The Whoopee Boys (1986) – DVD

Posted in1980s, 2008, Authors: Alex Jackson, Comedy, DVD

**/**** Image B- Sound B-
starring Michael O’Keefe, Paul Rodriguez, Denholm Elliott, Dan O’Herlihy
screenplay by Steve Zacharias and Jeff Buhai and David Obst
directed by John Byrum

by Alex Jackson John Byrum’s 1986 comedy The Whoopee Boys is a strictly hit-and-miss affair. When it hits, it’s good for a chuckle and a worthy distraction. When it misses, it is, to borrow one of the film’s favourite visuals, like a swift kick to the groin. I’m being a lot easier on the picture than I imagine most people would be, in part because I simply admire its sheer hubris. The Whoopee Boys really puts it on the line, and there are many times where it seems like it’s working without a safety net. What do you have to gain from making a movie like this? You might make people laugh. What do you have to lose? You could create such an unholy object of pure, unadulterated shittiness that audiences will commit hara-kiri in the aisles to preserve the very last shred of dignity they have left after buying a ticket.

Felon (2008) – Blu-ray Disc

Felon (2008) – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in2000s, 2008, Action, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Drama, Prison, Thriller

***/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B-
starring Stephen Dorff, Harold Perrineau, Marisol Nichols, Val Kilmer
written and directed by Ric Roman Waugh

by Bryant Frazer If Jeffrey Lebowski had made a few wrong turns in life–if, let’s say, he had brutally murdered some very bad men, as well as their families–he may have turned out not entirely unlike John Smith, the hulkingly mellow convict played by a moustachioed, goateed Val Kilmer in Felon. Judging from the wide berth the rest of the inmates give him, Smith is known as the silent-but-deadly type. Kilmer plays him from behind a whole bunch of prison tattoos with a steely glare, but also with a kind of openness that doesn’t immediately compute. Although he’s tagged as a sociopath, he’s really just the opposite. He believes in justice, and he longs for the death sentence he feels his crimes deserve.

Birds of Prey: The Complete Series (2002-2003) – DVD

Birds of Prey: The Complete Series (2002-2003) – DVD

Posted in2000s, 2008, Action, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Ian Pugh, Drama, DVD, Sci-Fi, Superhero, Television

Image C+ Sound B- Extras C+

BIRDS OF PREY: THE COMPLETE SERIES
“Pilot,” “Slick,” “Prey for the Hunter,” “Three Birds and a Baby,” “Sins of the Mother,” “Primal Scream,” “Split,” “Lady Shiva,” “Nature of the Beast,” “Gladiatrix,” “Reunion,” “Feat of Clay,” “Devil’s Eyes”

GOTHAM GIRLS: THE COMPLETE SERIES
“The Vault,” “Lap Bat,” “Trick or Trick, Part 1,” “Trick or Trick, Part 2,” “A Little Night Magic,” “More Than One Way,” “Precious Birthstones,” “Pave Paradise,” “The Three Babies,” “Gardener’s Apprentice,” “Lady-X,” “Hold That Tiger,” “Miss Un-Congeniality,” “Strategery,” “Baby Boom,” “Cat-n-Mouse,” “Bat’ing Cleanup,” “Catsitter,” “Gotham Noir,” “Scout’s Dishonor,” “I’m Badgirl,” “Ms.-ing in Action,” “Gotham in Pink,” “Hear Me Roar,” “Gotham in Blue,” “A Cat in the Hand,” “Jailhouse Wreck,” “Honor Among Thieves,” “No, I’m Batgirl,” “Signal Fires,” “Cold Hands, Cold Heart”

by Ian Pugh The most that can be said for the execrable “Birds of Prey” is that, five years beforehand, it predicted the disaster of David Eick’s unfortunate “Bionic Woman” remake: Owing its creation to the popularity of a similarly-themed show (“Smallville” being the analog for “Battlestar Galactica” in this instance), it transforms an already-overblown superhero premise into an ill-conceived soapbox to peddle some artificial feminist claptrap. And, like “Bionic Woman”, it attempts to capture the atmosphere of its forebears while betraying zero understanding of what made them successful in the first place. Unlike many of the show’s detractors, I don’t really care that “Birds of Prey” is a Batman series without Batman’s literal presence; I do, however, care that it basically removes any hint of pathos from the setting and, in the classic tradition of the now-defunct WB television network, replaces it with the superficial whininess that teenagers frequently use to get attention. It’s The Dark Knight Returns without the nostalgic melancholy. The Killing Joke without the sick, mind-bending tragedy. No Man’s Land without the goddamned earthquake.

Once Upon a Zeitgeist: Blue City (1986); Top Gun (1986); The Lost Boys (1987); Bull Durham (1988)

Once Upon a Zeitgeist: Blue City (1986); Top Gun (1986); The Lost Boys (1987); Bull Durham (1988)

Posted in1980s, 2008, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Crime, Directors: Joel Schumacher, Directors: Tony Scott, Drama, DVD, Horror, Sports, Teen, Thriller, Tom Cruise, Vampire

BLUE CITY – DVD
ZERO STARS/**** Image C- Sound C-
starring Judd Nelson, Ally Sheedy, Paul Winfield, Scott Wilson
screenplay by Lukas Heller and Walter Hill, based on the novel by Ross MacDonald
directed by Michelle Manning

TOP GUN [Widescreen Special Collector’s Edition] – DVD + [Special Collector’s Edition] Blu-ray Disc
*/****
DVD – Image B Sound B+ Extras B
BD – Image B+ Sound A+ (DTS) A- (DD) Extras B
starring Tom Cruise, Kelly McGillis, Val Kilmer, Anthony Edwards
screenplay by Jim Cash & Jack Epps, Jr.
directed by Tony Scott

THE LOST BOYS [Two-Disc Special Edition] – DVD
***/**** Image B+ Sound B Extras C+
starring Corey Feldman, Jami Gertz, Corey Haim, Dianne Wiest
screenplay by Janice Fischer & James Jeremias and Jeffrey Boam
directed by Joel Schumacher

BULL DURHAM [Collector’s Edition] – DVD
**/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras B+
starring Kevin Costner, Susan Sarandon, Tim Robbins, Trey Wilson
written and directed by Ron Shelton

by Walter Chaw Released in 1986 and tonally identical to contemporary suck classics The Wraith and Wisdom, the Brat Pack travesty Blue City represents the nadir of a year that produced Blue Velvet, Down By Law, The Mosquito Coast, Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, Sid and Nancy, Aliens, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, The Fly, Big Trouble in Little China, Something Wild, Mona Lisa, and Night of the Creeps, for starters. It’s the quintessence of why people remember the 1980s as a terrible decade for film, poor in every single objective measure of quality. Consider a central set-piece where our hero Billy (Judd Nelson) and his buck-toothed cohort Joey (David Caruso) stage a weird re-enactment of the heist from The Killing at a dog track that includes not only such bon mots as “I’m new at this! Give me a break!” but also the dumbest diversionary tactic in the history of these things as Joey tosses a prime cut on the track in front of a frankly startled/quickly delighted pack of muzzled greyhounds. Then again, it’s not a bad metaphor for the Me Generation and its blockbuster mentality. After cracking wise a few times in a way that makes one wonder if he’s suddenly become a Republican, Billy blows on the barrel of his gun in his best John Ireland-meets-Montgomery Clift and professional bad editor Ross Albert (the whiz kid behind Bushwhacked, The Beverly Hillbillies, and The Pest) cracks a little wise himself by cutting to a rack of hot dogs. Unfortunately, suggesting that Judd Nelson is gay as a French holiday is only mildly wittier than suggesting the same of clearly gay Tom Cruise. More on that when we get to Top Gun.

Encounters at the End of the World (2008) + Frozen River (2008)

Posted in2000s, 2008, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Directors: Werner Herzog, Documentary, Drama, Theatrical

ENCOUNTERS AT THE END OF THE WORLD
***½/****
directed by Werner Herzog

FROZEN RIVER
*½/****
starring Melissa Leo, Misty Upham, Charlie McDermott, Mark Boone Junior
written and directed by Courtney Hunt

by Walter Chaw It’s a source of endless delight for me that Werner Herzog–the man who refers to nature as “obscene”–has become known of late for delivering mordant, mildly condescending nature documentaries. His Grizzly Man is a modern classic of Bavarian madness–now find Herzog in Antarctica, declaring at regular intervals in Encounters at the End of the World that “something doesn’t seem right” with a perfectly-preserved hut used by Shackleton a hundred years ago, or with a demented penguin making its way to certain doom on an inexplicable march to the inland. With an opening that has Herzog immodestly laying out his mission statement as wishing to discover, in a roundabout way, why it is that men are obsessed with riding their metaphorical steeds into the wild unknowns, he illustrates the conundrum with a sideswipe at mankind, equating us with ants that hold other insect species as “slaves” and wondering why chimps, despite their intellectual sophistication, decline to domesticate goats to ride them on their own existential pursuits.

Untraceable (2008) – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in2000s, 2008, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Mystery, Thriller

*/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B
starring Diane Lane, Billy Burke, Colin Hanks, Joseph Cross
screenplay by Robert Fyvolent & Mark R. Brinker and Allison Burnett
directed by Gregory Hoblit

by Bryant Frazer Diane Lane is one of the few actresses in Hollywood who, in her 40s, manages to stay bankable while looking and acting her age. That she’s beautiful doesn’t hurt, but she brings a dignity and knowingness to a role that can pull the whole enterprise up a notch. So it’s a little depressing to see Lane wasting her time legitimizing hackwork like Untraceable, directed with stone competence and not much else by Gregory Hoblit. The problem here isn’t so much Hoblit’s workmanlike style (after all, he directed Anthony Hopkins in a highly entertaining performance in last year’s Fracture) as it is his apparent failure to question the cloddish sermonizing of a script that wallows in clichés lifted from The Silence of the Lambs, Se7en, and the Saw movies without seeming to realize the ridiculous hypocrisy in which it engages.

Tootsie (1982) [25th Anniversary Edition] + The Pied Piper (1972) – DVDs

Posted in1970s, 1980s, 2008, Authors: Ian Pugh, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Fantasy, Musical, Romance, UK, West Germany

TOOTSIE
**/**** Image B Sound A- Extras B
starring Dustin Hoffman, Jessica Lange, Teri Garr, Dabney Coleman
screenplay by Murray Schisgal and Larry Gelbart
directed by Sydney Pollack

THE PIED PIPER
*½/**** Image C Sound C
starring Donovan, Jack Wild, John Hurt, Donald Pleasence
screenplay by Andrew Berkin, Jacques Demy & Mark Peploe
directed by Jacques Demy

by Ian Pugh SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. The fatal flaw of Tootsie can be traced back to the fact that, here at least, Teri Garr is a better actress than Jessica Lange, playing a better character in a more interesting scenario. It only takes one scene to realize that: Garr’s Sandy Lester, long-time friend and protégé to douchebag actor Michael Dorsey (Dustin Hoffman, who possesses enough self-awareness as a douchebag actor to be the film’s saving grace), bursts into tears because a promising role on the soap opera “Southwest General” requires the one quality she can’t play: “a woman!” Suddenly, you’re thrust into the compelling inner circle of a profession fraught with self-doubt, false friends, and the attempt to decipher a very slippery perception of “reality.”

The Sum of All Fears (2002) [Special Collector’s Edition] – DVD|Blu-ray Disc

The Sum of All Fears (2002) [Special Collector’s Edition] – DVD|Blu-ray Disc

Posted in2000s, 2008, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Canada, Drama, DVD, Espionage, Germany, Thriller, War

**/****
DVD – Image A- Sound B Extras A-
BD – Image B+ Sound A Extras A-
starring Ben Affleck, Morgan Freeman, James Cromwell, Liev Schreiber
screenplay by Paul Attanasio and Daniel Pyne, based on the novel by Tom Clancy
directed by Phil Alden Robinson

by Walter Chaw The Sum of All Fears is a well-made techno-horror film based on a reasonably well-written (by Tom Clancy standards) techno-horror novel. It’s a studio marketing department’s worst nightmare post-9/11 (the movie revolving around a pilfered nuclear weapon and a terrorist plot to destabilize the universe) and a critic’s wet dream: finally, something meaty to write about in popular film. Or so it would seem, for alas, The Sum of All Fears is just a well-made techno-horror film–in theme and suggestion, it’s as moldy and stately as a Le Carré master plot with little comment regarding the state of our world besides “Bad people do bad things despite the best efforts of good people.” See, we know that already; while I’m the first to decry the pathological dedication of mainstream pictures to provide easy solutions for life’s injustices, The Sum of All Fears is a remarkably ill-timed piece that plays essentially like the sharp twist of a buried knife.

Vantage Point (2008) – Blu-ray Disc

Vantage Point (2008) – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in2000s, 2008, Action, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Mexico, Mystery, Spain, Thriller

*/**** Image A Sound A Extras C+
starring Dennis Quaid, Matthew Fox, Forest Whitaker, William Hurt
screenplay by Barry L. Levy
directed by Pete Travis

by Bryant Frazer If Vantage Point is an experiment, it can be pretty much considered a failure. The unconventional strategy here is to construct a narrative feature by taking multiple passes at the same 20 minutes or so in a very bad day for Secret Service agent Thomas Barnes (Dennis Quaid). Barnes took a bullet for the President of the United States a year ago and has been scheduled to return to duty by working the security detail for the POTUS’s speech at an anti-terrorist summit in Salamanca, Spain. And before he can speak, President Ashton (William Hurt) is nailed by an assassin’s bullet–or is he?

The Frank Sinatra and Gene Kelly Collection – DVD

Posted in1940s, 2008, Animation, Authors: Alex Jackson, Comedy, DVD, Musical, Romance, Sports, War

ON THE TOWN (1949)
**/**** Image C Sound B-
starring Gene Kelly, Frank Sinatra, Betty Garrett, Ann Miller
screenplay by Adolph Green and Betty Comden, based on the play
directed by Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen

TAKE ME OUT TO THE BALL GAME (1949)
**/**** Image B+ Sound A- Extras C
starring Frank Sinatra, Esther Williams, Gene Kelly, Betty Garrett
screenplay by Harry Tugeno and George Wells
directed by Busby Berkeley

ANCHORS AWEIGH (1945)
**/**** Image C+ Sound B- Extras D
starring Frank Sinatra, Kathryn Grayson, Gene Kelly, Dean Stockwell
screenplay by Isobel Lennart
directed by George Sidney

by Alex Jackson One of the cinema’s most startling moments in recent years was a close-up of Paul Dano early on in There Will Be Blood. Dano was never meant to get that friendly with the camera. I’m not sure I can properly convey this notion, but his close-up created a dissonant effect. It felt as though director Paul Thomas Anderson had broken some unstated rule of filmmaking. I think the reason it’s so jarring is that the Close-Up wasn’t designed for actors like Paul Dano. It was designed for somebody like his co-star, Daniel Day-Lewis. To put it as delicately as possible, Dano wasn’t blessed with a “movie star” face. He’s a bit strange-looking. In contrast, Daniel Day-Lewis is traditionally handsome and truly “belongs” on the silver screen. In and of himself, he’s as cinematic as anything you’re ever going to find in the movies.

Stop-Loss (2008) + 21 (2008)|21 – Blu-ray Disc

Stop-Loss (2008) + 21 (2008)|21 – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in2000s, 2008, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Drama, Theatrical, Thriller, War

STOP-LOSS
*½/****
starring Ryan Phillippe, Abbie Cornish, Channing Tatum, Joseph Gordon-Levitt
screenplay by Mark Richard & Kimberly Peirce
directed by Kimberly Peirce

21
*/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
starring Jim Sturgess, Kate Bosworth, Laurence Fishburne, Kevin Spacey
screenplay by Peter Steinfeld and Allan Loeb
directed by Robert Luketic

by Walter Chaw The only thing really wrong with MTV–besides the fact that they don’t show music videos anymore–is that its branding on some of the most vacuous, appalling celebrations of vanity, stupidity, and acting-out in the not-exactly-sterling history of the medium has spawned a rash of imitative programming. It’s cheap to turn a few cameras on pretty idiots fucking each other figuratively and literally in resort locales, and so now there are Tiffany versions of this (“Survivor”) on broadcast networks and sewer versions of this (those Flava Flav things, Anna Nicole’s old show) on struggling basic-cable outlets. (Cartoon Network even has an animated send-up of “The Real World”.) And if the genre momentarily appeared to be on the verge of extinction, it suddenly found new life with the recent writers’ strike. Because a good many films nowadays are populated by pre-fabricated tween (and post-tween) stars, I have no idea who they are until they’re shoved into my consciousness as “stars”; indeed, MTV’s dread influence on popular culture has extended itself (hand-in-hand with Titanic‘s mammoth babysitter’s-club popularity) into the multiplex. Too ephemeral for any nickname (no “brat pack” here, just a revolving door of fresh meat), the real legacy of MTV might be that it functions as a microcosm for the lost youth phenomenon in the United States: In every Britney Spears, I see a Virginia Tech. Promise the terminally untalented the moon and repay them with a goat’s portion of disappointment, disillusionment, and frustration bound to simmer to a foul boil.

Drillbit Taylor (2008) – Blu-ray Disc

Drillbit Taylor (2008) – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in2000s, 2008, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, John Hughes, Teen

**/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras B
starring Owen Wilson, Leslie Mann, Danny McBride, Josh Peck
screenplay by Kristofor Brown & Seth Rogen
directed by Steven Brill

by Bill Chambers For good and for ill, John Hughes’s sticky fingerprints are all over Drillbit Taylor, his first screen credit (under his nom-de-plume “Edmond Dantès”) in six years. The film has signs of something written post-Curly Sue, given its glib fascination with the homeless, penchant for quasi-Dickensian names (Drillbit, Filkins, Doppler, Fence), and reams of sadistic slapstick. Yet it also echoes an earlier period in which Hughes treated high-schoolers with sensitivity, confronted the sometimes-toxic influence of their parents (particularly the patriarch), and understood pop-culture as teenage shorthand. (If the score’s pomo quotation of the Cape Fear theme wasn’t indicated in Hughes’s 70-page “scriptment,” it’s an uncanny homage. Ditto a non-sequitur of the nurse’s office pulling down a “Closed” sign like a nervous bank teller in the Wild West during an altercation in the hall outside.) Too, Drillbit Taylor betrays Hughes’s influence in scenes of class warfare, though a moment when the protagonists, running for their lives, stop to ogle a couple of sunbathers is so derivative of his Ferris Bueller’s Day Off that only the rabid fandom of script doctors Kristofor Brown and Seth Rogen could account for it.

Hellboy II: The Golden Army (2008)

Posted in****/****, 2000s, 2008, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Fantasy, Germany, Hungary, Sci-Fi, Superhero, Theatrical

****/****
starring Ron Perlman, Selma Blair, Doug Jones, John Hurt
written and directed by Guillermo del Toro

by Walter Chaw It’s at the forefront of one’s mind during Hellboy II: The Golden Army (hereafter Hellboy II), Guillermo del Toro’s brilliant dance along an ephemeral tightrope between pop and Puccini, that David Cronenberg and Howard Shore recently converted their remake of The Fly into a full-fledged opera: I can see the same thing happening with a lot of del Toro’s pictures. The director’s said that after his Pan’s Labyrinth “something popped” in regards to his restraint in allowing the menagerie of monsters in his brain free rein over his imagination–and that he endeavoured to bring all the madness of Mike Mignola’s “Hellboy” universe to the big screen with or without a commensurately giant budget. (Of Summer ’08’s blockbusters, Hellboy II, costing around 85 million dollars, might be the most frugal.) The result is a film so crammed to the gills with invention that a bit of background business in a scene set at a bazaar hidden beneath the Brooklyn Bridge (this is the second great genre film this year after Cloverfield to make a pit stop at that particular locale) wherein a creature plays a pipe made out of a tanned human corpse is left uncommented-upon and is somehow ultimately unremarkable. The wonders of Hellboy II as experienced through our avatars Hellboy (Ron Perlman), Liz (Selma Blair), and Abe (Doug Jones, this time vocalizing the character as well)–team members for a covert government agency that deals with supernatural intrusions–are the way the world is, and it’s fascinatingly left for the normals in the audience to crane for a better look.

Lars and the Real Girl (2007); The Passion of Greg the Bunny: The Best of the Film Parodies Volume 2 (2006-2007); The Cottage (2008) [Unrated] – DVDs

Lars and the Real Girl (2007); The Passion of Greg the Bunny: The Best of the Film Parodies Volume 2 (2006-2007); The Cottage (2008) [Unrated] – DVDs

Posted in2000s, 2007, 2008, Authors: Ian Pugh, Canada, Comedy, Crime, Drama, DVD, Horror, Romance, Scream/Shout! Factory, Thriller, UK

LARS AND THE REAL GIRL
*½/**** Image A Sound B Extras D
starring Ryan Gosling, Emily Mortimer, Paul Schneider, Kelli Garner
screenplay by Nancy Oliver
directed by Craig Gillespie

THE PASSION OF GREG THE BUNNY: THE BEST OF THE FILM PARODIES VOLUME 2
Image B+ Sound B Extras C+
“Fur on the Asphalt,” “Wumpus the Monster,” “Sockville,” “Blue Velveteen,” “Plush: Behind the Seams,” “Wacky Wednesday,” “The Passion of the Easter Bunny: A Fabricated American Movie”

THE COTTAGE
½*/**** Image A- Sound B- Extras D
starring Andy Serkis, Reece Shearsmith, Stephen O’Donnell, Jennifer Ellison
written and directed by Paul Andrew Williams

by Ian Pugh Beyond its pale stab at indie street cred and an Oscar nomination for Best Original Screenplay (which are almost one and the same these days), Lars and the Real Girl shares with Juno an invitation to partake in a never-ending stream of laughs over its premise until it basically flips a switch and instructs you to get emotional over it–the supposed target of discussion here being nothing less than that ever-popular subject of paternalistic revulsion, mental illness. Ryan Gosling turns his “twitchy zombie” knob up to eleven as Lars, a quiet loner living in his brother Gus’s (Paul Schneider) backyard shed. After Gus’s pregnant wife Karin (Emily Mortimer) expresses concern that her brother-in-law is spending too much time by himself, Lars orders a realistic sex doll named “Bianca” over the Internet and parades it around the neighbourhood as the girlfriend he never had, much to the consternation of Gus, Karin, and Lars’s would-be love interest Margo (Kelli Garner), who can only respond with uncertain stares and a lot of hemming and hawing.

P.S. I Love You (2007) – Blu-ray Disc

P.S. I Love You (2007) – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in2000s, 2007, 2008, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Drama, Romance, UK

**/**** Image B Sound B Extras C+
starring Hilary Swank, Gerard Butler, Lisa Kudrow, Kathy Bates
screenplay by Richard LaGravanese and Steven Rogers, based on the novel by Cecelia Ahern
directed by Richard LaGravanese

Bryant Frazer In P.S. I Love You, Hilary Swank gets to play a part that’s typically the province of male actors: the lovesick bachelor. The gender-specific word for what she is here is widow: Her husband has succumbed to brain cancer, leaving her alone in a Chinatown apartment. But the stereotype is so familiar as a guy thing–Swank’s place is littered with pizza crusts, Chinese take-out containers, and take-out coffee cups, and she herself parades around in boxers–that its presence is a touch of wit in a movie that has lots of grace notes. That’s a testimony to the skills of writer-director Richard LaGravenese, a sort of go-to guy for contemporary melodrama. He’s made a career out of investing commercial romantic comedy with soul, humour, and a little bit of weirdness. Alas, that LaGravenese touch is not enough to balance out the manipulative tone of the whole wish-fulfillment enterprise he’s working at here. P.S. I Love You is easy to watch and occasionally rewarding, but it’s so transparently inspirational that its feel-good contortions might end up making you feel worse for the wear.

Hancock (2008)

Posted in2000s, 2008, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Fantasy, Superhero, Theatrical, Will Smith

***/****
starring Will Smith, Charlize Theron, Jason Bateman, Jae Head
screenplay by Vy Vincent Ngo & Vince Gilligan
directed by Peter Berg

by Walter Chaw I’m an unabashed Peter Berg fan. I think that his Very Bad Things is naughty and transgressive in ways that Judd Apatow could only pretend; that his The Rundown is the first film since Herzog’s Even Dwarfs Started Small to use little people correctly in a rollicking, rousing sentence; and that his Friday Night Lights did a very fine job of essaying the insular madness of Texas high-school football. Berg’s last picture, The Kingdom, is the finest pop explication of the brief history of (and our relationship with) the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and now his superhero epic Hancock has the temerity to try to address the colour barrier in comics as it relates, uneasily, to these United States. Talking about it tells everything, so beware the major spoiler, but Hancock has at its centre an indestructible, airborne, super-strong black man with a white wife who, should he spend too much time near her, renders him completely, utterly mortal and thus subject to the world that would see them apart. Consider that this is a mega-budget, 4th of July blockbuster starring Will Smith, the black guy all America can agree on, doing the old miscegenation tango with the whitest white girl on the planet, South African lovely Charlize Theron, which should have aged white Republicans twisted up in their Confederate-flag panties. We’re only really forty years removed from Selma, Alabama, and here’s forty-year-old Will Smith planting a big wet one on Theron’s lips in a tentpole flick the summer that Barack Obama became the first black man chosen as the Democratic nominee for the President of the United States. God bless America, free(r) at last.

Bridge to Terabithia (2007) [Widescreen]; The Seeker: The Dark is Rising (2007); The Spiderwick Chronicles [2-Disc Field Guide Edition] – DVDs

Bridge to Terabithia (2007) [Widescreen]; The Seeker: The Dark is Rising (2007); The Spiderwick Chronicles [2-Disc Field Guide Edition] – DVDs

Posted in2000s, 2007, 2008, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Disney, Drama, DVD, Family, Fantasy, Thriller

BRIDGE TO TERABITHIA
**½/**** Image A Sound A- Extras C
starring Josh Hutcherson, Annasophia Robb, Robert Patrick, Zooey Deschanel
screenplay by Jeff Stockwell and David Paterson, based on the book by Katherine Paterson
directed by Gabor Csupo

THE SEEKER: THE DARK IS RISING
½*/**** N/A
starring Alexander Ludwig, Christopher Eccleston, Ian McShane, Frances Conroy
screenplay by John Hodge, based on the book by Susan Cooper
directed by David L. Cunningham

THE SPIDERWICK CHRONICLES
**/**** Image A Sound A Extras C-
starring Freddie Highmore, Mary-Louise Parker, Nick Nolte, David Strathairn
screenplay by Karey Kirkpatrick and John Sayles, based on the books by Tony DiTerlizzi and Holly Black
directed by Mark Waters

by Walter Chaw In the genre of wide-eyed, hyperactive ‘tween bullshit, there seems a common thread of missing parents or siblings with all the attendant Oedipal complexities upon which to coat-hanger every genus of just-pubescent, Uncle Joe Campbell shenanigans. (Oh, I get it, it’s a metaphor for strange hair, jerking off, and embarrassing hard-ons–no wonder I identify with these things again as I get older.) More underground than overt adolescent emo rock-star/rapist fantasies like vampirism, the flicks of this type that work–such as Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man trilogy, or the third and fifth Harry Potters, or The Passion of the Christ–incorporate the uncertainty and body horror of growing up with hero/martyr fantasies and, ultimately, the melancholy of childhood’s end. The result of a job well done is a piece of enduring, often befuddling, resonance, owing in part to the canny hijacking of some existing folklore or mythology (including comic books) and the gratifying recognition that at the end of all that hormonal devastation is the justification of manhood. Psychosexual psychodrama at least, the new crop of boy-into-man-boy flicks, in the wake of the astounding success of that certain boy wizard (and, shit, probably Shrek‘s, too), takes a new interest in fantasy as a means to specific ontological ends. For this unabashed fan of Matthew Robbins’s idyllic, laden Dragonslayer, it’s not entirely bad news.

WALL·E (2008)

Posted in2000s, 2008, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Family, Pixar, Sci-Fi

***½/****
screenplay by Andrew Stanton & Jim Reardon
directed by Andrew Stanton

by Walter Chaw What curbs Andrew Stanton’s WALL·E from being a complete triumph is an extended Battle Royale in the middle of the film between a ship’s captain and his HAL-like autopilot–more Mack Sennett than Stanley Kubrick, it’s a moment that panders to the diaper set instead of, as the rest of the picture does, elevating animation ever-so-delicately into a medium in the United States instead of a genre. Here in this children’s film, find a blasted post-apocalyptic wasteland–a ruined Manhattan with towers of trash stacked higher than its abandoned skyscrapers by a robot, WALL·E, left behind for seven hundred years while humanity waits in orbit for Earth to become inhabitable again. It’s never clear what devastated the planet, though there are suggestions aplenty that it has something to do with unfettered consumerism and terminal neglect by its human stewards, as the film opens with an elegant, eloquent, wordless forty-minutes of WALL·E nursing a connection with his absent masters through endless viewings of the “Put on Your Sunday Clothes” sequence from Hello, Dolly!–the one that ends with a lovely moment of hands held in new love, which becomes the central image of longing in the piece. The song’s refrain is haunting to me now–in a way that I never expected anything sung by Babs could be–similar to how the phrase “meet me in Montauk” has post-Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. If WALL·E had stayed on this uninhabitable Earth scoured by 250 mph windstorms, especially with our hero discovering a plant sprouting in an abandoned refrigerator, I don’t know that I could bear the sadness of it.

Cloverfield (2008) – DVD|Blu-ray Disc

Cloverfield (2008) – DVD|Blu-ray Disc

Posted in2000s, 2008, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, DVD, Horror, Pseudo-Documentary, Sci-Fi, Thriller

***½/****
DVD – Image A Sound A Extras A
BD – Image A Sound A+ Extras A
starring Lizzy Caplan, Jessica Lucas, T.J. Miller, Michael Stahl-David
screenplay by Drew Goddard
directed by Matt Reeves

by Walter Chaw I love this movie. I love its freedom and its exuberance, its sense of fun and its creativity. I love that it uses The Blair Witch Project as a launchpad for its low-tech, found-footage brilliance; I love its genius-level viral marketing campaign and its Ludditism and overt technophobia. Where The Blair Witch Project skewered trust-fund kids picking a particularly unfortunate senior project, Cloverfield takes on twentysomething urbanites on top of the world in Manhattan, celebrating the departure of one of their own on the night the chickens come home to roost. There’s no explanation of the mayhem in Cloverfield beyond that a monster has attacked and that the recoil its rampage spawns inevitably resembles memories of our collective scarring by 9/11. All it does, really, is clarify that when people at Ground Zero referred to the falling of the WTC as “just like in a movie,” it didn’t point to a divorce from reality but to an inability, utterly, to conceive of anything so epoch-shaking as possible outside the prism of our precious, silver-graven images. The history depicted in our films is the only history we know.