Happy Times (2000)

August 15, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, China, Comedy, Drama, Theatrical

幸福时光
Happy Time
*½/****
starring Benshan Zhao, Jie Dong, Biao Fu, Xuejian Li
directed by Zhang Yimou

by Walter Chaw Titled in the same serio-ironic vein as Giuseppe Tornatore’s Everybody’s Fine, Zhang Yimou’s Happy Times aspires for the piquant but only really achieves a sort of ridiculous sourness. It’s a misunderstanding of irony taken to an Alanis Morrisetteian extreme; far from the eventuality being the opposite of the expected, the outcome of Happy Times is the worst kind of cliché, and its execution is so blunt compared to the sharp satirical barb of Yimou’s own Ju Dou that I wonder if Gong Li wasn’t the brains in that long lamented relationship. Still, what works in Happy Times is what has worked in this director’s best work (Shanghai Triad, Raise the Red Lantern, Red Sorghum): mordant social critique so far removed from realism that its status as political allegory is as subtle as a neon sign and a crack to the noggin.

Kids in the Hall: Brain Candy (1996) – DVD

August 10, 2002Posted in1990s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Canada, Comedy, DVD, Satire

**½/**** Image B+ Sound B+
starring David Foley, Bruce McCulloch, Kevin McDonald, Mark McKinney, Scott Thompson
screenplay by Norm Hiscock & David Foley & Bruce McCulloch & Kevin McDonald & Mark McKinney & Scott Thompson
directed by Kelly Makin

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover The mad Scotsman John Grierson, documentary king and architect of Canada's National Film Board, often made the naïve assertion that those who wanted to make Canadian fiction films should go to Hollywood and make them there. He would have been pleased to learn that in 1996, the Kids in the Hall did just that: left without any pop-film infrastructure on their home turf, they made a bid for Yankee stardom with Kids in the Hall: Brain Candy, shooting a Hollywood film that's Canadian to the core–for good and for ill.

The Good Girl (2002)

August 7, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, Drama, Germany, Netherlands, Romance, Theatrical

**/****
starring Jennifer Aniston, Jake Gyllenhaal, John C. Reilly, Tim Blake Nelson
screenplay by Mike White
directed by Miguel Arteta

Goodgirlby Travis Mackenzie Hoover The Good Girl is a sitcom that dreams of one day becoming an opera. Like its heroine, the film feels a great dissatisfaction with modern life, and like her eventual paramour, it goes to great lengths in order to articulate such a feeling. But also like these characters, The Good Girl is both too timid and too inarticulate to truly get its ideas across. Instead, the film resorts to “quirky” indie-film types armed to the teeth with wisecracks; offering none of the ambiguity that its narrative thrust seems to warrant, its flaws kill the movie’s aspirations and make sure that it stays in the generic backwater it so dearly wants to escape.

The Sweetest Thing (2002) [Unrated] – DVD

August 6, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD, Romance, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/**** Image B+ Sound B Extras B-
starring Cameron Diaz, Christina Applegate, Thomas Jane, Selma Blair
screenplay by Nancy M. Pimental
directed by Roger Kumble

by Walter Chaw Roger Kumble’s The Sweetest Thing presents a good news/bad news situation. On the one hand, it’s barely eighty minutes long–on the other, for those eighty minutes it’s repugnant beyond words. On the one hand, the worst film of 2002 has already appeared with eight months to go, and on the other, I not only had to watch the benighted thing, I am now required by my vocation to relive it in detail. I am forced, for instance, to remember a scene in which the only Jewish Laundromat owner in all of San Francisco’s Chinatown tastes a semen stain to determine that it’s such; to recall the moment where a woman with a penis stuck in her throat mumbles Aerosmith‘s “I Don’t Wanna Miss a Thing” to clear her air passage. Yes, The Sweetest Thing is crass and moronic, this much goes without saying (that Cameron Diaz plays another emetic simpleton is also not much of a surprise). What is a shock is that Parker Posey cameos late in the game and even she’s not funny. If it takes a brilliant director to make a bad actor look good, the corollary holds, too.

Spy Kids 2: Island of Lost Dreams (2002)

August 6, 2002Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Family, Sci-Fi, Theatrical

**½/****
starring Antonio Banderas, Carla Gugino, Alexa Vega, Daryl Sabara
written and directed by Robert Rodriguez

by Walter Chaw Owing to Robert Rodriguez’s infectious goodwill and delirious visual sensibility, Spy Kids 2: Island of Lost Dreams is the kind of children’s movie that respects a child’s imagination along with parental patience. Packed with invention from its opening theme park to its closing Island of Dr. Moreau, the picture is a three-pepper salsa that, for all its flashing gizmos and stop-motion monsters, suggests that the best gadget is a rubber band, and that the most important quest is one undertaken on behalf of a family member.

Secret Ballot (2001)

August 6, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, Iran, Italy, Switzerland, Theatrical

Raye makhfi
***½/****
starring Nassim Abdi, Cyrus Abidi, Youssef Habashi, Farrokh Shojaii
written and directed by Babak Payami

by Walter Chaw It begins and ends with waiting, while the middle of Babak Payami’s Secret Ballot (Raye makhfi) is invested in the Theatre of the Absurd–this is Samuel Beckett, in other words, applied to the Iranian voting process, as an unnamed election agent (Nassim Abdi) travels to a remote Persian island on a quest to gather votes from citizens who may not know that it’s election time, are probably unfamiliar with the candidates, and almost certainly aren’t affected by the outcome anyway. If anything, Payami’s picture confirms that things are the same all over.

The Starz Independent FilmCenter Project, Vol. 11

August 2, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, Coming of Age, Crime, Drama, Teen, Theatrical

by Walter Chaw

SWIMMING (2002)
***/****
starring Lauren Ambrose, Jennifer Dundas Lowe, Joelle Carter, Josh Pais
screenplay by Lisa Bazadona, Robert J. Siegel, Grace Woodard
directed by Robert J. Siegel

An insightfully-written, delicately-performed coming-of-age piece that is good enough not to be cheapened by that genre appellation, Robert Siegel's Swimming captures one summer at tourist-filthy Myrtle Beach. (A film professor, Siegel directs his first feature here in some 20 years.) Frankie (Lauren Ambrose) works at her family's restaurant, right on the main drag next to childhood pal Nicola's (Jennifer Dundas) piercing parlour. Frankie's plain and pale, Nicola's brash and blonde; their banal day-to-day is interrupted by the introduction of floozy bombshell Josee (Joelle Carter), who begins as the standard catalytic plot device but ends as something complicated and possessed of unusual depth. The same could be said of the rest of the cast, from Dundas's volatility to Ambrose's amazingly transparent and tricky performance. Even-handedly negotiating the tricky shoals of hormone-addled actions and emotions, Swimming excels in presenting the sort of small-town yearning I most associate with Steve Earle's early production, the cruelty of teens on the make smartly presented with the same kind of nostalgic affection as the moment when a plain girl recognizes the strength of her decency and the inimitable quality of her difference. Observations of the ebbs and flows of adolescent angst are interesting in Swimming, though not interesting enough to make this charming adolescent melodrama resonate with the melancholia of Bogdanovich's similarly themed The Last Picture Show, and the picture runs out of steam with a goofy subplot involving a sweet-natured ganja-burner played by Jamie Harrold.

Full Frontal (2002)

August 2, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Directors: Steven Soderbergh, Esoterica, Romance, Theatrical

*/****
starring Blair Underwood, Julia Roberts, David Hyde Pierce, Catherine Keener
screenplay by Coleman Hough
directed by Steven Soderbergh

Fullfrontalby Walter Chaw An experiment in perceptual distortion that questions the nature of viewership and the law of observation that states, in part, that the nature of the process of observation necessitates a change in the essential quality of the observed, Steven Soderbergh's Full Frontal is a hyper-pretentious film-within-a-film-within-a-film conceit so gimmicky it hardly matters that by the end gimmickry is its point. The picture begins with the opening of a fictional film called "Rendezvous" starring Calvin (Blair Underwood) and Francesca (Julia Roberts), written by Carl (David Hyde Pierce) and produced by Gus (David Duchovny), and as this "fake" film proceeds in perfectly acceptable 35mm, it is interrupted by long stretches of extremely grainy digital-video footage that purports to represent "reality."

The Master of Disguise (2002)

August 2, 2002Posted in2000s, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Family, Theatrical, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Dana Carvey, Mark Devine, Jennifer Esposito, Harold Gould
screenplay by Dana Carvey & Harris Goldberg
directed by Perry Andelin Blake

Masterofdisguiseby Walter Chaw Produced by Adam Sandler’s Happy Madison company and directed by one of Sandler’s sycophantic toadies (Perry Andelin Blake), The Master of Disguise is every bit as soul-sucking and painful as one of the comedian’s own plodding star vehicles. Graceless and dunderheaded, the film’s only message is that slapping people across the face is the best way to achieve empowerment, and its only reason for being is to serve as proof positive of the Peter Principle. Edited with a hacksaw and presenting an insipid child character (Austin Wolff) used for slapstick laughs before getting kicked to the curb, The Master of Disguise represents a lot of what’s wrong with movies in the United States today. That it happens to be the sequel-in-spirit of Dana Carvey’s “breakthrough” film Opportunity Knocks (1990) is what folks in the business call “sadistic.”

Martin Lawrence Live: Runteldat (2002)

August 2, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Concert Doc, Theatrical

½*/****
directed by David Raynr

by Walter Chaw The funniest five minutes of Martin Lawrence’s embarrassing concert diatribe Martin Lawrence Live: Runteldat (trans: “Run, Tell That”) occur in an opening video montage that recounts the troubled comedian’s arrest for shouting at traffic while brandishing a firearm and the time he fell into a coma while jogging wrapped in plastic wrap yet somehow overlooks the sexual harassment suit filed against him by former television co-star Tisha Campbell. After an hour of deadening material that fails to elicit one cross-cultural laugh, Lawrence returns to the topic of how members of the evil media (and critics) have done him wrong and then proceeds to admit that he was shouting at traffic because he was high as a kite, did indeed have a gun (just for self-defense, he assures, though intentionality is hard to gauge when one is “high as a kite”), and passed out from heat exhaustion during a jogging on the hottest day of the year (a wool skullcap is confessed; not so the cling-wrap). His confessions lead one to wonder how exactly the comedian believes he’s been misrepresented by the media.

Innerspace (1987) – DVD

July 27, 2002Posted in1980s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, DVD, Sci-Fi, Spielberg, Thriller

**½/**** Image A- Sound A- Commentary B+
starring Dennis Quaid, Martin Short, Meg Ryan, Kevin McCarthy
screenplay by Jeffrey Boam and Chip Proser
directed by Joe Dante

by Bill Chambers Fifties monster movies and grindhouse sludge bookended Joe Dante’s coming-of-age, and these twin species of B cinema–sisters in spirit if not in execution–often squish up against each other in his work as a director. The man who gave us the loving but danger-filled tribute to showman William Castle and Castle’s acolytes Matinee (a better Cuban Missile crisis picture, he said ducking tomatoes, than Thirteen Days) preceded his tenure with neo-Castle Roger Corman (for whom he made Piranha) by covering every last exploitation picture of the early-Seventies for THE FILM BULLETIN.

Joe Somebody (2001) – DVD

July 27, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B-
starring Tim Allen, Julie Bowen, Kelly Lynch, Greg Germann
screenplay by John Scott Shepherd
directed by John Pasquin

by Walter Chaw There is no life to Joe Somebody; it is a rotting, derelict husk of a film that drifts anchorless in a sea of dead jokes and plot detritus. It has no excuse for existing, and should be held up as the prime example whenever conversation turns to what’s wrong with our culture in general and the movies in particular. Joe Somebody is so sloppily put together that when it comes time at last to end this cinematic thumbscrew, its moments of uplift make little, if any, sense because of the lack of care taken to establish a place for them. If you have a moment to which the entire film is supposedly building, I humbly offer that it’s probably not good when that epiphany appears with neither warning nor justification. It’s like having a story that is not otherwise about a playwright wrapping up with a playwright having her first play produced. Exactly like that, in fact.

Mad Monster Party (1967) – DVD

July 27, 2002Posted in1960s, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD, Family, Horror, Musical

Mad Monster Party?
***/**** Image A+ Sound B+ Extras B
screenplay by Forrest J Ackerman, Leo Korobkin, Harvey Kurtzman
directed by Jules Bass

by Walter Chaw From Arthur Rankin Jr. and Jules Bass, the creators of such disturbing “animagic” fare as Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and the unintentionally terrifying Frosty the Snowman comes 1967’s Mad Monster Party?, a sort of Jay Ward Lite stop-motion revue featuring the vocal talents of Boris Karloff (shudder) and Phyllis Diller (shudder) as well as Allen Swift doing his best Jimmy Stewart, Peter Lorre, and Bela Lugosi.

Tadpole (2002)

July 25, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Coming of Age, Drama, Romance, Theatrical

**/****
starring Sigourney Weaver, Aaron Stanford, John Ritter, Bebe Neuwirth
screenplay by Heather McGowan & Neils Mueller
directed by Gary Winick

by Walter Chaw An underwritten indie The Graduate (a connection the film makes itself) that plays a little more like one of J.D. Salinger’s terrible short stories than like Wes Anderson’s dead brilliant Rushmore (which it aspires to be at every turn), Tadpole emerges as exactly the kind of self-conscious product that crowds equate, knee-jerk-like, with independent credibility. Buoyed at times by an occasional sweetness and Bebe Neuwirth’s fantastic performance as a hippie still flying her freak flag (or at least her free-love banner), Tadpole hints at what it might have been had it the courage to follow through on the ramifications of a fifteen-year-old boarding school Voltaire-quoting brat using the language of his absent mother to attempt to win his stepmother Eve (Sigourney Weaver) away from his ineffectual academic of a dad (John Ritter).

Chat Room (2002) – DVD

July 24, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD, ZERO STARS

The Chatroom
ZERO STARS/**** Image D Sound B-
starring Brian Hooks, Darryl Bronson, Christopher Richards, Troy Winbush
screenplay by Barry Bowles & Carl Washington
directed by Barry Bowles

by Walter Chaw A feature-length episode of “What’s Happening!!” minus the nuance and sophistication of that late lamented blaxploitation garbage, Chat Room shares with the Seventies sitcom an unholy diner-hangin’ trinity of fat one, dumb one, and the one with whom we’re supposed to identify. Following this trio of miscreants during an online booty call, Chat Room begins with a You’ve Got Mail sequence of the guys “chatting” in the titular chatrooms edited together so hopelessly as to suggest, oh so hilariously, that these horny dudes are actually talking to each other.

Kung Pow: Enter the Fist (2002) [The Chosen Edition] + Contract Killer (1998) – DVDs

July 23, 2002Posted in1990s, 2000s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Crime, DVD, Hong Kong, Martial Arts, Satire, Thriller

KUNG POW: ENTER THE FIST
**½ Image B+ Sound A- Extras B
starring Steve Oedekerk
written and directed by Steve Oedekerk

CONTRACT KILLER
*/**** Image B Sound B
starring Jet Li, Eric Tsang, Simon Yam, Gigi Leung
screenplay by Chan Heng Ka, Vincent Kok, Cheng Kam Fa
directed by Tung Wai

by Bill Chambers In addition to putting the fear of God in us about CGI, Kung Pow: Enter the Fist (henceforth Kung Pow) makes us wish the technology it employed to seamlessly superimpose writer-director-star Steve Oedekerk into the 1977 kung fu movie Tiger and Crane Fists had been around circa Bruce Lee’s demise. Back then, the producers of Game of Death struggled to complete a half-finished star vehicle minus one star using cardboard cut-outs and a variety of unconvincing doubles. (Lee’s character, the hero, spends most of the picture with his back to the camera.) Oedekerk, playing the archetypal grown-up orphan seeking vengeance against “Master Pain” for his parents’ murder, spends most of Kung Pow looking into the lens with his tongue sticking out, the tongue itself adorned with a face that has its own tongue. Technological advances have always been either too dawdling or too hasty in serving the cinema, alas.

K-9: P.I. (2002) [Widescreen] – DVD

July 21, 2002Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, DVD

*/**** Image A Sound A
starring James Belushi, Gary Basaraba, Kim Huffman, Jody Racicot
screenplay by Gary Scott Thompson and Ed Horowitz
directed by Richard J. Lewis

by Walter Chaw Much more interesting than talking about a film called K-9: P.I. is talking about exactly the kind of mind it takes to embrace the idea of a standard buddy picture composed of one half mangy dog and one half German Shepherd not once, not twice, but thrice. On the night of their retirement, Dooley (James Belushi) and Jerry Lee (King) break up a microchip heist, which, of course, makes them the prime suspects of the crime in the eyes of the evil FBI. The feds are always wicked bumblers in films of this breed; the police chiefs always give the heroes a hard time; and there are always femmes fatale to briefly distract the hero from the super-bland "appropriate" love interest.

Stuart Little 2 (2002)

July 19, 2002Posted in2000s, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Family, Theatrical

**/****
starring Michael J. Fox, Geena Davis, Hugh Laurie, Jonathan Lipnicki
screenplay by Bruce Joel Rubin
directed by Rob Minkoff

Stuartlittle2by Walter Chaw As boring as it is generally well-intentioned, Stuart Little 2 takes a page from the Hunchback of Notre Dame II playbook by presenting a wilting fatale with a heart of gold (Melanie Griffith voices a larcenous canary) adopted as an orphaned chick by an evil criminal mastermind (James Woods, speaking for a falcon) and infiltrating a kind family’s good graces for the purposes of pilfering. The family in question, based loosely on that described in E.B. White’s beloved Stuart Little, consists of a cheery mom (Geena Davis), a cheery dad (Hugh Laurie), an insipid kid with a giant head (Jonathan Lipnicki), and an adopted mouse named Stuart (voiced by Michael J. Fox), whom the Littles treat like one of their own. No wonder–Stuart can talk, wear clothes, walk upright, drive little toy cars and, in the standard sequel amplifications, fly a little toy airplane and fall in love with something outside his species.

The Final Hit (2001) – DVD

July 14, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD

The Last Producer
½*/**** Image C Sound B+
starring Burt Reynolds, Lauren Holly, Sean Astin, Benjamin Bratt
screenplay by Clyde Hayes
directed by Burt Reynolds

by Walter Chaw Seeing himself as Hollywood’s last angry man (the film was originally and just as inexplicably called “The Last Producer”), Burt Reynolds, in the twilight of his benighted resurrection, jumps behind the camera to helm his self-starred anti-Hollywood tirade The Final Hit, which washes out as equal parts senior citizen grotesquery and unfocused satire. Wall-to-wall with Peter M. Robinson’s excrescent scatty woo-bop score, The Final Hit, in discussing how Tinsel Town disdains the older generation of actors, proceeds to give the stage back to that same older generation and, in the process, demonstrates exactly why these people aren’t getting much work.

Storytelling (2002) [Unrated and R-rated Versions] – DVD

July 12, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Esoterica, Romance, Satire

**½/**** Image B+ Sound B+
starring Selma Blair, Leo Fitzpatrick, Robert Wisdom, Paul Giamatti
written and directed by Todd Solondz

by Walter Chaw The line between love and misanthropy is thin, and Todd Solondz is a cunning cartographer of that precarious divide. He sees political correctness as an insidious product of the kind of paternalistic racism that discards truth in favour of generally held truisms, a crutch for well-meaning racists who lack the wit to grasp that the basic misunderstanding of difference driving a desire to discriminate against minorities is identical to that which drives a desire to protect minorities. Solondz’s films are confrontational in the extreme, full-frontal assaults on the hypocrisy that fuels most relationships and stark dissections of the politics of cruelty.