Never on Sunday (1960) + The Man from Elysian Fields (2002) – DVDs

August 28, 2003Posted in1960s, 2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Greece, Romance

Pote tin Kyriaki
***/**** Image A Sound B
starring Melina Mercouri, George Foundas, Titos Vandis
written and directed by Jules Dassin

THE MAN FROM ELYSIAN FIELDS
**½/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras C-
starring Andy Garcia, Mick Jagger, Julianna Margulies, Olivia Williams
screenplay by Phillip Jayson Lasker
directed by George Hickenlooper

by Walter Chaw They could be sisters in philosophy. The school of happy-go-lucky hookers perfected by Billy Wilder and his Irma La Douce (1963) also graduated Melina Mercouri’s Ilya three years previous in expatriated filmmaker Jules Dassin’s ebullient Never on Sunday (1960). Dassin and Wilder are involved in a perverse sort of mythmaking–fed by the artifice of classic theatre for Dassin, and for Wilder, more, the hysterical artifice of musical theatre, reclaiming the state of whore to the state of Madonna in what feels like a mania for order in a world without it. The whore as pacific nurturer, Rose of Sharon recast as Xaviera Hollander, represents a cynic’s compromise: the font of life and hearth nursed in the oft-fondled breast of a wanton woman. Mary Magdalene, unrepentant–ascendant.

Bend It Like Beckham (2002) [Widescreen Edition] – DVD

August 26, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Germany, Romance, Sports, UK

**½/**** Image A- Sound A Extras A-
starring Parminder Nagra, Keira Knightley, Jonathan Rhys-Meyers, Anupam Kher
screenplay by Gurinder Chadha, Guljit Bindra, Paul Mayeda Berges
directed by Gurinder Chadha

by Bill Chambers This year's British-import-pre-sold-as-a-hit Bend It Like Beckham coasts on its similitude to John Badham's magnificent Saturday Night Fever, but when all a picture is doing is reminding you of a better one without embarrassing itself, it can hardly be called a triumph. I'm surprised that more critics haven't picked up on the film's debt to Saturday Night Fever, actually, which extends to the set design and placement of key props. It's this kind of popular coding that has, I suspect, buoyed Bend It Like Beckham aloft the market doldrums of other mainstream-pitched East-meets-West comedies (East Is East, Bollywood/Hollywood): the subliminal affiliation of one ethnicity (orthodox Sikh) with another (Italian-Americans) that was long ago embraced by the masses.

Vintage Mickey – DVD

August 25, 2003Posted in1920s, 1930s, Animation, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, Disney, DVD, Family

Image B Sound B
Steamboat Willie (1928), Plane Crazy (1928), The Karnival Kid (1929), The Birthday Party (1931), The Castaway (1931), Mickey’s Orphans (1931), Mickey’s Revue (1932), Building a Building (1933), Mickey’s Steam-Roller (1934)

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover The difference between Disney and Warner Bros. animation isn’t exactly the standard business vs. art dichotomy–it’s about the smoothing over of rough spots vs. the celebration of their interruptions. Where the whole point of Looney Tunes was to affirm the thing that caused the chaos, Disney either healed that thing or pretended like it didn’t really matter. But before the battle of the trademarks began in earnest, there were only the shorts, and Disney’s M.O. was simply to provide a salve–not through the personality cult of its sadly conservative mastermind, but through the reduction of things that can hurt. The new compilation “Vintage Mickey” is thus bittersweet occasion to look through the prism of the company’s semi-fascistic present at the apparent innocence of the beginning and wonder where it all went wrong.

Down with Love (2003) [Widescreen] – DVD

August 24, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD, Germany, Romance

*/**** Image B Sound A Extras B+
starring Renée Zellweger, Ewan McGregor, David Hyde Pierce, Sarah Paulson
screenplay by Eve Ahlert & Dennis Drake
directed by Peyton Reed

by Walter Chaw Renée Zellweger doesn't look altogether well and Ewan McGregor appears a little bored in Peyton Reed's post-modern take on the three Doris Day/Rock Hudson innuendo operas of the late-'50s and early-'60s. An opening voiceover informs that it's "Now, 1962!" and the jokes don't get any funnier than that; Down with Love makes so many miscalculations about its cast and premise that its theatrical release concurrent with The Matrix Reloaded doesn't seem so much "counter-programming" as "hide the evidence." Its greatest crime isn't that its one joke is tiresome from the thirty-minute mark on, it's that at the end of the day the picture doesn't particularly convince as a romance, tickle as a comedy, or score as a satire of any kind.

American Splendor (2003) + The Secret Lives of Dentists (2003)

August 22, 2003Posted in****/****, 2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Comedy, Drama, Esoterica, Theatrical

AMERICAN SPLENDOR
*½/****
starring Paul Giamatti, Hope Davis, James Urbaniak, Harvey Pekar
screenplay by Shari Springer Berman & Robert Pulcini, based on the comics by Harvey Pekar & Joyce Brabner
directed by Shari Springer Berman & Robert Pulcini

THE SECRET LIVES OF DENTISTS
****/****
starring Campbell Scott, Hope Davis, Denis Leary, Robin Tunney
screenplay by Craig Lucas, based on the novella The Age of Grief by Jane Smiley
directed by Alan Rudolph

by Walter Chaw The same between American Splendor and Ghost World is that both have middle-aged outcasts as protagonists who each collect old blues 78s, that both were adapted from comic books, and that there’s a bus stop in Cleveland. The difference between American Splendor and Ghost World is that with two solitary figures in search of completion, there is the possibility for recognition of sameness–but with two figures (underground comic book writer Harvey Pekar and his wife Joyce Brabner (Hope Davis)) who have found in one another a sympathetic orbit, a partner in life and lo, with a child dropped willy-nilly into their midst to tie up loose ends, there is instead a sort of alien, island of lost toys exclusion that makes for a further alienation of the very alienated audience to which Pekar’s comic so appealed and, eventually, took for granted and pandered. The difference between American Splendor and Ghost World is that one is in love with its contrivance, and the other is in love with its melancholy.

The Medallion (2003)

August 21, 2003Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Fantasy, Hong Kong, Jackie Chan, Martial Arts, Theatrical, Thriller

½*/****
starring Jackie Chan, Lee Evans, Claire Forlani, Julian Sands
screenplay by Bey Logan, Gordon Chan, Alfred Cheung, Bennett Joshua Davlin, Paul Wheeler
directed by Gordon Chan

Medallionby Walter Chaw I think it's fair at this point to say that I'm no longer so much a Jackie Chan fan as I really like a few Jackie Chan movies. His career has taken a rather conspicuous downturn since he reintroduced himself to Hollywood almost a decade ago, just after his last great film Drunken Master 2, scraping and bowing and remixing a few of his Hong Kong hits with English-dubs (and why is it that Asian films are the only ones consistently re-voiced for North American release?) and consenting to play ethnic Kato caricature to a string of Yank comedians for inexperienced directors and that screaming idiot Brett Ratner.

Dirty Pretty Things (2003); Shanghai Ghetto (2003); Camp (2003)

August 20, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Documentary, Drama, Musical, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

DIRTY PRETTY THINGS
***/****
starring Audrey Tautou, Sergi López, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Sophie Okonedo
screenplay by Steve Knight
directed by Stephen Frears

SHANGHAI GHETTO
**/****
directed by Dana Janklowicz-Mann & Amir Mann

CAMP
*½/****
starring Daniel Letterle, Joanna Chilcoat, Robin de Jesus, Steven Cutts
written and directed by Todd Graff

by Walter Chaw Stephen Frears, like antipodean director Phillip Noyce before him, found the Hollywood waters to be a touch turgid and so in 2000 went back to the small country where he first rose to prominence. For Frears, who made his first resonant mark with a fantastic quartet of films–My Beautiful Laundrette, Walter and June, Prick Up Your Ears, and Sammy and Rosie Get Laid–in the mid-’80s, the return to his homeland presaged a return to his interest in England’s bottom caste and immigrant class, first with the grim, slight Liam and now with the trancelike, nightmarish Dirty Pretty Things. Its title both a reference to smarmy hotel manager Juan’s (Sergi López) philosophy of hotel management (“Our guests are strangers–they leave dirty things, we make them pretty things”) and the idea that the “pretty things” might be the film’s pretty heroes, Nigerian refugee Okwe (Chiwetel Ejiofor) and Turkish illegal Senay (Audrey Tautou), dirtied by the realities of blue-collar London. The struggle between the pragmatism of Juan’s outlook and the idea of sullied purity of Okwe and Senay is really all you need know about the picture–it’s a piece composed of equal parts social realism and fairytale martyrdom, with either part watered down by the other.

City Hunter (1993) – DVD

August 14, 2003Posted in1990s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, DVD, Hong Kong, Jackie Chan, Japan, Martial Arts, Romance, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/**** Image C Sound C Extras D
starring Jackie Chan, Joey Wong, Kumiko Goto, Chingmy Yau
written and directed by Wong Jing

by Walter Chaw There’s a scene towards the middle of Jackie Chan’s unwatchable City Hunter where starving, womanizing Ryô (Chan) leers at a pretty bimbo, and director Wong Jing provides a point-of-view shot that replaces her breasts with hamburgers and her arms and legs with corresponding fried chicken parts. The film never gets any funnier. City Hunter is garbage–fetid and painful from its prologue to a conclusion 100 minutes later that feels for all the world like a week-and-a-half later. It’s misogynistic, which is not really a surprise as almost all of Jackie Chan’s modern-era films are virulently so, but it does what I wouldn’t have suspected to be possible: it makes Chan a smarmy, oafish reptile. The modern Buster Keaton is here recast as Lorenzo Llamas, with the level of violence towards women in the film so extreme and unacceptable that it feels not so much prehistoric as something of a first.

Hello, Dolly! (1969) – DVD

August 14, 2003Posted in1960s, Adventure, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, DVD, Musical, Romance

*/**** Image A- Sound A
starring Barbra Streisand, Walter Matthau, Michael Crawford, Louis Armstrong
screenplay by Ernest Lehman, based on the stage play by Michael Stewart and The Matchmaker by Thornton Wilder
directed by Gene Kelly

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Hunter S. Thompson once remarked that the Circus Circus casino would be “what the whole hep world would be doing on a Saturday night if the Nazis had won the war.” The family audience, meanwhile, would be taking in something like Hello, Dolly!, a film so totalitarian in its crushing good cheer that anyone without a predisposition towards its phoney “togetherness” will find themselves beaten down in their seats. Equal parts Lawrence Welk and Albert Speer, it’s a grotesque epic pageant designed to show off all the money spent on production while being as condescendingly “cute” and innocuous as possible–a brew of wastefulness and sentimentality so strong that it’s hard to breathe in its aroma, let alone drink it to its dregs.

Drop Dead Fred (1991) + The Last American Virgin (1982) – DVDs

August 7, 2003Posted in1980s, 1990s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Romance, Teen, UK

DROP DEAD FRED
½*/**** Image C+ Sound B+
starring Phoebe Cates, Rik Mayall, Marsha Mason, Tim Matheson
screenplay by Carlos David & Anthony Fingleton
directed by Ate De Jong

THE LAST AMERICAN VIRGIN
**½/**** Image A- Sound A-
starring Lawrence Mondson, Diane Franklin, Steve Antin, Joe Rubbo
written and directed by Boaz Davidson

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Not all bad films are created equal. Like everything else, there are “good” examples and bad ones, the distinction resting on how much they’re willing to give. For example, a film like The Last American Virgin, while stopping well shy of being a real movie, nonetheless holds interest with its constant barrage of boorish behaviour and its curious attempts to shoehorn “touching” drama into its gross-out formula. It’s bad, but it tries things, and you admire its valiant attempts to give the people some low satisfaction. A movie like Drop Dead Fred, meanwhile, has been so ruthlessly scrutinized for anything that might resemble creativity that it has nothing to offer, and exhausts its 100-odd minute running time chasing its short stubby tail as we rush to the exits.

Piglet’s Big Movie (2003) – DVD

August 5, 2003Posted in2000s, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Disney, DVD, Family, Musical, Mystery

*½/**** Image A Sound A- Extras C-
screenplay by Brian Hohlfeld, from stories by A.A. Milne
directed by Francis Glebas

by Bill Chambers To its credit, Piglet's Big Movie, unlike so many Disney franchise pictures, is inoffensive (unless being monotonous is offensive), but it was hamstrung (har-har) from the outset by the departure through death or firing of original Pooh voice actors Sterling Holloway (Pooh), Paul Winchell (Tigger), Ralph Wright (Eeyore), Junius Matthews (Rabbit), and Hal Smith (Owl). Only the inveterate John Fiedler returns to lend his pipes to the eponymous Piglet, and while Jim Cummings technically sounds like Holloway and Winchell in replacing them, he lacks the mischievous twinkle that both brought to their respective roles. Meanwhile, the character-sprung songs, a major ingredient of the series' charm, are too attached this time around to Carly Simon, who appears in an inexplicably live-action closing-credits sequence singing solo in the Hundred-Acre Wood like she's a real "get" for an audience that hasn't learned to tie their shoes yet. (There are no tunes to get kids in touch with their melancholy side early like Winnie the Pooh and the Blustery Day's depressing "The Rain Rain Rain Came Down, Down, Down," only stuff to teach them how most songs are sub-folk music until you replace your Fisher-Price radio with a ghetto blaster.) And while it makes more sense here, given that Pooh's first feature film The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh was a compilation of short subjects, did we really need another Disney flick with an anthology structure on the heels of Cinderella II, Atlantis: Milo's Return, and Tarzan & Jane? It's starting to feel like an injection mold.

American Wedding (2003)

August 1, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Romance, Theatrical

*½/****
starring Jason Biggs, Seann William Scott, Alyson Hannigan, Eddie Kaye Thomas
screenplay by Adam Herz
directed by Jesse Dylan

Americanweddingby Walter Chaw Joining the Porky’s triptych as teensploitation smut franchises that have made it to three instalments (the Revenge of the Nerds series has four chapters, but only the first two are really all that smutty), American Pie finds (hopefully) its conclusion in the dreadfully incomplete-feeling American Wedding. A series of set-ups without punchlines that compensate for the deficiency by featuring a truly impressive number of random de-pantsings, people caught in unlikely tableaux that are inevitably mistaken for some sort of sexual deviancy, and a stable of stock characters so locked into their exploitative roles that existential questions of predestination and choice tickle at making the picture interesting. Featuring the best fecal-consumption-mined-for-yuks scene since the second Austin Powers movie (though a disappointingly minimal amount of gratuitous nudity), American Wedding can, in all honesty, be analyzed with profit as a satire of the whole tits-and-zits genre. It resembles Jurassic Park III in its general disdain for its audience and fatigue with its own shake-and-bake premise, but it does have a couple of laughs–the best bits involving a surreal dance-off and a ridiculously convoluted sequence with a pair of role-playing strippers.

Mondays in the Sun (2002); Freaky Friday (2003); The Eye (2002)

August 1, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, France, Hong Kong, Horror, Italy, Singapore, Spain, Theatrical, Thriller

Los Lunes al sol
**/****
starring Javier Bardem, Luis Tosar, José Ángel Egido, Nieve de Medina
screenplay by Fernando León de Aranda, Ignacio del Moral
directed by Fernando León de Aranda

FREAKY FRIDAY
**/****
starring Jamie Lee Curtis, Lindsay Lohan, Harold Gould, Mark Harmon
screenplay by Heather Hach and Leslie Dixon, based on the novel by Mary Rodgers
directed by Mark S. Waters

Jian gui
*½/****
starring Angelica Lee, Lawrence Chou, Chutcha Rujinanon, Yut Lai So
screenplay by Jo Jo Yuet-chun Hui, Oxide Pang & Danny Pang
directed by Oxide Pang & Danny Pang

Mondaysfreakyeyeby Walter Chaw Fernando León de Aranda's Mondays in the Sun is probably best described as a Spanish version of Fred Schepisi's Last Orders: a journal of a depressed nation's aging gentry, ferrying one of their own on to the great symbolic hereafter. It aspires to the sort of myth of Vittorio Di Sica's neo-realism, portraying the plight of the dispossessed working class in its unadorned splendour, succeeding by the end only to be a repetitive tattoo around the threadbare theme of men defined by work and destroyed by obsolescence. A castration melodrama in several anecdotal horizontal movements, Mondays in the Sun loses steam and tests patience by making its one point to exhaustion. A scene where the great Javier Bardem rails at the fable of the grasshopper and the ants ("This is bunk! It has no sympathy for someone who is born a grasshopper instead of an ant!") says almost all there is to say about the film, while a lingering close-up of Bardem's battered mug in all its injured brute eloquence is, by itself again, enough.

The Cuckoo (2002)

August 1, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Drama, Russia, Theatrical, War

Kukushka
**/****
starring Anni-Christina Juuso, Ville Haapasalo, Viktor Bychkov
written and directed by Aleksandr Rogozhkin

by Bill Chambers As with the ineffably similar No Man’s Land, Danis Tanovic’s “Twilight Zone”-esque morality play in which a Bosnian and a Serb duke it out while the dead body of a Serb soldier threatens to detonate a landmine between them, when you’re done watching The Cuckoo, you’re done thinking about it as well. Both films make their points too baldly–the stress of analysis and the joy of drawing conclusions are pleasures you won’t much experience after a viewing of The Cuckoo despite its having the pretense of being profound. An awkwardly-translated quote that writer-director Aleksander Rogozhkin provided for the film’s North American pressbook–“I don’t write scripts, I write novels for cinema… I could just note ‘Sniper Veiko shoots from a rifle,’ but it will be an absolutely different approach if I write ‘Sniper Veiko shoots from old Austrian rifle, with optical sight rifle'”–is telling: he’s not a man who likes to leave many doors open to interpretation.

The Fortune Cookie (1966) – DVD

July 30, 2003Posted in1960s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Directors: Billy Wilder, DVD, Romance

**/**** Image C+ Sound B
starring Jack Lemmon, Walter Matthau, Ron Rich, Judi West
screenplay by Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond
directed by Billy Wilder

by Bill Chambers The Fortune Cookie was an attempt on Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond’s part to recapture the glory days of six years previous, when their one-two punch of Some Like It Hot and The Apartment hit pay dirt. (Imagine Steven Spielberg’s 1993, with its back-to-back releases of Jurassic Park and Schindler’s List, and you’ll have some idea of the position that Wilder and Diamond were in following The Apartment‘s Oscar glory.) More to the point, it was an act of redemption for the roundly lambasted Kiss Me, Stupid, and like most movie art seeking atonement from the masses, it so slavishly recapitulates a past success that audiences still aren’t getting what they want, only what they’ve had. A homoerotic redux of The Apartment, with Jack Lemmon reassuming the role of the weak-willed schlub and a black man filling in for Shirley MacLaine (although these character ascriptions prove interchangeable), The Fortune Cookie does nothing so well as make you wish you were watching The Apartment instead.

Son of the Beach: Volume 1 (2000-2001) – DVD

July 30, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, DVD, Television

Image C Sound B Extras C+
"With Sex You Get Eggroll", "Silence of the Clams", "In the G-Hetto", "Love, Native-American Style", "Two Thongs Don't Make a Right", "Fanny and the Professor", "Eat My Muffin", "Miso Honei", "South of Her Border", "Day of the Jackass", "A Star is Boned," "Attack of the Cocktopuss", "Mario Putzo's The Last Dong", "B.J. Blue Hawaii", "From Russia with Johnson", "Remember Her Titans", "Rod Strikes Back", "Queefer Madness", "Light My Firebush", "Chip's a Goy", "A Tale of Two Johnsons"

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Attention all 13-year-old boys: your time has come. It is decreed that all of you must buy, watch and perhaps even memorize the handsome 3-disc set "Son of the Beach: Volume 1". You heard me, buster: it is incumbent upon you to own twenty-one solid episodes of some of the most puerile, asinine, and questionable TV ever produced by man or beast. You may not know that this is your civic duty, but I assure you, it is: you, and only you, are ideally suited to its unique blend of jiggle-visuals, toilet humour, smutty double-entendres and crude ethnic stereotyping.

Gigli (2003)

July 29, 2003Posted in2000s, Al Pacino, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Gangster, Romance, Theatrical

*/****
starring Ben Affleck, Jennifer Lopez, Justin Bartha, Lenny Venito
written and directed by Martin Brest

Gigliby Walter Chaw While it doesn’t live up to its hype as the worst film ever made, Martin Brest’s Gigli, with its creepy contention that Ben Affleck is the cure for lesbianism, certainly makes a run for the most unintentionally hilarious film ever made. Its first mistake is in giving not one, but two charisma vortexes the leading roles, the sucking black hole this creates at the film’s centre thrown into sharp relief whenever a real actor (Christopher Walken, Al Pacino) makes a cameo appearance. The most surprising thing about Gigli isn’t the failed casting gambit or the gruesomely over-written dialogue (this isn’t anyone’s first film, after all), however, but rather the idea that Jennifer Lopez would authorize the reduction of her famously outsized posterior on the posters–abandoning (after mocking it in Maid in Manhattan–which, as it happens, was written by Brest’s Meet Joe Black scribe Kevin Wade) what is arguably the only thing so far about Lopez that hasn’t proven to be facile and over-hyped.

Valley Girl (1983) [Special Edition] + The Sure Thing (1985) [Special Edition] – DVDs

July 29, 2003Posted in1980s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, DVD, Nicolas Cage, Romance, Teen

VALLEY GIRL
**/**** Image B Sound C- Extras B+
starring Nicolas Cage, Deborah Foreman, Elizabeth Daily, Cameron Dye
screenplay by Andrew Lane and Wayne Crawford
directed by Martha Coolidge

THE SURE THING
**½/**** Image A Sound B Extras B
starring John Cusack, Daphne Zuniga, Viveca Lindfors, Nicollette Sheridan
screenplay by Steven L. Bloom & Jonathan Roberts
directed by Rob Reiner

by Bill Chambers SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. I spent the better part of 1983 in a hospital hooked up to a poetically elaborate I.V., the end result of a pyeloplasty to repair an irritable kidney. Media saturation wasn’t then what it is now, and living sheltered like that made it doubly easy for movies to pass by my radar undetected. But in the strange case of Valley Girl, which I didn’t even know existed until four or five years after its release (once its star, Nicolas Cage, was on the rise), I climbed aboard the bandwagon unbeknownst: The weekday nurses–who seemed old to me then but whom I now realize were probably in their early-twenties at best–returned to work one spring Monday having adopted an entirely new dialect and nicknamed themselves “the Valley girls.” My susceptible young mind took to the language–I still talk like a goddamn Valley girl.

Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over (2003)

July 25, 2003Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Family, Sci-Fi, Stallone

Spy Kids 3: Game Over
½*/****
starring Antonio Banderas, Carla Gugino, Alexa Vega, Daryl Sabara
written and directed by Robert Rodriguez

Spykids3dby Walter Chaw Robert Rodriguez’s deeply unpleasant conclusion to his Spy Kids trilogy lacks the smarts and inventiveness of the first two films in the series, putting all of its eggs in a 3-D basket that is so certain to cause headache that bottles of aspirin should be passed out alongside the flimsy red/blue glasses. All the weaknesses of the previous Spy Kids entries, unbolstered in Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over (hereafter Spy Kids 3) by a sense of joy and innovation, are unforgivable in this film: the genuinely awful child actors, the cheesy special effects, and that certain air of imported moral superiority that seems a late-hour attempt to justify the emptiness of the exercise. Out of nowhere, the lessons of family and respect for disability find themselves grafted to this flimsiest of low-tech frameworks–special effects that are so amateurish and poorly implemented they don’t so much remind of Tron as replicate Tron bit-for-bit twenty-one years after the fact. The narrative of the film, such as it is, reveals itself to be a life-support system for hyperactive incompetence, and for a series of stupid cameos that are at least preferable to Sylvester Stallone as something called The Toymaker.

Masked and Anonymous (2003)

July 24, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Esoterica, Music, Theatrical, UK, Western

*/****
starring Bob Dylan, John Goodman, Jessica Lange, Luke Wilson
screenplay by Bob Dylan & Larry Charles, writing under very dumb pseudonyms
directed by Larry Charles

Maskedanonymousby Walter Chaw The three or four times that Larry Charles's Masked and Anonymous features musical performances by its star Bob Dylan (particularly a rousing rendition of "Dixie"), the picture manages to be something just north of unbearable. The rest of the time, it's an interminable ego trip through Dylan's towering sense of self-importance, his almost total inability to relate with reality, and that curious phenomena of popular artists who are at once imperiously patronizing and desperate to be seen as common men. When failed concert promoter Uncle Sweetheart (John Goodman) asks down-on-his-luck folk singer Jack Fate (Dylan) about the importance of Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin to American rock-and-lore, the inanity of the answer (and the evasiveness of Dylan's demeanour–"Well, it matters to someone, I guess") isn't mysterious so much as inane and disingenuous; even the evocation of social phenomena as important and galvanizing to roots rock and the inner city as the myth of Stagger Lee is tossed off with a wry flick of the hand. Pretending that he doesn't know himself to be an icon in American music (and, arguably, even of American letters) is the worst kind of arrogance: the sin of false modesty, which Dylan doesn't wear particularly well and is frightfully unbecoming besides.