Spanglish (2004)

December 17, 2004Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Romance, Theatrical

*/****
starring Adam Sandler, Téa Leoni, Paz Vega, Cloris Leachman
written and directed by James L. Brooks

Spanglishby Walter Chaw Take a real close look at the two fertile women in James L. Brooks’s Spanglish: one, Deborah (Téa Leoni), is a fright-masked, screeching harridan who resurrects all by herself the offense once implied by the term “hysterical,” and the other, a fiery Latina clothed in soft browns named Flor (Paz Vega), is nurturing, reasonable, and maternal to the point of smothering her daughter. Which is the worse stereotype would be an interesting conversation to have; how the both of them torment John (Adam Sandler), the decent white guy hero (Deborah with outbursts, Flor with forbidden fruit), is a conversation not worth having. You expect a lot of things from a Brooks film: lethal levels of schmaltz, diarrheic streams of introspective dialogue, precocious tots–but you generally don’t anticipate a lot of underdeveloped characters, a disquieting undercurrent of paternalistic racism, and one central personality apparently constructed for the sole purpose of being the lightning rod for the audience’s every aggression. (Deborah is the most hellish–and consequently the most memorable–affront to rich white women I’ve seen since Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?.) The only two interesting characters in the piece are Deborah’s alcoholic mother Evelyn (Cloris Leachman) and chubby daughter Bernice (Sarah Steele)–not coincidentally, the two characters least like convenient pastiches. Frankly, the film should have been about them.

Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events (2004)

December 17, 2004Posted in2000s, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Family, Fantasy, Germany, Theatrical

A Series of Unfortunate Events
**½/****
starring Jim Carrey, Jude Law, Liam Aiken, Emily Browning
screenplay by Robert Gordon, based on the books The Bad Beginning, The Reptile Room, and The Wide Window by "Lemony Snicket"
directed by Brad Silberling

Lemonysnicketby Walter Chaw The best children's entertainments accentuate a child's strengths, encouraging the pursuit of aptitude and bliss instead of impossible pipe dreams. It's the lesson of The Incredibles, one of the bravest, most subversive films the year–and it seems to be the lesson of Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events as well until the picture caves in to kid-flick conventions and worse. But while it's humming along with the freshly-orphaned Baudelaires–Violet (Emily Browning), Klaus (Liam Aiken), and little Sunny (Kara and Shelby Hoffman)–doing what they do best (Violet the engineer, Klaus the reader, Sunny the biter), Lemony Snicket, with its gothic sets and grotesque gallery of rogues, offers up a brilliant antidote to the saccharine blather of traditional holiday fare. Fleetingly effective or no, it's a shot of insulin in a season that generally offers up bloated prestige items for the grown-ups and freakishly genial, accidentally perverse fare for the kiddies.

The Beverly Hillbillies (1993) – DVD

December 13, 2004Posted in1990s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, DVD, Family

*/**** Image B+ Sound B-
starring Diedrich Bader, Dabney Coleman, Erika Eleniak, Cloris Leachman
screenplay by Lawrence Konner & Mark Rosenthal and Jim Fisher & Jim Staahl
directed by Penelope Spheeris

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover I could tell you plenty of things about The Beverly Hillbillies. That it's based on the beloved Buddy Ebsen sitcom (a fact which pretty much thins the ranks of those who will tolerate it), for instance. That it features Jim Varney in Ebsen's place as Jebediah Clampett, a farmer who heads out to California with his family in tow after striking the mother lode of oil. That once the Clampetts arrive in the land of "swimming pools [and] movie stars," the mission is to a) find a fiancée for widowed Jeb, and b) domesticate the tomboyish Ellie May (Erika Eleniak). Or that these bits of information are used by a couple of schemers (Rob Schneider and Lea Thompson) to bilk the Clampetts–including Jeb's strapping son Jethro (Diedrich Bader, looking appropriately dim)–out of their newly-acquired millions. But ultimately, the only piece of information you require is that The Beverly Hillbillies is about as funny as a mugging, or an armed robbery, or "The Family Circus"–everything else is irrelevant.

The Marx Brothers: Silver Screen Collection – DVD

December 13, 2004Posted in****/****, 1920s, 1930s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD, Musical

THE COCOANUTS (1929)
**½/**** Image C- Sound C-
with Oscar Shaw and Mary Eaton
screenplay by Morrie Riskind, based on the play by George S. Kaufman
directed by Robert Florey and Joseph Santley

ANIMAL CRACKERS (1930)
***/**** Image C Sound C
with Lillian Roth and Margaret Dumont
screenplay by Morrie Ryskind
directed by Victor Heerman

MONKEY BUSINESS (1931)
***½/**** Image B+ Sound C+
with Rockliffe Fellowes and Harry Woods
screenplay by S.J. Perelman and Will B. Johnstone
directed by Norman McLeod

HORSE FEATHERS (1932)
****/**** Image C+ Sound B
with Thelma Todd and David Landau
screenplay by Bert Kalmar and Harry Ruby and S.J. Perelman and Will B. Johnstone
directed by Norman McLeod

DUCK SOUP (1933)
****/**** Image B+ Sound B
with Margaret Dumont and Raquel Torres
screenplay by Bert Kalmar and Harry Ruby and Arthur Sheekman and Nat Perrin
directed by Leo McCarey

by Walter Chaw Popular wisdom holds that the Marx Brothers were best at Paramount, before the public disapproval of their satirical masterpiece Duck Soup sent them fleeing with proverbial tails between their legs to MGM and an ignoble end in a series of progressively worse, studio-sterilized soft-shoe routines. But the truth is that the Marxes didn’t hit their stride until at least their third picture for Paramount, Monkey Business: the first couple of flicks (The Cocoanuts and Animal Crackers) are laden by the team’s dependence on played-out stage productions and the “oh my god” quality of the early talkie, in which actors played to microphones hidden in flower pots, extras stared straight at the camera, and the florid gestures of the theatre were adhered to with pathological devotion.

Sleepover (2004) [Special Edition] – DVD

December 1, 2004Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD, Family, Romance

*/**** Image A Sound A Extras C-
starring Alexa Vega, Mika Boorem, Jane Lynch, Sara Paxton
screenplay by Elisa Bell
directed by Joe Nussbaum

Sleepoverdvdcapby Walter Chaw Okay, I admit it: I'm fascinated by Joe Nussbaum's squirmy, sleazy Sleepover, a comedy for kids so queasy in its conception and execution that I'm reasonably certain it qualifies as child abuse in most states. It's not as bad as the Olsen Twins' New York Minute, mainly because it isn't disgustingly racist in addition to disturbingly paedophilic–but I have a sneaking suspicion that Sleepover engages in with some measure of cunning what New York Minute engages in recklessly. It's thus better than the evil 13 Going on 30 as well, though not nearly as good as the only so-so Mean Girls, marking it as one of those pieces of swill whose chief claim to glory is that it's subversive for adult audiences. Tragically, Sleepover is pitched at 'tweens, and the only adults likely to see it are either parents stupid enough to rent it to watch with their children or critics stupid enough to review it themselves in lieu of running Kevin Thomas's predictably lonesome positive review off the wire.

National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation 2: Cousin Eddie’s Island Adventure (2003); National Lampoon’s Holiday Reunion (2003); Dorm Daze (2004) – DVDs

November 29, 2004Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Canada, Comedy, Crime, DVD, Mystery, Romance, Television

Christmas Vacation 2: Cousin Eddie's Island Adventure
½*/****
 Image B Sound B Extras F
starring Randy Quaid, Miriam Flynn, Dana Barron, Jake Thomas
screenplay by Matty Simmons
directed by Nick Marick

Thanksgiving Family Reunion
ZERO STARS/**** Image B+ Sound B
starring Bryan Cranston, Judge Reinhold, Hallie Todd, Penelope Ann Miller
screenplay by Marc Warren & Dennis Rinsler
directed by Neal Isreal

DORM DAZE
*/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras C
starring Tatyana Ali, Botti Bliss, James DeBello, Marieh Delfino
screenplay by Patrick Casey, Worm Miller
directed by David Hillenbrand and Scott Hillenbrand

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Did anybody ever actually read NATIONAL LAMPOON? That question occurred to me while contemplating the idea of reviewing three recent, awful exploitations of the magazine's name, and I came to the conclusion that I've never met anybody who in fact had. Maybe I was slightly too young to know the rag's heyday, for all I remember were the movies stamped with their logo–and it's largely through the popularity of Animal House and the Vacation series that most of the non-snarky population felt their influence. Whatever its content as a publication, it sold tickets for a good stretch–but decades have passed and the Lampoon brand has lost its currency, meaning it's been largely reduced to whoring itself out to low-grade imitations of past successes. Thus we have the ignominy of National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation 2 (relegated to television), Holiday Reunion (cable), and Dorm Daze (more or less straight-to-video), all of which cost money better spent on special editions of National Lampoon's glory-days titles.

Eloise at Christmastime (2003) – DVD

November 26, 2004Posted in2000s, Adventure, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Christmas, Comedy, Disney, Drama, DVD, Family, Television, UK

***/**** Image B Sound B+ Extras B+
starring Julie Andrews, Sofia Vassilieva, Kenneth Welsh, Debra Monk
screenplay by Elizabeth Chandler, based on the book written by Kay Thompson & illustrated by Hilary Knight
directed by Kevin Lima

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Last year around this time, I was expressing my surprise (and perhaps embarrassment) at having actually enjoyed Disney's first Eloise TV movie, Eloise at the Plaza. For once, the Mouse House had perpetrated something that was cleverly conceived, skilfully shot, and lacking in the mushy sentiment that oozes out of many a Disney enterprise. But the jaded cynic in me was wary of the sequel, Eloise at Christmastime, which, if only to salvage my integrity, I hoped would be a cheap quickie riding on the success of the original. No such luck: Eloise at Christmastime is every bit the effervescent piece of fluff that its predecessor is. Once again director Kevin Lima has sized up the limitations of the material and obscured them with a fleet-footed visual wit, creating one of the few Christmas specials you can watch without wincing.

Christmas with the Kranks (2004)

November 24, 2004Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Christmas, Comedy, Family, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Tim Allen, Jamie Lee Curtis, Julie Gonzalo, Dan Aykroyd
screenplay by Chris Columbus, based on the novel Skipping Christmas by John Grisham
directed by Joe Roth

Christmaswiththekranksby Walter Chaw Jamie Lee Curtis is looking alarmingly like Kim Hunter from Planet of the Apes and Tim Allen remains the single most aggressive, unpleasant personality who's supposed to be sunny and hilarious in the medieval endurance ritual that is Christmas with the Kranks. An act of self-flagellation like wearing a hair shirt, say, or whipping oneself with a cat-o-nine tails whilst chanting the liturgy, the picture has all the Christmas cheer of a reindeer carcass and is the finest evocation of being in Hell since The Passion of the Christ. People voting for "moral values" this last election should take a good hard look at Christmas with the Kranks, which purports to champion all those old-fashioned, God-fearing, middle-American moral landmarks (family, community, Christmas) but ends up championing consumerism, venality, hedonism, vanity, and intolerance. So much intolerance, in fact, that it plays rather well as a horror movie. A character is asked if a family not celebrating Christmas is Jewish or Buddhist: "No, none of that," he says. It reminds a lot of that "Twilight Zone" episode "The Monsters are Due on Maple Street," where a crisis shows suburban everymen to be monstrous, tribal, and dogmatic.

The Complete Gidget Collection – DVD

November 19, 2004Posted in1950s, 1960s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD, Romance

GIDGET (1959)
***/**** Image F Sound C
starring Sandra Dee, Cliff Robertson, James Darren, Arthur O'Connell
screenplay by Gabrielle Upton, based on the novel by Frederick Kohner
directed by Paul Wendkos

GIDGET GOES HAWAIIAN (1961)
*/**** Image D+ Sound C
starring James Darren, Michael Callan, Deborah Walley, Carl Reiner
screenplay by Ruth Brooks Flippen
directed by Paul Wendkos

GIDGET GOES TO ROME (1961)
**/**** Image D+ Sound C
starring James Darren, Jessie Royce Landis, Cesare Danova, Danielle De Metz
screenplay by Ruth Brooks Flippen, Katherine and Dale Eunson
directed by Paul Wendkos

by Walter Chaw Breaking the cresting wave of surf films that ran as counter-programming to the medium-cool cinema of the early Sixties, 1959's Gidget, despite finding itself as the bane of the real surf counterculture, is a surprisingly dark-hued entry into the evolution of generational rebellion that heralded the new-real of the coming decade. It works as a sunnier mirror to the next year's West Side Story, likewise spinning off from a tomboy's infiltration of an insular boys' club to examine some of the friction that exists between the staged artificiality of Old Hollywood and the grittier verisimilitude of the American new wave. As grizzled beach bum The Big Kahuna, for instance, Cliff Robertson has a thousand-yard stare, a couple of tours in Korea under his belt, and a disturbing rape/pedophilia moment wherein he realizes that his life of retreat is all of glittering sun-kissed surfaces and carefully-waxed emptiness. Kahuna's surrender to the bourgeois is more The Wild One and Rebel Without a Cause than it is Psycho and Hud, but therein lies the embryonic hint of the theme that drives Sixties films: acceding to Mrs. Bates makes you a psycho.

Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice (1969) + The Pickle (1993) – DVDs

November 15, 2004Posted in1960s, 1990s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Romance

BOB & CAROL & TED & ALICE
*/**** Image B Sound B+ Extras B
starring Natalie Wood, Robert Culp, Elliott Gould, Dyan Cannon
screenplay by Paul Mazursky and Larry Tucker
directed by Paul Mazursky

THE PICKLE
*/**** Image B+ Sound A- Extras B-
starring Danny Aiello, Dyan Cannon, Shelley Winters, Jerry Stiller
written and directed by Paul Mazursky

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover There are certain talented but minor directors–"second-rank," as opposed to "second-rate"–who sadly manage to outlive their moment. John Frankenheimer was one of them, Alan J. Pakula another: both made key popular films of their time and then had nowhere to go once the cultural ground shifted beneath them. Add to this list the name of Paul Mazursky. Watch his 1969 comedy Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice and his 1993 summation The Pickle and you'll see two completely different people at work: one bases his work on observation and the mood of his times, and the other is so far behind the curve that his characters hardly seem human. Though it's painful to retrace Mazursky's slide and ultimately impossible to connect Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice to The Pickle, the juxtaposition of the two films is instructive in terms of what not to do when you're no longer the hot young thing and the industry contradicts your every single move.

Mickey’s Twice Upon a Christmas (2004) + It’s a Very Merry Muppet Christmas Movie (2002) [Special Edition] – DVDs

November 10, 2004Posted in2000s, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Christmas, Comedy, Disney, DVD, Family, Muppets, Musical

*½/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras C
directed by Matthew O'Callaghan

by Bill Chambers 2-D animation is dead, long live 2-D. Mickey Mouse and his apostles move into the realm of 3-D with Mickey's Twice Upon a Christmas, cementing this maddeningly disposable gewgaw's place in the history books next to far more sublime firsts like 1928's Steamboat Willie (Mickey's debut) and 1935's The Band Concert (Mickey's colour debut). But while it's tempting to lob cheap shots along the lines of "Uncle Walt is spinning in his grave," fact is Disney's frosty remains were already a veritable "Price is Right" wheel by the early '70s, and if he'd lived to see the digital revolution, he probably would've been one of its pioneers. In other words, it's not sacrilege to experiment with a CGI Mickey, but the results probably never should've seen the light of day.

Mr. & Mrs. Smith (1941) – DVD

November 9, 2004Posted in1940s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Directors: Alfred Hitchcock, DVD, Romance

*½/**** Image B Sound B Extras C+
starring Carole Lombard, Robert Montgomery, Harry E. Edington, Gene Raymond
screenplay by Norman Krasna
directed by Alfred Hitchcock

by Walter Chaw Even a cursory glance at Alfred Hitchcock's favoured themes would find the idea of rules–particularly as they're expressed by written forms of communication–to be the ineffectual rein seeking to subdue the protean tumult of human identity, greed, and passion. The way that books hide the body in Rope, for instance; the newspaper headlines discovered too late in Shadow of a Doubt; the contracts and penny dreadfuls of Suspicion; Norman Bates's hotel book; the profession of Foreign Correspondent; Carlotta's engraved headstone and Mozart's mathematical structure in Vertigo; Melanie's birthday wishes in The Birds; the beckoning empty cages in Rutland's house in Marnie; or how the lines of a ledger page predict North by Northwest's astonishing play on humans reduced to numbers before a brilliant bit of business involving a message written inside a matchbook cover. In Mr. and Mrs. Smith, Hitchcock pairs with good friend Carole Lombard (on her second-to-last film before a plane crash ended her life), a prototypical Hitchcock blonde for whom the term "screwball comedy" was invented, to produce what's widely seen as an anomaly in Hitchcock's career: a slapstick romantic imbroglio. And indeed, the film is different from nearly anything Hitchcock ever did (though it shares a similar plot with Rich and Strange and a similar antic energy with The Trouble with Harry), but not because it deviates from his themes. Rather, Mr. and Mrs. Smith seems to be a film that outlines what it is exactly about rules and written communication that Hitchcock perceives to be so fundamentally unstable and misleading.

Elf (2003) [Infinifilm] – DVD

November 8, 2004Posted in2000s, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Christmas, Comedy, DVD, Family, Fantasy, Romance

**/**** Image A Sound A- Extras A
starring Will Ferrell, James Caan, Zooey Deschanel, Mary Steenburgen
screenplay by David Berenbaum
directed by Jon Favreau

by Walter Chaw Some of the preview spots for Jon Favreau's Elf are hysterical, leading me to think that the film's failure to be very funny has a lot to do with bad direction, editing, or maybe both. It's a lightweight, unapologetically warm-hearted picture that earns a lot of respect for avoiding scatological humour en route to honouring nearly every other ingredient of the The Jerk bumpkin-out-of-water formula. Like Steve Martin, Will Ferrell announces himself with this film (and Old School) as a smart comedian unusually committed to effect and the directions his performance might take him. Ferrell isn't a chaotic jester. His clowning compels because it has the quality of internal logic, enough so that it's somehow possible to accept his man-raised-by-elves creation at face value.

Christmas in Connecticut (1992) + Jingle All the Way (1996) – DVDs

November 8, 2004Posted in1990s, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Christmas, Comedy, DVD, Family, Romance, Schwarzenegger, ZERO STARS

CHRISTMAS IN CONNECTICUT
ZERO STARS/**** Image C Sound C+
starring Dyan Cannon, Kris Kristofferson, Richard Roundtree, Tony Curtis
screenplay by Janet Brownell, based on the screenplay by Lionel Houser and Adele Comandini and story by Aileen Hamilton
directed by Arnold Schwarzenegger

JINGLE ALL THE WAY
ZERO STARS/**** Image B Sound C+
starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sinbad, Phil Hartman, Rita Wilson
screenplay by Randy Kornfield
directed by Brian Levant

by Walter Chaw A man of many talents (a jag-off of all trades, let’s say), the honourable Arnold A. Schwarzenegger made his directorial debut with the 1992 telefilm Christmas in Connecticut, a remake of a 1945 Barbara Stanwyck flick and the sort of unqualified failure that finds something like thirty dozen ways to redefine “fatuous.” Dyan Cannon, she of the toothy, shark-like grin, stars as Elizabeth Blane, a popular cooking-show host without any actual cooking skills who’s led around by her pert snoot by her queen of a producer, Alexander (Tony Curtis, playing Harvey Fierstein). When heroic Colorado park ranger Jefferson Jones (Kris Kristofferson, one definition of “fatuous” all by his own self) saves a kid from the wilderness, Alexander hatches the brilliant plan to capitalize on Grizzly Adams’s national hero status by inviting him to a live broadcast of a fake dinner at a fake house in Connecticut populated by a family of terrible actors and an unspeakable mammy stereotype. It’s hard to draw the line between fiction and reality sometimes, isn’t it?

Alfie (2004)

November 5, 2004Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Romance, Theatrical, UK

*½/****
starring Jude Law, Marisa Tomei, Omar Epps, Nia Long
screenplay by Elaine Pope & Charles Shyer, based on the play and screenplay by Bill Naughton
directed by Charles Shyer

Alfie2004by Walter Chaw I haven’t liked any of the six films that Charles Shyer directed before his remake of Lewis Gilbert’s Alfie, so I guess there’s something to the auteur theory after all. Minus one fab performance from the suddenly omnipresent Jude Law, Shyer’s Alfie is a toothless affair–not surprising given modern cinema’s propensity for turning out lifeless twaddle, but somewhat dismaying given that the film’s source material is one of the most scabrous flicks in the annals of misogyny captured on celluloid. Contrasting the 1966 and 2004 versions of Alfie would be like an essay on how the movies have lost their edge over the course of the past four decades: we’ve moved from the medium cool of Sixties films, with their yearning to break free from the oppression of the Fifties, to the stagnant pond of the now, with its films too scared to offend the priggish States, filthy as they are with the descendants of pilgrims and Puritans. Come to think of it, a comparison between the two pictures also functions as an examination of the general difference between Europe and America–or an overview of religiosity in all its florid and degenerative influences on art.

Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (1994) – DVD

November 1, 2004Posted in1990s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, Directors: Gus Van Sant, Drama, DVD, Esoterica, Romance, Western

***/**** Image A- Sound A- (DD)/A (DTS)
starring Uma Thurman, Lorraine Bracco, Angie Dickinson, Noriyuki "Pat" Morita
screenplay by Gus Van Sant, based on the novel by Tom Robbins
directed by Gus Van Sant

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover From its disastrous premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival (which prompted a hasty re-edit) to the unanimous critical drubbing it received a short while later, few films have had harder luck than Gus Van Sant's Even Cowgirls Get the Blues. The reviews were at best vague, alluding to some thing in the theatre that defied description as much as it discouraged it, while those brave souls not scared off by the word-of-mouth–even fans of Tom Robbins's 1973 source novel, people who could at least be said to have known what they were in for–came away hostile and perplexed. But anything that inspires this kind of uncomprehending panic is a special sort of film–that's right, I'm one of those lonely few who actually liked Even Cowgirls Get the Blues. And analyzing its successful failure is hugely instructive, specifically in showing how certain social forces, then as now, unfairly shape what is considered aesthetic treason.

Mulan (1998) [Special Edition] – DVD

October 28, 2004Posted in1990s, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, China, Comedy, Disney, DVD, Eddie Murphy, Family, Fantasy, Musical, War

**/**** Image B+ Sound A Extras B-
screenplay by Rita Hsiao, Christopher Sanders, Philip LaZebnik, Raymond Singer & Eugenia Bostwick-Singer
directed by Barry Cook and Tony Bancroft

by Bill Chambers If Disney’s animated features can be reduced to a stable of alternating boy movies and girl movies, then the studio’s decision to make the cross-dressing fable Mulan at a juncture when they really needed mass approval (that is, after striking out post-Katzenberg with Pocahontas, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and Hercules) comes across as conspicuously non-partisan–and the hero’s androgyny isn’t the only bet-hedging the filmmakers practice. A meticulous recreation of Imperialist China, for instance, is compromised by anachronisms cultural and temporal (the eponymous Mulan (voice of Ming-Na Wen), a pre-Tang Dynasty Chinese maiden, is introduced to us wearing a tank top and what resemble capri pants; later, she is served bacon and eggs for breakfast), while musical numbers, subversive humour, and Spielbergian spectacle perpetually collide like bumper cars. The end-product is neither fish nor fowl, though it certainly leans towards foul.

Around the Bend (2004)

October 27, 2004Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Theatrical

*/****
starring Michael Caine, Jonah Bobo, Josh Lucas, Glenne Headly
written and directed by Jordan Roberts

Aroundthebendby Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. There’s nothing alive in Around the Bend, a story of three generations of men healing one another during a road trip. It’s just as bad as it sounds: one contrivance piled upon another while Kentucky Fried Chicken looms large in nearly every scene and, by narrative necessity, figures in every critical plot point. The central metaphor for the film is a series of KFC bags, crumpled up and stuffed inside each other like Russian dolls–each entrusted with a couple of post-it notes containing cryptic messages that send our cardboard boys on a scavenger hunt across the Four Corners area of the western United States. It’s the manner in which grand patriarch Henry (Michael Caine) decides he’ll reveal to his grandson Jason (Josh Lucas) why and how his leg doesn’t work right anymore. Jason has been raised by Henry ever since Jason’s father, Turner (Christopher Walken), ran out on them when Jason was just a crippled tot; now Jason has a moppet of his own, saucer-eyed Zach (Jonah Bobo). Zach, regrettably, is saddled with the task of being the precious/precocious font of the film’s alleged humour and the lion’s share of its bittersweetness as well. Bad enough that Caine and Walken agreed to be in this mess; they consented to playing second fiddle to Tiny Tim, too.

The Rose Tattoo (1955) – DVD

October 26, 2004Posted in1950s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Romance

**½/**** Image A- Sound A-
starring Burt Lancaster, Anna Magnani, Marisa Pavan, Ben Cooper
screenplay by Tennessee Williams, based on his play
directed by Daniel Mann

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Anna Magnani is the kind of actress people describe using all the wrong superlatives. Everybody talks about her “big” presence, about how she’s a “powerhouse” and a “force of nature,” as though she were the Italian Shelley Winters. This kind of blather hardly approximates the scope of Magnani’s talent. She’s big all right, but she’s more than the pyrotechnic scenery-chewer that “big” normally designates: she’s that rare combination of big and nuanced, a crushing blend of uninhibited physicality and the willingness to take every line, word, and punctuation mark personally. Technically, even a luminary like her has her work cut out for her in something like The Rose Tattoo, what with its middling Louisiana Peyton Place scenario by Tennessee Williams, the dry, emotionless direction of Daniel Mann, and a supporting cast of Hollywood phoneys conspiring to waste her talent. But Magnani never betrays the thought that her part might be less than worth her time, and in so doing, she makes it worth her time. Ours, too, more often than not.

DIFF ’04: King of the Corner

October 25, 2004Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DIFF/SDFF, Drama, Film Festivals
**½/****starring Peter Riegert, Isabella Rossellini, Jennifer Albano, Eric Bogosianscreenplay by Peter Riegert & Gerald Shapirodirected by Peter Riegert by Walter Chaw Peter Riegert, Animal House's Boon, makes his directorial debut with King of the Corner, a Jewish mid-life crisis of a film that casts Isabella Rossellini in the long-suffering wife role she played so well in Fearless and Riegert himself as a travelling salesman on the verge. Eli Wallach is the father, Rita Moreno is the mother ("He started calling me a 'wetback'"), and Eric Bogosian has a splendid cameo as Rabbi Fink, a man without much patience for mincing…