Film Freak Central

Holes (2003) [Widescreen] - DVD

**/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
starring Sigourney Weaver, Jon Voight, Patricia Arquette, Shia LaBeouf
screenplay by Louis Sachar, based on his novel
directed by Andrew Davis

by Walter Chaw A certain level of grotesquerie in a children's entertainment is essential, but at some point grotesquerie just becomes grotesque. Holes, adapted by Louis Sachar from his award-winning children's novel, is a cheerless little melodrama, dusty and marooned in the middle of nowhere with what is essentially a pint-sized version of the time-tripping buffoonery of The Hours. Its tale of destiny and stroking the sins of the fathers rattles along its rails like a rusted-out mine cart, going to where it's going with a lot of noise and broken-down drama but without anything like surprise.

DIFF '03: Introduction

by Walter Chaw I took a trip down Denver's revitalized Blake Street (baseball field on one end, Auraria Campus of the University of Colorado at the other) last week to meet with the Denver Film Society's Creative Director and whirlwind Ron Henderson, the brilliant and capable Director of Media Relations Britta Erickson, and dedicated Program Director Brit Withy to talk about the cancellation of the "Critics' Choice" program from the roster of the 26^th Starz Denver International Film Festival. A mainstay of the event for the last quarter-century, I was told in sombre tones--or was that relief?--that the availability of prints on platters was getting increasingly scarce and the program had become unfeasible. Honoured last year as the first Internet-based ink-stained wretch to be asked to present a film at the festival, I was disappointed to have my sophomore bow (I planned on bringing McCabe and Mrs. Miller and then Fat City) erased by circumstance and the fickle tide of technology.

Cobb (1994) - DVD

***½/**** Image A Sound B+ Extras B
starring Tommy Lee Jones, Robert Wuhl, Lolita Davidovich
written and directed by Ron Shelton

by Walter Chaw Completely uncompromising in a way that films, especially sports films, just aren't, Ron Shelton's Cobb is one of the most effective hagiographies in film history not for the way that it elevates its subject to sainthood, but for the way that it allows its subject to be one of history's most notorious, relentless miscreants. A malcontent in every measurable way, Ty Cobb--habitual spousal abuser, virulent racist, sadist (Cobb sent twelve men to the hospital one season), alcoholic, braggart, trigger-happy pistol-brandisher, alleged murderer, and so on--also happens to be the best baseball player in the history of the game. (In a modern era where Barry Bonds is making a claim for the best the game's produced while also being, hands down, its biggest jerk and public-relations nightmare, Cobb's transgressions puts all of Bonds's childishness in perspective.) Accordingly, the picture is a beautifully lensed nightmare, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas shot as a road-trip horror film instead of an acid-enhanced carnival ride, where the villain is the devil in Cobb's back pocket.

Duplex (2003)

*/****
starring Ben Stiller, Drew Barrymore, Eileen Essel, Justin Theroux
screenplay by Larry Doyle and John Hamburg
directed by Danny DeVito

by Walter Chaw Danny DeVito's Duplex begins promisingly enough as a dark comedy, its resemblances to The War of the Roses (and Throw Momma from the Train) only natural as DeVito directed both of those as well. But by its sunny conclusion, Duplex is a spineless bit of populist garbage that tries to mine broad cheer from the murder of an irritating old lady. The movie of value in this premise is one that examines the ways that young people hate the frailties of senior citizens, and for long stretches of the picture, the neo-yuppies played by Ben Stiller and Drew Barrymore are cast as self-centered assholes more interested in procreation and real-estate values than in the golden years of their upstairs tenant. Sadly, DeVito is the worst kind of coward, condescending to an audience he doesn't believe able to handle ambiguity, crafting in the process a film that so completely betrays its moments of audacity at its conclusion that the failure of Duplex lingers in memory as something to be more pitied than derided.

Ghoulies (1985)/Ghoulies II (1988) [Double Feature] + Troll (1988)/Troll 2 (1990) [Double Feature] - DVDs

GHOULIES
*/**** Image B Sound A-
starring Peter Liapis, Lisa Pelikan, Michael Des Barres, Jack Nance
screenplay by Luca Bercovici and Jefery Levy
directed by Luca Bercovici

GHOULIES II
*½/**** Image B Sound B+
starring Damon Martin, Royal Dano, Phil Fondacaro, J. Downing
screenplay by Charlie Dolan and Dennis Paoli
directed by Albert Band

TROLL
**/**** Image B+ Sound B+
starring Noah Hathaway, Michael Moriarty, Shelley Hack, Jenny Beck
screenplay by Albert Band
directed by John Buechler

TROLL 2
ZERO STARS/**** Image B+ Sound C
starring Michael Stephenson, Connie McFarland, George Hardy, Margo Prey
written and directed by Drago Lloyd

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover What's the only thing worse than a DVD of a bad '80s monster movie? A DVD with two of them. That's the conclusion I've reached after subjecting myself to some warmed-over chillers recently unleashed on disc--detritus from or inspired by the defunct B-mill Empire Pictures that only Forrest J. Ackerman could love. I'd like to say that they're enjoyably tacky nostalgia items for those old enough to barely remember them, but the truth is that they skimp on the crass goods that make a good bad movie: attempting to find a broader audience through a PG-13 rating, they lack the sex and violence that a true exploitation film would deliver, and the films are so cheap that the remaining attraction of monster effects are by necessity curtailed. What's left are scripts and direction at best enervating and at worst maddening.

28 Days Later (2002) [Widescreen Special Edition] - DVD

28 Days Later...
**½/**** Image B Sound A- Extras A
starring Cillian Murphy, Naomie Harris, Brendan Gleeson, Christopher Eccleston
screenplay by Alex Garland
directed by Danny Boyle

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover 28 Days Later... is a film that shoots for resonance but is too shortsighted to hit the target. Its tale of an England beset by rage-crazed zombies is clearly a metaphor for something--but what? Timing rules out certain international disasters (9/11 happened as the film was shooting), and a certain opacity of intent clouds the entire film, making you reach out for something that you're never sure is really there. There are compensatory pleasures (a general creepiness, one smashing performance), but the film lacks something beyond its grasp, leaving you with an adequate, reasonably entertaining picture, and nothing more.

Enigma (2001) [Special Edition] - DVD

**½/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras A-
starring Dougray Scott, Kate Winslet, Jeremy Northam, Saffron Burrows
screenplay by Tom Stoppard, based on the novel by Robert Harris
directed by Michael Apted

by Walter Chaw The easy thing to say is that the Mick Jagger-produced Enigma is enigmatic--it's more difficult to pinpoint the exact reasons why. Stars Dougray Scott, Kate Winslet, and Jeremy Northam are fine, Tom Stoppard's screenplay would on the surface surely seem fine, and Michael Apted's polished, if unremarkable, direction is the very definition of just fine. So the onus must fall on the material adapted, Robert Harris's follow-up to his much-lauded Fatherland, which promised a Ken Follett romantic espionage page-burner while delivering a staid and occasionally incomprehensible period bodice-ripper crushed under the dual gorgons of the sophomore jinx and the Tom Clancy "guess I'm not very good at dialogue" bogey. Enigma's problems begin and end with its inability to overcome the essential faults of its inherited plot, its most interesting aspect--WWII cryptologists at London's Bletchley Park--subsumed by a run-of-the-mill mystery and a never-in-doubt love story. It appears the curse of many historical fictions that attempt to familiarize the "long ago" with a "universal" romantic story arc dooms Enigma's period and historical detail to function as mere decorative flourish.

Stevie (2003) - DVD

****/**** Image A Sound A- Extras A
directed by Steve James

by Walter Chaw Eleven years after mentoring little Stevie in an Advocate Big Brother program in rural Illinois, documentary filmmaker Steve James restores ties to find that Stevie is a troubled man, emotionally crippled and awaiting trial for molesting his eight-year-old cousin. In science, the Heisenberg Principle postulates that the essential nature of an object changes when that object is observed; its application to documentary filmmaking is obvious. The question, then, becomes whether the documentarian should give himself a part in the film or remain outside of it, the alleged unobserved observer that in several critical contexts (Lacanian, Heisenbergian) loses its meaning, anyway. Integrity in the observation of documentary subjects is a delicate thing to navigate, and Stevie chooses early and often to be more about the Steve behind the camera than the Stevie before it. Stevie fascinates because it's a little like Montaigne's essays--a process of self-discovery that manages to indict our broken health care system and our "selfish cell" society in one fell swoop.

Andrei the Giant: FFC Interviews Andrei Codrescu

September 21, 2003|The Rattlebrain Theater Company resides at a bustling intersection of Denver's 16^th Street Mall in the basement of what appears to have once been a church. Backstage, with a little kid functioning as the company's receptionist for some reason that will best remain a mystery to me, I sat on a tatty sofa in what's essentially a catacomb, the "blue room," to meet NPR regular, Louisiana State English Professor, and founder of EXQUISITE CORPSE alternative literary magazine, Andrei Codrescu. An exile of Ceausescu's Romania, Codrescu found refuge in among the thinkers and bohemians of the American Sixties: William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg his spiritual and literary advisors in the new world, Codrescu sought with his life and career to redefine what Transylvanian poet and philosopher Lucien Blaga called "Mioritic Space"--an idea taken from Romanian folklore about the Romanian character defined by his geography, distilled by Codrescu into the idea that thought is its own nation and the poet, forever in exile, the only creator of its shifting borders.

Underworld (2003)

*½/****
starring Kate Beckinsale, Scott Speedman, Shane Brolly, Michael Sheen
screenplay by Danny McBride
directed by Len Wiseman

by Walter Chaw Appearing to be based on two White Wolf role-playing games--"Vampire: The Masquerade" and "Werewolf: The Apocalypse"--introduced a while back (and indeed, the games company is suing Sony, Screen Gems, and Lakeshore for copyright infringement, citing no fewer than sixty points of unique similarity), Len Wiseman's Underworld may prove to be less "Romeo and Juliet" than much ado about nothing. The picture looks fantastic, Kate Beckinsale and Scott Speedman look fantastic, and that's pretty much all there is recommend about the piece, which is so boring, lifeless, and humourless that White Wolf would do well to distance itself from the thing toot sweet. This is gravid filmmaking at its worst, indulging in its twin cults' puerile wish-fulfillment fantasies with a sexless lust: the life of an immortal rock star in period garb thirsting for the blood of bullies for the one, of a raging man-beast thirsting for the blood of bullies for the other. In between are tons of rip-offs of everything from The Crow to The Matrix to the leather fetish and arms of Blade to the sweaty bodice-ripping of Anne Rice to the Alien³ wall-crawling monster views of David Fincher. Wiseman, in his hyphenate debut (he co-concocted the story), has scored big with a real-life engagement to the ethereally beautiful--and undernourished and anaemic--Kate Beckinsale, enough to take the sting out of the blah of Underworld, I'd surmise. And why not? Many would fail worse for less, but as a writer and director he proves himself to be a pretty good set designer.

The Fighting Temptations (2003)

*/****
starring Cuba Gooding Jr., Beyoncé Knowles, Chloe Bailey, Demetress Long
screenplay by Elizabeth Hunter and Saladin K. Patterson
directed by Jonathan Lynn

by Walter Chaw It's fair to wonder at some point what it is, exactly, about Cuba Gooding Jr. that appeals the most. Is it the broad mugging? The amazingly insulting material? Or is it the kind of manic energy that proves so enervating to most people too old to be entertained by insulting, mugging clowns? And while The Fighting Temptations isn't quite as bad as Snow Dogs, Boat Trip, or Men of Honor, it's somehow less of a movie than either--a collection of flimsy narrative excuses for musical numbers that manages to suggest that poor southern African-Americans are slavishly devoted to the word of New York advertising executives while confirming that there are some characters so revolting as to indeed be above redemption. In its zeal to graft a few uplift dramas to its gospel-highlights showcase, The Fighting Temptations finds in its protagonist an appalling yaw of moral cess and, worse, a lack entire of much of anything resembling a recognizable humanity. Gooding Jr. is typecast in the part, in other words, and things don't appear to be looking up with the dreaded upcoming disability opera Radio.

Sleeping Beauty (1959) [Special Edition - 2-Disc Set] - DVD

***½/**** Image A Sound A Extras A+
story adaptation Erdman Penner, from the Charles Perrault version
directing animators Milt Kahl, Frank Thomas, Marc Davis, Ollie Johnston, John Lounsbery; supervising director Clyde Geronimi; sequence directors Eric Larson, Wolfgang Reitherman, Les Clark

by Bill Chambers

"Heralded by audiences and critics alike, Sleeping Beauty was the final fairy tale to be produced by Walt Disney himself. Now fully restored with revolutionary digital technology, its dazzling colors, rich backgrounds, and Academy Award-nominated orchestrations shine brighter than ever. When an enchanted kingdom and the most fair princess in the land falls prey to the ultimate mistress of evil, the fate of the empire rests in the hands of three small fairies and a courageous prince's magic kiss. Their quest is fraught with peril as the spirited group must battle the evil witch and a fire breathing dragon if they are to set the Beauty free. From spectacular action to the breathtaking pageantry of the princess and her kingdom, Sleeping Beauty has something to charm every member of your family." -- Sleeping Beauty DVD liner summary

The second animated feature shot in CinemaScope after Disney's own Lady and the Tramp, Sleeping Beauty looks on the widescreen frame as a vast frame for the spread of darkness. This is Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs with twenty years' worth of successes and failures factored in, Disney's most fatalistic vision and one of their most gratifying when all's said and done. The picture is so doomy that its happy ending feels more coma-dream than fairy-tale resolution, something like the conclusion to Taxi Driver; in its world of medieval tapestries come to life, joy looks out of place. Joy, in fact, becomes nothing less than a magnet for evil, with villain Maleficent dooming Princess Aurora on the festive occasion of her birth to an untimely grave (by a poisonous prick from a spinning wheel on her sixteenth birthday--a menstrual nightmare from which the animators do not flinch) and later stumbling upon the secreted-away Aurora by scouting the kingdom for excess merriment.

Cleopatra (1963) [Five Star Collection]; Lawrence of Arabia (1962) [Exclusive Limited Edition|Superbit]; The Mummy (1999) [Ultimate Edition] - DVDs

CLEOPATRA
**/**** Image A Sound A Extras A+
starring Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, Rex Harrison, Pamela Brown
screenplay by Joseph L. Mankiewicz, Ranald MacDougall and Sidney Buchman
directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz

LAWRENCE OF ARABIA
****/****
ELE DVD - Image A Sound A Extras B
Superbit DVD - Image A Sound A
starring Peter O'Toole, Alec Guinness, Anthony Quinn, Omar Sharif
screenplay by Robert Bolt and Michael Wilson
directed by David Lean

THE MUMMY
**/**** Image A Sound A (DD)/A+ (DTS) Extras A-
starring Brendan Fraser, Rachel Weisz, John Hannah, Arnold Vosloo
screenplay by Stephen Sommers
directed by Stephen Sommers

by Bill Chambers Cleopatra, meet T.E. Lawrence. Now allow me to introduce the two of you to...Rick O'Connell?

Dreamcatcher (2003) [Widescreen Edition] - DVD

*/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B-
starring Morgan Freeman, Thomas Jane, Jason Lee, Damian Lewis
screenplay by William Goldman and Lawrence Kasdan, based on the novel by Stephen King
directed by Lawrence Kasdan

by Walter Chaw As stupid as stupid can be, Lawrence Kasdan's splashy comeback on the backs of two writers who haven't really been any good for about forty years between them (Stephen King and William Goldman) is riddled with knee-slapping plot inconsistencies and the sort of dunderheaded conveniences that reek equally of desperation and a lack of respect for the audience. Based on the first King novel written after the author was smeared across a Maine highway by a man who would later kill himself in a trailer, the book is a fine short story trapped in the body of a six-hundred page book. Hopelessly protracted, after the first two-hundred pages, the novel becomes a pathetic exercise in chronic self-reference: the malady of a successful author who's begun to lose the line between reality and his cult of personality. King has become a writer interested in writing love letters to his fanbase and smug gruel for everyone else.

TIFF '03: The Agronomist

**½/****
directed by Jonathan Demme

by Bill Chambers Jonathan Demme alternates between fiction and documentary filmmaking, a practice that has gone curiously unheralded for an Academy Award-winning director of both mainstream and cult repute. If The Agronomist is any indication of what to expect from Demme's Cousin Bobby or Storefront Hitchcock, to name two of his earlier documentaries thus far unseen by yours truly, I can see why his studio features garner all the attention: though a committed work (Demme began tracking the exploits of his subject, slain Haitian radio journalist Jean Dominique, as far back as the late-Eighties), The Agronomist is amateurish bordering on sloppy, overreliant on newsroom-font intertitles as a way of not only conveying research but also patching together a chronology for newcomers to the seismic shifts in Haiti's inscrutable political climate. Additionally, however good his intentions, Demme had an obligation to lay into Dominique a little for his repeated self-exiles to New York City whenever the Haitian people needed his outspoken, progressive voice the most: he seems to count Dominique's founding of Haiti's first film club (which provides ample opportunity for cheesy inserts of classic one-sheets) as a pre-emptive bid for redemption. Still, their kinship, if you will, is not without avail: Demme's window into Dominique through this shared love of movies humanizes the latter in a way a standard piece of reportage might not, and The Agronomist's ending is appropriately cinematic in its bittersweet uplift. I suspect the next step is a biopic, which, if produced in America, will surely omit Demme's shrewd criticisms of U.S. foreign policy. Programme: National Cinema Spotlight

TIFF '03: Bus 174

****/****
directed by José Padilha

by Bill Chambers Bus 174 sums up its own trumping of the devious City of God with a quote from Sandro do Nascimento, the hostage-taker who becomes the focal point of this absorbing, even-handed documentary: "This ain't no American movie!" Presumed to be on a cocaine bender as he holds the passengers of a Rio city bus at gunpoint, his irrational demands amounting to more firearms (he asks police for "a rifle and a grenade"), Sandro is almost impossible for special forces to psychologically profile: he lets a student go to prevent him from being late for class but refuses to relinquish a woman in the throes of a stroke. Director José Padilha attempts to retrace the escalating misfortunes that led to Sandro's tragic June 12^th, 2000 hijacking; the tranquility of those aerial vistas to which Padilha crosscuts underscores just how Brazil's street kids--among whom Sandro roamed--earned their nickname "The Invisibles," so deflective is the candy-coated surface of this tourist town. At once an overview of the crime-poverty cycle (Sandro's pregnant mother was murdered, orphaning him to the life responsible for her demise), a discomforting police procedural, and a re-sensitization to action-movie tropes, Bus 174 is one of the most thoughtful films of 2003, an incredibly sensitive account of a situation that should never have transpired and probably will again in some form, to be as fatalistic as the filmmakers about it. Programme: National Cinema Spotlight

Virginie Speaks (sorta): FFC Interviews Virginie Ledoyen

September 15, 2003|Gallic ingenue Virginie Ledoyen strides confidently into the room, and the second she spots me we say a grinny "Hi!" in unison. Alas, the communication breakdown commences shortly thereafter: I was diagnosed with a swollen eardrum a few days before, and I lead our interview with a pre-emptive apology for any struggle I might encounter trying to hear her, which I think--combined with my being her last in a morning brimming over with interviews and the usual language-barrier issues--caused her to be a tad...brusque in her responses.

TIFF '03: Undead

½*/****
starring Felicity Mason, Mungo McKay, Rob Jenkins, Lisa Cunningham
written and directed by Peter Spierig & Michael Spierig

by Bill Chambers For novice directors, even genre can become an irresistible new toy. So it is with the Spierig Brothers' Undead, an Australian film that liberally applies CG but more detrimentally cribs from every and any horror flick that fanboys ever extolled; those mouth-breathing types who post talkback at AICN have never been this condescended to, yet I fear that Undead's pandering will sail over their heads and lead to a misguided appreciation of the film as a one-stop shop for all their geek cravings. Borrowing the alien conceit and over-the-top splatter from Peter Jackson's Bad Taste, the super-prepared, avenging quasi-cowboy from The Evil Dead and its innumerable rip-offs (Undead's wannabe Ash totes a cumbersome three-barrelled shotgun), the zombies from Day of the Dead (actually zombie cinema in general, but the third entry in George Romero's Dead trilogy specifically for a gruesome decapitation-by-shovel), the pretty heroine who stays clothed throughout from the annals of slasher tradition, the space creatures with inverted knees from The Arrival, the transporting beam of light from Fire in the Sky, and the miracle cure from Signs, the picture is exhaustively derivative. Unendurably boring in its superfluousness, its ersatz feel accentuated by a plethora of digital effects, Undead is simply a stiff. Programme: Midnight Madness

Cabin Boy: FFC Interviews Eli Roth

September 14, 2003|Debuting with a splash at the 2002 Toronto International Film Festival, Eli Roth's zero-budgeted Cabin Fever sparked a bidding war won by Lions Gate Entertainment to the tune of $3.5M. A throwback to the Spam-in-a-cabin flicks of the early 1980s, the picture, for all its references and debts to films like The Evil Dead, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and John Carpenter's The Thing, bears the unmistakable mark of a young Joe Dante: equal parts Roger Corman and cartoons. Cabin Fever is energetic and puerile, best when it apes Dante's energy and sense of humour, worst when it takes on Dante's occasional sloppiness and lack of cohesion. It's dedicated, in either case, to providing a nostalgic glut of gratuitous nudity and gore while offering something I've been missing for a while now: a special-effects movie reliant on Karo syrup, KY jelly, and imagination uncorrupted by the perfect lines of a mainframe. That there is the possibility for a deeper analysis of the picture, centring on menstrual anxieties and banning rituals, is almost beside the point when the picture boasts of a scene involving a lady Bic, a bathtub, and a girl infected by a flesh-eating virus.

TIFF '03: Danny Deckchair

**/****
starring Rhys Ifans, Miranda Otto, Justine Clarke, Rhys Muldoon
written and directed by Jeff Balsmeyer

by Bill Chambers Danny Deckchair is so aware of being a formula fish-out-of-water comedy that it leaves some of the more crucial gestures of plot off its checklist, resulting in a film equally unsatisfying for its clichés and for its lack thereof. Rhys Ifans, that starved Allman brother, plays Danny Morgan, a Walter Mitty-ish construction worker stuck in a dead-end relationship with Trudy (Glenda Lake), a fame-hungry travel agent seeing a TV newsman on the side. Aware that Trudy is sick of his weird inventions, Danny ties a bunch of helium-filled balloons to a deckchair to rattle her at a barbecue and ends up floating away to the far off Aussie town of Clarence, where he crash-lands in the backyard of a lonely traffic cop named Glenda (Miranda Otto). When the villagers storm Glenda's house, pitchfork-style, in search of the alien they saw cruising the skies, Glenda impulsively introduces Danny as a visiting professor from her college days, and in no time flat the town adopts the stranger as one of their own. It's a shame that Danny's awakening to happiness is weaved into a fabric of deception, since it means we'll have to suffer the trite dismantling of his newfound life. Perhaps the filmmakers waited as impatiently as we do to reach that point, since there is nothing on the order of, say, the unsung Doc Hollywood to show that anyone but the love interest would ingratiate herself with Danny, who gives the locals a left-field testimonial two-thirds into the picture; it all feels rushed through the motions. (Raising Arizona, meanwhile, did better the policewoman and her dishevelled mate watching sunsets together.) Only The Lord of the Rings' Otto, securing our sympathies from our first glimpse of her like Emily Watson in Punch-Drunk Love, makes Danny Deckchair bearable, emerging from the wreckage a new and dignified sweetheart icon. Programme: Viacom Galas

TIFF '03: The Brown Bunny

***/****
starring Vincent Gallo, Chloe Sevigny, Cheryl Tiegs
written and directed by Vincent Gallo

Editor's Note: Roger Ebert responded to this capsule in his print review when The Brown Bunny was finally released to theatres. It sicced his readers on me, which I deserved; I particularly regret my cheap shot at his weight. Fortunately, I met up with him at a TIFF screening of Saw a few weeks later and it was water under the bridge. (He even told a joke: when I asked if he was "seeing Saw," he said, "I thought I'd teeter-totter instead.") I often wonder if I actually liked The Brown Bunny, or just wanted to be an iconoclastic asshole. What I do know is that I really miss Roger Ebert. Be sure to check out Walter Chaw's own review of the film, as well as his interview with Vincent Gallo.

by Bill Chambers "They're getting a little warm in their sweaters," David Lynch said of Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert when they panned his Kafkaesque Lost Highway. And Ebert finally combusted at last May's Cannes Film Festival when he threw stones at the glass arthouse that is Vincent Gallo's The Brown Bunny; you'll note, however, that he never did mount a convincing case against it. Instead, Ebert catalogued his mainstream biases (unbroken takes: bad; non-classical structure: bad; name actresses being aggressively sexual: bad), made a crack about the esoteric tastes of the French (who legitimized his field of film criticism--oh well, phooey on them), and then had a bigger delusion of grandeur than The Brown Bunny's Gallo-centric credit assignations: "I will one day be thin but Vincent Gallo will always be the director of The Brown Bunny." At worst, The Brown Bunny suggests a student film, that sensation often aggravated by the fact that Gallo, who also stars, was his own cinematographer--shots give off the impression of Dad setting the camera timer and then running into the frame, although Gallo has never looked more handsome. The picture is like the plastic-bag scene in American Beauty, minus the disingenuousness--there it's just foreplay, after all, but Gallo, his cobalt eyes frozen in gawk, is truly receptive to the mundane; his awe is infectious. (His character's name, Bud Clay, implies both malleability and oneness.) Bud is on his way to a motorcycle race in California, a trip that brings him closer to the memory of a lost love (Chloë Sevigny), and their foreordained reunion--which, yes, includes graphic fellatio--is the essence of a man in a quiet room with his pain. If such wounded passages fail to resonate with Ebert, I can only envy his charmed life--though in his defense, the version of The Brown Bunny I saw ran thirty minutes shorter. Programme: Visions

TIFF '03: Vodka Lemon

***/****
starring Lala Sarkissian, Romen Avinian, Ivan Franek, Armen Marouthian
screenplay by Hiner Saleem, Lei Dinety, Pauline Gouzenne
directed by Hiner Saleem

by Bill Chambers Discombobulating and deadly dull for its initial half-hour, Hiner Saleem's Vodka Lemon coalesces before it's too late into something by no means ineffectual. The first in an accumulation of vignettes finds an old man being schlepped in his bed through the Armenian tundra to a funeral site, where he promptly removes his dentures to pipe a dirge for the other mourners. The picture continues to lightly tread such surreal ground until the whimsical closing shot, in which music also acts as a kind of catharsis; Saleem stocks as much of his faith in minimalism as he does absurdity, though, the hush merger proposing at the best of times--during the nonverbal love story between two transient peddlers that commandeers the narrative, for instance--Sunrise for a new era. With a title like Vodka Lemon and wintry bleakness as far as the eye can see, one could easily misinterpret this as a Mosfilm production, but the film, despite the economic hardships it itemizes, is more Beckett than Chekov, the title referring to the beverage served at a lemonade stand in the middle of nowhere, the characters carrying portable chairs with them on their regular snowbound treks not, it would seem, for the small luxury of idleness, but rather should an impromptu bottomless debate arise. Vodka Lemon is a self-confident work that disarms existential misery with humour without trivializing a soul--there's actually an abundance of joy to savour here, even if it takes a microscope. *** (out of four) | Programme: Contemporary World Cinema

TIFF '03: Gozu

Yakuza Horror Theater: Gozu
***½/****
starring Hideki Sone, Sho Aikawa, Kimika Yoshino, Keiko Tomita
screenplay by Sakichi Soto
directed by Takashi Miike

by Bill Chambers I've sat here staring at a flashing cursor, wondering what to write about Takashi Miike's Gozu--a picture whose spirit harks back to the David Lynch of Eraserhead--that could persuade you to see it: Though Gozu begs a viewing, any description likely to pique one's interest would force you to pre-emptively pass moral judgment on a film that a) explicitly requests to be taken as a joke, and b) is too fecund to truly offend. Gozu begins with the over-the-top murder of a "Yakuza attack dog" the size of a purse; Ozaki (Shô Aikawa), the perpetrator, is stopped before shooting the driver of a "Yakuza attack car" by his closest "brother," Minami (Hideki Sone). Escorting Ozaki across the Japanese countryside to a Yakuza meeting, Minami, fearing further consequences of Ozaki's mental breakdown, plans to ditch his passenger in a small town along the way. Instead, he accidentally kills Ozaki, Ozaki's corpse disappears, and Minami reluctantly enlists the aid of the ultra-eccentric locals (including a man whose "missing pigment" transforms his face into a Kabuki enigma) in finding his presumed-dead friend. I'm amazed by how cut-and-dry it all sounds in a recap, considering that not a second of Gozu, not a line of dialogue, is easy to predict--with the possible exception of the gimmick of the lactating woman repeated from Miike's Visitor Q. As in Visitor Q as well, Miike threatens hommage to Takeshi Kitano, but Gozu most significantly moves that film's discussion of motherhood into the natal realm to arrive at a climax that goes through with what Martin Scorsese had planned for After Hours before the studio put the kibosh on it. Gozu (which means "cow head") suggests that the prolific Miike--the director of nine films in 2002 alone--has grown fond of the extended-family dynamic from practically living on a movie set; the film's stirring fraternal uplift is matched and tempered only by its witty, extreme grotesqueries. Programme: Midnight Madness

TIFF '03: The Five Obstructions

De Fem Benspænd
***½/****
a film by Jørgen Leth & Lars von Trier

by Bill Chambers Jørgen Leth struck a self-described "Faustian" deal with half-insane auteur Lars von Trier to remake his own experimental short film The Perfect Human five times according to "ruinous" changes mandated by von Trier. But the mouse repeatedly outwitted the cat with an incapacity for anything but quality product: The first four of the titular "obstructions" are up there with, well, early Leth, and the venture teaches von Trier--who thrives on unforeseen obstacles and how they lead to personal dissatisfaction with his work--that you can't make crap on purpose. In the film's best sequence (though it doesn't involve the best obstruction, a version set in Cuba with shots that last twelve frames apiece), Leth and von Trier express their mutual loathing for cartoons, prompting the latter to send Leth to the Austin-based workshop of Waking Life co-director Bob Sabiston, where the pair concoct an animated rendition of The Perfect Human that only bears out Leth's artistic integrity. (No matter the medium, a true filmmaker won't begrudge his or her vision so long as reputations are at stake.) It'd be imprudent to spoil the nature of the fifth and final obstruction, but suffice it to say the final minutes of this fascinating, if specialized pseudo-documentary are as unexpectedly affecting as most von Trier productions, even if they confirm one's preconceived notion that von Trier is a terribly malicious softie. Programme: Real to Reel

TIFF '03: Falling Angels

*½/****
starring Miranda Richardson, Callum Keith Rennie, Katharine Isabelle, Kristin Adams
screenplay by Esta Spalding, based on the novel by Barbara Gowdy
directed by Scott Smith

by Bill Chambers Falling Angels has accumulated a lot of buzz over the past couple of days at the TIFF, but I don't mind telling you to ignore it. Basically a Sunday-funnies version of The Virgin Suicides, the film stars an already-typecast Katharine Isabelle as the most embittered of three daughters who live under the gun of a live-wire buffoon (Callum Keith Rennie) while tending to their catatonic mother (Miranda Richardson, doing a mean Joan Allen impersonation). It's set in the early Sixties, an excuse to splash the same old anti-suburbia tropes with a fresh coat of Day-Glo; the gap between the Canadian filmmaker and his/her audience doesn't get any smaller as a newfound satiric bent revitalizes the national cinema's incuriosity. Rennie and Richardson hardly suggest husband and wife (nephew and aunt, maybe), but more problematic is the latter's role, which requires of a terrific actress to sit silent on a couch for the film's duration, a slab of Canadian misery like one of the corpses Molly Parker bangs herself with in Kissed (also, like Falling Angels, based on a Barbara Gowdy novel). Falling Angels is, ironically, more realistic (ergo, likeable) in a series of flashbacks to the girls' temporary stay in a bomb shelter that exudes the colours and compositions of old "Davy & Goliath" cartoons. Programme: Perspective Canada

TIFF '03: The Cooler

*½/****
starring William H. Macy, Alec Baldwin, Maria Bello, Shawn Hatosy
screenplay by Frank Hannah & Wayne Kramer
directed by Wayne Kramer

by Bill Chambers A lame exercise in Mamet posturing, The Cooler has been subject to inexplicable pre-release hype for both its tame (by post-Irréversible standards) sex scenes and, allegedly, for being good. William H. Macy plays another variation on his stock nebbish, this one employed by the Shangri-La Casino to "cool" gamblers on a hot streak with his contagious bad luck--a premise that contains the potential to expose the heart of the most superstitious city in America. But writers Frank Hannah and Wayne Kramer (who also directed) can't leave well enough alone, giving Macy's Bernie Lootz (gimme a break) a ticking time-bomb boss (Alec Baldwin, gung-ho but deserted by the screenplay), a lubricious son (Shawn Hatosy), and a girlfriend-with-a-past (Maria Bello, in a well-modulated performance that's one of the film's few saving graces). The ballsiness of The Cooler's late-narrative contrivances almost conceals the pathetic lack of imagination that went into devising them, but this is a useless picture scarred from the start by Mark Isham's putrid light-jazz score, which does damage unknown since Lennie Niehaus's music for Tightrope. Doesn't change the fact that The Cooler is nearly unsalvageable, of course, but it shows the importance of a good soundtrack supervisor. Programme: Special Presentations

TIFF '03: Bon Voyage

*½/****
starring Isabelle Adjani, Gérard Depardieu, Virginie Ledoyen, Yvan Attal
written and directed by Jean-Paul Rappeneau

by Bill Chambers "And I'll huff, and I'll puff, and I'll boorrre the hell out of you." Jean-Paul Rappeneau's Bon Voyage labours harder than any film in recent memory to entertain, but the result is so draining I don't remember grooving with it once. In the opening scene, the latest vehicle for champagne starlet Viviane Denverts (Isabelle Adjani, who at 48 should be too old to play an ingénue, but looks at least half her age--it's quite miraculous, really) leaves rapt the attendees of a French movie premiere. Scene two, the film's frisky producer pays Viviane a late-night booty call, and she shoots dead the would-be rapist. Scene three, Viviane's neighbour Frédéric (Grégori Derangère), an aspiring novelist, answers her cry for help, agreeing to dispose of the body. Frédéric is pulled over in scene four and convicted for having a corpse in his trunk in five. WWII reaches France in six; Frédéric escapes from prison in seven, boards a train in eight, and stows away with physicists--one of whom (the always-enchanting Virginie Ledoyen) finds him alluring--transporting a scarce supply of heavy water in nine. Within twenty minutes, Bon Voyage has dipped a toe in the waters of five or six distinct genres--never to cohere, alas. The film's most dependable tone is one of farce, but Rappeneau's problem is that he wants to make an epic farce (and in the process asks a stage tradition to bear too much cinematic weight) along the lines of Spielberg's 1941, replete with Dolbyized door-slamming. I know, because every one of them woke me up. Programme: Viacom Galas

There's Only One Sharif in This Town: FFC Interviews Omar Sharif

September 7, 2003|He made one of the cinema's greatest (and lengthiest) entrances in Lawrence of Arabia, appearing as a heat-obscured speck of dust that gradually adopts the form of a black-swathed man on horseback, one Sherif Ali ibn el Kharish. Omar Sharif's regal stride into our appointed meeting place, a third-floor room within Toronto's Hotel Intercontinental, felt almost as dramatic to me, for his every step is weighted with a half-century of fame. Mr. Sharif is at the Toronto International Film Festival promoting a delicate French film in which he stars opposite young Pierre Boulanger, François Dupeyron's Monsieur Ibrahim et les fleurs du Coran. The picture works largely because of the legend-in-his-own-time baggage the actor brings to the title role of a neighbourhood grocer yearning to pass his considerable wisdom on. When I interviewed him, Mr. Sharif was, like his alter ego Ibrahim, pensive and forthcoming, with little patience for subtext. I found him both gracious and melancholy, and was heartbroken when our all-too-brief time together ran out.

TIFF '03: Elephant

***½/****
starring Alex Frost, Eric Deulen, John Robinson, Elias McConnell
written and directed by Gus Van Sant

by Bill Chambers Though it ultimately garnered Gus Van Sant the Best Director prize (in addition to the Palme d'or), Elephant's lukewarm reception among ink-slingers at last May's Cannes Film Festival confirms the dulled senses of the critical establishment--that a contemporary masterwork can practically blind with its colour scheme and still go unrecognized as such by cinema's ambassadors is more terrifying than anything in Van Sant's searing interpretation of the Columbine atrocity. The first film intended for theatrical exhibition to be screened in Academy ratio since possibly the Sixties, Elephant observes youth in the constrictive TV dimensions in which it perceives itself while at the same time giving the lie to the medium that most panders to them. Camera moves that stalk students from behind, meanwhile, call attention to the con of Donnie Darko and its bravura tracking shot through the hallways of an overpopulated high school--bustle is hardly the epitome of adolescence. Van Sant's Watt High is a veritable ghost world, and it's easy to see how this building could become the nexus of hate for Alex (Alex Frost), who's being pelted with spitballs when we meet him because, despite a quiet temperament, he seems yet to have found his camouflage. That Elephant doesn't overexplain Alex and Eric's (Eric Deulen) motives for opening fire on classmates and faculty, or even much exert itself to circumstantiate characters (Van Sant's tactic of introducing each student with a title card is a remarkably efficient way of ensuring there are no nameless victims), has perhaps frustrated viewers, but how much more poignant can you get than scoring--in a sequence that for once shows first-person shooters for what they are: a capitalization on the youthful disregard for human life, not a progenitor of violence--a thrill-kill videogame to Beethoven's "Moonlight Sonata"? Van Sant caricatures three superficial girls who turn out to be bulimics in an uncharacteristically insensitive and costly aside (it has the temporary effect of making us root for the killers), but the rest of Elephant is the best picture of his career, a more shocking recovery from his extended detour through the Hollywood wasteland than even Gerry. The picture also has an ending that packs the unnerving wallop of John Frankenheimer's cruel Seconds. Programme: Masters

TIFF '03: Monsieur Ibrahim et les fleurs du Coran

**½/****
starring Omar Sharif, Pierre Boulanger, Gilbert Melki, Isabelle Renauld
screenplay by François Dupeyron, based on the novel by Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt
directed by François Dupeyron

by Bill Chambers Set, for the most part, against the backdrop of a Paris ghetto circa the early 1960s, Monsieur Ibrahim et les fleurs du Coran ("Coran" being the French spelling of the Qur'an) is an agreeable coming-of-age fable in the Tony Gatlif vein. Moses "Momo" Schmitt (Pierre Boulanger), an artless Jewish youth accustomed to holding down the fort while his father sweats away in an office for a piddling wage, regularly purloins items from the grocery run by "the Arab," Monsieur Ibrahim (Omar Sharif, poised for a substantial comeback), who goes easy on the lad when he at last confronts him about his shoplifting: "Better you steal from me than steal somewhere else." Soon the Arab is giving Momo advice--some of it solicited, more of it part and parcel of the social contract between the old and the young, the wise and the naïve--on money and women, and if there's anyone whose advice on money and women you should probably heed, it's Omar Sharif's. Before mortality and spirtuality become opaque spectres in Momo's process of maturation, Monsieur Ibrahim et les fleurs du Coran is a transporting, pop-hued period piece brimming with "local" colour--including worldly streetwalkers, from whom Momo gets a crash course in the birds and the bees--straight out of the collective unconscious. Which is to say that the picture eventually turns parched-looking and strange-feeling, even as it remains inherently predictable. (Think of a more subversive Finding Forrester with a third act set in Turkey.) The film's conclusion is oddly disturbing in its implication not of torches passed but of bodies possessed--an extreme reading, to be sure, yet I can't think of a better way to convey the melancholy that suffuses the sticky closing shot. Programme: Special Presentations

TIFF '03: The Barbarian Invasions

Les Invasions barbares
**½/****
starring Rémy Girard, Stéphane Rousseau, Marie-Josée Croze, Marina Hands
written and directed by Denys Arcand

by Bill Chambers Denys Arcand's The Decline of the American Empire belongs to the homecoming genre of films like Lawrence Kasdan's The Big Chill and John Sayles's Return of the Secaucus Seven, but its quasi-sequel, twice honoured at this year's Cannes Film Festival (for Marie-Josée Croze's performance and Arcand's screenplay), is a Muppet movie with socialists. When embittered poli-sci professor Rémy (Rémy Girard) is diagnosed with untreatable cancer, his estranged, millionaire son Sébastien (David Duchovny look-alike Stéphane Rousseau) seeks out Rémy's Marxist friends of yore--who have more or less gone their separate ways since that momentous dinner party in 1986 and are reunited in true Muppets Take Manhattan, Kermit-needs-me fashion--to be by his bedside for the old man's final days, while also scoring dad painkilling heroin from Nathalie (the plain wonderful Croze), the junkie with whom family friend Dominique (Dominique Michel), her mother, has irreconcilable differences. That the original's neo-realist gimmick of naming the characters after the actors playing them has been dispensed with for new additions to the cast announces Arcand's acquiescence to the inescapable fraudulence of motion pictures; the film's sentimentality, Arcand's embracing of it. Elements carried over from Decline are the most picayune in Invasions: Ever-intrigued by the preoccupations of the younger generations, Arcand's heart lies with Sébastien, whose story takes a moving left turn in the final minutes that looks to set-up another, more interesting continuation. Still, Arcand's narrative skills are as lumpy as Tim Burton's--subplots name-checking a cop (French-Canadian cinema fixture Roy Dupuis) and Nathalie's dealer add verisimilitude but seem to lead nowhere by accident, while the impositions of mild contempt for American culture are just that: impositions. (The barbarians of the title refer literally to they who toppled the Twin Towers, discussed in an ill-advised, Noam Chomsky-inspired interlude.) Uneven but affecting just the same, The Barbarian Invasions kicks off the TIFF on a promising note. Programme: Viacom Galas

Burnt Offerings (1976) - DVD

**/**** Image C+ Sound D+ Extras C
starring Karen Black, Oliver Reed, Burgess Meredith, Eileen Heckart
screenplay by William F. Nolan and Dan Curtis, based on the novel by Robert Marasco
directed by Dan Curtis

by Walter Chaw Plodding, ugly, moribund, Burnt Offerings is bolstered by a few great campy turns from a game cast that includes Oliver Reed, Karen Black, and Bette Davis in a performance that runs counter to the self-loathing roles of her Baby Jane/Sweet Charlotte days. Finding its way to the DVD format just a couple of weeks before another haunted house flick (Cold Creek Manor) debuts on the big screen, veteran television director Dan Curtis's horror quickie is one of those comfortable relics that doesn't scare so much as mildly chill, offering countless opportunities to shout at the screen without any sort of discernible payoff--until the end, that is, but even that shocker of a conclusion has been telegraphed since at least the midway point of the first act, muffling its surprise.

Confidence (2003) - DVD

***½/**** Image A Sound A Extras A
starring Edward Burns, Rachel Weisz, Andy Garcia, Dustin Hoffman
screenplay by Doug Jung
directed by James Foley

by Walter Chaw The urban surfaces of Americana are lent the sheen of Edward Hopper's neon isolationism by cinematographer Juan Ruiz Anchía in the appropriately named Confidence, which finds director James Foley back on noir ground, where his footing is firmest. It's the same effect generated by Foley/Anchía's Glengarry Glen Ross, here in Confidence used to mellifluous affect rather than staccato at the service of a caper flick if not the equal to Jules Dassin's seminal contributions to the genre, at least several times better than the slickified nonsense (The Score, the Ocean's Eleven remake) and sinkholes of talky illogic (Heist) of recent fare. A successful heist film as rare as a film that uses Edward Burns correctly in a sentence, Confidence is proof positive--if proof were needed--that James Foley, when he's at the top of his game, is at the top of the game.

The Ωmega Man (1971) - DVD

The Omega Man
*/**** Image A- Sound B Extras D
starring Charlton Heston, Anthony Zerbe, Rosalind Cash
screenplay by John William Corrington and Joyce H. Corrington, based on the novel I Am Legend by Richard Matheson
directed by Boris Sagal

by Walter Chaw Its dialogue and score at constant war with the tickle of poignancy threatening to justify The Ωmega Man's cult status, Boris Sagal's at times astonishingly awful adaptation of Richard Matheson's classic short novel I Am Legend is some kind of weird hippie elegy spiced with a few disturbing religious images and a lot of casual racism. The idea that Matheson's vampires are now black-hooded (monastic and judicial) albino mutants living in an abandoned civic building, representative of not a new order but the oppressive old, is too clearly a lament for the doom of the flower-power generation. Frankly, the image of broken-down hippies trying to plant seeds in blasted earth in the middle of Easy Rider said it all with more elegance and brevity.