Agent Cody Banks 2: Destination London (2004) [Special Edition]; The Cheetah Girls (2003); Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen (2004) – DVDs

July 21, 2004Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Canada, Comedy, Disney, Drama, DVD, Family, Germany, Music, Musical, Romance, Sci-Fi, UK

AGENT CODY BANKS 2: DESTINATION LONDON
*½/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras C-
starring Frankie Muniz, Anthony Anderson, Cynthia Stevenson, Daniel Roebuck
screenplay by Don Rhymer
directed by Kevin Allen

THE CHEETAH GIRLS
*/**** Image C Sound B Extras C-
starring Raven, Adrienne Bailon, Kiely Williams, Sabrina Bryan
screenplay by Alison Taylor, based on the series of books by Deborah Gregory
directed by Oz Scott

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Here’s how it works. The entertainment machine churns out low-quality wish-fulfillment fantasies for ‘tweens and teenagers, then print and web outlets assign grown men and women to review them. Yes, the logic behind this weird symbiosis is elusive, as few teenagers are savvy enough to read reviews and few adult reviewers (beyond the occasional junket flunky) are possibly going to recommend them to anyone else. But somebody somewhere must benefit from this arrangement, because I have two such discs staring me in the face right now: one is the Frankie Muniz vehicle Agent Cody Banks 2, the other is a Disney Channel TV movie called The Cheetah Girls. Both are fantasies of juvenile mastery, both are scrubbed clean and chaste, both seem to have been dashed off in an afternoon by drunken hacks, and I guarantee you that both will make anyone over the age of fifteen want to poke their eyes out with a metal spike. But that’s just me. I’m 31.

For Queen & Country (1989) – DVD

July 11, 2004Posted in1980s, Action, Crime, Drama, DVD, Thriller, UK

**½/**** Image B Sound B+
starring Denzel Washington, George Baker, Amanda Redman, Dorian Healy
screenplay by Martin Stellman and Trix Worrell
directed by Martin Stellman

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover I've asked it before, and I'll ask it again: what the hell happened to British cinema? I don't just mean that the quality of the images has slipped–the general sense of contemporary life that it championed in the late '70s and '80s has vanished without a trace. Something in the water during the dark days of Thatcher's reign produced blunt, bracing films about subjects that would be demeaned by the tag 'social issues': the great, nimble Stephen Frears/Hanif Kureishi collaborations, for instance, or the brutally frank teleplays of Alan Clarke, demonstrated that you could engage working-class, non-white, and gay realities without looking like Tony Richardson or hiding in Merchant/Ivory denial. To be sure, For Queen & Country isn't in the league of the abovecited examples, and it isn't even very good on its own terms, but even its half-flubbed earnestness was committed enough to make me nostalgic for a cinema that was dedicated and fleet-footed–if not for the economic conditions that made it necessary.

King Arthur (2004)

July 6, 2004Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Ireland, Theatrical, UK, War

*/****
starring Clive Owen, Kiera Knightley, Stellan Skarsgård, Stephen Dillane
screenplay by David Franzoni
directed by Antoine Fuqua

Kingarthurby Walter Chaw King Arthur wants to have it both ways. It wants to be smart and it wants to be stupid, too. It wants to appeal to eggheads, so it opens with a title card that promises what follows is based on "new" archaeological evidence; then, for the alleged delight of the peanut gallery, it trots out the same period epic dog-and-pony show to which we've been repeatedly subjected since Zulu Dawn. Strangely enough, this new archaeological evidence apparently dates feminism back to the fifth century (witness the dominatrix version of Guinevere, decked out at one point like Grace Jones), in addition to facilitating a clumsy political satire of twenty-first century America's religiosity, arrogance, and imperialism. Needless to say, when something tries to please everyone, everyone is seldom pleased; King Arthur is both stupid and boring, and the revelation that, stripped of tragedy, controversy, and resonance, Arthurian legend is as banal as and similar to Tears of the Sun (director Antoine Fuqua's previous film) displeases indeed.

Bandolero! (1968); Myra Breckinridge (1970); Mother, Jugs & Speed (1975); One Million Years B.C. (1966) – DVDs

June 20, 2004Posted in1960s, 1970s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Drama, DVD, Esoterica, Fantasy, Romance, UK, Western

BANDOLERO!
**/**** Image A Sound B
starring James Stewart, Dean Martin, Raquel Welch, George Kennedy
screenplay by James Lee Barrett
directed by Andrew V. Mc Laglen

MYRA BRECKINRIDGE
**/**** Image A Sound A- Extras A+
starring Mae West, John Huston, Raquel Welch, Rex Reed
screenplay by Michael Sarne and David Giler
directed by Michael Sarne

MOTHER, JUGS & SPEED
***/**** Image B+ Sound B
starring Bill Cosby, Raquel Welch, Harvey Keitel, Allen Garfield
screenplay by Tom Mankiewicz
directed by Peter Yates

by Walter Chaw Very much the product of its time, Andrew V. McLaglen's Bandolero!, the last of the three westerns the director made with Jimmy Stewart, appeared in 1968, the same year as the end of Sergio Leone's Spaghetti Western cycle (Once Upon a Time in the West) and alongside such seminal generational discomfort flicks as Rosemary's Baby and Night of the Living Dead. And while it's not nearly so good as McLaglen/Stewart's devastating Civil War idyll Shenandoah, Bandolero! is still better than it probably should be, saved by its above-the-line talent. With Raquel Welch as a freshly widowed Mexican woman ("I was a whore when I was 12–my family never went hungry"–and so it went in Welch's career) and a good, if woefully miscast Dean Martin as Stewart's no-account, bank-robbin' outlaw brother, the picture is a border film, the basis in many ways for Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove and one that contents itself with tepid character melodrama unfolding at a snail's pace along the road to Ensenada.

Around the World in 80 Days (2004)

June 15, 2004Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Disney, Family, Germany, Ireland, Jackie Chan, Schwarzenegger, Theatrical, UK, Western

½*/****
starring Jackie Chan, Steve Coogan, Robert Fyfe, Jim Broadbent
screenplay by David Titcher and David Benullo & David Andrew Goldstein, based on the novel by Jules Verne
directed by Frank Coraci

by Walter Chaw I’ve spent all the bile and disappointment I’m going to spend on Jackie Chan and what’s become of possibly the biggest star on the planet since his relocation to Hollywood. The rumour that this iteration of Jules Verne’s Around the World in 80 Days is to be Chan’s American swan song fuels the suspicion that even folks unfamiliar with the stuff that once earned Chan comparisons to Buster Keaton have begun to wish, like any majority culture member towards any outcast in any community, that they would stop taking the abuse and just go home. There must be a breaking point for Centurion scourers when pity (revulsion?) overtakes zeal for punishment, and the lengths to which Chan has voluntarily subjugated himself in the role of sidekick, comic relief, and yellow Stepin Fetchit have progressed beyond paternalistic bemusement into the raw area of salt into an open wound. The old Jackie Chan would have done this film and taken the role of Phileas Fogg–new Jackie Chan is content to be Kato. (Burt Kwouk’s, not Bruce Lee’s.) I was one of three Asians in a large high school in the middle of one of the whitest, most conservative states in the Union, where Chan bootlegs provided by one of South Federal’s Vietnamese groceries were among my few lifelines to a positive Chinese media role model amidst all the Long Duck Dongs, Short Rounds, and Ancient Chinese Secret launderers. For me now to feel more apathy than outrage at Chan selling out–dancing, singing, and acting the fool for the charity of the dominant culture–represents a death of a lot of things essential about me. It happens this way: the tide of ignorance wins out not with a bang but with a whimper.

The Chronicles of Riddick (2004)

June 10, 2004Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller

***½/****
starring Vin Diesel, Colm Feore, Thandie Newton, Judi Dench
written and directed by David Twohy

Chroniclesofriddickby Walter Chaw David Twohy constructs films from ideas and images borrowed from the well of archetype–Shakespeare ("Julius Caesar" and "Macbeth" in particular), Greek theatre and mythology, Joseph Campbell by way of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg–and he sometimes does so at the expense of transitional scenes or traditional narrative sense. There's a gestalt to his work, if not much linearity, sparing no time for niceties like how a character arms himself, or how such nifty details as the hero's ability to navigate like a biological sextant comes into play, but in the case of Twohy and, in particular, The Chronicles of Riddick, the gestalt is enough. The picture is a survey of George Lucas's original Star Wars trilogy, of all four Alien films, of dashes of Jeunet and Caro's French phantasms, and of David Lynch's Dune, with–and I mean this in a good way–just a smidge of Flash Gordon factored in: a parade of black leather-clad grotesqueries inhabit a lushly imagined future (breaking records for lumber usage in its Vancouver construction) in a film that attempts to tell old stories in a new way and, for the most part, succeeds with an agreeable level of whiz-bang. Occasionally it succeeds brilliantly, as in a late shot of its anti-hero Riddick (Vin Diesel) slumped on a Giger throne before throngs of rubber jack-suited storm troopers, which stimulates not just for the audacity of its scale, but also for the comparisons it summons to the "Orestiea" and "Titus Andronicus."

Spartan (2004) – DVD

June 7, 2004Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, DVD, Mystery, Thriller

½*/**** Image B+ Sound A- Commentary C+
starring Val Kilmer, Derek Luke, William H. Macy, Ed O'Neill
written and directed by David Mamet

by Walter Chaw Because we hate Arabs (and women almost as much as we think that Arabs hate women, those hateful Arabs), there are films like David Mamet's patently ridiculous, relentlessly offensive, unintentionally hilarious Spartan. A brilliant theatre man, the very definition of a keen cultural philosopher (his book of essays Some Freaks is must-reading), Mamet as film auteur has grown increasingly esoteric to the point now that his exclusive playpens of linguistic masturbation are so alien and self-conscious that they begin instantly to function as satires of themselves. His action is action as imagined by an egghead, all awkward movement and frustrated invective. His is the school of anti-casual cool, the drama club suiting up for the Friday night football game, and his supporters are cut from the same cloth, believing that there's a point to be made in Beckett for the brute while ignoring that Beckett is best staged with Spartan minimalism and left in the theatre besides. The films Mamet has directed range from sophomoric (House of Games) to grating (State and Main) to just incompetent (Heist), though Spartan reminds the most of one he only wrote: the wilderness howler The Edge, with its machismo over-examined and placed in a context that isn't allegorical as it must be, but hardboiled realism as it can't be. It's P.G. Wodehouse adapted for the screen by John Milius, and predictably awful.

The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003) [Widescreen] – DVD

June 1, 2004Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Best Picture (Academy Awards), Drama, DVD, Fantasy, New Zealand

**½/**** Image A+ Sound A+ Extras B-
starring Elijah Wood, Ian McKellen, Viggo Mortensen, Sean Astin
screenplay by Fran Walsh & Philippa Boyens & Peter Jackson, based on the novel by J.R.R. Tolkien
directed by Peter Jackson

Returnofthekingeecap2

by Walter Chaw For the uninitiated few, Frodo (Elijah Wood) and Sam (Sean Astin) are diminutive hobbits making their way, with the treacherous Gollum (Andy Serkis) as their guide, through perilous lands on a quest to destroy the One Ring of power, forged by evil Sauron in a volcano called Mount Doom. Their story is set against a series of epic military manoeuvres and intimate Machiavellian machinations engaged in by elf Legolas (Orlando Bloom), dwarf Gimli (John Rhys-Davies), wizard Gandalf (Ian McKellen), and the once and future human king, Aragorn (Viggo Mortensen).

The Day After Tomorrow (2004)

May 27, 2004Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Disaster Movie, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller

**/****
starring Dennis Quaid, Jake Gyllenhaal, Emmy Rossum, Dash Mihok
screenplay by Roland Emmerich & Jeffrey Nachmanoff
directed by Jeffrey Nachmanoff

Dayaftertomorrowby Walter Chaw Roland Emmerich's The Day After Tomorrow completes a trilogy for the German director in which he trashes New York City, revealing either a deep hatred of the United States or a shocking disdain for civil planning. Aliens and a radioactive Japanese iguana the culprits in Independence Day and Godzilla, respectively, Emmerich's cycle of NYC flicks continues the evolution of blame from extra-terrestrial to the whimsical side-effects of military testing to, with The Day After Tomorrow, the Bush Jr. administration. The picture is overtly political, going so far as to offer a Mutt and Jeff duo as his fictional executive branch, while less stridently it presents what is possibly the first semi-literal 9/11 film in its vision of Gotham devastated from without and all warnings ignored, its denizens putting aside differences to survive and its emergency workers heroic and iconic. To compare a modern Ice Age (repeatedly referred to as a permanent shift in climate (was it ever)) to 9/11 is inelegant but, in the long run, perhaps ideologically accurate.

Saving Private Ryan (1998) [D-Day 60th Anniversary Commemorative Edition] – DVD

May 24, 2004Posted in1990s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Drama, DVD, Spielberg, War

***½/**** Image A+ Sound A- Extras B
starring Tom Hanks, Edward Burns, Matt Damon, Tom Sizemore
screenplay by Robert Rodat
directed by Steven Spielberg

Savingprivateryancap

by Bill Chambers SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. One is tempted to speculate that, perhaps even more than his father's tour of duty, something that inspired the teenaged Steven Spielberg to shoot a succession of WWII docudramas on 8mm (since he had authentic props–Dad's medals–at his disposal), lingering guilt over his dismissal from the U.S. Army after a military shrink deemed him unfit for the battlefield accounts for Spielberg's frequent digressions into the war genre. As reductive, nay, Freudian as this may seem, for one thing, it has the potential to dilute the vitriol commonly reserved for the bookends of Saving Private Ryan by bringing them into autobiographical relief. Certainly ignoring the picture's prologue and epilogue altogether doesn't help: I once programmed my DVD player to do just that and the result felt surprisingly incomplete, as the context for a WWII narrative with a conspicuously anecdotal quality had all of a sudden disappeared.

Too Late the Hero (1970) – DVD

May 19, 2004Posted in1970s, Action, Drama, DVD, War

***/**** Image B+ Sound A
starring Michael Caine, Cliff Robertson, Ian Bannen, Harry Andrews
screenplay by Robert Aldrich and Lukas Heller
directed by Robert Aldrich

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Too Late the Hero is the consummate "solid flick"–sturdy, well-written, and just thoughtful enough to keep its machinations from working on autopilot. It's not a masterpiece by any stretch, but it is suffused with a dread and a tension that lift it out of the bunch-of-guys-on-a-mission ghetto and into something more sober and dignified. Whether or not it is the subterfuge Vietnam allegory of cult legend, it's a war film about people–not iron-jawed superheroes–whose selfless deeds have all the more impact when placed in context with the cowardice and stupidity of others. In the end, it does mouth certain pieties about that heroism that keep it from being too corrosive, but in this age of Black Hawk Down and Iraq prison scandals, it's refreshing for its refusal to knuckle under to the myth of the glorious warrior.

Paycheck (2003) [Special Collector’s Edition] – DVD

May 18, 2004Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Directors: John Woo, DVD, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Thriller

½*/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B
starring Ben Affleck, Uma Thurman, Aaron Eckhart, Michael C. Hall
screenplay by Dean Georgaris, based on the short story by Philip K. Dick
directed by John Woo

by Walter Chaw At the end of John Woo's latest Hollywood misstep, Ben Affleck, as brilliant "reverse engineer" Michael Jennings, hefts two bags of manure on his back and stumbles around with them for a while, effectively defusing anything cogent I could say about Paycheck. It is worth wondering, however, why people like Affleck and Keanu Reeves are so attractive in science-fiction premises (Reeves even had a turn with the memory-loss high-tech agent thing in Johnny Mnemonic)–probably something to do with the idea of robots and minds wiped clean. The problem with Paycheck isn't really that it's not well thought-out or that it's possibly the first Woo action film to be genuinely boring from start to finish, but that Woo seems to have replaced his joy of genre (and genius within the medium) with a scrabbling desperation to manufacture what used to come naturally.

Troy (2004)

May 13, 2004Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Malta, Romance, Theatrical, UK

*½/****
starring Brad Pitt, Eric Bana, Orlando Bloom, Diane Kruger
screenplay by David Benioff
directed by Wolfgang Petersen

Troyby Walter Chaw There are two major problems with Wolfgang Petersen's bloated swords and sandals opera Troy. The first is that James Horner contributes another of his patented walls of non-directional trumpets and violins as the score, and the second is that first-billed Brad Pitt lacks the gravity to hold down the middle of a 165-minute epic. There's a reason that people are always surprised to learn that Pitt stands just north of six feet tall: a gifted second fiddle who consistently steals the show (12 Monkeys, Thelma and Louise, Fight Club, Se7en, Kalifornia, Legends of the Fall, Snatch) and a sometimes-leading man who consistently has the show stolen out from him (Seven Years in Tibet, Meet Joe Black, The Mexican), Pitt, as warrior Achilles in this adaptation of Homer's The Iliad, is curiously weightless, a phantom haunting the film, so that by the end it all it feels like nothing of great import has happened. Consider what the film would have been like with Russell Crowe as Achilles (or, conversely, consider what Master and Commander would have been like with Pitt)–there's a reason that Gladiator was a success, and it had very little to do with its scripting or plot.

Sword of the Valiant (1984) – DVD

May 10, 2004Posted in1980s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD, Fantasy, Romance, UK, ZERO STARS

Sword of the Valiant: The Legend of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
ZERO STARS/**** Image D+ Sound C-
starring Miles O'Keefe, Cyrielle Claire, Leigh Lawson, Sean Connery
screenplay by Stephen Weeks and Philip M. Breen and Howard C. Pen
directed by Stephen Weeks

by Walter Chaw A film that is actually exactly bad enough to be uproariously funny, Stephen Weeks's Sword of the Valiant: The Legend of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (hereafter Sword of the Valiant)–peculiarly, Weeks's second adaptation (after 1973's Gawain and the Green Knight) of The Rose Poet's fourteenth century Arthurian epic "Gawain and the Green Knight"–is one of those Golan-Globus productions that helped redefine the bottom of the barrel in the early Eighties. It gives Miles O'Keefe of Tarzan the Ape Man fame a short-lived and wholly unjust stay of career execution (decking him out in a Prince Valiant wig that makes him look suspiciously like Mary Worth with abs), and it furthers my contention that Sean Connery is pretty much just the Scottish Burt Reynolds. I'm not sure what Weeks and company had in mind when embarking on this project, but the result is something so deeply stupid as to inspire hopefulness and hopelessness in equal draughts: anyone can do it, apparently–but is it worth doing if it turns out to be Sword of the Valiant?

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003) [New Line Platinum Series] – DVD

April 28, 2004Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, DVD, Horror

***/**** Image A+ Sound A+ Extras A+
starring Jessica Biel, Jonathan Tucker, Erica Leerhsen, Andrew Bryniarski
screenplay by Scott Kosar
directed by Marcus Nispel

by Walter Chaw With its low-angle compositions, gradual evolution of animalistic antagonists (from opossum to kid to crippled man to monster), discovery of a feral child, claustrophobic sets drenched in water, and neo-feminist slant, what Marcus Nispel’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre resembles most is not Tobe Hooper’s 1974 masterpiece, but James Cameron’s 1986 masterpiece, Aliens. In structure and execution, in fact, even in visual style, Nispel’s picture recasts Aliens with its cannibalistic hillbilly clan the insectile “other” and tight tank-top sporting Jessica Biel as stand-in for Sigourney Weaver’s tight tank-top sporting über-mater. The problem with the comparison is that where Hooper’s original presented its nihilism in detached tableau (the first attack is a classic in savage hopelessness), Nispel’s remake sports the intimate camerawork favoured by Cameron-inspired action films, replacing the existential desolation of Hooper’s vision with more standard flight and fight sequences. As genre exercises go, despite a decent amount of sadistic gore, the picture is better spoken of as a thrilling, beautifully shot action film that only flirts around with social significance.

The Punisher (2004)

April 20, 2004Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, Germany, Revenge, Romance, Superhero, Theatrical, Thriller

***/****
starring Tom Jane, John Travolta, Rebecca Romijn-Stamos, Laura Harring
screenplay by Michael France and Jonathan Hensleigh
directed by Jonathan Hensleigh

by Walter Chaw A barometer of our culture–an exploding western world balanced between listless fatalism on the one side and violent nihilism on the other (Elephant and Young Adam vs. Walking Tall, The Passion of the Christ, and Man on Fire)–at this exact moment in time, long-time blockbuster scribe Jonathan Hensleigh's hyphenate debut is his adaptation of Marvel Comics' vigilante title The Punisher. With the possible exception of Mel Gibson's ode to sadism, this is the year's most irredeemable picture thus far, but it's elevated by a bracing idea, an astonishingly courageous idea: that its hero and villain are equally reprehensible, and, by extension, that both of them do what they do because in their psychotic haze, the only thing they have to tie them to any kind of illusion of equilibrium is the dangerous idealization of their families. When a picture like this appears in the middle of a glut of vigilante flicks and in the middle of a society that may have been led into a predictably cruel and bloody war on the basis of a personal grudge, one forgiven by many for its specious association with a collective insult to our illusion of sanctuary, people should prick up their ears. While The Punisher may not be a particularly good film, it is a particularly important one.

Bulletproof Monk (2003)

April 15, 2004Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, Fantasy, Theatrical

*/****
starring Chow Yun-Fat, Seann William Scott, Jamie King, Karel Roden
screenplay by Ethan Reiff & Cyrus Voris
directed by Paul Hunter

Bulletproofmonkby Walter Chaw There is a moment in the middle of Bulletproof Monk: Chow Yun-Fat leaps to the top of a car, brandishing two pistols, his overcoat flaring in slow-motion as he rains down bullets on the bad guys. It's an homage to Brother Chow's work with John Woo, of course, in the seminal HK action flicks The Killer, Hard-Boiled, and A Better Tomorrow–and Woo is listed among the film's producers. It sort of makes you wonder why the pair doesn't stop dancing around and just make another movie together already, particularly since neither Chow nor Woo has really made a film worth a damn since sailing over to a Hollywood that doesn't understand them. The American film industry would rather marginalize them into racial caricatures than take advantage of their unique talents.

Hellboy (2004)

April 2, 2004Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Superhero, Theatrical

***/****
starring Ron Perlman, Selma Blair, Jeffrey Tambor, Karel Roden
screenplay by Guillermo del Toro, based on the comics by Mike Mignola
directed by Guillermo del Toro

Hellboyby Walter Chaw A bona fide auteur in an age of facile pretenders, Guillermo del Toro is the pulp genre’s Martin Scorsese, his films filtering devout Catholic imagery through a lurid colour palette and obsessed with insectile machineries and mentor relationships between boys and old men. Del Toro’s pictures are deeply personal explorations of faith, of redemption and resurrection–he made of Blade II a tale of the prodigal son, and now with Hellboy he’s crafted a story of an evolving passion.

The Rundown (2003) [Widescreen] – DVD

April 1, 2004Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD, Schwarzenegger, Thriller

***/**** Image A+ Sound A+ Extras B+
starring The Rock, Seann William Scott, Christopher Walken, Rosario Dawson
screenplay by R.J. Stewart and James Vanderbilt
directed by Peter Berg

by Walter Chaw There’s an ebullient lustre to Peter Berg’s dedicatedly obnoxious The Rundown, an action film with so little pretension that it actually comes off as smart. It’s the same peculiar phenomenon that makes of Laurel & Hardy geniuses after the fact, banking on timing and carefully cultivated absurdity to at once define and rejuvenate the mismatched buddy-on-the-run genre. Consider a scene in which Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson fights a tribe of pygmy Brazilian freedom fighters, edited and choreographed like a Yuen Brothers wu xia married to a Weissmuller Tarzan flick. Delirious and ridiculous, exciting in spite of itself, The Rundown is the kind of adrenalized filmmaking that is, in fact, more intelligent and misanthropic than it seems. More, it’s not a fluke: Actor Berg’s directorial debut Very Bad Things remains, along with Doug Liman’s Go, one of the great underestimated time-capsule pitch-black comedies of the late-Nineties. If not for a few glaring moments where Berg displays the first symptoms of obfuscating Danny Boyle disease (CGI pullouts, nauseating zooms, and meaningless hyper-edits), particularly in its prologue, The Rundown would be something of a cult all-timer.

Dawn of the Dead (2004)

March 19, 2004Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, France, Horror, Japan, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller, Zombie

***/****
starring Sarah Polley, Ving Rhames, Jake Weber, Mekhi Phifer
screenplay by James Gunn
directed by Zack Snyder

Dawnofthedeadby Walter Chaw Heretical to even suggest it, I'm sure, Zack Snyder's remake of George A. Romero's Dawn of the Dead surpasses the original in any number of ways. It gives the idea of consumerism run wild the short shrift that it deserves (and the cynicism that an intervening quarter-century demands), touching on the original's explanation of the zombies' affinity for the shopping mall and the human heroes' delight at their newfound material wealth before becoming a bracing action film that, like Marcus Nispel's reworking of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (the source of which didn't need updating as much as Dawn arguably did), is more firmly entrenched in the James Cameron Aliens tradition than the Seventies institution of disconcerting personal horror film. There's nothing like fat on the bone of this picture (something the original can't claim), providing a canny demonstration of how comedy and satire can work without descending into slapstick (no pies in zombie faces this time around), and of how great performances and smart direction can craft a piece that honours its origins while significantly upping the effectiveness of its themes and premise.