A Troll in Central Park (1994) – DVD

March 10, 2002Posted in1990s, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD, Family, Fantasy, Musical

½*/**** Image D+ Sound B
screenplay by Stu Krieger
directed by Don Bluth, Gary Goldman

by Walter Chaw So Gnorga (voiced by Cloris Leachman), the queen of the trolls, hates flowers, outlawing them in her forsaken trolldom. Kindhearted simple-troll Stanley (Dom DeLuise) finds himself and his green thumb in quite the pickle: What’s a horticulturally inclined troll to do when everything his olive digit touches turns to a badly-animated flower? Get banished to Central Park in New York, of course–the only place in the universe more unpleasant (according to Gnorga) than Trolldom. Not content to be a worm in the Big Apple, fish-out-of-water intrigue, Don Bluth’s excrescent A Troll in Central Park also manages to shoehorn in a Mary Poppins, “parents too busy to fly a kite” bit of nonsense. It seems too much to wrap up in just under seventy-six minutes, but not only does it manage to do just that in its trundling, underdeveloped way, A Troll in Central Park also wastes what feels like hours on aimless and appalling musical numbers.

Monsoon Wedding (2001)

March 8, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, France, Germany, India, Italy, Romance, Theatrical

**½/****
starring Naseeruddin Shah, Lillete Dubey, Shefali Shetty, Vijay Raaz
screenplay by Sabrina Dhawan
directed by Mira Nair

by Walter Chaw Mira Nair’s Monsoon Wedding plays like an unedited wedding video, capturing peccadillo along with celebration and ugliness along with beauty. Slyly, a little in the manner of an Ousmane Sembene film, it weaves the troubling elements of its culture into the rituals of joy. (In the case of Monsoon Wedding, Nair explores India’s caste system, American cultural diffusion, the question of expatriated sons, and the inevitable death of tradition.) Yet Monsoon Wedding is also an exuberant Bollywood-lite soap opera with flat characterizations and badly telegraphed plot points punctuated periodically by bombastic sitar sing-alongs. What most separates Nair’s piece from Sembene’s masterpieces, however, is that ineffable sense of naturalism which better defines a culture than an abuse of its mad cinema’s mad archetypes.

All About the Benjamins (2002)

March 8, 2002Posted in2000s, Action, Comedy, Crime, Germany, Theatrical, Thriller

**/****
starring Ice Cube, Mike Epps, Tommy Flanagan, Carmen Chaplin
screenplay by Ronald Lang and Ice Cube
directed by Kevin Bray

Allaboutthebenjaminsby Walter Chaw Blaxploitation without the sex, All About the Benjamins is a gratuitously violent film laudably free of the pretense of political correctness, but it’s so calamitously loud and arbitrary (and has a character who fits the same description) that it fritters away almost as much goodwill as it earns. The only things separating All About the Benjamins from other whip-edited, hard-action movies are Ice Cube’s joyfully offensive screenplay (co-written with Ronald Lang) and an opening set in a Confederate’s dream of a trailer park that does more for exploding the race issue in these United States than the past five Denzel Washington pulpits.

The Anniversary Party (2001) – DVD

March 7, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Romance

**½/**** Image A Sound A Extras A+
starring Jennifer Jason Leigh, Alan Cumming, Jane Adams, Jennifer Beals
written and directed by Alan Cumming/Jennifer Jason Leigh

by Walter Chaw The overriding feeling in and of The Anniversary Party is high anxiety. The film represents a study of the ways in which insecurities manifest themselves through a dazzling panoply of multifarious defense mechanisms: pretension, jealousy, aggression, bootlicking, hostility, inappropriate flirtation, and casual drug abuse. It’s telling that for a toast, someone recites the last stanza of Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach”*–telling not for the sentiment of steadfastness in the face of societal unkindness, but for the fact that the poem has already once received a revision (in 1922 as “The Dover Bitch” by Anthony Hecht) and clearly receives another in Alan Cumming and Jennifer Jason Leigh’s very personal hyphenate debut. Not content to point out that the world is an ugly place, The Anniversary Party dares to suggest that the world’s ugliness is very often a product of marauding hordes of neurotic internal demons.

40 Days and 40 Nights (2002)

March 1, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Romance, Theatrical, UK

**½/****
starring Josh Hartnett, Shannyn Sossamon, Monet Mazur, Maggie Gyllenhaal
screenplay by Rob Perez
directed by Michael Lehmann

40daysand40nightsby Walter Chaw Matt (Josh Hartnett) is an oversexed young man in a sanitized San Francisco who, after suffering a tough split from man-eater Nicole (Vinessa Shaw), decides to follow his brother John (Adam Trese), an apprentice in the seminary, in the walk of celibacy. He gives up sex for Lent in all its myriad forms (neglecting, dishonestly, orchid-alingus in the film’s dumbest bit of “Penthouse Forum” erotica), and spawns an Internet culture of schadenfreudens waiting for Matt to fall off the wagon and into the hay. During that period, can it be any wonder that Matt meets Erica (Shannyn Sossamon), the girl of his dreams, in a Hopper-esque laundromat?

The Larry Sanders Show: The Entire First Season (1992) – DVD

February 26, 2002Posted in1990s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, DVD, Television

Image C+ Sound B Extras B-
“The Garden Weasel (a.k.a. What Have You Done For Me Lately?),” “Promise,” “Spiders,” “The Guest Host,” “The New Producer,” “The Flirt,” “Hank’s Contract,” “Out of the Loop,” “The Talk Show,” “The Party,” “Warmth,” “A Brush with the Elbow of Greatness,” “Hey Now”

by Bill Chambers TV was born puritanical and never really took the stick out of its ass. We don’t even think of cable as TV–one asks, “What’s on TV?” vs. “What’s on cable?” It’s a television medium, a bastard offspring, and what I love–one of the things I love–about “The Larry Sanders Show” is that it revolves around TV but could only be a cable show. You’ll wish, after a couple of episodes, that network sitcoms weren’t still so reined-in by standards and practices and beholden to children up past their bedtimes, as “The Larry Sanders Show” makes poetry of profanity and has a sadistic, altering worldview, particularly on business relationships and the entertainment industry. One whiff of it wipes the Stepford smile off TV’s face.

Italian for Beginners (2000)

February 22, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Denmark, Drama, Romance, Theatrical

Italiensk for begyndere
***/****
starring Anders W. Berthelsen, Anette Støvelbæk, Peter Gantzler, Ann Eleonora Jørgensen
written and directed by Lone Scherfig

by Walter Chaw Dogme 95 is a naïve and self-gratifying cinematic movement founded by Danish filmmakers Thomas Vinterberg, Lars Von Trier, Søren Kragh-Jacobsen, and Kristian Levring. Between them they drafted a(n oft-betrayed) manifesto dedicated to “rescuing” motion pictures from artifice by forbidding special lighting and props brought in from off-site, by advocating handheld camerawork, and by urging an avoidance of recognizable genre definitions. Too often that obsession with bypassing convention plays a little like convention; over the course of eleven films, it has defined a disquieting genre all its own.

Queer as Folk: The Complete First Season (1999) – DVD (volumes 1 and 6 only)

February 19, 2002Posted in1990s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Romance, Television

Image C Sound C+ Extras ?

by Walter Chaw It's extremely difficult to review a television show in a traditional sense. Television series tend to be long-term investments–seldom is the first season of anything ("The Sopranos" being an obvious exception, "Cheers" being an obvious example) worth much of a damn, especially in comparison to later seasons, when everything hums like a well-oiled machine. Explanation for this can be found in the awkwardness inherent in too much desperate exposition crammed into too short a time. Accordingly, the first episode of "Queer as Folk", recently collected in a six-DVD box set (FILM FREAK CENTRAL was supplied only with discs one and six), is mannered and uncomfortable. That's almost beside the point.

Super Troopers (2002)

February 15, 2002Posted in2000s, Comedy, Crime, Mystery, Theatrical

½/****
starring Jay Chandrasekhar, Kevin Heffernan, Steve Lemme, Paul Soter
screenplay by Broken Lizard
directed by Jay Chandrasekhar

Supertroopersby Walter Chaw From the self-satisfied pens of LA/NY sketch comedy troupe “Broken Lizard” springs Super Troopers, fully formed like some Plutonian messenger from midnight-movie hell. The film is a series of skits involving a bumbling division of highway patrolmen more interested in pranking the unfortunates they pull over than in doing their jobs. Wrapped around a pathetic excuse for a plot, the vignettes vary wildly in quality from dull to slightly less dull, the lone exception being the opening sequence, which approaches the menacingly surreal. A film that debuted at last year’s Sundance Film Festival and sat on the shelf since for various reasons (not the least of which is a running gag involving “Afghanistan-imation” and some mocking pro-Taliban dialogue), what Super Troopers succeeds the most in doing is providing a disquiet world the long-dreaded completion of the Police Academy series.

The Object of My Affection (1998) – DVD

February 12, 2002Posted in1990s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Romance, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/**** Image A Sound B
starring Jennifer Aniston, Paul Rudd, Alan Alda, Nigel Hawthorne
screenplay by Wendy Wasserstein, based on the novel by Stephen McCauley
directed by Nicholas Hytner

by Walter Chaw A fascinatingly unpleasant precursor to NBC’s “Will & Grace”, The Object of My Affection details the predominantly platonic friendship between a romantically tortured straight woman, Nina (Jennifer Aniston), and a prototypically sensitive gay man, George (Paul Rudd). The unbearably treacly score by long-time offender George Fenton immediately announces by its very presence (and Fenton’s very participation) that The Object of My Affection is going to be atrocious, and true to form, it’s really atrocious. Yet to say that it’s as predictable as it is sickening in its laziness (there’s a VH1 music video montage in which our odd couple attends a dance class) would be to downplay the actual visceral “wrongness” of the piece, something that has nothing to do with the subject matter.

Bubble Boy (2001) – DVD

February 5, 2002Posted inAdventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD, Road Movie, Romance, Sci-Fi

**½/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Swoosie Kurtz, Marley Shelton, Danny Trejo
screenplay by Cinco Paul & Ken Daurio
directed by Blair Hayes

by Walter Chaw At its giant heart, Bubble Boy attempts the Herculean task of convincing us that the best parts of America died with the forced naiveté of “Land of the Lost”. Single-handedly, the film tries to resurrect the cheesiness of that awful Kroft Brothers’ show that held my generation transfixed after Saturday morning cartoons, allowing its titular protagonist to play a mean electric guitar version of its theme song (provided by Dweezil Zappa) while featuring a dream sequence cobbled together from outtakes from that late, lamented prehistoric Neverland. If this strikes you as a strange thing for a movie to try, consider that Bubble Boy is also the finest Todd Solondz film that Solondz never made.

The Smokers (2001) – DVD

February 3, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, DVD, Teen, Thriller

*½/**** Image B- Sound C
starring Dominique Swain, Busy Philipps, Keri Lynn Pratt, Nicholas M. Loeb
screenplay by Christina Peters and Kenny Golde
directed by Christina Peters

Smokersdvdcapby Bill Chambers Thora Birch turns around in the closing shot of The Smokers and sticks her tongue out at the camera. Short of adding a raspberry sound, we couldn't ask for a more pithy review of the film, even if Birch's gesture wasn't intended as such. (Whatever the case, it's a bit of fourth-wall breaking that ultimately feels cathartic.) The Smokers is aimless, feckless, and finally bad, an indie made with an absence not only of cash but also vision, though the fact that it doesn't have any major-studio obligations leaves the filmmakers free to present complex female characters. Too bad they are that way in large part because their actions are so damn inexplicable.

Slackers (2002)

February 1, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Romance, Theatrical

**/****
starring Devon Sawa, Jason Schwartzman, James King, Michael C. Maronna
screenplay by David H. Steinberg
directed by Dewey Nicks

by Walter Chaw A film that does for masturbation what Freddy Got Fingered did for manually pleasuring large land mammals, Slackers is a teen revenge/romance film (a bellicose cross between Real Genius and Three o’Clock High) that surprises for its random Conan O’Brien-esque spark of perverse invention. There are at least two sequences that belong in a better film, and they’re tied together by a gross-out comedy that vacillates between the typical (a vibrator gag) and the surreal (a talking penis-powered sock puppet). It’s an amalgam of Farrelly Brothers archetypes (i.e., the flawless inamorata: gorgeous, kind, candy striper) and Jason Schwartzman’s Rushmore-brand of aggressive outcast, and though it spends long minutes flirting with “potential cult favourite,” Slackers ends up as just another ugly also-ran.

My Bodyguard (1980) – DVD

January 30, 2002Posted in1980s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Coming of Age, Drama, DVD, Family, Teen

**½/**** Image B Sound B
starring Chris Makepeace, Matt Dillon, John Houseman, Adam Baldwin
screenplay by Alan Ormsby
directed by Tony Bill

by Bill Chambers My Bodyguard, not to be confused with the sudsy Costner-Huston thriller The Bodyguard, has been described to me as “the ultimate bully movie.” I won’t even toy with the idea that this feature-length Afterschool Special is the best at anything, but the film does have some merit as a teen revenge fantasy. Making his low-key directorial debut, Academy Award-winning producer Tony Bill brings visual grace sans style to this tale of the new kid in school and how he masterminds one bully’s downfall through another’s redemption.

Amy’s O (2002) – DVD

January 29, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD, Romance

Amy’s O…
Amy’s Orgasm
½*/**** Image C+ Sound C+ Extras C+
starring Julie Davis, Nick Chinlund, Caroline Aaron, Mitchell Whitfield
written and directed by Julie Davis

by Walter Chaw It’s one thing to make a film about a person who’s terminally self-indulgent and stricken with delusions of grandeur, another altogether to make a film that endorses its insufferable main character’s unrepentant egotism. Julie Davis’s abrasively cute Amy’s O… is ninety minutes of watching someone masturbate while fantasizing about herself–there are enough lines of dialogue here about our heroine’s overpowering beauty and great tits that it starts to resemble There’s Something About Mary without the attendant sense of self-awareness and irony.

A Lady Takes a Chance (1943) + Flame of Barbary Coast (1945) – DVDs

January 27, 2002Posted inAuthors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Musical, Romance, Western

A LADY TAKES A CHANCE
**/**** Image C+ Sound B-
starring Jean Arthur, John Wayne, Charles Winninger, Phil Silvers
screenplay by Robert Ardrey
directed by William A. Seiter

FLAME OF BARBARY COAST
**½/**** Image B- Sound B
starring John Wayne, Ann Dvorak, Joseph Schildkraut, William Frawley
screenplay by Borden Chase
directed by Joseph Kane

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Such is the enduring celebrity of John Wayne that there exists a market for even his most humdrum and lacklustre vehicles–a rule which the current DVD releases of A Lady Takes a Chance (1943) and Flame of Barbary Coast (1945) proves to perfection. Here is a pair of the Duke's least iconic roles, both of which hinge on their incongruity with their star's western legend: using the actor as a found object to be installed in some alien landscape, they force him to struggle with a fish-out-of-water intrigue before coming to the conclusion that his place remains at home on the range. As such, they're of importance only to superfans and tangentially interested buffs–they're interesting as trials-by-fire for Wayne iconography but only marginally tolerable when taken on their own terms.

Rock Star (2001) – DVD

January 24, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Music

**½/**** Image A Sound B+ Extras C+
starring Mark Wahlberg, Jennifer Aniston, Dominic West, Timothy Spall
screenplay by John Stockwell
directed by Stephen Herek

by Walter Chaw Stephen Herek’s return to the realm of dope-head fantasy (his second and perhaps most remembered film is Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure) gets off to a smashing start. For a brief, exhilarating time, he captures all the dim-witted exuberance, all the pathological pride, all the explosive machismo of long-haired, tight-leathered cock-rock bands and the symbiotic relationship they have with fans, who revere them as greasy, gyrating lizard kings. Once it becomes another tired cautionary tale of sex, drugs, and rock n’ roll, however, Rock Star turns off the amps and coasts home like a rusted-out DeSoto running on fumes.

The War of the Roses (1989) [Special Edition] – DVD

January 24, 2002Posted in1980s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Romance

***½/**** Image A- Sound B- Extras A
starring Michael Douglas, Kathleen Turner, Danny DeVito, Marianne Sägebrecht
screenplay by Michael Leeson, based on the novel by Warren Adler
directed by Danny DeVito

by Walter Chaw Oliver and Barbara Rose (Michael Douglas, Kathleen Turner) have it all: a beautiful house, two children, a dog, a cat, and a burning hatred for one another nursed through years of disintegrating familiarity. The first irony of The War of the Roses is that a film structured around a divorce is named after a historical conflict that ended in marriage–an indication that in addition to being brutally funny, the film is whip-smart and dangerous. Framed by sleazy divorce lawyer Gavin D’Amato (Danny DeVito) as a cautionary tale to a prospective client (Dan Castellaneta), The War of the Roses charts the disintegration of the Roses’ marriage from sylvan bliss to Stygian night. In no uncertain terms, the film details why dog people should not marry cat people; just how irritating eating a steak can be to your spouse; and the reason that angry sex is the only sex for some couples. A brilliant screenplay (Michael Leeson adapted Warren Adler’s novel) and a trio of performances that honour the sharpness and difficulty of said script justifies watching this alternately just-bearable and agonizing comedy.

Snow Dogs (2002)

January 18, 2002Posted in2000s, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, Disney, Family, Sports, Theatrical

½*/****
starring Cuba Gooding Jr., James Coburn, Randy Birch, Joanna Bacalso
screenplay by Jim Kouf and Tommy Swerdlow & Michael Goldberg and Mark Gibson & Philip Halprin, based on the book Winterdance: the Fine Madness of Running the Iditarod by Gary Paulsen
directed by Brian Levant

Snowdogsby Walter Chaw Brian Levant’s Snow Dogs counts on adult audiences rationalizing that although it was terrible, at least their kids liked it. Why is it that the standards we hold for our children are substantially lower when it comes to the movies? (And if kids will probably like anything, why not expose them to something a little less offensive than Snow Dogs?) It isn’t so much that Snow Dogs finds its humour in a black man getting humiliated by a pack of dogs who are smarter than him, nor that it also mines for yuks by placing a black man in mortal peril because of his suicidal stupidity. No, the moment that Snow Dogs crossed a line for me was when Cuba Gooding Jr., an Oscar-winning African-American actor (one of, what, six?), gets comically treed by a ferocious dog.

Orange County (2002)

January 11, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Teen, Theatrical
**½/****
starring Colin Hanks, Schuyler Fisk, Catherine O’Hara, Jack Black
screenplay by Michael White
directed by Jake Kasdan

Orangecountyby Walter Chaw The director of five episodes of the late, lamented television series “Freaks and Geeks”, Jake Kasdan, with screenwriter Mike White (a scribbler on that same show), produces a surprisingly (or, perhaps, not so surprisingly) tender and observant commencement comedy with Orange County. It’s After Hours as filtered through the sensibility of a young, pre-suckage Cameron Crowe, and though it’s extremely uneven and clearly hacked to bits (the film feels clipped at 86 minutes), the end result is a cameo-laden piece that for the most part resists the cheap, exploitive garbage that indicates most of the teen comedy genre. While I expected more from the young man who debuted as writer-director of the brilliant Zero Effect (and from White, half of the creative team behind the overrated but intriguing Chuck and Buck), Orange County is a good film–particularly, I suspect, for those anticipating just another teen movie.