Six Feet Under: The Complete First Season (2001) – DVD

March 2, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Television

Image A Sound A Extras B+
"Pilot," "The Will," "The Foot," "Familia," "An Open Book," "The Room," "Brotherhood," "Crossroads," "Life's Too Short," "The New Person," "The Trip," "A Private Life," "Knock, Knock"

by Bill Chambers Like you, I was enthralled by American Beauty, but its resonance proved short-lived. The spell was broken for me when my friend innocently observed after a screening that men only masturbate in the shower in movies–the whole film mentally unravelled from there, that hanging thread, as I became cognizant of, and progressively bothered by, its oversimplifications. Is it just my imagination, or would Mr. Furley spin in his syndicated grave over the misinterpretation that informs the picture's climax? Though the culturally young are entitled to find American Beauty profound, since it's of that particular kind of Hollywood caginess that takes a trained eye (and is especially cheeky coming from an enfant terrible of the British stage), more people need(ed) to recognize that it's Blame It On Rio with proscenium arches.

The First $20 Million (2002) – DVD

February 26, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD, ZERO STARS

The First $20 Million Is Always the Hardest
ZERO STARS/**** Image C Sound B-
starring Adam Garcia, Rosario Dawson, Jake Busey, Enrico Colantoni
screenplay by Jon Favreau and Gary Tieche, based on the novel by Po Bronson
directed by Mick Jackson

by Walter Chaw Food-obsessed Japanese girl band Cibo Matto plays quietly behind a weird commercial of pastel San Diego Chickens sky-diving within the first five minutes of The First $20 Million Is Always the Hardest, offering a benighted hope that the film won’t suck that is so ephemeral that its inevitable death is less cruel than perverse. Playing like a version of Real Genius that’s somehow worse, the idea of a hard-partying geek fraternity involved in changing the world one byte at a time is so disinteresting and bankrupt that its resounding failure isn’t nearly as surprising as the twin revelations that the otherwise bright-seeming Jon Favreau co-wrote the screenplay (and appears in a cameo with crap in his mouth), and that this dog pile of a script (based on a novel by Po Bronson) actually found suitors.

Ordinary Decent Criminal (2000) – DVD

February 24, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, DVD, Gangster, Germany, Ireland, UK

*/**** Image A- Sound B+
starring Kevin Spacey, Linda Fiorentino, Peter Mullan, Stephen Dillane
screenplay by Gerard Stembridge
directed by Thaddeus O’Sullivan

by Walter Chaw Completed about a year after John Boorman’s infinitely superior The General, Thaddeus O’Sullivan’s Ordinary Decent Criminal is a sporadic “fictionalizing” of the life of Irish crime boss Martin Cahill that dresses up Cahill’s exploits with slick visuals while attempting the unsavoury task of doing exactly what The General was accused of doing: making urban terrorism and torture whimsical caper fare. Recasting Cahill as a Keyser Soze with a sense of oily humour and renaming him Michael Lynch (Kevin Spacey), Ordinary Decent Criminal is extraordinarily lightweight blather free entirely of the sense of scale and place of Boorman’s film. The General is fantastic, Ordinary Decent Criminal: just fatuous.

Frank McClusky, C.I. (2002) – DVD

February 24, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD

**/**** Image A Sound A-
starring Dave Sheridan, Randy Quaid, Enrico Colantoni, Dolly Parton
screenplay by Mark Perez
directed by Arlene Sanford

by Walter Chaw There’s a freshness to the staleness of Frank McKlusky, C.I. that charms initially before it grates for its dedicated cuteness and innocuous incorrectness. With an amazing supporting cast of the lower echelon of B-list comedy performers (Dolly Parton, Randy Quaid, Orson Bean (reprising his Being John Malkovich character), Andy Richter, Kevin Pollack, Adam Corolla, and Chris Farley’s also-fat brother), the picture is clearly a rip-off of Jim Carrey’s Ace Ventura films, complete with a mugging Dave Sheridan (so good in Bubble Boy, now channelling Carrey), a pooch sidekick, and a blonde love interest in the emetic Cameron Diaz (of Carrey’s The Mask) mold played, strangely enough, by Cameron Richardson.

The Money Pit (1986) [Widescreen] – DVD

February 22, 2003Posted in1980s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, DVD, Spielberg

**/**** Image A- Sound B+
starring Tom Hanks, Shelley Long, Alexander Godunov, Maureen Stapleton
screenplay by David Giler
directed by Richard Benjamin

by Bill Chambers Many comedies are padded by slapstick–here’s slapstick padded by jokes, every single one of which bears the tang of a warm-up act. There is dialogue that advances a scene and there is dialogue that fills a page count, and David Giler’s screenplay for The Money Pit toils almost exclusively in the latter. On the one hand, that’s exactly the right approach, as it relegates stars Tom Hanks and Shelley Long to the status of Chachi and Joanie whilst elevating the titular house to starring role. But “the money pit” can only fall down and go boom so many times, thus making The Money Pit a stop-and-go feature that would kill as a short. I’ve often toyed with doing my own edit of the film.

Sports Night: The Complete Series Plus Pilot Episode (1992-1993) – DVD

February 22, 2003Posted in1990s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Sports, Television

Image B Sound B
SEASON 1 – “Pilot,” “The Apology,” “The Hungry and the Hunted,” “Intellectual Property,” “Mary Pat Shelby,” “*The Head Coach, Dinner and the Morning Mail,” “Dear Louise,” “Thespis,” “The Quality of Mercury at 29K,” “Shoe Money Tonight,” “The Six Southern Gentlemen of Tennessee,” “Smoky,” “Small Town,” “Rebecca,” “Dana and the Deep Blue Sea,” “Sally,” “How Are Things in Gloca Morra?,” “The Sword of Orion,” “Eli’s Coming,” “Ordnance Tactics,” “Ten Wickets,” “Napoleon’s Battle Plan,” “What Kind of Day Has it Been”
SEASON 2 – “Special Powers,” “When Something Wicked This Way Comes,” “Cliff Gardner,” “Louise Revisited,” “Kafelnikov,” “Shane,” “Kyle Whitaker’s Got Two Sacks,” “The Reunion,” “A Girl Named Pixley,” “The Giants Win the Pennant, the Giants Win the Pennant,” “The Cut Man Cometh,” “The Sweet Smell of Air,” “Dana Get Your Gun,” “And the Crowd Goes Wild,” “Celebrities,” “The Local Weather,” “Draft Day: Part I – It Can’t Rain at Indian Wells,” “Draft Day: Part II – The Fall of Ryan O’Brian,” “April is the Cruelest Month,” “Bells And A Siren,” “La Forza Del Destino,” “Quo Vadimus”

by Walter Chaw Taken as a whole, and a box set from Buena Vista allows one to do just that, Aaron Sorkin’s “Sports Night” takes on the character of an extended experiment that starts tentatively and ends as one of the genuinely valuable moments of television in the year before HBO and flagship show “The Sopranos” became the benchmark for quality boob-tubery in the post-post-modern age. Detailing the behind-the-scenes drama of producing an “ESPN SportsCenter”-esque news program, it draws inevitable comparison to James L. Brooks’s Broadcast News (and accordingly, during the first season, episode five, Felicity Huffman gets to knock over a production assistant à la Holly Hunter’s character in that film), but distinguishes itself with an understanding that in many ways, sports is an effective locus for the hot-button issues of modern society: misogyny, race, addiction, violence.

Old School (2003)

February 21, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Theatrical

*½/****
starring Luke Wilson, Will Ferrell, Vince Vaughn, Ellen Pompeo
screenplay by Todd Phillips & Scot Armstrong
directed by Todd Phillips

by Walter Chaw Following in the tepid footsteps of National Lampoon’s Van Wilder‘s attempt to update Animal House for the new millennium, Todd Phillips’s Old School is better than it should be for a surprisingly funny Will Ferrell and another one of those laconic performances by a Wilson brother (Luke, this time) that just begs for a better vehicle. Less than John Landis’s landmark ode to anarchy, however, Old School most resembles Hart Bochner’s PCU–a film to which it pays unsubtle homage in the “ironic” casting of Jeremy Piven as that hale genre archetype: the button-down dean. (And PCU ultimately finds itself the superior campus clone comedy… For whatever that’s worth.) As diaries of arrested development go, Old School at least has the wit to tell a story of thirtysomethings seeking to recapture the halcyon days of binge-drinking and the joys of sexual objectification, making it something of a middle class/mid-life crisis tragedy and fitfully engaging in a distracted way as a result.

Brown Sugar (2002) – DVD

February 15, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Music, Romance

**/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras C
starring Taye Diggs, Sanaa Lathan, Mos Def, Nicole Ari Parker
screenplay by Michael Elliot and Rick Famuyiwa
directed by Rick Famuyiwa

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover There's a lot of talk of integrity in Brown Sugar, and a lot more of the defiant nature of good hip-hop; if the film embodied either of those traits in its words or pictures it would be a perfect ten. Alas, for all of Brown Sugar's hue and cry over the mainstreaming of the music, the film is tediously commonplace in its attitudes; director/co-writer Rick Famuyiwa treats hip-hop mania like the sedate cream-coloured furniture his protagonists seem to enjoy–just another tony item to be collected. He simply isn't smart or passionate enough to evoke an obsessive love for anything, be it musical or human, and both his romance plot and his professing of musical devotion are borrowings from other movies and conversations overheard. While it's too low-key and oblivious to be offensive (and the furniture does have its qualities), it makes no impression at all beyond the miracle one fluky, inspired performance that belongs in a better movie.

All in the Family: The Complete Second Season (1971-1972) – DVD

February 15, 2003Posted in1970s, Authors: Christopher Heard, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Television

Image B- Sound C-
"The Saga of Cousin Oscar," "Gloria Poses in the Nude," "Archie in the Lock-Up," "Edith Writes a Song," "Flashback: Mike Meets Archie," "The Election Story," "Edith's Accident," "The Blockbuster," "Mike's Problem," "The Insurance is Canceled," "The Man in the Street," "Cousin Maude's Visit," "Christmas Day at the Bunkers'," "The Elevator Story," "Edith's Problem," "Archie and the F.B.I," "Mike's Mysterious Son," "Archie Sees a Mugging," "Archie and Edith Alone," "Edith Gets a Mink," "Sammy's Visit," "Edith the Judge," "Archie is Jealous," "Maude"

by Christopher Heard It has to be stated at the outset that I am one of the world's most ardent "All in the Family" fans–I believe this television series to be the greatest ever. Producer Norman Lear bought the rights to Johnny Speight's British kitchen-sink comedy "Till Death Do Us Part" and relocated it to Queens, New York, and in so doing he unwittingly rewrote the books on the power of the medium. A show that weekly served up major sociological storylines, dressing them in darkly comedic depictions of the ugliness of racism and intolerance, in "All in the Family", you were laughing at Archie Bunker, not with him. And in the end, the moral right always won out over Archie's ignorance.

The Magic Christian (1969) – DVD

February 15, 2003Posted in1960s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, DVD, Esoterica, UK

*½/**** Image A- Sound A-
starring Peter Sellers, Ringo Starr, Isabel Jeans, Caroline Blakiston
screenplay by Terry Southern & Joseph McGrath, based on Southern's novel
directed by Joseph McGrath

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover The worst thing about The Magic Christian is that it thinks it's good for you. Essentially a series of blackout sketches in which people are induced by cash to do embarrassing and/or unprincipled things, it comes on like it's revealing some hitherto concealed facet of "straight" society, the better to seem irreverent and "with-it" in that vaguely-defined Sixties kind of way. But a movie where a rich guy with a briefcase full of money delights in its power to destroy other people's self-image is more than a little cynical, and sure enough, The Magic Christian seems to like its self-appointed judge/jury/executioner roles too much for comfort. The more it tries to convince you that it's everyone else who's rotten and corrupt, the more the film reveals its own misanthropy–and its mean-spirited nature thwarts whatever meagre stabs at merriment it attempts.

Little Secrets (2002) – DVD

February 9, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Family, Music

**/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras B
starring Evan Rachel Wood, Michael Angarano, David Gallagher, Vivica A. Fox
screenplay by Jessica Barondes
directed by Blair Treu

by Bill Chambers Little Secrets, a movie about the fear of honesty we have when we’re children, begins in the vein of a Joe Dante suburban satire but ends, oh so detrimentally, like a nightmare of Chris Columbus pap. Directed with genuine zest by Blair Treu, a man whose resume includes a film with the title “Just Like Dad” and episodes of the quickly-jettisoned television adaptation of Chicken Soup for the Soul, Little Secrets grows so self-involved that the dial of its own moral compass comes off its hinge: Treu (ironic spelling, don’t you think, for the director of a film dealing with the subject of lying?) and screenwriter Jessica Barondes steer their picture irreversibly south in the final minutes in what amounts to an act of belligerence–the filmmakers are too proud to admit they’ve made a gross miscalculation of plot, leading not only to the most aggravating closing smooch in a kids’ flick since Columbus’s own Adventures in Babysitting, but also Little Secrets‘ misogynistic aftertaste.

How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days (2003)

February 7, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Romance, Theatrical

*½/****
starring Kate Hudson, Matthew McConaughey, Adam Goldberg, Michael Michele
screenplay by Kristen Buckley & Brian Regan and Burr Steers, based on the book by Michele Alexander and Jeannie Long
directed by Donald Petrie

Howtoloseaguyin10daysby Walter Chaw In the rush to anoint Gore Vidal blood relation Burr Steers the next Dylan Kidd (writer-director of Roger Dodger), I wonder how many people suspected that Steers’s follow-up act to Igby Goes Down would be the conceptual lollapalooza of habitual bad director Donald Petrie’s How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days. Only one of three scribes to blame for this mess, Steers seems to have contributed a certain smug misanthropy to the picture of the variety that fuelled the overpraised Salinger ape Igby, with Brian Regan and Kristen Buckley, the brain trust behind 102 Dalmatians, apparently responsible for the sentimental slapstick garbage that comprises the rest of the piece. What emerges is a shrunken chimera of a movie, hobbled by a pair of competing mainstream romantic movie contrivances (“One of them is lying. So is the other,” assures the tagline), a self-knowledge of its own crapulence coupled with an inability to do anything about it, and a middle that, surprisingly, doesn’t totally stink.

blind date: UNCENSORED (2002) – DVD

February 6, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Documentary, DVD, Television

**½/**** Image B+ Sound B+

by Bill Chambers The only reality-TV (whatever that oxymoron means) series I watch, “blind date” has a crack writing staff, photogenic–and certifiable–‘contestants,’ and editing that’s breezy without feeling clipped. For the uninitiated: Cameras follow a couple apparently arbitrarily but more often, one imagines, cruelly matched on their first date and, in the vein of pop-up video, word balloons and subtitles provide patronizing though often uproarious and surreal commentary on the proceedings. My personal favourite moment of the show to date is the oblivious bodybuilder who is asked what he is thinking by his companion: a thought-bubble appears above his head containing a chicken smoking a cigarette. Mostly these asides are, as Homer Simpson would say, funny ’cause they’re true.

Q&A (1990) + I’ll Do Anything (1994) – DVDs

February 1, 2003Posted in1990s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Directors: Sidney Lumet, Drama, DVD, Satire, Thriller

Q&A
***/**** Image A- Sound B
starring Nick Nolte, Timothy Hutton, Armand Assante, Luis Guzman
written and directed by Sidney Lumet, based on the novel by Edwin Torres

I’LL DO ANYTHING
***/**** Image A- Sound A-
starring Nick Nolte, Albert Brooks, Julie Kavner, Joely Richardson
written and directed by James L. Brooks

by Bill Chambers When news of Nick Nolte’s arrest for driving under the influence of the date-rape drug hit the Toronto International Film Festival last year, just days after he’d made a strong showing there with Neil Jordan’s The Good Thief, I immediately flashed back to the time I met Nolte–“met,” alas, a figure of speech in this case: We crossed paths in the lobby of the Park Hyatt Hotel. His beanstalk frame sheathed in an emasculating banana-yellow housecoat, Nolte wore a pair of bookish specs that offset his craggy mug, and his snow-coloured hair stood unnaturally on end, as though he’d just seen a ghost. On his way to record interviews for Breakfast of Champions (and looking a lot more like that film’s Kilgore Trout than like the erstwhile Tom Wingo), Nolte growled this to a gawping me in passing:

Swept Away (2002) – DVD

January 30, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Italy, Romance, UK

**/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Madonna, Adriano Giannini, Jeanne Tripplehorn, Bruce Greenwood
screenplay by Guy Ritchie, based on the screenplay by Lina Wertmüller
directed by Guy Ritchie

by Bill Chambers No, it's not a masterpiece, but the deck was already stacked against Guy Ritchie's Swept Away long before anyone saw the picture. That it was a remake (of Lina Wertmüller's squirm-inducing Swept Away… by an Unusual Destiny in the Blue Sea of August) was strike one; that it starred Madonna, a lousy film actress considered box-office poison, strike two; that Ritchie is married to Madonna, marking Swept Away as the kind of vanity project that power couples make to spend more time together than their private life allows, strike three. And every review you read of Swept Away–that I read, at least–parroted these three strikes, sizing them to fit a column's allotment; there's no doubt in my mind that, even though it became the whipping-boy of late-night talk-show hosts and assured its victory at the 2003 Golden Raspberrys with near-universal placement on year-end worst-of lists, you haven't any meaningful clue as to what's actually wrong with Swept Away.

Sweet Home Alabama (2002) – DVD

January 29, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD, Romance

½*/**** Image A Sound A- Extras C+
starring Reese Witherspoon, Josh Lucas, Patrick Dempsey, Fred Ward
screenplay by C. Jay Cox
directed by Andy Tennant

by Walter Chaw The first clue as to the vileness of Andy Tennant's Sweet Home Alabama is that it's named after a Lynyrd Skynrd song (paving the way, one supposes, for Freebird: The Movie and Smokestack Lightning); the second clue is that it's the first Reese Witherspoon picture in a while to find a way to squander her almost preternatural ability to salvage terrible scripts and spent concepts floating her way post-Election. Extraordinarily boring and unfunny while redolent with the sort of bad behaviour-made-cutesy that made stars of Julia Roberts and Ashley Judd, Sweet Home Alabama at least has the unlikely distinction of rendering Witherspoon shrill, dull, and during one ugly drunken tirade, irredeemable.

Dreamers (1999) – DVD

January 24, 2003Posted in1990s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, Drama, DVD

½*/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras B-
starring Jeremy Jordan, Courtney Gains, Portia Dawson
written and directed by Ann Lu

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover There's a film-within-the-film in Ann Lu's Dreamers that underlines everything that makes Dreamers itself so terrible. Ethan (Mark Ballou), Dreamers' chief wannabe auteur, shoots a fantasy sequence involving an asylum-style treatment program for those who suffer from movie love; the idea would seem to be that would-be filmmakers are martyrs, regardless of talent. It becomes obvious that this aspirant has nothing else to put on film but annoyance at his frustrated ambitions, and we'd wonder who'd watch such an empty exercise in self-pity if we were not, in fact, watching one just like it at the time. I don't recommend that you become part of that elite club of Dreamers-watchers, because, despite an incidental evocation of squalid life on the fringes of film, it has little reason to live–save as a warning to all indie dreamers not to follow its shabby path to destruction.

S1m0ne (2002) – DVD

January 24, 2003Posted in2000s, Al Pacino, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Satire, Sci-Fi

***½/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras C+
starring Al Pacino, Catherine Keener, Jason Schwartzman, Winona Ryder
written and directed by Andrew Niccol

“Pygmalion saw so much to blame in women that he came at last to abhor the sex, and resolved to live unmarried. He was a sculptor, and had made with wonderful skill a statue of ivory, so beautiful that no living woman came anywhere near it… His art was so perfect that it concealed itself and its product looked like the workmanship of nature.” – Bulfinch’s Mythology

Andrew Niccol’s brilliant S1m0ne is an updating of the Pygmalion myth substituting a sculptor of clay for a sculptor of film and his disdain for women for disdain towards the peccadilloes of actors. The ending, however, stays the same.

Shampoo (1975) – DVD

January 18, 2003Posted in1970s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Romance

***½/**** Image B- Sound B
starring Warren Beatty, Julie Christie, Goldie Hawn, Lee Grant
screenplay by Robert Towne and Warren Beatty
directed by Hal Ashby

by Bill Chambers SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. To put things in perspective, Tootsie is, arguably, a remake of Hal Ashby’s carefully cultivated 1975 classic Shampoo, except that it goes one step farther in feminizing the lead by putting him in drag–and takes a step backward in deciding the fallout of his deceptions. Making fantasy out of Tootsie‘s ending, Shampoo comes to terms with the reality of a lothario getting his foot caught in his own trap by giving the last word to The Beach Boys: “You know it seems the more we talk about it,” they sing of unfeasible marital bliss in the film’s closing song (“Wouldn’t It Be Nice”), “it only makes it worse to live without it.”

About a Boy (2002) [Widescreen] – DVD

January 17, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD, France, Germany, Romance, UK

**½/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B
starring Hugh Grant, Toni Collette, Rachel Weisz, Isabel Brook
screenplay by Peter Hedges and Chris Weitz & Paul Weitz, based on the novel by Nick Hornby
directed by Paul Weitz & Chris Weitz

by Walter Chaw Will Freeman (Hugh Grant) is a philanderer and a playboy. Independently wealthy because of residuals from his father’s authorship of an inexplicably successful Christmas tune, he spends his feckless days in carefully scheduled thirty-minute “units.” (One unit for taking a bath; three for lunch.) Finally feeling a void in the middle of his rootless life at the tender age of thirty-eight, Will–after a scheme to feign single-parentage backfires roughly–finds himself involved with a mordant thirteen-year-old named Marcus (Nicholas Hoult) and Marcus’s suicidally-depressed mother, Fiona (Toni Collette). Rachel Weisz plays the girl too good for the pre-evolution rapscallion, her late appearance ultimately best described as the plot point that drives act three.