The Beach Boys: An American Band (1985)/Brian Wilson: “I just wasn’t made for these times” (1995) [Double Feature] – DVD

February 27, 2003Posted in****/****, 1980s, 1990s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Documentary, DVD, Music

THE BEACH BOYS: AN AMERICAN BAND
****/**** Image C+ Sound B+
directed by Malcolm Leo

BRIAN WILSON: “I JUST WASN’T MADE FOR THESE TIMES”
***½/**** Image B Sound B+
directed by Don Was

by Walter Chaw There are a handful of albums indispensable to a comprehensive understanding of the roots of modern music, and The Beach Boys‘ “Pet Sounds”–a sort of Apocalypse Now for band-leader Brian Wilson, a mad compendium of musical fragments (Bach’s progressions, The Four Horsemen‘s harmonies) that cohered into a Spector-esque Wall of Sound sparsity/harmony–is irrefutably among them. Intent on making definitive, album-length statements, spurred on by his obsessive competitiveness with The Beatles (“Rubber Soul” predates “Pet Sounds”, and though Paul McCartney cited “Pet Sounds” as a primary influence on “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band”, the release of that album is often blamed for Brian Wilson’s nervous breakdown), and sensing the opportunity in 1966 of being at the vanguard of the psychedelic movement with a follow-up album (the never-completed “Smile”), the story of The Beach Boys and Brian Wilson is as operatic and tinged with ironic destiny as an Aeschylean tragedy.

The First $20 Million (2002) – DVD

February 26, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD, ZERO STARS

The First $20 Million Is Always the Hardest
ZERO STARS/**** Image C Sound B-
starring Adam Garcia, Rosario Dawson, Jake Busey, Enrico Colantoni
screenplay by Jon Favreau and Gary Tieche, based on the novel by Po Bronson
directed by Mick Jackson

by Walter Chaw Food-obsessed Japanese girl band Cibo Matto plays quietly behind a weird commercial of pastel San Diego Chickens sky-diving within the first five minutes of The First $20 Million Is Always the Hardest, offering a benighted hope that the film won’t suck that is so ephemeral that its inevitable death is less cruel than perverse. Playing like a version of Real Genius that’s somehow worse, the idea of a hard-partying geek fraternity involved in changing the world one byte at a time is so disinteresting and bankrupt that its resounding failure isn’t nearly as surprising as the twin revelations that the otherwise bright-seeming Jon Favreau co-wrote the screenplay (and appears in a cameo with crap in his mouth), and that this dog pile of a script (based on a novel by Po Bronson) actually found suitors.

Ordinary Decent Criminal (2000) – DVD

February 24, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, DVD, Gangster, Germany, Ireland, UK

*/**** Image A- Sound B+
starring Kevin Spacey, Linda Fiorentino, Peter Mullan, Stephen Dillane
screenplay by Gerard Stembridge
directed by Thaddeus O’Sullivan

by Walter Chaw Completed about a year after John Boorman’s infinitely superior The General, Thaddeus O’Sullivan’s Ordinary Decent Criminal is a sporadic “fictionalizing” of the life of Irish crime boss Martin Cahill that dresses up Cahill’s exploits with slick visuals while attempting the unsavoury task of doing exactly what The General was accused of doing: making urban terrorism and torture whimsical caper fare. Recasting Cahill as a Keyser Soze with a sense of oily humour and renaming him Michael Lynch (Kevin Spacey), Ordinary Decent Criminal is extraordinarily lightweight blather free entirely of the sense of scale and place of Boorman’s film. The General is fantastic, Ordinary Decent Criminal: just fatuous.

Frank McClusky, C.I. (2002) – DVD

February 24, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD

**/**** Image A Sound A-
starring Dave Sheridan, Randy Quaid, Enrico Colantoni, Dolly Parton
screenplay by Mark Perez
directed by Arlene Sanford

by Walter Chaw There’s a freshness to the staleness of Frank McKlusky, C.I. that charms initially before it grates for its dedicated cuteness and innocuous incorrectness. With an amazing supporting cast of the lower echelon of B-list comedy performers (Dolly Parton, Randy Quaid, Orson Bean (reprising his Being John Malkovich character), Andy Richter, Kevin Pollack, Adam Corolla, and Chris Farley’s also-fat brother), the picture is clearly a rip-off of Jim Carrey’s Ace Ventura films, complete with a mugging Dave Sheridan (so good in Bubble Boy, now channelling Carrey), a pooch sidekick, and a blonde love interest in the emetic Cameron Diaz (of Carrey’s The Mask) mold played, strangely enough, by Cameron Richardson.

Sports Night: The Complete Series Plus Pilot Episode (1992-1993) – DVD

February 22, 2003Posted in1990s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Sports, Television

Image B Sound B
SEASON 1 – “Pilot,” “The Apology,” “The Hungry and the Hunted,” “Intellectual Property,” “Mary Pat Shelby,” “*The Head Coach, Dinner and the Morning Mail,” “Dear Louise,” “Thespis,” “The Quality of Mercury at 29K,” “Shoe Money Tonight,” “The Six Southern Gentlemen of Tennessee,” “Smoky,” “Small Town,” “Rebecca,” “Dana and the Deep Blue Sea,” “Sally,” “How Are Things in Gloca Morra?,” “The Sword of Orion,” “Eli’s Coming,” “Ordnance Tactics,” “Ten Wickets,” “Napoleon’s Battle Plan,” “What Kind of Day Has it Been”
SEASON 2 – “Special Powers,” “When Something Wicked This Way Comes,” “Cliff Gardner,” “Louise Revisited,” “Kafelnikov,” “Shane,” “Kyle Whitaker’s Got Two Sacks,” “The Reunion,” “A Girl Named Pixley,” “The Giants Win the Pennant, the Giants Win the Pennant,” “The Cut Man Cometh,” “The Sweet Smell of Air,” “Dana Get Your Gun,” “And the Crowd Goes Wild,” “Celebrities,” “The Local Weather,” “Draft Day: Part I – It Can’t Rain at Indian Wells,” “Draft Day: Part II – The Fall of Ryan O’Brian,” “April is the Cruelest Month,” “Bells And A Siren,” “La Forza Del Destino,” “Quo Vadimus”

by Walter Chaw Taken as a whole, and a box set from Buena Vista allows one to do just that, Aaron Sorkin’s “Sports Night” takes on the character of an extended experiment that starts tentatively and ends as one of the genuinely valuable moments of television in the year before HBO and flagship show “The Sopranos” became the benchmark for quality boob-tubery in the post-post-modern age. Detailing the behind-the-scenes drama of producing an “ESPN SportsCenter”-esque news program, it draws inevitable comparison to James L. Brooks’s Broadcast News (and accordingly, during the first season, episode five, Felicity Huffman gets to knock over a production assistant à la Holly Hunter’s character in that film), but distinguishes itself with an understanding that in many ways, sports is an effective locus for the hot-button issues of modern society: misogyny, race, addiction, violence.

Old School (2003)

February 21, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Theatrical

*½/****
starring Luke Wilson, Will Ferrell, Vince Vaughn, Ellen Pompeo
screenplay by Todd Phillips & Scot Armstrong
directed by Todd Phillips

by Walter Chaw Following in the tepid footsteps of National Lampoon’s Van Wilder‘s attempt to update Animal House for the new millennium, Todd Phillips’s Old School is better than it should be for a surprisingly funny Will Ferrell and another one of those laconic performances by a Wilson brother (Luke, this time) that just begs for a better vehicle. Less than John Landis’s landmark ode to anarchy, however, Old School most resembles Hart Bochner’s PCU–a film to which it pays unsubtle homage in the “ironic” casting of Jeremy Piven as that hale genre archetype: the button-down dean. (And PCU ultimately finds itself the superior campus clone comedy… For whatever that’s worth.) As diaries of arrested development go, Old School at least has the wit to tell a story of thirtysomethings seeking to recapture the halcyon days of binge-drinking and the joys of sexual objectification, making it something of a middle class/mid-life crisis tragedy and fitfully engaging in a distracted way as a result.

The Life of David Gale (2003)

February 21, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, Germany, Mystery, Spain, Theatrical, Thriller, UK, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Kevin Spacey, Kate Winslet, Laura Linney, Gabriel Mann
screenplay by Charles Randolph
directed by Alan Parker

Lifeofdavidgaleby Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. One wonders if there isn’t, after all, a subtle right-wing conspiracy at work in the entertainment industry, where ultra-liberal stumps are turned into the sort of ostensibly pro-leftist propaganda reel that does serious harm to the pro-leftist agenda. If it’s not the reprehensible The Contender, with its Ayn Rand-ian hypothetical, it’s I Am Sam and its bizarre vilification of the child welfare system–or worse, John Q, with its curiously misdirected lament against our obviously broken health-care state. Trumping them all in terms of muddle and melodrama, however, is The Life of David Gale, an anti-death penalty tirade that, by the end, feels like a life sentence the audience wishes hadn’t been commuted. The only way to make any sense of the film is to suspect it of darker motives: Its ultimate message–and it’s not a bad one–seems to be that the criminal justice system the film so actively vilifies is, in fact, the only honest (though imperfect) force in the entire mess.

Gods and Generals (2003)

February 21, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Drama, Theatrical, War

*/****
starring Chris Conner, Jeff Daniels, Stephen Lang, Robert Duvall
screenplay by Ronald F. Maxwell, based on the book by Jeffrey M. Shaara
directed by Ronald F. Maxwell

Godsandgeneralsby Walter Chaw Somewhere in the translation from Jeff Shaara’s only so-so novel Gods and Generals to Ronald F. Maxwell’s magnificently bad film Gods and Generals lies the mystery of why the younger Shaaras and the Maxwells of the world see fit to take a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel like Jeff Shaara’s The Killer Angels and make a country-fried trilogy out of it. Perhaps most of the blame should be laid at the ten-gallon feet of Ted Turner, Fortune 500’s Yosemite Sam/Ross Perot amalgam who seeks, it appears, to finally get the South to rise again, single-handedly, after about 150 years of threats. It seems odd, however, that The Ted would seek to get the bayonets a-rattlin’ again with almost four hours of awkward period speechifying punctuated occasionally by random recreations of random early Civil War battles (Manassas, Fredericksburg, and Chancellorsville), each of which leads to the events of Maxwell’s 1993 adaptation of The Killer Angels, Gettysburg.

Swimfan (2002) – DVD

February 19, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD, Teen, Thriller

½*/**** Image A Sound B Extras B-
starring Jesse Bradford, Erika Christensen, Shiri Appleby, Kate Burton
screenplay by Charles Bohl & Phillip Schneider
directed by John Polson

by Walter Chaw It’s one thing to say that Swimfan is a boldly unoriginal rip-off of such gems as The Crush, Deadly Friend, Wicked, and Poison Ivy, but it’s another, far more disturbing thing altogether to note that Swimfan travels the same inexplicable path of the moon-faced pork-pie Lolita so purposefully trundled by the likes of Alicia Silverstone, Kristy Swanson, Julia Stiles, and Drew Barrymore. Erika Christensen–memorably spacey as the troubled daughter in Soderbergh’s Traffic–reveals herself in Swimfan as just the next completely interchangeable cherubic baby-fat starlet to try (or continue) to sully her ephemeral image in a role day-trippers might mistake for “edgy.” Make no mistake, Swimfan may be many things, but it’s about as edgy as Christensen’s Romanesque elbow.

More Mulatto Than Chocolate: FFC Interviews David Gordon Green & Paul Schneider

February 16, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Interviews

AlltherealgirlsinterviewtitleWalter Chaw 'exfoliates' the stuff that matters with the gifted minds behind ALL THE REAL GIRLS

February 16, 2003|I met David Gordon Green and Paul Schneider in the lounge mezzanine of Denver's historic Mayan Landmark Theater; they met each other while attending the North Carolina School of the Arts. Green: "I wrote the script for All the Real Girls before George Washington, while Paul and I were still in college. I wanted to make a movie that captured the genuine feeling of being young and in love." Schneider: "We both got dumped by girls that we were madly in love with. We were completely depressed and we just sat in my room listening to the most melancholy music we could find."

Daredevil (2003)

February 14, 2003Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Sci-Fi, Superhero, Theatrical, Thriller

**/****
starring Ben Affleck, Jennifer Garner, Michael Clarke Duncan, Colin Farrell
written and directed by Mark Steven Johnson

Daredevilby Walter Chaw There’s a real grittiness to Mark Steven Johnson’s Daredevil–most of it attributable to Frank Miller’s “Daredevil: Born Again” comic-book series (penned just prior to the author’s seminal “The Dark Knight Returns”), from which the film borrows tone, religious iconography, and a certain washed-out colour scheme as reflected in Ericson Core’s moody cinematography (which is closer to his work on Payback than on The Fast and the Furious). The problem is that the film’s tenor and Catholic fetishism are moored to the light redemption of the titular hero, the bizarre stigmata and martyrdom of one villain (and forced genuflection of another), and perhaps the suggested rebirth of a femme fatale. Daredevil, then, is interesting for its borrowed elements, but it doesn’t have any real weight to justify the treatment.

O (2001) [Signature Series] – DVD

February 12, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Romance, Shakespeare, Teen, Thriller

**½/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras B
starring Mekhi Phifer, Josh Hartnett, Julia Stiles, Elden Henson
screenplay by Brad Kaaya, based on the play “Othello” by William Shakespeare
directed by Tim Blake Nelson

by Walter Chaw Tim Blake Nelson’s updating of Shakespeare’s “Othello” is hamstrung by a deficient script that hastily neglects motivation and character depth in favour of a dependence on our familiarity with the source material to lend O its tragic gravity. It overuses animalism and the specious equation of high school basketball with military conquests and prowess, and it unforgivably consigns the Desdemona character to a haughty afterthought and a series of shrill, shallow pronouncements. Another fatal misjudgment of the hackneyed and over-complicated plot (which actually seems to contradict itself right at its conclusion) reduces Iago’s wickedness to his need to earn daddy’s approval. Admittedly, though, O‘s transplanting of “Othello”‘s insular Venetian political setting to an exclusive upper-class prep school is a wry and excellent decision, offering any number of opportunities for satirizing the glowering atmosphere and claustrophobic in-fighting of high school at its most advantaged.

How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days (2003)

February 7, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Romance, Theatrical

*½/****
starring Kate Hudson, Matthew McConaughey, Adam Goldberg, Michael Michele
screenplay by Kristen Buckley & Brian Regan and Burr Steers, based on the book by Michele Alexander and Jeannie Long
directed by Donald Petrie

Howtoloseaguyin10daysby Walter Chaw In the rush to anoint Gore Vidal blood relation Burr Steers the next Dylan Kidd (writer-director of Roger Dodger), I wonder how many people suspected that Steers’s follow-up act to Igby Goes Down would be the conceptual lollapalooza of habitual bad director Donald Petrie’s How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days. Only one of three scribes to blame for this mess, Steers seems to have contributed a certain smug misanthropy to the picture of the variety that fuelled the overpraised Salinger ape Igby, with Brian Regan and Kristen Buckley, the brain trust behind 102 Dalmatians, apparently responsible for the sentimental slapstick garbage that comprises the rest of the piece. What emerges is a shrunken chimera of a movie, hobbled by a pair of competing mainstream romantic movie contrivances (“One of them is lying. So is the other,” assures the tagline), a self-knowledge of its own crapulence coupled with an inability to do anything about it, and a middle that, surprisingly, doesn’t totally stink.

Monster’s Ball (2001) – DVD|Monster’s Ball [Lions Gate Signature Series] – DVD

February 2, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Romance

***½/****
DVD – Image A+ Sound A Extras A-
DVD (SIGNATURE SERIES) – Image A+ Sound A Extras A-
starring Billy Bob Thornton, Halle Berry, Peter Boyle, Heath Ledger
screenplay by Milo Addica & Will Rokos
directed by Marc Forster

by Walter Chaw Two men tell poor Leticia Musgrove (Halle Berry) that she’s beautiful during the course of Marc Forster’s pitch-black Monster’s Ball. The first is her condemned husband Lawrence (Sean Combs), and the second is Hank (Billy Bob Thornton), the head of the death-row guard team responsible for bringing Lawrence to the electric chair. The circumstances and timing of their compliments, separated by almost the entire body of the film, says a great deal about where Monster’s Ball has gone in the interim. Lawrence says it as his last words to his wife during their last time together on the last day of his life. Hank says it over a pint of ice cream, just after an important revelation has been claimed without his knowledge. In both instances, there is a simple, fated truth to the words: the first utterance represents the realization that there’s nothing left to say, the second the recognition that some things are best left unspoken.

Sweet Home Alabama (2002) – DVD

January 29, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD, Romance

½*/**** Image A Sound A- Extras C+
starring Reese Witherspoon, Josh Lucas, Patrick Dempsey, Fred Ward
screenplay by C. Jay Cox
directed by Andy Tennant

by Walter Chaw The first clue as to the vileness of Andy Tennant's Sweet Home Alabama is that it's named after a Lynyrd Skynrd song (paving the way, one supposes, for Freebird: The Movie and Smokestack Lightning); the second clue is that it's the first Reese Witherspoon picture in a while to find a way to squander her almost preternatural ability to salvage terrible scripts and spent concepts floating her way post-Election. Extraordinarily boring and unfunny while redolent with the sort of bad behaviour-made-cutesy that made stars of Julia Roberts and Ashley Judd, Sweet Home Alabama at least has the unlikely distinction of rendering Witherspoon shrill, dull, and during one ugly drunken tirade, irredeemable.

Blue Crush (2002) [Collector’s Edition] (Widescreen) – DVD

January 27, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Germany, Romance, Sports

***/**** Image A- Sound A+ Extras B-
starring Kate Bosworth, Michelle Rodriguez, Matthew Davis, Sanoe Lake
screenplay by Lizzy Weiss & John Stockwell, based on the article "Surf Girls of Maui" by Susan Orlean
directed by John Stockwell

by Walter Chaw Bob Marley sings "Could You Be Loved" as a quartet of surf girls in a finned vintage powder-blue ride, yellow surfboards strapped to its roof, chase the dawn to catch the perfect pipe breaking over Hawaii's sand bars and coral reefs. There is possibly no finer capsule of the adrenaline of early morning and youth in recent memory, and while Blue Crush, the movie surrounding this moment, can't sustain that feeling of hope springing eternal, what it manages is an estrogen opera so intensely feminine that it serves as the antidote (and cannier doppelgänger) to Diesel's xXx flex-a-thon.

My Big Fat Greek Wedding (2002) – DVD

January 26, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Drama, DVD, Romance

**/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras C
starring Nia Vardalos, John Corbett, Michael Constantine, Lainie Kazan
screenplay by Nia Vardalos
directed by Joel Zwick

by Walter Chaw Destined to be one of those much-touted Hollywood discovery stories, Nia Vardalos's one-woman play "My Big Fat Greek Wedding" was seen by Rita Wilson (Mrs. Tom Hanks) and ultimately conceived as a film for veteran bad-TV director Joel Zwick (Hanks's "bosom buddy," as it were). The results are predictably sloppy: all expansive gestures, big emotions, and ethnic sitcom generalities that were handled with more intelligence and wit by Moonstruck. The sad reality of My Big Fat Greek Wedding's stultifying predictability and stand-up sensibility–what plays well as a monologue translates clumsily as film narrative–is that there are enough broad stabs at overbearing mothers and in-law tensions that folks will come away from the film mistaking a warmth for their own experiences with an overabundance of affection for My Big Fat Greek Wedding.

S1m0ne (2002) – DVD

January 24, 2003Posted in2000s, Al Pacino, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Satire, Sci-Fi

***½/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras C+
starring Al Pacino, Catherine Keener, Jason Schwartzman, Winona Ryder
written and directed by Andrew Niccol

“Pygmalion saw so much to blame in women that he came at last to abhor the sex, and resolved to live unmarried. He was a sculptor, and had made with wonderful skill a statue of ivory, so beautiful that no living woman came anywhere near it… His art was so perfect that it concealed itself and its product looked like the workmanship of nature.” – Bulfinch’s Mythology

Andrew Niccol’s brilliant S1m0ne is an updating of the Pygmalion myth substituting a sculptor of clay for a sculptor of film and his disdain for women for disdain towards the peccadilloes of actors. The ending, however, stays the same.

Python II (2002) – DVD

January 23, 2003Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Bulgaria, DVD, Horror, Sci-Fi, Thriller

Python 2
*/**** Image C Sound A
starring William Zabka, Dana Ashbrook, Alex Jolig, Simmone Mackinnon
screenplay by Jeff Rank
directed by L.A. McConnell

by Walter Chaw Though I’ve never seen Python I, I had a surprisingly easy time following Python 2, a direct-to-Sci Fi Channel CGI worm-fest that at least has the distinction of featuring a terrible-looking monster no worse than the one in its higher-profile cousin, Anaconda. It seems that a huge snake (two of them, in fact, making the title “clever”) is running around in cheap-to-film-in faux Russia, chomping digital comrades to the accompaniment of mirth-inspiring crunchy sound effects as a heroic CIA agent (Billy Zabka, who appears to also have been in the first of the Python epic) is sent to capture the beastie.

One Hour Photo (2002) [Widescreen] – DVD

January 22, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Thriller

**/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B
starring Robin Williams, Connie Nielsen, Michael Vartan, Gary Cole
written and directed by Mark Romanek

by Walter Chaw There is a keystone moment in the middle of One Hour Photo where lonely SavMart photo-technician Sy (Robin Williams) mourns his impending layoff by providing uncanny approximations of the comedy and tragedy masks in fast succession. Long our weeping velvet-clown chronicler of the twee ironic comedy of life in balance with death (hence his affection for misusing cancer-riddled kids and turning every film, including this one, into a Jacko-esque kid-love pulpit), Williams isn’t stretching here to play a lonely and disturbed old guy who becomes fixated on a pretty family so much as he’s indulging yet again in an aspect of his persona always fluttering under the surface of his more frenetic characterizations.