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.

DIFF ’01: Amélie (2001)

October 27, 2001Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DIFF/SDFF, Esoterica, Film Festivals, France, Germany, Romance

Le fabuleux destin d’Amélie Poulain
Amélie Poulain
***/****
starring Audrey Tautou, Mathieu Kassovitz, Rufus, Yolande Moreau
screenplay by Guillaume Laurant, Jean-Pierre Jeunet
directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet

by Walter Chaw Caught between an iceberg of a father (Rufus) and a nervous wreck of a mother (Lorella Cravotta), the very peculiar Amélie (Audrey Tautou) develops in her youth an active imagination to combat emotional starvation. When she’s 22, on the night of Lady Di’s death by paparazzi, Amélie accidentally discovers a tin of toys and photographs, a child’s treasure cache hidden away in her apartment some forty years previous. Resolving to return the artifacts to their rightful owner, Amélie discovers that acts of altruism serve as voyeuristic surrogates to her life’s social desolation. Taking its cue from the bare structure of Jane Austen’s Emma and–ironically, considering the ultra-stylistic character of Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s direction–the stark work of the Nouvelle Vague (Truffaut in particular), the strength of Amélie (Le Fabuleux destin d’Amélie Poulain) is in its imagery. Its weaknesses, alas, are a running time that is at least a half-hour too long and a resolution so predictable that the film’s problems of pacing and length meet in something resembling frustration.

DIFF ’01: Novocaine

October 27, 2001Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, DIFF/SDFF, Drama, Film Festivals, Thriller

*/****
starring Steve Martin, Helena Bonham Carter, Laura Dern, Scott Caan
written and directed by David Atkins

Novocaineby Walter Chaw An ill-fated hybrid of Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid and the dentist portions of Frank Oz's Little Shop of Horrors, Novocaine lacks a cohesive tone. It vacillates from dark comedy to Forties-style melodrama, from light-hearted slapstick to medium-heavy gore and nudity, and in one particularly inexplicable sequence, Novocaine attempts to be a post-modernist Lacanian thing involving a character's heightened self-awareness as a fictional construct. It's neither funny nor the slightest bit suspenseful, too jumbled and arbitrary to ever sustain much in the way of tension or interest. Even its central conceit–a plot to steal pharmaceuticals and the resultant chaos when the victim catches on to the scheme–is so essentially flawed that the revelation of the guilty party, which occurs after we've spent two desperate hours suspending increasingly leaden disbelief, isn't so much a shocker as a "shrugger."

Heathers (1989) – DVD

October 25, 2001Posted in****/****, 1980s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, DVD, Satire, Teen

****/**** Image A Sound B- Extras A-
starring Winona Ryder, Christian Slater, Shannen Doherty, Lisanne Falk
screenplay by Daniel Waters
directed by Michael Lehmann

Mustownby Walter Chaw Veronica Sawyer (Winona Ryder) is the only non-Heather "Heather," one of four girls in Westerberg High's most popular and fashionable clique. The conscience of a harridan quartet responsible for much of the insecurity and intimidation at their institution, Veronica confides to new kid J.D. (Christian Slater), "I don't really like my friends." Nor is there much to admire about Westerberg's other clusters, who spend their time destroying overweight students, tormenting the "geek squad," and placing themselves in humiliating situations for the sake of imagined boosts to their ill-gained status. J.D., a rebel with a cause, functions as the catalyst for Veronica's revenge fantasies: The two begin a killing spree of the beautiful people, getting away with it by playing on grown-ups' propensity to romanticize teenage suicide.

DIFF ’01: Haiku Tunnel

October 24, 2001Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DIFF/SDFF, Film Festivals

**½/****
starring Josh Kornbluth, Amy Resnick, June Lomena, Helen Shumaker
screenplay by Jacob Kornbluth & John Belluci & Josh Kornbluth
directed by Jacob & Joshua Kornbluth

by Walter Chaw Featuring the kind of humour made popular by those irritating sports improvisation dinner-theatre troupes, Haiku Tunnel opens inauspiciously: Josh Kornbluth (who co-directed with his brother and plays himself) stands in front of a chalkboard introducing the film as a made-up work set in the fictional town of…erm…"San Franclisco." His over-emoting and burlesque eye-rolling soon betray the fact that Haiku Tunnel began life as a series of stand-up monologues Kornbluth performed to small but appreciative venues in San Francisco. (Urban legends abound of entire secretarial pools going to his shows en masse and adopting catchphrases for inspirational memos.) Clearly a creature of the stage, Kornbluth's mugging and brother Jacob and John Bellucci's aside-laden script translate uneasily to the screen, aspiring to a kind of Woody Allen-esque fourth-wall breaking but only succeeding in being mildly embarrassing. Still, Josh Kornbluth's engaging warmth and egoless sense of humour portends a destiny for Haiku Tunnel as a cult classic and good things for the future of the fraternal auteurs behind it.

My First Mister (2001)

October 22, 2001Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Coming of Age, Drama, Germany, Romance, Teen, Theatrical

*/****
starring Albert Brooks, Leelee Sobieski, John Goodman, Michael McKean
screenplay by Jill Franklyn
directed by Christine Lahti

Myfirstmisterby Walter Chaw Something’s fatally off about My First Mister, veteran character actor Christine Lahti’s feature-length directorial debut. Awkward and atonal, it appears to be some strange cross between a reverse-gendered Harold and Maude and a mainstream Ghost World, and despite its desperation to appear so, it’s neither as intelligent nor edgy as either. Jill Franklyn’s screenplay (her first produced) just doesn’t work. It’s hollow to the ear and disagreeable to the taste, only ringing true occasionally through the Herculean intervention of Albert Brooks, here in his most restrained and affecting performance since Broadcast News. That noise you hear when Leelee Sobieski’s weary (and wearying) voiceover confides, “My clothes are not all black. Some of them are blue. Sometimes I wear them together so I look like a bruise,” is an audience’s worth of eyeballs rolling skyward. The problems Franklyn’s script presents to the rest of the cast, however, particularly the Helen Hunt-ishly smug (and similarly limited) Sobieski and Carol Kane as another gnomish manic eccentric, are insurmountable. They’re crushed beneath the weight of convenience, contrivance, Lahti’s unfortunate impulse towards the cutesy, and a score that is as insulting and invasive as any to be found in a Chris Columbus film or from the recently-flaccid baton of the once-great John Williams.

Dr. Seuss’ How the Grinch Stole Christmas (2000) [Collector’s Edition (Widescreen) + DVD Interactive Playset] – DVDs

October 21, 2001Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Christmas, Comedy, DVD, Family, Fantasy

*/**** Image A Sound A Extras B- Playset A-
starring Jim Carrey, Jeffrey Tambor, Christine Baranski, Molly Shannon
screenplay by Jeffrey Price & Peter S. Seaman, based on the book by Dr. Seuss
directed by Ron Howard

by Bill Chambers Dr. Seuss’ How The Grinch Stole Christmas? More like Dr. Strangelove’s. The Ron Howard film version of the children’s perennial has horror-movie limbs that spring up independently of Seussian intent, the most extended of them going by the name of Jim Carrey, who wants to be the only Grinch remembered and marks his territory with piss and vinegar. Then there are the subversive asides, reckless stabs at hipping up a classic story that hadn’t fallen out of fashion in the first place. So miscast as a director, Howard is guilty of trying too hard; so well-cast in the lead role, Carrey is also guilty of trying too hard–or maybe not hard enough. Improvising ten topical jokes to every five that succeed while smothered by a fuzzy-wuzzy bodysuit, Carrey suggests a green Robin Williams in maximum sellout mode.

DIFF ’01: Mortal Transfer

October 19, 2001Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, DIFF/SDFF, Film Festivals, France, Germany, Thriller

Mortel Transfert
***/****
starring Jean-Hugues Anglade, Helene de Forgerolles, Denis Podalydes
screenplay by Jean-Jacques Beineix, from the novel by Jean-Pierre Gattengo
directed by Jean-Jacques Beineix

by Walter Chaw Returning to the "nouvelle noir" grotesquery that marked his 1981 debut Diva, Jean-Jacques Beineix's Mortal Transfer is wickedly funny, visually stunning, and perverse in a malevolent way that, along with Bernard Rapp's Une affaire de gout, appears to be a Gallic specialty this festival season. Its highlight is a ghoulish, hilarious scene having to do with a corpse, an icy road to be crossed, and a rather unorthodox means of delivery; and though the film never quite seems at ease with its own black heart, its game cast is more than up to the task of the earnest deadpan that Stygian farces require.

DIFF ’01: Mutant Aliens

October 19, 2001Posted in2000s, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DIFF/SDFF, Film Festivals, Sci-Fi

**/****
starring the voices of Dan McComas, Francine Lobis, Matthew Brown
written and directed by Bill Plympton

by Walter Chaw Oscar-winning animator Bill Plympton's full-length animated feature The Tune is among my all-time favourite films. It's perverse, hilarious–a whiff of brilliance, proving Einstein's contention that imagination is more powerful than science and the truism that the pen is sharper by far than the rapier wit. Detailing a jingle writer's search for the perfect commercial hymn, The Tune is 80 minutes of kinetic bliss sketched out in Plympton's distinctively rough style that nonetheless demonstrates the kind of pure artistry betrayed by, say, Bill Watterson. It is with great anticipation, then, that I entered Mr. Plympton's latest foray into squiggles for the cinema, Mutant Aliens–and it is with some disappointment that I left the auditorium 80-odd minutes later. Eighty very odd minutes, as it turns out, and more's to the benefit of the film and of no surprise to the illustrator's fans. What offsets Plympton's trademark lunacy this time around, however, is not a joy of creation, but rather a somewhat disturbing puerility that relies once too often on humping to further the plot or provide comic relief. Mutant Aliens plays a little like Harlan Ellison's short story "How's the Nightlife on Cissalda?": all xeno-erotica and bestiality. Except for a few moments involving how a man imagines his member (chainsaw, locomotive, erupting volcano, wild horses), the rampant sexuality of Mutant Aliens mostly falls embarrassingly flat.

DIFF ’01: Big Bad Love

October 18, 2001Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DIFF/SDFF, Drama, Film Festivals, Romance

½*/****
starring Arliss Howard, Debra Winger, Paul Le Mat, Rosanna Arquette
screenplay by James Howard & Arliss Howard, from stories by Larry Brown
directed by Arliss Howard

by Walter Chaw Arliss Howard's Big Bad Love (or, "Fear and Loathing in Appalachia") is both self-conscious and self-indulgent. It doesn't pass the sniff test in terms of truth and lack of pretense, malodorous with that peculiarly rank stink of hubris. Marking his auteur debut, veteran character actor Howard adapts a collection of Larry Brown short stories wearing three hats (star, director, and writer–co-writer, actually, with brother James), each of which fits uneasily if at all. As a director, Howard tosses so many gimmick shots and narrative tricks (dream sequences, fantasy sequences, magic realism, etc.) at the celluloid wall that it's almost a statistical impossibility for not a one of them to stick–but it happens. Gimmicks like fake voiceover news broadcasts are distracting and irritating at the best of times; when overused, as in Big Bad Love, they're screaming bores rather than endearing quirks. As an actor, Big Bad Love is evidently a vanity vehicle for Howard, and it's again something of a marvel that Howard is so consistently ineffective and emotionally flat. Onscreen for about 98% of the time, Howard's exercise in self-love backfires to the extent that every other performer he shares a scene with blows him off the screen. Finally, as screenwriters, the Brothers Howard prove themselves to lack a sense of grace in their symbolism and a sense of coherence in their narrative.