Drama Archives - Page 52 of 119 - FILM FREAK CENTRAL

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

September 1, 20092000s, 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.

Inglourious Basterds (2009)

August 21, 2009****/****, 2000s, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: Quentin Tarantino, Drama, Theatrical, War

****/****
starring Brad Pitt, Christoph Waltz, Michael Fassbender, Mélanie Laurent
written and directed by Quentin Tarantino

by Walter Chaw There are two stars in Inglourious Basterds (Quentin Tarantino and Christoph Waltz), the one to be expected, the other a shoo-in for Oscar consideration in what’s easily the most mesmerizing, commanding performance I’ve seen in any film this year. The opening sequence, in which Waltz’s SS Col. Hans Landa interrogates a French dairy farmer as to the whereabouts of a Jewish family that’s gone missing, is, how to say this, perfect, but unlike the other perfect sequences of 2009 (the prologue of Up, the main titles of Watchmen), Inglourious Basterds matches this exceptional moment with another as Landa has a little confection with a rare survivor of his attentions, Shosanna (a stunning Mélanie Laurent); then another as German actress Bridget von Hammersmark (Diane Kruger) does her best to cover for her three suspicious pals in an underground speakeasy; then another with Landa again as he asks von Hammersmark to put her foot in his lap. At first glance two separate films that only fit together roughly, if at all, it becomes clear during Inglourious Basterds‘ final chapter, as the ghostly image of a beautiful woman cackles in the smoke above a burning auditorium (“This is the face of Jewish vengeance!”), that this is Tarantino no longer making something new and strange out of his obsessive movie-love, but something dangerous and risky about the ethics of vengeance and the shifting ground beneath moral quagmires we thought we’d put to bed. What better conflict than the last popular war to stage a conversation about whether or not the only reason the winners weren’t held accountable for their atrocities is that they were the winners.

Across the Universe (2007) – Blu-ray Disc

August 14, 20092000s, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Esoterica, Musical

**/**** Image A Sound A Extras A-
starring Evan Rachel Wood, Jim Sturgess, Joe Anderson, Dana Fuchs
screenplay by Dick Clement & Ian La Frenais
directed by Julie Taymor

by Bryant Frazer Long considered sacrosanct, in recent years the catalogue of music recorded by The Beatles has become fairer game. The success of a 2000 CD reissue of #1 singles may have greased the wheels for Beatles-related projects, including a 2006 Cirque du Soleil extravaganza based around the group’s songs and mounted in Las Vegas, a comprehensive four-year-long digital remastering project involving all the original albums, and even a Beatles-only edition of the hit videogame series Rock Band. In this context, Across the Universe feels like a cog in a much bigger marketing machine. To some degree, it’s impressive that director Julie Taymor managed to build a period-romance-cum-rock-musical entirely around Beatles songs, although the film never manages to answer the question of why such a project might be worth undertaking in the first place.

Sleuth (2007) – Blu-ray Disc

August 10, 20092000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Mystery, Thriller, UK

*/**** Image B+ Sound A- Extras B
starring Michael Caine, Jude Law
screenplay by Harold Pinter, based on the play by Anthony Shaffer
directed by Kenneth Branagh

by Walter Chaw Call it an actor's workshop, if you must, but it's more like an actor's mausoleum, and the Anthony Shaffer source material, as punched-up by Harold Pinter just prior to Pinter's death in the classic unfilmable Pinter style, is hopelessly stagebound and déclassé. It's old people playing at Patrick Marber, falling into the exact trap that most adaptations of Ian McEwan have fallen: mistaking the author fucking with us for great insights into the human condition. Sleuth, Kenneth Branagh's reboot of Joseph L. Mankiewicz's museum piece starring Laurence Olivier and a thirty-six-years-younger Michael Caine, brings Caine back in the Olivier role, with Jude Law once again taking over for Caine after the Alfie remake. It's terrible stuff, stiff and laboured and crippled by self-importance, self-aggrandizing camera trickery, and foreground symbolism that fails from its Osterman Weekend surveillance paranoia all the way through to its willing suspension of disbelief in a pair of performances that never for a moment feel like anything but performances. Most disappointingly, there's a conspicuous lack of fun in a picture that seems more interested in the antagonists' psychology than in exploiting the possibilities of a piece surgically tuned to being a lark. Excavations of male psychology beyond the urge to gamesmanship have absolutely no place in Sleuth: you can talk about why guys lay their dicks on the bar, but you shouldn't do it for an entire feature. Branagh's strength as a director of Shakespeare is as an ambassador for the Bard's latent themes of sociological aggression and animism, while his Dead Again proved that even without Shakespeare, his ear for the operatic could carry the day in an artfully campy supernatural melodrama. But in applying his anthropologist's touch to Sleuth, he's met his match: there's nothing to unearth because the dig site is, frankly, sterile.

Paper Heart (2009)

August 6, 20092000s, Authors: Ian Pugh, Comedy, Drama, Esoterica, Romance, Theatrical

*½/****
starring Charlyne Yi, Jake Johnson, Michael Cera
screenplay by Nicholas Jasenovec & Charlyne Yi
directed by Nicholas Jasenovec

by Ian Pugh The twain where mainstream comedy conventions and a certain vogue-ish indie aesthetic meet, Paper Heart is desperate to be seen as an earnest exploration of love but done in by an almost suffocating desire to please. Any emotion or profundity to be taken from this hybrid documentary is rendered irrelevant by its attempts to increase its entertainment value through cheap laughs. Comic Charlyne Yi (Knocked Up) is touring the nation asking passersby from all walks of life their thoughts on the nature of love when a chance encounter with young gadabout Michael Cera (Michael Cera)–more or less Yi's ideological soul mate–convinces her documentary's director, Nick Jasenovec (played on camera by an affable Jake Johnson), that they've found the perfect opportunity for romantic skeptic Yi to experience love first hand. It's a prefab narrative scenario meant to complement the documentary footage, though it's not exactly a "standard" love story since it casts doubt on whether anyone is actually in love. The problem is that it employs the worn-out tactics of pretty much every lame juvenile laffer from the last four years: bad jokes are told, then let out in the air to die–and everyone stares at each other for longer than is deemed socially acceptable. Because even the documentary aspects aren't enough to stand on their own, each story of true love is recreated by one of Yi's intentionally-amateurish puppet shows/third-grade dioramas, with the major players represented by Popsicle-stick people and every metaphor literalized to the point of ridiculousness.

Dollhouse: Season One (2009) – DVD | Blu-ray Disc

August 5, 20092000s, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Television, Thriller

DVD – Image N/A Sound N/A Extras N/A
BLU-RAY – Image A- Sound B Extras B
"Ghost," "The Target," "Stage Fright," "Gray Hour," True Believer," "Man On the Street," "Echoes," Needs," "A Spy In the House of Love," "Haunted," "Briar Rose," "Omega"
—
"Epitaph One," "Echo"

by Jefferson Robbins They're committing a grand social experiment over there at FOX, using some of the most loyal genre lovers in fandom as their rhesus monkeys. The disease they seek to wipe out, it appears, is the intermediary of the critic. Take much-abused, much-adored TV creator Joss Whedon; kick dirt in the face of his latest brainchild, "Dollhouse", when the poor thing is too weak to stand; and then, upon achieving maximum buzz by holding back longed-for portions of the resulting science-fiction series, release them through a hidden proxy and pretend it's a leak. It's pandering to geeks' idea of the Internet as a wild frontier, where the dispossessed can build a community and you can't stop the Signal, man. Meanwhile, for critics with a yen to stay independent of the studio's manipulation, they send out watermarked, shit-quality burns minus the fourth disc in the "Dollhouse" home video release. That missing platter features basically all the supplements any reasonable person would expect with their purchase, as well as the original, scrapped pilot "Echo" and the unaired thirteenth episode, "Epitaph One." So any critical analysis–like the one I'm about to perform–can be written off as sour grapes, spilt milk, the breast-beating of a self-appointed arbiter of good taste who's just mad because he didn't see it first.

Sunshine Cleaning (2009); The Last House on the Left (2009); Race to Witch Mountain (2009)|Race to Witch Mountain – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

August 2, 20092000s, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Ian Pugh, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Crime, Disney, Drama, DVD, Family, Horror, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller, UK, Wes Craven

SUNSHINE CLEANING
**½/****
starring Amy Adams, Emily Blunt, Alan Arkin, Jason Spevack
screenplay by Megan Holley
directed by Christine Jeffs

THE LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT
**½/****
starring Garret Dillahunt, Sara Paxton, Monica Potter, Tony Goldwyn
screenplay by Adam Alleca and Carl Ellsworth, based on the motion picture written and directed by Wes Craven
directed by Dennis Iliadis

RACE TO WITCH MOUNTAIN
*½/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras C
starring Dwayne Johnson, AnnaSophia Robb, Carla Gugino, Ciarán Hinds
screenplay by Matt Lopez and Mark Bomback, based on the book Escape to Witch Mountain by Alexander Key
directed by Andy Fickman

by Ian Pugh SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Norah (Emily Blunt) is a sort of overripe Juno MacGuff: older but no wiser, quick-witted but shiftless. As she sticks her hand underneath a railroad track, pulling it out just before a train passes, the question is clear: why is she here, doing something so unbelievably stupid, when she should be out trying to get a life? Turns out this game of chicken reminds her of the day she and her sister Rose (Amy Adams) discovered that their mother committed suicide. Christine Jeffs's Sunshine Cleaning feels like a response to a recent spate of smarmy little indie films in the sense that it bothers to explore the self-aware idiosyncrasies typically taken for granted, and it comes to the startling conclusion that perhaps these "personality quirks" aren't the building blocks of individualism, but rather signposts for unresolved trauma and budding mental illness. (Given how contradictory this film is to the Little Miss Sunshine mentality (and Alan Arkin's presence makes the comparison inevitable), can we assume that its title is a double entendre?) You may laugh when Rose's son Oscar (Jason Spevack) is kicked out of school for licking his teacher's leg, or when her father Joe (Arkin) hustles unsuspecting business owners with one get-rich-quick scheme after another, yet the lingering question is whether or not they'd engage in "funny" behaviour if not for their inherited anguish. "It's tough raising a kid by yourself, huh?" Joe tells Rose after she asks him to babysit at an inconvenient time. "Try two." The attempt to mine humour from these tragic aftermaths doesn't make Sunshine Cleaning a morbid film, exactly–but it definitely makes for a haunted one.

Funny People (2009)

July 31, 20092000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Theatrical

*/****
starring Adam Sandler, Seth Rogen, Leslie Mann, Eric Bana
written and directed by Judd Apatow

by Walter Chaw I liked the first hour of Judd Apatow's Funny People quite a lot–the last four not so much. Needless to say, focus and pacing are a problem. Focus and pacing are a problem for just about any film that runs two-and-a-half hours. It starts as something different and strange, an experiment that seems to be working whereby Adam Sandler's sociopathic persona is put under the microscope and left to squirm. And then it turns into a James L. Brooks melodrama, and then a Kevin Smith joint. (Its epilogue, taking place in a deli between two protagonists after the storm, is shot in exactly the same way as Brooks's conclusion to Broadcast News, while a late-film kiddie rendition of "Memory" from "Cats" exhumes musty memories of Jersey Girl's Sondheim desecration.) What I'm saying is that Funny People starts as Punch-Drunk Love, transmogrifies into Spanglish, and metastasizes into Jersey Girl. If this were a boxing match between film and audience, the rope's the only thing holding us up for the last six rounds. It would be wrong to say that I hated Funny People; it squanders so much potential that it's closer to the truth to say the overwhelming feeling it engenders is one of intense disappointment.

Go (1999) – Blu-ray Disc

July 29, 20091990s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Christmas, Comedy, Crime, Drama

***½/**** Image B Sound A Extras C+
starring William Fichtner, Katie Holmes, Jay Mohr, Sarah Polley
screenplay by John August
directed by Doug Liman

by Walter Chaw I saw Doug Liman’s Swingers at the right age to recognize it as a pretty fair portrait of me and my buddies a couple of years removed from college, playing Sega hockey against each other into the small hours and doing our best to score with as wide a variety of women as possible while responsibility loomed. The dialogue struck us as true and hilarious. Three years later, 1999, I had met and married my wife and was taking for granted a genuinely great year at the movies. I remember loving The Matrix, and The Iron Giant; Fight Club changed my life a little, The Phantom Menace broke my heart, Being John Malkovich blew my mind, and Sleepy Hollow and The Blair Witch Project provided portholes backwards and forwards into beloved genres. It seems strange to say it, but without thinking much about it, I saw more films at the theatre in 1999 than I probably had in any year since the matinee of my movie-love in high school. And my wife and I have complementary tastes, always have; in retrospect, that film cemented our relationship in those first few years makes a lot of sense. But we were drawn to it insensate.

Southland Tales (2007)

July 28, 20092000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Drama, Esoterica, France, Germany, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Thriller

½*/**** Image A Sound A Extras C-
starring Dwayne Johnson, Seann William Scott, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Justin Timberlake
written and directed by Richard Kelly

by Walter Chaw Call it professional vanity, or just vanity vanity, but I like to be the iconoclast. I want to be the one who understands the movie nobody else seems to understand–the lone champion of Unleashed as a sharp critique of popular East/West relationships, for instance. There are times, I think, it's the only reason I go to films that are riding waves of negative buzz or frankly otherwise lacking much cause for confidence. Southland Tales, Richard Kelly's follow-up to his cult classic Donnie Darko, had the bad buzz (from a legendarily jeered screening at Cannes) but a great pedigree despite the extent to which Kelly had begun to cast Donnie Darko as a fortuitous accident through his DVD commentary for that film, his ill-wrought Director's Cut of the same, and his script for the excrescent Domino.

Valkyrie (2008) – DVD

July 27, 20092000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, Thriller, Tom Cruise, UK, War

***/**** Image N/A Sound B Extras A
starring Tom Cruise, Kenneth Branagh, Bill Nighy, Terence Stamp
screenplay by Christopher McQuarrie & Nathan Alexander
directed by Bryan Singer

by Walter Chaw Tight as a drum, deadly serious, and a mild corrective to not the enduring misconception that there were no men of conscience in Hitler's Germany, but rather to sickly, condescending awards-season bullshit like Defiance, The Reader, and The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, Bryan Singer's Valkyrie swoops down like its titular winged avatar to deliver the Holocaust melodrama to a minor kind of Valhalla. It's sober-minded and fact-based, with another handsome-destroying performance by Tom Cruise (though he only loses one eye here after losing both in Minority Report) that places him in uneasy orbit alongside Warren Beatty as another pretty boy aspiring for seriousness through mutilation of the self. It's a sober thriller, and because the outcome is never in doubt in a historically-based plot to assassinate Hitler, it lives and dies by its ability to sound smart and cast well.

Watchmen: Director’s Cut (2009) [Digital Copy Special Edition] – Blu-ray Disc

July 22, 20092000s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Superhero

**/**** Image A Sound A Extras B+
starring Malin Akerman, Billy Crudup, Matthew Goode, Carla Gugino
screenplay by David Hayter and Alex Tse, based on the graphic novel by ALAN MOORE and Dave Gibbons
directed by Zack Snyder

by Walter Chaw It knows the notes but doesn't hear the music. Watchmen, Zach Snyder's long-awaited, over-hyped adaptation of Alan Moore's venerated graphic novel, is technically proficient and occasionally beautiful-looking but also flat and nerveless. It has no heart and, more damning, no real understanding of the irony of itself, save for a title sequence set to the tune of Bob Dylan's "The Times They Are A-Changin'" that's bound to be the best five minutes I'm going to see in any movie this year. In this stirring montage, a travelogue through the three ages of comics against the backdrop of American history, Snyder captures the idea that what Moore accomplished in casting a conversation about idol-making through the most populist medium of pop culture is in fact translatable through film, this other most populist medium of pop culture. Where the picture missteps is in restoring the superhero group Watchmen to the heavens, resurrecting pop icons in impossible, perfect, virtual tableaux: the character designs are impeccable, the suits are clean, and the violence is obscene, yes, but glossy enough that when things stop for a moment to delve into one character's appalling creation story, it feels unearned and exploitive–so much so that the question that fast follows of why the rest of it feels removed and inhuman almost derails the entire enterprise. Coming from a guy who more admires the Moore source than loves it, it occurs to me that Watchmen is a movie made by Dr. Manhattan; it should've been made by Rorschach.

What Makes Sammy Run? (1959) – DVD

July 20, 20091950s, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Biopic, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Music, Romance, Television

***½/**** Image C Sound C Extras B-
starring Larry Blyden, John Forsythe, Barbara Rush, Dina Merrill
teleplay by Budd & Stuart Schulberg, based on Budd's novel
directed by Delbert Mann

by Jefferson Robbins In adapting his hit 1941 novel What Makes Sammy Run? for a planned live TV broadcast, writer Budd Schulberg dropped two elements: driven Hollywood producer Sammy Glick as union-buster; and Glick as self-hating Jew. In an interview with Schulberg featured on the telecast's DVD release, he cops to scrubbing the former but not the latter. "I didn't think I would have enough time and space to adequately describe what the Writers Guild was and what the whole problem was," he says. Though Schulberg's not queried on Sammy's Judaism, it's safe to assume that throughline was a non-starter for a network (NBC) trying to capture Middle-American living rooms in 1959.

Blue Thunder (1983) [Special Edition] – DVD|Blu-ray Disc

July 20, 20091980s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Drama, DVD, Thriller

**/****
DVD – Image B+ Sound A Extras A-
BD – Image A Sound A Extras A-
starring Roy Scheider, Warren Oates, Candy Clark, Daniel Stern
screenplay by Dan O'Bannon & Don Jakoby
directed by John Badham

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover When I was in university, the off-campus students always had a cast-off '80s couch in their shared houses and apartments–you would go to a party and without fail encounter something upholstered in what looked like tan burlap with a collection of thick and thin brown or rust stripes close to the centre. I honestly couldn't remember seeing anything so horrid in anyone's house I knew during the '80s, but now that it was there in front of me, it brought back all the uncool childhood memories that the decade's official style story lives to deny. Blue Thunder is exactly like that couch: it's a ridiculous farrago of clichés intended to turn the cop movie into Star Wars (and The Parallax View into both) that winds up roping in a variety of cheesy tropes most people would rather forget they once responded to–though I dare say anyone of a certain generation will grin at least a little at what once passed for entertainment.

(500) Days of Summer (2009)

July 17, 20092000s, Authors: Ian Pugh, Comedy, Drama, Romance, Theatrical

*½/****
starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Zooey Deschanel, Geoffrey Arand, Chloe Moretz
screenplay by Scott Neustadter & Michael H. Weber
directed by Marc Webb

by Ian Pugh (500) Days of Summer is another entry in a bizarre trend of films expecting a medal and a cookie for recognizing romcom clichés and concluding that relationships are difficult (see also: He's Just Not That Into You, Whatever Works, the upcoming Paper Heart, and the narrative distractions from the raw emotional power of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince), respectively, although there is, admittedly, some instinct that makes you want to play along with this one. You'd like nothing more than some assurance that the smug asshole hitting on the protag's girlfriend will get punched in the mouth–but attendant to that is a peculiar desire to see said asshole defy convention by rising up from the floor and slugging the guy right back. Each of these scenarios plays out in (500) Days of Summer: In an admirable attempt to strike at both the base of the spine and the depths of the brain, hopeless romanticism shares time with intellectual cynicism without ever pretending they can be truly reconciled in matters of romance. But grabbing your attention with this tactic is the film's idea of a trump card–and the apparent intention to dig a little deeper only results in uncovering the same old revelations imparted dozens of times before by much more eloquent voices. And then there's the question of who, in this day and age, needs to be reminded that the greeting-card industry is built on banal emotional shorthand.

Air Force One (2007) + Gran Torino (2008) – Blu-ray Discs

July 16, 2009****/****, 1990s, 2000s, Action, Authors: Ian Pugh, Blu-ray Disc, Clint Eastwood, Drama, FFC Must-Own, Germany, Thriller

AIR FORCE ONE
**/**** Image B+ Sound A Commentary B-
starring Harrison Ford, Gary Oldman, Wendy Crewson, Paul Guilfoyle
screenplay by Andrew W. Marlowe
directed by Wolfgang Petersen

GRAN TORINO
****/**** Image A Sound A- Extras C+
starring Clint Eastwood, Christopher Carley, Bee Vang, Ahney Her
screenplay by Nick Schenk
directed by Clint Eastwood

GRAN TORINO

by Ian Pugh In Wolfgang Petersen's Air Force One, a band of Soviet ex-soldiers (whose leader is played by Gary Oldman, in full Boris Badenov mode) hijacks the President's personal aircraft and in the process facilitates a double-dose of old-fashioned, flag-waving cinematic convention for the good old U.S. of A., just a few short years before 9/11 would fuck up that whole dynamic. The film is nothing more than a dying gasp of Cold War good-versus-evil nostalgia, complete with a no-nonsense Commander-in-Chief impossible to dislike or defy. Harrison Ford is cast as the beloved President/Vietnam vet/all-around ass-kicker, who establishes a stern anti-terrorism decree shortly before literally becoming the one to see his policies through. (He was easily American cinema's most ridiculous angelic-politician fantasy until Petersen outdid himself with Poseidon's New York mayor/firefighter/super-patriot.) Nothing really matters in this scenario, and nothing really has to matter: not the reasons for the hijacking (something to do with commie dictator Jürgen Prochnow and Kazakhstan–almost ten years before Borat established that country as the former Soviet territory no one in the West knows anything about), nor the White House staffers executed during the hijack. It's all pretext for Ford saving his family and the proverbial day.

Chick Flick Politick – DVDs + Blu-ray Disc

July 12, 20092000s, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Disney, Drama, DVD, Family, Fantasy, Musical, Romance, ZERO STARS

BRIDE WARS (2009)
ZERO STARS/**** Image N/A Sound C Extras F
starring Kate Hudson, Anne Hathaway, Kristen Johnston, Candice Bergen
screenplay by Greg DePaul and Casey Wilson & June Diane Raphael
directed by Gary Winick

CATCH AND RELEASE (2007)
ZERO STARS/**** Image B Sound B Extras C
starring Jennifer Garner, Timothy Olyphant, Kevin Smith, Juliette Lewis
written and directed by Susannah Grant

WHAT HAPPENS IN VEGAS (2008)
[JACKPOT EDITION]
***/**** Image N/A Sound B Extras B+
starring Cameron Diaz, Ashton Kutcher, Rob Corddry, Dennis Miller
screenplay by Dana Fox
directed by Tom Vaughan

27 DRESSES (2008)
[WIDESCREEN EDITION]
**/**** Image N/A Sound B Extras B+
starring Katherine Heigl, James Marsden, Malin Akerman, Edward Burns
screenplay by Aline Brosh McKenna
directed by Anne Fletcher

ENCHANTED (2007)
**/**** Image A Sound A Extras D
starring Amy Adams, Patrick Dempsey, James Marsden, Susan Sarandon
screenplay by Bill Kelly
directed by Kevin Lima

by Walter Chaw I’m not kidding: Bride Wars is reptilian, hateful stuff, biologically engineered to disrespect–with maximum efficiency–the precise demographic to which it targets itself. It’s like an antibody to the middle-class, medium-attractive girl by virtue of encouraging her to associate herself with upper-middle-class, gorgeous avatars and, through that agency, act in ways completely hostile towards common sense and decency. It’s an epidemic of bad taste: there’s no other way to read the suggestion that size-zero Kate Hudson is a fat, disgusting swine for gaining five pounds pounding chocolate and cookies for a couple of weeks, is there? What’s harder to explain is a scene in the middle where rivals/best friends Liv (Hudson) and Emma (Anne Hathaway) do a slutty dance-off in a strip-club for the crown of “sexiest bride.” Here’s the weird part: one of them actually cares when the other one wins. In the middle of a movie that can only hope to attract women as its audience, here’s a scenario that physically exploits women as opposed to just emotionally or situationally (as is more to be expected). It’s like a soul kiss and a reach-around between Vin Diesel and Paul Walker to cap off a nice street race. But does it have the same chilling effect on its would-be audience, or does it instead feed into the electric lesbian tension that serves as the motor for all these “Sex and the City” knock-offs? Never mind, it’s not important. What is somewhat important is that Gary Winick, the heir-apparent to Garry Marshall’s chick-flick throne, be discouraged from ever directing another movie.

In Treatment [Season One] (2008) + Tell Me You Love Me: The Complete First Season (2007) – DVDs

July 6, 20092000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Television

Image B Sound B Extras B ("Tell Me You Love Me")

by Walter Chaw It's a show about the traditional mode of psychoanalysis–a nine-week, five days-a-week series detailing shrink Paul (Gabriel Byrne) and four patients, culminating each "Friday" in Paul's own session with former mentor Gina (Dianne Wiest). It's based on a popular Israeli drama that was the brainchild of such filmmaking talents as Eran Kolarin and Nir Bergman. And though it begins stilted and ends badly, its thick mid-section is the enabler of our obsessive, maybe ugly, voyeuristic impulses, gratifying the viewer with the sensation that, for all the dense verbal webs spun in these little progressive one-acts, the real expert is the viewer. "In Treatment" clarifies the role of the observer in this media, how the active participant is always involved in an anthropological exercise deconstructing the characters' motives and actions–and how that critical facility, eternally underused, is occasionally gratified by material that's not quite smarter than you, but appears to be.

Whatever Works (2009)

July 2, 20092000s, Authors: Ian Pugh, Comedy, Drama, France, Romance, Theatrical

**/****
starring Ed Begley, Jr., Patricia Clarkson, Larry David, Conleth Hill
written and directed by Woody Allen

by Ian Pugh Whatever Works, Woody Allen's latest stinker, at least has the advantage of starting a conversation about who Allen is and what he stands for at this stage in the game. Dusting off a decades-old script that apparently underwent very minor revisions, the director makes his first attempt to flummox you by evidently declaring himself too old/inappropriate for the role of an aging, neurotic, egomaniacal ephebophile. There's no longer any currency in saying that Allen makes movies for himself in the most literal sense, and I've always considered the man to be the best purveyor of his own shtick–considering how transparent his writing is to that end, why bother settling for pale imitations? What prevents a total dismissal of his latest proxy is the notion that Allen might actually be right in this instance, as his own stammering delivery lacks the acidic edge required for Boris Yellnikoff (Larry David), a nuclear physicist and self-proclaimed genius with contempt for everything and everyone around him. When the film does work, in fact, it's because David is so quick and sharp with his insults ("simpleton," "inchworm," "moron"). (The part was apparently written with Zero Mostel in mind, and he would have been perfect for it.) But then, everything else about the character harks back to the old standbys that, seemingly, would make Allen ideally cast: the obsession with suicide and death, the rambling nihilist diatribes about man's inhumanity to man, the intoxication with New York culture–all wrapped up in a relentlessly meta package that finds Boris's friends whispering with consternation as he casually breaks the fourth wall to tell us things we already know.

Public Enemies (2009)

June 30, 20092000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Crime, Directors: Michael Mann, Drama, Gangster, Japan, Theatrical

**/****
starring Johnny Depp, Christian Bale, Marion Cotillard, Billy Crudup
screenplay by Ronan Bennett and Michael Mann & Ann Biderman
directed by Michael Mann

by Walter Chaw It's possible that Johnny Depp in a zoot suit, firing a Tommy gun from the running board of a vintage Ford, is so distractingly perfect an image that all other considerations are shunted to the soft shoulder–possible for the audience to only realize afterwards that there was nothing much of substance revealed about John Dillinger in Michael Mann's gorgeous Public Enemies. (Possible for Mann, too, who in the process of creating another of his odes to masculinity and bloodshed, accidentally crafted this pedestal upon which to worship the cult of iconic stardom.) Maybe no accident at all, as the movie closest to this one is Terrence Malick's Badlands–right down to a scene amongst law-enforcement officials in which our Johnny is treated like a Hollywood demiurge of a street-thug bank robber. And if Mann is trying to craft a film along similarly fetishistic, Americana-informed lines, then the media is the massage as they say. Aside from that, somewhere down the road from today, we may look back and wonder about the sudden proliferation late in this decade of films centred on Robin Hoods literal and allegorical, robbing from a broken system of fiscal governance to give to (or, at least, not directly take from) the common guy. From our current vantage, though, what we see is the biggest movie star on the planet playing the most famous and admired "public enemy" of the outlaw era, 1931-1935 edition. While there are intimations now and again of darker contextual rumblings, they don't feel convicted; and in the end, there's left just a collection of beautiful pictures as inert as a coffee-table book.