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.

Love Don’t Co$t a Thing (2003) + Something’s Gotta Give (2003)

December 17, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Jack Nicholson, Romance, Theatrical

LOVE DON'T CO$T A THING
½*/****
starring Nick Cannon, Jordan Burg, Jackie Benoit, George Cedar
screenplay by Troy Beyer and Michael Swerdlick, based on Swerdlick's screenplay Can't Buy Me Love
directed by Troy Beyer

SOMETHING'S GOTTA GIVE
*/****
starring Jack Nicholson, Diane Keaton, Amanda Peet, Keanu Reeves
written and directed by Nancy Meyers

by Walter Chaw The only thing stranger than an urban remake of the late-'80s Patrick Dempsey teensploitation flick Can't Buy Me Love is a blow-by-blow remake of 2000's What Women Want, the latter suddenly more understandable in light of the stultifying limitations John Gray-disciple Nancy Meyers brings to the table as writer-director of that unforgivable rom-com and the dedicatedly unremarkable Something's Gotta Give as well. The disturbing realization is that both Love Don't Co$t a Thing and Something's Gotta Give are products of women filmmakers, writing and directing films in an industry, at least in the United States, still dominated by men–and that both films are non-descript, fairly unflattering to women, definitively unkind to men, and ostensible comedies that wring the genre dry with great droughts of meet-cute, contrivance, bad direction, and enough predictable, twee dialogue to fill a dozen Ephron sisters pictures.

Jet Lag (2002) – DVD

December 15, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD, France, Romance, UK

Décalage horaire
½*/**** Image B Sound A Extras N/A
starring Juliette Binoche, Jean Reno, Sergi López, Scali Delpeyrat
screenplay by Christopher Thompson & Danièle Thompson
directed by Danièle Thompson

by Walter Chaw A beautician (Rose (Juliette Binoche)) fleeing an abusive relationship and a frozen-food magnate (Félix (Jean Reno)) on his way to the funeral for an ex-in-law meet when Charles de Gaulle Airport is shut down during some kind of labour strike. Bonding over a constantly ringing cell phone (ah, what's more romantic than a goddamned cell phone?), the unlikely twosome decides to share a hotel room, where Félix browbeats Rose into taking off some of her makeup, and Rose decides that she's already ready to settle down into another abusive relationship. With the airport forever threatening to open, Binoche and Reno move around various sets in exact two-shot medium compositions that find them spouting their deadening monologues at one another in a failed attempt to convince that they are actually occupying the same space, head or heart or otherwise.

Dream a Little Dream (1989) – DVD

December 10, 2003Posted in1980s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Romance, Teen

*½/**** Image C+ Sound B
starring Jason Robards, Corey Feldman, Piper Laurie, Meredith Salenger
screenplay by Daniel Jay Franklin and Marc Rocco & D.E. Eisenberg
directed by Marc Rocco

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover How to describe the sublimely awful experience of Dream a Little Dream? Imagine a whacked-out homage combo to John Hughes and Nicolas Roeg–one made without the talent or intelligence of either–and you’ll have an idea of its astoundingly ill-advised combination of temporal step-dancing and teenage romance. You have to admire the guts of director Marc Rocco for going so far out on aesthetic limbs that he’ll inevitably crash to earth–if nothing else, he’s willing to try things, and his plotting and editing rhythms are so unlike anything in the rest of the ’80s teen genre that they border on the avant-garde. Dream a Little Dream isn’t actually good, but it’s certainly never dull, and it will keep bad-film enthusiasts forever wallowing in pig heaven.

The Last Samurai (2003) + The Girl from Paris (2003)

December 5, 2003Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, France, Japan, New Zealand, Theatrical, Tom Cruise

THE LAST SAMURAI
**½/****
starring Tom Cruise, Billy Connolly, Tony Goldwyn, Shin Koyamada
screenplay by John Logan and Marshall Herskovitz & Edward Zwick
directed by Edward Zwick

Une hirondelle a fait le printemps
***/****
starring Michel Serrault, Mathilde Seigner, Jean-Paul Roussillon, Frédéric Pierrot
screenplay by Christian Carion and Eric Assous
directed by Christian Carion

Lastsamuraiby Walter Chaw Concerned with the encroachment of technology, spawned by the humanism of the French Revolution, Romanticism as a movement in poetry is involved in nostalgia for an idealized Natural history. On film, it occasionally manifests itself in period pieces that focus on the encroachment and proliferation of the railroad: its engines (as in King Vidor’s Duel in the Sun and Beyond the Forest, or the Hughes Brothers’ From Hell) the manifestation of the industrial revolution in terms of hellmouths and serpents–William Blake’s “Tyger” burning bright in the forests of a primordial night, all-consuming and inexorable. That loss of ritual to the march of time, tradition and heritage falling before the metal chimera of technology finds itself articulated in two very different films: Edward Zwick’s curious, derivative, workmanlike The Last Samurai, and Christian Carion’s bleak and affecting The Girl from Paris (Une hirondelle a fait le printemps).

Looney Tunes: Reality Check (2003) + Looney Tunes: Stranger Than Fiction (2003) – DVDs

December 5, 2003Posted in2000s, Animation, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, DVD, Looney Tunes, Satire

LOONEY TUNES: REALITY CHECK
½*/**** Image A Sound B Extras B-

LOONEY TUNES: STRANGER THAN FICTION
½*/**** Image A Sound B Extras B-

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover So it's come to this: after decades of revelling in the hair-trigger-timed, artfully-drawn, beautifully lush fruits of the old Warner Brothers animation stable, we are now reduced to badly animated web broadcasts slapped haphazardly onto DVD. This cynical cash-grab has nothing to do with the craft of classic-Hollywood Looney Tunes and everything with trying to muscle in on an animation market largely dominated by Disney. But the iron that forged the greatness of the old shorts has largely run cold, replaced by the pathetic brandishing of the only other big cartoon trademarks in town–making for something from which only the very young or the very easily amused could derive any pleasure.

Boat Trip (2003) [The Unrated Version] – DVD

December 4, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD, Germany

*/**** Image B- Sound B Extras C-
starring Cuba Gooding, Jr., Horatio Sanz, Vivica A. Fox, Roselyn Sanchez
screenplay by Mort Nathan & William Bigelow
directed by Mort Nathan

by Walter Chaw Scraping bottom, he said adding to the pool of limp entendre that comprises the whole of Mort Nathan’s excrescent Boat Trip–scraping bottom describing not only the film, but also–this was possible?–Cuba Gooding Jr.’s career. Booked onto a gay cruise by a vengeful travel agent, jilted Jerry (Gooding Jr.) and his pal Nick (Sanz), an interesting odd couple in that both are career second-fiddles (imagine Garfunkel and Oates and you’re close to the mark), try a little too hard to prove their heterosexuality before Gooding Jr. again demonstrates that his career more typically leans towards the mute Stepin Fetchit sidekick of Lightning Jack than it does Rod Tidwell. It’s no shocker that Jerry will fall for a fetching steward Gabriella (Roselyn Sanchez) while being unable, Jack Tripper-like, to reveal to her his affection for the weaker sex; complicating matters is a gaggle of Swedish swimsuit models needing a lift, offering a healthy dose of leering misogyny to the already lethal stew of screaming homophobia. If anything, Boat Trip is an extraordinary monument to bad decisions and bad timing–a picture so ill-conceived and, at its heart, so mean-spirited that it’s nigh impossible to understand how any person in their right mind could have thought this was a bright idea.

Bruce Almighty (2003) [Widescreen] – DVD

November 25, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD, Fantasy

½*/**** Image B+ Sound A- Extras B-
starring Jim Carrey, Jennifer Aniston, Morgan Freeman, Lisa Ann Walter
screenplay by Steve Koren & Mark O'Keefe and Steve Oedekerk
directed by Tom Shadyac

by Walter Chaw There's something blissfully broken about the state of our self-esteem when first The Emperor's Club and now Bruce Almighty come shambling onto the silver screen wearing candy-coloured clothes while stumping subversive messages apropos to never being able to overcome one's shortcomings. And there's something blissfully broken about popular Christianity when within two weeks comes a high profile film about a wooden surfer unifier of nature and machine (Blake's Old and New Testament in The Matrix Reloaded) and this malignant high profile stillbirth, which answers Job's question with, "Let's see if you can do any better"–the one a politically-correct gloss on Christianity as survey movie spirituality, the other a politically-correct–and facile–view of the Christian walk with an entirely unredeemable (and unredeemed) protagonist who plays into our current theocratic leadership's belief that the imitation of Christ includes vengeance and greed.

Eloise at the Plaza (2003) – DVD

November 21, 2003Posted in2000s, Adventure, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, Disney, Drama, DVD, Family, UK

***/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras C
starring Julie Andrews, Jeffrey Tambor, Sofia Vassilieva, Christine Baranski
screenplay by Janet Brownell, based on the book written by Kay Thompson & illustrated by Hilary Knight
directed by Kevin Lima

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover I never thought I'd hear myself saying this, but Eloise at the Plaza is made with far greater skill and care than a Disney TV-movie would normally warrant. Derived from the much-loved children's books by Kay Thompson and Hilary Knight, the film goes out of its way to reproduce their junior-NEW YORKER tone, only in a heavily formalist, hyper-real manner that thrives on perfect shape and well-timed movement. So accomplished is the look of the film that it makes one forget the mealy-mouthed sentiment of some of the dialogue–the clockwork archness of the production transforms its clichés into pure narrative form, so that they might give pleasure in their deployment and execution. In short, it's much better than it had to be and not half bad on its own terms, even by the standards of devoted cynics like me.

Bubba Ho-Tep (2003)

November 21, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Horror, Mystery, Theatrical

***/****
starring Bruce Campbell, Ossie Davis, Reggie Bannister, Bob Ivy
screenplay by Don Coscarelli, based on the novel by Joe R. Lansdale
directed by Don Coscarelli

by Walter Chaw Joe R. Lansdale is best known for his tales of the “weird west,” a genre mixing splatterpunk with alternate-history western almost entirely defined by the author in the early-Nineties. His work reads a little like the sort of folklore in which Mark Twain dabbled (or the gothic in which Flannery O’Connor was involved), but with zombies and gore, while Don Coscarelli’s Bubba Ho-Tep, an adaptation of a Lansdale short story, is steeped in the same sort of bent sensibility that informs the author’s work, performing something like a masterstroke in casting Bruce Campbell as Elvis and Ossie Davis as JFK–if ultimately falling a little short of the astonishing audacity of Lansdale’s prose. (That very ballsiness what has kept any film prior to this one being made from Lansdale’s work, methinks.) What distinguishes the picture, however, is what feels like a genuine concern for the difficulties of aging and the aged, a melancholy tone to the proceedings that, fascinatingly, equates a mummy unquiet for being buried nameless with a pair of American folk heroes declining, also anonymous, in a retirement facility in East Texas.

National Lampoon’s Animal House (1978) [Double Secret Probation Edition – Widescreen] – DVD

November 20, 2003Posted in1970s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD

***½/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras A
starring John Belushi, Tim Matheson, John Vernon, Verna Bloom
screenplay by Harold Ramis, Douglas Kenny & Chris Miller
directed by John Landis

by Walter Chaw Films that spawn genres are unusual, and if twenty-five years and dozens of imitators have diluted the sex and scatology formula of John Landis’s National Lampoon’s Animal House a bit, nothing touches the tightness of an enterprise that finds a golf ball hit into cafeteria stew in one scene and John Belushi casually eating that golf ball a few minutes later. The picture doesn’t so much cover the bases as draw the diamond, casting the evil dean of a small college, Wormer (John Vernon), against a band of fun-loving frat boys led by smooth Otter (Tim Matheson), animalistic Bluto (Belushi), hapless Flounder (Stephen Furst), and audience surrogate Pinto (Tom Hulce). What distinguishes Animal House‘s irreverence from feckless anarchy is the same thing that distinguishes the films of the Farrelly Brothers, the true inheritors of the picture’s legacy: a strong feeling for character and a congenial willingness to transgress that rings as honest even as it tickles at inappropriate.