Fat Albert (2004) – DVD

March 23, 2005Posted in2000s, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Family, Fantasy

***/**** Image A Sound A- Extras C
starring Kenan Thompson, Kyla Pratt, Dania Ramirez, Bill Cosby
screenplay by William H. Cosby, Jr. & Charles Kipps
directed by Joel Zwick

by Bill Chambers The memory I have of watching Bill Cosby's "Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids" as a wee lad is that it always left me a little bit depressed, like listening to Jim Croce's "Time in a Bottle" or dining at the Ponderosa restaurant. (Doesn't "ponderosa" mean "weighty" in English?) Subtext is a kind of phantom presence when you're five or six years old: you're too young to be able to read it but also young enough that you've not yet been blinded by anti-intellectualism to everything below the surface. I realize now that it was probably through the Saturday-morning buzzkill of "Fat Albert…" that I became cognizant of poverty, and just the fact that the show was populated with an all-black cast of ragamuffins (almost all of whom suffered from learning disabilities) took the patronizing sting out of its NBC Life Lessons–it was less pious than it was possessed of an old soul. I'm happy to report that Fat Albert, an anachronism of a live-action feature film based on the long-running (and long-cancelled) cartoon, captures a lot of its source's melancholy appeal. Moreover, its ideas are provocative verging on profound, although they're shackled to a sketchy screenplay (by Cosby and Charles Kipps) and an aesthetic that is as paint-by-numbers as the animation that inspired it. No surprise that director Joel Zwick hails from television–multi-camera sitcoms, to be precise.

The Iron Giant (1999) [Special Edition] – DVD

March 7, 2005Posted in****/****, 1990s, Action, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Coming of Age, Drama, DVD, Family, FFC Must-Own, Sci-Fi

****/**** Image A+ Sound A+ Extras A+
screenplay by Tim McCanlies, based on The Iron Man by Ted Hughes
directed by Brad Bird

Mustownby Walter Chaw Brad Bird's The Iron Giant, based on a children's book, The Iron Man, that British poet laureate (and Mr. Sylvia Plath) Ted Hughes wrote after his wife's suicide, is improbably transformed from the dark and Anglocentric source into a throughline pure and sweet to the rapturous Americana of Richard Donner's Superman. It captures an impossible period existing between the idealism of Rockwell and the lonely realist decompositions of Edward Hopper in a flurry of animated cels, telling the tale of a boy and his robot in the month or so when Sputnik was scaring the bejesus out of a suddenly-humbled, suddenly-Luddite United States. Accordingly, the Colour from Outer Space that was the monstrous bad guy in the book is transformed in the film into the paranoia of a country taught to fear an invisible (or barely visible) foe–marking The Iron Giant as something of a timeless picture particularly topical for a country embroiled in a war on foreign soil, a war with an invisible enemy, and the makings of a cold war with a country that has decided the only way to combat American aggression is with nuclear weapons. Tellingly, it's the appearance of nukes at the end of The Iron Giant that coaxes out the heart of the titular tin man–the last word that he has in the picture–"Superman"–whispered with something like awe that has never failed to bring a tear to my secretly-patriotic eye.

Sky Blue (2003)

February 18, 2005Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Animation, Fantasy, Sci-Fi, South Korea

Wonderful Days
**/****
screenplay by Kim Moon-saeng & Park Sun-min & Park Yong-jun
directed by Kim Moon-saeng & Park Sun-min


by Walter Chaw Pretty much your standard anime post-apocalyptic master plot, what distinguishes Kim Moon-saeng and Park Sun-min's Korean contribution Sky Blue is the oppressive weight of its visual accomplishment. Blending the character animations of, say, a Satoshi Kon with the environmental concerns of an early Miyazaki, the movie is beautiful. But at the same time, it slathers on such a thick layer of obfuscating dialogue and glowering plot complications that it's hard to muster up much enthusiasm beyond the initial "wow" factor. Still, that "wow" factor: I don't know that I've ever seen a better blend of CGI and traditional cel animation–in terms of how it looks, Sky Blue even trumps last year's astonishing Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence. A shame that a person can only really be dazzled for a few minutes before becoming something closer to "stunned."

Aladdin II & III Collection – DVD

February 8, 2005Posted in1990s, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, Disney, Family, Fantasy, Musical, Romance

THE RETURN OF JAFAR (1994)
Aladdin 2: The Return of Jafar
*½/**** Image B+ Sound B Extras C
written by Kevin Campbell and Mirith J.S. Colao & Bill Motz & Steve Roberts & Dev Ross & Bob Roth & Jan Strnad & Brian Swenlin
directed by Toby Shelton, Tad Stones, Alan Zaslove

ALADDIN AND THE KING OF THIEVES (1996)
*/**** Image B Sound B+ Extras C
screenplay by Mark McCorkle & Bob Schooley
directed by Tad Stones

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover About the only reason for Disney to send out their direct-to-video product to be reviewed is to accumulate free advertising. They know that no sensible critic will tolerate anything so obviously thrown together as a cash grab, just as they know that no reader of critics will willingly sign up to watch them; instead, the assumption is that said readers will have kids, and that the review will act as one more reminder (in concert with the saturation ad campaigns in print and on television) that those kids are undiscerning and will probably want the discs bad. So here's my link in the chain of avarice: two age-old attempts to cash in on Disney's Random Ethnic Stereotype Generator are back on the market, and if your children are lacking in aesthetic sense (they are), these might be right up their alley. Just make sure you bite down on a leather strap as you watch them with your goggle-eyed rugrat, and take heart in the knowledge that someone on the World Wide Web knows your pain.

Mulan II (2004) – DVD

February 7, 2005Posted in2000s, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, Disney, DVD, Family, Fantasy, Japan, Musical

**½/**** Image A Sound A Extras C-
directed by Darrell Rooney, Lynne Southerland

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Let it be known that Mulan II is out on DVD, and that it's surprisingly good. The House That Walt Built appears to have learned from its early, awful forays into the direct-to-video realm and decided to put a little elbow grease (not to mention money) into these glorified policy redemptions; once you get past its pitifully limited research of actual Chinese culture (no mean feat, believe me), you can't help but notice that the movie looks stellar. Content-wise, it's a decent, if not great, do-what-makes-you-happy message picture slightly curtailed by its minuscule running time and bolstered by a couple of songs that sound like somebody cared how they turned out. Nothing in Mulan II is brilliant, but it's a couple of notches above eyewash–and just smart enough not to drive unwilling parents completely insane. I can think of worse things to show your attention-deficient knee-biter.

Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence (2004); Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (2004); Time of the Wolf (2003)|Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (2004) [Special Collector’s Edition – Widescreen] – DVD

January 24, 2005Posted in****/****, 2000s, Action, Adventure, Animation, Austria, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

イノセンス
Innocence
Inosensu: Innocence
****/****
written and directed by Mamoru Oshii

SKY CAPTAIN AND THE WORLD OF TOMORROW
**½/**** Image A Sound A Extras A
starring Jude Law, Gwyneth Paltrow, Angelina Jolie, Giovanni Ribisi
written and directed by Kerry Conran

Le Temps du loup
****/****
starring Isabelle Huppert, Béatrice Dalle, Patrice Chéreau, Rona Hartner
written and directed by Michael Haneke

Skyghostwolfby Walter Chaw For me, the most intoxicating visions of the future are those in which we’re drowning in an ocean of our past–garbage, wreckage, Romes burned to a cinder and heaped against the new Meccas of our collective tomorrows. Star Wars proffered a kind of aesthetic of dirt that appealed: a wonderland where the spaceships looked like they’d been flown and there were places like Mos Eisley that reeked of stale liquor, sawdust, and cigarettes. (The distance that George Lucas has gone to disinfect his grubby vision of the future is the same distance that esteem for the franchise has fallen amongst all but the most die-hard chattel.) Among the spearhead of a group of artists who redefined the science-fiction genre in film the same way that Sergio Leone and Sam Peckinpah scuffed-up the western in the Sixties, Ridley Scott evolved the idea of a functional future, with his Alien and Blade Runner serving as visual echoes of T.S. Eliot’s broken stones and fragments shored against our ruins. Terry Gilliam defined the aesthetic when describing his rationale for the look of Brazil (1985): he wanted it to seem as though the whole century had been compacted into a single moment. The timeless “someday soon” that is always just around a corner that never comes.

Family Guy: The Freakin’ Sweet Collection – DVD

January 18, 2005Posted in2000s, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD, Satire, Television

Image A+ Sound A Extras A
"When You Wish Upon a Weinstein," "Road to Rhode Island," "To Live and Die in Dixie," "I Am Peter, Hear Me Roar," "Lethal Weapons"

by Walter Chaw Possibly the most consistently appalling television show in the history of network television, Seth MacFarlane's "Family Guy" has a scary intelligence and a willingness to go places that most popular entertainment fears to tread. It's inspiring, is what I'm saying, and I put it on whenever I feel afraid to take my shots at the inexplicable sacred cow of the moment. I'm not sure how "Family Guy" survived for three seasons on Fox (actually, it sort of didn't: Bombarded with hate and diapers following the alleged series finale, the net allowed a selectively censored third season), but a precedent-setting fourth season, which will begin airing on Fox in May of this year, serves as a reminder that however many people have a conniption over Janet's tit, there are two million fewer of us who flinch at the moment of crisis, too, but in anticipation of the backlash instead of at the event itself. For what it's worth, "Family Guy" has picked up the baton from "The Simpsons" as the most relevant and daring adult entertainment. Take it with a healthy dose of "The Daily Show" and you're well on your way to developing pathos and irony.

Mickey’s Twice Upon a Christmas (2004) + It’s a Very Merry Muppet Christmas Movie (2002) [Special Edition] – DVDs

November 10, 2004Posted in2000s, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Christmas, Comedy, Disney, DVD, Family, Muppets, Musical

*½/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras C
directed by Matthew O'Callaghan

by Bill Chambers 2-D animation is dead, long live 2-D. Mickey Mouse and his apostles move into the realm of 3-D with Mickey's Twice Upon a Christmas, cementing this maddeningly disposable gewgaw's place in the history books next to far more sublime firsts like 1928's Steamboat Willie (Mickey's debut) and 1935's The Band Concert (Mickey's colour debut). But while it's tempting to lob cheap shots along the lines of "Uncle Walt is spinning in his grave," fact is Disney's frosty remains were already a veritable "Price is Right" wheel by the early '70s, and if he'd lived to see the digital revolution, he probably would've been one of its pioneers. In other words, it's not sacrilege to experiment with a CGI Mickey, but the results probably never should've seen the light of day.

Mulan (1998) [Special Edition] – DVD

October 28, 2004Posted in1990s, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, China, Comedy, Disney, DVD, Eddie Murphy, Family, Fantasy, Musical, War

**/**** Image B+ Sound A Extras B-
screenplay by Rita Hsiao, Christopher Sanders, Philip LaZebnik, Raymond Singer & Eugenia Bostwick-Singer
directed by Barry Cook and Tony Bancroft

by Bill Chambers If Disney’s animated features can be reduced to a stable of alternating boy movies and girl movies, then the studio’s decision to make the cross-dressing fable Mulan at a juncture when they really needed mass approval (that is, after striking out post-Katzenberg with Pocahontas, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and Hercules) comes across as conspicuously non-partisan–and the hero’s androgyny isn’t the only bet-hedging the filmmakers practice. A meticulous recreation of Imperialist China, for instance, is compromised by anachronisms cultural and temporal (the eponymous Mulan (voice of Ming-Na Wen), a pre-Tang Dynasty Chinese maiden, is introduced to us wearing a tank top and what resemble capri pants; later, she is served bacon and eggs for breakfast), while musical numbers, subversive humour, and Spielbergian spectacle perpetually collide like bumper cars. The end-product is neither fish nor fowl, though it certainly leans towards foul.

Aladdin (1992) [Platinum Edition] – DVD

October 5, 2004Posted in1990s, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Disney, DVD, Family, Fantasy, Musical, Romance

***½/**** Image A+ Sound A+ Extras A+
screenplay by John Musker & Ron Clements and Ted Elliott & Terry Rossio
directed by John Musker & Ron Clements

Aladdincapby Bill Chambers Jeffrey Katzenberg may have revived the American animated feature while he was at Disney, but only one of the hits his reign yielded is worth a second viewing. Where 1989's The Little Mermaid and especially 1991's nauseating Beauty and the Beast tried to pass themselves off as Golden Age Disney (1937 (Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs)-1950 (Cinderella), for argument's sake), before a certain stateliness loosened its grip on the house style, 1992's Aladdin took its cue from Uncle Walt's twilight years, the Sixties, when he was interested in telling–as he geared up to pass the torch, perhaps–mentor stories (The Sword in the Stone and The Jungle Book) and pop culture had finally caught up with his incongruous predilections for psychedelia and bohemianism. It's a risk to emulate the period considered the birth of the studio's Dark Ages, and Aladdin is the least spurious movie of Disney's renaissance because of it.

Shark Tale (2004)

October 1, 2004Posted in2000s, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Family, Theatrical, Will Smith

*½/****
screenplay by Michael J. Wilson and Rob Letterman
directed by Vicky Jenson, Bibo Bergeron, Rob Letterman

Sharktaleby Walter Chaw Shark Tale is a soulless platform for the Will Smith persona, here voicing a duplicitous social climber called Oscar who disdains his legacy as a car wash (make that “whale wash”) employee in favour of a feckless dreamlife of bling and adulation. His wishes come true when a series of unfortunate events constructs the impression that little Oscar has slain Frankie (Michael Imperioli), favoured son of Godfather Don Lino (Robert De Niro), with Lino’s “other” son, Lenny (Jack Black), still missing. Dubbed “Shark Slayer” by all of a submerged fish-tropolis, Oscar finds himself a celebrity spokesman, complete with a posse composed of agent Sykes (Martin Scorsese), grouper groupie Lola (Angelina Jolie), and the girl-Friday-next-door with the heart of gold, Angie (Renée Zellweger).

Home on the Range (2004) – DVD

September 24, 2004Posted in2000s, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Disney, DVD, Family, Western

*/**** 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.

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

September 20, 2004Posted in1990s, 2000s, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Disney, Drama, DVD, Family, Fantasy, France, Musical, Romance, Sci-Fi

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.

The Three Musketeers (2004) – DVD

August 30, 2004Posted in2000s, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Disney, DVD, Family, Musical, Romance

Mickey, Donald, Goofy: The Three Musketeers
*½/**** Image B Sound A- Extras C-
screenplay by Evan Spiliotopoulos and David Mickey Evans
directed by Donovan Cook

by Bill Chambers I must confess to something like a fetish for the joint screen ventures of Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, and Goofy, animation's answer to The Ritz Brothers. Their 1937 short Lonesome Ghosts is one of the essential building blocks in my love of cinema: I used to own a silent 8mm cartridge of it that could be viewed by handcranking a to-the-eye projector, and I unwittingly taught myself persistence of vision through bored frame-by-frame dissections of Mickey tiptoeing across the floor and Donald losing his cool. And as far as Mickey Mouse is concerned, he has Donald and Goofy in tow in his best colour outings–with a handful of exceptions (such as 1941's guardedly wistful The Nifty Nineties, or the Sorcerer's Apprentice sequence from Fantasia) that cast Mickey as an emblem of virtue rather than as a virtuous individual (thus seizing on the iconic resonance of the character's design), Mickey's solo shorts circa the war years are far too polite for their own good. Mercurial Donald and accident-prone Goofy add a much-needed pinch of salt. 

Thunderbirds International Rescue Edition – DVD

August 11, 2004Posted in1960s, Action, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Drama, DVD, Family, Sci-Fi, UK

THUNDERBIRDS ARE GO (1966)
**½/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B+
screenplay by Gerry Anderson & Sylvia Anderson
directed by David Lane

THUNDERBIRD 6 (1968)
*/**** Image A- Sound A- (DD)/A (DTS) Extras B+
screenplay by Gerry Anderson & Sylvia Anderson
directed by David Lane

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Why is it that "Thunderbirds", the marionette sci-fi TV series of 1960s vintage, exerts such weird fascination? Narratively, it's nothing to get excited about–just the usual conservative guff involving stiff-necked operators of sci-fi machinery, all of whom are given one trait each and are as pure in heart as they are heavy on exposition. One wants to make an obvious joke about the delivery being as wooden as the puppets, except that to do so would be missing the point: the erotics of the series are powerful specifically because everything is made of wood. The figures themselves are as rigid and rock-solid as the meticulously-designed machinery, making the stylization of the series total and more convincing than if it were superimposed over the documentary image of mere human flesh. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the two lavish and colourful movies made under the "Thunderbirds" brand, which, despite their formulaic tendencies, manage to hold our attention with a rich and affective sense of necrophilia.

Wizards (1977) – DVD

August 4, 2004Posted in1970s, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, DVD, Fantasy, Sci-Fi

**½/**** Image B+ Sound A- Extras A-
written and directed by Ralph Bakshi

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover I like Ralph Bakshi movies. I wish I didn’t, because they’re shrill and vulgar and slightly immature, and not even examples of brilliant cartooning. But they’ve got a working-class desperation to them that most American movies are too posh and moneyed to accurately capture. Hollywood filmmakers typically see poverty as an occasion for condescension from above; Bakshi sees it at ground level–consider the generations of failure that littered American Pop, or the chaotic skid-row scramble that defined Heavy Traffic. Thus I find myself in the unenviable position of guardedly praising his 1977 Wizards, which in the hands of any other director would have been merely a sleazy Tolkien-meets-Heavy-Metal fantasy riff. This is not to say that it isn’t a sleazy Tolkien-meets-Heavy-Metal fantasy riff, but it’s one with moments that resonate beyond simplistic sex and violence and wipe the goofy grin off of the normally flighty and gossamer-draped genre.

Disney’s Teacher’s Pet (2004) – DVD

July 14, 2004Posted in2000s, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Disney, DVD, Family, Musical

Teacher's Pet
***/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras C
screenplay by Bill Steinkellner & Cheri Steinkellner
directed by Timothy Björklund

by Walter Chaw If nothing else inventive, at the very least perverse, and at moments transcendently bizarre, the feature-length version of Disney Channel's "Teacher's Pet" is the brainchild of incorrigible animator/illustrator Gary Baseman. Think of his stuff as landing somewhere between R. Crumb and John Kricfalusi, all of bulging eyeballs and serpentine necks and skeletons a touch too eager to flee their skins. As the palette for a kid's entertainment, it's a bracing presumption that kids aren't stupid and, when given the choice, are capable of appreciating something outside the pale.

Garfield (2004)

June 11, 2004Posted in2000s, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Family, Theatrical, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Breckin Meyer, Jennifer Love Hewitt, Stephen Tobolowsky, Bill Murray
screenplay by Joel Cohen & Alec Sokolow, based on the Jim Davis comic strip
directed by Peter Hewitt

by Walter Chaw The sell-by date on a big-screen version of Jim Davis's flyblown syndicated comic strip-cum-merchandising empire "Garfield" expired at least twenty years ago, explaining in part why this Bill Murray-voiced abomination looks and acts so much like a giant hunk of rotten meat. It's corpse-soft, shambling along without much direction from its jellied brain, instantly alienating children with its snarky in-jokes about the cat's once-ubiquitous advertising appeal and pissing off adults with its die-cast dedication to being as worthless as possible. Parcelled off in little segments that approximate the rat-a-tat texture and length of the Sunday funnies but without the colour and for about seventeen times the price and potential headache, Garfield is trying so hard that it transfers its strain to anyone unfortunate enough to have gotten to the theatre after their first three choices were already sold-out.

Shrek 2 (2004)

May 18, 2004Posted in2000s, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Eddie Murphy, Family, Fantasy, Japan, Romance, Theatrical

*½/****
screenplay by Andrew Adamson and Joe Stillman and J. David Stem & David N. Weiss
directed by Andrew Adamson, Kelly Asbury, Conrad Vernon

Shrek2by Walter Chaw Neither better nor worse than its predecessor, think of Shrek 2 as a step sideways–it doesn’t so much earn an audience as inherit one. A DreamWorks/PDI production, Shrek 2 transplants the first picture’s bitterness towards Disney, though the characters it skewers are in the public domain (Sleeping Beauty, the three little pigs, Hansel & Gretel, Pinocchio, and so on) and happen to be among the icons that Disney, by and large, never dishonoured. Without a viable target, then, the film is the kind of satire-less satire that mistakes being a self-congratulatory trivia game designed for beginning players for being a post-modern commentary on fairytales and, more specifically, the traditional Disney animated feature. There’s no sharpness inherent in making reference to Spider-Man or Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings saga (just as there was no sharpness in referencing The Matrix in the original), and imitation has no point of view, just a brief rush of pride and bemusement for folks generally unused to catching the allusions. To say the picture functions best for the lowest common denominator (note a trio of flatulence gags) isn’t entirely fair–but it’s accurate.

Give My Regards to Broad Street (1984) + Paul McCartney: The Music and Animation Collection – DVDs

May 13, 2004Posted in1980s, 1990s, 2000s, Animation, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Family, Fantasy, Music, Short Films, UK

GIVE MY REGARDS TO BROAD STREET
**/**** Image B Sound B+
starring Paul McCartney, Bryan Brown, Ringo Starr, Barbara Bach
screenplay by Paul McCartney
directed by Peter Webb

PAUL McCARTNEY: THE MUSIC AND ANIMATION COLLECTION
*½/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras B+
directed by Geoff Dunbar

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Self-absorption is probably an occupational hazard at a certain level of fame: once the world lays itself at your feet, pelts its money at you, and replaces your mirrors with airbrushed portraits, it's well-nigh impossible not to be nudged a little closer to the realm of the narcissistic. Such is the case with Paul McCartney, who, having been canonized during his stint with The Beatles, apparently came to believe that anything involving his personage would be a celestial experience for all. The ego trips of 1984's Give My Regards to Broad Street and his more current forays into animation show a McCartney trapped in his own private hall of mirrors, one whose past musical triumphs are looking ever more distant from the tepid easy-listening of his present-day output.