The Kids Are All Right (2010) – Blu-ray Disc

November 23, 2010Posted in2000s, 2010, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Coming of Age, Drama, France, Romance

**/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Annette Bening, Julianne Moore, Mia Wasikowska, Josh Hutcherson
screenplay by Lisa Cholodenko & Stuart Blumberg
directed by Lisa Cholodenko

by Bill Chambers Joni (Mia Wasikowska) and her younger brother Laser (Josh Hutcherson) are the offspring of lesbian couple Nic (Annette Bening) and Jules (Julianne Moore) and an anonymous sperm donor named Paul (Mark Ruffalo). Nic and Jules shared the burden of pregnancy, and though The Kids Are All Right never comes right out and says who gave birth to whom, the dispositional echoes, subtle shows of favouritism, and even just the kids’ names suggest that gynecologist Nic had the overachieving Joni and hippie-dippy Jules bore impressionable, impetuous Laser. But the movie’s more intriguing when the dots are harder to connect. Nic, for instance, gets off on watching a tape of two guys fornicating as Jules pleasures her. And Laser has to guilt goodie-goodie Joni into contacting their biological father, yet it’s Joni who takes an immediate shine to the man, while Laser sniffs, “I think he’s a little into himself”–directly mirroring Nic’s subsequent assessment of Paul as “self-satisfied.” A critical callback, it shows that Nic and Jules aren’t two single mothers sharing a roof à la “Kate & Allie”, but parents whose dynamic jointly influences their children. It’s also more convincing evidence of their togetherness than their bedtime nicknames for each other (“chicken” and “pony”), which the actresses can barely utter without giving away the blooper reel.

Daria: The Complete Animated Series (1997-2002) + Party Down: Season One (2009) – DVDs

August 2, 2010Posted in2000s, 2010, Animation, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Comedy, Coming of Age, DVD, Teen

DARIA: THE COMPLETE ANIMATED SERIES
Image A- Sound B- Extras B+
"Esteemsters," "The Invitation," "College Bored," "Café Disaffecto," "Malled," "This Year's Model," "The Lab Brat," "Pinch Sitter," "Too Cute," "The Big House," "Road Worrier," "The Teachings of Don Jake," "The Misery Chick," "Arts 'N' Crass," "The Daria Hunter," "Quinn the Brain," "I Don't," "That Was Then, This Is Dumb," "Monster," "The New Kid," "Gifted," "Ill," "Fair Enough," "See Jane Run," "Pierce Me," "Write Where it Hurts," "Daria!," "Through a Lens Darkly," "The Old and the Beautiful," "Depth Takes a Holiday," "Daria Dance Party," "The Lost Girls," "It Happened One Nut," "Lane Miserables," "Jake of Hearts," "Speedtrapped," "The Lawndale File," "Just Add Water," "Jane's Addition," "Partner's Complaint," "Antisocial Climbers," "A Tree Grows in Lawndale," "Murder, She Snored," "The F Word," "I Loathe a Parade," "Of Human Bonding," "Psycho Therapy," "Mart of Darkness," "Legends of the Mall," "Groped by an Angel," "Fire!," "Dye! Dye! My Darling," "Fizz Ed," "Sappy Anniversary," "Fat Like Me," "Camp Fear," "The Story of D," "Lucky Strike," "Art Burn," "One J at a Time," "Life in the Past Lane," "Aunt Nauseam," "Prize Fighters," "My Night at Daria's," "Boxing Daria"

PARTY DOWN: SEASON ONE
Image A- Sound A- Extras B
"Willow Canyon Homeowners Annual Party," "California College Conservative Union Caucus," "Pepper McMasters Singles Seminar," "Investors Dinner," "Sin Say Shun Awards Afterparty," "Taylor Stiltskin Sweet Sixteen," "Brandix Corporate Retreat," "Celebrate Rick Sargulesh," "James Rolf High School Twentieth Reunion," "Stennheiser-Pong Wedding Reception"

by Jefferson Robbins If he hadn't helped oversee the death of the music video, Abby Terkuhle's tenure at MTV could be viewed as the network's Silver Age. "The State", "Liquid Television", "Beavis and Butt-Head"–apogees or nadirs, depending on your perspective, they defined the channel in the '90s, until "Road Rules" and "Cribs" redefined it into irrelevance. Terkuhle, the network's director of animation and overall creative chief, left MTV in 2002, but when hipsters in the decade just passed whined that such-and-such MTV show wasn't available on DVD, they were usually talking about something he'd incubated. His reign straddles the cultural shift from the Age of Irony (David Foster Wallace, "Daria") to the Age of Schadenfreude ("Mad Men", the shitty-childhood memoirs of Augusten Burroughs). We used to be able to contemplate human abasement and crack wise about it, like Daria Morgendorffer; now the abasement is our entertainment, and we sit slack-jawed before the awesome pathos of Snooki and The Situation.*

An Education (2009) – Blu-ray Disc

April 21, 2010Posted in2000s, 2010, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Coming of Age, Drama, Romance, UK

**½/**** Image B Sound B+ Extras C
starring Peter Sarsgaard, Alfred Molina, Rosamund Pike, Carey Mulligan
screenplay by Nick Hornby, based on the memoir by Lynn Barber
directed by Lone Scherfig

by Walter Chaw Director Lone Scherfig is perhaps notoriously the first woman to direct a Dogme95 picture (Italian for Beginners) and preserves her effortlessness with actors and light romantic imbroglios with An Education. Yet it shows little maturation, particularly after her scabrous, delicately balanced, Hal Ashby-esque Wilbur Wants to Kill Himself, instead regressing into the ghetto of only-adequate BBC coming-of-age story. If An Education is remembered at all, it will be for raising the profile of the immensely appealing Carey Mulligan. She's Jenny, a sharp, sensitive sixteen-year-old schoolgirl with a promising future in letters and eyes on Oxford until she's distracted by the allure of a bohemian lifestyle with pretentious friends, who pretend at the civilization she would rightfully earn in time. Leader of said bohemians is creepy/suave David (Peter Sarsgaard), whose courtship of Jenny is a laudable contrast to Twilight in showing a worldly older man using all the benefits of his experience to impress, and eventually deflower, an easily-exploited high-schooler with stars in her eyes.

Hannah Montana: The Movie (2009) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

January 14, 2010Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Coming of Age, Disney, Drama, DVD, Family, Music, Romance, Teen

**/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B-
starring Miley Cyrus, Emily Osment, Jason Earles, Billy Ray Cyrus
screenplay by Dan Berendsen
directed by Peter Chelsom

by Bill Chambers Peter Chelsom may have sold his soul when he joined the ranks of Lasse Hallstrom and John Madden to become a house director for Miramax, but going to work at Disney–on a feature-film vehicle for one of the company’s biggest brands, no less–is a mercenary move, pure and simple. So it’s surprising, considering he probably could’ve treated the job as a paid vacation without incurring the wrath of “Hannah Montana” fans (who’ve been weaned on a particularly low-rent sitcom), to say nothing of the suits in charge (Disney favours foremen to filmmakers, after all), that Chelsom seems legitimately inspired by the material more often than not. The ‘Hannah Montana’ concept itself needs only gentle pushes to yield something resembling a story, but Chelsom doesn’t exactly coast on it; anyone who’s involuntarily endured the collected works of Kenny Ortega or Andy Fickman will notice a more idiosyncratic hand at the helm almost immediately. While I can’t say I’ve ever thought much of Chelsom’s films (they’re a bit twinkly for my tastes), he appears to have found his niche. As a work of Hollywood imperialism goes, it’s certainly preferable to his remake of Shall We Dance?.

I Love You, Beth Cooper (2009) – DVD

November 10, 2009Posted in2000s, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Canada, Comedy, Coming of Age, DVD, Romance, Teen

*½/**** Image N/A Sound N/A Extras C
starring Hayden Panettiere, Paul Rust, Jack T. Carpenter, Lauren London
screenplay by Larry Doyle, based on his novel
directed by Chris Columbus

by Jefferson Robbins I believe this is what it looks like when a veteran director throws in the towel. Morosely paced, edited with no ear for slapstick, perfectly mediocre in its staging, timing, scripting, and performances, I Love You, Beth Cooper (hereafter Beth Cooper) betrays benign neglect on the part of producer-director Chris Columbus. It's as if he tossed together all the ingredients for a thoughtful but teen-friendly confection–a recipe inherited from his late mentor John Hughes–and took it on faith that the cake would bake itself. There's even a weird invocation of the dead god of teen comedies: Columbus casts Alan Ruck, a.k.a. Cameron in Ferris Bueller's Day Off, as the hero's dad and supplies the sidekick with Cameron's absent, oppressive shadow of a father. That's not homage–that's the desperate rubbing of a talisman, a prayer to recapture lightning that leaked out of the bottle long ago.

Adventureland (2009) + Alien Trespass (2009)|Adventureland (2009) – Blu-ray + Digital Copy

September 1, 2009Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Ian Pugh, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Coming of Age, Drama, Horror, Romance, Satire, Sci-Fi, Teen, Theatrical, Thriller

ADVENTURELAND
***½/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B
starring Jake Eisenberg, Kristen Stewart, Martin Starr, Margarita Levieva
written and directed by Greg Mottola

ALIEN TRESPASS
***/****
starring Eric McCormack, Jenni Baird, Robert Patrick, Dan Lauria
screenplay by Steven P. Fisher
directed by R. W. Goodwin

by Ian Pugh In everyone's life there's a summer of '42, but of course it was never as wonderful as you remember. Although Greg Mottola's Adventureland is set in 1987, that's almost incidental–it really takes place in that hazy cloud known as "the past," full of fly-by-night jobs rife with fraud and deceit, fairweather friends who sock you in the crotch, and, of course, the music that brings to mind painful experiences perhaps best left forgotten. (Funny to think that this might be the ideological inverse of another great 2009 film about memory, The Uninvited: unhealthily obsessive instead of unhealthily in denial.) The key to understanding the film, I think, lies in Falco's New Wave anthem "Rock Me Amadeus," here serving as an inescapable nightmare at the titular amusement park, where it's pumped through the sound system ad nauseam ("Can you give me an ice pick that I can just jam into my ears?"). But then the romantic confusion driving the plot unravels in a series of betrayals, and that same song becomes a damning elegy. Seems strange that the director of Superbad, an instant classic of maturity-through-childishness and nostalgia-without-precedent, should deliver something so angry and contradictory for a follow-up. Perhaps it is strange–but Adventureland is also a more honest, more personal, and, most importantly, more mature film than Superbad.

Parker Lewis Can’t Lose: The Complete First Season (1990-1991) – DVD

August 25, 2009Posted in1990s, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Comedy, Coming of Age, DVD, Scream/Shout! Factory, Teen, Television

Image C Sound B Extras B-
“Pilot,” “Operation Kubiac,” “Power Play,” “Parker Lewis Must Lose,” “Close, But No Guitar,” “G.A.G. Dance,” “Love’s a Beast,” “Saving Grace,” “Musso & Frank,” “Deja Dudes,” “Radio Free Flamingo,” “Science Fair,” “”Teacher, Teacher,” “Rent-a-Kube,” “Heather the Class,” “Jerry: Portrait of a Video Junkie,” “Splendor in the Class,” “The Human Grace,” “Citizen Kube,” “Randall Without a Cause,” “Jerry’s First Date,” “Against the Norm,” “King Kube,” “Teens from a Mall,” “My Fair Shelly,” “Parker Lewis Can’t Win”

by Jefferson Robbins It’s the cool uncle of “Malcolm in the Middle”. It’s got “Scrubs” among its progeny, and the ’80s teen comedies of Savage Steve Holland somewhere back up the line of descent. It may have single-handedly established the swoosh-smash-zip school of sitcoms, festooned with sound effects, inner monologues, and discursive daydreams. If it wanted, “Parker Lewis Can’t Lose” could claim “Family Guy” as a descendant, for the way it appropriates “Parker”‘s absurdist jump-cuts to tangential situations.1

The Fall (2008) – Blu-ray Disc

June 8, 2009Posted in2000s, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Coming of Age, Disability, Drama, Esoterica, Fantasy, India, South Africa

*½/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras C+
starring Lee Pace, Justine Waddell, Catinca Untaru
screenplay by Dan Gilroy and Nico Soultanakis & Tarsem
directed by Tarsem

by Walter Chaw Beware the film that positions itself as being told from the perspective of a child, because unless you’re a child or that specific child’s parent, you’re eventually going to wish that someone would slap the kid in question. Tarsem’s labour of love The Fall, his unlikely follow-up to his serial killer movie as shot by Salvador Dali-cum-Caspar David Friedrich The Cell, is such a film, told from a child’s perspective–and rather than as an artistic decision, it plays as a plea for leniency. It’s a fairytale about a little girl’s emergence into maturity… No, it’s a fairytale about the delicacy of life… No, it’s not anything much of anything. By touching on a suicidal movie star’s convalescence after an impressively shot accident on a film set (involving a horse, Tarsem scholars take note), the picture seems to want to access some discussion concerning artificiality and its intrusion into reality–something that would make sense if The Fall positioned itself as a dyad with The Cell (which was, after all, only about film as a dream medium that acts as the brain does), but it doesn’t really do that, either. All it does, in fact, is provide Tarsem an excuse to indulge his prurience and affection for elaborate set-pieces awash in saturated colours and tableaux that often border on the grotesque. Freed of the necessity to be coherent, freed of much understanding of Bruno Bettelheim or Jung or Freud, it’s a fairytale without purpose and pretentious to boot, reminding more than a little of the also-pretty, also-empty Neil Gaiman/Dave McKean collaboration Mirrormask. It’s too bad, really, as there are images in here genuinely affecting for their visual splendour. I wonder if it’s unforgivable heresy to say The Cell is badly underestimated and due for revisionism while The Fall, despite its relative obscurity (no J-Lo anywhere in sight), is badly overestimated.

WarGames (1983) [25th Anniversary Edition] + Saturday Night Fever (1977)/Staying Alive (1983) [Double Feature] – DVDs|Saturday Night Fever [30th Anniversary Special Collector’s Edition]- Blu-ray Disc

May 4, 2009Posted in****/****, 1970s, 1980s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Coming of Age, Drama, Espionage, FFC Must-Own, Music, Sci-Fi, Stallone, Teen, Thriller, ZERO STARS

War Games
***½/**** Image B Sound C Extras A
starring Matthew Broderick, Dabney Coleman, John Wood, Ally Sheedy
screenplay by Lawrence Lasker & Walter F. Parkes
directed by John Badham

SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER
****/****
DVD – Image B Sound B+ Extras C
BD – Image A Sound A Extras B-
starring John Travolta, Karen Gorney, Barry Miller, Joseph Cali
screenplay by Norman Wexler
directed by John Badham

STAYING ALIVE
ZERO STARS/**** Image C+ Sound B+
starring John Travolta, Cynthia Rhodes, Finola Hughes, Steve Inwood
screenplay by Sylvester Stallone and Norman Wexler
directed by Sylvester Stallone

by Walter Chaw I hadn't realized until I watched the 25th Anniversary Edition DVD of it how intimately WarGames is embedded in my psyche. I saw it in the theatre as a ten-year-old in 1983 and, for the rest of that decade (the prime of my excited filmgoing experience), I didn't know that movies were ever different. The first time, in fact, that I recognized that movies were human was the first time they revealed themselves as something that could fail to inspire any kind of response at all–and I wonder if that initial moment of disappointment had more to do with the development of my cynicism than any one picture's deficiency. Film is a progressive addiction, says one theory: the more sophisticated you get as a viewer, the harder it is to find the fix. WarGames presented me with the idea of eroticism through mild scatological exhibitionism. It had a young man in his room, alone with a young woman, excusing himself to urinate in the next room–an act unthinkable to me as a ten-year-old, and holding with it the thrill of taboo. The next time they meet, the world starts to explode and, better yet, the girl traps the boy between her legs when he tries to edge by.

Dead Like Me: The Complete Collection + Dead Like Me: Life After Death (2009) – DVDs + Pushing Daisies: The Complete First Season (2007) – Blu-ray Disc

April 13, 2009Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Coming of Age, Drama, DVD, Esoterica, Fantasy, Television

DEAD LIKE ME (2003-2004)
Image B+ Sound B Extras D
"Pilot," "Dead Girl Walking," "Curious George," "Reapercussions," "Reaping Havoc," "My Room," "Reaper Madness," "A Cook," "Sunday Mornings," "Business Unfinished," "The Bicycle Thief," "Nighthawks," "Vacation," "Rest in Peace," "Send in the Clown," "The Ledger," "Ghost Story," "The Shallow End," "Hurry," "In Escrow," "Rites of Passage," "The Escape Artist," "Be Still My Heart," "Death Defying," "Ashes to Ashes," "Forget Me Not," "Last Call," "Always," "Haunted"

DEAD LIKE ME: LIFE AFTER DEATH
½*/**** Image C+ Sound C+ Extras D
starring Ellen Muth, Callum Blue, Sarah Wynter, Henry Ian Cusick
screenplay by John Masius and Stephen Godchaux
directed by Stephen Herek

PUSHING DAISIES: THE COMPLETE FIRST SEASON
Image A Sound B Extras D
"Pie-lette," "Dummy," "The Fun in Funeral," "Pigeon," "Girth," "Bitches," "Smell of Success," "Bitter Sweets," "Corpsicle"

by Walter Chaw Diagnosing the ills of Showtime original productions is a tricky deal, but whatever's wrong with them seems consistent across the board. Compared against HBO's output, there's nothing that can hold a candle to "The Sopranos" or "Six Feet Under" or "Big Love"; there aren't any masterpieces like "Deadwood", much less fascinating failures like "Carnivàle" or "Rome". To be brutally honest, it doesn't matter if we lower the bar, since not a single Showtime series could be called good on network TV terms, either. Flagships "Dexter" and "Weeds" are both overwritten and under-thought, jumping sharks regularly beginning somewhere around the middle of their first seasons and betraying their unsustainability faster than "Heroes". It's not for lack of star power or high concept that Showtime shows suck–not a surfeit of budgets or production values, no. I'd argue that the reason they're awful is because Showtime is incapable of hiring writers who aren't twee asswipes molding themselves to pop morality and rote, conventional character sketches and plot outcomes. Those hailing "Dexter" as an antiheroic crime thriller need to consider the storyline about the tough-talking Latina cop who has her heart softened by an Elian Gonzalez clone, or the revelation that Dexter might not be a serial killer after all, but a teddy bear with issues. And just as "Dexter" wastes the wonderful Michael C. Hall in its title role (ditto "Weeds"/Mary-Louise Parker), so, too, does another bit of Showtime dreck, "Dead Like Me", boast the excellent Ellen Muth and Mandy Patinkin in the pursuit of decidedly modest returns.

The Butcher Boy (1998) + The Brave One (2007) – DVDs

March 6, 2008Posted in****/****, 1990s, 2000s, Action, Australia, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Coming of Age, Crime, Drama, DVD, FFC Must-Own, Ireland, Revenge, Thriller

THE BUTCHER BOY
****/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B-
starring Stephen Rea, Fiona Shaw, Eammon Owens, Alan Boyle
screenplay by Neil Jordan and Patrick McCabe, based on the novel by McCabe
directed by Neil Jordan

THE BRAVE ONE
***½/**** Image B- Sound B Extras C+
starring Jodie Foster, Terrence Howard, Naveen Andrews, Nicky Katt
screenplay by Roderick Taylor & Bruce A. Taylor and Cynthia Mort
directed by Neil Jordan

Butcherboycap

Mustown

THE BUTCHER BOY

by Walter Chaw Opening with a series of panels from Golden Age comics produced circa the era in which the film is set (i.e., 1962), The Butcher Boy identifies Neil Jordan as a director with a secret yen for superhero fantasies. It certainly jibes with the filmmaker's affection for protagonists who, for whatever reason, live in private worlds, in fairytale dreamscapes populated by emblems of good and emissaries of evil–worlds where the most colourful places are the interiors of churches, where the characters' fears and failings alike are assets. Jordan's films are unfailingly about transformation (though sometimes they're about the failure to transform adequately, or quickly enough) and heavy with the illness of existential introspection–the Judas strain with which the modern superhero pantheon is sick. His heroes are rendered simple by their duality, confronted by the idea that for as hollow as it is to change to fit the demands of a particular time and place, it's equally useless to try to stay the same as the world falls down. Jordan makes the movies Terry Gilliam never quite made until Tideland; far from the compassionate fare many label it, his oeuvre is comprised of harsh little ditties about the voraciousness of the social organism and the bites it takes out of individuals living perpendicular to the absolute mean. For me, all of his films, from The Crying Game to Mona Lisa, from The End of the Affair to Interview with the Vampire, are pointedly concerned with the futility of compensatory measures in the lives of deviants.

Juno (2007)

December 7, 2007Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Coming of Age, Drama, Teen, Theatrical

*/****
starring Ellen Page, Michael Cera, Jennifer Garner, Jason Bateman
screenplay by Diablo Cody
directed by Jason Reitman

Junoby Walter Chaw Brutally overwritten, smug, and self-indulgent to no discernible point, Jason Reitman’s disappointing Juno is an unfortunate attempt to marry Judd Apatow’s sleazy morality plays with a Kevin Smith pop-cultural gabber–the result being a ventriloquism tract in which virgin screenwriter (formerly blogger) Diablo Cody crams so many unlikely gluts of verbiage into so many sterile, undeveloped characters that the whole production is the ultimate act of masturbatory puppetry. The movie would be twice as funny with half as many wisecracks–it’s so stuffed that there are long moments of zero interplay as one person or another acts as mute sounding board to whoever’s reeling off a Dennis Miller-ism. Red-flag time when a film acts as both main attraction and audience. Ellen Page stars as the titular Juno McGuff, a Soupy Sales-referencing sixteen-year-old who finds herself pregnant by her nebbish boyfriend, Bleeker (Michael Cera). Exactly: What 16-year-old references Soupy Sales? What 66-year-old? Look to something like Heathers for how to write absurdist dialogue–that film along with Clerks the chief antecedent for Juno, which isn’t as good as either because it wears its hipster cred like a chip on its shoulder. It’s also not very good because even though it’s about teen pregnancy, abortion, and adoption, it’s about nothing so much as quirky teen romance, revealing itself to be inclined towards mining laughter from dorkiness and thus allaying itself, too (and in the worst possible way), with Napoleon Dynamite.

The Graduate (1967) [40th Anniversary Edition] – DVD

October 26, 2007Posted in1960s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Coming of Age, Drama, DVD, Romance

**½/**** Image B Sound B Extras A
starring Anne Bancroft, Dustin Hoffman, Katharine Ross, William Daniels
screenplay by Calder Willingham and Buck Henry, based on the novel by Charles Webb
directed by Mike Nichols

WATCH IN iTUNES – USA|CANADA

Graduatecapby Walter Chaw Bonnie and Clyde's counter-cultural bridesmaid, Mike Nichols's The Graduate is the "easy" version of Arthur Penn's American nouvelle vague classic. It's too "straight," too deadpan–a safer Harold & Maude (think of it as doing for cradle-robbing what Guess Who's Coming to Dinner? did for miscegenation) with a similarly "hip" period soundtrack of previously-released hits (there Cat Stevens, here Simon & Garfunkel). 'Nuff said that the film failed to offend Bosley Crowther. Bonnie and Clyde is the blueprint for Quentin Tarantino–The Graduate is the blueprint for Wes Anderson; and while both 1967 pictures find a goodly portion of their bedrock in images mined from Truffaut, Godard, Antonioni, and the rest of the film-brat arthouse pantheon, it's only Bonnie and Clyde that speaks at all to the culture in revolt at the close of the Flower Power generation. By the climax of Penn's picture, the rebellious youth, contemplating integration into the society at large, are betrayed by The Father, gunned down in cold blood by The Law. By The Graduate's finale, there's just that old, one-second reconsideration of the wisdom of vowing to spend the rest of your life with an unbelievably beautiful, fresh-faced starlet in the full bloom of her attractiveness.

Marie Antoinette (2006) + Tideland (2006)

October 19, 2006Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Canada, Coming of Age, Directors: Sofia Coppola, Directors: Terry Gilliam, Drama, France, Horror, Japan, Theatrical, UK

MARIE ANTOINETTE
**½/****
starring Kirsten Dunst, Jason Schwartzman, Judy Davis, Rip Torn
screenplay by Sofia Coppola, based on the novel Marie Antoinette: The Journey by Antonia Fraser
directed by Sofia Coppola

TIDELAND
***½/****
starring Jodelle Ferland, Jeff Bridges, Brendan Fletcher, Jennifer Tilly
screenplay by Terry Gilliam & Tony Grisoni, based on the novel by Mitch Cullin
directed by Terry Gilliam

Marietidelandby Walter Chaw In going from The Virgin Suicides to Lost in Translation to Marie Antoinette, Sofia Coppola appears to be charting the arc of her own soft, unstructured dive into the morass of melancholia and regret, discovering her voice along the way in the bell tones of Kirsten Dunst, who plays a fourteen-year-old in The Virgin Suicides and, at the start of Coppola's latest film, a fourteen-year-old again, the Austrian Archduchess Marie Antoinette. Coppola's "Fast Times at Palais Versailles" opens with Marie loping through her Austrian palace, just another sleepy, stupid girl with a tiny dog, one poised to have the fate of two countries riding on her ability to produce a male offspring. Betrothed to nebbish French King Louis XVI (Jason Schwartzman), she's put into a French court ruled by gossip and bloodline (in one of the film's few literal moments, Marie offers that her waking ritual attended by what seems the entire family plot is "ridiculous") and, while crowned with the mantle of governance, thrust into the role of most popular girl in school, sprung fully-grown as the captain of the football team's best girl. It's impossible for me to not see something of Coppola's own premature coronation as the emotional centre of her father's own royal court, the third Godfather film–and to see in the intense media scrutiny afforded her in the wake of that fiasco the source of all these films about lost youth and the pain of hard choices made on her behalf. Marie Antoinette isn't a historical film so much as it's a dress-up picture; and like most any work of honesty, it's autobiographical (as indicated by its selection of '80s punk-influenced pop) and intensely vulnerable–at least for most of its first hour.

TIFF ’06: Citizen Duane

September 11, 2006Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Canada, Comedy, Coming of Age, Drama, Film Festivals, Teen, TIFF
*/****starring Douglas Smith, Donal Logue, Vivica A. Fox, Alberta Watsonscreenplay by Jonathan Sobol and Robert DeLeskiedirected by Michael Mabbott by Bill Chambers This Canuck Rushmore really got on my nerves. The movie makes a crucial miscalculation in the early going by introducing its puny teenaged hero, Duane Balfour (Douglas Smith), in revenge mode: Given that we already know Duane's girlfriend (Jane McGregor) is way out of his league, he would seem to have pre-emptively settled any scores he could possibly have with the Most Popular Kid in School (porcine Nicholas Carella, as miscast as Haylie Duff was as the distaff…

Dawson’s Creek: The Complete Sixth Season (2002-2003) – DVD

April 26, 2006Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Coming of Age, Drama, DVD, Teen, Television

Image B Sound B+ Commentary A-
"The Kids Are Alright," "The Song Remains the Same," "The Importance of Not Being Too Earnest," Instant Karma!," "The Imposters," "Living Dead Girl," "Ego Tripping at the Gates of Hell," "Spiderwebs," "Everything Put Together Falls Apart," "Merry Mayhem," "Day Out of Days," "All the Right Moves," "Rock Bottom," "Clean and Sober," "Castaways," "That Was Then," "Sex and Violence," "Love Bites," "Lovelines," "Catch-22," "Goodbye, Yellow Brick Road," "Joey Potter and the Capeside Redemption," "All Good Things… …Must Come to an End"

by Bill Chambers It's been three years since "Dawson's Creek" left the airwaves, and a side-effect of revisiting the final, wistful season of the show–in which the characters are constantly tabulating five years' worth of individual progress (or lack thereof)–is the urge to subject its core ensemble to a mental game of "Where Are They Now?". Newly-minted Oscar nominee Michelle Williams (a.k.a. Jen Lindley), whose revisionist contempt for the series manifested itself while she was doing press for Brokeback Mountain, has carved out a niche for herself as the muse of indie filmmakers, while Katie Holmes (Joey Potter) has spent the better part of the last nine months promoting the first blockbuster of her career (Batman Begins) and living out a real-life Rosemary's Baby. As for the dudes, James Van Der Beek (Dawson Leery) and Joshua Jackson (Pacey Witter), they've had a great deal more difficulty hitting their stride–which makes a certain amount of sense, given the program's gradual transformation into a distaff version of itself. Call it "Joey's Creek".

The Squid and the Whale (2005) + The Weather Man (2005)|The Squid and the Whale [Special Edition] – DVD

March 23, 2006Posted in****/****, 2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Coming of Age, Drama, DVD, FFC Must-Own, Nicolas Cage, Theatrical

THE SQUID AND THE WHALE
****/**** Image B Sound A- Extras A
starring Laura Linney, Jeff Daniels, Jesse Eisenberg, Owen Kline
written and directed by Noah Baumbach

THE WEATHER MAN
½*/****
starring Nicolas Cage, Michael Caine, Hope Davis, Michael Rispoli
screenplay by Steven Conrad
directed by Gore Verbinski

Mustownby Walter Chaw The title refers to a New York Museum of Natural History diorama called "Clash of the Titans" that proposes what a tussle between a sperm whale and a giant squid would look like–and it functions as the final, stirring tableaux of a 16mm film self-consciously shot in the manner of early Jim Jarmusch or Spike Lee joints. But The Squid and the Whale, Noah Baumbach's fourth film as writer-director, has inspired more conversation about the degree to which it does or does not tell the story of his own childhood–more specifically, the divorce of his parents, novelist Jonathan Baumbach and former VILLAGE VOICE film critic Georgia Brown–than about the self-reflexive canniness of the filmmaking itself.

The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants (2005) [Widescreen Edition] – DVD

December 7, 2005Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Coming of Age, Drama, DVD, Romance, Teen

*½/**** Image A- Sound B Extras B-
starring Amber Tamblyn, America Ferrera, Blake Lively, Alexis Bledel
screenplay by Delia Ephron and Elizebth Chandler, based on the novel by Ann Brashares
directed by Ken Kwapis

by Walter Chaw The quartet of best pals portrayed in The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants are, we're told, complementary parts of one consciousness, which goes some way towards explaining why it is that individually they seem like machine-tooled fonts of tween didacticism. They're Judy Blume-spawned pods: the fat, brassy one with speeches about the importance of being fat and brassy; the slut with mother issues and speeches about regret; the frigid one who lightens up; and the morose one who learns to set aside her barbed irony at the expense of a disease-of-the-week urchin with a message of her own. Although the whole thing's too long as it is, there's barely enough room in the picture for each of the girls to have a complete narrative arc, and so we're given preachy shorthand speechifying in lieu of character complexity. It's a TIGER BEAT quiz about puberty and it's astonishingly irritating, even if you can spot glimmers of truth in there amid the weeping and screeching.

Sky High (2005) + Stealth (2005)|Sky High [Widescreen] – DVD

November 28, 2005Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Coming of Age, Disney, DVD, Sci-Fi, Superhero, Teen, Theatrical, Thriller

SKY HIGH
½*/****  Image A Sound B+ Extras C+
starring Michael Angarano, Danielle Panabaker, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Kurt Russell
screenplay by Paul Hernandez and Robert Schooley & Mark McCorkle
directed by Mike Mitchell

STEALTH
**/****
starring Josh Lucas, Jessica Biel, Jamie Foxx, Sam Shepard
screenplay by W.D. Richter
directed by Rob Cohen

Skyhighby Walter Chaw A kids movie for the stupid ones and a guys movie for the stupid ones of those, Sky High and Stealth are lowest-common-denominator entertainments that throw sense out the window in favour of clumsy one-liners, bad special effects, and an eye focused keen on demographics and the bottom line, which those demographics promise to fork over on opening weekend. It doesn't matter if they're good, just that they rake in enough moolah before people get a whiff of the noisome rot and ennui wafting on air-conditioned currents out of the friendly neighbourhood cineplex and start staying home again in droves. The dreadfulness of Sky High and Stealth can be measured by the extent to which this nation's timid, gaffed, untrained, dispassionate film critics equivocate in their reviews that it's for kids, that it's an enjoyable film if you check your brain at the door, and/or that it's "finally" the family/action/blockbuster you've been waiting for all summer long.

Leave It To Beaver: The Complete First Season (1957-1958) – DVD

November 21, 2005Posted in1950s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Coming of Age, Drama, DVD, Television

Image A- Sound B+ Extras C
"Beaver Gets 'Spelled'," "Captain Jack," "The Black Eye," "The Haircut," "New Neighbors," "Brotherly Love," "Water, Anyone?," "Beaver's Crush," "The Clubhouse," "Wally's Girl Trouble," "Beaver's Short Pants," "The Perfume Salesmen," "Voodoo Magic," "Part-Time Genius," "Party Invitation," "Lumpy Rutherford," "The Paper Route," "Child Care," "The Bank Account," "Lonesome Beaver," "Cleaning Up Beaver," "The Perfect Father," "Beaver and Poncho," "The State vs. Beaver," "The Broken Window," "Train Trip," "My Brother's Girl," "Next-Door Indians," "Tenting Tonight," "Music Lesson," "New Doctor," "Beaver's Old Friend," "Wally's Job," "Beaver's Bad Day," "Boarding School," "Beaver and Henry," "Beaver Runs Away," "Beaver's Guest," "It's a Small World"

by Bill Chambers "Leave It To Beaver" was the first TV series to show a toilet. That sort of illustrates a point I want to make that while it may be an idealized portrait of the nuclear family, it's not a lie. Indeed, there's a touch of neo-realism in the show's emphasis on the bathroom, on laundry, on haircuts and making the bed. It's the only series I can think of where the characters are seen grooming themselves on a regular basis, and this almost blithe disregard for fourth-wall etiquette extends to not only frank discussions of hygiene, money, faith, and morality, but also an aesthetic that eventually supports 360º blocking. You won't, in other words, see the standard set-up of four people all sitting on the same side of the dinner table, except in the earliest episodes.