Authors: Bill Chambers Archives - Page 52 of 68

The Fortune Cookie (1966) – DVD

July 30, 20031960s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Directors: Billy Wilder, DVD, Romance

**/**** Image C+ Sound B
starring Jack Lemmon, Walter Matthau, Ron Rich, Judi West
screenplay by Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond
directed by Billy Wilder

by Bill Chambers The Fortune Cookie was an attempt on Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond’s part to recapture the glory days of six years previous, when their one-two punch of Some Like It Hot and The Apartment hit pay dirt. (Imagine Steven Spielberg’s 1993, with its back-to-back releases of Jurassic Park and Schindler’s List, and you’ll have some idea of the position that Wilder and Diamond were in following The Apartment‘s Oscar glory.) More to the point, it was an act of redemption for the roundly lambasted Kiss Me, Stupid, and like most movie art seeking atonement from the masses, it so slavishly recapitulates a past success that audiences still aren’t getting what they want, only what they’ve had. A homoerotic redux of The Apartment, with Jack Lemmon reassuming the role of the weak-willed schlub and a black man filling in for Shirley MacLaine (although these character ascriptions prove interchangeable), The Fortune Cookie does nothing so well as make you wish you were watching The Apartment instead.

Valley Girl (1983) [Special Edition] + The Sure Thing (1985) [Special Edition] – DVDs

July 29, 20031980s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, DVD, Nicolas Cage, Romance, Teen

VALLEY GIRL
**/**** Image B Sound C- Extras B+
starring Nicolas Cage, Deborah Foreman, Elizabeth Daily, Cameron Dye
screenplay by Andrew Lane and Wayne Crawford
directed by Martha Coolidge

THE SURE THING
**½/**** Image A Sound B Extras B
starring John Cusack, Daphne Zuniga, Viveca Lindfors, Nicollette Sheridan
screenplay by Steven L. Bloom & Jonathan Roberts
directed by Rob Reiner

by Bill Chambers SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. I spent the better part of 1983 in a hospital hooked up to a poetically elaborate I.V., the end result of a pyeloplasty to repair an irritable kidney. Media saturation wasn’t then what it is now, and living sheltered like that made it doubly easy for movies to pass by my radar undetected. But in the strange case of Valley Girl, which I didn’t even know existed until four or five years after its release (once its star, Nicolas Cage, was on the rise), I climbed aboard the bandwagon unbeknownst: The weekday nurses–who seemed old to me then but whom I now realize were probably in their early-twenties at best–returned to work one spring Monday having adopted an entirely new dialect and nicknamed themselves “the Valley girls.” My susceptible young mind took to the language–I still talk like a goddamn Valley girl.

All the Real Girls (2003) – DVD

July 27, 20032000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Romance

***½/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras B+
starring Paul Schneider, Zooey Deschanel, Patricia Clarkson, Benjamin Mouton
written and directed by David Gordon Green

by Walter Chaw David Gordon Green’s sophomore picture All the Real Girls has the quality of a Faulknerian myth, with rural North Carolina subbing for his Yoknapatawpha County. It reminds of (and refers to) Terrence Malick’s dreamlike naturalism more than in the stylistic similarity of Tim Orr’s meticulous compositions–there is in Green’s work an understanding of those delicate moments that carve indelibly into the collective sublime. Marking the unbearable tragedy of being human, in his second film Green observes the madness of love in a temporary world, his gift in charting the native poetry of place and imperfection. When he allows that inarticulate frustration to fester against the backdrop of a stained paradise (George Washington), he creates an American masterpiece; when that furious inability to communicate comments on first love (All the Real Girls), he creates something no less elegant though considerably less able to sustain the gravity of its treatment.

Final Destination 2 (2003) [infinifilm] – DVD

July 25, 20032000s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, DVD, Horror, Thriller

**/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B+
starring Ali Larter, A.J. Cook, Michael Landes, Terrence ‘T.C.’ Carson
screenplay by J. Mackye Gruber & Eric Bress
directed by David Richard Ellis

by Walter Chaw Earning some marks for a gratuitous tit shot and a few graphic kills, the mystical gorefest Final Destination 2 is an unusually mordant excuse to knock off a few good-looking caricatures. Philosophically speaking, it develops its mythology with a series of rules so Byzantine that rather than spend a surplus of time trying to unravel what’s going on, it’s best just to settle comfortably into the realization that the ones we’ve marked for death are, in fact, marked by Death in the film. The most interesting thing about the picture, in fact, is that it is self-reflexive for genre fans, who’ve made it something of a matter of course to pick out the heroine and the meat bags from the rest of the cattle. In our way, we become the avatars of the Grim Reaper, laying our bony fingers on each inevitable victim in turn. The audience, in a very direct way, becomes that invisible cold wind that announces the arrival of doom–Final Destination 2 is almost interactive.

Felicity: Season Two Six-Disc Set [Sophomore Year DVD Collection] (1999-2000) – DVD

July 20, 20031990s, 2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Coming of Age, Drama, DVD, Romance, Television

Image A- Sound B Extras A-
“Sophomoric”, “The List”, “Ancient History”, “The Depths”, “Crash”, “The Love Bug”, “Getting Lucky”, “Family Affairs”, “Portraits”, “Great Expectations”, “Help for the Lovelorn”, “The Slump”, “Truth or Consequences,” “True Colors”, “Things Change”, “Revolutions”, “Docuventary II”, “Party Lines”, “Running Mates”, “Ben Was Here”, “The Aretha Theory”, “Final Answer”, “The Biggest Deal There Is”

by Bill Chambers

What is a haircut?

According to Merriam-Webster, it is “the act, process, or result of cutting and shaping the hair.” Maybe the definition should be expanded to account for the transmogrifying impact a haircut can have on public perception of the vehicle for a fictional character. I encountered my own follicular prejudices when I went to see Lethal Weapon 4 and found myself even more put off by the absence of Martin Riggs’s signature mullet than by the film’s idiotic script, abject racism, and incongruous delivery-room hijinks–none of which were quite so indicative of Richard Donner’s undisciplined direction as his electing to leave Mel Gibson’s ‘do as short as it always is outside the Lethal Weapon franchise. Perhaps we can trace this back to the Sunday funnies: imagine how disconcerting it would be if Ziggy or Charlie Brown suddenly had hair. With the ingratiation of comic books, motion pictures, and television in the latter half of the twentieth century, our escapist figures got deported from the realm of imagination; transmuted into visual icons, they consequently became far less malleable.

May (2003) – DVD

July 19, 20032000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Horror, Thriller

***/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B-
starring Angela Bettis, Jeremy Sisto, Anna Faris, James Duval
written and directed by Lucky McKee

by Walter Chaw Lucky McKee takes a look at the end of the world and it comes half-blinded before a student version of Claire Denis’s Trouble Every Day and a poster-shrine to Dario Argento’s Opera. The apocalypse in May is the end of cinema, a self-consuming contemplation of itself as the product of genre, and so its touchstones are films that consider the horror of unnatural progeny, inappropriate consumption, and, of course, the literariness of “Frankenstein”‘s exhumation and reconstitution tropes. When May (Angela Bettis) pleads at the picture’s conclusion to be seen, more than the plaintive cry of a child molded by fear into something strange, it’s an understanding that the life of cinema is like the span of any beast: naivety into optimism into cynicism into contemplation into, finally, a breed of facile irony fed by the mordancy of existence at its extremity.

Loving (1970) – DVD

July 14, 20031970s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Drama, DVD

***½/**** Image B+ Sound B-
starring George Segal, Eva Marie Saint, Sterling Hayden, Keenan Wynn
screenplay by Don Devlin, based on a novel by J.M. Ryan
directed by Irvin Kershner

by Bill Chambers The top ten winners in TOTAL FILM’s recent poll on the cinema’s greatest “bastards” (that would be in front of the camera, not behind it) were a fairly stock bunch: old faithfuls like The Sweet Smell of Success‘ JJ Hunsecker (Burt Lancaster) and Get Carter‘s Carter (Michael Caine)–who placed first–joined such choices that pander to currency while feigning esoterica as Internal Affairs‘ Dennis Peck (Richard Gere) and As Good As It Gets‘ Melvin Udall (Jack Nicholson). But you will find few bigger bastards than the overlooked protagonist of Irvin Kershner’s Loving, Brooks Wilson (George Segal), a lousy husband and father who has to be among the most self-absorbed suburbanites ever to despoil the screen. In our introduction to him, he decides to have a smoke instead of watching his daughter perform in the school Christmas pageant–an event for which he was made late by a fight with his mistress. One of them, anyway.

Curly Sue (1991) – DVD

July 11, 20032000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Family, John Hughes, Romance, Spielberg

**/**** Image B Sound B+ Commentary B-
starring James Belushi, Kelly Lynch, Alisan Porter, John Getz
written and directed by John Hughes

by Bill Chambers John Hughes almost returned to directing with last year’s Maid in Manhattan, and Curly Sue, the last film with Hughes at the helm, perhaps offers some explanation beyond his reported displeasure with having to cast Jennifer Lopez as to why the torch was ultimately passed to Wayne Wang. In Curly Sue‘s best bit, the housekeeper (Viveka Davis, a genuine comic find) of an upscale Manhattan apartment gambles away her paycheck playing poker against the two derelicts who’ve mostly conned their way into staying there. Davis has everything that Lopez doesn’t in Maid in Manhattan: modesty, natural beauty, charisma, a wry sense of humour–you could watch a whole movie about this persona, which is probably what Hughes had in mind, and her one sequence ends with a joke that also happens to be a far more accurate representation of the subtle fear that aristocracy puts in the minimum-wager than any of the Cinderella markers you’ll find in Maid in Manhattan. Or anything else you’ll find in Curly Sue, for that matter.

Spun (2003) – DVD (R-rated)

July 8, 20032000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Drama, DVD, Esoterica

*/**** Image A- Sound A Extras C
starring Jason Schwartzman, John Leguizamo, Mena Suvari, Patrick Fugit
screenplay by Creighton Vero & William De Los Santos
directed by Jonas Åkerlund

by Walter Chaw I don't have anything in particular against music-video directors making the transition to feature films, except that so often strobe-lighting and images-per-second are the only lessons about film craft they've ever learned. Swedish wunderkind Jonas Åkerlund, who cut his teeth as a chop-horse for Madonna and Moby, makes his feature film debut with jittery crystal meth opera Spun, a picture so misconstrued and haphazardly slapped together that it doesn't so much suggest the sensation of being "spun" on meth as it does getting thrown off a tall building in a washing machine. It strives for a sort of grimy realism but succeeds mainly in being Ken and Barbie Take a Shit-Bath: the young and the beautiful are covered in a patina of grotesquerie, it's true, but the filth isn't taking

Gasoline (2002)

July 3, 20032000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Crime, Drama, Italy, Road Movie, Romance, Theatrical

Benzina
**/****
starring Maya Sansa, Regina Orioli, Pietro Ragusa, Mariella Valentini
screenplay by Anne Riitta Ciccone & Monica Stambrini, based on the novel by Elena Stancanelli
directed by Monica Stambrini

by Bill Chambers Scarlett Johansson-esque Regina Orioli stars in Monica Stambrini’s Gasoline (Benzina) (hereafter Benzina) as Lenni, a bespectacled loner who went looking for work at a coffee bar/gas station one day and found love with its proprietor, Stella (Maya Sansa). When Lenni’s mother (Mariella Valentini) comes to visit and tries to talk her once-presumed-straight daughter out of her gay lifestyle, a scuffle ensues between madre and Stella in which the former is inevitably accidentally killed; even more inevitably, Stella doesn’t think they should tell the police despite her innocence looking forensically sound; and most inevitably of all, Lenni’s mom had a fortune in her purse. If you’re playing the home game and guessed that Stella and Len go on the lam, give yourself ten points–twenty if you had it down that they would do so with a body in the trunk.

Shanghai Knights (2003) – DVD

July 1, 20032000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD, Hong Kong, Jackie Chan, Martial Arts, Western

**/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras A-
starring Jackie Chan, Owen Wilson, Aidan Gillen, Fann Wong
screenplay by Alfred Gough & Miles Millar
directed by David Dobkin

by Walter Chaw Crossing the Big Pond hasn’t exactly done wonders for the heroes of the halcyon days of Hong Kong cinema. Lured by the prestige and mythology of the Hollywood dream factory, folks like Chow Yun Fat, Jet Li, Michelle Yeoh, John Woo, Ringo Lam, Tsui Hark, and so on have transformed the honesty of their craft into the same sort of boom crash opera we’ve been churning out on Yankee shores for decades now. Without a strong sense of how to film action, of the martial arts tradition in Chinese cinema, nor of the particular strengths of a particular artist, even as this genre has taken a dramatic upturn in popularity in the West, the folks most responsible for its sophistication have become sidekicks (Michelle Yeoh in Tomorrow Never Dies), B-list hunks (Yun Fat), villains (Li), failures (Lam, Hark), starfuckers (Woo), and, in the sad case of Jackie Chan, broad racial caricatures at the mercy of people like Brett Ratner, Kevin Donovan, and Tom Dey. Chan has made over 100 films over the course of forty years as an actor, director, writer, producer, and stuntman; the first thing that happens to him when he comes to the United States is that he’s placed in the company of idiots and neophytes. It feels like racism.

Phone Booth (2003) – DVD

June 22, 20032000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Directors: Joel Schumacher, DVD, Mystery, Thriller

**½/**** Image B+ Sound A Commentary A
starring Colin Farrell, Kiefer Sutherland, Forest Whitaker, Radha Mitchell
screenplay by Larry Cohen
directed by Joel Schumacher

by Walter Chaw Responsible for some of my favourite weirdo low-tech cult films (Q, God Told Me To, It’s Alive!), underground auteur Larry Cohen’s output is a lollapalooza of high-concept hokum invested equally in the Catholic and the apocalyptic. Joining forces with master hack Joel Schumacher (who’s made a mean schlock classic or two himself–Flatliners, The Lost Boys, The Incredible Shrinking Woman) on the unfortunately-timed sniper fantasy Phone Booth, Cohen’s script reveals the man up to his old tricks: a barely feature-length product (about seventy-five minutes without credits) set inside a confessional-cum-8^th Avenue phone booth that mires an anti-hero in an old-school oasis amidst our sterile technological wasteland. What should have been an agreeable bit of nonsense, however, gets tangled up in Cohen’s desire to proselytize, transforming the potential for a paranoid piece of B-sociology into something empty and pretentious–a tale directed by an idiot, full of some admittedly innovative sound design and a surplus of Method fury.

Empire Records (1995) [Remix! Special Fan Edition] – DVD

June 22, 20031990s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Music, Romance, Teen

Empire Records: Remix!
*½/**** Image B Sound A- Extras C-
starring Liv Tyler, Anthony LaPaglia, Renee Zellweger, Maxwell Caulfield
screenplay by Carol Heikkinen
directed by Allan Moyle

by Bill Chambers Allan Moyle’s Empire Records has defenders too staunch to disregard–and because I listened to them, I’m left with the sensation that I chewed a piece of bubblegum until well after its flavour ran dry. The Canadian Moyle, whose inauspicious directorial debut was the 1977 tax-shelter crime flick The Rubber Gun, discovered teenagers three years later with his oddity of a second film Times Square and has rarely looked back since. Yet although his cinematic beginnings predate those of John Hughes, Moyle’s Pump Up the Volume and Empire Records are eclipsed by even the lesser entries in Hughes’s teen canon, such as Sixteen Candles and the Hughes-produced Pretty in Pink.

Me Without You (2001) – DVD

June 20, 20032000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Coming of Age, Drama, DVD, Germany, UK

***/**** Image F Sound B-
starring Anna Friel, Michelle Williams, Oliver Milburn, Kyle MacLachlan
screenplay by Sandra Goldbacher and Laurence Coriat
directed by Sandra Goldbacher

by Walter Chaw Sandra Goldbacher’s Me Without You is feral and alive and home to two of the best performances of last year, courtesy Michelle Williams and Anna Friel. One of the more uncompromising films about the things women do to one another over the course of a long friendship, it becomes a bit repetitive by the end and a bit like a Jane Austen novel (“Emma, actually,” the film helpfully informs) transplanted to the England of the past three decades, but its conventions skate with the honesty of performances from its main trio of Williams, Friel, and Oliver Milburn as the prototypical rakish, misunderstood Austen hero.

Laurel Canyon (2003) – DVD

June 18, 20032000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Music

**½/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B-
starring Frances McDormand, Christian Bale, Kate Beckinsale, Natascha McElhone
written and directed by Lisa Cholodenko

by Walter Chaw Buoyed by a fantastic performance from Frances McDormand, Lisa Cholodenko’s follow-up to her deft, well-regarded High Art is the disappointing, sprawling, somewhat overreaching Laurel Canyon. In its ambition it resembles Rose Troche’s third film, The Safety of Objects–that picture also saddled with a large, veteran cast and a problem with focus, but most importantly with the responsibility of a young filmmaker given the opportunity, with a bigger budget and well-regarded performers, to produce a piece commensurate in scale to that perceived expectation. The problem with the situation is that more times than not it leads to the type of film that Laurel Canyon is: ostentatious in structure, but in that way also a departure from the succinct character observations that brought the young artist the opportunity in the first place.

The Incredible Hulk Returns (1988)/The Trial of the Incredible Hulk (1989) [2 Disc Set]; The Death of the Incredible Hulk (1990); The Incredible Hulk (1996) – DVDs

June 17, 20031980s, 1990s, Action, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Espionage, Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Superhero

THE INCREDIBLE HULK RETURNS
**/**** Image B- Sound B Extras A+
starring Bill Bixby, Lou Ferrigno, Lee Purcell, Jack Colvin
written by Nicholas Corea
directed by Bill Bixby & Nicholas Corea

THE TRIAL OF THE INCREDIBLE HULK
*/**** Image B- Sound B Extras A+
starring Bill Bixby, Lou Ferrigno, Rex Smith, John Rhys-Davies
written by Gerald Di Pego
directed by Bill Bixby

by Walter Chaw It all comes back in a rush, the crosshairs fixing David Banner’s (Bill Bixby) face, the breathless narration summarizing the whole of the creation story in ninety seconds, the shots of long-haired Lou Ferrigno, in full body paint, embodying the rage and frustration of the flower-power generation in all its ripped-jean glory. Punked with a horse’s dose of gamma radiation, mild-mannered Dr. Banner turns into a ball of flexing id that gets most wroth until running across a kitten or something and calming down. Jekyll and Hyde for the “me” generation; that a research scientist disinterested in the particulars of cashing in turns into a giant green ball of type-A is one avenue for discussion, though a better one is the fact that Banner represents in a real way the idea of hope and compassion in a time more interested in “Hulk smash”–making the moldy Marvel hero a potentially good match for the reflective sensibilities of Ang Lee. That Banner’s pacifist nature is always defeated by his “anger” speaks volumes about the inevitability of the metamorphosis of hippie to yuppie, as well as the death of a dream that transformation encompasses.

Spider-Man (2002) [Full Screen Special Edition + Superbit] – DVDs

June 13, 20032000s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: Sam Raimi, DVD, Sci-Fi, Spider-Man, Superhero

***½/****
SE – Image C Sound A- Extras B
SUPERBIT – Image A Sound A (DTS) A- (DD) Commentary B
starring Tobey Maguire, Willem Dafoe, Kirsten Dunst, James Franco
screenplay by David Koepp
directed by Sam Raimi

by Walter Chaw Sam Raimi’s banana yellow, 1973 Dodge 88 Oldsmobile is Uncle Ben’s (Cliff Robertson, himself the happy–however briefly–subject of a lab experiment in 1968’s Charley) ride in Spider-Man, and it is as canny and appropriate a cameo as any since Hitchcock’s greedy quaff of a champagne flute in Notorious. The good news is, the appearance of said vehicle is as clever as the rest of Spider-Man, that rare variety of modern popular film boasting of subtext and tricky riptides tackling puberty and abrupt Oedipal splits with good humour, insight, and grace. If not for the abominable CGI (really only overused in two scenes), I would have a hard time finding fault with Spider-Man, the model comic book movie in its surprisingly dark tone, lively pace, shrewd performances, sense of humour, and sly intelligence.

Basic (2003) – DVD

June 12, 20032000s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, DVD, Mystery, Thriller

*½/**** Image B Sound A Extras B-
starring John Travolta, Connie Nielsen, Samuel L. Jackson, Brian Van Holt
screenplay by James Vanderbilt
directed by John McTiernan

by Walter Chaw It occurred to me about midway through Basic that director John McTiernan, having nowhere to go but up after last year’s amusingly noxious Rollerball, was taking a page from the Michael Bay book of filmmaking before realizing that Bay had the McTiernan school (the McTiernan of Die Hard and Predator) to thank for the whole of his austere career. The Hollywood shooting match is an incestual Moebius strip, it seems, and for who was once the best action director in the United States to find himself a hollow shade of not only his past glory, but also Bay, is depressing beyond words. Which is not to say that Basic doesn’t start out extremely well: For a full minute, the picture provides a brief history of the French attempt at digging a canal in Panama in the 1880s scored to Bizet’s Carmen; the problem is that by the end of Basic, the only justification for the Carmen cue is that it’s also packed to the gills with bull.

Franchise Boogie: The Jungle Book 2; The Brady Bunch Movie; A Very Brady Sequel; Terminator 2: Judgment Day; Die Another Day; The Animatrix

June 9, 20031990s, 2000s, Action, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Disney, DVD, Family, James Bond, Musical, Sci-Fi

THE JUNGLE BOOK 2 (2003)
*/**** Image A Sound A Extras C
screenplay by Karl Geurs
directed by Steve Trenbirth

THE BRADY BUNCH MOVIE (1995)
***/**** Image B+ Sound A-
starring Shelley Long, Gary Cole, Christine Taylor, Christopher Daniel Barnes
screenplay by Bonnie Turner & Terry Turner
directed by Betty Thomas

A VERY BRADY SEQUEL (1996)
***½/**** Image B Sound A-
starring Shelley Long, Gary Cole, Christopher Daniel Barnes, Christine Taylor
screenplay by Harry Elfont & Deborah Kaplan and James Berg & Stan Zimmerman
directed by Arlene Sanford

TERMINATOR 2: JUDGMENT DAY (1991)
***½/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras A
starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Linda Hamilton, Edward Furlong, Robert Patrick
screenplay by James Cameron & William Wisher Jr.
directed by James Cameron

DIE ANOTHER DAY (2002)
**/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras A-
starring Pierce Brosnan, Halle Berry, Toby Stephens, Rosamund Pike
screenplay by Neal Purvis & Robert Wade
directed by Lee Tamahori

THE ANIMATRIX (2003)
***/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras A
written by The Wachowski Brothers*, Yoshiaki Kawajiri, Kôji Morimoto, Shinichirô Watanabe, Peter Chung
directed by Peter Chung, Andrew R. Jones, Yoshiaki Kawajiri, Takeshi Koike, Mahiro Maeda, Kôji Morimoto, Shinichirô Watanabe

(*We defer to screen billing but recognize this is inaccurate.-Ed., 2016)

by Bill Chambers The studios apply their stratagem for summertime theatrical releases to DVD in 2003, having overcrowded video store shelves this month and last with sequels and offshoots to the degree that, a few weeks from today, you will notice that a Matrix film and a Terminator film are vying for attention both at home and at the multiplex. As Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle, Bad Boys II, and Legally Blonde 2 touch down in theatres, Die Another Day, The Jungle Book 2, and the Brady Bunch movies land on DVD, and then there are the cross-promotions: It seems like everyone wants a piece of the fallout from Universal’s big-screen Hulk, with Fox, Buena Vista, Anchor Bay, and Universal itself issuing “Hulk”-branded discs prior to the feature film’s June 20^th opening. Synergy this aggressive may well erase the line separating legitimate media from its ancillaries yet; Fox takes a bold step in this direction with the upcoming From Justin to Kelly, slated to debut on disc a mere six weeks past its theatrical premiere date, thus rendering the latter a glorified trailer for the former.

Dark Blue (2002) [Special Edition] – DVD

June 6, 20032000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, DVD, Germany, Thriller, UK

**/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B-
starring Kurt Russell, Scott Speedman, Ving Rhames, Brendan Gleeson
screenplay by David Ayer
directed by Ron Shelton

by Walter Chaw Lost in the familiarity of critics calling films combinations of two similar films is the truism that, in all likelihood, these films were pitched exactly the same way to stuffed wallets lacking in much imagination. In this spirit, Dark Blue is Training Day meets L.A. Confidential–to that end, Training Day scribe David Ayer wrote the screenplay from a story by James Ellroy, author of L.A. Confidential the novel. In other words, Dark Blue is a chimera composed of the worst parts of a pair of better films–a green rookie/corrupt grizzled vet police thriller set in Los Angeles (Training Day) that, banking on the borrowed gravity of historical events to lend itself a measure of importance, features an evil Irish mentor/supercop responsible for the picture’s central crime (L.A. Confidential) and a tired storyline riddled with exhausted characters (a showboat role, a thankless role) and racial conveniences. It’s by now fair to wonder if director Ron Shelton will make another Blaze, let alone another Bull Durham.