Film Freak Central

The Untouchables (1987) - DVD|[Special Collector's Edition] - DVD

***½/****
DVD - Image A- Sound A-
SCE DVD - Image B+ Sound A- Extras B+
starring Kevin Costner, Charles Martin Smith, Andy Garcia, Sean Connery
screenplay by David Mamet
directed by Brian De Palma

by Vincent Suarez Will the real Brian De Palma please stand up?

The Motorcycle Diaries (2004)

***/****
starring Gael García Bernal, Rodrigo De la Serna, Mía Maestro, Mercedes Morán
screenplay by Jose Rivera, based on the books Notas de viaje by Ernesto Guevara and Con el Che por America Latina by Alberto Granado
directed by Walter Salles

by Walter Chaw Adapting respective memoirs by then-young Cuban-by-way-of-Argentine revolutionary Ché Guevara (Gael García Bernal) and his best friend Alberto Granado (Rodrigo De la Serna) that documented their Kerouac-ian odyssey down the spine of South America to find the soul of their country, Walter Salles's The Motorcycle Diaries is difficult at best. It's a road movie and a good one, as far as it goes, but it lacks the fire of change of something like Easy Rider in its substitution of a picaresque travelogue lightly spiced with delightful romantic misunderstandings for Peter Fonda's swiftly tilting planet and deserts of the real. Easy Rider talks about the dying of the light; The Motorcycle Diaries talks about how doe-eyed Ernesto Guevara became Ché, the Hoffa of Latin America and eventually the most reproduced and mass-marketed image since Marilyn Monroe's.

Home on the Range (2004) - DVD

*/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
written and directed by Will Finn & John Sanford

by Walter Chaw It opens with a musical number and a rabbit with a peg leg--and what feels like days later, Home on the Range ends with an ear-splitting action sequence featuring Cuba Gooding Jr. typecast as an over-animated pack animal. Meanwhile, a crass two-dimensional cow is typecast as Roseanne, her prize heifer Maggie introduced onscreen udder-first: "Yeah, they're real, quit staring." Real nice. And the intrigue, such as it is, revolves around yodeling cattle rustler Alameda Slim (Randy Quaid) narrowing his sights on the bucolic Patch of Heaven ranch, no-kill home of stock chickens ("It's a chick thing," hardy har har), a duck, a goat, and some swine.

September Tapes (2004)

Septem8er Tapes
ZERO STARS/****
starring George Calil, Wali Razaqi
screenplay by Christian Johnston & Christian Van Gregg
directed by Christian Johnston

by Walter Chaw Exactly the kind of exploitative garbage that fellow post-9/11er The Guys was, September Tapes recasts The Blair Witch Project as a hunt for Osama Bin Laden in the wilderness of Afghanistan. It's this sort of film that takes collective tragedy and renders it something several degrees south of inconsequential, boiling horror down to soups and bones. The film is a vile, thick reduction, making a 9/11 victim's last cries the catalyst for a dimwitted first-person shooter with an unsympathetic protagonist and such stunning--and stunningly unsubstantiated--claims as, "America's not serious about tracking down Bin Laden." Maybe so, maybe not, but September Tapes isn't about politics, it's about bad filmmakers armed with a bad idea teaching an audience they imagine is less-informed than they are a lesson in seeking vengeance like a man. It's the "let's roll" school of Yankee machismo, the "bring it on" theory of diplomacy and warfare, and when the flick turns into the nightmare revisionist cartoon of Rambo, that susurration you hear isn't tension, it's resignation and maybe disgust. 9/11 has to be more than an excuse to make bad action/adventure flicks or (like The Guys) self-pitying chamber dramas.

Silver City (2004)

*½/****
starring Chris Cooper, Richard Dreyfuss, Billy Zane, Danny Huston
written and directed by John Sayles

by Walter Chaw The Summitville Mine Disaster in Colorado left over 20 miles of the Alamosa river "dead," so contaminated by waste materials (cyanide chief among them) that it very simply killed all the fish. A good thing, I guess, that there wasn't a sizable human population downstream. A superfund site now and fast becoming a sore election point in a Senate race between A.G. Ken Salazar and beer magnate Pete Coors as third-party interests begin a round of misleading, venomous attack ads, Summitville represents in a way a handy microcosm of the ugliness of the Kerry/Bush presidential election. There's a point when third-party interests and smear campaigns, on either side of the divide, start to demean all of us as a people, feeding on our worst instincts and treating us like dumb, mute animals. The political discourse in our country has devolved into a playground jibe match where it's easy to forget in the mud storm who's the rubber and who's the glue; no great surprise that the general death of conversation in our culture includes the whole spectrum of politics.

Mean Girls (2004) [Special Collector's Edition - Widescreen Collection] - DVD

***/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras B+
starring Lindsay Lohan, Rachel McAdams, Tim Meadows, Ana Gasteyer
screenplay by Tina Fey, based on the book Queen Bees and Wannabes by Rosalind Wiseman
directed by Mark S. Waters

by Walter Chaw Plastics instead of Heathers; Lindsay Lohan instead of Winona Ryder; director Mark Waters instead of screenwriter brother Daniel; lunchtime poll: same. The biggest difference between Mean Girls and Heathers is the lack of that unmistakable spark of dark, playful genius. Both the Waters brothers made a splash with their initial public offerings (Mark with the fantastic The House of Yes, Daniel with Heathers), but while Daniel's portfolio is sprinkled with lead balloons like The Adventures of Ford Fairlane and the fitfully interesting Demolition Man, he did score with Batman Returns; Mark, alas, has a Freddie Prinze Jr./Monica Potter, a Jason Priestly/Mariel Hemingway, and a pair of Lohans in his deck, making The House of Yes an anomaly, it seems--as outcast from its comrades as Waters's imperfect characters are from his vision of a perversely stolid normality. Not to say that Waters's work post-The House of Yes is without unifying vision, just that his tendencies betray themselves as desperately wanting to be popular. It's a yen that makes Mean Girls actually a little autobiographical, and, probably as a direct result of that transparency, better than it should be.

Saved! (2004) - DVD

½*/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras B-
starring Jena Malone, Mandy Moore, Macaulay Culkin, Patrick Fugit
screenplay by Brian Dannelly & Michael Urban
directed by Brian Dannelly

Hot on the heels of Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen and Mean Girls, Saved! presents the same evil-girl-clique-victimizes-good-girl formula that is still defined by the wicked Machiavellian brilliance of Heathers, the last word on eloquence and intelligence in the bully sub-genre of teensploitation. In the wake of Columbine and the end-of-the-millennium spate of school mayhem, the greatest disappointment isn't the unabated gratification of the jock set, but the fact that school-based satires have yet to find the courage to address the absurdity of reaction post-atrocity while continuing to produce school-based satires at an unabated clip. If anything speaks to the ultimate triumph of the guilty bourgeoisie and the ineffectual leadership in charge of our nation's public schools, it's the glaring inadequacy of our cinema, that most agile and sensitive of our cultural barometers, in reproducing the voice of the oppressed. It's up to television's "Freaks and Geeks" (was, anyway) and NPR's stable of gifted monologists (Sarah Vowell, Dave Eggars, David Sedaris, and so on) to pick up the considerable slack.

Kaena: The Prophecy (2003) + The Lion King II: Simba's Pride (1998) [2-Disc Special Edition] - DVDs

KAENA: THE PROPHECY
*/**** Image A Sound B Extras C
screenplay by Tarik Hamoine and Chris Delaporte
directed by Chris Delaporte

THE LION KING II: SIMBA'S PRIDE
½*/**** Image B Sound B- Extras C+
screenplay by Flip Kobler and Cindy Marcus
directed by Rob LaDuca & Darrell Rooney

by Walter Chaw There's a timorous, resonant quality to Kirsten Dunst's voice. It's amazing, really: it vibrates at a contralto as tense and lovely as a cello string drawn--I think it's her most attractive feature. She's tailor-made, then, to be a vocal performer, and finds herself as such in French filmmaker Chris Delaporte's plodding misfire of a movie Kaena: The Prophecy. Completely computer-animated, it's every bit as ugly and prosaic as its American cousin Ice Age (insomuch as it even includes a prehistoric-squirrel vignette towards the end) and obsessed with the jiggle dimensions of Kaena (or is that me, obsessed?), who must save her tree-world Axis from destruction at the hands of the evil Selenites (whose queen is voiced by Anjelica Huston). The story is so Joseph Campbell hero's journey-obsessed, so humourless and--how do I say it delicately?--Bakshi in its execution, that poor Dunst, in the title role, is wasted on plucky pronouncements and grunts of exertion as her .gif alter-ego leaps hither and yon.

Wimbledon (2004)

*½/****
starring Kirsten Dunst, Paul Bettany, Kyle Hyde, Robert Lindsay
screenplay by Adam Brooks and Jennifer Flackett & Mark Levin
directed by Richard Loncraine

by Walter Chaw If you go see Wimbledon, the umpteenth edition of Tired Romantic Comedy Theater, it's only because you have a checklist in your head and aren't content with a film that doesn't satisfy every contrivance. There's the meet-cute, the unlikely match, the handsome rival, the gay best friend, the falling-in-love montage, the plot conflict (spouse, parents), the break-up montage, the public apology, the triumphant reunion. Director Richard Loncraine's tepid foray into Richard Curtis territory is rife with the kind of familiar hallmarks that lull throngs of lonesome Mia Farrows to the warm embrace of The Purple Rose of Cairo--a brief respite from the used paperback bookstores that rely on a steady trade of romance novels the way that independent movie stores rely on porn. In fact, there's not that much of a difference between Wimbledon and porn: plot is predictable and secondary to the performers, who provide whatever interest there might be in the enterprise. Everything else is plug and play, so to speak.

TIFF '04: Saw

**/****
starring Leigh Whannell, Cary Elwes, Danny Glover, Monica Potter
screenplay by Leigh Whannell
directed by James Wan

by Bill Chambers Saw is ready and rarin' to be analyzed, opening as it does with the scholar-baiting tableau of a man (Leigh Whannell, also the film's screenwriter) waking in a bathtub, baptized or reborn. (It just so happens that his name is Adam.) And I swear to God the bad guy lives on "Stygian Street." Everything about Saw points to Whannell putting the cart before the horse: symbolism before context; set-pieces before bridges; revelations before mysteries... The movie's logic is at once unassailable and curiously inorganic--twice characters choose not to shoot a gun at an opportune moment in order to facilitate a final turn of the screw, but since that's all they're doing, Whannell should never have armed them in the first place. This and the fact that the villain's motive is rendered arbitrary by us learning things at the pace of the heroes--Adam and Lawrence (Cary Elwes), a shutterbug and a doctor, respectively, who've been locked together in a fluorescent-lit dungeon with a dead body between them--is the sort of thing we'd not even stop to consider during a Dario Argento giallo, which finally places more blame on the fittingly-named James Wan's direction than on Whannell's script. Though the film does work marginally well as a satire of modern serial-killer thrillers and their increasingly Byzantine games of cat-and-mouse (not to mention the same in reality-TV), I have a hunch that's the zeitgeist's doing. Programme: Midnight Madness

TIFF '04: Palindromes

*½/****
starring Ellen Barkin, Stephen Adly Guirgis, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Richard Masur
written and directed by Todd Solondz

by Bill Chambers Preceded by the snarkiest, if also funniest, on-screen dedication since The War Zone's "For my father" ("In loving memory of Dawn Wiener"--Dawn being the pre-teen heroine of Todd Solondz's breakthrough feature Welcome to the Dollhouse), Solondz's fifth film, Palindromes, is a virtual sprinkler head oscillating back and forth to spritz everything in the director's purview with venom. (It's his idea of moral ambivalence.) A "palindrome" is something that reads the same forwards and backwards, and by casting several different actresses to consecutively appear as his palindromic lead character, 12-year-old suburbanite--and victim of a botched abortion--Aviva, Solondz highlights the immutability of her hopeless mission to get pregnant. It's a canny gesture, to be sure, but it's also worth noting that the various Avivas seem to have been plugged into the film's timeline in such a way as to maximize each performer's discomfort, with a heavy-set black woman (Sharon Wilkins) materializing in the role just when it calls for a teenybopper dance number and adolescent girls (as opposed to, say, Jennifer Jason Leigh, the one celeb playing Aviva) used for the less-than-gentle sex scenes. The movie plunges irrevocably into a misanthropic abyss once Aviva takes up residence at Bible-thumping Mama Sunshine's, a halfway house for crippled children who've written their doctor his own theme song, which they perform whenever he pays a housecall. Owing a transparent debt to Tod Browning's vastly more well-intentioned Freaks (familiar campers and clotheslines surround the Sunshine home), it's the passage that goes for the biggest laughs, almost all of them aimed squarely at the disabled--this is the first time in Solondz's career that his signature political incorrectness feels like compassion envy. Solondz is apparently playing a game of "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em" with the critics now that Storytelling, his riposte to the accusation that he condescends to his subjects, failed to dramatically impact the conversation, and for all its temerity, Palindromes fatally lets Solondz's reputation precede it. Programme: Special Presentations

TIFF '04: Keane

***½/****
starring Damian Lewis, Abigail Breslin, Amy Ryan
written and directed by Lodge Kerrigan

by Bill Chambers It may seem as though Lodge Kerrigan is spinning his wheels by revisiting the territory of his directorial debut two pictures later, but this actually provides a means by which to judge Kerrigan's maturation as an auteur. Only slightly more prolific than Terrence Malick, Kerrigan quietly penetrated the indie scene with 1994's Clean, Shaven, which cast Peter Greene--in a role that brilliantly exploited the actor's own mercurial nature--as Peter Winter, a paranoid schizophrenic scoping out his only child and her new parents; the film furnishes us with a view of Peter's mental landscape through a crafty, Alan Splet-esque sound design but ultimately reverts to conventional cat-and-mouse tropes. Kerrigan's wondrous Keane is about a man, William Keane (a simply profound Damian Lewis), whose little girl was stolen out from under his nose at a train station the year before; Keane is recapitulating the events of that fateful day as the movie opens, wielding a newspaper clipping on the kidnapping as if it's a doctor's note rationalizing his manic behaviour. Like Clean, Shaven, Keane mines considerable suspense from the protagonist's fluctuating sanity, but John Foster's camera never leaves Lewis's side--most of the time, it's not more than ten inches from his face. Where Clean, Shaven introduced a cop to bias us against the main character (leading to a memorably guilty reversal of expectations), the sheer intimacy of Keane denies the viewer a scapegoat for any of our feelings towards the unstable but manifestly human Keane when he befriends a part-time waitress (Amy Ryan) and her holy grail of a young daughter (Abigail Breslin of Signs, holding her own). For some, Kerrigan's cinema of unclosed grief is an endurance test because watching a movie without an emotional superintendent is too great a responsibility. (Keane doesn't even have underscore.) What matters is empathy, though, and that's something Kerrigan obviously has for Keane in spades, or else he wouldn't be so patient with him. Programme: Special Presentations

The Mangler (1995) - DVD

*/**** Image A Sound B Extras C-
starring Robert Englund, Ted Levine, Daniel Matmor
screenplay by Tobe Hooper, Stephen Brooks and Peter Welbeck
directed by Tobe Hooper

by Walter Chaw I think there's probably profit in taking the tactic that Tobe Hooper's The Mangler is his shot at the lurid comic book genre and, more specifically, the weird self-abnegating prosthetics opera of Warren Beatty's Dick Tracy. But I'm not the guy to do it. Sufficed to say that Robert Englund appears in fright latex, affecting equal parts Dr. Strangelove and Lionel Barrymore's Mr. Potter as Mr. Gartley, the decrepit, despotic owner of an old industrial steam laundry that features as its centerpiece the massive, four-story long Hadley Watson Model-6 Steam Ironer & Folder, which sits in the middle of his brick sweatshop belching steam like the boiler in The Overlook Hotel.

TIFF '04: p.s.

P.S.
**½/****
starring Laura Linney, Topher Grace, Gabriel Byrne, Marcia Gay Harden
screenplay by Helen Schulman and Dylan Kidd, based on the novel by Helen Schulman
directed by Dylan Kidd

by Bill Chambers Curious that Dylan Kidd, the mind behind the revelatory Roger Dodger, felt compelled to include a "director's statement" in the pressbook for his sophomore feature, p.s., but it's nonetheless an essential read in that it gives the lie to artist intentionality. "From Aristotle to Joseph Campbell to Robert McKee," Kidd writes, "everyone's in agreement: you can't have drama without obstacles...The idea behind p.s. was to tell a story where nothing stands between the heroine and her love object. Even more: in this story, the universe works with the heroine, dumping the love object on her doorstep time after time! Is it possible that the only obstacle this heroine needs to overcome is herself?" It's Murphy's Law, perhaps, that p.s. not only doesn't reinvent the wheel, but also orchestrates a veritable gauntlet for the heroine in question to run through. Louise Harrington (Laura Linney, appropriately described in the film as blindingly beautiful) is an admissions officer with the graduate fine arts program at Columbia University who one day happens upon an unprocessed application from someone with the same name--Scott Feinstadt--as her late high-school sweetheart. When Scott (Topher Grace, he of the Swiss-watch comic timing), actually "F. Scott," shows up for his interview, he's so much the reincarnation of her dead lover that she takes him back to her place for the most cathartic screw of her life. ("That was fucking awesome!" Scott exclaims--and so it seems.) But although their attraction is mutual and enduring, Louise is a couple of decades Scott's senior. She's behaving unprofessionally; he shouldn't be doing anything to jeopardize his chances of getting into Columbia. She's got a horny friend (Marcia Gay Harden) coveting F. Scott because she, too, dated the prototype; he's a young man sowing his wild oats. And so on and so forth. The romantic conflicts are, in other words, inexhaustible, as well as nearly unavoidable--they'd foil better filmmakers than Kidd. I wish there were more scenes like the one in which F. Scott tells Louise that she needs to move on from teen angst and she asks him if he "moves on" when he's stuck on a piece, because Kidd excels at (or maybe, just maybe, he burns himself out on) these heart-to-hearts between a master and pupil of the same emotional age. Whenever Linney and Grace are apart, the movie is like a detuned radio. (Additional points shaved off for casting the stars of Miller's Crossing (Harden and Gabriel Byrne) and not reuniting them on screen.) Unless I'm mistaken, that's Kidd posing for a couple of the paintings in F. Scott's portfolio--which for once are as good as the characters pretend. Programme: Special Presentations

TIFF '04: Sideways

***/****
starring Paul Giamatti, Thomas Haden Church, Virginia Madsen, Sandra Oh
screenplay by Alexander Payne & Jim Taylor, based on the novel by Rex Pickett
directed by Alexander Payne

by Bill Chambers Alexander Payne has a gift for wry humour, of course, and in Sideways, there's a nice, sardonic hold on a bathroom door's sign--"MEN"--after Jack (Thomas Haden Church), having learned nothing from a sour indiscretion that netted him a broken nose, starts hitting on a waitress. By the same token, the curlicue noted above is typical of the level of organization, for lack of a better word, in Payne's work, which always seems a tad elementary in retrospect. Citizen Ruth, Election, About Schmidt, and now Sideways are each so auto-critical that they leave next to no room for either interpretation or improvement...and leave almost nothing like a lasting impression. Still, they sure are firecrackers in the moment, with Sideways, Payne's most emotionally intelligent film to date, being no exception. Lamenting a generation of overgrown children, this companion piece of sorts to the identically-structured About Schmidt follows depressed wine connoisseur Miles (Paul Giamatti) as he takes impulsive Jack on a tour of California's vineyards just before Jack is due to be married. Giamatti, though typecast as a self-loathing bachelor who's reached a career impasse (see: Storytelling and American Splendor), at last has a role that doesn't hermetically seal him off from his co-stars, but it's Church and especially Virginia Madsen, playing a waitress finally ready to embrace adulthood, who are the true discoveries of the piece--as well as pretty much all that you see in the rear-view when giving Sideways a backwards glance. Programme: Special Presentations

TIFF '04: I ♥ Huckabees

i ♥ huckabees
I Heart Huckabees
**/****
starring Dustin Hoffman, Isabelle Huppert, Jude Law, Jason Schwartzman
screenplay by David O. Russell & Jeff Baena
directed by David O. Russell

by Bill Chambers David O. Russell's debut feature Spanking the Monkey now bears the mark of Kane. (Citizen, that is.) A funny, caustic mood-piece that heralded the Second Coming of Hal Ashby, it was also an impossible thing to live up to--or down, for that matter, Spanking the Monkey's mother-son incest plot in some ways a modern correlative to Citizen Kane's taboo-shattering demystification of William Randolph Hearst. Russell's work since (Flirting with Disaster, Three Kings) has been off-beat but circumspect, and at first, I ♥ Huckabees seems like a return to rebellious form, what with its wilfully uncommercial throughline: To find out why he's crossed paths with the same African stranger on three separate occasions, environmental activist Albert (Jason Schwartzman) hires a pair of "existential detectives" (Lily Tomlin and Dustin Hoffman), who in turn encumber his mission to stop corporate foe Brad (Jude Law, essentially resurrecting Dickie Greenleaf) from building a Huckabees department store on a sacred patch of marshland. But it's smug anachronisms that make the film as alienating as it sounds: the dialogue has a Hawksian tempo hardly honoured by the sitcom-level punchlines, while the retro iconography for Huckabees is, however evocative (prepare to be floored by Naomi Watts's banal poses as the spokesmodel for the chain (I ♥ Naomi Watts)), ultimately unmoored--you never get to see inside a Huckabees outlet, which places the brunt of satiric emphasis on the marshland rather than on the ersatz Wal-Mart. (With suburban sprawl all but ignored, Huckabees needn't ever have its business characterized.) Though clever in fits and starts (film buffs should get a charge out of Isabelle Huppert's comic take on her sick character from The Piano Teacher), I ♥ Huckabees only really catches fire during a Dinner From Hell presided over by Richard Jenkins--not surprisingly, a saving grace of the similarly arch but far funnier Flirting with Disaster--and Jean Smart, two of the best-kept secrets in Hollywood. Programme: Viacom Galas

Cellular (2004)

*/****
starring Kim Basinger, Chris Evans, Eric Christian Olsen, Jessica Biel
screenplay by Chris Morgan
directed by David R. Ellis

by Walter Chaw At last, a film for all the yahoos with a cell phone soldered onto their ears--a giant eighty-minute billboard for Nokia with characters constantly extolling the virtues of what the Chinese call their hand-engines: "Amazing thing these new cell phones. They take digital video, remember the last fifty numbers that call it..." Stuntman-turned-director David Ellis follows up Final Destination 2 with Cellular, its top-heavy gimmick flick dreamed up by the king of high-concept, one-trick ponies, Larry Cohen, who cobbles together the story at the heart of the thing from the odds-and-ends of his last telecommunications thriller, Phone Booth. It's Strange Days married to Nick of Time, Falling Down, and Ferris Bueller's Day Off, where Asians are still Orientals (and boy, are they stupid) and black people are sassy back-talkers working at impound lots. Yet, understand that it's not so much racist as it is prehistoric--ossified and bone-weary.

Cellular (2004)

*/****
starring Kim Basinger, Chris Evans, Eric Christian Olsen, Jessica Biel
screenplay by Chris Morgan
directed by David R. Ellis

by Walter Chaw At last, a film for all the yahoos with a cell phone soldered onto their ears--a giant eighty-minute billboard for Nokia with characters constantly extolling the virtues of what the Chinese call their hand-engines: "Amazing thing these new cell phones. They take digital video, remember the last fifty numbers that call it..." Stuntman-turned-director David Ellis follows up Final Destination 2 with Cellular, its top-heavy gimmick flick dreamed up by the king of high-concept, one-trick ponies, Larry Cohen, who cobbles together the story at the heart of the thing from the odds-and-ends of his last telecommunications thriller, Phone Booth. It's Strange Days married to Nick of Time, Falling Down, and Ferris Bueller's Day Off, where Asians are still Orientals (and boy, are they stupid) and black people are sassy back-talkers working at impound lots. Yet, understand that it's not so much racist as it is prehistoric--ossified and bone-weary.

TIFF '04: White Skin

La Peau blanche
**/****
starring Marc Paquet, Marianne Farley, Frédéric Pierre, Jessica Malka
screenplay by Joël Champetier, Daniel Roby, based on the novel by Joël Champetier
directed by Daniel Roby

by Bill Chambers I had a pretty good idea of where White Skin (La Peau blanche) was headed, and although I was more tickled that it had the French-word-for-chutzpah to go to those ludicrous extremes than disappointed that the outcome was vaguely predictable (if movies never failed to surprise me, it would only mean that I watch as many as I do in vain (besides which, no film uses a clip from Rabid indiscriminately)), there's something annoyingly retrograde about the whole megillah. The melancholic film starts off promisingly with a conversation between two men on the streets of Montreal: white Thierry (flavourless Marc Paquet), an aspiring author and undergrad, laments his incapacity for being exploited by the suddenly multiculti publishing world to Haitian roomie Henri (Frédéric Pierre, who should be the star); later, Henri plays the race card after getting stabbed in the neck by a (Caucasian) hooker, telling family and friends that a gang of skinheads did it. This sets the stage for a provocative Boy Who Cried Wolf satire that never materializes; instead, Thierry becomes infatuated with a redheaded busker (Karyn Dwyer doppelgänger Marianne Farley), his attraction inexplicable (because he can't stand redheads--it's their translucent skin, you see) but insatiable. She, alas, has cancer, so there will be sacrifices on both their parts (to say the least), and aye, there's the rub: she has "cancer"--embellishment has by such time taken the place of articulateness, effectively putting a stop to the picture's ethnological undercurrents. (A rather unfortunate juxtaposition of speeches about how blacks are more human than human and about how human beings are worthless suggests an editorial blind spot above all else.) Once again, Quebec demonstrates more aptitude for commercial filmmaking than the rest of Canada (even if the trashy, likeminded Decoys ultimately feels less indie), but I still say the national cinema could use rebooting. Programme: Canada First

The Ladykillers (2004) [Widescreen] - DVD

**/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B-
starring Tom Hanks, Irma P. Hall, Marlon Wayans, J.K. Simmons
written for the screen and directed by Joel Coen & Ethan Coen

by Walter Chaw There's a great line in the Coen Brothers' The Ladykillers: The General (Tzi Ma), asked for his Buddhist perspective on a caper gone awry, offers, "Be as leaf floating down river. Kill old lady." Still, it's a poor blueprint for a film, as the picture locates its narrative rhythm in a desultory, listless noodle that ends right when it threatens to begin. With Tom Hanks playing the Alec Guinness role of affected cad with larceny--eventually murder--on his mind, The Ladykillers feels like an inside joke. (A slapstick gag featured prominently in the previews, for instance, sees Hanks plucking bills from the air in what has become the defining image of his career, from Forrest Gump's feather inanity to Hanratty's dollar bill futility in Catch Me If You Can.) Returning in a way to more familiar ground after the screwball shrine of Intolerable Cruelty, it's nice to see the Coens, credited as co-directors for the first time in their twenty-year collaboration, tackling another caper noir, but it feels more than a little stale this time around, contrived in the way that genius starts to feel when inspiration flags.

TIFF '04: Tarnation

***/****
written and directed by Jonathan Caouette

by Bill Chambers Stylistically falling somewhere between avant-garde and dog's-breakfast, Jonathan Caouette's Tarnation invents an ethos to go along with the name of the editing software, "iMovie," used to assemble it, giving us what feels like the world's first "I" movie. The film doesn't so much defy description as resist it (Frank Zappa's "dancing about architecture" maxim applies here), but clearly a summary shouldn't be discouraged, as the more subjective the work, the greater the chance it stands of becoming the salvation of some disenfranchised individual. (Caouette himself says he was relieved to find an empathetic view of queer street life in Gus Van Sant's My Own Private Idaho.) Though it begins with an obviously staged scene of Caouette learning of his schizophrenic mother's lithium overdose, followed by a credits sequence that bills its documentary subjects as actors (these formal concessions likely helping Caouette to keep a modicum of intellectual distance), Tarnation, perhaps the next logical step in the evolution of the personal memoir (which has hit something of a cul-de-sac in literary circles), is a video collage of home movies and found footage that linearly but impressionistically retraces Caouette's tormented family history. Authentic where someone like Harmony Korine feels touristic, Caouette effortlessly conveys the self-fulfilling lucklessness of the underprivileged, and, thanks to an eclectic pop soundtrack, with Tarnation he turns his life into the rock opera he always wanted it to be. (Hedwig himself, John Cameron Mitchell, came on board as a co-producer, as did Van Sant.) But the Job-like Caouette's deck is so stacked politically--he's a gay, experimental filmmaker who's secured distribution for a $219 production--that I do wonder if it's possible to review Tarnation without fearing that you're complimenting the emperor on his new wardrobe. Programme: Visions

The Martian Chronicles (1980) - DVD

½*/**** Image B- Sound B-
starring Rock Hudson, Gayle Hunnicutt, Bernie Casey, Roddy McDowell
screenplay by Richard Matheson, based on the novel by Ray Bradbury
directed by Michael Anderson

by Walter Chaw There is and probably always will be a warm place in my heart for Ray Bradbury. The author of my childhood in many ways, Bradbury taught me about poetry in "April Witch," about fear in The Dark Carnival and Something Wicked This Way Comes, about dry irony in "A Sound of Thunder" and "There Will Come Soft Rains," and about vengeance reptilian and cold in "The Veldt." His only real work of science-fiction, Fahrenheit 451, remains an interesting touchstone of unintentional messages couched in seriomythic terminologies, but his output is moored deep, intractably deep, in the literary. Bradbury doesn't transpose well to different mediums (and a book of poetry, When Elephants Last in the Dooryard Bloomed, was somehow even more disastrous than the multiple attempts to export the author to television and film)--he's too purple, his philosophies too immature, his worldview embarrassingly simplistic and only really current for children or the childish. I'll never be able to exactly express the thrill, the horror, of my first reading of "Mars is Heaven" when I was in third grade. Nor have I been able to replicate it by reading it again since.

Stage Fright (1950) - DVD

**½/**** Image C+ Sound C+ Extras B-
starring Jane Wyman, Marlene Dietrich, Michael Wilding, Richard Todd
screenplay by Whitfield Cook; adaptation by Alma Reville; additional dialogue by James Bridie, based on a novel by Selwyn Jepson
directed by Alfred Hitchcock

by Walter Chaw Blame it on the subject matter: Stage Fright, especially for postwar Hitchcock, is all elbows. Its technique is its narrative, plot, character, and motive--something that's a relative rarity in the master's oeuvre despite his notoriously stringent preparation and acumen. And though it works pretty well as an academic inquiry into how the artificiality of the stage can comment with eloquence, "Hamlet"-like, on the bigger picture, the film stumbles along in fits and starts, pulled forward by its mechanism instead of anything like momentum or logic. In truth, I wonder if the "play-within-a-play" trope doesn't work better as either microcosm (as in the final confession of I Confess) or leitmotif (as in the numerous references to performance in North by Northwest, which most likely owes its title to a line about pretending to be crazy from "Hamlet"). Of particular issue is one of Marlene Dietrich's mannered turns, which is potentially excusable (given the staginess of the piece), and a horrible score by Leighton Lucas, which isn't. Still a Hitchcock film in his middle-period, however, Stage Fright, no doubt owing to its nature, is particularly focused in on disguises, perceptions, mirrors, eyeglasses, and cigarettes--finding our hero, Eve (Jane Wyman, fantastic), taking on the guise of a Dorothy Parker-esque reporter at one moment and a maid infiltrating a fatale's lair at another, all for the cause of a suspect flashback from an unreliable narrator.

TIFF '04: Blood

*½/****
starring Emily Hampshire, Jacob Tierney
screenplay by Jerry Ciccoritti, based on the play by Tom Walmsley
directed by Jerry Ciccoritti

by Bill Chambers Just the other day I watched Dial M for Murder, a single-set movie faithfully adapted from a stage play that never quite becomes theatre-on-film because, let's face it, we're talking about Alfred Hitchcock here. Jerry Ciccoritti is no Alfred Hitchcock--not that Ciccoritti's Blood wants or tries to be Dial M for Murder, but its Mike Figgis, let's-see-what-this-button-does aesthetic so reeks of overcompensation as to end up not only preserving the material's stage roots in amber, but also lulling us into a stupor. No doubt there's some method to Ciccoritti's onaninistic use of his editing console, an endeavouring to mirror, echo, or otherwise amplify his characters' addled state of mind, but Blood's subject matter is alien enough that a more straightforward shooting style might have proved less disengaging. Credit where credit is due that Ciccoritti--a pillar, as the co-founder of the Buddies in Bad Times Theatre Company, of Toronto's queer and goth communities--is not an apprehensive or antiseptic director like most of his Canuck brethren (the eight-time Gemini Award winner surely benefited from working at the pace of television in that regard), but Blood, a stream-of-consciousness chamber piece about a part-time hooker (Neve Campbell-ish Emily Hampshire) deciding whether or not to make her own brother (filmmaker Jacob Tierney) the third party in an impending ménage à trois when he shows up at her door after a years-long absence, is nothing if not uniquely Canadian in its use of sex as a threat rather than as a promise. Programme: Visions

Foreign Correspondent (1940) - DVD

***/**** Image B Sound B Extras B-
starring Joel McCrea, Laraine Day, Herbert Marshall, George Sanders
screenplay by Charles Bennett, Joan Harrison; dialogue by James Hilton, Robert Benchley
directed by Alfred Hitchcock

by Walter Chaw Largely dismissed as a jingoistic anomaly in the generally anti-establishment Hitchcock canon (and dwarfed by the meatier fort/da of the same year's Rebecca), Foreign Correspondent is arguably a superior representation of the screwball genre to which the later Mr. and Mrs. Smith aspired. That it has political undertones is undeniable (its spies and hunters plot a throwback to Hitch's Gaumont years), but most conspicuous is the kind of macabre visual wit that would define the bulk of Hitchcock's early American output. Consider a haunting sequence with titular journalist Huntley Haverstock (Joel McCrea) trying to find a missing getaway car in a Dutch field dotted with windmills that begins with a gust of wind blowing off his hat (a castration metaphor--the film is full of them) as his girl-Friday Carol Fisher (Laraine Day) laughs uncontrollably, proceeds to the inside of a false mill where Haverstock is nearly discovered when he gets his coat caught in gears, and ends with an exchange with non-English speaking Dutch police resolved by one of Hitch's precocious little-girl characters. With an intimidating self-possession, an already mature Hitchcock presents in fast fashion a dizzying series of technical gags (the suspicious windmill suspicious because it's turning in the wrong direction--compare to the tennis crowd of Strangers on a Train and this film's own chase beneath a canopy of umbrellas); a preoccupation with birds as representatives of the corruption of social order (introduced in Young and Innocent, it became a central throughline in Hitchcock's career); a serio-comic scene of near-discovery; and a slapstick vignette that makes asses of the police, Hitch's favourite target.

Suspicion (1941) - DVD

**½/**** Image A Sound B Extras B
starring Cary Grant, Joan Fontaine, Sir Cedric Hardwicke, Nigel Bruce
screenplay by Samson Raphaelson, Joan Harrison and Alma Reville
directed by Alfred Hitchcock

by Walter Chaw In truth, watching any of Alfred Hitchcock's American films is like hearing the voice of your master. So it is even with 1941's Suspicion: Probably the most compromised of Hitchcock's major pictures, it nevertheless sports a trio of sequences that rank among his best. An early flirtation between Cary Grant's layabout playboy Johnnie Aysgarth and Joan Fontaine's unlikely take on a dowdy spinster, for instance, looking for all the world like a rape and featuring brilliant, Lubitsch-esque purse-play, is as dense a five minutes as whole pictures. (The second virtuoso sequence involves a staircase and a glass of milk lit from inside the liquid while the third is a fantasy that transforms laughter into the howls of a dying man.) So coy and hesitating that it's a lot like courting a eunuch, Suspicion is not easy to like, but it does offer a glimpse of what's possible within a studio system that won't allow one of its marquee players to play a villain. The picture gives lie to the idea that creative people suddenly lose their creativity when they move to Hollywood: It's still there, it just goes (in this case, deep) underground.

The Vanishing (1993) + Hardcore (1979) - DVDs

THE VANISHING
**½/**** Image A Sound B+
starring Jeff Bridges, Kiefer Sutherland, Nancy Travis, Sandra Bullock
screenplay by Todd Graff, based on the novel The Golden Egg by Tim Krabbé
directed by George Sluizer

HARDCORE
***/**** Image A- Sound B
starring George C. Scott, Peter Boyle, Season Hubley, Ilah Davis
written and directed by Paul Schrader

by Bill Chambers 1993 was the year that American remakes of two estimable foreign thrillers became instant poster boys for Hollywood condescension. While John Badham's Point of No Return is every bit as egregious as they said it was (although I prefer its "Cleaner" sequence with Harvey Keitel to Nikita's field test of Jean Reno's Léon persona), George Sluizer's The Vanishing, an Americanization of his own Spoorloos, often stands shoulder-to-shoulder with its forerunner--or is at the very least too provocative in its departures to dismiss out of hand. A lot of people wondered how Sluizer could desecrate what had been the crowning achievement of his career in this way, but what artist wouldn't jump at the chance to view a piece of work through the looking glass without physically altering the original? (A kindred impulse drives novelists to sell the screen rights to their books.) All I can say is that the end result is more seductive than, say, Vanilla Sky, or Christopher Nolan's Insomnia.

TIFF '04: 5x2 - Five Times Two

Cinq fois deux
**/****
starring Valérie Bruni-Tedeschi, Stéphane Freiss, Géraldine Pailhas, Françoise Fabian
screenplay by François Ozon & Emmanuèle Bernheim
directed by François Ozon

by Bill Chambers Racking up an unorthodox number of short films before tackling his first feature, 1998's lead balloon Sitcom, the prolific François Ozon returns to his roots in a way with 5x2 - Five Times Two (5x2 - Cinq fois deux), a collection of five vignettes that charts an ill-fated marriage--backwards. As the picture opens, Marion (archetypal Ozon blonde Valérie Bruni-Tedeschi) and Gilles (Stéphane Freiss) are being read the terms of their divorce agreement; as the picture closes, the two are prospective lovers sizing each other up on an empty but sun-kissed beach, she portentously warning he of the choppy waters in which they're about to go swimming--a moment I preferred to think of as a tongue-in-cheek reference to Ozon's Under the Sand, so starved is 5x2 for levity. Irréversible Lite, the film is less emotionally draining than stultifying, in part because the anthology format does all the heavy-lifting, skipping anything interstitial that might let us form an impression of these characters organically or, moreover, fluidly: sympathies sway back-and-forth between the wife and the husband (though not to the extent that we ever forgive Gilles's abuse of Marion in the first segment), but never within the same episode, making Ozon just another god from the machine. Bruni-Tadeschi and Freiss, both of whom are in fine form, do seem to miraculously de-age throughout, however, lending the picture some credibility and surface interest. Programme: Special Presentations.

Shalhoubian Chants: FFC Interviews Tony Shalhoub

September 5, 2004|Poised on the eve of The Last Shot and the intriguing The Great New Wonderful, Tony Shalhoub had me a long time ago at his three minutes or so in Barton Fink. The best part of Galaxy Quest, playing the guy playing the ethnic guy in a "Star Trek"-like cult television series, Shalhoub also stole the show as fast-talking lawyer Freddy Riedenschneider in his reunion with the Coen Brothers, The Man Who Wasn't There; demonstrated uncommon intelligence and sensitivity in the still-underseen Big Night; and made his feature-film debut behind the camera with wife Brooke Adams in the independent Made-Up, now trickling into video stores. Shalhoub is an Emmy-winner, too, taking home a trophy for cable-series "Monk", which is winding down its third critically-acclaimed season.

Ju-On: The Grudge (2003)

*½/****
starring Megumi Okina, Misaki Ito, Misa Uehara, Yui Ichikawa
written and directed by Takashi Shimizu

by Walter Chaw There are a couple of startling moments in Takashi Shimizu's Ju-On: The Grudge buried in a mountain of mendacity. It looks cheap and it feels cheap--something like Takashi Miike's Visitor Q without the barrier-breaking, society-challenging audacity, or a television drama with low production values and a hilariously inept cast. It's kids playing at spooky: It'll work a time or two, but mostly it'll be clumsy and stilted. Mainly, it seems as though Ju-On: The Grudge hopes that you haven't seen the movies of Hideo Nakata and Kiyoshi Kurosawa, because suddenly we're not even talking the same ballpark anymore.

Twisted (2004) [Special Collector's Edition - Widescreen Collection] - DVD

½*/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B
starring Ashley Judd, Samuel L. Jackson, Andy Garcia, David Strathairn
screenplay by Sarah Thorp
directed by Philip Kaufman

by Walter Chaw Ashley Judd's stab at In the Cut, Twisted washes out to be closer to a distaff Tightrope. It's just another Judd film co-starring Morgan Freeman, here played by Samuel L. Jackson. Once again humiliated and physically abused for her sexuality, Judd has this perverse penchant for self-mortification legitimized by yet another contractually required African-American mentor. What really wounds is that it's a movie with a pedigree and a little promise (unlike Judd's constant dalliances with the best of the airport bookrack), what with Philip Kaufman, back on the west coast in his favourite American setting of San Francisco, at the reins. A love of the City by the Bay is on display in a gorgeously-composed opening sequence that finds the Golden Gate Bridge floating on a bed of fog and, later, when the first body is discovered in Twisted's requisite corpse gallery against the nighttime backdrop of Pac Bell Ballpark, and there's an underlying menace to San Francisco that no one aside from Hitchcock has been able to capture quite like Kaufman, especially in Invasion of the Body Snatchers. So the possibility that this ostensibly dark psychological thriller might actually be good springs eternal for a full five minutes, exactly the amount of time that passes until someone utters the first of screenwriter Sarah Thorp's tragically over-written lines--and for us to rediscover Judd as an extremely limited actress whose best film remains the grossly underestimated Eye of the Beholder.