Film Freak Central

The House That Dripped Blood (1972) - DVD

**½/**** Image B Sound B Extras D+
starring Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing, Nyree Dawn Porter, Denholm Elliot
screenplay by Robert Bloch
directed by Peter Duffell

by Bill Chambers Anthology films are by their very nature self-defeating--especially, it seems, when the individual stories are linked by a framing device rather than by a thematic spine. (The majority of Hammer also-ran Amicus' output vs. Pulp Fiction, for example.) As the Amicus production The House That Dripped Blood draws to a close, you can't contain the urge to crown a favourite chapter; the rest of the picture becomes a useless husk. Based on the works of Psycho author Robert Bloch, The House That Dripped Blood stars genre stalwarts Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing, John Pertwee, and still others (including an unrecognizably young Joss "Diplomatic Immunity!" Ackland) in separate tales all set inside a gothic manse that, we determine from interstitial vignettes, is unloaded on some steel-nerved rich dude roughly once a week by shifty real estate agent A.J. Stoker (John Bryans).

The Human Stain (2003)

½*/****
starring Anthony Hopkins, Nicole Kidman, Ed Harris, Gary Sinise
screenplay by Nicholas Meyer, based on the novel by Philip Roth
directed by Robert Benton

by Walter Chaw A gravid piece of Oscar-baiting garbage, Robert Benton's dead-on-arrival The Human Stain plods along with the dedication of the dangerously bloated and the pathologically self-important. It's so woefully miscast that its awards-season intentions become transparent, honouring pedigree to mortify the material, and no matter how eternally topical issues of race in the United States might be, the whole production feels airless and badly dated--something like an Arthur Miller parable, lead balloons and rhetorical minefields and all. In fact, the picture is just on this side of camp classic as venerable whore Anthony Hopkins cuts a rug with Gary Sinise to a few Irving Berlin classics and game Nicole Kidman, going the Frankie and Johnny route with an entirely unsuccessful blue-collar turn indicated by a fake tattoo and cigarette, is outmatched by a Nicholas Meyer screenplay packed with head-slappers and incongruities. The sort of movie I tend to dismiss offhand, The Human Stain proves trickier to exorcise for its populist attack on the populist phenomena of political correctness. That doesn't mean the picture's interesting, it means that the picture's thumbing of a hot-button topic buys it a little analysis.

Watchers/Watchers II [Double Feature] - DVD

WATCHERS (1988)
*/**** Image C- Sound C
starring Corey Haim, Barbara Williams, Michael Ironside
screenplay by Bill Freed and Damian Lee, based on Watchers by Dean R. Koontz
directed by Jon Hess

WATCHERS II (2002)
ZERO STARS/**** Image C Sound C
starring Marc Singer, Tracy Scoggins, Jonathan Farwell, Irene Miracle
screenplay by Henry Dominic
directed by Thierry Notz

by Walter Chaw Lassie vs. Link in what amounts to one of the stupidest films ever made: an adaptation of a Dean Koontz (one of the stupidest novelists ever made) novel, Watchers looks cheap, plays cheap, and stars Corey Haim as a Lita Ford-looking, ambiguously gay teen who's upstaged by a dog yet again (see: The Lost Boys and, in a way, Silver Bullet). At least he's not upstaged by Corey Feldman this time around, which, frankly, can't be good for anyone's career or self respect. A tale of a genetically engineered orangutan warring with a genetically engineered golden retriever in the upscale suburbs of Anywhere, America that looks like Vancouver and boasts of the entire Mayberry police force, Watchers is aided now and again by a trademark ridiculous performance from Michael Ironside, the poor man's Jack Nicholson, but is generally an unredeemable tale of military paranoia and dog love. As the mutt gazes intently off-screen at the commands of his invisible handler (and Haim the same), the film has as its only vaguely interesting moment one where a fat kid named "Piggy" and Jason Priestly try to out-bike the killer-monkey, restaging The Lord of the Flies as a BMX downhill derby. Oh, the humanity.

In the Cut (2003) + Sylvia (2003)

IN THE CUT
****/****
starring Meg Ryan, Mark Ruffalo, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Nick Damici
screenplay by Jane Campion & Susanna Moore, based on the novel by Moore
directed by Jane Campion

SYLVIA
*½/****
starring Gwyneth Paltrow, Daniel Craig, Jared Harris, Blythe Danner
screenplay by John Brownlow
directed by Christine Jeffs

"Come at last to this point
I look back on my passion
And realize that I
Have been like a blind man
Who is unafraid of the dark"
-Yosana Akiko

by Walter Chaw Frances Avery (Meg Ryan) is in love with words. She moves through life obscuring herself in a nimbus of them, passing through the world with poetry as her guiding principle. Director Jane Campion is no stranger to a life lived in thrall to poesy--her films An Angel at My Table and The Piano detailed the life of poet Janet Frame and the life of the mind, respectively, and In the Cut finds its meaning and rhythm in the words that Frannie collects, fragments of poems cut from books and collected from subway walls. The New York through which Frannie walks is festooned with ghosts of American flags, tattered and blown after two years of constant display, losing their meaning along with their colours fading up to the sky. Likewise, Frannie sees herself a phantom of unmentioned tragedies, haunting her own life, retreating to the comfort of words when a half-sister, Pauline (Jennifer Jason Leigh), pillories her chaste existence, or when Detective Malloy (Mark Ruffalo) interrogates her about a string of serial murders he's investigating. A scholar of words, Frannie is involved as the film opens in a project analyzing inner-city slang: language as organic and in transition.

Halloween (1978) [25th Anniversary Divimax Edition] - DVD

****/**** Image B- Sound A Extras A
starring Donald Pleasence, Jamie Lee Curtis, Nancy Kyes, P.J. Soles
screenplay by John Carpenter & Debra Hill
directed by John Carpenter

by Walter Chaw As tempting as it is to write the umpteenth dissertation on the importance and brilliance of John Carpenter's Halloween, it's almost enough to say that there is very possibly no other seminal Seventies film--not The Godfather, not Star Wars, perhaps not even Jaws--that has had a greater influence on popular culture. It's a movie about a fishbowl that exists now only in a fishbowl, a picture so examined that its sadistic ability to maintain an atmosphere of horrified anticipation is consumed by the intellectualization of its hedonism=death equation. A screening with fresh eyes reveals a picture and a filmmaker owing incalculable debts to Alfred Hitchcock and Howard Hawks.

Bride of Re-Animator (1990) - DVD

**½/**** Image C Sound C
starring Bruce Abbott, Claude Larl Jones, Fabiana Odento, David Gale
screenplay by Woody Keith and Rick Fry
directed by Brian Yuzna

by Walter Chaw Screaming Mad George is a genius. Make-up artist extraordinaire, his legacy is born of Stan Winston and Tom Savini, but his touch is more witty than the former and more perverse than the latter, resulting in a body of work that, by itself, makes the third Children of the Corn film a winner, the climax of Brian Yuzna's Society unspeakably sticky, and this, Yuzna's sequel to Stuart Gordon's classic splatter flick Re-Animator, a gore flick of unusual visual wit and energy. A continuation of the sad events at H.P. Lovecraft's doomed Miskatonic University, the tale of mad Herbert West (B-movie legend Jeffrey Combs) and his experiments in reanimating living tissue (undaunted, apparently, by his run-in with an over-eager intestinal tract in the first film) with hapless assistant Dan (Bruce Abbott), Bride of Re-Animator captures a lot of the gleeful lack of boundaries of the first film without, predictably, the attendant surprise and freshness. Still, what emerges is a genre picture that, for all of its lack of psychosexual subtext and subtlety, gains for its jubilant indulgence in the wetworks.

Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (2003) [2-Disc Widescreen Edition] - DVD

**½/**** Image A- Sound A+ Extras B
starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Nick Stahl, Claire Danes, Kristanna Loken
screenplay by John D. Brancato & Michael Ferris
directed by Jonathan Mostow

by Walter Chaw Where the first film banked on romantic melancholy, and the second on a literalization of both techno-paranoia and the Oedipal split, Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (hereafter T3)--the first in the Terminator trilogy to be directed by someone other than James Cameron (U-571's Jonathan Mostow)--is essentially a mega-budgeted slasher flick rematted as a hero mythology, but without the sociological significance of the genre. What T3 is, at its core, is a post-modern picture with a few agreeable moments of self-knowing humour that devolve into a self-worshipping reverence. With Arnold Schwarzenegger threatening to jettison his foundering movie career (something of a disaster since the last Terminator film) to pursue a terrifying career in politics, the picture plays like an Academy highlight reel, with Arnie delivering three variations of his "I'll be back" as well as a quick "I lied" for the dozen or so people who still remember Commando. T3 never gets more clever than that, really (though a moment where Arnie's killer robot dons a pair of Elton John sunglasses is a classic image only missing a quick refrain of "The Bitch is Back"), and the picture resolves itself as derivative (I should say "slavishly, worshipfully derivative") of the other films in the trilogy while adding a lot of loud "nothing new."

Milk Money (1994) + I.Q. (1994) - DVDs

MILK MONEY
*½/**** Image B Sound B
starring Melanie Griffith, Ed Harris, Michael Patrick Carter
screenplay by John Mattson
directed by Richard Benjamin

I.Q.
**/**** Image B+ Sound B
starring Meg Ryan, Tim Robbins, Walter Matthau, Charles Durning
screenplay by Andy Breckman and Michael Leeson
directed by Fred Schepisi

by Walter Chaw The first preteen sex comedy I've ever seen, Richard Benjamin's inexplicable Milk Money is a fascinating example of a movie that was never a good idea brought to life in a presentation that is every bit as misguided as its appalling premise would suggest. Melanie Griffith is a hooker who flashes her goodies for a bag of change collected by a trio of pre-pubescent youngsters who seem to live in 1994 but act like they're from 1950. They've idealized The City in an impossibly provincial "aw shucks" country-mouse sort of way, proclaiming it the place where anything can happen and, more importantly, anything can be bought. It's stupid, but at least its naivety is echoed in the way they earn their cash, the cool "Fonzie" kid selling a brief turn with his leather jacket for a handful of change. I'm not certain what freakish netherworld Benjamin and writer John Mattson (responsible for this and two Free Willy sequels) dragged themselves out of, but Milk Money is a product of the same kind of autumnal bullshit-spring from which wells magnificent falderal like The Majestic.

George of the Jungle 2 (2003) - DVD

**/**** Image A Sound A Extras C+
starring Christopher Showerman, Thomas Haden Church, Julie Benz, Christina Pickles
screenplay by Jordan Moffet
directed by David Grossman

by Bill Chambers

"Me new George. Studio too cheap to hire Brendan Fraser."

Tough Enough: FFC Interviews Wes Studi

October 26, 2003|For all the praise afforded it in recent years, Michael Mann's 1992 The Last of the Mohicans is still an undervalued film of big emotions, boasting of a macho sensibility more bracing than any number of post-modern ruminations on the cult of manhood. Above all its technical achievements and ecstatic scripting, it offers Magua, perhaps the most important modern depiction of any minority character and one that arguably, single-handedly, made the casting of the Native American as the impossibly noble Child of the Earth suddenly déclassé. Wes Studi is much of the reason for the success of Mohicans, his portrayal of Magua revealing depths that reverberate with me still, offering hope that Asians in American cinema might one day be as difficult to minimize as Native Americans have become. Tied in with that respect, however, is of course the reality that roles for Indians have become relatively scarce in recent years.

The Singing Detective (2003)

***/****
starring Robert Downey Jr., Robin Wright Penn, Jeremy Northam, Mel Gibson
screenplay by Dennis Potter, based on his miniseries
directed by Keith Gordon

by Walter Chaw A film about transplants (UK to America, Michael Gambon to Robert Downey Jr., postwar-'40s English tunes to 1950s American doo-wop), The Singing Detective has as its most effective moments the parts transplanted whole from Dennis Potter's amazing six-hour BBC miniseries. Not to say that Keith Gordon's The Singing Detective isn't a frequently fascinating beast all by itself (the late Potter's own screenplay, shot nearly word-for-word by Gordon, assures a measure of quality almost deliriously high), but to say that the inevitable comparisons will be harsh and, frankly, unfair, given the author's hand in the adaptation and the strain of compression.

Scary Movie 3 (2003)

ZERO STARS/****
starring Anna Faris, Charlie Sheen, Regina Hall, Denise Richards
screenplay by Craig Mazin and Kevin Smith and David Zucker
directed by David Zucker

by Walter Chaw Even without the Wayans Brothers, the latest Scary Movie sequel is unspeakably bad. A disjointed series of set-piece recreations from popular films (Signs, The Matrix Reloaded, The Ring, 8 Mile) populated by idiots and scripted with a flat collection of obvious fall-down gags and scatology, the picture doesn't even respect the movies it mocks enough to understand what it is about them that fails. More, with the absence of the Wayans (who are replaced by David Zucker, one-third of the braintrust behind successful spoofs like Airplane! and The Naked Gun), the repeated shout-outs to heroes of hip-hop (an entire record label shows up in cameo bits) and attendant disrespect of the culture land with disturbing racial undertones. The film is aimed specifically at an African-American demographic: That's one thing when the filmmakers are African-American, another thing altogether when they're not.

Party Monster (2003)

***/****
starring Macaulay Culkin, Seth Green, Chloë Sevigny, Natasha Lyonne
screenplay by Fenton Bailey & Randy Barbato, based on the book Disco Bloodbath by James St. James
directed by Fenton Bailey & Randy Barbato

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover By all rights, Party Monster shouldn't work as well as it does. Not only is it flip about matters of grave seriousness (in this case, the murder of a Hispanic drug dealer by Club Kid impresario Michael Alig), but it hasn't got much on its mind beyond the endless debauchery afforded by its subject matter, and consequently gives all other matters the rhinestone-studded shaft. But despite all of this shallowness, the film is surprisingly engrossing; as Alig falls into his downward spiral, it becomes a harrowing reminder that, per the film's much-abused Blake quote, the road of excess can often lead to the path of destruction.

The Same River Twice (2003) + The Weather Underground (2003)

THE SAME RIVER TWICE
****/****
directed by Robb Moss

THE WEATHER UNDERGROUND
***/****
directed by Sam Green & Bill Siegel

by Walter Chaw I've just seen an episode of CNN's "Crossfire" that featured as one of its topics the proliferation of "Bush Bashing," which, for as scatologically intriguing as it sounds, refers to the growing popularity of pummelling our dimwit president for his dimwit philosophies and hilljack presentation. The verbal assault gratifying for what it is, what's missing in the new American dyspepsia is any real activism: The movies feel like-Sixties movies, and the government certainly feels like the late-Sixties government, but the level of outrage is something just north of "mild simmer." Students aren't massing, the National Guard isn't mobilizing, and there's no new Flower Power generation to oxymoronically stir the great, slobbering melting pot of American sex and politics. What there is, however, is a glut of underground documentaries finding their way into small theatres to smaller audiences but enough critical support to at least put the intelligentsia on record as suitably discomfited.

To Live and Die in LA (1985) [Special Edition] - DVD

To Live and Die in L.A.
***/**** Image B Sound A- Extras A
starring William L. Petersen, Willem Dafoe, John Pankow, Debra Feuer
screenplay by William Friedkin and Gerald Petievich, based on the novel by Petievich
directed by William Friedkin

by Bill Chambers William Friedkin's To Live and Die in L.A. sprang from the director's mid-'80s preoccupation with music-video nihilism, and as such has peaks and valleys depending on the degree of montage a sequence calls for. The tin-ear that Friedkin contracted sometime after the Seventies, which drove him to fatally second-guess Paul Brickman's Swiftian screenplay for Deal of the Century, imbues many an exchange in To Live and Die in L.A. with authenticity (only real people flounder this much trying to sound hard-boiled), but the stylish visuals in turn butt heads with the dialogue, prompting us to wish for a slicker whole. The silliest repartee also throws the symbolic-to-the-point-of-corny names of central figures Chance (William L. Petersen) and Masters (Willem Dafoe) into tautological relief: Chance is a Secret Service agent who thrives on risk (fittingly, a found poker chip decides him in pursuit of the bad guy), while Masters, who's like Patrick Bateman without the civility, is a painter who has mastered the art of making funny-money, as is demonstrated for us in a breathtaking collection of how-to shots that single-handedly justifies Friedkin's dabble in the MTV aesthetic.

Willard (2003) [New Line Platinum Series] - DVD

*½/**** Image A Sound A Extras A+
starring Crispin Glover, Laura Elena Harring, Jackie Burroughs, R. Lee Ermey
screenplay by Glen Morgan, based on the screenplay by Gilbert Ralston and Ralston's novel Ratman's Notebook
directed by Glen Morgan

by Walter Chaw If you're going to remake an Ernest Borgnine movie from the Seventies, I'd rather see a redux of The Devil's Rain. But Willard it is; for the blissfully uninitiated, Willard concerns the travails of a lonesome weirdo who makes friends with a bunch of rats, Phenomena-style (Argento not Travolta, which brings us back to The Devil's Rain, curiously), and sends them on a crusade against an evil boss who wants to buy Willard's house. Bruce Davison as the original Willard has a nice moment in that film where he implores his rat-kinder to "tear it up" good, but the film is probably best remembered for the theme song of its sequel, Ben, penned by Michael Jackson v.0.2. The theme song, and Davison, have stupid cameos in the new Willard.

Beyond Borders (2003) + Radio (2003)

BEYOND BORDERS
*/****
starring Angelina Jolie, Clive Owen, Linus Roache, Teri Polo
screenplay by Caspian Tredwell-Owen
directed by Martin Campbell

RADIO
*/****
starring Cuba Gooding Jr., Ed Harris, Riley Smith, Sarah Drew
screenplay by Mike Rich
directed by Michael Tollin

by Walter Chaw Some pharaohs spent their reign building mighty pyramid tributes to themselves, so in that respect we should feel lucky that Angelina Jolie and Cuba Gooding Jr. have only used up the latter part of their plummeting careers constructing towering monuments to their splendid ideological isolation. The real wonder of it all is that there's room enough in the universe for both of their dangerously inflated senses of self-satisfaction, simultaneously reaching their respective pinnacles in a pair of atrocious films that at least have the virtue of being really funny, albeit for all the wrong reasons. For Jolie, her desire to save the entire third world, one orphan at a time, manifests itself in a picture that poses the big-lipped beauty carefully as a fashion plate and a sainted martyr; a debutante with an amazing wardrobe and a UN worker with a streak of activism; and a figure in its way as ridiculous as Gooding Jr.'s caricature of a severely mentally-disabled man (James Robert Kennedy) that reminds, of all things, of that acorn-crazed, pre-verbal prehistoric squirrel from Ice Age.

DIFF '03: Sam & Joe

½*/****
written and directed by Jason Ruscio

by Walter Chaw Amateurish and lit like a hospital ward, the extraordinarily unpromising feature debut of Jason Ruscio is bolstered a bit by a game cast (especially a luminous Petra Wright, who deserves better) but undermined by a determined lack of craft, a clumsy, over-burdened screenplay, and a surplus of mordant self-righteousness. A tale of a woman (Wright) who makes the mortal error of returning to her abusive husband (Michael T. Ringer), Sam & Joe is shot on jittery, ugly, handheld DV exacerbated by what appears to be an over-affection for Tarantino's whip-pans, time-skip edits, and circular dialogue. Not a bad topic for a film (and indeed, the inescapable cycle of love and violence permeates a good portion of modern cinema to some degree or another); what grates about this picture is a feeling of arrogance--the student-film arthouse malady that infects guys with cameras, making them believe that great cinema springs full-grown from attractive actors and a hot-button topic. But nothing interesting comes from the piece: it's boring and flat, and the pathos that you might feel springs more from the understanding that embedded in Sam & Joe are the pieces of a good film--at least, an effective film--given short-shrift by a production that doesn't understand how to function within its medium (The Celebration and The Blair Witch Project are no more visually polished but are infinitely "smarter" about film), and doesn't appear overly interested in making the effort.

DIFF '03: Shattered Glass

***/****
written and directed by Billy Ray

by Walter Chaw The saga of disgraced NEW REPUBLIC journalist Stephen Glass is retraced in Billy Ray's hyphenate debut Shattered Glass, an unassuming walk across the crossed threads of deceptive webs fuelled by an interesting pair of performances from Hayden Christensen as Glass and Peter Sarsgaard as embattled editor Chuck Lane. Fascinatingly repetitive, the picture itself is something of a scam, portraying Glass's tall tales in straight flashback fashion before systematically debunking them, replicating, in a sense, the feeling of betrayal that Glass's readership, his audience, must have felt upon learning that they'd been duped with craft and imagination. Questions of journalism sliding into entertainment (and the general slackening of ethics and standards that such a descent entails) are handled with the sort of subtlety that suggests a rare regard for an audience's intelligence--a wise decision, considering the subject matter. Shattered Glass is entertaining and slightly discomfiting stuff, given a snappy pace and a professional look by folks who are, after all, engaged in the same sort of mythmaking and fabrications as poor, lonesome Glass. The film is ingratiating, and more dangerous than it seems because of it.

The Whales of August (1987) - DVD

**½/**** Image A- Sound A-
starring Bette Davis, Lillian Gish, Vincent Price, Anne Sothern
screenplay by David Berry, based on his play
directed by Lindsay Anderson

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Auteurists take note: sometimes, economic circumstances play hell with your theories. There is the example of Lindsay Anderson, who began in the '60s as a star of the new British realism (This Sporting Life, et al) and went surrealist with the celebrated Mick Travis trilogy. By the end of the '80s, his particular quirks were no longer commercial, and he was reduced to sausages like The Whales of August, which bears absolutely no resemblance to the work that made his reputation. Try as one might, the film won't fit the brash, cynical template of Anderson's best work and is instead polite and obsequious in ways that a free director would never be. The resulting film is workmanlike but hardly compelling and serves mainly as a showcase for a group of aged actors who deserved better material almost as much as their director.

DIFF '03: The Wild Dogs

**/****
written and directed by Thom Fitzgerald

by Walter Chaw Thom Fitzgerald makes movies that celebrate the cult of himself. Carefully nourished by his sense of smug self-satisfaction like a private pleasure garden, his pictures, numbering five, are auteur in the sense that they're predictable now: one cannot fail to be scolded when sitting down to a Fitzgerald piece, and even his best work (The Hanging Garden) shows flashes of the pedantic sermonizer he's about to become. The topics into infinity are the holy trinity of the father, oppressed subcultures (especially homosexuals); the son, AIDS; and the holy ghost, Fitzgerald himself, floating above it all with an air of moral superiority, wielding his baton of obvious metaphor and loaded arguments. Consider The Wild Dogs, a film set in post-Ceaucescu Bucharest overrun by stray dogs that function as a lead-pipe metaphor for the cast-offs and victims of the dictators savage reign. Beggars tainted by what John Frankenheimer would have dubbed "freakism" are grounded by Fitzgerald himself as a pasty pornographer seeking to exploit the barely legal women of Romania; in the gesture of casting himself the exploiter, the filmmaker sees himself absolved of his sins of exploitation, but not nearly enough to forgive the condescension that oozes from every frame of the picture. With no connection too clear not to be elucidated and no character too stock to be underlined, The Wild Dogs casts light on a worthy topic by highlighting exactly the sort of trap a filmmaker can fall into when he believes himself to be smarter--better, somehow--than an audience that must get tired of being underestimated.

DIFF '03: The Event

*½/****
screenplay by Tim Marback, Steven Hillyer and Thom Fitzgerald
directed by Thom Fitzgerald

by Walter Chaw Thom Fitzgerald's rip-off of--of all things--It's My Party miscasts Parker Posey as a hard-nosed prosecutor intent on exposing the assisted suicide of a terminally AIDS-ridden man by his well-meaning coterie of family and quirky friends. While Olympia Dukakis doesn't entirely embarrass herself as the dead guy's mother, the same is impossible to say for Fitzgerald, who, by trying to ultimately equate the AIDS holocaust with the 9/11 atrocity, manages to be both distasteful and ideologically suspect. Tragedy aside, the equation, however tenuous, of a virus with Arab fundamentalists with a grudge strikes at the heart of the problem of a self-important filmmaker with an axe to grind and limited tools with which to do it. The number of casualties doesn't equate phenomena--9/11 has as much symbolic value to the AIDS epidemic as either does to car accidents. The film is redolent with this sense of smugness: proclamations of "never fuck with a drag queen" punctuated by a rabbit-kick to the nads are only ever vaguely successful in a John Waters film; playing camp as high opera, after all, rarely breeds happy results. The death party ritual itself is mawkish and seen, for the bulk of the film, twice-removed as snippets here and again of an illicit videotape, circulated in some murky queer underworld just waiting for a straight-guy mole to ferret out and use against the well-meaning felons. The conversation about merciful euthanasia is a good one to have, no argument here. So go have it instead.

DIFF '03: Bitter Jester

***/****
directed by Maija DiGiorgio

by Walter Chaw Bitter Jester is a hard-to-watch record of an irritating, dangerously self-destructive stand-up comedienne named Maija (director Maija DiGiorgio) who, with a video camera and goombah ex-boxer boyfriend Kenny in tow, imposed herself on the frighteningly neurotic underworld of stand-up performers. With the endorsement of Kenny's legend-in-the-stand-up-world pal Richard Belzer and Maija's dead therapist, the pair set out to make a documentary on the effectiveness of throwing oneself at the mercy of antagonistic comedy-club audiences as therapy for working out childhood trauma and pathological personality defects. What results is a surreal, Hunter S. Thompson-esque travelogue wherein we learn that Kenny quit boxing because he had reached "the pinnacle" of the profession (and witness the aftermath of Kenny trying to kill Jerry Seinfeld)--that professional pinnacle being the in-ring murder of one of his hapless opponents. We learn a lot about Kenny because, while the pair wins interviews with a few of the biggest stars on the stand-up circuit (Rita Rudner, George Carlin, Chevy Chase, Whoopi Goldberg, and so on), Kenny is completely incapable of not revealing the breadth of his scary pathology. The tragedy of Maija and Kenny is equalled by the tragedy of these comedians clamouring to be included in this project--many of them solely because they see other people clamouring to be a part of this project. An honest and frightening confirmation of more than I ever wanted to know on the subject of fame and performance (particularly when the picture watches as Kenny joins the rescue effort at ground zero following 9/11 before organizing a benefit for the children of the victims of the atrocity attended by most of the people interviewed), Bitter Jester lends something like an amazing perspective on how complicated a person can be--and, oddly enough, how transforming September 11^th was on a collective and personal level.

DIFF '03: The Flower of Evil

*½/****
screenplay by Caroline Eliacheff and Louise L. Lambrichs, adaptation by Claude Chabrol
directed by Claude Chabrol

by Walter Chaw Claude Chabrol, the master of the French thriller, is perhaps better described as the master of the French femme-fear film, making an art of women empowering themselves through the destruction of class and gender distinction. With The Flower of Evil (La Fleur du Mal) (no relation to the Baudelaire), Chabrol continues his slide into quaint, comfortable insignificance with his umpteenth treatment of a theme; he's become sort of a French Ozu, if you will, but with murder. This time around, the aging spinster with a secret sociopathology is Tante Line (Suzanne Flon), a toothless Raymond Chandler hothouse fatale wilting in a Parisian home with political aspirant Anne (Nathalie Baye), womanizing sleazebag Gérard (the aptly named Bernard Lecoq), and Anne's daughter Michéle (Mélanie Doutey). A moment where Chabrol frames Michéle and Line through an empty birdcage screams "Hitchcock" in a way as jarring and unbecoming as the sudden bursts of Matthieu Chabrol's drop-needle score, recalling the Nouvelle Vague pioneer's trademark detachment and irony (and fascination with Hitchcock: he co-authored an exhaustive examination of Hitchcock's work with Eric Rohmer in 1957), but also pointing to an undeniable fatigue with working over the same ground he's been ploughing for over four decades now. Still, there's no arguing Chabrol's amazing command of the medium--his edits and choices are rapturous. Just too bad that Chabrol favourite Isabelle Huppert isn't around to lend the piece a little fascination to go along with its expertise.

DIFF '03: Bright Future

Akarui mirai
***½/****
written and directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa

by Walter Chaw Like many of Kiyoshi Kurosawa's pictures, Bright Future is about the virulence of apathy, the way that malaise seeps into the cracks of character, infecting ambition into inaction or inspiring sudden, malevolent acts inspired not so much by violence, but by a lack of prevention of violence. The Yin to Takashi Miike's Yang, Kurosawa increasingly finds himself at the fringe of narrative, making this film a remarkable companion piece to Gus Van Sant's similarly haunted, lyrical, and allegorical Elephant. Yuji (Joh Odagiri) is a shiftless youth working in a towel factory; his friend Mamaro (Tadanobu Asano) functions like Masato Hagiwara's drifter in Kurosawa's amazing Cure, an enigmatic catalyst for an almost existential refusal first to act, then to take responsibility for any action, no matter its significance. Kurosawa's worlds are contaminated with Bartleby's--sick with them, the way that Yuji and Mamaro eventually manage to infect Japan's waterways with a meticulously engineered freshwater jellyfish, an entity as malignant in its feckless, mindless drift as Kurosawa's disaffected, isolated antiheroes. The bright future of the title isn't ironic in a traditional sense because it's genuinely hopeful in the way of the New Testament's Revelations, understanding that for Yuji and Mamaro the completion of the quest is predictably apocalyptic and, like Camus's Sisyphus, finding joy in the reassuring inevitability of a never-deviating eternity. A closing shot of a canal packed with diaphanous death touches on the Christian (and T.S. Eliot-ian) image of Christ the river, divider and unifier (note the split-screen device that frames Yuji's conversations with his father)--understanding that the return of that particular catalyst is also certain death for a mythology that, like post-modernism, proselytizes salvation of sorts in the life of a sheep.

Wrath of Caan: FFC Interviews Scott Caan

October 19, 2003|It's in a subterranean hotel breakfast nook with fountains and a tiny little glassed-in room for God knows what that I meet the manic Scott Caan, who wears a tight baseball t-shirt and demonstrates yo-yo tricks to the slight consternation of a publicist eyeing the glass enclosure, I thought, a little nervously. After showing me a trick of his own devising, the Caan Machine Gun, I asked him to repeat it so that I could photograph it:

DIFF '03: Resist!: To Be with the Living

****/****
directed by Dirk Szuszies

by Walter Chaw I have long been sustained by the belief that film can change the world, and that the most interesting dialogues I have ever had about the medium (the idea that it is the logical child of the oral storytelling tradition--Lord Byron's seed and wind, both) are connectable some way to the larger issues of my, or any, day. Dirk Szuszies and Karin Kaper's Resist!: To Be with the Living draws a line of crystal purity from the cycles of Greek tragedy (the eternal fight for individuality, moral objection, and freedom of "Antigone") and the primal power of public theatre to the possibilities of the film medium to be a vehicle of change and revolution. A document of 50 years of New York's "The Living Theater," a collection of the ideological children of the impossibly tumultuous summer of '68, the picture is a refutation that everything is lost to apathy in a modern age that seeks to sanitize and market atrocity and crusade into patriotism and some perverse version of manifest destiny. Resist! follows this group of idealist performers, engaged in a ministry of outraged pacifism, capturing them and their performances in the cell of film that, in its own way, is as invasive and jarring as any Living Theater guerrilla performance. With this film, Paul Cronin's Amos Vogel documentary, Sam Green & Bill Siegel's The Weather Underground, and Errol Morris's The Fog of War, there seems a pointedly renewed interest in issues of sociopolitical unrest, of the arts in crisis, of youth in revolt, and of the importance of civil disobedience as the most patriotic form of expression. It's not for hatred of the country but rather for mistrust of the government, and at its core, Resist! is about the joy of passionate communication and that kernel of sublimity in art that represents the meaning of living.

The Ox-Bow Incident (1943) - DVD

****/**** Image A Sound B+ Extras A-
starring William Holden, Jennifer Jones, Torin Thatcher
screenplay by Lamar Trotti, based on the novel by Walter Van Tilburg Clark
directed by William A. Wellman

by Bill Chambers William A. Wellman's 1943 film The Ox-Bow Incident is so brave and piercing that you can overlook its gawky title. That star Henry Fonda had a knack for picking westerns goes without saying, but The Ox-Bow Incident has more gothic qualities than do most oaters made prior to the dawn of Europe staking its genre claim: it's the scene in cowboy flicks where a bunch of guys cheer on an unceremonious hanging expanded to feature-length. The movie has such definitive--and perhaps, given the climate, urgent--things to say about mob mentality, the sour side of fraternity, that the Navy-enlisted Fonda deferred his tour of duty in order to appear in it. What makes this doubly noble is that, despite his lead billing, he's really not The Ox-Bow Incident's leading man. With a cast of dozens granted comparable screen time, no one is.

Veronica Guerin (2003)

*/****
starring Cate Blanchett, Gerard McSorley, Ciarán Hinds, Brenda Fricker
screenplay by Carol Doyle and Mary Agnes Donoghue
directed by Joel Schumacher

by Walter Chaw By the end of the piece, the only thing missing is John Wayne in ill-fitting Centurion garb, drawling "I do believe she truly was the son of God" over the corpse of slain journalist Veronica Guerin (Cate Blanchett), so at pains is Joel Schumacher's tedious spectacle of a hagiography of Guerin to paint her as some sort of sainted martyr. Veronica Guerin is horrible, really, a passel of forced dramatic slow push-ins framing Blanchett's mannered performance (in a Princess Diana haircut, no less, to really ramp up that pathos) all of insouciantly arched eyebrows and saucy eyeballs and centred dead and soft-lit like a Giotto effigy. Much is made of Guerin's print peers looking down on her, then a closing title card offers a statistic on the number of journalists killed in the line of duty, the suggestion being that journalists are sniffy elitists who don't like someone who can't write, has no background or experience in journalism, and takes unnecessary risks with themselves and their families--and that journalists are heroes regularly martyred by their thirst for truth. You really can't have it both ways, and that lack of focus isn't ambiguity so much as confusion brought about by a mortal dose of self-righteousness.

L'auberge espagnole (2002)

***/****
starring Romain Duris, Judith Godrèche, Audrey Tautou, Cécile De France
written and directed by Cédric Klapisch

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Cédric Klapisch is the director of a mid-'90s gem called When the Cat's Away; although it wasn't of great shattering importance, it understood that, and turned out to be enjoyably funky nonetheless. Alas, the intervening years have taken their toll on Klapisch's sense of self-importance, because now he's made L'auberge espagnole--a film with the potential to be another enjoyably funky little movie that instead pushes banal life lessons and shallow cultural observations. L'auberge espagnole might have squeaked by had its tale of a French student in a Barcelona rooming house just been a sex farce with low ambitions, but as it stands, it's a sex farce that thinks that it's actual drama, making for some serious head-slapping when it drags out the ersatz "importance."

Pieces of April (2003)

**/****
starring Katie Holmes, Patricia Clarkson, Oliver Platt, Derek Luke
written and directed by Peter Hedges

by Walter Chaw Modest in its intentions and achievements, Peter Hedges's Pieces of April has an undercurrent of paternalistic racism that verges on the disturbing. April (Katie Holmes, great but wasted) and her boyfriend Bobby (Derek Luke) invite April's difficult family to Thanksgiving dinner. Because it's potentially, ominously, the "last" Thanksgiving, the estranged nuclear unit composed of mom Joy (Patricia Clarkson), dad Jim (Oliver Platt), grandma Dottie (professional grandma Alice Drummond), and their other two children Beth (Alison Pill) and Timmy (John Gallagher Jr.) pack themselves into the station wagon and head up the interstate. The picture cuts between April struggling to find someone in her tenement who'll lend her the use of an oven and the family doing their best to suffer the acerbic, often nasty Joy.

House of 1000 Corpses (2003) + Waxwork/Waxwork II: Lost in Time [Double Feature] - DVD

HOUSE OF 1000 CORPSES
**/**** Image A Sound A Extras A
starring Sid Haig, Bill Moseley, Sheri Moon, Karen Black
written and directed by Rob Zombie

WAXWORK (1988)
*/**** Image D Sound D
starring Zach Galligan, Deborah Foreman, Michelle Johnson, Dana Ashbrook
written and directed by Anthony Hickox

WAXWORK II: LOST IN TIME (1991)
ZERO STARS/**** Image C Sound C
starring Zach Galligan, Alexander Godunov, Monika Schnarre
written and directed by Anthony Hickox

by Walter Chaw Curiously, compulsively watchable in a grindhouse exploitation sort of way, neo-glam shock-rocker Rob Zombie follows in Twisted Sister Dee Snider's capering footsteps with a derivative flick that mainly goes a long way towards demonstrating how hard it is to make a coherent movie. More Richard Donner's The Goonies than Tobe Hooper's The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, House of 1000 Corpses is a shoestring series of hyperactive camera movements and disjointed images culled from what seems too many films to count, from Bloodsucking Freaks to Near Dark to Maniac to The Serpent and the Rainbow to Halloween to Hellbound: Hellraiser 2 and so on, with no reason except to demonstrate how many horror movies Zombie has seen. The only thing missing from the picture--besides actual dread--is a helpful annotation so that youngsters intrigued can check out the real deal.

DIFF '03: Off the Map

***/****
screenplay by Joan Ackerman, based on her play
directed by Campbell Scott

by Walter Chaw Campbell Scott's Off the Map reminds me of some dimly-remembered authors I used to read when I was younger: Harper Lee, maybe Tony Hillerman in a contemplative mood--alien cultures and modes of thought set to soothing rhythms against a saguaro sunset. More to the point, the film resembles the book its characters read to each other by lamplight: Richard Henry Dana, Jr.'s wonderful Two Years Before the Mast, which I first read when a beloved professor recommended it as a corollary to Melville's Moby Dick and a primer for Patrick O'Brian (due to receive his own adaptation with this holiday's Master and Commander). Off the Map is a look at the nautical life and the contemplative philosophy that evolves from it, the ocean tied to the desert in a word and watercolour by William Gibbs (Jim True-Frost) and cemented in the gift of a boat from young daughter Bo (Valentina de Angelis) to depressed father Charley (Sam Elliott). The picture is a wonderfully off-kilter character drama and the kind of movie directed by a man with the sensitivity to cut on a swallow; even if it never quite escapes its theatrical roots, the picture has the poetry to score a love scene with a house settling in a desert breeze, understands the power of uncommented-upon sunsets, and mentions a dead goat named "Harry Dean Stanton." It's about art as a conduit to the sublime, pure and prevailing, created of a moment but eternally relevant, and so Off the Map is also about the creative process--the rationale for making a film that is personal and passionate. Understated, intimate, Off the Map feels a little like the art of Egon Schiele (and so reflected in Gibbs's paintings): melancholy, lost, but looking. Originally published: October 16, 2003.

DIFF '03: A Slipping-Down Life

**½/****
screenplay by Toni Kalem, based on the novel by Anne Tyler
directed by Toni Kalem

by Walter Chaw With an excellent first hour and a less impressive, almost sprawling second, Toni Kalem's hyphenate debut A Slipping-Down Life finds an excellent cast in the employ of a Southern Gothic about a young woman "awakened" by the "shout outs" of a small-time backwater singer/songwriter. With tunes by Peter Himmelman and nice performances from Guy Pearce and Lili Taylor (too pretty to play the overweight teen protagonist of the Anne Tyler novel on which the film is based), what starts out as unusual and compelling loses its way at some point to become a more conventional comedy of manners, Grant Wood-style. Though it reminds of May in a way for Taylor's self-mutilation and studied romantic intensity, Kalem strives more for the grimly uplifting than the grimly ironic. Still, there's something smart going on in the picture's visual design and return to doubling motifs, in its portrayal of the difficulties of communication, and Taylor's trademark obsession with young women on journeys of discovery and love. Add a genuinely affecting moment between Taylor and veteran Tom Bower, not to mention a few pointed unicorn images given poignancy when Taylor's character carves a name on her forehead, and A Slipping-Down Life finds itself, if not entirely successful, at least ambitious and, for a long while, even brave. Originally published: October 15, 2003.

DIFF '03: Casa de los babys

*/****
written and directed by John Sayles

by Walter Chaw It feels increasingly as if John Sayles is a little sick of making John Sayles films. This dramatically inert ensemble piece about a group of American women in a South American limbo hoping to adopt babies feels curiously underwritten and stale despite the heaviness of the dialogue. Maggie Gyllenhaal makes the best impression as a woman of privilege who hopes a child will save her marriage, but like the rest of the cast (Daryl Hannah, Marcia Gay Harden, Lili Taylor, Susan Lynch, Rita Moreno, Mary Steenburgen), her character is composed of one dramatic moment, a few uncomfortably didactic lines, and a sketch that doesn't go much beyond workshop outline. Coming off worst are Harden as a shrill kleptomaniac and Hannah as a Coloradoan health nut with a tragic history. Sayles's obsessions with the plight of the working class and the lefty disdain for television and the lottery (handled with more grace in the director's City of Hope) seem threadbare here, almost perfunctory, and his last South American epic, the amazing Men with Guns, seems already to have said all there needs to be said about the plight of youth in tension between capitalist imperialism and third-world civil unrest. More puzzling is the decline of Sayles as a lyrical craftsman and careful visual stylist--the trade-off between his most fruitful collaborations with Haskell Wexler for the flatness of DP Maurizio Rubenstein's images renders Casa de los Babys something contrary to Sayles's core beliefs in the story of place and the power of cinema as the modern "oral" tradition. Originally published: October 15, 2003.

Star Trek V: The Final Frontier (1989) - DVD|[Special Collector's Edition] DVD

**½/****
1999 DVD - Image B Sound A-
SCE DVD - Image A Sound A Extras A
starring William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, DeForest Kelly, James Doohan, Laurence Luckinbill
screenplay by David Loughery
directed by William Shatner

by Vincent Suarez On the heels of the wildly successful (and equally overrated) Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, the Trek franchise seemed poised to become, of all things, a crossover phenomenon. That changed with the release of the financially disappointing and generally reviled (by critics and Trek fans alike) fifth installment, Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, which nearly killed the film series. Wisely, Paramount and producer Harve Bennett asked Nicholas Meyer, director of the magnificent Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, to helm Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, putting the series back on warp drive.

DIFF '03: I'm Not Scared

Io non ho paura
***/****
written by Niccolò Ammaniti, Niccolò Ammaniti, Francesca Marciano
directed by Gabriele Salvatores

by Walter Chaw An Italian version of Charles Laughton's Night of the Hunter in many respects, Gabriele Salvatores' I'm Not Scared (Io Non Ho Paura) is admirable in its ability to evoke the dreamy disconnection of childhood--the startling realization at some point along the way that your parents may not be merely flawed, but occasionally malicious. A young boy, Michele (Giuseppe Cristiano), finds a child imprisoned in a hole next to an abandoned house in the middle of an impossibly beautiful fall Tuscan landscape, all yellow wheat and verdant hillock. Shots of wildlife--owls and toads, snakes and chickens--evoke Laughton's film, while ants crawling on eyes and animals killed by automobiles suggest the intrusions of the things of man into the things of the wilderness. A quiet picture, I'm Not Scared is ultimately hopeful as well, finding in its young protagonist the innocence of childhood and the boundless courage it requires to become a man in a savage universe. Lovely to behold and almost as lovely to reflect upon, the picture is inevitably corrupted by a weak conspiracy narrative--pointedly, the only portions of the film that don't centre on the child or the will and ordeal of maturation.

DIFF '03: Film as Subversive Art: Amos Vogel and Cinema 16

***/****
directed by Paul Cronin

by Walter Chaw Documenting the rise and fall of New York International Film Festival director Amos Vogel, who got his start in the programming business as the mastermind behind the legendary "Cinema 16" film society, Film as a Subversive Art: Amos Vogel and Cinema 16 provides a traditional documentary treatment of an unconventional man. A refugee from Hitler's Germany, Vogel, a fierce antagonist of censorship, introduced the United States to folks as diverse and vital as Yasujiro Ozu and Stan Brakhage. The sort of thing dying in an America that embraces the mundane and the comfortable in its moviegoing choices, Vogel's Cinema 16 defined over and again the things that any film society worth its salt should embrace: the extraordinary, the controversial, and the uncomfortable. That NEW YORK TIMES critic Bosley Crowther never once lent his weight to Cinema 16, a slight cited by Vogel as perhaps the primary reason for its eventual collapse, is one of those ignorant omissions that's only gotten worse with the vast majority of this generation's "major daily" newspaper "movie writers." The picture is a reminder of what it means to love and respect the medium, and something of a call to arms to resurrect the corpses of movie clubs and societies in cities and universities across the country.

DIFF '03: Dallas 362

***½/****
written and directed by Scott Caan

by Walter Chaw An extremely auspicious hyphenate debut from actor-director Scott Caan (son of James), Dallas 362 is a kinetic and visually literate film composed of Nan Goldin-inspired two-person tableaux that offer a startlingly clear-eyed balance to the force of transitional sequences. An opening montage reminds in the best way of the still-photo manipulation over the main titles of "The Rockford Files", an interesting photo-scoping technique seen in the recent documentary The Kid Stays in the Picture and revisited in the body of the film as a particularly interesting way to tell a flashback. The power of images, black-and-white, juxtaposed with hard-driving music or narration is a nice reminder of the nature of picture's storytelling authority--enough so that when the flashback substitutes its black-and-white for colour, the effect is startling and elucidative. Shawn Hatosy and Caan provide the film's centre, but in truth Dallas 362 soars on its ensemble democracy that counts as its assets Jeff Goldblum in his best performance in years and Kelly Lynch, likewise. Its story eventually a crime drama, Caan's writing and direction betray a greater interest in character and dialogue. Not an unqualified triumph, Dallas 362 nonetheless feels too good to be a first film and represents a bar for Caan that'll be difficult to best.

Dawson's Creek: The Series Finale (2003) - DVD

**½/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras A-
starring James Van Der Beek, Katie Holmes, Michelle Williams, Joshua Jackson
screenplay by Kevin Williamson & Maggie Friedman
directed by James Whitmore, Jr. ("All Good Things...") and Greg Prange ("...Must Come to an End")

by Bill Chambers SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. When it first aired, I was fuming. But I've not only come to terms with the series finale of "Dawson's Creek", I've grown to appreciate it, too. What I realized on a second viewing (not as superfluous as you might think: the DVD that facilitated a reassessment restores 20 minutes of footage cut from the broadcast version) was that my own tenuous identification with the main character, a movie lover and amateur filmmaker prone to befriending unattainable hotties, was getting in the way of appreciating a perfectly laudable reversal of expectations. There's no sense beating around the bush: Joey (Katie Holmes) picked suave Pacey (Joshua Jackson). The first "Dawson's Creek" scripted by series creator Kevin Williamson since the second season's "...That Is the Question" (in tandem with which he announced he was stepping down as the show's Professor Marvel), the two-part capper--aired as a movie-of-the-week--leaves Dawson (James Van Der Beek) without a fallback girl, as Joey romantically rejects Dawson on the heels of the passing of her alternate: single-mother Jen (Michelle Williams), who dies from a rare heart condition.

DIFF '03: What Alice Found

½*/****
written and directed by A. Dean Bell

by Walter Chaw Petty to fixate on such things, but what to make of a heavy Boston accent that appears and disappears so randomly (in a character from New Hampshire, for God's sake) that it causes one to wonder why they even bothered in the first place? The performances in the digital cheapie What Alice Found are uniformly awful, but Emily Grace as titular trailer-park refugee Alice is a special case, trembling between Tori Spelling and Melanie Hutsell's SNL impersonation of Tori Spelling--all zombie stares, eye-rolling, and lop-sided sneers. Out of the park and into the mobile home, Alice finds herself through the looking glass, as it were, travelling with a kindly lot lizard (Judith Ivey) selling her wares at the rest stops of the Eastern Seaboard. Not long before Alice decides to hustle a little cheesecake herself, the picture is wall-to-wall with acoustic girl-folk meant, I guess, to inject some pathos and irony where there is none. Credit due for its decidedly unglamorous look at sex for hire (recalling Lizzie Borden's Working Girls in that respect), and for including a nice Beth Orton tune, What Alice Found--heavy with self-importance and dolphin symbolism--is a grim little ditty more unintentionally hilarious than thought-provoking, more cheap thriller than social exposé.

Bobby Darin': FFC Interviews Bobby Cannavale

October 12, 2003|Talking with actors, especially young actors, is always an iffy proposition: the craft of acting is a difficult one to articulate, its choices obscure or instinctual, ideally, and in the case of a fresh talent, anecdotes are fewer and of less interest. So you find yourself, often, repeating the junket line: How'd you get started? What was it like working with X? Who are your influences? What's your next project? Questions, all, that only really need to be asked once in this day of fast, permanent information.

DIFF '03: Wilbur Wants to Kill Himself

Wilbur Begar Selvmord
***½/****
written by Lone Scherfig, Anders Thomas Jensen
directed by Lone Scherfig

by Walter Chaw Uncompromising yet surprisingly gentle for all that, Lone Scherfig's Wilbur Wants to Kill Himself is an unmannered character drama about Wilbur (Jamie Sives), despondent and suicidal after the death of his father; Wilbur's older brother, Harbour (Adrian Rawlins), who's taking the family's loss much better; and Harbour's new wife, Alice (the self-swallowing, eternally imploding Shirley Henderson), who finds love for the first time only to find it again in her husband's mordant brother. A psychiatric support group is funny in predictably quirky ways (though its resolution in an icy drink mines surprise from the premise), while Wilbur's evolution from self-obsessed asshole into less of a self-obsessed asshole is done with an observational humour veering on the brilliant. And for all the embracing of topics of life and death, there is remarkably little that rings false or strident. Wilbur Wants to Kill Himself is a great black comedy in the vein of Harold & Maude or The Loved One and an announcement, if one were needed, that Scherfig--after her oxymoronically "kind" Dogme film Italian for Beginners--may be the best director of dark romantic comedies going. Originally published: October 11, 2003.

DIFF '03: Dark Cities

Ciudades oscuras
Dark City
½*/****
written by Juan Madrid, Enrique Renteria, Fernando Sariñana
directed by Fernando Sariñana

by Walter Chaw Fernando Sariñana's grimy Dark Cities (Ciudades oscuras) is essentially a series of hardboiled vignettes that criss-cross in perfunctory ways over the course of one miserable night. Infanticide, rape, castration, long chats with corpses, murder, graft, and a criminal amount of hysterical camera tricks combine in a stew so sour and unintentionally funny that it plays out like the love child of City of Hope and Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer--with hookers. Not enough can be said about the invasiveness of Sariñana's camera: it's epileptic and obfuscating when the aspiration is clearly towards some kind of uncompromising vérité. The Bernard Herrmann-inspired strings score identifies the film as an urban horror story (as an homage to Psycho's drain shot identifies the filmmaker as drunk on delusions of grandeur), but with an endless series of melodramatic fits and starts functioning as the meat of the picture, such as it is, it all seems a little too neo-Tarantino silly. Silly, of course, the last thing a shocking exposé can afford to be.

DIFF '03: Breakfast with Hunter

**/****
directed by Wayne Ewing

by Walter Chaw Culled from what seems like B-roll of gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson in the months leading up to the filming and release of Terry Gilliam's film adaptation of the author's seminal Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Breakfast with Hunter is interesting now and again for the extent to which Thompson is revered in certain circles, but feels curiously prosaic for the wicked incisiveness of its subject. The highlights of the film are Thompson's interactions with Johnny Depp and Alex Cox, the former the actor tabbed to play him in Gilliam's film and the latter the director Gilliam replaced on the project. A scene where Hunter serves Cox and Cox's frequent collaborator Tod Davies fried sausage before screaming at them for minutes on end suggests with more profundity the reasons behind Cox's eventual firing than that to which Cox's own weblog cops. As he begins preparations for the role of Thompson, Depp, meanwhile, gets genuinely creepy. If the whole of Breakfast with Hunter is assuredly less than the sum of a few of its parts, there are enough moments of insight here to reward the curious--though it's really just a love note for the devout.

DIFF '03: Noi the Albino

Nói albinói
****/****
written and directed by Dagur Kári

by Walter Chaw Dagur Kári's Noi the Albino (Nói Albinói) is a film about emptiness, really--a terrific picture crouched in the centre of a blasted Icelandic winter, with its titular hero, Nói (Tómas Lemarquis), too smart for the isolation. When the beautiful Iris (Elin Hansdóttir, wow) comes to work in the town-of-maybe-100-people's convenience store, Nói finds himself for perhaps the first time motivated for long enough to aspire to something larger. A Steve Earle song directed by Jim Jarmusch, the picture is deadpan hilarious and haunted by the oppressive power of dark and chill, which presses down on the characters with a smothering insistence. Kári's direction is understated and the performances he elicits from his cast of newcomers are the perfect pitch for the low timbre of the film. A look at adolescence as yearning and blue as The Ice Storm, Nói Albinói is tragedy punctuated by repeated glances into a ViewMaster: a vehicle for escape like the picture on Barton Fink's wall, with the box Nói's underground bunker, Zippo-lit protection from natural disaster and the life of the mind. Originally published: October 9, 2003.

Sunday Bloody Sunday (1971) - DVD

**½/**** Image B Sound B+
starring Peter Finch, Glenda Jackson, Murray Hedd, Peggy Ashcroft
screenplay by Penelope Gilliatt
directed by John Schlesinger

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover "Are you bourgeois?" asks a child in Sunday Bloody Sunday, hoping to catch an adult in an awkward moment, and the question is crucial to your enjoyment of the film. If you are well-off enough to have good taste and fine things, and are somewhat guilty about the freedom and power that entails, then it will seem a sober and mature work about life and love in the post-hippie '70s. If, on the other hand, you are just scraping by and worrying about where your next meal is coming from, the film will seem a self-piteous soap opera in love with the idea of defeat. There's no denying the skill and professionalism at work here--it's what mid-period Woody Allen wishes it were, but it never quite licks the question of what to do with bourgie liberal guilt, and thus waffles towards an underwhelming conclusion.

DIFF '03: Bought & Sold

**/****
written and directed by Michael Tolajian

by Walter Chaw Michael Tolajian's Bought & Sold is a low-aspiring inner-city fairy tale featuring an Oscar De La Hoya-looking hoodlum protagonist named Ray Ray (Rafael Sardina) who dreams of buying DJ turntables from the local pawn shop while working part-time at a shoe store. He falls in with the wrong crowd, ends up going undercover for a local godfather in the pawn under kindly Armenian storekeeper (Isiah Whitlock Jr.), and gets twitterpated for the pawnshop owner's niece, Ruby (beautiful Marjan Neshat)--all of which unfolds in a herky-jerky kind of way as Tolajian's dialogue too often intrudes on the performances, all better than they probably have any right to be. Boasting of the comfortable familiarity of an old pair of slippers, the picture earns some points for the energy of the cast but fails to do much that's surprising, illuminating, or, ultimately, affecting in any meaningful way.

DIFF '03: Assisted Living

**/****
written and directed by Elliot Greenbaum

by Walter Chaw Playing at times like a documentary (indeed, the film used the residents of its retirement-home setting as extras), Assisted Living is a troubling picture, balanced as it is midway between fiction and essay, with some actors feigning dementia and others clearly in its sway. Todd (Michael Bonsignore) is a pot-smoking twentysomething working at a nursing home--a kind-hearted soul, it seems, burned out in more ways than one and fixated on one of his charges, Mrs. Pearlman (Maggie Riley). Their relationship really not much more than a sketch, Todd's "rescue" of Mrs. Pearlman is heartfelt but verging on the sentimental and the pyrrhic besides. On the one hand a portrait of decline, on the other a heavy-handed sermon on it, Assisted Living has a few moments that charm and a scene or two that even transcend the discomfort of its premise and presentation, but not enough stamina in the end to justify its smoke and mirrors.

Legally Blonde 2: Red, White & Blonde (2003) [Special Edition] - DVD

*½/**** Image B Sound A- Extras A-
starring Reese Witherspoon, Sally Field, Bob Newhart, Luke Wilson
screenplay by Kate Kondell
directed by Charles Herman-Wurmfeld

by Walter Chaw Recognizing that there's nothing more patriotic than rampant materialism, cultural ignorance, fast fashion, a steadfast lack of imagination, and disturbing dog-love, Charles Herman-Wurmfeld's Legally Blonde 2: Red, White & Blonde is essentially a blow-by-blow remake of its predecessor with a different setting and more Chihuahua. It tackles animal rights and congressional corruption with the same seriousness as Versace vs. Gucci, hoping against hope that Reese Witherspoon's considerable charm will smooth over the clumsy grafts and inevitable tissue rejection of a film with speaking roles for Jennifer Coolidge, Bob Newhart, and Sally Field. Harvard Law is replaced by the Beltway Boys, factoids about perms are replaced by factoids about facials, and all of it boils down to the importance of sorority sisters--particularly ironic in a picture so horrified by the evils of intractable nepotism amongst insular societies.