Comedy Archives - Page 43 of 77 - FILM FREAK CENTRAL

RV (2006)

April 28, 20062000s, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Family, Germany, Theatrical, UK

½*/****
starring Robin Williams, Jeff Daniels, Cheryl Hines, Kristin Chenowith
screenplay by Geoff Rodkey
directed by Barry Sonnenfeld

by Walter Chaw Shit, feral raccoons, hillbillies, tits, white-boy Ebonics, more shit, and oodles of forced sentimentality to propel the septic stew down our collective throat as we strain towards it, baby bird-like. Or so the theory goes. In the interest of complete disclosure, the reason Barry Sonnenfeld's excrescent RV dodged a zero-star rating from me is that I actually laughed at a perversely perfect sewage geyser. It's one thing when you're all about the slapstick gross-out gag; another when, National Lampoon's Vacation-style (the film that, structurally, RV, Johnson Family Vacation, Are We There Yet?, and so on most resemble), your trip across the middle of the United States yields insights into the caste and racial strata of our expansive country. Then you have a feckless relic like this that pulls its punches even in regards to the bigotry it directs at rednecks. There's nothing to hold onto in RV, and it tries so hard to please that there's not much joy in taking it down. It's like kicking a puppy, with the puppy trying to lick your boot as you do it.

Mae West: The Glamour Collection [The Franchise Collection] – DVD

April 27, 20061930s, 1940s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Music, Musical, Romance, Western

NIGHT AFTER NIGHT (1932)
*½/**** Image A- Sound A-
starring George Raft, Constance Cummings, Wynne Gibson, Mae West
screenplay by Vincent Lawrence and Kathryn Scola, based on the novel Single Night by Louis Bromfield
directed by Archie Mayo

I'M NO ANGEL (1933)
***½/**** Image A Sound A-
starring Mae West, Cary Grant, Gregory Ratoff, Edward Arnold
screenplay by Mae West
directed by Wesley Ruggles

GOIN' TO TOWN (1935)
***/**** Image B+ Sound A-
starring Mae West, Paul Cavanagh, Gilbert Emery, Marjorie Gateson
screenplay by Mae West
directed by Alexander Hall

GO WEST YOUNG MAN (1936)
*½/**** Image A- Sound B+
starring Mae West, Warren William, Randolph Scott, Alice Brady
screenplay by Mae West, based on the play Personal Appearance by Lawrence Riley
directed by Henry Hathaway

MY LITTLE CHICKADEE (1940)
**½/**** Image B+ Sound B
starring Mae West, W.C. Fields, Joseph Calleia, Dick Foran
screenplay by Mae West & W.C. Fields
directed by Edward F. Cline

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Flower Belle Lee reads some words off a school blackboard: "'I am a good boy. I am a good man. I am a good girl.' What is this, propaganda?" Thusly does My Little Chickadee sum up the appeal of its female star, Mae West, who invited all of us (but mostly women) to reject the nice behaviour we learned in school and chart a course based on glory and gratification. You can keep your Bette Davises and your Katharine Hepburns, so often punished for their lively behaviour or pushed into the arms of some man; rest assured that men found their way into West's arms and not the other way around. Certain proto-feminist elements are inescapable: long before Laura Mulvey was a gleam in her mother's eye, West would dare to return the male gaze and demand a sexual appetite equal to, if not exceeding, the men bound to use it against her in a double standard. There was only one standard in West's world, and she set it.

Rescue Me: The Complete Second Season (2005) – DVD

April 24, 20062000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Television

Image A Sound A Extras C
"Voicemail," "Harmony," "Balls," "Twat," "Sensitivity," "Reunion," "Shame," "Believe," "Rebirth," "Brains," "Bitch," "Happy," "Justice"

by Walter Chaw If we proceed from the premise that the first season of FX's firefighter series "Rescue Me" is an overt metaphor for the reconfiguration of society post-9/11 along tribal/machismo lines, the second season sees the rules established, leaving only the playing-out of über-civilization's system of justice. It's post-apocalyptic in the same manner as Walter Hill's The Warriors: a diary of urban demolition and the erosion of decorum; the crude, reductive barbarism of its survivors is worn as a badge of honour. They're martyrs in uniform flying the banner of the underpaid and overworked–credit the series for acknowledging their position on the cross a time or two through the firefighter's natural archenemy, the bulls. The world as we knew it ended one day, and from its ashes rose cowboys, cowboy crusades, and a "bring it on" attitude towards loss of life and the dealing of death. If the show gets progressively more unpleasant and hard to justify, it also charts the same arc in our culture and society. And it makes perfect sense in this way (if in no other) that Season Two's cliffhanger revolves around the senseless death of a child enlisted in a war not of his making and certainly beyond his comprehension.

High Anxiety (1977) – DVD

April 17, 20061970s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, DVD, Mystery, Satire, Thriller

**/**** Image B Sound B
starring Mel Brooks, Madeline Kahn, Cloris Leachman, Harvey Korman
screenplay by Mel Brooks, Ron Clark, Rudy DeLuca, Barry Levinson
directed by Mel Brooks

by Bill Chambers There are three clever sight gags in Mel Brooks's disingenuous love letter to Alfred Hitchcock High Anxiety, all of which poke fun at Hitchcock's invasive camera. As far as I can tell, the remaining laughs have no real precedent in the Master's work, while riffs on signature moments from Vertigo, Psycho, and The Birds elicit nary a titter. (It doesn't help that filmmakers straight-faced and tongue-in-cheek alike had plundered those pictures long before Brooks came along; the movie was destined to be impotent in a Brian DePalma world.) Choosing the misbegotten Spellbound, oddly, as its jumping-off point, High Anxiety stars Brooks as acrophobic Dr. Richard H. Thorndyke, the new Chief of Staff at "The Psycho-Neurotic Institute for the Very, Very Nervous." After stumbling upon some corrupt bookkeeping, Thorndyke is hustled off to a psychiatric convention by the scheming Nurse Diesel (Cloris Leachman, perhaps doing Rebecca's Mrs. Danvers) and her S&M-craving toady Dr. Charles Montague (Harvey Korman), where he meets the requisite blonde bombshell (Madeline Kahn) and becomes a murder suspect.

Edward Scissorhands (1990) [Anniversary Edition] – DVD

April 11, 20061990s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Directors: Tim Burton, Drama, Fantasy, Romance

***/**** Image A- Sound B Extras C+
starring Johnny Depp, Winona Ryder, Dianne Wiest, Anthony Michael Hall
screenplay by Caroline Thompson
directed by Tim Burton

by Walter Chaw Edward (Johnny Depp), all of Edward Gorey blacks and angles, is the product of a variation on the Frankenstein myth, his mad scientist creator (Vincent Price) dying before he can replace Edward's scissor-hands with wax appendages. Marooned at a child's emotional development, he's thus unburdened by the sort of rage for usurpation of Mary Shelly's creation; when he kills his "father" by neither accident nor design, find in Edward an adolescent's existential angst in an Oedipal split interrupted at the moment he was to be given the instruments of his ascension into "humanity" by his creator. The irony of his condition is expressed by the Stan Winston-designed shears with which he's burdened, lost on the edges of civilization (Tim Burton's twisted view of suburbia), cutting out articles from scavenged magazines and junk mail flyers and arranging them in a collage that includes a story about a boy without eyes, an ad for the kind of prefab-furniture favoured by Burton's suburbanites, and a Madonna-and-child. Our introduction to Edward, facilitated by chirpy Avon sales lady and housewife Peg (Dianne Wiest), is the film's signature set-piece, allowing as it does this twisted, tragic figure to emerge as both effrontery and holy effigy. For Burton, Edward glows with the romance of an eternal child–Peter Pan in love with a memory of Wendy for eternity, adrift with the Lost Boys and working with ice.

C.R.A.Z.Y. (2005) – DVD

April 10, 20062000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Canada, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Morocco

***½/**** Image A Sound A- Extras N/A
starring Michel Côté, Marc-André Grondin, Danielle Proulx, Pierre-Luc Brillant
written and directed by Jean-Marc Vallée

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover The emotional epic that Canada deserves but never gets has finally arrived. There are no finger-wagging lessons here, no sluggish trudges through masochistic misery, no pointless abstractions hammered home a few too many times–only the sense that, despite the constant, agonizing gauntlet one runs in a lifetime, it's all worth it in the long, ecstatic view. C.R.A.Z.Y. isn't interested in wallowing in misery, though its narrative has plenty of that: instead, it's cheerleading the endless struggle to get what you need, and its refusal to acquiesce or admit defeat makes it a special movie. That it comes from Quebec is entirely predictable (although their last crossover success, The Barbarian Invasions, was about a suicide); what isn't predictable is how charged, how unpretentious, and how light on its feet it is even for Canada's provincial hotbed of film talent. C.R.A.Z.Y. suggests we might be good for something other than fictional defeat and documentaries on Paul Anka.

Friends with Money (2006)

April 6, 20062000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Romance, Theatrical

**/****
starring Jennifer Aniston, Joan Cusack, Catherine Keener, Frances McDormand
written and directed by Nicole Holofcener

by Walter Chaw Nicole Holofcener follows her marginal success Lovely and Amazing with the equally marginal failure Friends with Money, presenting a series of interpersonal apocalypses as awkward dinner parties and scenes made unwisely at Old Navy by super-successful fashion designers. It's not subtle in its broad strokes, and once the layers of Angelino self-mortification and obfuscation are plumbed, it's not subtle in its character strokes, either. What it is is a caesura in the middle of those pictures that don't care about their characters that's only interested in its characters–a film that might be shorthanded as "European" in that nothing much happens as words and glances billow in carefully ventriloquited clouds. It's about how people talk to one another among friends and then lover/confidants on the drive home, and as such it provides a clearer look at conversation in any single exchange than does the whole of Crash. Friends with Money is a comparison of our intimate with our open lives; in the comparison, it suggests a third persona, an interiority–though not entirely successfully, making it only as good, really, as the conversation that it may itself inspire on the ride home.

Adam & Steve (2006)

April 5, 20062000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, Drama, Music, Romance, Theatrical

*/****
starring Craig Chester, Malcolm Gets, Parker Posey, Chris Kattan
written and directed by Craig Chester

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover This site's editor Bill and I were on the phone one night, and we came up with a pleasant dream: What if a movie's stereotypical gay character–the one who gets all the bitchy repartee–actually wasn't funny? Be careful what you wish for: Adam & Steve is all stereotypes, all the time, and none of them are remotely funny. Only not by design, like in our fantasy–it's meant to be hilarious, meaning that you die of embarrassment on behalf of everyone involved. Although the film is supposed to be about a gay romance, its real theme is failure, and it's so terrified to seem like anything less than an outrageous good time that it tries too hard. (That the film's lone comedienne generally performs to crickets pretty much sums up the self-flagellant tone of the whole enterprise.) Hostile, ugly, and generally unpleasant to endure, it engenders fear intense enough to snuff out whatever lightness it might have had.

Fun with Dick and Jane (2005) – DVD

April 2, 20062000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, DVD

½*/**** Image B Sound A- Extras B
starring Jim Carrey, Téa Leoni, Alec Baldwin, Richard Jenkins
screenplay by Judd Apatow & Nicholas Stoller
directed by Dean Parisot

by Walter Chaw Dean Parisot's remake of Ted Kotcheff's 1977 Fun with Dick and Jane is simultaneously lifeless and desperate, a collection of horrid eleventh-hour edits that result in jokes without punchlines and Carrey's old physical-comedy riffs trotted out in the service of a half-assed redux of a half-assed original. The one nod to freshening up the original's full-frontal assault on capitalism as a means towards happiness (a satirical slot machine tugged to better effect by the act and allure of playing "The Sims") is that it's set in the year 2000 and deals with corporate malfeasance of the kind most conspicuously indulged in by Enron. (In case you don't get that, the last rimshot of the film is taken at Enron's expense, while the first closing credit is a "special thanks" to Ken Lay and his lieutenants.) The fictional big bad fiscal wolf of the piece is Globodyne, presided over by Jack McAllister (Alec Baldwin, in his second corporate bigwig turn after Elizabethtown), a southerner mainly because "southerner" is one of the last cultural groups (along with, say, Asians and gays) you can mock without much fear of backlash. On the day before it's revealed that "Big Jack" has stripped the corporate coffers (including pensions), Dick (Carrey) is promoted to VP of something or another, inspiring wife Jane (Leoni) to quit her job and pushing Dick before the cameras on some Lou Dobbs's "Moneyline" show, where he discovers, in a very public way, that his steed is a paper tiger.

Huff: The Complete First Season; Masters of Horror: Dreams in the Witch House; Masters of Horror: Cigarette Burns – DVDs

March 30, 20062000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Directors: John Carpenter, Drama, DVD, Horror

HUFF: THE COMPLETE FIRST SEASON (2004-2005)
Image A Sound B Extras C
"Pilot," "Assault and Pepper," "Lipstick on Your Panties," "Control," "Flashpants," "Is She Dead?," "That Fucking Cabin," "Cold Day in Shanghai," "Christmas Is Ruined," "The Good Doctor," "The Sample Closet," "All the King's Horses," "Crazy Nuts & All Fucked Up"

MASTERS OF HORROR: H.P. LOVECRAFT'S DREAMS IN THE WITCH HOUSE (2005)
Image A Sound A Extras A+
starring Ezra Godden, Chelah Horsdal
teleplay by Dennis Paoli & Stuart Gordon, based on the story by H.P. Lovecraft
directed by Stuart Gordon

MASTERS OF HORROR: CIGARETTE BURNS (2005)
Image A Sound A Extras A+
starring Norman Reedus, Udo Kier
teleplay by Drew McWeeny & Scott Swan
directed by John Carpenter

by Walter Chaw In an effort to step out from the shadow of HBO's remarkable run of original programming, Showtime contributes to the noise pollution with retarded, sub-par retreads like the inexplicably-lauded hour-longs "Weeds", "The L Word", and the puffed-up psychodrama "Huff". I'm a big fan of Hank Azaria, for no good reason, I guess, beyond his long-term involvement with "The Simpsons", but cast herein as the titular shrink (Craig "Huff" Huffstodt) who witnesses a gay patient (Noel Fisher) commit suicide in his office in the pilot episode, Azaria finds more than just his character neutered and ineffectual. The writing is the first problem with "Huff", leaning hard as it does on the Dr. Phil Handbook for Fake Shrinks in its therapy sessions (leave out the dead gay kid, incidentally, and until episode four's guy-who-refuses-to-shit Huff's patients all appear to be beautiful women) and making the bad mistake of thinking that castrating bitch goddess mothers (Blythe Danner, playing Estelle Getty), nymphomaniac wives (Paget Brewster), and precious/precocious kids (Anton Yelchin) will write themselves out of narrative Bermuda Triangles. Its lack of originality and stultifying obviousness isn't what I hate (it's too boring to hate), though: what I hate is the intrusion of the supernatural in the character of a Hungarian panhandler (Jack Lauger) Huff helps in ways so astonishingly altruistic as to suggest religious mania–not to mention an aesthetic that applies edits and score with the feckless aggression of the genuinely clueless. It looks cool, it sounds sage, and it leaves characters stranded in the middle of a whole lot of slick, iMovie-crunched, amateurish bullshit.

Elizabethtown (2005) [Widescreen Edition] – DVD

March 28, 20062000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Romance

*/**** Image B- Sound A- Extras D+
starring Orlando Bloom, Kirsten Dunst, Susan Sarandon, Alec Baldwin
written and directed by Cameron Crowe

by Walter Chaw Casting about wildly for that elusive "Lubitsch Touch" so prized by his hero Billy Wilder, underdog-uplift auteur Cameron Crowe has patched together Elizabethtown: an awkward, shambling, Frankenstein's monster of a romantic screwball farce that, for all its slickness, shows off every one of its bolts and stitches in monstrous bas relief. Crowe piles on the pathos in this tale of fallen shoe designer Drew (Orlando Bloom), who travels from the West Coast to the semi-Deep South (the titular Elizabethtown, KY) to collect the ashes of his freshly-dead father for the purposes of a maudlin (and interminable) eleventh-hour road trip. "We should have done this years ago," says Drew to his dad's earthly remains, wiping away a brave tear, but for as machine-calibrated as the scene is to pluck at the heartstrings, there isn't–as there isn't at any moment in this film–a hint of authenticity to the sentiment. It's hard to question Crowe's earnestness, but it's easy to point at the alien remove of this picture and speculate as to whether the mom-dependent Crowe (has anyone checked to see if he's still attached to her umbilically?) has ever had a genuinely examined emotion regarding his pop.

Chicken Little (2005) – DVD

March 27, 20062000s, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Disney, DVD, Family, Sci-Fi

*/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras C
screenplay by Ron Anderson, Steve Bencich and Ron J.Friedman
directed by Mark Dindal

by Walter Chaw Frantic, frenetic, anxious, obnoxious: the ideal audience for Chicken Little should be in bed by seven, and Disney's umpteenth cry of "sure-fire comeback project" looks, appropriately, like another convulsive episode of corporate crying-wolf. Chicken Little, for instance, makes pop culture references that don't mean anything in the context of a film whose sole purpose appears to be instructing your children to be fearful and hyper. They're just there to give parents, alternately stunned and bored, a little rootless pleasure in the middle of epileptic flash; what's left isn't clever (or kinetic) enough for us to ignore its essential emptiness. What Chicken Little is more than anything else is exhausting. You could by rights hope that it's is a send-up of the Fifties cycle of Martian invasion pictures (it name-checks War of the Worlds for no good reason) as The Incredibles was a send-up of Golden Age superhero comics, but even a cursory comparison between the two films shows that Disney's desperation to make Pixar's looming secession a non-issue is as limp and impotent as the Nevada State Boxing Commission.

Grey’s Anatomy: Season One (2005) + Arrested Development Season: Two (2004-2005) – DVDs

March 26, 20062000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Romance, Television

GREY'S ANATOMY: SEASON ONE
Image A Sound B Extras C
"A Hard Day's Night," "The First Cut Is the Deepest," "Winning a Battle, Losing the War," "No Man's Land," "Shake Your Groove Thing," "If Tomorrow Never Comes," "The Self Destruct Button," "Save Me," "Who's Zoomin' Who?"

ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT: SEASON TWO
Image A Sound B+ Extras B
"The One Where Michael Leaves," "The One Where They Build a House," "Amigos," "Good Grief!," "Sad Sack," "Afternoon Delight," "Switch Hitter," "Queen for a Day," "Burning Love," "Ready, Aim, Marry Me," "Out on a Limb," "My Hand to God," "Motherboy XXX," "The Immaculate Election," "The Sword of Destiny," "Meet the Veals," "Spring Breakout," "Righteous Brothers"

by Walter Chaw A show so odious, so repugnant, that it's impossible not to have predicted its newly-minted role as the most popular program in the land, Shonda Rhimes's "Grey's Anatomy" has the singular distinction of transforming the adorable Ellen Pompeo into a shallow, whorish version of Doogie Howser, practiced in the art of interspersing extraordinary, near-savant leaps of medical intuition with rolling in the hay with her boss, the hipster-dubbed Dr. McDreamy (Patrick Dempsey). When Dr. Meredith Grey meets a new patient, lay you even money that his/her pain and suffering will be used to augment Meredith's face-swallowing, thirtysomething pout, which is one thing–making her brilliant ex-doctor mother a victim of prime time soap opera Alzheimer's for the same ends is something else altogether. Other alternatives include Dr. Meredith babysitting a severed penis in a Coleman cooler and, better, her lingerie model-turned-MD cohort intervening on behalf of a man undergoing erection-threatening prostate surgery. What better way to end the season, then, but to do a whole episode about a syphilis epidemic sleazing like wildfire through the show's Seattle Grace Hospital?

The Squid and the Whale (2005) + The Weather Man (2005)|The Squid and the Whale [Special Edition] – DVD

March 23, 2006****/****, 2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Coming of Age, Drama, DVD, FFC Must-Own, Nicolas Cage, Theatrical

THE SQUID AND THE WHALE
****/**** Image B Sound A- Extras A
starring Laura Linney, Jeff Daniels, Jesse Eisenberg, Owen Kline
written and directed by Noah Baumbach

THE WEATHER MAN
½*/****
starring Nicolas Cage, Michael Caine, Hope Davis, Michael Rispoli
screenplay by Steven Conrad
directed by Gore Verbinski

by Walter Chaw The title refers to a New York Museum of Natural History diorama called "Clash of the Titans" that proposes what a tussle between a sperm whale and a giant squid would look like–and it functions as the final, stirring tableaux of a 16mm film self-consciously shot in the manner of early Jim Jarmusch or Spike Lee joints. But The Squid and the Whale, Noah Baumbach's fourth film as writer-director, has inspired more conversation about the degree to which it does or does not tell the story of his own childhood–more specifically, the divorce of his parents, novelist Jonathan Baumbach and former VILLAGE VOICE film critic Georgia Brown–than about the self-reflexive canniness of the filmmaking itself.

Prime (2005) [Widescreen] – DVD

March 17, 20062000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Romance

*½/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B-
starring Meryl Streep, Uma Thurman, Bryan Greenberg, Jon Abrahams
written and directed by Ben Younger

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Conservatives may actually be right when they say that Hollywood is out of touch–their mistake lies in thinking it's because the major studios don't serve their agenda. More to the point, Hollywood is out of touch with human behaviour, ethical consistency, left or right politics, and simple cause and effect, so much so that the most "normal"-seeming of films is seething with unacknowledged fear and loathing. One might expect a film about a 37-year-old woman dating a 23-year-old man, for instance, to have some feminist or at least Freudian subtext, especially when coupled with the fact that the young man's mother is the older woman's therapist. But Hollywood's version–the pointless and confused Prime–goes out of its way to avoid the dangerous implications of its subject matter, hedging its bets enough times that it's impossible to divine what the hell it's trying to say.

Big Bad Mama (1974) [Roger Corman: Early Films] – DVD

March 14, 20061970s, Action, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, Crime, Drama, DVD

**/**** Image B Sound A- Extras B-
starring Angie Dickinson, William Shatner, Tom Skerritt, Susan Sennett
screenplay by William Norton and Frances Doel
directed by Steve Carver

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Has Molly Haskell written on Big Bad Mama? The title of her seminal feminist study on American film–From Reverence to Rape—fits the movie and its two-faced approach to women perfectly. Under any other circumstances, completely implacable mother Wilma McClatchie (Angie Dickinson) would be a feminist superhero for her ability to go on the lam and do what's best for her daughters, all while swindling the system. But Wilma's will-to-power is largely played for laughs: not only is she way in denial about her offspring's abilities (both of whom turn out to be brain-dead sex objects), but her whole mission is perceived as transgressive in the wrong ways, opening her up to ridicule and, in her nude scenes, degradation. One doesn't expect feminism from Roger Corman, but the handling of the women in Big Bad Mama is telling about a time and place far beyond its diegetic moment.

Everything is Illuminated (2005) + A History of Violence (2005)|A History of Violence [New Line Platinum Series] – DVD

March 13, 2006****/****, 2000s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, Crime, Directors: David Cronenberg, Drama, DVD, Theatrical, Thriller

EVERYTHING IS ILLUMINATED
**/****
starring Elijah Wood, Eugene Hutz, Boris Leskin, Laryssa Lauret
screenplay by Liev Schreiber, based on the novel by Jonathan Safran Foer
directed by Liev Schreiber

A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE
****/**** Image A Sound A Extras A
starring Viggo Mortensen, Maria Bello, Ed Harris, William Hurt
screenplay by Josh Olson, based on the graphic novel by John Wagner and Vince Locke
directed by David Cronenberg

by Walter Chaw A year after a glut of films about the past being wilfully stifled by the present, find Liev Schreiber's Everything is Illuminated and David Cronenberg's A History of Violence, literal calls to awake following the nightmare of the night before–or, better, avenues through which we might recognize that suppressing a collective shadow mainly serves to nourish it until it explodes, monstrous, back into our consciousness. The one is based on an Anthony Burgess-like book of great linguistic imagination by Jonathan Safran Foer, the other a spare graphic novel by John Wagner and Vince Locke–and just the obliqueness of the respective source materials speaks to the primacy of their message: "Everything is illuminated by the past." The keystone line in Schreiber's picture, this serves as a mission statement of sorts for both films, locating in the middle of this first decade of the new millennium something that feels like a weary acceptance that not only are we products of our trauma and misdeeds, but also that our trauma and misdeeds are beyond redress and completely inescapable. To parse the best line in Kenneth Branagh's Dead Again, it's the karmic payment plan: buy now, pay forever.

Failure to Launch (2006)

March 10, 20062000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Romance, Theatrical, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Matthew McConaughey, Sarah Jessica Parker, Zooey Deschanel, Justin Bartha
screenplay by Tom J. Astle & Matt Ember
directed by Tom Dey

by Walter Chaw Starring professional unctuous petroleum spill Matthew McConaughey as Tripp, a carefree stallion still making a stable of his parent's house, Tom Dey's excruciating Failure to Launch is two things and both of them suck: a romantic comedy and a boorish fraternity slapstick, mashed together like a jumped track mashes together train cars. When Tripp is ready to break up with a girl too interested in something resembling an adult relationship, the modus is to screw her at his place and hope that his folks walk in on them. So what do his adoring parents (Kathy Bates and Terry Bradshaw: she's not naked this time, he is–let's call it a draw) do but hire an unctuous tan line named Paula (Sarah Jessica Parker) to pretend to be his girlfriend? Yes, they get their boy a whore, who, in a particularly uncomfortable scene in a particularly uncomfortable film, mumbles her way around an excuse as to why she's fucked her client to keep him from breaking up with her. Now that's professionalism for you. (At least in The Wedding Date, the jane had the decency to pay for her own escort.) If you don't think it's loathsome when the Bradshaw character, ogling Paula, says, "I'm payin' fer it, I'll stare if I want to," then have I got a movie for you.

Junebug (2005) – DVD

March 10, 20062000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD

***½/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B
starring Amy Adams, Embeth Davidtz, Ben McKenzie, Alessandro Nivola
screenplay by Angus MacLachlan
directed by Phil Morrison

by Walter Chaw Charting the vicissitudes of regional attitudes and the mercurial family dynamic, Phil Morrison's Junebug restores some of the lustre to the indie dysfunction genre (and to the Sundance imprint) with a beautifully performed drama about the cost of grace. If critics have a function anymore besides carving their own gravestones on the marble of modern cinema, it's to point a finger at films like Junebug, which sounds like a thousand other pictures but is actually something all its own: a Southern Gothic in the tradition of Flannery O'Connor that treats its characters as more than plot-movers or cardboard caricatures. More, it tackles an issue as delicate as outsider art with a deceptively sharp satirist's scalpel, understanding that the best weapon against paternalism is an affectionate portrayal of people just as mean, petty, and ruined by life as the rest of us. It can't hurt that its cast is uniformly fantastic, that its script, by Angus MacLachlan, is intuitive and smart, and that Morrison understands devalued things like mise-en-scène and visual metaphors, presenting them with a quiet, unobtrusive confidence. Junebug is a character study in every way that "character study" used to be the gold standard instead of an overworked catchphrase used to describe boring, predictable low-budget movies set in the 1970s. It's nasty and it's lovely, it's nuanced and complex.

Forbidden Games (1952) [The Criterion Collection] – DVD

March 9, 20061950s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, Drama, DVD, France, War

Jeux interdits
***/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B
starring Brigitte Fossey, Georges Poujouly, Amédée, Laurence Badie
screenplay by Jean Aurenche, Pierre Bost, François Boyer, René Clément
directed by René Clément

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover René Clément's Forbidden Games is perhaps the best place to begin when comparing the Nouvelle Vague to its nemesis, the Tradition of Quality. As the director (and co-scenarists Pierre Bost and Georges Aurenche, regular CAHIERS DU CINEMA whipping boys) came in for abuse under Truffaut, there's no denying the film's connection to the ToQ and how that tradition represses so much of its more disturbing content. Indeed, one wonders how a movie that revolves around a WWII orphan named Paulette (Brigitte Fossey) who nicks grave markers can be this matter-of-fact and cute. Despite the astonishing morbidity of the subject matter, the film goes about it like Wally and the Beav setting barrel hoops for Lumpy Rutherford. Still, its total lack of shame is something that would be lost in the ensuing New Wave revolution, and though big claims for it are hard to make, it's remarkably fresh and open–if more than a little naïve.