In America (2003) + Big Fish (2003)|Big Fish [“Fairy Tale for a Grown-Up” Edition] – DVD

February 7, 2006Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Directors: Tim Burton, Drama, DVD, Fantasy, Theatrical

IN AMERICA
***½/****
starring Paddy Considine, Samantha Morton, Sarah Bolger, Emma Bolger
screenplay by Jim Sheridan & Naomi Sheridan
directed by Jim Sheridan

BIG FISH
***/**** Image A Sound A Extras B+
starring Ewan McGregor, Albert Finney, Billy Crudup, Jessica Lange
screenplay by John August, based on the novel by Daniel Wallace
directed by Tim Burton

Bigfishcap

by Walter Chaw Jim Sheridan's In America sees the nation's shores as the limits of a grand, dilapidated moviehouse, introduced at the border with The Lovin' Spoonful's "Do You Believe in Magic?" and sustained by the ideas that all deaths are dimpled with nobility, and that all life is instilled with the fever dream of an insomniac's carnival. Sheridan's all-night ice cream parlors are, of course, Edward Hopper paintings populated by pink-clad waitresses, while screaming men haunt his rundown tenement brownstones ("This house isn't haunted, it's a magic house"–referring to the domicile, then America), artists and mystics marooned on emotional floes by some seismic existential divorce. And his heroes are a family, aliens in America illegally who discover that their only ward against life's necessary evils is a faith in imagination and a fingernail declaration of hope.

Just Like Heaven (2005) – DVD

February 6, 2006Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD, Romance, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/**** Image A Sound A Extras C
starring Reese Witherspoon, Mark Ruffalo, Donal Logue, Dina Waters
screenplay by Peter Tolan and Leslie Dixon, based on the novel If Only It Were True by Marc Levy
directed by Mark Waters

Justlikeheavencapby Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. I’m reminded of another magic-realist romantic comedy named after a song: Emile Ardolino’s sweet, all-but-forgotten Chances Are, starring Robert Downey Jr. as the reincarnate of a man killed en route to meeting his sweetie Cybill Shepherd. He falls in love with Shepherd’s daughter Mary Stuart Masterson, then falls back in love with Shepherd. This is a circuitous, distressingly disinteresting route towards expressing that Mark Waters’s Just Like Heaven is not only a movie I really hate, but also a movie that’s been done so many times before that instead of needing to follow along with the rigid requirements of the picture, you have time to comb the memory banks for obscure films that are better variations on this theme. (Stuff like Ghost, natch, but even relentlessly creepy garbage like Return to Me (also titled after a song) or Heart Condition or Always–or Truly, Madly, Deeply or The Bishop’s Wife. Or the pinnacles of the ghost-love genre, Laura and Rebecca.) Just the fact that it turns The Cure‘s titular tune into a big sloppy glob of Lilith Fair saliva is enough to turn this child of the ’80s right off, sure, but Just Like Heaven is also exactly the kind of piss that uses pop songs to narrate the action.

When a Stranger Calls (2006)

February 3, 2006Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Horror, Theatrical, Thriller, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Camilla Belle, Tommy Flanagan, Tessa Thompson, Brian Geraghty
screenplay by Jake Wade Wall, based on the screenplay by Steve Feke and Fred Walton
directed by Simon West

Whenastrangercalls06by Walter Chaw There's nothing patently, obviously offensive about Simon West's abominable remake of the already awful "thriller" When a Stranger Calls: It's neither misogynistic nor racist nor really anything more than exactly what you'd expect from a project like this, dumped as it has been in the wasteland of another early-February. It's so studiedly inoffensive, in fact, that you could take an elderly nun to it and there would be nary a flutter in her rigidly tender sensibilities. It tittles no ates, manufactures no suspense, and no one in a packed audience of four-hundred folks at the preview screening rustled an inch when the cat–not once, but twice–provided the false jump before the "real" one, though I confess the reason for that might be that by the time West and company get around to actually having something happen, most anyone with any kind of sense is asleep or halfway home. I've failed to mention that it's acted by heavy-browed lead Camilla Belle (as babysitter Johnson, Jill Johnson) like a toy robot with her key only half-wound. Were she to have run out of juice negotiating a wall and leaned there motionless, I wouldn't have batted an eyelash.

In Her Shoes (2005) [Widescreen] – DVD

January 30, 2006Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Germany, Romance, UK

**½/**** Image B Sound B+ Extras B-
starring Cameron Diaz, Toni Collette, Shirley MacLaine, Mark Feuerstein
screenplay by Susannah Grant, based on the novel by Jennifer Weiner
directed by Curtis Hanson

Inhershoescapby Walter Chaw It looks like exactly the kind of formula chick-lit/chick-flick I detest, and not just because, for the most part, when you call something a "chick-" anything, you're doing it at the expense of the "Sex and the City" bimbos you imagine flock to this garbage like a swarm of Jimmy Choo shoe-flies. But Curtis Hanson, with In Her Shoes, overcomes (for an hour or so) that pigeonholing the same way he survived working with Eminem and Brittany Murphy–the same way he brought an adaptation of James Ellroy's un-adaptable L.A. Confidential to the screen and managed to tremor the delicate, carefully-sheathed grace nerve of Michael Chabon in Wonder Boys. His protagonists are worried about their weight, their bank account, and their shoes, of course, but Hanson (whose biggest accomplishment may be in disguising screenwriter Susannah Grant's propensity to pander to her audience in nasty, hypocritical strokes) makes those worries seem important in dissecting the psychology and interpersonal dynamics of his feuding sisters and wizened grandmamma. He shoots Philadelphia as though it were a blight and Florida like a shimmering summer daydream (or a Coppertone commercial)–and I thought that the moment that I would lose respect for it would come around the corner of every single epiphany, but it didn't arrive until admirably late in the game. It's a chick-flick, no question, but it's one with half a brain. Not much, but half a brain is half more than expected.

Pickpocket (1959) [The Criterion Collection] – DVD

January 30, 2006Posted in****/****, 1950s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, FFC Must-Own, France, The Criterion Collection

****/**** Image A Sound A Extras A+
starring Martin La Salle, Marika Green, Jean Pelegri, Dolly Scal
written and directed by Robert Bresson

Pickpocketcapby Walter Chaw Manny Farber described the films of Robert Bresson as “crystalline,” and it’s hard to argue with the singular idea of purity represented by that word: they’re all of gesture and implication, reduced down to the purest grist so that the powder of dramatic movements, rubbed together, might hum in miniature perfection. Diderot, Tolstoy, and especially Dostoevsky are sent to the kiln in Bresson, emerging at the end as a distillation thick with the observation that human behaviour, winnowed down, is only as mysterious as the mechanical motions of insects. When you use a term like “crystalline,” you evoke clockwork–the inner workings of music boxes, say. It’s wilfully, damnably, emotionally inscrutable, of course, and if it also calls to mind a watchmaker and his intricate art, then find another explanation for Bresson’s fascination with, and eroticizing of, the secret life of hands.

Mr. Frears Presents: FFC Interviews Stephen Frears

January 29, 2006Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Interviews, UK

SfrearsinterviewtitleJanuary 29, 2006|My first glimpse of lanky British director Stephen Frears was in passing as he took shelter from a frigid early-December wind in a doorway in front of Denver's historic Brown Palace Hotel. Iconoclastic at the least, Frears turned his back on a career in law and began his tutelage in the arts at the Royal Court Theatre under Karel Reisz and, eventually, Lindsay Anderson, on whose fantastic If… he worked before making his feature debut with Gumshoe in 1971. A two-film partnership with playwright Hanif Kureishi later yielded My Beautiful Laundrette and Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, and they, along with the magnificent Joe Orton biopic Prick Up Your Ears, brought Frears to the attention of Hollywood, where he's since had his share of ups (Dangerous Liaisons, The Grifters, and High Fidelity) and downs (Hero and Mary Reilly, high-profile flops made back-to-back for the same studio).

Thumbsucker (2005) + The Chumscrubber (2005) – DVDs

January 26, 2006Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Satire, Teen

THUMBSUCKER
**/**** DVD – Image A- Sound B+ Extras B
starring Lou Pucci, Tilda Swinton, Vincent D'Onofrio, Keanu Reeves
screenplay by Mike Mills, based on the novel by Walter Kirn
directed by Mike Mills

Thumbsuckercapby Walter Chaw With the brief reprieve offered the Sundance imprint by Junebug now smelling a lot more like "fluke" than "trend," find Mike Mills's underwhelming Thumbsucker, another Sundance sensation so familiar in its affected suburban quirk that its peculiarities seem like formula and its attacks on middle-class perversity and malaise seem all too comfortable. There simply isn't much heart left in this pursuit, this punching of holes into the façade of planned communities and their plastic citizenry–this central conceit of broken people leaning on psychic crutches as the apocalypse of the day-to-day cascades in on them in blue, stylized waves.

The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (2005)

January 25, 2006Posted in2000s, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, France, Mexico, Mystery, Theatrical, Western

*½/****
starring Tommy Lee Jones, Barry Pepper, Julio Cesar Cedillo, Dwight Yoakam
screenplay by Guillermo Arriaga
directed by Tommy Lee Jones

Threeburialsby Walter Chaw Crash by way of Cormac McCarthy, Tommy Lee Jones's "fuck you" of a mouthful The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada is another fairytale salvo from the race divide, fired from that good place that results in cultural artifacts so unbearably cheesy and proselytizing that any potential heat is lost long before the second reel has finished unspooling. It's about serendipity, this elegy for the American West, hence no transgression is left unredeemed in its long, rambling, "it's good for you, so swallow it" narrative, with blame going in equal portion to Jones–whose smug, smarter-than-you are attitude has shoehorned him into prestigious position as the resident asshole of Man of the House, Men in Black II, and The Missing–and screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga (21 Grams, Amores Perros), who paints every Mexican in the film in the same shade of saintly. (All the gringos, on the other hand, have a lot to learn about the grand mystery of being human.) It's tedious, unsurprising stuff, this picture–the kind of thing that gets the Right in a bunch about how Hollywood is a tool of the subversive Lefties while making smart folks on both sides of the Culture War cringe before its condescension.

Flightplan (2005) [Widescreen] – DVD

January 23, 2006Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Mystery, Thriller

*½/**** Image B- Sound A Extras B+
starring Jodie Foster, Peter Sarsgaard, Erika Christensen, Sean Bean
screenplay by Peter A. Dowling and Billy Ray
directed by Robert Schwentke

by Walter Chaw The bad guys have a plan and to pull it off they need only total omniscience and omnipotence, putting Robert Schwentke's Flightplan in the company of hysterical caper flicks like Arlington Road–though it's also the kind of hysterical estrogen melodrama à la Mildred Pierce in which Jodie Foster specializes these days. Between this and Panic Room, it almost seems as if Foster is taking tough maternal roles to protect the over-exposed, maybe-exploited child actress she used to be, to the point where the quality of the project itself comes second.

Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World (2006) + Why We Fight (2006)

January 20, 2006Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, Denmark, Documentary, France, Satire, Theatrical, UK, War

LOOKING FOR COMEDY IN THE MUSLIM WORLD
*/****
starring Albert Brooks, John Carroll Lynch, Sheetal Sheth, Fred Dalton Thompson
written and directed by Albert Brooks

WHY WE FIGHT
**/****
directed by Eugene Jarecki

by Walter Chaw The most frustrating thing about Albert Brooks's crushingly boring, infuriatingly unfunny Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World (hereafter Comedy) is the possibility that such was the intention all along. 'Lost in Arabia' (well, India and Pakistan–let's not get crazy, here) finds Brooks doing a high-wire act with post-modernism–the same one he's been doing his whole career, as it happens. At some point, though, it's fair to wonder how long you can push self-awareness before it finally flies apart in a storm of narcissistic deconstruction. Mull over, if you will, a moment where Brooks (as Brooks) recreates one of his classic gags–involving the world's most ironically-tragic ventriloquist–in the middle of an interminable stand-up routine staged in a New Delhi auditorium, closing his act with the dummy (the wooden one) drinking a glass of water. It's Brooks, and Brooks's film, in microcosm: a man who returns the term "mortification" to ritual and religion while being incapable of subsuming the belief that he's still the smartest guy in the room. The trick of Comedy is that in making a movie that isn't very funny about a man who isn't very funny in the middle of a gulf of cultural misunderstanding that's especially not very funny, Brooks hopes to draw a corollary between how the troubles of the world boil down to everybody's inability to communicate. As revelations go, it's not earth-shattering. Guess it goes without saying that it's also not worth the effort to get there.

The PianoTuner of EarthQuakes (2006); Mutual Appreciation (2006); Unknown (2006)

January 19, 2006Posted in2000s, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, Esoterica, Family, Fantasy, France, Germany, Music, Mystery, Romance, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

THE PIANOTUNER OF EARTHQUAKES
*½/****
starring Amira Casar, Gottfried John, Assumpta Serna, César Saracho
screenplay by Alan Passes and The Quay Brothers
directed by The Quay Brothers

MUTUAL APPRECIATION
***½/****
starring Justin Rice, Rachel Clift, Andrew Bujalski, Seung-Min Lee
written and directed by Andrew Bujalski

UNKNOWN
½*/****
starring Jim Caviezel, Greg Kinnear, Bridget Moynahan, Joe Pantoliano
screenplay by Matthew Waynee
directed by Simon Brand

by Walter Chaw The Quay Brothers, Stephen and Timothy, are marvellous animators, having shepherded stop-motion and a disquieting biomechanical ethic into a series of notably discomfiting shorts, more than one of which pays tribute to their hero/mentor Jan Svankmajer. I met their 1995 transition to live-action features (Institute Benjamenta) with equal parts excitement, curiosity, and trepidation–I believed they'd be a little like either fellow animator-turned-director Tim Burton or those masters of a form who overreach by switching to a different medium, à la Michael Jordan. The truth is somewhere in-between, as the Quays have retained a bit of their glacial patience and a marked affection for created environments but have miscalculated the extent to which our fascination with animate clockworks translates into a commensurate fascination with people sitting around, staring at a wall. The former inspires existential thoughts on the nature of sentience; the latter generally inspires boredom. No question in my mind that something's lurking in the Quays' underneath, but it's important to mark that fine line distinguishing fascination from obtuseness for the sake of itself. Exploring the waking/dreamlife divide is interesting–but it's neither original nor terribly useful when the main tactic seems to be to conjure up pomposity-inspired sleepiness.

Transamerica (2005) + Mrs. Henderson Presents (2005)

January 18, 2006Posted in2000s, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Music, Road Movie, Theatrical, UK, War

TRANSAMERICA
**/****
starring Felicity Huffman, Kevin Zegers, Fionnula Flanagan, Graham Greene
written and directed by Duncan Tucker

MRS. HENDERSON PRESENTS
*½/****
starring Judi Dench, Bob Hoskins, Will Young, Christopher Guest
screenplay by Martin Sherman
directed by Stephen Frears

by Walter Chaw Duncan Tucker makes his hyphenate debut with Transamerica, one of the first pictures distributed by the Weinsteins under their new aegis. Predictably, all the earmarks of the earnest indie genre Miramax blazed are cemented into place: it's over-written when it's not overreliant on a soundtrack of ethnically-cued melodies (the wood flute marks the appearance of an Indian, for instance) and folksy ballads (I challenge you not to 'pit up when a tune about a rose blooming accompanies our hero swapping his "outie" for an "innie"); narratively creaky; and hangs its hopes on its star, Felicity Huffman, to impose nuance where there is none. Huffman's performance being the sort of stunt in a minor independent film that plays fast and loose with smug liberal paternalism should guarantee her an Oscar nomination–and it can't hurt that another Leonardo DiCaprio doppelgänger arrives post-Michael Pitt in the form of Kevin Zegers, trailing a little pathos and a little inappropriate titillation on his thin shoulders.

Match Point (2005)

January 13, 2006Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Luxembourg, Romance, Scarlett Johansson, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

***/****
starring Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Scarlett Johansson, Emily Mortimer, Matthew Goode
written and directed by Woody Allen

Matchpointby Walter Chaw Match Point is a quasi-Patricia Highsmith flick about a rudderless Ripley cruising like a shark amongst England's polite society, and the extent to which it works has to do with the degree to which its philosophy of chance and living with ghosts attaches itself to the zeitgeist. The picture opens with a shot of a tennis ball lobbed low and in slow-motion into the top of a net, an image that has as its echo a key moment where a wedding ring tossed towards a river rebounds against a fence into the street. The voiceover talks about the common fear that our lives are governed by happenstance and entropy, transforming the ball going forward into a metaphor for winning–and back into one for losing. Using this as gospel, it's interesting to wonder what it means that, when push comes to shove, our hero's victory is defined by his defeat. Match Point is Woody Allen's best film in some time, which is a left-handed compliment at best; better to say that it's another decent millennial fable about class, the vicissitudes of fate, the reptilian hunger of infiltrating the social strata, and living with ghosts.

Tristan + Isolde (2006)

January 13, 2006Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Czech Republic, Drama, Germany, Romance, Theatrical, UK, War

*/****
starring James Franco, Sophia Myles, Rufus Sewell, David O'Hara
screenplay by Dean Georgaris
directed by Kevin Reynolds

Tristanisoldeby Walter Chaw After bravely transforming the Robin Hood legend into a case of thirtysomething love jones with Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, Kevin Costner's well-known ex-best friend Kevin Reynolds turns the Tristan + Isolde legend into a WB/TIGER BEAT-friendly, mouth-breathing bodice-ripper indicated by lots of backlighting, orgasmic slow-mo, and dialogue purple enough to blind a Bronte sister. It's shot like a perfume commercial and written like a florid creative-writing exercise, one packed with such AM Gold, Luther Ingram treasures as: "Why does loving you feel so wrong?" Well, it might have something to do with said love being the basis for the Guinevere/Lancelot adultery story in which a woman comes between a king and his most trusted knight, leading to the ideological and literal collapse of a kingdom. Or it might have something to do with the fact that the actors playing the lovers in question never for a moment manage to spark the soggy tinder packed beneath the story. This allows a great deal of time for the sentient beings left in the audience after the ten-minute-mark exodus to suss out why this thing was delayed, then dumped in the middle of the January dead zone. It also, incidentally, caused me to fantasize about somehow harnessing the ability of films like this to make 125 minutes feel like six days for youth-giving effects and racing box scores.

Glory Road (2006) + Last Holiday (2006)

January 13, 2006Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Comedy, Drama, Romance, Sports, Theatrical

GLORY ROAD
½*/****
starring Josh Lucas, Derek Luke, Emily Deschanel, Jon Voight
screenplay by Christopher Cleveland & Bettina Gilois and Gregory Allen Howard
directed by James Gartner

LAST HOLIDAY
*/****
starring Queen Latifah, LL Cool J, Timothy Hutton, Gérard Depardieu
screenplay by Jeffrey Price & Peter S. Seaman, based on the screenplay by J.B. Priestley
directed by Wayne Wang

by Walter Chaw There are two big laughs in Disney/Jerry Bruckheimer's African-American Hoosiers, Glory Road. The first comes when some white guy says derisively, "Can you imagine what basketball dominated by Negroes would look like?", while the sight of defeated Kentucky coaching legend Adolph Rupp (Jon Voight), vilified by history perhaps unfairly (though there's no question that he's vilified unfairly by this film), mourning the loss of the National Championship Game to an upstart team prompts the second. Both moments speak to the biggest problems in a film riddled with little ones: the former because it makes the audience complicit in–and comfortable with–the picture's callousness and casual blanket racism, and the latter because everything that happens in the film is already a foregone conclusion. The only appeal left is rooted in seeing the black players put on exactly the kind of degrading sideshow the picture suggests they're too human for. Glory Road is smug, offensive, and ignorant in the way that films with no self-awareness are ignorant–wrapped in a story designed specifically to make people cheer and believe that this one game in 1966 changed peoples' attitudes towards African-Americans in sports instead of simply bolstering the idea that the black athlete was advantageous and alien rather than just merely alien.

Dark Water (2005) [Unrated Widescreen Edition] – DVD

January 12, 2006Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Horror, Mystery, Thriller

***½/**** Image A Sound A Extras C+
starring Jennifer Connelly, John C. Reilly, Tim Roth, Dougray Scott
screenplay by Rafael Yglesias, based on the novel by Koji Suzuki
directed by Walter Salles

by Walter Chaw Dahlia (Jennifer Connelly) is having a nightmare. Dark water is flooding into the ramshackle apartment she’s been forced to rent with young daughter Ceci (Ariel Gade) now that husband Kyle (Dougray Scott) has left her for another woman, where she encounters the visage of her spiteful alcoholic mother. Connelly’s performance throughout, but especially within these few seconds, is so complex, so almost physically wrenching, that the knowledge that Dark Water was badly marketed, critically savaged, and largely ignored stings all the more. Specifically, the moment in question underscores how far from the usual supernatural thriller this picture aspires to be: a ghost story in which the hauntings are golems of the soul instead of ectoplasm, cold spots, and rattling chains. In many ways, Dark Water works as an update of Jack Clayton’s The Innocents, another story of a single woman in a strange place, beset by children and other reptiles of the spirit. And in return, that image of corrupt water invading a woman’s place of sanctuary with her daughter, already laden with archetype, gets a bracing shot of genre smarts.

Film Freak Central’s Top 10 of 2005

January 9, 2006Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Authors: Walter Chaw, Best-of Lists, Blog

Top102005graphicsmall

January 9, 2006|After a year, 2004, wherein we indulged in the fantasy that we could forget our recent past in favour of better tomorrows, 2005 finds us obsessed with the things we've lost (especially children), the things we deny, and the difficulty of living with ghosts. It was a reflection of our political landscape split starkly into a Yeatsian twain between the worst, with their passionate intensity, and the best, lacking all conviction–the ultra-conservatives producing more of the same old tired, divisive hate (The Island showed that even Old Scratch could be predictable and boring) and the ultra-liberals producing high-minded garbage that either studiously avoided a point-of-view (The Interpreter, The Constant Gardener, Kingdom of Heaven, Syriana) or was so clearly left-wing proselytizing that it jettisoned context and energy in favour of bland political allegory (Good Night, and Good Luck.). The reason Bush Jr. won a second term is that he ran unopposed–and after the disastrous year the Grand Old Party had under him as their fearless leader, the real tragedy is that there's still no strong message in any opposing party to fill the void. Which explains, I guess, why the most ambivalent, overtly politicized films of the year were not only ultimately mediocre, but also made by a guy who taught himself how to finally direct an almost-passable film on the trial-and-mostly-error backs of three of the most highly-anticipated films of all time (George Lucas and Revenge of the Sith) and the king of everything for everyone (Steven Spielberg and his War of the Worlds and Munich). The blatant exceptions were Christopher Nolan's genre Munich (Batman Begins) and David Cronenberg's A History of Violence, a film that says volumes about vengeance and the delusions of the righteous while trapped in the body of a good old American, sexy dames and guns-a-blazing, neo-noir.

Broken Lizard’s Puddle Cruiser (1996) + The Dukes of Hazzard (2005) [Unrated – Widescreen] – DVDs

January 9, 2006Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD, Romance, ZERO STARS

Puddle Cruiser
½*/**** Image C- Sound C- Extras C
starring Jay Chandrasekhar, Kevin Heffernan, Stephen Lemme, Paul Soter
screenplay by Broken Lizard
directed by Jay Chandrasekhar

THE DUKES OF HAZZARD
ZERO STARS/**** Image B Sound B+ Extras C
starring Johnny Knoxville, Seann William Scott, Jessica Simpson, Burt Reynolds
screenplay by John O'Brien
directed by Jay Chandrasekhar

by Walter Chaw The first film from what would become the comedy troupe Broken Lizard, Puddle Cruiser was completed and released in 1996 on a budget of a quarter of a million dollars and enjoys the dubious distinction of being irrefutable evidence that Jay Chandrasekhar and company are as funny now as they always were. Something about Chandrasekhar's Adam Corolla-on-quaaludes persona rubs me exactly the wrong way: it isn't the delivery, really, so much as the pervasive sense of smug superiority, not to mention the hostility and, while we're at it, the fact that he's just not funny. With Puddle Cruiser, he's created a film best described as a carbon copy of Noah Baumbach's debut pic Kicking and Screaming–the key difference between them that Chandrasekhar and co-writers Kevin Heffernan, Steve Lemme, Paul Soter, and Erik Stolhanske are woefully out of their element as scenarists, gag writers, actors, you name it. That Broken Lizard has attained a level of popularity now with garbage like Super Troopers, Club Dread, and The Dukes of Hazzard is astonishing, if not as astonishing as Chandrasekhar having helmed a handful of episodes from the brilliant "Arrested Development"'s first season. Goes to show that even a glib asshole can't ruin a gifted cast, pitch-perfect script, or ironclad premise.

Cheaper by the Dozen 2 (2005)

December 21, 2005Posted in2000s, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, Family, Theatrical, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Steve Martin, Bonnie Hunt, Piper Perabo, Tom Welling
screenplay by Sam Harper
directed by Adam Shankman

Cheaperbythedozen2by Walter Chaw I spent altogether too much time during Cheaper by the Dozen 2 anticipating the moment when Hilary Duff would snuffle some sugar cubes out of a little girl’s hand–but in my defense, what else was there to do? I feel strange saying that this film is unwatchable because, hey, I’m proof that, technically, it is watchable; I guess I should say that it’s highly inadvisable to watch this film. I want to be clever, to turn a phrase that better illustrates the point, but in cases like these it’s probably better to be straightforward. If you find yourself in a theatre with this film, leave. It’s awful. Director Adam Shankman is the Uwe Boll of family movies: he doesn’t know how to pace a picture, he has no idea what to do with a camera (check out an outdoor banquet sequence that looks like it was shot under muddy water), and his use of John Debney’s atrocious, hate-crime of a score should set off Amnesty International’s radar. This is film as punishment, I’m serious. It’s never funny, never insightful, never valuable in any way. Kids might like it in the way that kids like anything that’s short and kinetic, yet the film preys upon a consistent mass hunger for “family” entertainment, and children and idiots deserve better supervision. Family films in the United States seem defined only as having no “objectionable” content, such as non-cartoon violence, a whiff of poetry, or any hint of sexuality. At the risk of being a rebel, let me offer the heretical view that the only content that’s truly objectionable is witless sludge like Cheaper by the Dozen 2.

Must Love Dogs (2005) [Widescreen Edition] – DVD

December 20, 2005Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD, Romance

*/**** Image B Sound B Extras D+
starring Diane Lane, John Cusack, Dermot Mulroney, Elizabeth Perkins
screenplay by Gary David Goldberg, based on the novel by Claire Cook
directed by Gary David Goldberg

by Walter Chaw There must be some kind of comfort in seeing a film that is a carbon copy with only minor variations of a bazillion other films exactly like it. Or maybe the champions of something like Must Love Dogs come equipped with a sensory mechanism that makes them more attuned to detecting nuance between what appear to my untrained eyes to be identical low-aspiring/low-achieving, plug-and-play clockworks. Or maybe, just maybe, the people who will love this movie just don’t expect that much from their movies and will, in fact, resent it mightily if you say something that falls out of line with their miniscule expectations. If that’s the case, the demographic that loves stuff like this (or anything by Garry Marshall or Nora Ephron) is as zombified and brainwashed into acceptance of communally-approved garbage as the demographic that loves stuff by George Lucas and Michael Bay. Dimwits, in other words–ones with a Y chromosome and ones without, but a dimwit by any other name would still spend their hard-earned money on feckless garbage masquerading as art. Must Love Dogs is more extruded, like an iron casting, than created–more a mold than a piece of art. Not everything needs to be art, of course, so here goes your proof.