all manner of self-destructive behaviour; one DJ has acquired a coke habit that's already given him a heart attack. As such, it's guaranteed to make you look askance at the very idea of a strip club (assuming you don't already).

Hot Docs '03: My Flesh and Blood

***½/****
directed by Jonathan Karsh

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Susan Tom more or less adopts special-needs children; this is her story, and it's both gripping and moving. A woman described by her mother as trying to fill her own "loneliness," Tom has taken on the children who are too much for other people--there are kids missing limbs, who have been horribly burned, who have cancer and cystic fibrosis, and one hyperactive boy with a terrible mean streak. The film takes stock of a year with Tom and her family, and considers what it takes to care for children who demand so much attention. Tom comes off as heroic in her efforts: she rarely has time for herself, and she seems to have infinite wells of love for the kids who take so much out of her (one heartbreaking scene has her scrolling through Internet personal ads, knowing that there's no one who would take her and her huge family). It's not an entirely flattering portrait: While it comes down squarely on the side of Tom being good, it notes her emotional need to live as she does and records a nasty confrontation between her and her one "normal" child who feels neglected. But as the film considers what it takes to do the things she does, it shows how often people are allowed to slip through the cracks of care. One comes out of the film both amazed at Tom's abilities and angry that so many people would abandon their children for being "too much."

Hot Docs '03: Bruno S. - Estrangement is Death

Bruno S. - Die Fremde ist der Tod
***/****
directed by Miron Zownir

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover At the Cannes premiere of one of his films, Werner Herzog discovery Bruno S. decided to play his accordion outside the theatre; unfortunately, no one knew how to take this, and the police were called in to arrest him. That pretty much sums up the life of Bruno S., who, after two films with Herzog, faded into obscurity, never to catch the public eye again. But that wasn't the only rejection in his life: Not only was he the victim of neglectful parents, but his diagnosis of insanity when he was very young led to his being experimented on by the Nazis. This, naturally, has embittered Bruno, and in this film he expounds on the nature of his estrangement and rails against the unfairness that separates the haves from the have-nots. The documentary that surrounds him isn't always up to the challenge. It seems a little too Herzogian in its use of Bruno as a found object; one gets the feeling--especially from the intense man who does the interviewing--that it collects him as something like the "outsider art" he produces for a gallery. Nevertheless, it gives full reign to Bruno's dissatisfaction over his isolated life, and offers bitter testimony from someone who has been betrayed by the "normal" members of society. One wonders if the filmmakers are too much a part of that society, but there's no denying that Bruno shines through them and passionately states his case.

The Hot Chick (2002) - DVD

ZERO STARS/**** Image A Sound B+ Extras B-
starring Rob Schneider, Rachel McAdams, Anna Faris, Andrew Keegan
screenplay by Tom Brady & Rob Schneider
directed by Tom Brady

by Walter Chaw What to think of a variation on Teen Wolf wherein the victim of the lycanthropic puberty metaphor is a young girl who turns into Rob Schneider? What to make of a film that wrests its central conceit of enchanted jewellery from the long-putrefied grasp of Mannequin 2? And what to make of a film released in the year 2002 that is this misogynistic, homophobic, racist, and cruel to the obese? Rather than postulate that our culture has regressed to the hale cultural morass of the mid-1980s, it's doubtless more fruitful to examine the ways in which film is becoming as self-reflexive, meta-critical, and free of irony as television.

It Runs in the Family (2003)

ZERO STARS/****
starring Michael Douglas, Kirk Douglas, Cameron Douglas, Diana Douglas
screenplay by Jesse Wigutow
directed by Fred Schepisi

by Walter Chaw Appalling at its best, Fred Schepisi's It Runs in the Family is a congenital disaster best described as an interminable episode of "Old People Say the Darndest Things". Between this and Last Orders, Aussie director Schepisi seems to desire cornering the market on gravid meditations on decrepitude and death. He finds himself here a far cry from his Seventies output (The Devil's Playground, The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith), which, much like countryman Bruce Beresford's early work, announced an important filmmaker who has, in the intervening years, become a hired hand and a coin of considerably devalued worth. It Runs in the Family is so relentlessly mawkish that it does give insight into the state of mind that allows condescension to become comfortable status quo by habitually marginalizing the elderly and demented as adorable dispensers of quaint homilies and spunky vulgarity.

Hot Docs '03: Wheel of Time

*½/****
directed by Werner Herzog

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover I was initially bewildered by the substitution of this film for the cancelled Bus 174--how could a film by Werner Herzog, one of the big names of the German New Wave, have not been initially selected for a festival that could use the publicity? As it turns out, there is a reason: Despite some unusually good intentions (for Herzog, anyway), his documentary is disorganized and lacking in rigour. The film plays as sort of What I Did On My Spiritual Vacation, with Herzog visiting various Buddhist holy events as people pray, listen to the Dalai Lama, make sand mandalas, and go on gruelling holy pilgrimages. All the while, he explains in the most rudimentary fashion what's going on, and features a couple of wholly uninformative interviews with the Dalai Lama himself. Another filmmaker would have tried to evoke the spiritual journey of these people, but Herzog, strangely, isn't that creative this time out, and simply stands on the margins and films. The results are probably old news to the committed Buddhist, and definitely tedious to the uninitiated.

Hot Docs '03: Chicken Ranch (1982)

***/****
directed by Nick Broomfield and Sandi Sissel

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover This is the story of a Nevada brothel--the transplanted inspiration for The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas--and it's not a particularly happy one. On the surface, everything runs like a well-oiled machine: the girls troop out for selection by the customers, they negotiate the price with the customers, and the proprietor beams for journalists about what a public service he's providing. But, at least according to this film, the job of being a prostitute is an aggravating one, and as the women complain about inconsiderate tricks and fears of becoming "hard," it's clear that there's a dark undercurrent to the goings-on at the ranch. Chicken Ranch was made before director Nick Broomfield had invented his self-inserting approach to documentary, and compared to the films that made him famous, its approach is positively obsequious. The film crew cannot be heard at any time, and they pretty much stay out of the way of the women as they complain to and support one another. Nevertheless, the matter of documentary ethics comes up when one girl is unceremoniously fired: As the owner threatens to sue the filmmakers for showing what he doesn't want shown, the picture becomes as much about the process of documentary as Broomfield's other films. Maybe nothing you didn't already know, but it's disturbing enough to have it rubbed in your face.

Hot Docs '03: Echelon: The Secret Power

Échelon, le pouvoir secret
***/****
directed by David Korn-Brzoza

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover This is a sometimes gripping, sometimes irritating film about international espionage and those who direct it. An information-gathering organization with tentacles in the US, the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, "Echelon" long ago abandoned the post-WWII directives that created it and started gathering intelligence on private citizens through highly questionable means. Now that the electronic and information ages are upon us, Echelon, the NSA, and various satellite organizations can listen in on your telephone calls and whatever other electronic transmissions you might be making; the Anglo-American coalition uses this information not only to fight whatever aggressors might lurk in other countries but also to get an illegal economic edge on other countries. This is all disturbing stuff, but director David Korn-Brzoza doesn't seem to trust it. Instead of letting the facts and his interview subjects speak for themselves, he creates a sophisticated song-and-dance out of split screens, multiple camera positions, and assorted visual editorials that distract from the main event. Besides interfering with our ability to grasp the material, this has the counter-productive effect of getting us on a masochistic high, crushing us with ominous aestheticism when it ought to be rousing us to action. Nevertheless, the whole routine is expertly made, and the subject itself is so important that it can be forgiven an overzealous director.

Hot Docs '03 - A Taste of This Year's Hot Docs Festival

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover The documentary is a form fraught with danger. Doing double-duty as fact and cinema, it can often sell out the former to the latter; faced with the necessity of pleasing an audience as well as informing it, it can take shortcuts, highlight sensationalistic details, and succumb to an artificial pace in the attempt to boil down its information and create exciting drama. An innocent audience can be moved without truly getting a grasp on the film's subject, and can leave with the impression of having learned something while having merely scratched the surface. But when a documentary does its job (that is, when it teaches us about the world in which we live with eloquence and urgency), it justifies the form and makes you forget about all of its less noble brethren.

Darkwolf (2003) - DVD

Dark Wolf
ZERO STARS/**** Image B Sound B- Extras C
starring Samaire Armstrong, Ryan Alosio, Andrea Bogart, Jaime Bergman
screenplay by Geoffrey Alan Holliday
directed by Richard Friedman

by Walter Chaw Something to do with hybrid werewolves and full-breed werewolves and how one hybrid biker werewolf is interested in mating with the last full-bred matriarch bitch in order to preserve the line of the pure-blood werewolves, the direct-to-video DarkWolf at least has the decency to open in a strip club and continue into a fairly decent gore set-piece before launching into its incomprehensible lore. Tied to the creatures of the id-horror subgenre (the best example of which is probably Neil Jordan's psychosexual A Company of Wolves), a recent glut of lycanthropic fare (Ginger Snaps, Dog Soldiers) holds a curious candle to the idea that, despite Arab belief to the contrary, Western civilization seems to be regressing into a puritanical sexual hysteria that proves fertile ground for horror films about the cycle of sexual repression/aggression. It's possible, also, that guys (and dolls) in fur suits are just cool again.

The Straight Shooter: FFC Interviews George Hickenlooper

April 20, 2003|There at the beginnings of Billy Bob Thornton and Naomi Watts, after the success of 2002's The Man from Elysian Fields, it may finally be director George Hickenlooper's turn in the spotlight. In the mountain resort for the twelfth annual Aspen Shortsfest, I scouted out a place in the deserted lobby/bar area; Hickenlooper, suffering from the onset of a head cold, was down in a flash.

A skilled documentarian and interviewer, Hickenlooper is a friendly presence, cutting an unassuming swath through the impossibly nice lobby of Aspen's Hotel St. Regis. Starting his career after Yale with an internship under Roger Corman, the filmmaker has worked in several genres, earning his first major break with the exceptional documentary Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse. What impresses most about Mr. Hickenlooper, however, is his knowledge of film history and respect for the auteur theory--in his presentation as a part of the fest's "Masterworks" programming, he not only clarified what Bogdanovich defined to him as the two philosophies of editing (mise-en-scène vs. montage), but also made mention of Cahiers du cinema, Dziga Vertov, and the politics of shot selection that can actually save a director's vision from meddling studio interests.

The Wild Thornberrys Movie (2002) - DVD

The Wild Thornberrys
***/**** Image A Sound A Extras D
screenplay by Kate Boutilier
directed by Jeff McGrath and Cathy Malkasian

by Walter Chaw Preaching its message of courage, family, and self-confidence with grace and a bare minimum of soapbox grandstanding and mawkish sentimentality, The Wild Thornberrys Movie is a picture of warmth and imagination. Its globe-trotting wildlife-show family, the titular Thornberrys, have as their most conspicuous member gawky Eliza (voiced by Lacey Chabert), a freckled, bespectacled, orthodontically challenged little girl who earns the power to communicate with animals through an act of kindness. The locating of a traditionally unattractive young female as the superhero at the centre of an adventure serial (the picture is based on a Nickelodeon series) is so rare an idea in American animation that its appearance here makes for one of the more bracing, genuinely exciting creations of the modern popular culture. Its mainstay status in Chinese martial arts and Japanese anime films remains a gulf that U.S. culture, in its occasional simple-mindedness, remains far from bridging.

Marion Bridge (2003)

*/****
starring Molly Parker, Rebecca Jenkins, Stacy Smith, Marguerite McNeil
screenplay by Daniel MacIvor, based on his play
directed by Wiebke von Carolsfeld

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover I'd like to go along with the chorus of approval that has greeted Marion Bridge, but the sad truth is that it nearly bored me into an early grave. Armed only with a series of family-drama clichés and a nuance-free visual style, the experience is roughly akin to staring into a fluorescent lamp for 90 minutes and is just as retina-dulling. If this is, as last year's Toronto International Film Festival jury claimed, the best Canadian first-feature of 2002, it paints a chilly portrait of what the also-rans were like, as well as the state of film culture here in the Great White North.

Levity (2003)

*½/****
starring Billy Bob Thornton, Morgan Freeman, Holly Hunter, Kirsten Dunst
written and directed by Ed Solomon

by Walter Chaw Sort of Frank Capra without the subtlety, Levity is a relentlessly moralizing film that finds Billy Bob Thornton in his second role (Monster's Ball) in three years as a man responsible for another man's death who proceeds to woo a close relation of said victim as a means of atonement. The greatest irony of a film about forgiveness is that it's destined to inspire the opposite in most viewers, but with a professionally underachieving cast of good actors (Morgan Freeman is now into his eighth year of not trying very hard), a master cinematographer (Roger Deakins), and the sort of story that attracts said actors like atoning moths to the mainstream arthouse flame, the picture is not altogether useless.

Young Guns (1988) [Special Edition] - DVD

*/**** Image C+ Sound B Extras B-
starring Emilio Estevez, Kiefer Sutherland, Lou Diamond Phillips, Charlie Sheen
screenplay by John Fusco
directed by Christopher Cain

by Bill Chambers I know a thing or two about Billy the Kid, having written a thoroughly researched, if thoroughly awful, 240-page screenplay about him. It was just after finishing this magnum opus that I discovered Sam Peckinpah's Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid and realized that everything I'd tried to say had already been said much more poetically, thus exiling "For What It's Worth: The Life of Billy the Kid" permanently to the bottom drawer. But at the time, I only wanted to outdo Young Guns and Young Guns II--a mission more challenging than you might think, given the films' infamy as second-generation Brat Pack fodder. John Fusco's scripts for both pictures are historically accurate, action-packed, and have a good ear for the vernacular of not only the Old West, but also the western genre. Yet the original Young Guns, especially, is miscast, directed by Christopher Cain (The Principal) like an episode of "Best of the West", and fails to either humanize Billy the Kid or justify his lore. As played by Emilio Estevez, you get the feeling that Billy's unhinged because he's running low on mousse.

Stanley: Hop to It (2003) + Stanley: Spring Fever (2003) - DVDs

Image B+ Sound B+ Extras B-

by Jarrod Chambers My first encounter with "Stanley" was at Walt Disney World in Orlando, at the Disney-MGM Studios. There is a show combining live actors and puppets at Playhouse Disney, and Stanley and his goldfish Dennis were among the attractions. When they announced that they were going to look up gorillas in The Great Big Book of Everything, every kid in the place leaped to their feet and sang along with the Great Big Book of Everything song. I quickly realized that I was one of the few who had not heard of "Stanley".

A Mighty Wind (2003)

**½/****
starring Christopher Guest, Eugene Levy, Michael McKean, Bob Balaban
screenplay by Christopher Guest & Eugene Levy
directed by Christopher Guest

by Walter Chaw Though Waiting for Guffman remains the best of the three Christopher Guest-directed improv-sketch mockumentaries, A Mighty Wind finds Guest's troupe returning somewhat to form after the disappointing and mean-spirited dog show spoof Best in Show. Following the efforts of grieving son Jonathan Steinbloom (Bob Balaban) to reunite the folk acts represented by his late father Irving for a tribute concert to be broadcast on public television, the picture is essentially an outline fleshed-out through a bunch of improvisations tied loosely together by largely disconnected vignettes. Free, for the most part, of the cheap shots of Best in Show, A Mighty Wind's failures are again a cartoonish turn by Eugene Levy and a healthy dose of sentiment that goes down suspiciously like arrogance. If there's a unifying thread to Guest et al's forays into parody (including Rob Reiner's directorial debut This is Spinal Tap), it's that faint, pervasive whiff of superiority... And the atmosphere appears to be getting thicker.

Biggie & Tupac (2002) - DVD

***/**** Image B- Sound B Extras B+
directed by Nick Broomfield

by Bill Chambers A few days ago in THE HOT BUTTON, Dave Poland distinguished Nick Broomfield from his peers in the documentary field better--or, at least, more succinctly--than I've ever seen it done: "[Broomfield] creates an atmosphere in which you connect emotionally not with the characters in the film, but with his plight in trying to get his film made." That's certainly true of Broomfield's Biggie & Tupac, in which almost every sequence carries the subtext of peril: A bona fide Dante in headphones, Broomfield latches onto a Virgil (ex-police officer Russell Poole) who escorts him, more or less, through circles of Hell (the gang-marked territories of Compton, the rap-music industry, and finally prison). An alarming number of the director's interviews in Biggie & Tupac begin with a summary of attempts on the subject's life, and in a deleted scenes section on the DVD, we see that Broomfield tried and failed to chat with the owner of L.A.'s notorious "Last Resort," a bar at which gangbangers receive an ace-of-spades merit badge for their first killshot. A red ace means a flesh wound; a black ace means fatality.

Anger Management (2003)

**/****
starring Adam Sandler, Jack Nicholson, Marisa Tomei, Krista Allen
screenplay by David Dorfman
directed by Peter Segal

by Walter Chaw Packed with SNL alum in secondary roles and directed by Peter Segal, the steady hand behind Nutty Professor II: The Klumps, Adam Sandler's follow-up to the remarkably good Punch-Drunk Love is the remarkably familiar Anger Management. It finds Sandler returning to his old, tedious ways: the athlete cameos, Asian hate, scatological humour, mockery of disability, vintage sing-alongs, sentimental finales, and "you can do its." Good news for the ever-diminishing cult of Sandler, the rest of western civilization should cringe at Jack Nicholson returning to his Corman days by reciting a series of dick and fart jokes while banking to a dangerous degree on his lupine grin. The most frustrating thing about Anger Management isn't that Sandler is back to his old tricks, it's that there are observations embedded here about the state of our culture in decline that exhibit a genuine insight and cynicism that could have made for a fascinating satire rather than this unintentional one.

Femme Fatale (2002) - DVD

*½/**** Image A Sound A- Extras C
starring Rebecca Romijn-Stamos, Antonio Banderas, Peter Coyote, Eriq Ebouaney
written and directed by Brian De Palma

by Walter Chaw The first script written solely by Brian De Palma since his 1992 film Raising Cain, Femme Fatale, like that film, rips off the famous murderer-reveal of Dario Argento's Tenebre. Come to think of it, the picture is essentially a rehash in one way or another of every film De Palma's ever written (the voyeurism and body switch of Body Double, the phallic film equipment of Blow Out, the steamy stall-sex of Dressed to Kill, the evil twin thing and split-screen of Sisters, the voyeurism again of Hi, Mom!, and so on)--and because De Palma's best films and screenplays were iterations of Hitchcock (and sometimes Argento, the Italian Hitchcock), Femme Fatale is as stale and detached as the third-generation copy that it is.

Darkness Falls (2003) [Special Edition] - DVD

**/**** Image B- Sound A Extras B-
starring Chaney Kley, Emma Caulfield, Joshua Anderson, Andrew Bayly
screenplay by John Fasano and James Vanderbilt and Joe Harris
directed by Jonathan Liebesman

by Walter Chaw Two years removed from Victor Salva's Jeepers Creepers (and on the eve of a sequel to that film), Darkness Falls whets cult appetites by being nearly a scene-for-scene recreation of that film's inferior second half. Essentially a series of "I don't believe your story--hey, why did the lights go out?" scenarios and unearned jump scares, the picture opens with a nice fairytale prologue and a nifty "12 years ago" introduction that hints at the promise of a murderous Tooth Fairy. As soon as the action jumps to present-day with a warbling youngster, her hot sister, and our troubled hero, however, any pretense of a creepy, coherent mythology flies out the window as the flick devolves into an inexorable-killer flick amped-up to "11."

Red Dragon (2002) [2-Disc Director's Edition] - DVD

*/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B-
starring Anthony Hopkins, Edward Norton, Ralph Fiennes, Harvey Keitel
screenplay by Ted Tally, based on the novel by Thomas Harris
directed by Brett Ratner

by Walter Chaw Because Thomas Harris's haunting novel of the same name is flawed in someone's eye, Red Dragon hacks and slices the piece with a rude imprecision that would inspire pop icon Hannibal Lecter to sharpen his carving tools. The picture opens with a ridiculous and awkwardly-staged Lecter backstory (meaning it plays like the rest of the Lecter additions) that gives a self-parodying Anthony Hopkins a ponytail in place of the self-respect to which he can no longer lay claim, bringing to mind the unwieldy cameos of Cannonball Run.

A Man Apart (2003) + The Man Without a Past (2003)

A MAN APART
**/****
starring Vin Diesel, Larenz Tate, Steve Eastin, Timothy Olyphant
screenplay by Christian Gudegast & Paul Scheuring
directed by F. Gary Gray

Mies vailla menneisyyttä
***½/****
starring Markku Peltola, Kati Outinen, Annikki Tähti, Juhani Niemelä
written and directed by Aki Kaurismäki

by Walter Chaw The one an absurdist sketch, the other just absurd, both Aki Kaurismäki's The Man Without a Past and F. Gary Gray's A Man Apart use violence as a catalyst for existential introspection, but while Gray's emetic excess deadens with its Death Wish-cum-The New Centurions wish-fulfillment fantasy, Kaurismäki's gentle fable finds grace amongst society's victims. Gifting their respective stars each with a hospital scene and subsequent resurrection and new lease on life, the two protagonists are paired with a lady love once back on the street--Kaurismäki's hero with a Salvation Army matron (Kati Outinen), Gray's with a ridiculously loyal partner (Larenz Tate) who discards his role as conscience to become an extension of a revenge plot that's made more ludicrous with a heaping dose of morality and a Lethal Weapon graveside penance.

What a Girl Wants (2003)

*/****
starring Amanda Bynes, Colin Firth, Kelly Preston, Anna Chancellor
screenplay by Jenny Bicks and Elizabeth Chandler, based on the play "The Reluctant Debutante" by William Douglas Home
directed by Dennie Gordon

by Walter Chaw A cynical play for the babysitting money of a very particular demographic, What a Girl Wants is a by-the-numbers Cinderella story that's not only a carbon copy of The Princess Diaries but also the umpteenth iteration of a distaff preteen fantasy that equates irreverent immaturity with being true to one's own self. It takes potshots at the stuffiness of the British in the same way that urban comedies take aim at the stuffiness of white folks, seeking to loosen up the awkward unfortunates with a pathetic dance sequence. And it offers Nickelodeon phenom Amanda Bynes yet another opportunity to try on a bunch of outfits in not one, but two dress-up montages. The film believes that it knows what will please twelve-year-old girls (and their thirty-five-year old fathers), and it may well indeed, but the problem with What a Girl Wants is that there's precious little honour in satisfying the basest needs of its audience with the equivalent of leftover porridge.

Sordid Lives (2001) - DVD

ZERO STARS/**** Image D Sound D Extras C
starring Olivia Newton-John, Beau Bridges, Delta Burke, Bonnie Bedelia
written and directed by Del Shores

by Walter Chaw Essentially an extended drag shtick captured on surveillance-quality DV, Del Shores's Sordid Lives finds the playwright's stage production translated literally to the big screen (well, to the television screen) without, one presumes, the pace and the busyness that would have made it bearable. Poorly-aimed pot-shots at dysfunction (sexual, familial) share the stage with the classic "gathered for a funeral" plot that forms the basis of so many community theatre productions, mainly because no matter how ribald the comedy becomes, there will always be the opportunity for a sickening dose of sentiment at the final curtain. There's nothing suburban middlebrow consumers like better than a shot of the ol' pulpit to forgive all sins: round-in-the-round as buffet-dinner confessional.

Evelyn (2002) [Special Edition] - DVD

*/**** Image C+ Sound B- Extras B+
starring Pierce Brosnan, Julianna Margulies, Aidan Quinn, Stephen Rea
screenplay by Paul Pender
directed by Bruce Beresford

by Walter Chaw It seems as though "inspired" in the phrase "inspired by a true story" is the operative word as the 2002 Christmas season presents to us a rotten couplet of films "inspired" by true stories that, in all likelihood, were pretty interesting prior to the whitewashed variety of "inspiration" dished out in most high profile biopics. Headliner Antwone Fisher (a rancid piece of garbage I like to refer to as "Good Antwone Fishing" or "Finding Fisher-er") gains esteem just by the association of twinkly-eyed Denzel Washington behind the camera (and stentorian Denzel in front), while small foreign film Evelyn will probably gain esteem by dint of its small and foreign status. (Just like its cute-as-a-button titular waif.) Like so many horrible movies of this mongrel breed, however, both Antwone Fisher and Evelyn are so uncompromising in their saccharine manipulations that nurses should stand at theatre entrances, passing out hypodermics of insulin.