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.

Summer Catch (2001) – DVD

January 7, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Romance, Sports, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/**** Image A- Sound B Extras C
starring Freddie Prinze Jr., Courtney Driver, Jessica Biel, Matthew Lillard
screenplay by Kevin Falls and John Gatins
directed by Michael Tollin

by Walter Chaw Summer Catch bulges the already-overcrowded shelves reserved for appalling Freddie Prinze Jr. vehicles that no one saw in theatres and, predictably, no one is renting given a second chance. Determining which of Prinze’s performances and films is the worst is an exercise both diverting and daunting; to that end, I’d have to say that Summer Catch falls squarely in the middle: it’s physically impossible to sit through the whole thing without a lengthy break or some sort of medium-bore narcotic, thus making it inferior to the stolid water-torture of I Know What You Did Last Summer (that film’s relative enjoyability no doubt owing a great deal to Jennifer Love Hewitt’s oft-invoked bustline). Still, it has going for it that it doesn’t cause your eyes and ears to bleed with the consistency and volume of Down to You or Wing Commander.

American Pie 2 (2001) [Unrated – Widescreen Collector’s Edition] – DVD

January 6, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, DVD, Romance

**/**** Image B Sound B+ Extras B
starring Jason Biggs, Shannon Elizabeth, Alyson Hannigan, Chris Klein
screenplay by Adam Herz
directed by J.B. Rogers

by Bill Chambers If American Pie was the Nineties’ answer to the teen genre of Eighties cinema, then American Pie 2 revives the sitcom format of that same decade. It starts and it finishes, logging hours but not progress. That made the film awfully discomforting on the big screen: When I saw American Pie 2 in theatres, I felt similar to how I did the time I endured Close Encounters of the Third Kind on a 13″ television; movies, like people, have proportions, and some clothing just doesn’t fit. Part of me wishes I’d watched American Pie 2 on DVD first, because although I slightly preferred my home viewing to the one at the gigaplex, I knew where the jokes were, and they ain’t built for repetition, nor is the film’s malnourished narrative.

Hedwig and the Angry Inch (2001) [Platinum Series] – DVD

December 26, 2001Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Esoterica, Music, Musical

***/**** Image B Sound A Extras A+
starring John Cameron Mitchell, Michael Pitt, Miriam Shor, Stephen Trask
screenplay by John Cameron Mitchell, based on his play with Stephen Trask
directed by John Cameron Mitchell

by Walter Chaw A pretension-laden, soul-dissection opera crossed with the brooding musical chops that Pink Floyd all but defined in the late-Seventies, John Cameron Mitchell's Hedwig and the Angry Inch is Velvet Goldmine and All that Jazz by way of Pink Floyd The Wall–a bombastically endearing romp that is as infectious as it is (surprisingly) poignant. The anchor for the film is Mitchell's incendiary turn as the titular Hedwig, a transsexual/transvestite, Eastern Bloc rock diva on a national tour booked into Bilgewaters family restaurants in the same cities as flavour-of-the-month pop superstar Tommy Gnosis (Michael Pitt). Hedwig believes that Gnosis has stolen his songs from him, yet we sense the real theft was that of trust and the promise of love. Early on, we're shown a fantastically-conceived bleach-bypass/animation/performance piece set to a very nice Plato's Symposium-inspired tune ("The Origin of Love") that offers an explanation of the absent feeling that impels us all to find succour in a mate, a friend, or art. Hedwig and the Angry Inch never gets as good as this again, but it's almost impossible to imagine how it could: the sequence, lasting all of ten minutes, is one of the highlights of the year in cinema.

The Royal Tenenbaums (2001)

December 26, 2001Posted in****/****, 2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Directors: Wes Anderson, Drama, Theatrical

****/****
starring Gene Hackman, Anjelica Huston, Ben Stiller, Gwyneth Paltrow
screenplay by Wes Anderson & Owen Wilson
directed by Wes Anderson

Royaltenenbaumsby Walter Chaw Royal Tenenbaum (Gene Hackman) is the estranged patriarch of the Tenenbaums, a family of child prodigies that, beset by a series of “accidents and disasters,” has never again attained the heights of its early glories. Chas (Ben Stiller), an economics wizard, Margot (Gwyneth Paltrow), a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, and Richie (Luke Wilson), a tennis star, return after years of fecklessness to the home of their mother, Etheline (Anjelica Huston), drawn there by the news that Royal is mortally afflicted with stomach cancer. In his words, he has “six weeks to set things right” with his disenchanted, wounded kin, trying all the while to undermine Etheline’s budding relationship with their accountant, Mr. Sherman (Danny Glover).

The Affair of the Necklace (2001)

December 26, 2001Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Romance, Theatrical

½/****
starring Hilary Swank, Simon Baker, Adrien Brody, Jonathan Pryce
screenplay by John Sweet
directed by Charles Shyer

Affairofthenecklaceby Walter Chaw Alternately boring and hilarious, The Affair of the Necklace is high cheese of the French Revolution variety, delighted by its own creamery version of ribaldry (there are more stifled titters in Affair than at an Oscar Wilde convention) and infatuated with the passion that ripping bodices has failed to imply for over two centuries. It is inadvertently self-critical (at various points in the film characters breathily intone, “It is amazing how quickly you have become tedious,” or “It is a monument to vanity,” or “The public found her guilty of excess”), and credit is due, I suppose, to poor, gaffed Hilary Swank for being either too daffy to see that irony or a better actress than she appears in concealing any self-aware mirth. The Swank of The Affair of the Necklace is the Swank of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which is of course the only Swank, her stunt turn in Boys Don’t Cry notwithstanding. The most astonishing thing about The Affair of the Necklace, though, is how with a cast that includes Brian Cox, Christopher Walken, and Jonathan Pryce, it manages to be jaw-droppingly awful; had I not squirmed in mute horror, transfixed before the film’s appalling majesty, I would not have believed it myself.

Kate & Leopold (2001)

December 21, 2001Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Romance, Theatrical, Time Travel

**½/****
starring Meg Ryan, Hugh Jackman, Liev Schreiber, Breckin Meyer
screenplay by James Mangold and Steven Rogers
directed by James Mangold

by Walter Chaw That the consistently grating Meg Ryan, now milking her second decade as a suspect princess of perk, stars in yet another variation on the When Harry Met Sally, “opposites in love against all odds” scenario augers ill, to be certain. But Kate & Leopold is a decent addition to the beleaguered and overcrowded romantic comedy genre (think Somewhere in Time meets Splash); look for an explanation in James Mangold’s steady direction, the clever, deconstructive screenplay he wrote with Steven Rogers, and a rock-steady performance by Hugh Jackman that is confident and unembarrassed.

Evolution (2001) [Widescreen] – DVD

December 16, 2001Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD, Sci-Fi

½*/**** Image A- Sound A Extras C+
starring David Duchovny, Julianne Moore, Orlando Jones, Seann William Scott
screenplay by David Diamond & David Weissman and Don Jakoby
directed by Ivan Reitman

by Walter Chaw Ira Kane (David Duchovny) is a science teacher at a community college in Arizona. Not biology, not chemistry, not physics, but “science.” Uh-huh. His friend at the college is Harry Block (Orlando Jones), an honorary member of the United States Geological Society (not to be confused with the United States Geological Survey). When a meteorite smashes into Earth, totalling the vintage ’73 Riviera of complete moron Wayne (complete moron specialist Seann William Scott, late of Dude, Where’s My Car?), of course Harry and Ira are called in to collect “scientific” samples in the name of…um…”science.”

Osmosis Jones (2001) – DVD

December 13, 2001Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Family

**½/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B
starring Bill Murray, Molly Shannon, Elena Franklin, Chris Elliott
screenplay by Marc Hyman
directed by Bobby Farrelly, Peter Farrelly, Piet Kroon and Tom Sito

by Walter Chaw If the devil is in the details, so, in Osmosis Jones, is most of the humour. It is one part Farrelly Brothers biological comedy and one part Piet Kroon and Tom Sito (late of The Iron Giant) animated genius; that the balance of the film is heavily in favour of the latter speaks to rare good thinkin’ from the Hollywood brain trust. The live-action part stars Bill Murray as the slovenly Frank–Murray out-repulses co-star Chris Elliot, which means that he is very possibly the most disgusting human ever captured on film. The animation side features the voice of Chris Rock as the titular Osmosis Jones, a white blood cell cop who, after a controversial stomach evacuation, is busted down to mouth duty. If you’re not sure what “mouth duty” entails–it’s bad. When Frank is invaded by an evil virus named Thrax (Laurence Fishburne), Osmosis gets one last chance to make good, paired with a blustering blunderbuss of a timed flu capsule named Drix (David Hyde Pierce).

Almost Famous (2000) – DVD|Almost Famous: Untitled, The Bootleg Cut [Director’s Edition] – DVD

December 1, 2001Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, Coming of Age, Drama, DVD, Music

ALMOST FAMOUS
***/**** Image A Sound A Extras C+
UNTITLED
***/**** Image A Sound A Extras A
starring Patrick Fugit, Billy Crudup, Frances McDormand, Kate Hudson
written and directed by Cameron Crowe

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Almost Famous is an odd bird. It wants to be about rock and roll but isn't, seeking every opportunity to hide from the spirit of the music that is its ostensible starting point. It strains for important insights it doesn't have, mostly centred on a teenage boy's predictable loss of innocence at the hands of a rock band. Worst of all is that it subsumes its massive subject into the flowering of a ROLLING STONE journalist, crushing both the purity of the music and the excess of its players beneath a career move for a media player. But as the film lurches from issue to dodged issue, the reasoning behind its omissions is as intriguing as the omissions themselves; as it accidentally uncovers the spaces between what gets done and how it gets done, it manages to be a revealing document of how much chicanery goes into the creation of celebrity–entirely in spite of itself.

Backyard Dogs (2000) – DVD

November 28, 2001Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD, Sports, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/**** Image B Sound C
starring Scott Hamm, Bree Turner, Walter Emanuel Jones, Roger Fan
written and directed by Robert Boris

by Walter Chaw A painfully amateurish reworking of Play It to the Bone set against the turgid, redneck world of backyard wrestling, Robert Boris’s Backyard Dogs is the kind of head-scratcher that makes filmmakers of folks who never realized that making a movie was this easy. See, using the template provided, all you need is a digital camera, a bimbo who doesn’t mind flashing the groceries a couple of times, and a rent-a-script that shows how an already terrible mainstream film might actually be made worse with a little effort. Backyard Dogs is so hideous that with only a little imagination it begins to function as something of a satire of both Kickboxer-type death sports movies and gay pornography. You know you’re in trouble when the highlight of your film is an opening montage comprising real footage of idiots trying to kill one another in their backyards; you know you’re in bigger trouble when the title of your movie comes from an early moment in which a character steps on a pile of dog excrement.

Made (2001) [Special Edition] – DVD

November 27, 2001Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Crime, Drama, DVD, Thriller

**/**** Image A Sound A- Extras A
starring Jon Favreau, Vince Vaughn, Sean Combs, Famke Janssen
written and directed by Jon Favreau

by Bill Chambers Even if Swingers were terrible, one would have to admire writer-star Jon Favreau for making a film about waiting around to be discovered instead of actually waiting around to be discovered. Made, his official follow-up effort (this time as full-on auteur), is not such a noble affair. A vanity project in the tradition of Under the Cherry Moon, Prince’s pretentious encore to his star-making Purple Rain, the film boasts of a more distinguished supporting cast, stronger tech credits, and a budget 20x that of its predecessor. And yet almost every scene lands with a resounding thud, due in large part to Made‘s alleged raison d’être: the anticipated reunion of Swinger Vince Vaughn with Favreau–who turns into a morose do-gooder whenever he’s in Vaughn’s radar. It’s like watching “The Odd Couple” starring a tooth and a root canal.

Along for the Ride (2001) – DVD

November 26, 2001Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD, Germany, Romance, ZERO STARS

Forever Lulu
ZERO STARS/**** Image B- Sound B
starring Melanie Griffith, Patrick Swayze, Penelope Ann Miller, Joseph Gordon-Leavitt
written and directed by John Kaye

by Walter Chaw For as bad an actress as Melanie Griffith is (Night Moves and Another Day in Paradise notwithstanding), it’s not entirely her fault that John Kaye’s Forever Lulu (inexplicably renamed Along for the Ride for its DVD release) is unspeakably awful. True, her Betsy-Wetsy kewpie doll elocution and its attendant dead eyes–which wore out their welcome almost the second she trotted them out for an incredulous audience about twenty-six years ago–are in full-bore here, but what makes Along for the Ride, in which she plays the title role, so abominable are such exchanges as this one:

LULU
Did you know that sometimes I ask my pillow late at night, “How much sadness do I have to feel?” And did you know that love is the greatest painkiller and that Marilyn Monroe wore a mask of tragedy over her pubic hair?

CLAIRE
You’re right, I should go talk to Ben.

Rush Hour 2 (2002) [infinifilm] – DVD

November 19, 2001Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, DVD, Hong Kong, Jackie Chan, Martial Arts, Mystery, Thriller

**/**** Image A+ Sound A- Extras A-
starring Jackie Chan, Chris Tucker, John Lone, Zhang Ziyi
screenplay by Jeff Nathanson
directed by Brett Ratner

by Walter Chaw For as long as Jackie Chan has been the logical heir to Buster Keaton’s crown, it becomes apparent during the course of Brett Ratner’s Rush Hour 2 that he may also be the heir to Peter Sellers’s Inspector Clouseau/Pink Panther crown. Blithely mixing the broad racial humour with the broad slapstick theatrics that typify Sellers and Blake Edwards’s classic comedies of criminal bad taste, Rush Hour 2 even makes time for a couple of bombshell secret agents, a brief and largely inexplicable interlude involving breasts rendering a man amusingly mute, and a cheerfully inept sidekick who gets in the stray kick now and again. The tenor, then, is dedicatedly light, and the humour is predictably free of cleverness–mostly involving Asians eating dogs and killing chickens, and African-Americans preferring their chickens fried and their karaoke with a heaping helping of Jacko gesticulations. That Rush Hour 2 (and the Pink Panther saga, for that matter) is often so genial in its cheap humour and gratifying in its physical exertions speaks to an almost universal desire to see people get a pie in the face while inelegantly breaking societal taboos. Rush Hour 2 never once aspires to anything other than formula fluff and never once descends into the dangerous realm of superlative entertainment. It is the prototypical summer film: loud, cheap, exploitive, and forgotten almost as soon as it’s over.

Freddy Got Fingered (2001) – DVD

November 14, 2001Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD, Esoterica

**½/**** Image A Sound B Extras A
starring Tom Green, Rip Torn, Marisa Coughlan, Eddie Kaye Thomas
screenplay by Tom Green & Derek Harvie
directed by Tom Green

by Walter Chaw Tom Green’s Freddy Got Fingered is the most startling debut since Luis Buñuel’s Un chien andalou, with which it has a few things in common: both are constructed with a wilful disdain towards narrative; both are aimed at the outer limits of shocking imagery; both display an open hostility for the cultural status quo; and both joke on their audience’s entrenched preconceptions of film form. Even more admirably seditious, Freddy Got Fingered, unlike Un chien andalou, was actually backed and released by a major studio. (It’s extremely instructive to read Roger Ebert’s review of Un chien andalou as the definitive piece on Freddy Got Fingered, though I suspect Ebert would object to that notion.) The crucial of many differences between the two films is that Buñuel and Salvador Dali’s experiment in inciting an audience was only seventeen minutes long while Freddy Got Fingered is an excruciating eighty-seven. That said, it is destined for instant cult status and eventual critical respect.

America’s Sweethearts (2001) + Legally Blonde (2001) [Special Edition] – DVDs

November 12, 2001Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, DVD, Romance

AMERICA’S SWEETHEARTS
*/**** Image A Sound A- Extras C-
starring Julia Roberts, Billy Crystal, Catherine Zeta-Jones, John Cusack
screenplay by Billy Crystal & Peter Tolan
directed by Joe Roth

LEGALLY BLONDE
**/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B
starring Reese Witherspoon, Luke Wilson, Selma Blair, Matthew Davis
screenplay by Karen McCullah Lutz & Kirsten Smith, based on the novel by Amanda Brown
directed by Robert Luketic

by Bill Chambers This week, two of last summer’s comedies, Legally Blonde and America’s Sweethearts, transfer their competition to the video store. Neither film has a high-concept that’s fruitful–they’re both pitches without a paddle buoyed only by star power. I’ll take the former over the latter, however, because America’s Sweethearts is a shrill, lumpy stinker that sends up the movie business so vapidly it’s like a parody of Hollywood satires. Legally Blonde is watchable, at least, and you don’t have to suffer through the de facto Miss America, Julia Roberts, pretending as though she’s blending in with the furniture.

Monsters, Inc. (2001)

November 2, 2001Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Family, Pixar

***/****
starring the voices of Billy Crystal, John Goodman, James Coburn, Jennifer Tilly
screenplay by Dan Gerson & Andrew Stanton
directed by Peter Docter and David Silverman & Lee Unkrich

Monstersincby Walter Chaw Ten feet tall and covered in blue and purple fur, James “Sully” Sullivan (voiced by John Goodman) is the leading scarer at Monsters, Inc. and best friend to his “handler/assistant,” a green nebbish of a cyclops named Mike Wazowski (Billy Crystal). Despite their occupation, they’re sweet fellas; less so is Randall Boggs (Steve Buscemi), a colour-changing, chameleonic thing who is jealous of Sully’s reputation. When a dreaded child escapes into the monster’s factory, Sully and Mike gradually unearth Randall’s nefarious plot to overtake Sully for “Most Bloodcurdling” while trying to hide the renegade kid from their tick-like boss Henry J. Waternoose (James Coburn) and Celia (Jennifer Tilly), Mike’s girlfriend.

Jump Tomorrow (2001)

October 31, 2001Posted in****/****, 2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Romance, Theatrical

****/****
starring Tunde Adebimpe, Natalia Verbeke, Hippolyte Girardot, Patricia Mauceri
written and directed by Joel Hopkins

by Walter Chaw An unlikely romance, an unlikely road movie, and an unlikely buddy picture all in one that somehow works (and with a surplus of charm and sweetness), Joel Hopkins’s debut feature Jump Tomorrow could be described as either Harold Lloyd by way of Jacques Tati or Jim Jarmusch by way of Thirties screwball. Or just simply “fantastic.” It is hopelessly romantic and subversively funny, a Being There-esque collection of guileless characters left to interact in ways that are so nobly old-fashioned and innocent, it takes a good half-hour before we realize that Jump Tomorrow doesn’t have a baseball bat clutched in the hand behind its back. It doesn’t have a hand behind its back at all.

Kingdom Come (2001) – DVD

October 28, 2001Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Family

*½/**** Image B+ Sound C+ Extras B-
starring LL Cool J, Jada Pinkett Smith, Vivica A. Fox, Loretta Devine
screenplay by David Dean Bottrell & Jessie Jones, based on the play “Dearly Departed” by David Dean Bottrell
directed by Doug McHenry

by Walter Chaw A second-helping of Soul Food but seasoned this time around with a preponderance of syrupy good intentions and a hulking mess of stock burlesque caricatures, Kingdom Come vacillates between ridiculous and irritating: a far cry from the intended “heartwarming” and “funny.” Though it’s always nice to see a film with an all-African-American cast that doesn’t rely on gangsters and gunplay (ignoring a gun that is drawn and forgotten early on), I’m not certain that the opposite of that genre is necessarily forced dramedy camaraderie, complete with a sitcom narrative’s rise and fall, made popular by Waiting to Exhale. Still, for as simple-minded and shamelessly overacted as it is, the film is somewhat redeemed by an overall genial goodwill.