Marci X (2003) [Widescreen] – DVD

February 6, 2004Posted in2000s, Comedy, DVD, Germany, Music

**½/**** Image B+ Sound A
starring Lisa Kudrow, Damon Wayans, Richard Benjamin, Christine Baranski
screenplay by Paul Rudnick
directed by Richard Benjamin

by Walter Chaw Long about the time Lisa Kudrow and her JAP posse wrap scarves around their heads in a hip-hop club and engage in a tribal dance they learned at The Seven Sisters, it becomes apparent that, while Richard Benjamin's Marci X is sort of terrible, it's also sort of brave. The places that it goes with its observations about race relationships in the United States are places that films rarely go on purpose anymore, and I admire the hell out of it for that. If most of the jokes fall flat while too much of the runtime is given over to musical numbers starring Lisa Kudrow that go nowhere, when the barbs hit their target, they do so with a kind of timeliness that defeats Paramount's decision to shelve the thing for a couple of years before dumping it in theatres last summer without much fanfare to a chorus of pre-written pans.

Against the Ropes (2004) + Catch That Kid (2004)

February 6, 2004Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Comedy, Crime, Drama, Family, Germany, Romance, Sports, Theatrical

AGAINST THE ROPES
*/****
starring Meg Ryan, Omar Epps, Skye McCole Bartusiak, Tony Shalhoub
screenplay by Cheryl Edwards
directed by Charles Dutton

CATCH THAT KID
**/****
starring Kristen Stewart, Corbin Bleu, Max Thieriot, Jennifer Beals
screenplay by Michael Brandt & Derek Haas
directed by Bart Freundlich 

by Walter Chaw  AgainstthekidErin Brockovich with more boxing, Charles S. Dutton's Against the Ropes (released in the same time of year as Steven Soderbergh's surprise obliterating feminist uplift drama and likewise inspired by the true story of a crass woman from a blue-collar background making good) is interested in mythmaking in the way that boxing manager Jackie Kallen, the subject of this would-be biopic, was. Oddly enough, the film is also interested in marginalizing its minority "product" in the way that Kallen is portrayed to have been by the film. Ostensibly the story of Kallen (Meg Ryan) discovering middleweight James Toney on the streets and fashioning from such rough loam the stuff of a boxing hall of fame shoo-in, the film takes so many liberties with history that the "truth" resembles a Hallmark Hall of Fame production complete with a jaunty score by the late Michael Kamen that made me want to punch something. It's lowest-common-denominator filmmaking, a shake-and-bake Oprah Winfrey urban melodrama that hits all the Wildcats-meets-Rocky moments of saccharine populist uplift on its road to instant Palookaville.

Once Upon a Time in Mexico (2003) + Once Upon a Time in the Midlands (2002)|Once Upon a Time in Mexico – DVD

February 3, 2004Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Germany, Revenge, Romance, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

ONCE UPON A TIME IN MEXICO
*½/**** Image A Sound A- Extras A
starring Antonio Banderas, Salma Hayek, Johnny Depp, Rubén Blades
written and directed by Robert Rodriguez

ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE MIDLANDS
*/****
starring Robert Carlyle, Vanessa Feltz, Ricky Tomlinson, Kathy Burke
screenplay by Paul Fraser & Shane Meadows
directed by Shane Meadows

Onceuponatimeby Walter Chaw Ferociously patriotic but lacking in the epic scope suggested by its obvious debt to Sergio Leone's late masterpieces, pastiche-meister Robert Rodriguez's Once Upon a Time in Mexico is a magnification of John Woo in a lot of the same ways that Woo was a magnification of Leone–a post-post modern exercise bound together with a compelling sense of style but an alarming dearth of even the basics of sense. At the same time, if Leone understood the raucous humanism at the heart of Kurosawa, and Woo the insolent demystification of genre archetype of Leone, Rodriguez seems mainly to have ported the puerile macho fantasy of Woo while glancing off the deeper well of questions of honour and the mysterious bond between killers of men. I'm beginning to think that Rodriguez is a cheap filmmaker, interested in the mechanics of a piece more than the motivations of them. He can shoot a mean picture, he just can't set it up, pay it off, or explain it–and in replicating the best shoot-outs of Woo and Leone, he demonstrates that he's no Woo and most definitely no Leone.

Overrated/Underrated: Thirteen (2003) + Intolerable Cruelty (2003) [Widescreen] – DVDs

February 2, 2004Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Coen Brothers, Comedy, Coming of Age, Crime, Drama, DVD, Romance, Teen

by Bill Chambers

OVERRATED
THIRTEEN
*½/**** Image B+, Sound A, Extras B-
starring Evan Rachel Wood, Holly Hunter, Nikki Reed, Jeremy Sisto
screenplay by Catherine Hardwicke & Nikki Reed
directed by Catherine Hardwicke

I wrote my first script at around the age that 16-year-old Nikki Reed was when she collaborated with her father's ex-girlfriend Catherine Hardwicke on the screenplay for Thirteen. In an attempt to shape a thesis about the almost-unwatchable film made from this memoir of Reed's pubescence, I browsed that script (something I haven't done in over a decade) looking for examples of didacticism; by page three, a character has died from smoking, with cigarettes themselves characterized outside passages of dialogue as "cancer sticks." This was of course written in tandem with my own misadventures in smoking, but do as I say, not as I do. (Call it Harmony Korine Syndrome.) Teenagers make exceptionally bad screenwriters because all teens are Catholic, in a sense–every rebellious action has an equal and opposite guilty reaction. Manifested in confessional writing, that hypocrisy can be deliriously egotistical.

The Perfect Score (2004)

January 30, 2004Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Scarlett Johansson, Teen, Theatrical

*/****
starring Scarlett Johansson, Erika Christensen, Chris Evans, Darius Miles
screenplay by Mark Schwahn and Marc Hyman & Jon Zack
directed by Brian Robbins

Perfectscoreby Walter Chaw A remake in quality and spirit of the "what were they thinking" classic Hackers, Brian Robbins's The Perfect Score is one of those stunted adolescent teensploitation flicks that makes one pine for the suddenly-glory days of Fresh Horses and The Breakfast Club–which, as it happens, seems to serve as this flick's carbuncular muse. A band of five disparate high school washouts meet in detention–errr, during a PSAT test–and plot to steal the answers from SAT headquarters. The Jock is played by real-life jock Darius Miles; the basket case is Roy (Leonardo Nam); the princess is Anna (an even more zombie-like than usual Erika Christensen); the brain is Francesca (Scarlett Johansson); and the punk is Kyle (Chris Evans). It takes some doing, it goes without saying, to cause one to reassess the acting acumen of the Brat Pack.

The Big Bounce (2004)

January 30, 2004Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Romance, Theatrical

½*/****
starring Owen Wilson, Morgan Freeman, Sara Foster, Charlie Sheen
screenplay by Sebastian Gutierrez, based on the novel by Elmore Leonard
directed by George Armitage

Bigbounceby Walter Chaw By the end of The Big Bounce, I was mildly surprised that it was still the same day I sat down to watch it. The film is aspiring to give Owen Wilson the role of the breezy, insouciant rake popularized by authors like Gregory MacDonald, Carl Hiaasen, and, more to the point, Elmore Leonard (who I guess wrote the source material, previously adapted into a vehicle for Ryan O'Neal), but succeeds mainly in making the likable Wilson tedious. More a mood piece than a heist flick, The Big Bounce also casts ex-MTV news anchorperson Sara Foster as some kind of femme fatale so vacuous, so bad an actress, that although she's stunning in a Nicolette Sheridan sort of way, she fails to convince that there's enough going on upstairs to be even vaguely dangerous. Foster's entire performance is a yellow bikini and a variety of lucky sheets used as impromptu wraps–an object who never convinces that she's an object on purpose.

Le Divorce (2003) – DVD

January 25, 2004Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Romance

The Divorce
*/**** Image A- Sound B+
starring Kate Hudson, Naomi Watts, Leslie Caron, Stockard Channing
screenplay by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala & James Ivory, based on the novel by Diane Johnson
directed by James Ivory

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Rejoice, America: now there's a movie that hates the French just as much as you do. Operating under the code name Le Divorce, it has infiltrated the ranks of the smelly Frogs, scrutinized their every failing and foible, and exposed them for the no-goodniks that recent events have proven them to be. Were the film only so good at keeping its own house in order; despite its ostentatious accusations of Gallic obtuseness, it fails to notice its own American brand of bourgeois superiority, which treats the continent and its culture as items to be collected when they're not being sold to the highest bidder. There's a lesson to be learned here, especially in these postwar times, about the nature of a certain country and its arrogance.

The Simple Life (2003) (Complete Season One) – DVD

January 25, 2004Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Documentary, DVD, Television

Image A Sound A Extras C

by Walter Chaw As sociology goes, "The Simple Life" is not without cleverness. I'm not referring to the predictable meltdown of sticking Nicole Richie and Paris Hilton in the middle of the Ozarks, but rather the way in which our own prejudices about the extremes of class are manipulated with calculated cruelty. Every episode is preceded by the kind of narration that opens "The Dukes of Hazzard"–the show hates Nicole and Paris on the one hand because they represent absolutely every single evil quality that humans are capable of, and it hates the fine people of Altus, AR on the other hand because they're "simple." It's not a true test as reality shows go: after all, there are no stakes for the retarded heiresses asked to spend five weeks living the titular life who don't treat the stunt as an opportunity to improve themselves but as one to mess around at the expense of people for whom there is something at stake–like livelihood. The series would be a lot better if Nicole and Paris were threatened with being cut off from their inheritances should they act like crass, directionless, shiftless morons.

Bring It On Again (2004) [Widescreen] – DVD

January 23, 2004Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, Sports

Bring It On: Again
*½/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras C+
starring Anne Judson-Yager, Bree Turner, Kevin Cooney, Faune A. Chambers
screenplay by Claudia Grazioso and Mark Gunn & Brian Gunn
directed by Damon Santostefano

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover I'll say this much for Bring It On Again: it isn't nearly as bad as you might expect. Against all odds, the straight-to-video production shows traces of wit and a surfeit of good basic ideas in its tale of rival cheerleading squads, but alas, it was not to be: its core concept withers on the vine in favour of slapped-together aesthetics and teen-sitcom repartee. Par for the dtv course, its creators only seem interested in squeezing a few bucks out of the target demographic; the results, though far from painful, cruelly tantalize us with a glimmer of the film that might have been.

Touching the Void (2003) + Win a Date with Tad Hamilton! (2004)

January 23, 2004Posted in2000s, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Documentary, Drama, Romance, Sports, Theatrical, UK

TOUCHING THE VOID
**/****
starring Nicholas Aaron, Richard Hawking, Brendan Mackey, Joe Simpson
based on the book by Joe Simpson
directed by Kevin Macdonald

WIN A DATE WITH TAD HAMILTON!
*½/****
starring Kate Bosworth, Topher Grace, Josh Duhamel, Ginnifer Goodwin
screenplay by Victor Levin
directed by Robert Luketic

Touchingtadby Walter Chaw For those wondering what it would be like if one of those READER'S DIGEST "Drama in Real Life"s were ever made into a film, wonder no longer, for Touching the Void, packaged complete with suspense-shattering survivor testimonials and manageable tidbits of easily-digestible narrative, is a cunning simulacrum of the same. A feature-length dramatic re-creation in the television tabloid style, Touching the Void tells of a harrowing mountaineering cock-up that is, I guess, legendary in mountaineering circles for the same reason that dead NASCAR drivers are legendary in their sport. The problem though isn't with the ultimate banality of this account of one guy who crawls to safety down the bottom half a mountain he's already fallen down the top half of, but that the film of it mixes the victims of their own daredevil genes offering their perspective in front of a black backdrop with re-enactments featuring wheezy actors not entirely up to the task.

Beyond Re-Animator (2003) – DVD

January 22, 2004Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD, Horror, Sci-Fi, Spain

*/**** Image B Sound B Extras B
starring Jeffrey Combs, Jason Barry, Elsa Pataky, Enrique Arce
screenplay by Jose Manuel Gomez
directed by Brian Yuzna

by Walter Chaw Dr. Herbert West (Jeffrey Combs) apparently exists now in an alternate comic book universe where, as the hero, he can have innumerable concurrent adventures that disregard developments in other instalments in the series. Interred in a maximum security dungeon in the H.P. Lovecraft multiverse (a multiverse still dabbled in recently by Re-Animator director Stuart Gordon and his underestimated Dagon), West has jettisoned schlub assistant Dan for schlub prison doctor Howard (Jason Barry) while doomed love interest duties are assumed by the comely Elsa Pataky as a spunky investigative reporter. During imprisonment, West continues his experiments in re-animating the dead, expanding his research to encompass the idea that the soul has weight (making this an unlikely companion piece to Alejandro González Iñárritu’s 21 Grams) and can be captured and replaced–echoes, of course, of “Dr. Frankenstein”‘s experiments at humanizing Bub in Day of the Dead.

Along Came Polly (2004)

January 16, 2004Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Romance, Theatrical

½*/****
starring Ben Stiller, Jennifer Aniston, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Bryan Brown
written and directed by John Hamburg

Alongcamepollyby Walter Chaw A half-baked, underfed comedy of body function that doesn't even manage the wit to successfully honour the threadbare conventions of its idiot slapstick sub-genre, Along Came Polly isn't offensive so much as apocalyptically tiresome. Even at an anaemic eighty-five minutes, the film drags somehow, limping across the finish line with an ass rimshot that isn't funny at the beginning of the picture with Hank Azaria and hasn't gotten any funnier by the end of it with Ben Stiller. How something so indebted to dozens upon dozens of other films can't get the imitation right buggers the imagination, providing a nation of yearning hacks that dulcet feeling of hope that results in a few more horrifically inept screenplays (produced and directed with commensurate incompetence) just like this one probably in the first half of 2004 alone. Bleak doesn't even begin to describe it.

Lucía, Lucía (2003) – DVD

January 12, 2004Posted in2000s, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, Crime, Drama, DVD, Mexico, Mystery, Romance, Spain, Thriller

La hija del caníbal
**/**** Image B Sound A- Extras C+
starring Cecilia Roth, Carlos Álvarez-Novoa, Kuno Becker, Manuel Blejerman
screenplay by Antonio Serrano, based on the novella Homónima by Rosa Montero
directed by Antonio Serrano

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover A critic at the CHICAGO READER once pointed out that movies often show events that would traumatize us if they happened in real life. But what happens when they cheat and fail to traumatize the characters to which they occur? That's the major problem with Lucía, Lucía (La hija del caníbal), a film that takes a threatened murder and a shocking betrayal and treats them as springboards for a character-building "adventure." In reality, the events swirling around the protagonist would crush her spirit and leave her a broken woman, but in Antonio Serrano's Learning Annex version, everything is a conduit to her self-actualization–a desperately naïve approach that so lowers the stakes of the film that it barely registers.

Overnight Delivery (1998) – DVD

January 11, 2004Posted in1990s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, DVD, Road Movie, Romance

½*/**** Image B- Sound B
starring Reese Witherspoon, Paul Rudd, Christine Taylor, Larry Drake
screenplay by Marc Sedaka and Steven Bloom
directed by Jason Bloom

by Bill Chambers A cult film without a cult, Overnight Delivery has gained a reputation, if not a following, for being the uncredited inspiration behind slippery documentarian Todd Phillips’s official fiction debut, Road Trip. And, of course, it stars the Reese Witherspoon who had not yet been body-snatched by the species that also got Ashley Judd, although it’s worth noting that Overnight Delivery is a harbinger of Sweet Home Alabamas to come, with Witherspoon a conduit for one meet-cute cliché after another. I’ll admit that she’s adorable in the picture, but her character, a college student whose bad taste in men is made a virtue by the workhorse plot, is a cipher steadily depleting the goodwill she shamelessly earns in her introduction as a stripper in a Catholic school uniform named Ivy Von Trapp. In true Hollywood fashion, Ivy’s striptease is cut short before her Pointer Sisters get to do the Neutron Dance–she’s too busy squatting for the patrons stuffing bills into her skirt.

The Office: The Complete First Series (2001) – DVD

January 10, 2004Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Pseudo-Documentary, Television, UK

Image A- Sound A Extras B+
"Downsize", "Work Experience", "The Quiz", "Training", "New Girl", "Judgement"

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover

"I've had several e-mails complaining about a suggestion I made in this column that we should give cannabis to anorexics so they get the munchies. This was a satirical joke and was not meant to offend. I do not advocate the use of illegal drugs and I do not find any eating disorders amusing."
-David Brent, writing in the WERNHAM-HOGG NEWS

In the Line of Duty 4 (1989) – DVD

January 8, 2004Posted in1980s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Crime, DVD, Hong Kong, Martial Arts

In the Line of Duty IV
皇家師姐Ⅳ直擊證人
Wong ga si je IV: Jik gik jing yan
**½/****
starring Donnie Yen, Cynthia Khan, Yat Chor Yuen, Michael Wong
screenplay by Cheung Chi Shing & Wang Wing Fa
directed by Yuen Woo Ping

by Bill Chambers Generally regarded as the best chapter in the series (and released in America prior to any of the others), Yuen Woo Ping’s In the Line of Duty 4 is an effective action spectacle and a mediocre cop drama; intense though it may be, the film is simply not of a calibre that leaves you remembering it as such. I know there are people who swear by its star, Donnie Yen, but I’ve seen him in about six pictures now (most recently, Zhang Yimou’s awesome Hero), and I don’t find his screen presence all that enthralling. If he’s eschewed the peacocking that has catapulted his contemporaries in HK cinema to international stardom, he’s also lacking in the animal magnetism that keeps your eyes on one blur as opposed to another blur during a martial-arts brawl. Good fighter, of course. Yen is probably the biggest name in In the Line of Duty 4‘s bargain cast, a fact only emphasized by the wishful misprinting of Ping’s name above the title (implying that he’s Yen’s co-star rather than his director) on the front of Fox’s new R1 DVD release.

Johnny English (2003) [Widescreen] – DVD

January 3, 2004Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, DVD, Espionage, France, UK

*/**** Image B+ Sound B Extras C+
starring Rowan Atkinson, Natalie Imbruglia, Ben Miller, John Malkovich
screenplay by Neal Purvis & Robert Wade and William Davies
directed by Peter Howitt

by Bill Chambers The only thing mustier than James Bond movies are parodies of them, and as if we needed proof, along comes the excruciatingly predictable 007 send-up Johnny English, in which Rowan Atkinson soars to the lows of Leslie Nielsen at his most contemptibly greedy (see: Spy Hard). (I like both comedians, Atkinson and Nielsen, but only when they're leashed to masters Richard Curtis and David Zucker, respectively.) If it's true that Atkinson was recently motivated by the stateside failure of this very film to check himself into an Arizona rehab centre for depressed celebrities (and frankly, don't blame audiences–distributor Universal didn't exactly tax themselves advertising Johnny English to domestic moviegoers), I hope his caretakers remind him in haste that none of Monty Python's features grossed an enviable sum abroad, that the James Bond franchise has already satirized itself into the ground (it's no casual point that Johnny English was co-scripted by the same writing team behind The World Is Not Enough and Die Another Day), and that his first problem is trying to please a country that opens rehab centres for depressed celebrities.

So Close (2002) – DVD

December 30, 2003Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Drama, Hong Kong, Romance, Thriller

*/**** Image A Sound A-
starring Shu Qi, Vicki Zhao, Karen Mok, Song Seung Hun
screenplay by Jeff Lau
directed by Corey Yuen

by Walter Chaw Frankly, So Close could suck a tennis ball through a keyhole. Directed by action choreographer Corey Yuen (whose The Transporter I actually sort of liked), the film, a head-scratching mix of elaborate camera angles and stultifying “Dragnet” editing, is so dedicated to trundling from one rigorously disinteresting action set-piece to the next that it’s fair to wonder why the filmmakers even bothered to provide exposition of any sort.

Teknolust (2003); In July (2000); Taking Sides (2002); Monster (2003)

December 25, 2003Posted in2000s, Adventure, Austria, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Comedy, Crime, Drama, France, Germany, Music, Romance, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller, UK, War

TEKNOLUST
**/****
starring Tilda Swinton, Jeremy Davies, James Urbaniak, Karen Black
written and directed by Lynn Hershman-Leeson

Im Juli.
***/****
starring Moritz Bleibtreu, Christiane Paul, Mehmet Kurtulus, Idil Üner
written and directed by Fatih Akin

TAKING SIDES
**/****
starring Harvey Keitel, Stellan Skarsgård, Moritz Bleibtreu, Birgit Minichmayr
screenplay by Ronald Harwood
directed by István Szabó

MONSTER
**½/****
starring Charlize Theron, Christina Ricci, Bruce Dern, Scott Wilson
written and directed by Patty Jenkins

Teknoby Walter Chaw As the year winds down and distributors great and small try to cram their films into rotation for possible awards consideration, the truism that there are just as many mediocre foreign and independent films as mainstream ones proves sage for a quartet of minor releases. Lynn Hershman-Leeson chimes in with Teknolust, another of her riffs on Derek Jarman, this one obsessed with Tilda Swinton and eternity through technology. Fatih Akin’s second film In July (Im Juli.) is essentially a German The Sure Thing with elements of After Hours, obsessed with eternity through an immortal beloved lit by the nimbus of various suns. One-time Oscar-winner István Szabó offers Taking Sides, a morality tale plucked half-formed from the stage, questioning the eternity of art against the requirements of morality. And Patty Jenkins weighs in with Monster, this year’s Boys Don’t Cry; it’s vérité as lower-class urban ugly, with Charlize Theron seeking eternity through a performance that breaks her out of her starlet mold, Halle Berry-style. Only time will tell if any of it keeps.

Destry Rides Again (1939) + The Flight of the Phoenix (1965) – DVDs

December 23, 2003Posted in1930s, 1960s, Adventure, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Western

DESTRY RIDES AGAIN
***/**** Image B+ Sound A
starring Marlene Dietrich, James Stewart, Brian Donlevy, Charles Winninger
screenplay by Felix Jackson, Gertrude Purcell and Henry Mayers, based on the novel by Max Brand
directed by George Marshall

THE FLIGHT OF THE PHOENIX
***/**** Image A- Sound A
starring James Stewart, Richard Attenborough, Peter Finch, Hardy Kruger
screenplay by Lukas Heller, from the novel by Elleston Trevor
directed by Robert Aldrich

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover The word "clever" can be used as a compliment or an insult–it's either a means of saying how ingenious you are, or a way of showing how far you are from being "intelligent." The same goes for the star rating, which can be used to mark a sleeper that shows some real talent or to warn you that something is "only entertainment"–when is three stars just right, and when is it not enough? This is the conundrum that faces me in reviewing Destry Rides Again and The Flight of the Phoenix, two films completely separate in time and subject matter, but which both rate about the same in terms of their achievement. But despite their equal entertainment value, I have a better feeling about Phoenix than I do about Destry: it's more creative and resourceful, even if it doesn't come off perfectly. That doesn't mean you shouldn't see Destry, though it is an indication that you shouldn't raise your hopes too high for it–and that you might be surprised by the lesser-known Phoenix.