Fuck (2006) – DVD

Posted in2000s, 2006, 2007, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Documentary, DVD

F*ck
½*/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras C-
directed by Steve Anderson

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover I have no doubt that a first-rate documentarian could make a smart, provocative film about the sources and uses of the word “fuck.” But the thing about first-rate documentarians is, they usually have better things to do. Thus, it has been left to one Steve Anderson to do the legwork, resulting in a film that flaunts something far more obscene than the Seven Dirty Words: the self-righteous piety of comedians. Though I have been a lifelong user of the famous four-letter word, I found Anderson’s Fuck almost completely unbearable, as it brings out a variety of non-experts left and right to get hot-and-bothered about something that almost certainly needs to be appended to a larger issue. Between comics who are all too happy to attack us with their hostile fuck-talk and right-wingers who counter with vicious, repressive hate, it would require a stronger man than I to sit through Fuck without feeling completely battered down.

Casino Royale (2006) [2-Disc Widescreen] – DVD

Casino Royale (2006) [2-Disc Widescreen] – DVD

Posted in2000s, 2006, 2007, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Bahamas, Czech Republic, DVD, Espionage, Germany, James Bond, Thriller, UK

***/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B
starring Daniel Craig, Eva Green, Mads Mikkelsen, Judi Dench
screenplay by Neal Purvis & Robert Wade and Paul Haggis, based on the novel by Ian Fleming
directed by Martin Campbell

by Walter Chaw A genuinely good updating of the James Bond mythos from plastic, moldering relic to bloody, sweaty sociopath drunk on his own virility and general misanthropy, Martin Campbell’s Casino Royale–though the umpteenth chapter in a decades-old testosterone fever dream–is very much a part of this day and age. It’s a film that makes sense of the franchise using a modern vernacular of vengeance, terrorism, Texas Hold ‘Em, and paranoia. It’s unnecessarily padded by at least fifteen minutes, but when it switches into gear it announces itself a worthy peer to the Jason Bourne films with action that’s fantastically choreographed and alive with weight and violence. Most importantly, it finally has a protagonist who is, if not already, well on his way to becoming a serious psycho–post-modern man. What Daniel Craig brings to the role is a feral intelligence, this self-awareness that he’s a bad person. Any good that he does is tainted by the knowledge that this Bond’s only in it for the cheap thrills (drugs and murder, in particular) that lube his insect brain. Casino Royale summarizes the trend of detached, savage pictures from the last couple of years (Miami Vice, in particular, another bleak updating of a camp curio); when we talk about good action films now, we seem to be talking about the degree to which we have, as a culture, regressed to the Old Testament in matters of the heart and the hand. Call it “caveman vérité.”

Reno 911: Most Wanted Uncensored (2003-2006) – DVD

Posted in2000s, 2007, Authors: Ian Pugh, Comedy, Crime, DVD, Satire, Television

Image B- Sound B- Extras C
“Scavenger Hunt,” “Homeland Security, Pt. 1,” “Homeland Security, Pt. 2,” “Reverend Gigg LeCarp,” “Officer Smiley,” “Reading Ron,” “Rick from Citizen’s Patrol”

by Ian Pugh As often as “COPS” is used to validate political arguments regarding the police (on one side as a constant reminder of heroism, on the other as a constant reminder of excessive force), the show is rather useless in serious discussion because it filters out the mundanities in a cop’s line of work in favour of only the most titillating footage–which is exactly what’s kept it on the air for twenty years. As appalling as it is that “COPS”‘ lowest-common-denominator brand of entertainment has integrated itself into pop culture, if it is truly “guilty” of anything, it’s not that it has outright created a new generation of John Waynes and Harry Callahans (or William Kunstlers and Ron Kubys), it’s that it pares down the idea of the police into something that’s up for easy generalization. The attempt to throw them in a positive light is obvious, but it all depends on your own worldview: cops are either infallibly virtuous or infallibly corrupt.

Crank (2007) [Widescreen] – DVD

Crank (2007) [Widescreen] – DVD

Posted in2000s, 2007, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, DVD, Esoterica

**½/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Jason Statham, Amy Smart, Jose Pablo Cantillo, Dwight Yoakam
written and directed by Neveldine/Taylor

by Walter Chaw Consider the moment where French-fu schlockmeister Jason Statham marches through downtown traffic clad in a hospital smock, black socks, and boots while sporting a giant erection and ask yourself what more you could want from a dumb action movie called Crank. Seriously. A crotch-first fusion of Rudolph Maté’s D.O.A. and “Grand Theft Auto”, it defines that genre of video game-inspired non-sequitur mayhem indicated by epileptic edits, CGI-aided wire-fu, and John Woo gunplay by offering a high concept (hero is dying of a rare Chinese toxin that can be held in abeyance only with a steady infusion of adrenaline) as its narrative/excuse to exist.

Requiem (2006) – DVD

Requiem (2006) – DVD

Posted in2000s, 2006, 2007, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Drama, DVD, Germany, Horror

***½/**** Image B Sound A- (IFC) B+ (Mongrel)
starring Sandra Hüller, Burghart Klaussner, Imdgen Kogge, Anna Blomeier
screenplay by Bernd Lange
directed by Hans-Christian Schmid

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Like most pop epics, The Exorcism of Emily Rose was all about being sure. One had to throw down for the concept of the physical manifestation of Satan–any human considerations were swept aside in the affirmation of God’s merciless will. And if certain college girls were crushed to pulp (a sentiment which extends to the general expendability of humankind), so be it. Thank goodness, then, that there’s a movie like Requiem, based on the same case that inspired The Exorcism of Emily Rose but comparatively merciful in its mission. It wants to salvage the blighted life of an epileptic tossed around from doctor to doctor–one who, once presented with the beginnings of psychosis, had only religion and a mistrust of medicinal practice to fall back on. She’s a victim of other people’s indecision rather than of the Devil himself.

The Number 23 (2007)

Posted in2000s, 2007, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Directors: Joel Schumacher, Mystery, Theatrical, Thriller

*/****
starring Jim Carrey, Virginia Madsen, Logan Lerman, Danny Huston
screenplay by Fernley Phillips
directed by Joel Schumacher

by Walter Chaw The wilted potential part of it reminding a great deal of Ramsey Campbell’s The Count of Eleven, the new Jim Carrey vehicle The Number 23 finds professional hack Joel Schumacher returning to his Flatliners camp/schlock phase: a sort of supernatural thriller (sort of) that goes the Secret Window route towards absolute stunning mediocrity. Hardest to watch isn’t Schumacher’s umpteenth treatise on how to shine any project to a frictionless, dimwit, burlesque sheen, but rather Carrey’s betrayal of himself by following Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind with a limp Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events, a dreadful Fun with Dick and Jane, and now this. It suggests to me a lot of things, most of all the impression that Carrey, despite still wanting at least in part to be taken seriously as an actor, may have lost the critical facility first to avoid Schumacher projects and second to differentiate between high-concept dreck and Charlie Kaufman existential inspiration. Neither mysterious nor enthralling, The Number 23 is ridiculous, not for its complexity, but for its belief in its complexity–not for its Byzantine twists and turns, but for its utter self-delusion. It’s READER’S DIGEST: the presumption that people who actually read would prefer to read this truncated, pandering, aggressively neutered pap.

Down in the Valley (2006) [Widescreen] – DVD

Down in the Valley (2006) [Widescreen] – DVD

Posted in2000s, 2006, 2007, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Romance, Thriller

*/**** Image B- Sound B+ Extras C-
starring Edward Norton, Evan Rachel Wood, David Morse, Rory Culkin
written and directed by David Jacobson

by Walter Chaw Almost worth it for a scene on the set of a western where our deranged fabulist hero Harlan (Edward Norton) finally finds a home, David Jacobson’s Down in the Valley is otherwise so much pretentious hoohah waving its indie banner like a parasol. Rather than serve to illustrate a point about form and function à la Gus Van Sant’s shot-for-shot remake of Psycho, what Jacobson’s film does is strain its affection for (affectation of?) Taxi Driver, to the point of re-enacting the sacred “You talkin’ to me?” sequence–to the point of actually perverting Scorsese’s satire into your typical avenging-father/straying-daughter intrigue. It’s possible of course to boil Travis Bickle’s odyssey down to that, but to call Down in the Valley “reductive” is too kind: this is Taxi Driver recast as a protect-your-children-from-bad-dates picture, one that turns its back on the dreamlife of a crocodile in favour of the restoration of familial strata. It fails the courage test–going so far as to subtly pose an anti-Second Amendment suggestion–after failing, more damnably, to rationalize its pilfering of perhaps the definitive yawp in modern American cinema. Shake Down in the Valley hard enough and out falls another produced-by vanity piece for Norton to exercise his blank (as in Miyazaki-forest-sprite blank), squinty-eyed Method for the approval of his rapidly-shrinking circle of admirers. As far as the Norton mystique goes, Ryan Gosling is cheaper and prettier.

My Name is Earl: Season One (2005-2006) – DVD

My Name is Earl: Season One (2005-2006) – DVD

Posted in2000s, 2007, Authors: Ian Pugh, Comedy, DVD, Television

Image A Sound A- Extras B
“Pilot,” “Quit Smoking,” “Randy’s Touchdown,” “Faked My Own Death,” “Teacher Earl,” “Broke Joy’s Fancy Figurine,” “Stole Beer from a Golfer,” “Joy’s Wedding,” “Cost Dad an Election,” “White Lie Christmas,” “Barn Burner,” “O Karma, Where Art Thou?,” “Stole P’s HD Cart,” “Monkeys in Space,” “Something to Live For,” “The Professor,” “Didn’t Pay Taxes,” “Dad’s Car,” “Y2K,” “Boogeyman,” “Bounty Hunter,” “Stole a Badge,” “BB,” “Number One”

by Ian Pugh I don’t know a whole lot about the Buddhist concept of karma, but Earl Hickey knows even less, and I think that’s the point. As “My Name is Earl” begins, the titular petty criminal and leech on society (Jason Lee) scratches a winning lotto ticket, whereupon he’s immediately struck by a car. While a doped-up Earl convalesces, his cheating wife Joy (Jaime Pressly) seizes the opportunity to divorce him. Flipping through the TV channels from his hospital bed, Earl lands on Carson Daly, who attributes his own success to the most popular understanding of karma: “Do good things and good things happen to you. Do bad things and they come back to haunt you.” In the show’s first bit of hilarious commentary–one that guides the question of “doing the right thing” (which, in turn, dictates the series as a whole)–celebrity culture gives birth to self-serving pop religion. If Joe Sixpack is taking philosophical lessons from that guy whose primary function was to count down from the number ten…Lord, where did we go wrong?

Man of the Year (2006) [Widescreen] – DVD

Man of the Year (2006) [Widescreen] – DVD

Posted in2000s, 2006, 2007, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Romance, Thriller

½/**** Image A Sound A Extras C-
starring Robin Williams, Christopher Walken, Laura Linney, Jeff Goldblum
written and directed by Barry Levinson

by Walter Chaw Notorious dullard Barry Levinson’s second try at Wag the Dog, the Robin Williams vehicle Man of the Year is a limp wrist waved weakly at no more pathetic a target than new voting technology. The story, such as it is, involves a late-night political comedian/talk show pundit (in the Jon Stewart mold, I guess, if Jon Stewart were stupid, unfunny, and irritating) named Tom Dobbs (Williams) who carries his antiquated shtick all the way to Pennsylvania Avenue on the back of a faulty computerized voting system. Frail egghead techie Eleanor (Laura Linney, too good for this shit) discovers her company’s HAL-like flaw (hardly godlike in her erudition, she puzzles out that the digital voting booths choose winners alphabetically), and then promptly goes on the lam after an inexplicable and out-of-tune assault hays her wires and inspires her to seek out the freshly-minted POTUS-elect to inform him of the error. Meanwhile, Dobbs keeps acting like that asshole Robin Williams, desperately in need of a strong hand at his reins lest he run roughshod over his co-stars, the script, sense, respectability, plausibility, and so on down the line.

The Last Kiss (2006) [Widescreen] + Trust the Man (2006) – DVDs

The Last Kiss (2006) [Widescreen] + Trust the Man (2006) – DVDs

Posted in2000s, 2006, 2007, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Romance, ZERO STARS

THE LAST KISS
ZERO STARS/**** Image B+ Sound B Extras D
starring Zach Braff, Jacinda Barrett, Casey Affleck, Tom Wilkinson
screenplay by Paul Haggis, based on the screenplay for L’Ultimo Bacio by Gabriele Muccino
directed by Tony Goldwyn

TRUST THE MAN
½/**** Image A- Sound C Extras D
starring Billy Crudup, David Duchovny, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Julianne Moore
written and directed by Bart Freundlich

by Walter Chaw Zach Braff’s auto-elevation into the rarefied air of Ed Burnsian self-satisfaction has required a fraction of the smarmcoms, if a meaningful assist from an obscenely popular TV show that’s running on fumes at this point. Garden State is dreadful, of course, swarming with awkward, overwritten, creepy alt-folk montages and pocket epiphanies (just like “Scrubs”, albeit with half the rage and exploitation of frailty), but team up former “The Facts of Life” scribe (and Oscar-winning screenwriter) Paul Haggis with instant-brand Braff–he’s like sea monkeys: just add grease–for The Last Kiss and discover in the alchemy a more pungent, twice-as-stale vintage of a type of picture that used to be done with grace and wit by people like Whit Stillman and Hal Hartley, cheapened by noxious voice-overs and skeezy dialogues obsessed with the female orgasm without having the honesty to actually show one. What we get instead is the idea that this shit sells to a privileged “indie”-craving hipster demographic oblivious to the fact that “indie” films are as homogenous a ghetto as any other now. (Independent of what? Alternative to what?) There’s nothing genuine about these “relationshit” flicks (thanks to blogger John Landis for the term); they’re a sloppily-baited hook dangling in a waitlisted stucco bistro.

The Up Series [Five Disk Collector’s Edition] – DVD

Posted in****/****, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, 2007, Authors: Ian Pugh, Documentary, DVD, FFC Must-Own, UK

by Ian Pugh “Give me the child until he is seven, and I will give you the man.”

So goes the Jesuit maxim, and, as it happens, so begins almost every review you’ll find of Michael Apted’s “Up” documentary series. Of course, you can’t really fault someone for falling back on that warhorse (or this would be a very ironic paragraph indeed), because it’s the concept that brought the original television production Seven Up! to life, intended as it was as “a glimpse into Britain’s future.” That is to say, into the lives of fourteen seven-year-olds, chosen from all walks of life (though mostly from polar opposites of the class divide) and asked about the world, their ambitions, and just generally how they’re doing; they’ve been revisited for the same purpose every seven years hence.

Jesus Camp (2006) – DVD

Posted in2000s, 2006, 2007, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Documentary, DVD

**½/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras B
directed by Heidi Ewing & Rachel Grady

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover It’s hard not to be moved by the horrors of Jesus Camp. A record of one Pastor Becky Fischer’s far-right Christian summer camp, it’s loaded with stuff any compassionate person would decry–usually the cruelty and intimidation of adults, who are often seen scaring children shitless. But even as we may despise these guileless sadists as they reveal themselves to the camera, at some point it all begins to ring hollow. The film has nothing beyond the image of children being bullied while their parents natter on about hateful fundamentalism; perhaps most regrettably, there’s no discussion as to why, in the 21st century, 80 million Americans willingly believe in such corrosive nonsense.

Sundance ’07: Low and Behold

Posted in2000s, 2007, Authors: Alex Jackson, Drama, Film Festivals, Sundance

½*/****
starring Barlow Jacobs, Robert Longstreet, Eddie Rouse
screenplay by Zack Godshall & Barlow Jacobs
directed by Zack Godshall

by Alex Jackson I absolutely despise Zack Godshall’s Low and Behold. If there is a just and loving God governing the cosmos, it will be the worst movie I see all year; there should be a provision in the Patriot Act ensuring that these people never receive the funding to make another film. Turner Stull (co-writer Barlow Jacobs) has arrived in post-Katrina New Orleans to take a job as an insurance claims adjuster that his crude Uncle “Stully” has set up for him. Turner is reluctantly learning the ropes when he meets factory worker Nixon (Eddie Rouse, the uncle in George Washington). Seeing that Turner needs help checking the roofs, Nixon offers to trade his services for a ride around town to look for his daughters’ lost dog. Essentially, the film is a comedy–a really terrible one. Godshall scores lots of easy points against the uncle’s crassness and avarice: Stully is giddy about the fact that he has so many claims to process post-Katrina, he sees it as a big payday. Nevertheless, Godshall strains to satirize the callousness of the claims adjustment industry, apparently believing them to be soulless because they don’t visit people who haven’t filed a claim and won’t authorize payouts on houses with minimal damage. Obviously, if they could they would, as that would mean they would earn a higher commission–something Turner even points out for us. How could a film about Hurricane Katrina be this politically impotent? Turner’s naïveté is the secondary source of laffs.

Sundance ’07: Year of the Fish

Posted in2000s, 2007, Animation, Authors: Alex Jackson, Fantasy, Film Festivals, Romance, Sundance
**/**** starring Tsai Chin, Randall Duk Kim, Ken Leung, An Nguyen written and directed by David Kaplan by Alex Jackson I'm not quite sure why David Kaplan's Year of the Fish doesn't work, but I think it might have something to do with a fundamentally tainted central concept: the Cinderella story retold with a Chinese girl being sold into slavery in New York's Chinatown district. Cinderella is Ye Xian (An Nguyen), which was Cinderella's real name in the original Chinese folktale published a good 800 years before the better-known Perrault version. Xian must reimburse her benefactor for the cost of…

Sundance ’07: The Go-Getter

Posted in2000s, 2007, Authors: Alex Jackson, Comedy, Drama, Film Festivals, Sundance

**½/****
starring Lou Taylor Pucci, Zooey Deschanel, Jena Malone, Judy Greer
written and directed by Martin Hynes

by Alex Jackson Two columns of note recently circulated in the blogosphere. The first was Richard Corliss’s “The Trouble with Sundance,” in which Corliss complains that Sundance movies have become formulaic and predictable, effectively snuffing out the fresh, original voices the festival was supposed to be cultivating. The second article was a partial rebuttal by David Bordwell that sheds light on the phenomenon of what he calls “Indie Guignol”: independent filmmakers trying to outdo one another in sensationalistic brutality. Compared to entries in the “Sundance genre,” i.e., films typically involving dysfunctional families that strive to reconnect, oftentimes through road trips (the Oscar-nominated Little Miss Sunshine would be considered prototypical), these pictures are not mainstream, but they’re considered by critics to have more artistic merit. And yet, particularly because we can easily recognize the phenomenon, it’s losing its legitimacy as art. “Very often the predictable nonconformist is just as orthodox as the conformist,” Bordwell writes. I thought about this while watching Martin Hynes’s The Go-Getter, a film that subtly breaks away from Indie Guignol by embracing the possibly more passé Sundance genre. After Fido, Teeth, We Are The Strange, Hounddog, Strange Culture, and Low and Behold, all decidedly non-commercial films that take lots of chances and fail miserably, I have to admit I was happy to see something that gave me a few simple guiltless pleasures. Yes, Sundance films have become their own genre, but what the fuck is wrong with genre, anyway? Are you really a movie lover if you can’t enjoy a solid but generic horror film, war film, noir, romantic comedy, western, and/or musical?

Sundance ’07: Strange Culture

Posted in2000s, 2007, Authors: Alex Jackson, Documentary, Drama, Film Festivals, Sundance
*/**** starring Thomas Jay Ryan, Tilda Swinton, Peter Coyote written and directed by Lynn Hershman Leeson by Alex Jackson On May 11, 2004, artist and college professor Steve Kurtz called 911 to report the death of his wife Hope by heart failure. When medics arrived, they saw his art supplies and called the FBI: in preparing an installation that would let patrons test whether food had been genetically modified, Kurtz had ordered biological materials over the Internet. The feds detained Kurtz as a suspected terrorist and confiscated his equipment. After a grand jury rejected the charges of terrorism, Uncle Sam…

Sundance ’07: VHS – Kahloucha

Posted in2000s, 2007, Authors: Alex Jackson, Documentary, Film Festivals, Sundance, Tunisia
**/**** directed by Nejib Belkadhi by Alex Jackson There may very well be a Pauline Kael review for every occasion. For VHS - Kahloucha, it's her dismissal of Francois Truffaut's Day for Night: "[It's] a movie for the movie-struck, the essentially naïve--those who would rather see a movie, any movie (a bad one, a stupid one, or an evanescent, sweet-but-dry little wafer of a movie like this one), than do anything else." Ayup, that about covers it. This documentary portrait of amateur Tunisian filmmaker Moncef Kahloucha never makes the mistake of condescending to its subject, but it never quite elucidates…

Because I Said So (2007)

Posted in2000s, 2007, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Romance, Theatrical, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Diane Keaton, Mandy Moore, Gabriel Macht, Stephen Collins
screenplay by Karen Leigh Hopkins & Jessie Nelson
directed by Michael Lehmann

by Walter Chaw From the guy who once upon a time made Heathers–a film that remains the pithiest commentary on school violence and the sea of troubles faced by adolescents lost in the blackboard jungle–comes a fearsome rampage against mankind and art, the excrescent Because I Said So. The best that can be said about this early contender for the worst film of 2007 is that it’s properly keystone’d by Diane Keaton, who, between this and The Family Stone, cements her position as the most smug, insufferable, unwatchable persona in a long and tumescent line of such personae. She embodies the absolute worst of every single stereotype of the domineering mother: dotty, ditzy, Luddite, sexless/oversexed, cruel, racist, otherwise intolerant, and above all hysterical. Throw her psychotic mommy dearest from The Other Sister into the stew and it’s hard to find a more stalwart movie monster in the last ten years than Keaton, who’s gone from a charming neurotic to a cobwebbed, cell-phone-wielding vagina dentata.

Sundance ’07: Chapter 27

Posted in****/****, 2000s, 2007, Authors: Alex Jackson, Biopic, Canada, Crime, Drama, Film Festivals, Sundance
****/**** starring Jared Leto, Lindsay Lohan, Judah Friedlander, Ursula Abbott written and directed by Jarrett Schaefer by Alex Jackson Chapter 27 is creepy and possibly even unhealthy. I've been wondering for a couple of days now just how long writer-director Jarrett Schaefer stared into the Nietzsche abyss in researching and helming this aggressively subjective look into the mind of Beatle assassin Mark David Chapman. He purports to share Chapman's adoration of The Catcher in the Rye, The Beatles, and The Wizard of Oz and in person comes off as shy and somewhat withdrawn. What I find particularly disturbing is how…

Sundance ’07: It is Fine! Everything is Fine.

Posted in2000s, 2007, Authors: Alex Jackson, Disability, Drama, Film Festivals, Sundance

It is Fine! EVERYTHING IS FINE.
**/****
starring Margit Carstensen, Steven C. Stewart, Carrie Szlasa, Lauren German
screenplay by Steven C. Stewart
directed by David Brothers & Crispin Hellion Glover

by Alex Jackson An unlikely figurehead of Salt Lake’s independent film scene, Crispin Glover shot portions of his directorial debut What is It? in the city and cast local native Steven C. Stewart in the role of “Duelling Demi-God Auteur and the young man’s inner ego” against his own “Duelling Demi-God Auteur and the young man’s inner psyche.” (A great deal of the affection the townies seem to harbour for Glover and his films apparently stems from foolish local pride.) Stewart, who suffered from severe cerebral palsy and died from a collapsed lung shortly before the release of What is It?, wrote and stars in It is fine! EVERYTHING IS FINE.. The script was dictated almost thirty years ago to scenic artist and production designer David Brothers, who worked on several Utah-area productions such as The World’s Fastest Indian. Brothers introduced Glover to Stewart’s script and co-directed it with him; as with What is It?, It is fine! EVERYTHING IS FINE. is a lot more interesting to hear about than it is to watch.