Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence (2004); Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (2004); Time of the Wolf (2003)|Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (2004) [Special Collector’s Edition – Widescreen] – DVD

Posted in****/****, 2000s, Action, Adventure, Animation, Austria, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

イノセンス
Innocence
Inosensu: Innocence
****/****
written and directed by Mamoru Oshii

SKY CAPTAIN AND THE WORLD OF TOMORROW
**½/**** Image A Sound A Extras A
starring Jude Law, Gwyneth Paltrow, Angelina Jolie, Giovanni Ribisi
written and directed by Kerry Conran

Le Temps du loup
****/****
starring Isabelle Huppert, Béatrice Dalle, Patrice Chéreau, Rona Hartner
written and directed by Michael Haneke

by Walter Chaw For me, the most intoxicating visions of the future are those in which we’re drowning in an ocean of our past–garbage, wreckage, Romes burned to a cinder and heaped against the new Meccas of our collective tomorrows. Star Wars proffered a kind of aesthetic of dirt that appealed: a wonderland where the spaceships looked like they’d been flown and there were places like Mos Eisley that reeked of stale liquor, sawdust, and cigarettes. (The distance that George Lucas has gone to disinfect his grubby vision of the future is the same distance that esteem for the franchise has fallen amongst all but the most die-hard chattel.) Among the spearhead of a group of artists who redefined the science-fiction genre in film the same way that Sergio Leone and Sam Peckinpah scuffed-up the western in the Sixties, Ridley Scott evolved the idea of a functional future, with his Alien and Blade Runner serving as visual echoes of T.S. Eliot’s broken stones and fragments shored against our ruins. Terry Gilliam defined the aesthetic when describing his rationale for the look of Brazil (1985): he wanted it to seem as though the whole century had been compacted into a single moment. The timeless “someday soon” that is always just around a corner that never comes.

Are We There Yet? (2005)

Posted in2000s, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, Drama, Family, Romance, Theatrical, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Ice Cube, Nia Long, Aleisha Allen, Philip Bolden
screenplay by Steven Gary Banks & Claudia Grazioso and J. David Stem & David N. Weiss
directed by Brian Levant

by Walter Chaw Hot on the heels of the abominable Racing Stripes comes Are We There Yet?, an Ice Cube vehicle the rapper-turned-actor also produced that teaches in broad terms that black people like rims on their cars and bling around their necks, that Asians are just irritating and venal under/oversexed white people, and that actual white people are either hillbilly truckers or dancing, rapping grandmothers. Projectile vomit, scary slapstick, and pissing on women share equal time with forced sentiment and actions so inexplicable as to exist only in the infernal nether-verses reserved for this kind of jerk-finds-a-heart flick. Piling on the pleasure, a pair of demonic children carry on director Brian Levant’s (Problem Child, Beethoven, Jingle All the Way) proud tradition of featuring insufferable kids in unwatchable movies that will be popular enough to ensure that this grade-A assclown gets to continue to making them. Levant’s a racist and a card-carrying Neanderthal–and if he’s not, he’s actually something worse. If he’s not the retarded ogre that his films suggest he is, then he’s exuding this gruel with a calculated purpose instead of just a moronic fecklessness. That the little boy in this film has a doll that resembles the MegaMan toy at the centre of Jingle All the Way tells me that Levant is harking back to that debacle with fondness, which is a little like the Catholic Church harking back fondly to indulgences, child molestation, and the Crusades.

Deep Impact (1998) [Special Collector’s Edition] – DVD

Posted in1990s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Sci-Fi, Spielberg

*/**** Image B+ Sound A Extras B
starring Robert Duvall, Téa Leoni, Elijah Wood, Vanessa Redgrave
screenplay by Bruce Joel Rubin and Michael Tolkin
directed by Mimi Leder

by Walter Chaw Filthy as it is with TV stars past and present, it comes as no surprise that Deep Impact plays almost exactly like a movie-of-the-week grafted onto one of those stars-gone-to-seed-studded Seventies disaster flicks. Helmed by veteran TV director Mimi Leder in somehow small-screen-friendly Panavision (that she manages to make her panoramic establishing shots look like the stock transitions in any episode of "Hart to Hart" should be included in a textbook somewhere), the picture goes through the motions–from discovery of the peril by naïfs to the involvement of the Internet to the slow-in-coming participation of the powers that be–of a genre most recently (and faithfully) resurrected by The Day After Tomorrow. Both movies finding their way to DVD within a couple weeks of each other (Deep Impact in a freshly-minted "Special Collector's Edition") isn't, I'd wager, serendipity so much as an opportunity on the one side to capitalize on a semi-blockbuster.

Nobody’s Fool (1986) – DVD

Posted in1980s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Romance

**/**** Image A- Sound A-
starring Rosanna Arquette, Eric Roberts, Mare Winningham, Jim Youngs
screenplay by Beth Henley
directed by Evelyn Purcell

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover I haven't very much to say about 1986's Nobody's Fool (no relation to the 1936 or 1994 films of the same name), a Southern-set romantic saga in which a young woman named Jessie (Rosanna Arquette) must either reconcile with lost ex-boyfriend Billy (Jim Youngs) and the dead-end small town he represents, or blow away into the frightening unknown with travelling stagehand Riley (Eric Roberts). No guessing how it ends up: as one suitor is played by Eric Roberts and the other is not, it's pretty obvious what's going to go down long before it actually does. Also in Riley's/Roberts's corner is that everyone in the town of Buckeye–a cultural backwater that's destructive to free souls like Jessie's–is either completely loathsome (such as Billy, who deserted poor Jessie when she got pregnant) or dismissive (such as Jessie's mother, played by Louise Fletcher with superb restraint). In a narrative sense, it's all as surprising as snow in January.

Assault on Precinct 13 (2005) + Elektra (2005)

Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Crime, Drama, France, Superhero, Switzerland, Theatrical, Thriller

ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13
***/****
starring Ethan Hawke, Laurence Fishburne, John Leguizamo, Maria Bello
screenplay by James DeMonaco, based on the screenplay by John Carpenter
directed by Jean-François Richet

ELEKTRA
½*/****
starring Jennifer Garner, Goran Visnjic, Will Yun Lee, Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa
screenplay by Zak Penn and Stuart Zicherman & Raven Metzner
directed by Rob Bowman

by Walter Chaw Being under siege and obsessive-compulsive disorder have together wrought a weird parallel generation in the remake Assault on Precinct 13 and sequel/comic book adaptation Elektra. In each is not only a woman who uses numbers obsessively in stressful situations, but also some sort of predicament where a gang of bad guys traps a band of good guys only to be given the business end of heroic pluck. Both are unusually ugly films with a higher-than-expected body count, and, to various degrees of success, both traffic in a paranoid marshalling of forces that comes with a fear of invasion from without. When you’re panicked, drawing those you trust closer to the vest since the rest of the universe has murder in mind is the sanest recourse–even when you’re aware that you’re addicted, mad, or otherwise in desperate need of therapy. Early in 2005, trends are pointing to a year in which we champion isolationism, fear the marauding Hun, and start wondering if there’s a blue-stater playing sheep in the quilting cotillion. Unless, that is, the blue-stater is you, and the constant threat of lynching or crucifixion has caused you to lose your mind.

Racing Stripes (2005)

Posted in2000s, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Family, Sports, Theatrical

ZERO STARS/****
starring Bruce Greenwood, Hayden Panettiere, Gary Bullock, Wendie Malick
screenplay by David Schmidt
directed by Frederik Du Chau

Racingstripesby Walter Chaw It's some sort of tradition now, some kind of sick trick: a collaboration of nitwits releases a "family" film as counter-programming against the glut of morose, adult-oriented awards-season drivel that seeps into middle America in the first few months of the New Year. Kangaroo Jack, Home on the Range, Chasing Liberty, Snow Dogs, A Walk to Remember…each so misguided that to watch them in tandem is to see a pack of dogs outsmart a black man (and comment that he tastes like chicken), a trio of women (cows) receive threats of gang rape, and a wildlife conservationist have her breasts groped. (Then, of course, there's the metaphysical dead end of casting Mandy Moore in anything.) If parents don't pre-screen what their children watch, then care of the child's tender sensibilities is forked over to the chowderheads trafficking in shit, fart, boob, and pratfall jokes, which are only a quarter as damaging as the angry misogyny and casual racism binding them together. Add to the shaggy parade of diseased entertainments the 2005 edition, Frederik Du Chau's flat unwatchable Racing Stripes.

Coach Carter (2005)

Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Drama, Germany, Sports, Theatrical

**/****
starring Samuel L. Jackson, Ryan B. Adams, Ashanti, Adrienne Bailon
screenplay by Mark Schwahn and John Gatins
directed by Thomas Carter

Coachcarterby Walter Chaw Coach Carter is Dangerous Minds giving the gas good to Hoosiers. It's Stand and Deliver and Bad News Bears in flagrante delecto. The offspring of these dread unions is a trundling spawn so familiar, so much like its collection of moronically agreeable parents, that it's impossible not to sort of like it even as you're definitely sick of it. As is usually the case for movies like this, Coach Carter was inspired by a true story, which generally means that the events that instigated this project are not consequently saccharine and predictable enough to satisfy the imaginary demands of its imaginary audience. So there will be the athlete/students broken down into types to save time and energy on fleshing out the extended supporting cast, and there will be the valiant Dead Poets Society teacher who so rouses his/her hangdog students that they will eventually mass in a public show of support (standing on desks, running after ambulances, biking after cabs) when The Man (the school administration, the angry backwoods community) inevitably cracks down. What's not to like?

The Forgotten (2004) – DVD

Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Thriller

**½/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
starring Julianne Moore, Dominic West, Gary Sinise, Alfre Woodard
screenplay by Gerald DiPego
directed by Joseph Ruben

Forgottendvdcapby Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. I couldn't really understand at the time why Dark City didn't arouse imaginations. I resented the following year's The Matrix for stealing some of Dark City's thunder; I blamed a lack of vision and a general disdain for genre. Now I wonder if it wasn't a matter of the film coming out a few years ahead of its time. Maybe it was just too light for the Age of Irony. Maybe it was too apocalyptic a vision for a people who had yet to experience an apocalypse in their own backyard. But there are certain prescient pictures that point north, films like The Truman Show that I underestimated like I thought everyone else underestimated Dark City, or films that remain underestimated, such as Strange Days and Twelve Monkeys, Terry Gilliam's most uncompromising film since Brazil. It's the duty of some movies to draw the outlines in chalk, set the groundwork, dig the foundation for the way that speculative fiction will seek to define this culture in the aftermath of an inflamed fault line even before the dime drops. Just before Y2K, we dug ourselves into cinematic bunkers in preparation for some kind of technological apocalypse. Who would have suspected that the shape of our crucible would be not faulty microchips and mainframes, but assault rifles, airplanes, leadership without vision, and children without protection from leadership without vision?

The Village (2004) [VISTA Series – Widescreen] – DVD

Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: M. Night Shyamalan, Drama, DVD, Mystery, Thriller

½*/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras B
starring Bryce Dallas Howard, Joaquin Phoenix, Adrien Brody, William Hurt
written and directed by M. Night Shyamalan

by Walter Chaw M. Night Shyamalan’s films have become life support systems for his twists–empty, ponderous, self-righteous shells of ideas carried by cadaverous actors speaking in contraction-less sentences and spectral tones. He seems with Signs and now The Village to be espousing some kind of insane puritanical religion–call it the Church of Shyamalan, where the real world is too loutish a place for his gallery of close-mouthed martyrs, who exist in specially-created Hitchcockian microverses as airless as they are unlikely. It’s not too much of a stretch to begin to view his mission as one where he challenges his East Indian self to make his increasingly self-aggrandizing cameos as difficult as possible. Philadelphia? No problem. Hooterville, PA–a little tougher. Turn of the century Amish-town? Byzantine, to say the least.

Party of Five: The Complete First Season (1994-1995) – DVD

Posted in1990s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Drama, DVD, Family, Television

Image B- Sound B+ Extras C+
"Pilot," "Homework," "Good Sports," "Worth Waiting For," "All's Fair," "Fathers and Sons," "Much Ado," "Kiss Me Kate," "Something Out of Nothing," "Thanksgiving," "Private Lives," "Grownups," "Not Fade Away," "It's Not Easy Being Green," "Aftershocks," "In Loco Parentis," "Who Cares?," "Brother's Keeper," "The Trouble with Charlie," "All-Nighters," "The Ides of March"

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover It's strange that the term "afterschool special" has hung on as a pejorative long after the death of the form it officially describes. But in a sense, it never really did leave us: hanging over much dramatic television is the spectre of issues raised but never dealt with, pain stated but never felt, emotions described without being expressed. There's a little Afterschool spirit in most hour-longs, hovering as they do over the abyss of controversy into which artistic personnel love to gaze and which the front office lives to deny. Still, the mid-'90s drama "Party of Five" is an especially bizarre example of this sort of bet-hedging and trading off, taking as it does hugely traumatic events and making them seem as threatening and life-changing as a trip to Disneyland. It's a spectacular display of cake-having and cake-eating-too that defines the Afterschool mentality, ensuring that it will raise issues without dealing with them honestly.

A Tale of Two Sisters (2003)

Posted in****/****, 2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Horror, Mystery, South Korea, Theatrical, Thriller

Janghwa, Hongryeon
****/****
starring Kim Kap-su, Jum Jung-ah, Lim Su-jeong, Mun Geun-yeong
written and directed by Kim Ji-woon

by Walter Chaw Every frame of Kim Ji-Woon’s A Tale of Two Sisters (Janghwa, Hongryeon) is like taking a dip in the violet pools of A Place in the Sun-era Elizabeth Taylor’s eyes. It’s sensuous–and the characters that inhabit the velvet, silk, and wood environments put out their hands to touch, dangle their feet off the end of a wharf in the soft green water below, lay their faces against cool blue sheets touched by crepuscular shadows. This is filmmaking as tactile exercise, and the atmosphere in which Kim houses his debauched delights is something like smothering beneath the tender insistence of a satin glove. A Tale of Two Sisters is based on an old Korean folktale of two sisters so abused by the capriciousness of the world that they’re forced to take refuge in one another and within themselves. In tone and execution, it feels like Heavenly Creatures; in its tale of an evil stepmother and a haunted castle by the lake in the woods, it has the heft of classic German fairytales.

Judgment at Nuremberg (1961) [Special Edition] – DVD

Posted in1960s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, War

***/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Spencer Tracy, Burt Lancaster, Richard Widmark, Marlene Dietrich
screenplay by Abby Mann
directed by Stanley Kramer

by Walter Chaw By the end of the Fifties, the toll of about two decades of mainstream entertainment steadfast in its studied inoffensiveness catalyzed a movement in film and televison ("The Twilight Zone", one of the most politically-charged TV series in history, launched in 1959) that, fuelled by the twin prods of the death of Louis B. Mayer (the last of the studio moguls) and the discovery of Ed Gein's naughtiness in his wood shed (both in 1957), began to redefine what it meant to be "real." (One freed the artists, the other seemed to inspire them.) The new turks of the New Hollywood were Steve McQueen and Paul Newman, a real jerk and a screen jerk, respectively–self-serving, self-satisfied Old Glory jackanapes-next-door who embodied the theory of the antihero. And they put it in context of the blue-eyed, milk-fed, horse-kicked average Joe, the guy you wanted to be or wanted to bed, not just because they were dead sexy, but also because they were the future. You cast your lot in the Sixties with the rebels and didn't do a lot of apologizing for it.

Smithereens (1982) + The Ranch (2004) [Unrated and Uncut] – DVDs

Posted in1980s, 2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Blue Underground, Canada, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Music, Television

SMITHEREENS
***/**** Image A Sound A Extras A-
starring Susan Berman, Brad Rinn, Richard Hell
screenplay by Ron Nyswaner
directed by Susan Seidelman

THE RANCH
**/**** Image A- Sound B
starring Jennifer Aspen, Giacomo Baessato, Jessica Collins, Samantha Ferris
screenplay by Lisa Melamed
directed by Susan Seidelman

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover I’m not quite sure what there is to gain from a juxtaposition of director Susan Seidelman’s first and most recent efforts. For one thing, the conditions under which the low-budget, self-willed Smithereens was made would hardly resemble those of the Showtime-commissioned The Ranch. For another, the two pictures exist on totally different aesthetic grounds: Smithereens was part of the nascent New York independent film scene that would later give us Jim Jarmusch and Spike Lee, whereas The Ranch exists in the semi-artistic environment cable television tends to foster. Mostly, the comparison is just a sad example of promise unfulfilled–a comment, perhaps, on the fate that awaits hot filmmakers once they cease to whip the turnstiles into a blur.

A Love Song for Bobby Long (2004)

Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Scarlett Johansson, Theatrical

*/****
starring John Travolta, Scarlett Johansson, Gabriel Macht, Deborah Kara Unger
screenplay by Shainee Gabel, based on the novel Off Magazine Street by Ronald Everett Capps
directed by Shainee Gabel

by Walter Chaw Scarlett Johansson’s character in Shainee Gabel’s Faulknerian idiot man-child of a Southern Gothic A Love Song for Bobby Long is named “Pursey,” which strikes me as the least lascivious but still accurate way to describe the suddenly-gorgeous starlet. Though she’s adequately attired in her country-fried accent and long, hot summer finery, truth be told, she’s already too good for this kind of material–a compliment that sheds light on her co-stars (John Travolta, Gabriel Macht), who are, to a one, not up to the film’s desperate pretensions. In A Love Song for Bobby Long, see, every other line of dialogue is either a George Sand quote or a drawling, laconic narrative voiceover. (If it weren’t overlit and lousy with drowsy exteriors, I would have mistaken it for another Clint Eastwood film.) And if you don’t have a strong sense of self-awareness, you have no place in the sort of turgid julep this post-Tennessee Williams potboiler serves up as refreshment.

First Daughter (2004) – DVD

Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Romance

**/**** Image A Sound A Extras C
starring Katie Holmes, Marc Blucas, Amerie, Michael Keaton
screenplay by Jessica Bendinger and Kate Kondell
directed by Forest Whitaker

by Walter Chaw Forest Whitaker's First Daughter is so much better than the other two films this year dealing with the distaff fruit of the loins of the most powerful man in the free world (i.e., David Mamet's Spartan and Andy Cadiff's Chasing Liberty) that it's easy to make the mistake that the film is worth much of a damn. The sad fact of it is, there's nothing much at the centre of this babysitter's-club artifact. Saving it from the dustbin of total inconsequence, if only just, is its essential sense of decency and, of course, star Katie Holmes. She's not so much gifted, I think, as genuine-seeming–despite one's better judgment, you find yourself wishing her well. Holmes is able to batter defenses; the stratosphere isn't for her, but Anne Baxter had a pretty nice career, all things considered.

Beyond the Sea (2004)

Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Drama, Germany, Music, Musical, Theatrical, UK

*/****
starring Kevin Spacey, Kate Bosworth, John Goodman, Bob Hoskins
screenplay by Lewis Colick and Kevin Spacey
directed by Kevin Spacey

by Walter Chaw In Beyond the Sea, Kevin Spacey as Bobby Darin talks to the ghost of his kid self, a pint-sized Virgil leading Spacey’s decrepit Dante into the hell of vanity projects. It’s a flick that apes All that Jazz the way De-Lovely aped All that Jazz (that is: sickly, with a bad limp), with an aged Darin looking back on his life as though it were all a giant movie set. “Ain’t he too old to play Bobby Darin?” a reporter in the film asks while Bobby Darin directs his own fictional auto-biopic. “He was born to play Bobby Darin!” responds an angry Bob Hoskins as Bobby Darin’s father, who, one part Brooklyn hood and one part Russian bear, acts as the artist surrogate trying to pre-empt the chief criticism most will have of this creepy exercise in flaccid masturbation. Truth is, Beyond the Sea is the Kevin Spacey story without as much closeted homosexuality and just the same amount of delusions of grandeur and aspirations towards artistic martyrdom. It lacks passion and joy, replacing them both with something that smells a lot like midlife crisis.

Red Lights (2004)

Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Crime, Drama, France, Mystery, Theatrical, Thriller

Feux rouges
**/****
starring Jean-Pierre Darroussin, Carole Bouquet, Vincent Deniard, Carline Paul
screenplay by Cédric Khan and Laurence Ferreira-Barbosa, based on the novel by Georges Simenon
directed by Cédric Khan

Redlightsby Bill Chambers SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Red Lights (Feux rouges), the latest from the increasingly venerable Cédric Khan, joins this year's growing crop of ephemeral auteur flicks. Takeshi Kitano's Zatoichi, Michael Mann's Collateral, Alexander Payne's Sideways–there's a prosaic quality that undermines the resonance of these pictures, even though each is uniquely a product of its director. Red Lights, about a marriage spiralling down the drain, about a guy chasing his tail, about the symmetry that always seems to assert itself in chaotic situations, opens with a montage of roundabouts and other circle-based imagery. Hell, it's called Red Lights, and there probably isn't another film from 2004 that so compels you to yell, "Stop!" at its unheeding protagonist. Khan is the masticating mama bird to our tractable hatchlings, and the only reason that Red Lights hasn't caught on like the similarly pre-chewed Million Dollar Baby is because it's not awash in sentiment. At least not until the problematic finale.

The Sea Inside (2004) + Hotel Rwanda (2004)

Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Drama, Spain, Theatrical, War

Mar adentro
*½/****
starring Javier Bardem, Belén Rueda, Lola Dueñas, Mabel Rivera
screenplay by Alejandro Amenábar, Mateo Gil
directed by Alejandro Amenábar

HOTEL RWANDA
**½/****
starring Don Cheadle, Sophie Okonedo, Nick Nolte, Joaquin Phoenix
screenplay by Keir Pearson & Terry George
directed by Terry George

Seainsiderwandaby Walter Chaw Marking the second euthanasia melodrama of the 2004 awards season after Clint Eastwood's Million Dollar Baby, Alejandro Amenábar's peculiar follow-up to The Others is another ghost story of sorts documenting the last, sad days of Ramón Sampedro (Javier Bardem), made a quadriplegic by a distracted dive into a shallow tide pool. "Shallow pool" could also describe the film, a miserable little gimp-of-the-week exercise awash with clichés and platitudes that the real Sampedro would probably have found condescending and insulting. The Sea Inside (Mar adentro) is the very equivalent of an elementary school teacher taking your hand and helping you find a seat on the short ride to made-for-TV-dom. If not for its unromantic central performance from Bardem, the best actor in the world at this moment, this appallingly sentimental work would be a candidate for the most misguided movie of the year.

The Office Special (2003) – DVD

Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Pseudo-Documentary, Television, UK

Image A- Sound A Extras B+

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover I suppose the hot streak had to end sometime: "The Office" was so meticulously detailed, so vividly characterized, and so totally uncompromising in making you feel the agony of workaday life, that it can perhaps be forgiven for wanting to give back to the characters it had so spectacularly abused and humiliated. Thus we have "The Office Special", which is smart enough to know that the ride on the gravy train is over but can't bear to leave our heroes in limbo and thus forces a closure that violates everything the series stood for. It's still "The Office" and it's still worth watching, but its movement towards climactic release is incongruous after the two years of droning sameness that went on–hilariously–with no end in sight.

Open Water (2004) [Widescreen] – DVD

Posted in2000s, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Horror, Thriller

**/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B
starring Blanchard Ryan, Daniel Travis, Saul Stein, Estelle Lau
written and directed by Chris Kentis

Openwaterdvdcapby Walter Chaw The idea is that we've grown arrogant in our luxury, that we're a generation fattened on cell phones, the Internet, and the double-edged sword of 24-hour convenience. 1999's
has become sort of a favoured whipping boy of this spoiled culture (nothing breeds contempt like success), but what's missing in the backlash is the idea that the picture, besides being a seminal indie cross-marketing exercise, predicted the new wave of aggressively nihilistic horror films in our post-millennial/post-9/11 canvas. More literally, The Blair Witch Project dealt with our status off the proverbial reservation, counting the layers of technology with which we insulate ourselves from the capricious vagaries of reality and nature like rings on a felled tree. "There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your science," indeed–things like witches.