The Girls Next Door: Season One (2005) + Stacked: The Complete Series (2005-2006) – DVDs

Posted in2000s, 2007, Authors: Ian Pugh, Comedy, DVD, Romance, Television

THE GIRLS NEXT DOOR: SEASON ONE
Image A Sound A Extras D+
“Meet the Girls,” “New Girls in Town,” “Happy Birthday, Kendra,” “What Happens in Vegas,” “Fight Night,” “Operation Playmate,” “Just Shoot Me,” “Midsummer Night’s Dream,” “Under the Covers,” “Ghostbusted,” “Grape Expectations,” “I’ll Take Manhattan,” “My Kind of Town,” “Clue-Less,” “It’s Vegas Baby!”

STACKED: THE COMPLETE SERIES
Image B+ Sound C Extras D
“Pilot,” “Beat the Candidate,” “A Fan for All Seasons,” “Gavin’s Pipe Dream,” “The Ex-Appeal,” “Nobody Says I Love You,” “Two Faces of Eve,” “Darling Nikki,” “Crazy Ray,” “iPod,” “Heavy Meddle,” “Goodwizzle Hunting,” “After Party,” “Romancing the Stones,” “You’re Getting Sleepy,” “The Third Date,” “The Day the Music Died,” “Poker,” “The Headmaster”

by Ian Pugh I’m pretty sure it was Jon Stewart who described “lad mags” like MAXIM and STUFF as “porn for people too timid to buy porn,” and under that category we could probably also file PLAYBOY reality series “The Girls Next Door” and the Pamela Anderson sitcom “Stacked”: softcore pap for those too afraid to have God’s honest filth appear on their rental history or cable bill. I’m inclined to believe those same people are apt to use the phrase “turn your brain off” while justifying their love of these silicone parades–which in this case means, what, “shut up and masturbate”? PLAYBOY and Anderson are both cultural artifacts and thus demand scrutiny; protest, however, and you’ll just be dismissed as a double-plus-bad thought cop bringing intelligence to a discussion where it isn’t wanted. You know, the brainiac killjoy who has to say, “Why are you watching this garbage?” The programs themselves shout you down, in fact, before you have a chance to complain: each invokes Shakespeare on a whim (“Girls” in a party and episode named for “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”, “Stacked” in one of its sarcastic faux-intellectual quotations)–not for any genuine comparison, but as a surrogate for intelligence, introduced for the sole purpose of deriding it as impertinent. You’re the idiot, apparently, for harbouring the desire for something substantial out of one of the most widespread and influential media of the last century.

Takeshis’ (2005) – DVD

Takeshis’ (2005) – DVD

Posted in2000s, 2007, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Esoterica, Japan, Satire

**/**** Image B Sound B
starring Takeshi Kitano, Kotomi Kyono, Kayoko Kishimoto, Ren Osugi
written and directed by Takeshi Kitano

by Walter Chaw Midway between Fellini’s 8½ and Bob Fosse’s All That Jazz is Japanese auteur Takeshi Kitano’s Takeshis’, a film that indicates with its possessive title that it belongs to both the director (Takeshi Kitano) and star (“Beat” Takeshi); acknowledging that they’re one and the same (Kitano is billed as the former when he directs, the latter when he performs), they each have a function and persona unique unto themselves. The burden of that division, which Takeshi has taken on since midway through Violent Cop, is illustrated in the picture as a series of fractures that meld reality with televisual reality and filmic reality–nothing so ostentatious as Sven Nykvist and Ingmar Bergman reflected in a mirror in Persona, but going so far as to have “Beat” Takeshi, dressed as a clown, refer to Takeshi Kitano as “that asshole.” The omniscience of the director is referred to often in the text as casting directors (rather, actors playing casting directors, or casting directors playing themselves) remark that Yakuza never look like Kitano (who has made something of a name for himself as a Yakuza: he’s a little like the Japanese Robert De Niro)–and yet the central narrative of the picture then involves the slow evolution of the actor who looks like Kitano into Takeshi Kitano’s Yakuza persona. Kitano is thus marking the difference between the devices of the director and the relatively passive objectification that is the primary definition of an actor–between the godhead inscrutable and the subject humiliated, as well as the eventual bleed-through between the roles actors assume and the mold into which perception forces them.

Dane Cook’s Tourgasm (2006) – DVD

Posted in2000s, 2006, 2007, Authors: Ian Pugh, Comedy, Documentary, DVD, Television

Image A Sound A- Extras D
“The First Laugh,” “Working It Out,” “The United States of Insanity,” “It Was The Best of Times…,” “Determined and Injured,” “Competitively Speaking,” “Beginning of the End,” “Back in the Day,” “The Curtain Call”

by Ian Pugh It’s not that I don’t get Dane Cook. In fact, it’s difficult not to occasionally chuckle when looking over his repertoire, as in ruminating on the general inconvenience of having the Kool-Aid Man burst through your wall and the fact that no one can ever finish a game of Monopoly, or wondering who would write racial epithets while sitting on the toilet, he represents a strict literalization of that old sarcastic summation of stand-up comedy: “He’s sayin’ what we’re all thinkin’!” It’s not that funny, but we all laugh, anyway, partially for Cook’s enthusiasm, partially because he’s a reflection of us at our most vulnerable (that is, at our stalest creative moments), proudly transcribing the idle thoughts and half-attempts at wit that pass through our minds on a daily basis. We laugh, painfully, because we’ve all contemplated what Cook has to say.

That’s My Bush! [The Definitive Collection] – DVD

Posted in2000s, 2007, Authors: Ian Pugh, Comedy, DVD, Satire, Television

Image B+ Sound B+ Extras B-
“An Aborted Dinner Date,” “A Poorly Executed Plan,” “Eenie Meenie Miney MURDER!,” “S.D.I.-AYE-AYE!,” “The First Lady’s Persqueeter,” “Mom ‘E’ D.E.A. Arrest,” “Trapped in a Small Environment,” “Fare Thee Welfare”

“What we’re sick of–and it’s getting even worse–is: You either like Michael Moore or you wanna fuckin’ go overseas and shoot Iraqis. There can’t be a middle ground. Basically, if you think Michael Moore’s full of shit, then you are a super-Christian right-wing whatever. And we’re both just pretty middle-ground guys. We find just as many things to rip on on the left as we do on the right. People on the far left and the far right are the same exact person to us.”
— Trey Parker, “Interview of the Meanest”; IN FOCUS, October 2004

by Ian Pugh I think “South Park” boasts the occasional flash of brilliance, but I resent that its more flagrantly political messages, particularly in the past few seasons, essentially boil down to ‘both sides are fucking crazy: here’s how it really is.’ Trey Parker and Matt Stone strike me less as philosophers than as contrarians who force their perceived sensible alternatives down our throats as the infallible Solution. It’s a shame, too, because Parker and Stone remain two of the most talented satirists of our generation, if not in terms of hot-button topics: The ending of the recent “South Park” episode “Stanley’s Cup,” for instance, attacked sports movies by reminding us that every game involves two teams with similar aspirations, and, of course, Team America: World Police‘s caustic parody of “Rent” is as concise and shocking a criticism of that musical as one will find. I’m not taking the stupidly dismissive “I like you better when you’re funny” position that Tucker Carlson had towards Jon Stewart on CNN’s “Crossfire”, but in the world of “South Park”, there are only three options when it comes to world events: left, right, and middle, the latter being invariably correct. Compared to the innumerable increments in the political spectrum of reality, three extremes are no better than two.

Conversations with Other Women (2005) – DVD

Posted in2000s, 2007, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Romance, UK

**½/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B
starring Aaron Eckhart, Helena Bonham Carter, Nora Zehetner, Eric Eidem
screenplay by Gabrielle Zevin
directed by Hans Canosa

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover There's no real arguing with Conversations with Other Women–you either buy into its common program of relationship angst and mid-life crisis or you don't. Although director Hans Canosa tries to juice things up with a split-screen technique that's less unctuous than the description might suggest, it's still the same Woody Allen-ish trip through romantic failure via witty banter. There's an extent to which this can be entirely watchable, and at no point does the film grind to a halt and become a chore to sit through. Its concept is a tad far-fetched, however, and the insights gleaned from the chance encounter of two people at a wedding reception are nothing you can't find in the pages of any major glossy mag.

The Year Without a Santa Claus (2006) – DVD

The Year Without a Santa Claus (2006) – DVD

Posted in2000s, 2006, Authors: Ian Pugh, Christmas, Comedy, DVD, Family, Musical, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/**** Image B- Sound B
starring John Goodman, Ethan Suplee, Delta Burke, Chris Kattan
written by Larry Wilson and Tom Martin, based on the book by Phyllis McGinley
directed by Ron Underwood

by Ian Pugh I’m not really sure how anyone could consider Santa Claus the cure for December commercialism in this day and age, but it appears to be a popular sentiment right now. Before I knew that the network-television abortion The Year Without a Santa Claus existed, I suffered through The Santa Clause 3: The Escape Clause, a film that carries the same awful message in a way that’s worth mentioning. Tricked by Martin Short’s Jack Frost into relinquishing the job of Santa Claus to him, Tim Allen’s Scott Calvin returns to the North Pole to discover that Christmas has become “Frostmas,” an overwrought celebration of capitalism with all the child-screaming and toy-grabbing that implies. With Jack-Santa having literally taken the “Christ” out of Christmas, Tim Allen strangely becomes a surrogate Jesus figure attempting to reclaim his holiday from the money-grubbing fat man of false jolliness, who of course represents the holiday season as we know it in reality. The Santa Clause 3 essentially amounts to an episode of Allen’s sitcom “Home Improvement”, which is to say not only that it’s terrible, but also that its attempt at a metaphor is crude and obvious–come on, Santa Claus saving Christmas from himself? In retrospect, though, I have to admit that its joyfully malevolent predisposition to be such a balls-out hypocrite is a real head-scratcher worthy of further dissection.

The Holiday (2006)

Posted in2000s, 2006, Authors: Walter Chaw, Christmas, Comedy, Romance, Theatrical, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Cameron Diaz, Kate Winslet, Jude Law, Jack Black
written and directed by Nancy Meyers

by Walter Chaw There are bad movies, and then there are Nancy Meyers movies (first What Women Want, followed by the similarly excrescent Something’s Gotta Give): chick flicks in the most damning, insulting sense of the patronizing term and reason enough to question the wisdom of ever spending money to see a movie. If you go to Meyers’s latest, not only are you about to watch what is easily the worst movie of the year–you’re most likely going to do it in the company of people who’ll actually like it. The Holiday is appallingly written and icky besides in that familiar way of this brand of Love Actually/The Family Stone yuletide romantic refuse, casting Cameron Diaz and Jude Law as lovers fucking away the hours inside a Thomas Kincaid painting while Diaz’s frumpy house-swap buddy, played by Kate Winslet, finds meaning in Santa Monica by propping up a fossil (Eli Wallach) and falling for a James Horner-esque composer of horrible soundtracks (Jack Black). Parliament on the Thames is featured as prominently as the Pacific Coast Highway to underscore either how vacuous the filmmakers are or how stupid they think the audience is, while Hans Zimmer’s soul-sucking, teddy bears-humping score saps away the last hints of credibility anyone has after participating in this gingerbread death march. If the opening voiceover narration by Winslet’s lovelorn Iris isn’t warning enough, consider that the narrative crutch used by Diaz’s emetic movie-trailer editor Amanda is a series of fake movie trailers about Amanda’s romantic imbroglios.

The Venture Bros.: Season One (2003-2004) – DVD

The Venture Bros.: Season One (2003-2004) – DVD

Posted in2000s, 2006, Action, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Ian Pugh, Comedy, DVD, Satire, Television

Image B Sound A- Extras C
“Dia de los Dangerous!,” “Careers in Science,” “Mid-Life Chrysalis,” “Eeney, Meeney, Miney… Magic!,” “The Incredible Mr. Brisby,” “Tag Sale–You’re It!,” “Home Insecurity,” “Ghosts of the Sargasso,” “Ice Station–Impossible!,” “Are You There, God? It’s Me, Dean.,” “Past Tense,” “The Trial of the Monarch,” “Return to Spider-Skull Island”

by Ian Pugh Lengthy postmodern discussions about the drug use in “Scooby-Doo” and the sexual habits of the Smurfs dominated the public mind long before Time Warner acquired the Hanna-Barbera catalogue. It was only a logical move, then, that TimeWarner’s Cartoon Network would devote much of its late-night Adult Swim programming block (“Harvey Birdman: Attorney at Law”, “Sealab 2021”, and, to a lesser degree, “Robot Chicken”) to taking the old H-B anti-classics and filtering them through the fine mesh screen of a contemporary ironic eye. Look here, we’ve got an old superhero, he’s an attorney now, that’s pretty wacky! Check it out, we’ve turned the straightforward drama of “Sealab 2020” into angry surrealism! It works to varying degrees of success, primarily depending upon the individual show’s (or individual episode’s) willingness to move beyond the inherent ridiculousness of its premise. What can we say, then, when “The Venture Bros.” represents the kids-on-adventures serial “Jonny Quest”, a series centred on a family whose surname is a literal synonym for the characters being parodied? Are we meant to gasp when brilliant über-dad Dr. Benton Quest becomes Dr. Thaddeus “Rusty” Venture (voiced by Henry Fool’s James Urbaniak), an ignorant pill-popper, negligent of his teenage sons Hank (co-creator Jackson Publick) and Dean (Michael Sinterniklaas)? Or when bodyguard/second father figure Race Bannon becomes Brock Samson (Patrick Warburton), an emotionally-detected psychopath?

Porky’s Collection 1 2 3 [Special Collector’s Edition] – DVD

Posted in1980s, 2006, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Canada, Comedy, DVD, Teen

PORKY’S (1982)
**½/**** Image D Sound C-
starring Kim Cattrall, Scott Colomby, Kaki Hunter, Nancy Parsons
written and directed by Bob Clark

PORKY’S II: THE NEXT DAY (1983)
**½/**** Image D+ Sound C
starring Dan Monahan, Wyatt Knight, Mark Herrier, Roger Wilson
screenplay by Roger E. Swaybill & Alan Ormsby & Bob Clark
directed by Bob Clark

PORKY’S REVENGE (1985)
**/**** Image D- Sound D+
starring Dan Monahan, Wyatt Knight, Tony Ganios, Mark Herrier
screenplay by Ziggy Steinberg
directed by James Komack

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover There’s nothing more obnoxious than someone being pointlessly revisionist and declaring some bit of cultural detritus a lost masterpiece. Still, I can’t help but be guardedly pleased to discover several inches of depth charted in the legendarily foul waters of the Porky’s franchise. By far the most notorious of the big-name ’80s teen comedies, it was widely attacked for its misogyny–a charge I can’t exactly support yet can’t entirely dispel, either. But as a critic friend pointed out, they’re the only movies that retroactively take place in the Eisenhower era to suggest that all was not well in the American Republic. In fact, the first two films insist on a pervasive racism in their small-town Florida setting, Porky’s finding a character casting off his antisemitic father and Porky’s II: The Next Day baiting the Klan upon stupidly wading into a censorship fight. Coupled with Bob Clark’s blunt-witted realism, it makes for intriguing viewing–which is not to say there wasn’t room for improvement.

The Ant Bully (2006) [Widescreen] – DVD

The Ant Bully (2006) [Widescreen] – DVD

Posted in2000s, 2006, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, DVD, Family

*½/**** Image A Sound B+ Extras C
screenplay by John A. Davis, based on the book by John Nickle
directed by John A. Davis

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover If you read reviews with any degree of seriousness, you’re probably not seeing that many animated kidpix anyway, and so remarking that The Ant Bully is several cuts below the genre’s low standards will fall on deaf ears. Still, I can’t imagine an audience undemanding enough to not see through the film’s cashing in on both the cachet of its source material (a storybook by John Nickle) and the CGI animation gold rush itself. The film is so unenthusiastic about doing its job that it’s completely transparent, exposing its worship of the dollar at every turn of the screw. Even the creators of Shrek and their ilk seem to want to make the movie: there’s no evidence of that with John A. Davis and his team of unmoved movers of pixels.

The Devil Wears Prada (2006) [Widescreen Edition] – DVD

The Devil Wears Prada (2006) [Widescreen Edition] – DVD

Posted in2000s, 2006, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD, France

*½/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras B-
starring Meryl Streep, Anne Hathaway, Stanley Tucci, Simon Baker
screenplay by Aline Brosh McKenna, based on the novel by Lauren Weisberger
directed by David Frankel

by Walter Chaw “Sex and the City” fashion porn married to The Princess Diaries ‘tween ugly-duckling uplift, David Frankel’s facile sitcom The Devil Wears Prada allows Meryl Streep free rein to craft the titular, nattily attired hellspawn. Her presence here gives the film the kind of starfuck quotient tied to Jack Nicholson genre vehicles once upon a time; without much effort, one can imagine a carnival barker pulling the wide-eyed bumpkins into the freak tent with the promise of blue-chip capering. Alas, Streep disappoints by turning in a human performance as an Anna Wintour manqué, drifting about as “Miranda Priestly” in Cruella DeVil mane and couture, operating a publishing empire (fictional RUNWAY MAGAZINE substituting for VOGUE, though Madonna’s “Vogue” features prominently in the soundtrack for the terminally dim) with a soft voice and a sibilant brittleness.

Wild at Heart (1990) [Special Edition] – DVD

Wild at Heart (1990) [Special Edition] – DVD

Posted in1990s, 2006, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, Crime, Directors: David Lynch, Drama, DVD, Esoterica, Palme d'Or Winner, Road Movie, Thriller

**½/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras B
starring Nicolas Cage, Laura Dern, Willem Dafoe, Crispin Glover
screenplay by David Lynch, based on the novel by Barry Gifford
directed by David Lynch

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Back when I ran my website DAYS OF THUNDER, I identified the problem with David Lynch in general (and with Mulholland Drive in specific) as that of a man who didn’t want to know: his films tend to revolve around bland milquetoast heroes and heroines who open Pandora’s Box and then either become destroyed or must stuff horrible people back inside. But when I wrote that, I had repressed the memory of Wild at Heart, which chucks Velveeta America entirely and imagines a world run by Frank Booth and his ilk. Indeed, Wild at Heart wallows in the kinds of kinky horrors that are viewed in Lynch’s other films from a distance, and it’s not a pretty sight. Here is the fallen Eden, Lynch-style, where everyone has eaten from the Tree of Knowledge and been cast out of paradise to fuck, shoot, and act unnaturally before meeting untimely, gory ends.

DIFF ’06: Americanese

Posted in2000s, 2006, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DIFF/SDFF, Drama, Film Festivals, Romance
**½/**** starring Chris Tashima, Allison Sie, Sab Shimono, Munda Razooki screenplay by Eric Byler, based on the novel by Shawn Wong directed by Eric Byler by Walter Chaw Eric Byler's follow-up to his haunted, blue Charlotte Sometimes is this adaptation of Shawn Wong's American Knees, which, like Charlotte Sometimes, follows the day-to-day of Asian-Americans--though unlike that film, it fails to find that buried thrum to tie together the little glimpses comprising the whole. It's not for lack of trying, as Byler (over)uses the dissolve as his primary editing tactic in what tracks as an attempt to poeticize the essentially mundane and to literalize what,…
A Slight Case of Murder (1938) – DVD

A Slight Case of Murder (1938) – DVD

Posted in1930s, 2006, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, Crime, DVD, Gangster

***/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
starring Edward G. Robinson, Jane Bryan, Allen Jenkins, Ruth Donnelly
screenplay by Earl Baldwin and Joseph Schrank, based on the play by Damon Runyon and Howard Lindsay
directed by Lloyd Bacon

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover There’s nothing much that can be said about the creamy goodness of A Slight Case of Murder. Debuting at the tail end of the gangster cycle, the film spoofs Edward G. Robinson’s Little Caesar persona as Remy Marko, a limitlessly vulgar bootlegger who’s gone legit with the end of Prohibition, though his beer still tastes of the bathtub and isn’t selling well. Marko thus finds himself in several binds: how to fend off creditors while being $500k in the hole; how to reconcile the fact that his daughter (Jane Bryan) is engaged to a state trooper (Willard Parker); and how to deal with his country house having just played host to five armoured-car robbers–four of whom were plugged by the most sociopathic of the bunch. All good fun, to be sure, but it’s not a film for the sussing out of complexities: everything here is blunt, on the surface, and immediately gratifying without the necessity of comment.

Bobby (2006) + Fast Food Nation (2006)

Posted in2000s, 2006, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Directors: Richard Linklater, Drama, Mexico, Theatrical, UK

BOBBY
½*/****
starring Harry Belafonte, Joy Bryant, Nick Cannon, Emilio Estevez
written and directed by Emilio Estevez

FAST FOOD NATION
*/****
starring Patricia Arquette, Luis Guzman, Ethan Hawke, Ashley Johnson
screenplay by Eric Schlosser & Richard Linklater
directed by Richard Linklater

by Walter Chaw A completely pointless exercise in winsome, pathetic hand-wringing, the navel-gazing Bobby is just one of this year’s inevitable examples of the power of nepotism in dictating who gets to continue churning out the worst films anyone’s ever seen. Triple-threat Emilio Estevez (doing duties here as bad actor, bad director, and bad writer) continues his reign of terror unabated on the back of poor Bobby Kennedy, and those clips from RFK’s speeches littering the picture are the only things remotely of interest. Bobby itself is a Crash-like roundelay of desperately manufactured bathos, covering the entire spectrum of miserable plotting and characterization from the old battleaxe (Sharon Stone) to the youngsters tripping on acid (to the tune of Jefferson Airplane and images of Vietnam carpet-bombing, natch) to the buttermilk-scrubbed ingénue (Lindsay Lohan) marrying her gay schoolmate (Elijah Wood–that casting admittedly the only hint that the schoolmate is gay) to save him from the draft to the non-drama of an Ambassador Hotel manager (William H. Macy) and his firing of a mildly-racist kitchen manager (Christian Slater). Is there any doubt that each and every one of these folks (and more: best to forget Martin Sheen and the still-execrable Helen Hunt pillow-talking until well-past the point of audience tolerance) will find themselves in the kitchen where/when Bobby meets his end? I imagine them as the cardboard cut-out “friends” Steve Martin’s Lonely Guy uses to simulate a kickin’ cocktail party, here repurposed to simulate “characters” in a movie that’s supposed to mean something.

Strangers with Candy (2006) + Accepted (2006) [Widescreen] – DVDs

Posted in2000s, 2006, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, DVD, Teen

STRANGERS WITH CANDY
*½/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras B
starring Amy Sedaris, Stephen Colbert, Paul Dinello, Ian Holm
screenplay by Stephen Colbert & Paul Dinello & Amy Sedaris
directed by Paul Dinello

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover It may be churlish to hold a film to the standards of a TV show I recently panned, but comparing “Strangers with Candy” the series to Strangers with Candy the movie reveals a massive gulf between the two in both wit and style. The show at least had a sensibility and an idea of what it was satirizing, and it always delivered the goods; if those goods were not to my liking, it wasn’t for lack of trying. But the stillborn film version has neither a sense of craft nor a reason for being: apparently thrown together over a kegger weekend, it’s horribly paced, ugly to look at, and mostly rehashes the broader points of a sitcom that had moved on from its basic premise by the time it reached its final season. Strangers with Candy is neither the movie fans were waiting for nor an attractive intro for neophytes, and will most likely be cable filler before it shuffles off into well-deserved obscurity.

A Good Year (2006) + Harsh Times (2006)

Posted in2000s, 2006, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Directors: Ridley Scott, Drama, Romance, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

A GOOD YEAR
½*/****
starring Russell Crowe, Albert Finney, Marion Cotillard, Freddie Highmore
screenplay by Marc Klein, based on the book by Peter Mayle
directed by Ridley Scott

HARSH TIMES
**/****
starring Christian Bale, Freddy Rodriguez, Eva Longoria, Terry Crews
written and directed by David Ayer

by Walter Chaw The Fighting Temptations, The Family Man–the list of sappy redemption flicks about terrible assholes is as long and lamentable as Ridley Scott’s interminable A Good Year. Masquerading as a man-opause version of Under the Tuscan Sun, it is instead an incredibly cynical play for exactly the kind of audience Scott and Russell Crowe don’t reach and, apparently, shouldn’t bother trying to seduce. Imagine a light, frothy romantic comedy written by Dostoevsky and directed by David Lean: every pratfall registers like a cattle stampede, every delightful romantic misunderstanding like a nuclear disarmament talk. Meanwhile, all around it, golden-drenched landscape shots of Provence play the part of the grinning idiot, dancing like crazy to distract the potentially duped. (Scott at his best works in palettes drained of warmth and heat. Even the sunny Thelma & Louise plays like twenty miles of rough road compared to A Good Year‘s pretty postcards and stultifying stereotypes.) With the whole mess paying off in the most unlikely and irritating sequence of happy endings in a film not directed by Garry Marshall (or his Limey equivalent, Richard Curtis), the choices are either that you believe Scott and Crowe to have lost their minds or that A Good Year is smug and strident for the very reason that its creators are supercilious jackasses long since detached from any notion of the possible. Moreover, the picture demonstrates a marked disdain for those poor sods who aren’t millionaire stockbrokers or possessed of dead uncles with a sprawling villa to will to their heirs.

Little Man (2006) [Loaded with Extra Crap Edition] – DVD

Little Man (2006) [Loaded with Extra Crap Edition] – DVD

Posted in2000s, 2006, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, DVD

Littleman
*/**** Image B Sound B Extras C
starring Marlon Wayans, Shawn Wayans, Kerry Washington, John Witherspoon
screenplay by Keenen Ivory Wayans & Shawn Wayans & Marlon Wayans
directed by Keenen Ivory Wayans

by Walter Chaw An adult male the size of a baby masquerades as a toddler in order to retrieve a diamond he’s stolen and secreted in the purse of a young suburban wife (Kerry Washington) who happens to be contemplating starting a family. This sets the stage for man-baby mistaken for baby-baby jokes, man-baby resenting being mistaken for baby-baby jokes, man-baby trying to suck tits, man-baby raping his adopted mother, and getting-pissed-on gags. Meanwhile, a crotchety old man character (John Witherspoon) suspects foul play, but, as he represents the other demographic no one listens to (besides black people), no one listens to him. That’s it. Gut the Wayans machine’s latest, Little Man, and all that slops out is a Möbius strip of high-concept sketch-comedy garbage that isn’t really objectionable (save for the happy rape and the infantilization of a grown man and all that) in any way while actually managing to know itself as owing a debt to Baby Buggy Bunny en route to offering a few nightmarish, surreal images. Marlon and, I think, Shawn are the key instigators of this one, with Keenen (I bet) the man behind the flat, uninvolved camera set-ups and pacing. On the scale of such things, it’s not as bad as Son of the Mask, Are We There Yet?, or Problem Child, though it’s vastly inferior to Marci X.

Borat (2006) + This Film is Not Yet Rated (2006)

Posted in2000s, 2006, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Documentary, Pseudo-Documentary, Theatrical, UK

BORAT! CULTURAL LEARNINGS OF AMERICA FOR MAKE BENEFIT GLORIOUS NATION OF KAZAKHSTAN
***/****
directed by Larry Charles

THIS FILM IS NOT YET RATED
*½/****
directed by Kirby Dick

by Walter Chaw British Comedian Sacha Baron Cohen, as his Kazakhstani journalist alter ego Borat, tells former Georgia senator Bob Barr that the cheese Barr’s just eaten was made from his wife’s breast milk, and he does it in such a way as to suggest the naïf savage stereotype’s unaffected innocence as it preys on the secret bigot in us all. Borat! Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan plays on America’s belief that the rest of the world is run and populated by ridiculous children alternately in need of careful guidance and firm scolding. The Borat character, then, is very much a creation of the shortsightedness of a condescending American intolerance, while his ability to infiltrate America’s living rooms speaks to a complex national desire to fold the aliens it abhors to its breast in some sort of misplaced act of missionary grace. If we reduce the aim of evangelical Christianity down to the twin compulsions of damnation and salvation, what Borat really does is reveal the hypocrisy at the root of our professed acceptance and, more troublingly, highlight how divorced we are from the guiding principles of this sea to shining sea. In a film that does this much to expose the ugly undercurrent of homophobia, racism, and xenophobia in this country, it’s no great surprise when New York subway riders threaten to kill Borat for kissing them on the lips in exuberantly misguided greeting–and the reactions of these Big Apple commuters strike me as refreshingly honest.

Ren & Stimpy: The Lost Episodes (2003) – DVD

Posted in2000s, 2006, Animation, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, DVD, Horror, Television

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"Naked Beach Frenzy," "Stimpy's Pregnant," "Altruists," "Ren Seeks Help," "Fire Dogs, Part 2," "Onward and Upward"

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover There are, believe it or not, those who miss the days of the Production Code as a tool for making writers try harder to suggest things instead of spelling them out. I never really bought into the argument, but it seems almost sensible to me now that I've seen Ren and Stimpy unleashed and uncensored. To be sure, no loyalist can be without the six adventures contained on Paramount's new-to-DVD "Ren & Stimpy: The Lost Episodes" (only half of which ever reached the airwaves, under the banner "Ren & Stimpy 'Adult Party Cartoon'"), whose scripts were suppressed by Nickelodeon for being too raunchy for kids; and when they're on, they take the formula out of the cage of decency so that it might run around free and unfettered. Alas, the introduction of naked women and actual foul language somehow dampens the charm of the Nickelodeon run. The thrill of "Ren & Stimpy" lies in its childish, anal-stage irresponsibility, with its suppression of the sexual in favour of the scatological–to say nothing of the florid insults ("You bloated sack of protoplasm!") with which mere expletives can't possibly compete.