Giant (1956) [Two-Disc Special Edition] – DVD

Posted in1950s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Drama, DVD

***/**** Image C+ Sound A- Extras A-
starring Rock Hudson, Elizabeth Taylor, James Dean, Carroll Baker
screenplay by Fred Guiol and Ivan Moffat, based on the novel by Edna Ferber
directed by George Stevens

by Bill Chambers Imperfect, cumbersome, George Stevens’s 1956 melodrama Giant indeed lives up to its title, ploughing through its protracted story with “fee-fi-fo-fum” grace. Released during a time when films were seriously vying for attention against television, Giant stands apart from the other consequences of dire studio measures besides gargantuan length (widescreen, quadraphonic sound, more location work) by devoting its two-hundred-and-one minutes not to religion (The Ten Commandments, also 1956) or war (The Bridge on the River Kwai), but to the lives of an extended family–an ensemble ethic that had gradually fallen out of vogue following 1946’s The Best Years of Our Lives. In a way, Giant ironically serves as a precursor for the sudsers and mini-series that would become small-screen mainstays, and it goes without saying that in this day and age, the cinema leeches off TV with reckless abandon.

Adaptation. (2002) [Superbit] – DVD

Posted in****/****, 2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Charlie Kaufman, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Esoterica, FFC Must-Own, Nicolas Cage

****/**** Image A+ Sound A+
starring Nicolas Cage, Meryl Streep, Chris Cooper, Cara Seymour
screenplay by Charlie Kaufman and Donald Kaufman, semi-based on the novel The Orchid Thief by Susan Orlean
directed by Spike Jonze

by Walter Chaw A breathless map of the nervous play of axons and dendrites, Spike Jonze and Charlie Kaufman’s Adaptation. is an intimate cartography of the human animal in all its florid insecurity, ugliness, and potential for passionate pursuit. In relating its tale of screenwriter Kaufman’s existential wrestle with adapting Susan Orlean’s The Orchid Thief, the picture takes on a tangle of Lacanian meta-observation that begins with the nervy creation of a Kaufman-doppelgänger/id-projection and ends with a literal destruction of said phantom. A deceptively simple film given all its contortions and acrobatics, Adaptation. is concerned with the ways in which a man doubts himself, doubts his relationships (as well as the implicit lie of the social “professional smile”), and learns almost too late the damnably difficult (for the intelligent and the sensitive) ability to accept the simple and the obvious at face value. The picture suggests that to be genuinely adaptive is to give oneself over to entropy armed only with the knowledge of self; more than right, its journey is fantastic.

The Pianist (2002) [Limited Soundtrack Edition] – DVD

Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Drama, DVD, France, Germany, Music, Palme d'Or Winner, Poland, UK, War

***/**** Image C Sound A Extras B+
starring Adrien Brody, Daniel Caltagirone, Thomas Kretschmann, Frank Finlay
screenplay by Ronald Harwood, based on the book by Wladyslaw Szpilman
directed by Roman Polanski

by Walter Chaw It comes as little surprise that when the Nazis begin to build a wall around the Warsaw ghetto is also when Roman Polanski’s Holocaust drama The Pianist becomes distinctive, as the director is at his best bound by the endlessly symbolic edifices and crannies of architecture. The story of Polish pianist Wladyslaw Szpilman (Adrien Brody) and his survival under the auspices of the Polish underground, serendipity, and fear is almost anti-heroic, its central figure passive like the most memorable of Polanski’s heroes (Rosemary, Carol Ledoux, Trelkovsky, even Jake Gittes after a fashion), and its indignities more intimate than the grand tapestry of the Holocaust generally allows. The loss of Szpilman’s entire family to The Final Solution is less wrenching than the line that precedes it as Szpilman says to his sister, “I wish I knew you better,” and less difficult again as the musician’s inability to play a piano he’s imprisoned with in a tenement flat while in hiding. Far from insensitive, The Pianist is actually intensely humanist, focused as it is on the little indignities that bring a man from his comfortable environment to the furtive edge of capricious extinction.

Just Married (2003) – DVD

Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Germany, Romance

½*/**** Image A Sound A- Extras C+
starring Ashton Kutcher, Brittany Murphy, Christian Kane, David Moscow
screenplay by Sam Harper
directed by Shawn Levy

by Walter Chaw Just as 2002 began with Orange County, a disappointing, somewhat lacklustre comedy (though certainly nowhere near as terrible as the film I’m here to review), 2003 begins with Just Married, a comedy so dedicatedly unfunny that the best way to approach it would be through the perspective that it’s actually meant to be disturbing. In fact, until the first line of dialogue about a minute in, the picture feels like a mordant, tongue-in-cheek, domestic-horror film–something along the lines of The War of the Roses. It doesn’t take long for optimism to give way to extreme predictability, unrelieved puerility, and the creepy realization that Cristophe Beck’s invasive score is a riff on Orff’s “Musica Poetica,” best known perhaps as the main theme to Terence Malick’s own black love story Badlands. There seems a realization, in other words, that a better, darker film about America’s fifty-percent divorce rate is waiting frustrated in Just Married‘s wings.

About Schmidt (2002) – DVD

Posted in****/****, 2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD, FFC Must-Own, Jack Nicholson

****/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B-
starring Jack Nicholson, Hope Davis, Dermot Mulroney, June Squibb
screenplay by Alexander Payne & Jim Taylor, based on the book by Louis Begley
directed by Alexander Payne

Mustownby Walter Chaw Alexander Payne’s (Citizen Ruth, Election) third film is his best. He (like Wes Anderson and his third film, The Royal Tenenbaums) has come into his own as an auteur voice for a new American cinema that finds its underpinnings in David Lynch and John Cassavetes–in the Midwest grotesque and the elevation of the banal. In relating a Prufrockian tale of a man reassessing the ruin of his life upon the occasion of his retirement from a life-insurance firm, Payne strikes a balance between absurdity and pithiness, becoming in the process the sort of satire that exposes essential truths about the disintegrating spiral of life and the human condition. Married as it is to another wonderful late-career performance by Jack Nicholson, About Schmidt is heartbreaking and brilliant.

Star Trek: Nemesis (2002) [Widescreen Collection] – DVD

Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD, Sci-Fi, Star Trek, Thriller

*/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B-
starring Patrick Stewart, Jonathan Frakes, Brent Spiner, LeVar Burton
screenplay by John Logan
directed by Stuart Baird

by Walter Chaw For a film in a tired franchise trying to duplicate Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (inarguably the best of the cinematic “Trek” line) down to an articulate arch-villain, heroic sacrifice, and mind-meld cheat, the irony of having the central conflict revolve around a defective clone is delicious and hilarious. Star Trek: Nemesis (hereafter Nemesis) is abominable pretension draped in the sheep’s frock of sci-fi pulp–pap of the first water invested in undergraduate doubling subtexts and ridiculous stabs at existentialism reminding of the discovery of the wizard of God in the fifth Trek flick.

20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954) [Special Edition] + Atlantis: Milo’s Return (2003) – DVDs

Posted in1950s, 2000s, Action, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Disney, DVD, Family, Fantasy, Sci-Fi

20,000 LEAGUES UNDER THE SEA
***/**** Image B- Sound A- Extras A+
starring Kirk Douglas, James Mason, Paul Lukas, Peter Lorre
screenplay by Earl Felton, based on the novel by Jules Verne
directed by Richard Fleischer

ATLANTIS: MILO’S RETURN
*½/**** Image C+ Sound A- Extras D+
screenplay by Thomas Hart & Henry Gilroy & Kevin Hopps & Tad Stones & Steve Englehart & Marty Isenberg
directed by Victor Cook, Toby Shelton, Tad Stones

“Climb aboard the Nautilus…and into a strange undersea world of spellbinding adventure! Kirk Douglas, Paul Lukas and Peter Lorre star as shipwrecked survivors taken captive by the mysterious Captain Nemo, brilliantly portrayed by James Mason. Wavering between genius and madness, Nemo has launched a deadly crusade across the seven seas. But can the captive crew expose his evil plan before he destroys the world?” –DVD liner summary for 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea

by Bill Chambers The trained seal is impressive, but enough about Kirk Douglas. Disney’s epic live-action adaptation of the Jules Verne novel, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea proves three things over the course of its thick running time: that director Richard Fleischer (the man who brought us Fantastic Voyage, the film that inspired Innerspace) was a gifted special-effects marshall–20,000 Leagues Under the Sea is still eye- popping/fooling 49 years after its release; that James Mason essayed the cinema’s definitive Bligh archetype; and that there’s always some asshole in a striped shirt in submarine movies. (Here it’s Douglas’s scurvy harpoonist Ned Land.) What’s surprising is how prosaic the film can be with so many assets in place, i.e., Mason, the Seussian interiors of the Nautilus, head-hunters, an enthralling killer squid, a seal with the charisma of Fred Astaire, and an especially vein-popping Douglas.

A Guy Thing (2003) [Special Edition] – DVD

Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD, Romance

**½/**** Image B+ Sound A- Extras B
starring Jason Lee, Julia Stiles, Selma Blair, James Brolin
screenplay by Greg Glienna & Pete Schwaba and Matt Tarses & Bill Wrubel
directed by Chris Koch

by Walter Chaw Paul (Jason Lee) is a big-grinning milquetoast one week away from marrying chilly Karen (Selma Blair) when he wakes up next to free-spirit Tiki girl Becky (Julia Stiles) and begins to reassess his straight-arrow existence. Battling a case of the crabs, an excess of fantasy sequences, and the sort of embarrassing in-law situations that remind suspiciously of co-screenwriter Greg Glienna’s Meet the Parents, Paul takes about ninety minutes longer than the audience to realize that he belongs with Becky.

The Jimmy Show (2002) – DVD

Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Drama, DVD

**/**** Image B- Sound B-
starring Frank Whaley, Carla Gugino, Ethan Hawke, Lynn Cohen
screenplay by Jonathan Marc Sherman, based on his play “Veins and Thumbtacks”
directed by Frank Whaley

by Bill Chambers There’s depressing and then there’s depressing. The Jimmy Show, actor Frank Whaley’s heartfelt follow-up to his nakedly personal hyphenate debut Joe the King, is so faithful to the doldrums of its lower-middle-class milieu as to have viewers recoiling from the reality check. It’s here that I become hypocritical, having championed my share of sad and perhaps discouraging films, yet one looks for their despair to be tempered by a sense of the romantic–even in the bleak Jude, the suffering is admittedly idealized by the setting, the weather, the period flavour. The Jimmy Show is no exaltation of the common man, but rather a snapshot of a tedious, miserable life–it could be called “The Sad State of Affairs,” though it’s actually based on a Jonathan Marc Sherman play entitled, rather evocatively, “Veins and Thumbtacks”.

The Mothman Prophecies (2002) [Special Edition] – DVD

Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Drama, DVD, Horror, Mystery, Thriller

**½/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B+
starring Richard Gere, Laura Linney, Will Patton, Debra Messing
screenplay by Richard Hatem, based on the novel by John A. Keel
directed by Mark Pellington

by Walter Chaw Inviting comparisons to “The X-Files” (comparisons the series made inevitable by setting several of its episodes in rural West Virginia and making mention of the “Mothman” in an excellent fifth season episode called “Detour”), Mark Pellington’s The Mothman Prophecies has a peculiarly muted quality to it that suggests the entire piece is best seen as shrouded in a caul. Allied with that idea, The Mothman Prophecies is about knowing certain things of the future and exorcising the past, about accepting that there are things in life that can’t be prevented. It’s got heady messages for a film based on a cultish bit of crypto-zoology reportage by John Keel (documenting eerie events in Point Pleasant, WV that stretched thirteen months from November 15, 1966 to December 15, 1967), and ultimately the relatively lightweight genre bedrock of the piece is not strong enough to support its broad philosophizing.

The Emperor’s Club (2002) [Widescreen] – DVD

Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Coming of Age, Drama, DVD

*½/**** Image B- Sound B+ Extras B-
starring Kevin Kline, Emile Hirsch, Embeth Davidtz, Rob Morrow
screenplay by Neil Tolkin, based on the short story “The Palace Thief” by Ethan Canin
directed by Michael Hoffman

by Walter Chaw Saccharine, derivative, and overlong, Michael Hoffman’s often-painful The Emperor’s Club is remarkable only for the extremes to which it goes to avoid the clichéd ending–and the sad karmic (and ironic, given the film’s carpe diem, hakuna matata catchphrase) completeness with which it fails to do so. Set in the Sixties at an exclusive all-boys prep school, The Emperor’s Club is immediately recognizable as another iteration of Dead Poets Society, even more so when one realizes that the film features the same quartet of student types (the troubled one, the trickster, the bookish one, the gregarious one–also the same breakdown you’ll find in Stand By Me, come to think of it) and the same crinkly-eyed inspirational professor who finds a lesson for young lives in the heartening words of dead versifiers. That The Emperor’s Club spends its second half flashed-forward twenty-five years as said crinkly-eyed scholar discovers that his truest legacy is the success of his students reduces it to a variation of the miserable Mr. Holland’s Opus.

Speed Racer (1967) [Collector’s Edition] – DVD

Posted in1960s, Action, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, DVD, Family, Japan, Sci-Fi, Sports, Television

Image C Sound C Extras C+
"The Great Plan, Parts 1 & 2", "Challenge of the Masked Racer, Parts 1 & 2", "The Secret Engine, Parts 1 & 2", "The Race Against the Mammoth Car, Parts 1 & 2", "The Most Dangerous Race, Parts 1, 2 & 3"

by Bill Chambers The theme song says he's a demon on wheels, and in one traumatizing, out-of-step dream sequence, Trixie, Speed Racer's Girl Friday, meets a version of Speed Racer with a face like the Green Goblin's and scaly arms capable of summoning hellfire. Unmotivated by anything other than the fact that Trixie has fallen asleep, the scene embodies half the charm of the Americanized "Speed Racer": we're only given exposition if it matches the lip movements mapped out for the original Japanese scripts, leading to dialogue so profoundly aimless (but synchronized!) that US producer and former child model turned dubbing impresario Peter Fernandez should've called his version of the show "Samuel Beckett's Speed Racer". While the narration occasionally attempts to bridge story points A and C (with B either overdubbed into oblivion or lying on a cutting-room floor somewhere), for the most part it refamiliarizes us ad nauseam with the origin of Racer X, Speed's-older-brother-who-ran-away-from-home-when-he-crashed-Pops'-racecar-and-now-wears-a-facemask-to-conceal-his-true-identity.

Treasure Planet (2002) – DVD

Posted in2000s, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Disney, DVD, Family, Sci-Fi

**½/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B-
screenplay by Ron Clements & John Musker and Rob Edwards, based on the novel Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson
directed by John Musker & Ron Clements

by Walter Chaw Beginning as a clever updating of Robert Louis Stevenson’s kiddie adventure classic Treasure Island, by its end, Disney’s Treasure Planet washes out as another bombastic familial reconciliation fable that marks the flat trajectory of most Disney “boy” animations. Released just a few months removed from Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away in North America, Treasure Planet‘s narrative and character shortfalls are all the more glaring for their studied lack of depth and the picture’s general overreliance on excess, broad comic relief, and all of the stale portfolio of hackneyed Disneyisms. Treasure Planet even comes complete with that most irritating of cutesy crutches: an anthropomorphic globular whatzit created with what appears to be more of a concern for ease of holiday season polymer mass-reproduction than narrative foundation. The existence of one slapstick comic-relief gag not enough, enter Martin Short as homosexual robot B.E.N.–an animated caricature of Short’s Ed Grimley character whose appearance mid-film is as handy a signal as any that Treasure Planet, for all serious intents and aesthetic purposes, is over.

Love Liza (2002) – DVD

Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD, France, Germany

***½/**** Image B Sound A- Commentary B+
starring Philip Seymour Hoffman, Kathy Bates, Jack Kehler, Sarah Koskoff
screenplay by Gordy Hoffman
directed by Todd Louiso

by Walter Chaw Philip Seymour Hoffman is Dante and the slings and arrows of mendacity are his Virgil, chasing him through the inferno of his day-to-day. A remarkable actor at his frequent best when deserted by a lover, Hoffman in Love Liza is Wilson Joel, a man whose wife has just killed herself and left a sealed letter behind. It becomes his albatross, toted around unexamined, as Wilson descends on a spiral of juvenile addiction (gasoline huffing) and avoidance. He sleeps on the floor outside his bedroom and does his best to dodge his mother-in-law (Kathy Bates)–hiding the sharp odour of his addiction behind the lie of becoming a radio-controlled airplane pilot.

The Hot Chick (2002) – DVD

Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD, Teen, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/**** Image A Sound B+ Extras B-
starring Rob Schneider, Rachel McAdams, Anna Faris, Andrew Keegan
screenplay by Tom Brady & Rob Schneider
directed by Tom Brady

by Walter Chaw What to think of a variation on Teen Wolf wherein the victim of the lycanthropic puberty metaphor is a young girl who turns into Rob Schneider? What to make of a film that wrests its central conceit of enchanted jewellery from the long-putrefied grasp of Mannequin 2? And what to make of a film released in the year 2002 that is this misogynistic, homophobic, racist, and cruel to the obese? Rather than postulate that our culture has regressed to the hale cultural morass of the mid-1980s, it’s doubtless more fruitful to examine the ways in which film is becoming as self-reflexive, meta-critical, and free of irony as television.

Young Guns (1988) [Special Edition] – DVD

Posted in1980s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, DVD, Western

*/**** Image C+ Sound B Extras B-
starring Emilio Estevez, Kiefer Sutherland, Lou Diamond Phillips, Charlie Sheen
screenplay by John Fusco
directed by Christopher Cain

by Bill Chambers I know a thing or two about Billy the Kid, having written a thoroughly researched, if thoroughly awful, 240-page screenplay about him. It was just after finishing this magnum opus that I discovered Sam Peckinpah’s Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid and realized that everything I’d tried to say had already been said much more poetically, thus exiling “For What It’s Worth: The Life of Billy the Kid” permanently to the bottom drawer. But at the time, I only wanted to outdo Young Guns and Young Guns II–a mission more challenging than you might think, given the films’ infamy as second-generation Brat Pack fodder. John Fusco’s scripts for both pictures are historically accurate, action-packed, and have a good ear for the vernacular of not only the Old West, but also the western genre. Yet the original Young Guns, especially, is miscast, directed by Christopher Cain (The Principal) like an episode of “Best of the West”, and fails to either humanize Billy the Kid or justify his lore. As played by Emilio Estevez, you get the feeling that Billy’s unhinged because he’s running low on mousse.

Biggie & Tupac (2002) – DVD

Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Crime, Documentary, DVD, Music, UK

***/**** Image B- Sound B Extras B+
directed by Nick Broomfield

by Bill Chambers A few days ago in THE HOT BUTTON, Dave Poland distinguished Nick Broomfield from his peers in the documentary field better–or, at least, more succinctly–than I’ve ever seen it done: “[Broomfield] creates an atmosphere in which you connect emotionally not with the characters in the film, but with his plight in trying to get his film made.” That’s certainly true of Broomfield’s Biggie & Tupac, in which almost every sequence carries the subtext of peril: A bona fide Dante in headphones, Broomfield latches onto a Virgil (ex-police officer Russell Poole) who escorts him, more or less, through circles of Hell (the gang-marked territories of Compton, the rap-music industry, and finally prison). An alarming number of the director’s interviews in Biggie & Tupac begin with a summary of attempts on the subject’s life, and in a deleted scenes section on the DVD, we see that Broomfield tried and failed to chat with the owner of L.A.’s notorious “Last Resort,” a bar at which gangbangers receive an ace-of-spades merit badge for their first killshot. A red ace means a flesh wound; a black ace means fatality.

Femme Fatale (2002) – DVD

Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Directors: Brian De Palma, DVD, Romance, Satire, Thriller

*½/**** Image A Sound A- Extras C
starring Rebecca Romijn-Stamos, Antonio Banderas, Peter Coyote, Eriq Ebouaney
written and directed by Brian De Palma

FEMME_FATALE07by Walter Chaw The first script written solely by Brian De Palma since his 1992 film Raising Cain, Femme Fatale, like that film, rips off the famous murderer-reveal of Dario Argento’s Tenebre. Come to think of it, the picture is essentially a rehash in one way or another of every film De Palma’s ever written (the voyeurism and body switch of Body Double, the phallic film equipment of Blow Out, the steamy stall-sex of Dressed to Kill, the evil twin thing and split-screen of Sisters, the voyeurism again of Hi, Mom!, and so on)–and because De Palma’s best films and screenplays were iterations of Hitchcock (and sometimes Argento, the Italian Hitchcock), Femme Fatale is as stale and detached as the third-generation copy that it is.

Darkness Falls (2003) [Special Edition] – DVD

Posted in2000s, Australia, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD, Horror, Mystery, Thriller

**/**** Image B- Sound A Extras B-
starring Chaney Kley, Emma Caulfield, Joshua Anderson, Andrew Bayly
screenplay by John Fasano and James Vanderbilt and Joe Harris
directed by Jonathan Liebesman

by Walter Chaw Two years removed from Victor Salva’s Jeepers Creepers (and on the eve of a sequel to that film), Darkness Falls whets cult appetites by being nearly a scene-for-scene recreation of that film’s inferior second half. Essentially a series of “I don’t believe your story–hey, why did the lights go out?” scenarios and unearned jump scares, the picture opens with a nice fairytale prologue and a nifty “12 years ago” introduction that hints at the promise of a murderous Tooth Fairy. As soon as the action jumps to the present day with a warbling youngster, her hot sister, and our troubled hero, however, any pretense of a creepy, coherent mythology flies out the window as the flick devolves into an inexorable killer flick amped-up to “11.”

Red Dragon (2002) [2-Disc Director’s Edition] – DVD

Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, DVD, Germany, Thriller

*/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B-
starring Anthony Hopkins, Edward Norton, Ralph Fiennes, Harvey Keitel
screenplay by Ted Tally, based on the novel by Thomas Harris
directed by Brett Ratner

by Walter Chaw Because Thomas Harris’s haunting novel of the same name is flawed in someone’s eye, Red Dragon hacks and slices the piece with a rude imprecision that would inspire pop icon Hannibal Lecter to sharpen his carving tools. The picture opens with a ridiculous and awkwardly-staged Lecter backstory (meaning it plays like the rest of the Lecter additions) that gives a self-parodying Anthony Hopkins a ponytail in place of the self-respect to which he can no longer lay claim, bringing to mind the unwieldy cameos of Cannonball Run.