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.

Repo Man (1984) [Collector’s Edition] – DVD

February 6, 2006Posted in1980s, Action, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, Crime, DVD, Esoterica, Sci-Fi, Thriller

***/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B+
starring Harry Dean Stanton, Emilio Estevez, Tracey Walter, Olivia Barash
written and directed by Alex Cox

Repomanunicapby Travis Mackenzie Hoover SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. The question I ask after a screening of Repo Man is this: is it punk? And if it isn't punk, what is it? Those used to the anarcho-communitarian (i.e., "nice") ideals adopted by punk's intelligentsia would have no truck with the mentality of this film, whose hero, Otto Maddox (Emilio Estevez), is in it for cheap thrills and hasn't got an ideal in his head. Indeed, once he gets sucked into the more "intense" world of car repossessor Bud (Harry Dean Stanton) and thus gainful employment, he distances himself from his punk friends–as represented by the three mohawk'd chumps whose idea of "doing crimes" is "let's order sushi and not pay!" But the repo gig leads to another dead end, as Bud turns out to be a blowhard full of idiot rules and his compatriots prove more unstable than Otto's old friends. There is no future to Otto's dreaming–just the cul-de-sac of punk's dark flipside: nihilism.

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.

Thunder and Lightning (1977) – DVD

February 3, 2006Posted in1970s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, Crime, DVD, Romance

**/**** Image B+ Sound B+
starring David Carradine, Kate Jackson, Eddie Barth, Roger C. Carmel
screenplay by William Hjortsberg
directed by Corey Allen

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover A long time ago…I saw Thunder and Lightning with my family on a drive-in double-bill with Star Wars. I remember the experience of the former being not only uncomfortable for my 6-year-old self, but in fact the polar opposite of the elaborate fantasy I was there to see (again). Yet aside from a couple of scenes that stuck, I later drew a complete blank on what it was all about. In one of those grail quests exclusive to sedentary movie nerds, the idea that I had to find out never stopped bothering me, though I now know there was a reason for my initial discomfort: it turns out that Thunder and Lightning takes entirely serviceable moonshine B-movie tropes and does as little as possible with them.

Sundance ’06: Adam’s Apples

January 31, 2006Posted in2000s, Authors: Alex Jackson, Comedy, Crime, Denmark, Drama, Film Festivals, Germany, Sundance
Adams æbler*/****starring Ulrich Thomsen, Mads Mikkelsen, Nikolaj Lie Kaas, Nicolas Browritten and directed by Anders Thomas Jensen by Alex Jackson Adam's Apples begins with a Danish skinhead (Ulrich Thomsen) getting off a bus at a halfway house out in the country and keying the vehicle as it drives away, immediately telling us that this isn't going to be a movie that seriously considers the economic origins and social ramifications of the Danish white-supremacist movement. The skinhead, whose name is Adam, meets the other inhabitants of the halfway house, which include an Arabic stickup-man (who speaks in adorably broken Danish and…

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.

Jerry Lewis: The “Legendary Jerry” Collection – DVD

January 27, 2006Posted in1950s, 1960s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Family, Music, Romance, Sci-Fi

Jerryondvdtitleby Travis Mackenzie Hoover If you're savvy enough to read film criticism, you probably know it's supposed to be funny that the French love Jerry Lewis. We all have a big, self-satisfied laugh when we first hear that, as if anyone could take Jerry Lewis seriously. (We certainly didn't.) But the thing is, there aren't a lot of people who will admit to actually seeing one of his movies–the Lewis hate-on has become so intense that the only thing remaining of him is the joke; he's the scapegoat of anti-French resentment and anti-intellectual hostility, as if only frogs and eggheads could possibly find anything redemptive in his work. Thus a generation has shunned his films, never to know if there really is a centre to the onion, something more than mugging to the Lewis mystique.

We at FILM FREAK CENTRAL have decided to put a stop to this. Over the next ten weeks, we will be interrogating the Lewis canon (as it relates to Paramount's recently released DVD box set "Jerry Lewis: The 'Legendary Jerry' Collection") for traces of artistic merit–assuming there are some to be found. We may come up with revelations; we may come up with suggestive patterns; or we may come up with nothing whatsoever. By the end, though, we hope to have definitively answered the question of whether the French are onto something–and if we can really point fingers in a culture that conversely embraces Betty Blue. And Luc Besson. And Amélie. Originally published: November 11, 2005.

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.

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.

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.

The Scalphunters (1968) – DVD

January 17, 2006Posted in1960s, Authors: Alex Jackson, Comedy, DVD, Western

**/**** Image A- Sound B
starring Burt Lancaster, Shelley Winters, Telly Savalas, Ossie Davis
screenplay by William Norton
directed by Sydney Pollack

by Alex Jackson In that glorious blow-job-thinly-disguised-as-a-documentary Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures, director Sydney Pollack claims to remember Pauline Kael's pan of 2001: A Space Odyssey "very well." A decade later, he says, the film was considered a classic–suggesting that Kael was seriously out of touch when she reviewed it, I guess. Pollack fails to mention the punch line, though: in the same piece, a notorious essay called "Trash, Art, and the Movies," Kael exalts Pollack's own The Scalphunters! 2001 is pretty lousy art, she decided, while The Scalphunters is pretty great trash. Between the two, she frankly prefers The Scalphunters.

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.

The Flesh Eaters (1964) – DVD

January 9, 2006Posted in1960s, Authors: Alex Jackson, Comedy, DVD, Horror, Sci-Fi

*½/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
starring Byron Sanders, Barbara Wilkin, Rita Morley, Martin Kosleck
screenplay by Arnold Drake
directed by Jack Curtis

by Alex Jackson When I pan Jack Curtis's The Flesh Eaters, I want you to know that this isn't code to go see it anyway. Watching it, I found myself wondering from time to time if I was no longer capable of appreciating movies like The Flesh Eaters. Comparing my happy memories of Night of the Creeps and the collective work of Ed Wood to this, I've decided that they really do have something that The Flesh Eaters does not. This isn't a "good" bad movie, friends, it's just a bad one.

Kronk’s New Groove (2005) – DVD

January 9, 2006Posted in2000s, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, Disney, DVD, Family, Musical, Philippines, Romance

*½/**** Image A+ Sound B+ (DD)/A- (DTS) Extras C
screenplay by Tom Rogers
directed by Saul Andrew Blinkoff & Elliot M. Bour

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover You know you're watching a family film when: a) father issues dominate the plot; b) it talks down to the parents in the guise of speaking on their level; and c) the whole thing is larded with pseudo-in-jokes intended to make everybody feel smart. So it is with Kronk's New Groove, a straight-to-disc sequel (to an original unseen by yours truly) that posits the Emperor Kuzco's one-time adversary Kronk (voice of Patrick Warburton) in a race against time to impress his "Papi" with the classic wife/kids/house-on-hill bellwethers of success. Alas, it's an indifferently-concocted affair, with the minor character pushing more charismatic presences to the side and leaving nothing to distract from some feeble jokes, obvious plotting, and a total refusal to bring something new to the table.

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.

The Family Stone (2005); Loggerheads (2005); The Dying Gaul (2005)

December 16, 2005Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Christmas, Comedy, Drama, Romance, Theatrical

THE FAMILY STONE
*/****
starring Sarah Jessica Parker, Claire Danes, Diane Keaton, Rachel McAdams
written and directed by Thomas Bezucha

LOGGERHEADS
*½/****
starring Tess Harper, Bonnie Hunt, Michael Kelly, Michael Learned
written and directed by Tim Kirkman

THE DYING GAUL
**/****
starring Patricia Clarkson, Campbell Scott, Peter Sarsgaard, Ryan Miller
written and directed by Craig Lucas

by Walter Chaw An absolute freakin' nightmare: Imagine spending the holidays with Diane Keaton in full-smirk, full-chuffing, shit-eating laughter mode, then magnify that with a screenplay by hyphenate and former fashion executive Thomas Bezucha that never misses an opportunity to excrete a little dollop of quirk where silence would have spoken volumes. The Family Stone is an intensely middlebrow bath, dipped in warm sentiments and institutionalized ugliness–one half slapstick fish-out-of-water, one half chestnut-lit holiday perennial-hopeful. (The marriage works about as well as it does in other pieces of Yuletide garbage like Christmas with the Kranks and Home Alone.) Therein, eldest Stone boy Everett (professional piece of wood Dermot Mulroney) is home for the holidays (it's not as good, obviously, as Jodie Foster's film of the same name but it's cut from the same cloth) to introduce his girlfriend Meredith (Sarah Jessica Parker) to his quirky tribe. Chief antagonist for the first hour is mousy (yeah, right) Amy (Rachel McAdams), who has an NPR duffel bag in a brief introductory shot, thus establishing her character as much as it's ever going to be established. She doesn't like Meredith because I don't know why but proceeds to brand her a racist and a boor when it seems that, mostly, Meredith is intensely uncomfortable and self-conscious. Maybe she has social anxiety disorder, or the more common stick-up-her-ass-ism. That's how appropriately-named evil mother Sybil (Diane Keaton) diagnoses her, except she calls Meredith a monkey and replaces the ass-stick with a silver spoon.

Valiant (2005) – DVD

December 13, 2005Posted in2000s, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Disney, DVD, Family, War

½*/**** Image A Sound B+ Extras D
screenplay by Jordan Katz, George Webster, George Melrod
directed by Gary Chapman

Valiantcapby Walter Chaw The animation is flat, the screenplay is insipid, the pacing is mortally off, and the voice acting is the mixed bag you generally get when you hire movie stars instead of professional voice talent (this is already the second animated film Ewan McGregor's tackled this year–third if you count Lucas's folly) to breathe life into your pixellated creations. But other than that, Valiant's fantastic. Its setting (WWII, circa D-Day) isn't as imaginative as that of Robots (this year's other glaring animated failure), and its CGI housefly sidekicks don't talk, as they did in Racing Stripes (this year's other glaring made-for-kids animal-related failure), but if you can overlook its obvious and subtle and inescapable deficiencies, well, what you have here is a blockbuster simply waiting to have its destiny fulfilled by the same group that flocked to the inexplicably popular Shrek films. Valiant's central marketing point is that it's from the same producer, John H. Williams, as the Shrek franchise, which, while technically true, ignores the movie's ten other producers.

Fun with Dick & Jane (1977) – DVD

December 12, 2005Posted in1970s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, Crime, DVD

Fun with Dick and Jane
*/**** Image C+ Sound A-
starring George Segal, Jane Fonda, Ed McMahon, Dick Gautier
screenplay by David Giler and Jerry Belson and Mordecai Richler, based on the novel by Gerald Gaiser
directed by Ted Kotcheff

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Although Hollywood and Big Statements have gone hand-in-hand since the very beginning, it's usually a match made in artistic Hell. Being virtuous and fun taxes the tiny minds of the movie colony, resulting in unpleasant "entertainments" that frequently cancel themselves out. Case in point: the original Fun with Dick and Jane, which races through some liberal subtext concerning economic hardships and "materialism" while slinging lame jokes that trivialize everything the film name-checks. That Ted Kotcheff isn't the right guy for pointed satire should have been obvious from the rest of his fuzzy career, but the complete lack of seriousness (or black absurdism) from all quarters reduces the film to just another naughty crime comedy that isn't even very funny–a fact made all the more puzzling by the presence of Canada's acid wit Mordecai Richler among the writing credits.