The Lookout (2007)

March 29, 2007Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, Theatrical, Thriller

***/****
starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Jeff Daniels, Matthew Goode, Isla Fisher
written and directed by Scott Frank

Lookoutby Walter Chaw Perfectly workmanlike in execution, Scott Frank's hyphenate debut The Lookout is a mash of admirable capers (A Simple Plan, Memento, and Fargo are high in its pantheon of giants' shoulders), but it lacks suture in its crime arc, making one wish that its small character moments–highlighted by a superlative cast–were allowed to anchor its climax and epilogue. As Chris Pratt, a brain-damaged youth suffering after an act of high school chutzpah that resulted in the annihilation of his golden life, Joseph Gordon-Levitt continues to cement his claim as the best young actor of his generation, delivering a performance revolving around the life and death of the mind that is heartbreaking in its observation and subtlety. I think a lot about a moment near the end of the film where he makes change for an old acquaintance and lament that the twenty minutes or so that precede its conclusion–twenty minutes that drag The Lookout into convention and cheap formula–even happened. Until then, the picture drags some seriously dark shit out from under the psychic bed, such as how being a sports hero in high school can hide the fact that you're maybe an asshole setting yourself up for a fall, and how robbing anyone of virility and self-esteem (not to mention Everybody's All-American) can lead to dangerous explosions involving women and long firearms. Once exposed to this genre's sputtering arc light, however, all that darkness in The Lookout is suddenly at the mercy of a lot of travel-worn underdog revenge bullshit. The tightrope of genre pictures is that the first time I can predict what's going to happen is usually when it loses me for good.

Premonition (2007)

March 15, 2007Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Mystery, Theatrical, Thriller, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Sandra Bullock, Julian McMahon, Nia Long, Peter Stormare
screenplay by Bill Kelly
directed by Mennan Yapo

Premonitionby Walter Chaw There's a scene in the middle of Mennan Yapo's thunderously bad Premonition where two little moppets do a little "Who Killed Cock Robin?" hopscotch that is meant, I think, to mirror their mother's tripping back and forth through time to before and after her husband's timely/untimely death. See? I get it. Premonition, with its faux-spiritual, quasi-pretentious, Hallmark Hall of Fame-enshrined machinations, not only thinks pretty highly of itself in its Lake House fashion, but also corroborates a whole new genre behind the ample wake generated by newly-solemn Sandra Bullock involving fractured narratives (see also: Crash), often time travel (The Lake House), and pat morals having to do–like the ironic moral to another time travel fable–with being excellent to one another. Not even the sight of a severed head rolling around at a funeral or Peter Stormare as the voice of reason lends the picture the slightest flicker of life. It's less damning than Bullock's primary career as the poor man's Julia Roberts in vaguely misogynistic romantic comedies, I suppose, though the best that could be said about Bullock's dreary new path is that while the films are still appallingly bad, at least they're not especially popular. This predilection for knocking off Nicholas Sparks master plots should be a short-lived one.

The Films of Kenneth Anger: Volume One – DVD

March 15, 2007Posted in1940s, 1950s, 1970s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Drama, DVD, Esoterica, Fantasy, Horror, Short Films

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover J. Hoberman once stated that the critic who forgoes the avant-garde "has as much claim to serious attention as a historian who never heard of the Civil War." If that's the case, Kenneth Anger is the avant-garde's Ulysses S. Grant. Lurking in the boho wilderness long before awareness of the New American Cinema spread, he's an influential figure not only in the underground but also in the mainstream. A young Martin Scorsese watched Anger's leather-boy opus Scorpio Rising, gasped at its radical use of popular music, and promptly swiped it for his Mean Streets, thus setting off a chain of events that would end up–somewhat unpleasantly–at the films of Tarantino. That director's incorporation of pop-cult detritus likewise has its roots in the camp underground of which Anger is a part–though our avant-gardist chose to pilfer from Crowley and Kabbalah in addition to the leftovers of pop.

The Rodgers & Hammerstein Collection (1934-1965) – DVD

March 12, 2007Posted in****/****, 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Best Picture (Academy Awards), Comedy, Drama, DVD, Family, Fantasy, Musical, Romance, War, Western

THE SOUND OF MUSIC (1965)
*½/**** Image B Sound B Extras B+
starring Julie Andrews, Christopher Plummer, Richard Haydn, Eleanor Parker
screenplay by Ernest Lehman
directed by Robert Wise

MustownTHE KING AND I (1956)
****/**** Image A Sound A Extras A
starring Deborah Kerr, Yul Brynner, Rita Moreno, Martin Benson
screenplay by Ernest Lehman, based on Margaret Landon’s play “Anna and the King of Siam”
directed by Walter Lang

SOUTH PACIFIC (1958)
*½/**** Image A+ (Theatrical) A (Roadshow) Sound B Extras C+
starring Rossano Brazzi, Mitzi Gaynor, John Kerr, Ray Walston
screenplay by Paul Osborn, based on Tales of the South Pacific by James A. Michener
directed by Joshua Logan

CAROUSEL (1956)
**/**** Image A Sound A Extras C
starring Gordon MacRae, Shirley Jones, Cameron Mitchell, Barbara Ruick
screenplay by Phoebe and Henry Ephron, based on the Ferenc Molnár’s play “Liliom”
directed by Henry King

LILIOM (1934)
****/**** Image B Sound B Extras B+
starring Charles Boyer, Madeleine Ozeray, Robert Arnoux, Roland Toutain
screenplay by Robert Liebmann, dialogue by Bernard Zimmer, based on the play by Franz (a.k.a. Ferenc) Molnár
directed by Fritz Lang

STATE FAIR (1945)
½*/**** Image B- Sound B- Extras A
starring Jeanne Crain, Dana Andrews, Dick Haymes, Vivian Blaine
screenplay by Oscar Hammerstein II, based on the novel by Philip Strong
directed by Walter Lang

STATE FAIR (1962)
**/**** Image A Sound A Extras C
starring Pat Boone, Bobby Darin, Pamela Tiffin, Alice Faye
screenplay by Richard Breen; adaptation by Oscar Hammerstein II, Sonya Levien, Paul Green
directed by José Ferrer

OKLAHOMA! (1955)
***/**** Image A (CinemaScope) C (Todd-AO) Sound B+ Extras B-
starring Gordon MacRae, Gloria Grahame, Shirley Jones, Gene Nelson
screenplay by Sonya Levien and William Ludwig
directed by Fred Zinnemann

Rodgerssoundofmusiccapby Walter Chaw God, The Sound of Music is so freakin’ nice. Nazis are the bad guys, no controversy there; raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens–have you no heart, man? But when I like Rodgers & Hammerstein–and I like them quite a lot, truth be wrenched–I like their ambiguity, their irony, their goddamned fatalism in the face of eternal romantic verities. Consider the animal (jungle?) heat of “Shall We Dance,” cut off like a faucet by the fascistic abortion of The King and I‘s secondary love story; or the persistence of love despite abuse and abandonment in Carousel; or the slapdash kangaroo court that justifies love in Oklahoma!. This is all so much more than the slightly shady (and ultimately redeemed) shyster of The Music Man–this is reality in the midst of the un-, sur-, hyper-reality of the musical form. Yet what The Sound of Music offers up is a military man shtupping an ex-nun with no corresponding sense of fetishistic eroticism. How is it that the two most popular adult Halloween costumes engaged in naughty Alpine sexcapades could be totally free of va-va-va-voom? It’s so relentlessly wholesome that of course it’s the most beloved artifact of its kind in the short history of the movie musical: If you’re of a certain age, the plot of the thing is almost family mythology, resurrected every holiday like a dusty corpse at a decades-long Irish wake gone tragically awry. That ain’t a grin, baby, it’s a rictus.

Westerns with a Twist: Three Feature Films – DVD

March 6, 2007Posted in1960s, 1970s, Adventure, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Drama, DVD, East Germany, Romania, Soviet Union, Western, Yugoslavia

THE SONS OF GREAT BEAR (1965)
Die Söhne der großen Bärin
*½/**** Image B- Sound B+ Extras B
starring Gojko Mitic, Jirí Vrstála, Rolf Römer, Hans Hardt-Hardtloff
screenplay by Liselotte Welskopf-Henrich, based on her novel
directed by Josef Mach

CHINGACHGOOK: THE GREAT SNAKE (1967)
Chingachgook, die grosse Schlange
**/**** Image C+ Sound B Extras B
starring Gojko Mitic, Rolf Römer, Lilo Grahn, Helmut Schreiber
screenplay by Wolfgang Ebeling and Richard Groschopp, based on the novel by James Fenimore Cooper
directed by Richard Groschopp

APACHES (1973)
Apachen
*½/**** Image C+ Sound B+ Extras C+
starring Gojko Mitic, Milan Beli, Colea Rautu, Leon Niemczyk
screenplay by Gojko Mitic, Gottfried Kolditz
directed by Gottfried Kolditz

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover On paper, it seems like a good idea: a series of westerns that not only adopt the Indian point-of-view but also paint the advancing white hordes as monstrous despoilers of the landscape and its peoples. From 1965 to 1982, that's exactly what East Germany's DEFA studios proposed: fifteen Native-centric westerns featuring chiselled Gojko Mitic as an Indian hero ready and willing to kick settler ass. But though these films took the most American of genres and used it against its homeland (a propaganda coup if ever there was one), that's where the fascination ends. Once you've dispensed with the hilarious Cold War contortions, you're left with education-film-quality productions that preach loud and long while boring the audience early and often.

A Man for All Seasons (1966) [Special Edition] – DVD

February 27, 2007Posted in1960s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Best Picture (Academy Awards), Biopic, Drama, DVD, UK

**½/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras B-
starring Wendy Hiller, Leo McKern, Robert Shaw, Paul Scofield
screenplay by Robert Bolt, based on his play
directed by Fred Zinnemann

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Assessing A Man for All Seasons is no easy task. In its favour is the fact that it’s quite sensitively directed: Fred Zinnemann lays on a level of melancholy largely unheard-of in the costume-movie sweepstakes, making the film plenty more affecting than the twilight-of-Old-Hollywood clunker it could very well have become. Alas, Robert Bolt’s screenplay (and presumably his stage play) is resolutely impervious to directorial manipulation–and also completely full of crap. Bolt’s hilariously over-the-top deification of Thomas More (Paul Scofield) and More’s opposition to the divorce of Henry VIII (Robert Shaw) is so emptied of contemporary meaning that you can project anything you like onto it. Such care has been taken to shift the discussion away from political matters and towards “personal ethics” that an atheist like me can groove to More’s rigid refusal to indulge Henry’s transgression over God’s law.

Requiem (2006) – DVD

February 26, 2007Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Drama, DVD, Germany, Horror

***½/**** Image B Sound A- (IFC) B+ (Mongrel)
starring Sandra Hüller, Burghart Klaussner, Imdgen Kogge, Anna Blomeier
screenplay by Bernd Lange
directed by Hans-Christian Schmid

Requiemcapby Travis Mackenzie Hoover Like most pop epics, The Exorcism of Emily Rose was all about being sure. One had to throw down for the concept of the physical manifestation of Satan–any human considerations were swept aside in the affirmation of God's merciless will. And if certain college girls were crushed to pulp (a sentiment which extends to the general expendability of humankind), so be it. Thank goodness, then, that there's a movie like Requiem, based on the same case that inspired The Exorcism of Emily Rose but comparatively merciful in its mission. It wants to salvage the blighted life of an epileptic tossed around from doctor to doctor–one who, once presented with the beginnings of psychosis, had only religion and a mistrust of medicinal practice to fall back on. She's a victim of other people's indecision rather than of the Devil himself.

The Illustrated Man (1969) – DVD

February 22, 2007Posted in1960s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Drama, DVD, Fantasy, Horror, Sci-Fi

Ray Bradbury's The Illustrated Man
*/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
starring Rod Steiger, Claire Bloom, Robert Drivas, Don Dubbins
screenplay by Howard B. Kreitsek, based on the book by Ray Bradbury
directed by Jack Smight

Illustratedmancapby Travis Mackenzie Hoover Ray Bradbury's The Illustrated Man (hereafter The Illustrated Man) lays its cards out on the table right from the start. There's not much going on, just a couple of drifters named Carl (Rod Steiger) and Willie (Robert Drivas) taking a dip in the river, unaware of each other's presence. It should have been fairly simple to communicate this, but director Jack Smight is no simpleton: he throws the cuts at you, struggling to achieve with sweeping helicopter shots and other ephemera an effect he ultimately can't articulate. This pretty much sums up the movie, a series of attempts to look like somebody's working when nobody has any idea why they bothered. Coupled with Steiger's obnoxious persona and Drivas' blankness, The Illustrated Man is largely a hole in the screen that turns Ray Bradbury's gripping anthology of the same name into something sluggish and unpleasant to behold.

Down in the Valley (2006) [Widescreen] – DVD

February 21, 2007Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Romance, Thriller

*/**** Image B- Sound B+ Extras C-
starring Edward Norton, Evan Rachel Wood, David Morse, Rory Culkin
written and directed by David Jacobson

Downinthevalleycap

by Walter Chaw Almost worth it for a scene on the set of a western where our deranged fabulist hero Harlan (Edward Norton) finally finds a home, David Jacobson's Down in the Valley is otherwise so much pretentious hoohah waving its indie banner like a parasol. Rather than serve to illustrate a point about form and function à la Gus Van Sant's shot-for-shot remake of Psycho, what Jacobson's film does is strain its affection for (affectation of?) Taxi Driver, to the point of re-enacting the sacred "You talkin' to me?" sequence–to the point of actually perverting Scorsese's satire into your typical avenging-father/straying-daughter intrigue. It's possible of course to boil Travis Bickle's odyssey down to that, but to call Down in the Valley "reductive" is too kind: this is Taxi Driver recast as a protect-your-children-from-bad-dates picture, one that turns its back on the dreamlife of a crocodile in favour of the restoration of familial strata. It fails the courage test–going so far as to subtly pose an anti-Second Amendment suggestion–after failing, more damnably, to rationalize its pilfering of perhaps the definitive yawp in modern American cinema. Shake Down in the Valley hard enough and out falls another produced-by vanity piece for Norton to exercise his blank (as in Miyazaki-forest-sprite blank), squinty-eyed Method for the approval of his rapidly-shrinking circle of admirers. As far as the Norton mystique goes, Ryan Gosling is cheaper and prettier.

Man of the Year (2006) [Widescreen] – DVD

February 19, 2007Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Romance, Thriller

½/**** Image A Sound A Extras C-
starring Robin Williams, Christopher Walken, Laura Linney, Jeff Goldblum
written and directed by Barry Levinson

Manoftheyearcap

by Walter Chaw Notorious dullard Barry Levinson's second try at Wag the Dog, the Robin Williams vehicle Man of the Year is a limp wrist waved weakly at no more pathetic a target than new voting technology. The story, such as it is, involves a late-night political comedian/talk show pundit (in the Jon Stewart mold, I guess, if Jon Stewart were stupid, unfunny, and irritating) named Tom Dobbs (Williams) who carries his antiquated shtick all the way to Pennsylvania Avenue on the back of a faulty computerized voting system. Frail egghead techie Eleanor (Laura Linney, too good for this shit) discovers her company's HAL-like flaw (hardly godlike in her erudition, she puzzles out that the digital voting booths choose winners alphabetically), and then promptly goes on the lam after an inexplicable and out-of-tune assault hays her wires and inspires her to seek out the freshly-minted POTUS-elect to inform him of the error. Meanwhile, Dobbs keeps acting like that asshole Robin Williams, desperately in need of a strong hand at his reins lest he run roughshod over his co-stars, the script, sense, respectability, plausibility, and so on down the line.

The Last Kiss (2006) [Widescreen] + Trust the Man (2006) – DVDs

February 14, 2007Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Romance, ZERO STARS

THE LAST KISS
ZERO STARS/**** Image B+ Sound B Extras D
starring Zach Braff, Jacinda Barrett, Casey Affleck, Tom Wilkinson
screenplay by Paul Haggis, based on the screenplay for L'Ultimo Bacio by Gabriele Muccino
directed by Tony Goldwyn

TRUST THE MAN
½/**** Image A- Sound C Extras D
starring Billy Crudup, David Duchovny, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Julianne Moore
written and directed by Bart Freundlich

by Walter Chaw Zach Braff's auto-elevation into the rarefied air of Ed Burnsian self-satisfaction has required a fraction of the smarmcoms, if a meaningful assist from an obscenely-popular TV show that's running on fumes at this point. Garden State is dreadful, of course, swarming with awkward, overwritten, creepy alt-folk montages and pocket epiphanies (just like "Scrubs", albeit with half the rage and exploitation of frailty), but team up former "The Facts of Life" scribe (and Oscar-winning screenwriter) Paul Haggis with instant-brand Braff–he's like sea monkeys: just add grease–for The Last Kiss and discover in the alchemy a more pungent, twice-as-stale vintage of a type of picture that used to be done with grace and wit by people like Whit Stillman and Hal Hartley, cheapened by noxious voice-overs and skeezy dialogues obsessed with the female orgasm without having the honesty to actually show one. What we get instead is the idea that this shit sells to a privileged "indie"-craving hipster demographic oblivious to the fact that "indie" films are as homogenous a ghetto as any other now. (Independent of what? Alternative to what?) There's nothing genuine about these "relationshit" flicks (thanks to blogger John Landis for the term); they're a sloppily-baited hook dangling in a waitlisted stucco bistro.

Ginger & Fred (1986) – DVD

February 12, 2007Posted in1980s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, Drama, DVD, France, Italy, West Germany

Ginger and Fred
Ginger e Fred
***/**** Image A Sound A
starring Marcello Mastroianni, Giulietta Masina, Franco Fabrizi, Friedrich von Ledebur
screenplay by Federico Fellini, Tonino Guerra and Tullio Pinelli
directed by Federico Fellini

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover The idea of Fellini criticizing television for its vulgarity–as he does in Ginger and Fred–is indeed a bit rich: Federico Fellini complaining of vulgarity is rather like Roberto Rossellini complaining of neo-realism. But beneath the surface of this admittedly shallow lament lies the movie's real theme, which is the displacement of artists once their chosen form is rendered obsolete. It's not too hard to see Fellini himself, high-modernist art director that he was, in his music-hall dancer protagonists, who by 1985 have been completely snowed under by seismic shifts in technology and, by extension, entertainment. Slight as the film may be, you can't help feeling a twinge of regret for not only its leads, but also the increasingly-forgotten filmmaker who pulls their strings.

Sundance ’07: Low and Behold

February 6, 2007Posted in2000s, Authors: Alex Jackson, Drama, Film Festivals, Sundance
½*/****starring Barlow Jacobs, Robert Longstreet, Eddie Rousescreenplay by Zack Godshall & Barlow Jacobsdirected by Zack Godshall by Alex Jackson I absolutely despise Zack Godshall's Low and Behold. If there is a just and loving God governing the cosmos it will be the worst movie I see all year; there should be a provision in the Patriot Act ensuring that these people never receive the funding to make another film. Turner Stull (co-writer Barlow Jacobs) has arrived in post-Katrina New Orleans to take a job as an insurance claims adjuster that his crude Uncle "Stully" has set up for him. Turner…

Sundance ’07: The Go-Getter

February 5, 2007Posted in2000s, Authors: Alex Jackson, Comedy, Drama, Film Festivals, Sundance

Sundancegetter**½/****
starring Lou Taylor Pucci, Zooey Deschanel, Jena Malone, Judy Greer
written and directed by Martin Hynes

by Alex Jackson Two columns of note recently circulated in the blogosphere. The first was Richard Corliss's "The Trouble with Sundance," in which Corliss complains that Sundance movies have become formulaic and predictable, effectively snuffing out the fresh, original voices the festival was supposed to be cultivating. The second article was a partial rebuttal by David Bordwell that sheds light on the phenomenon of what he calls "Indie Guignol": independent filmmakers trying to outdo one another in sensationalistic brutality. Compared to entries in the "Sundance genre," i.e., films typically involving dysfunctional families that strive to reconnect, oftentimes through road trips (the Oscar-nominated Little Miss Sunshine would be considered prototypical), these pictures are not mainstream, but they're considered by critics to have more artistic merit. And yet, particularly because we can easily recognize the phenomenon, it's losing its legitimacy as art. "Very often the predictable nonconformist is just as orthodox as the conformist," Bordwell writes. I thought about this while watching Martin Hynes's The Go-Getter, a film that subtly breaks away from Indie Guignol by embracing the possibly more passé Sundance genre. After Fido, Teeth, We Are The Strange, Hounddog, Strange Culture, and Low and Behold, all decidedly non-commercial films that take lots of chances and fail miserably, I have to admit I was happy to see something that gave me a few simple guiltless pleasures. Yes, Sundance films have become their own genre, but what the fuck is wrong with genre, anyway? Are you really a movie lover if you can't enjoy a solid but generic horror film, war film, noir, romantic comedy, western, and/or musical?

Sundance ’07: Strange Culture

February 5, 2007Posted in2000s, Authors: Alex Jackson, Documentary, Drama, Film Festivals, Sundance
*/****starring Thomas Jay Ryan, Tilda Swinton, Peter Coyotewritten and directed by Lynn Hershman Leeson by Alex Jackson On May 11, 2004, artist and college professor Steve Kurtz called 911 to report the death of his wife Hope by heart failure. When medics arrived, they saw his art supplies and called the FBI: in preparing an installation that would let patrons test whether food had been genetically modified, Kurtz had ordered biological materials over the Internet. The feds detained Kurtz as a suspected terrorist and confiscated his equipment. After a grand jury rejected the charges of terrorism, Uncle Sam tried to…

Sundance ’07: Chapter 27

February 1, 2007Posted in****/****, 2000s, Authors: Alex Jackson, Biopic, Canada, Crime, Drama, Film Festivals, Sundance
****/****starring Jared Leto, Lindsay Lohan, Judah Friedlander, Ursula Abbottwritten and directed by Jarrett Schaefer by Alex Jackson Chapter 27 is creepy and possibly even unhealthy. I've been wondering for a couple of days now just how long writer-director Jarrett Schaefer stared into the Nietzsche abyss in researching and helming this aggressively subjective look into the mind of Beatle assassin Mark David Chapman. He purports to share Chapman's adoration of The Catcher in the Rye, The Beatles, and The Wizard of Oz and in person comes off as shy and somewhat withdrawn. What I find particularly disturbing is how he praised…

Sundance ’07: It is Fine! Everything is Fine.

February 1, 2007Posted in2000s, Authors: Alex Jackson, Disability, Drama, Film Festivals, Sundance
It is Fine! EVERYTHING IS FINE.**/****starring Margit Carstensen, Steven C. Stewart, Carrie Szlasa, Lauren Germanscreenplay by Steven C. Stewartdirected by David Brothers & Crispin Hellion Glover by Alex Jackson An unlikely figurehead of Salt Lake's independent film scene, Crispin Glover shot portions of his directorial debut What is It? in the city and cast local native Steven C. Stewart in the role of "Duelling Demi-God Auteur and the young man's inner ego" against his own "Duelling Demi-God Auteur and the young man's inner psyche." (A great deal of the affection the townies seem to harbour for Glover and his films…

Sundance ’07: Hounddog

January 31, 2007Posted in2000s, Authors: Alex Jackson, Drama, Film Festivals, Music, Sundance

Sundancehounddog*/****
starring Dakota Fanning, Robin Wright Penn, David Morse, Piper Laurie
written and directed by Deborah Kampmeier

by Alex Jackson Deborah Kampmeier's Hounddog is even worse than its pre-emptive objectors assume it is. The film is offensive in precisely the way you think it's going to be but surprises you by becoming offensive on a whole new level. Everything in the film revolves around a scene where Dakota Fanning is raped, which, far from "gratuitous," is the film's entire raison d'être. Before The Rape, Hounddog plays like one big striptease leading up to it: in the very first scene, Fanning promises her playmate a kiss if he shows her his penis, and throughout the picture, Kampmeier has her prancing around in her panties, gyrating in her rendition of Elvis Presley's "Hounddog," and going swimming in an undershirt. Naysayers are calling the picture "a pedophile's dream," and though I maintain that you would have to be a pedophile of particularly low self-esteem to whack off to this, they do have a point. Up until The Rape, the film is just plain exploitive and cynical. It starts to seem like Kampmeier knows why we're here and is going to draw out our dread/anticipation past the breaking point before delivering "the goods." Then little Dakota gets popped. The scene is simultaneously cowardly, leering, and utterly tasteless: we see close-ups of her limbs flailing and her playmate staring on, fascinated and horrified. Her demonic rapist, who had been hiding in the shadows, grunts a couple of times, comes inside her, and very audibly zips up as she lies on the ground, bawling and defeated. The pre-rape portion of the film was sweating with sex, but all that heat dissipates out during and after the rape.

The Addams Family: Volume One (1964-1965) + Bones: Season One (2005-2006) – DVDs

January 31, 2007Posted in1960s, 2000s, Authors: Ian Pugh, Comedy, Crime, Drama, DVD, Family, Horror, Mystery, Romance, Television

THE ADDAMS FAMILY: VOLUME ONE
Image B Sound B- Extras B+
"The Addams Family Goes to School," "Morticia and the Psychiatrist," "Fester's Punctured Romance," "Gomez, the Politician," "The Addams Family Tree," "Morticia Joins the Ladies League," "Halloween with the Addams Family," "Green-Eyed Gomez," "New Neighbors Meet the Addams Family," "The Addams Family Meets the V.I.P.s," "Morticia, the Matchmaker," "Lurch Learns to Dance," "Art and the Addams Family," "The Addams Family Meets a Beatnik," "The Addams Family Meets the Undercover Man," "Mother Lurch Visits the Addams Family," "Uncle Fester's Illness," "The Addams Family Splurges," "Cousin Itt Visits the Addams Family," "The Addams Family in Court," "Amnesia in the Addams Family"

BONES: SEASON ONE
Image A Sound A+ Extras C-
"Pilot," "The Man in the S.U.V.," "A Boy in a Tree," "The Man in the Bear," "A Boy in a Bush," "The Man in the Wall," "The Man on Death Row," "The Girl in the Fridge," "The Man in the Fallout Shelter," "The Woman in the Airport," "The Woman in the Car," "The Superhero in the Alley," "The Woman in the Garden," "The Man on the Fairway," "Two Bodies in the Lab," "The Woman in the Tunnel," "The Skull in the Desert," "The Man with the Bone," "The Man in the Morgue," "The Graft in the Girl," "The Soldier in the Grave," "The Woman in Limbo"

by Ian Pugh Charles Addams's darkest cartoons for THE NEW YORKER were routinely hilarious, not just for their brazen denial of the nuclear family unit, but also because, unlike so many of the publication's other strips, they take their one-panel restrictions to heart without coming off as smarmy. Moreover, Addams's scenarios were simple without being stupid, e.g., family of ghouls about to dump boiling oil on Christmas carollers. The problem in turning these characters into a half-hour sitcom, namely "The Addams Family", should be self-evident: it bloats the brisk silliness into a particularly tiresome game of "Opposite Day"–thirty minutes of a family that cheerfully approves of the macabre and homicidal while despising normalcy and respectability.

Elizabeth Taylor-Richard Burton: The Film Collection – DVD

January 30, 2007Posted in****/****, 1960s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Bermuda, Drama, DVD, FFC Must-Own, France, Romance, UK

THE V.I.P.S (1963)
½*/**** Image C+ Sound B
starring Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, Elsa Martinelli, Margaret Rutheford
screenplay by Terence Rattigan
directed by Anthony Asquith

THE SANDPIPER (1965)
½*/**** Image B Sound B- Extras C-
starring Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, Eva Marie Saint, Morgan Mason
screenplay by Dalton Trumbo and Michael Wilson
directed by Vincente Minnelli

MustownWHO'S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF? (1966)
****/**** Image A+ Sound A- Extras B
starring Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, George Segal, Sandy Dennis
screenplay by Ernest Lehman, based on the play by Edward Albee
directed by Mike Nichols

THE COMEDIANS (1967)
*½/**** Image B Sound B- Extras C-
starring Richard Burton, Elizabeth Taylor, Alec Guinness, Peter Ustinov
screenplay by Graham Greene, based on his novel
directed by Peter Glenville

by Walter Chaw Also called International Hotel, The V.I.P.s–the first chronologically-released vehicle for Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor following the initiation of their legendary infidelities on the set of Cleopatra–is unwatchable dreck of the Old Hollywood variety. When people say "They don't make 'em like they used to," it's a good corrective to start listing off dusty artifacts like this one. As it was something of a financial windfall at the time (though not enough of one to offset the impending disaster of Cleopatra), one assumes that audiences flocked to theatres to sniff the musky odour of Burton/Taylor's forbidden l'amour that had dominated the world's lascivious imagination as production on an epic failure (or failed epic) dragged on for months and years. For me, the curiosity about The V.I.P.s, currently available in Warner's freshly-minted box set of Burton/Taylor pictures made during the height of their notoriety, has a lot more to do with Richard Burton, who was, to my mind, his generation's Russell Crowe. Like Crowe, Burton is thick with virility and gravitas and the ability, by himself, to carry a picture on his broad shoulders; I wonder if his seduction by a relic of Old Hollywood glamour hasn't tainted his legacy irrevocably. My voyeuristic impulse ultimately isn't so different from that of contemporary viewers, in fact, though I do offer the slight caveat that I'm in it to see how touching a match to Burton's already-boundless explosiveness would infect, for good or for ill, what are essentially vanity pieces for a couple drunk on the cult of themselves.