The Devil’s Rain (1975) – DVD

February 13, 2007Posted in1970s, Authors: Alex Jackson, DVD, Horror, Zombie

***/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B-
starring Ernest Borgnine, Eddie Albert, Tom Skerritt, William Shatner
screenplay by James Ashton, Gabe Essoe, Gerald Hopman
directed by Robert Fuest

by Alex Jackson SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. The Devil's Rain is like a bad song you can't get out of your head. It isn't a successful film, or even a particularly good one, but it's made with sincerity, verve, and an understanding of the horror genre's potential for kinetic filmmaking and potent allegory. Moreover, it isn't a cheat–this isn't just another cheap cash-in on the "Satan" craze of the 1970s. The last thing director Robert Fuest and screenwriters James Ashton, Gabe Essoe, and Gerald Hopman are looking to do is take your money and run. And though this is largely a trend of the mid-to-late-'80s onward, they aren't looking to vindicate their reputations by condescending to the material, either. I actually feel a little protective of The Devil's Rain; its failure is one more of incompetence than of cynicism, and that's really rather reinvigorating in an age where self-consciousness reigns supreme in horror films both good (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning) and bad (See No Evil).

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.

The Up Series [Five Disk Collector’s Edition] – DVD

February 11, 2007Posted in****/****, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, Authors: Ian Pugh, Documentary, DVD, FFC Must-Own, UK

Mustownby Ian Pugh "Give me the child until he is seven, and I will give you the man."

So goes the Jesuit maxim, and, as it happens, so begins almost every review you'll find of Michael Apted's "Up" documentary series. Of course, you can't really fault someone for falling back on that warhorse (or this would be a very ironic paragraph indeed), because it's the concept that brought the original television production Seven Up! to life, intended as it was as "a glimpse into Britain's future." That is to say, into the lives of fourteen seven-year-olds, chosen from all walks of life (though mostly from polar opposites of the class divide) and asked about the world, their ambitions, and just generally how they're doing; they've been revisited for the same purpose every seven years hence.

Jesus Camp (2006) – DVD

February 9, 2007Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Documentary, DVD

**½/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras B
directed by Heidi Ewing & Rachel Grady

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover It's hard to not be moved by the horrors of Jesus Camp. A record of one Pastor Becky Fischer's far-right Christian summer camp, it's loaded with stuff any compassionate person would decry–usually the cruelty and intimidation of adults, who are often seen scaring children shitless. But even as we may despise these guileless sadists as they reveal themselves to the camera, at some point it all begins to ring hollow. The film has nothing beyond the image of children being bullied while their parents natter on about hateful fundamentalism; perhaps most regrettably, there's no discussion as to why, in the 21st century, 80 million Americans willingly believe in such corrosive nonsense.

Cry-Baby (1990) [Director’s Cut] – DVD

February 7, 2007Posted in1990s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD, Musical

***½/**** Image A- Sound C+ Extras A+
starring Johnny Depp, Amy Locane, Susan Tyrrell, Iggy Pop
written and directed by John Waters

by Walter Chaw Cry-Baby, John Waters's brilliant, ebullient satire of 1950s teensploitation, finds Johnny Depp and Amy Locane immaculately cast opposite one another as the ne plus ultra "He" and "She" of the Golden Age's doomed-youth pictures. One part Elvis musical calamity, one part queer camp exhibition, it's a cult classic for a reason: The second part of Waters's Hairspray nostalgia trip, Cry-Baby is a jubilant send-up of the lie of atomic-age perfection fixed broadly to the lie of modern sophistication that Waters would confront for the rest of his "legit" career. It's exactly what I imagine a David Lynch rockabilly rebel flick would be like–and indeed, when you get down to it, I don't know whether Lynch and Waters are really all that different.

Here Comes Mr. Jordan (1941) – DVD

February 6, 2007Posted in1940s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, DVD, Fantasy, Romance

**/**** Image A- Sound B+
starring Robert Montgomery, Claude Rains, Evelyn Keyes, Rita Johnson
screenplay by Sidney Buchman and Seton I. Miller, from the play "Heaven Can Wait" by Harry Segall
directed by Alexander Hall

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Here Comes Mr. Jordan shakes your faith in the idea of Hollywood as Dream Factory. It's a film about a prizefighter (Robert Montgomery, playing Joe Pendleton) meeting an untimely end in a plane crash and having his consciousness transferred into the body of a murdered millionaire. (When his plane takes a nosedive via the magic of a camera off its axis, so, too, do the clouds in the sky.) There's a patrician, Mr. Roarke-ish afterlife overseer–the titular Mr. Jordan (Claude Rains)–and much switcheroo'ing involving bodies and identities and romance; it would take quite an effort for this to be less than light on its feet. But despite it all, the film hits the ground with a thud and sits there without a truly fanciful thought in its head. Not only is the script so impressed with itself that you can hear the writers crack up at every single feeble joke, but director Alexander Hall has also decided to shoot everything in cold, wide master shots that see everything and suggest nothing. It must be the least wondrous fantasy in Tinseltown history.

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.

Looker (1981) – DVD

January 29, 2007Posted in1980s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Drama, DVD, Sci-Fi, Thriller

**½/**** Image B Sound C+ Extras B-
starring Albert Finney, James Coburn, Susan Dey, Leigh Taylor-Young
written and directed by Michael Crichton

Lookercap

by Bill Chambers Michael Crichton's Looker is a kinky paranoia thriller in which an unlikely sleuth teams up with the nearest bimbo to solve a murder mystery. It is, in other words, vintage De Palma, and if he'd actually helmed it, legions of cinephiles would've flameproofed it by now. At the risk of further estranging myself from De Palma geeks, I must admit I rather enjoyed watching a Body Double without Armond White guilt-tripping my subconscious–which is not to say that Looker circumvents an auteurist reading altogether, but the idiosyncrasies that betray it as 'Crichtonian' (like a novelistic conceit that starts off each new act with a placard indicating the day of the week*) are less than venerable and thus hardly lend themselves to an apologia.

Fiddler on the Roof (1971) [2-Disc Collector’s Edition] – DVD

January 29, 2007Posted in1970s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Drama, DVD, Family, Musical, Romance

***/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Topol, Norma Crane, Leonard Frey, Molly Picon
screenplay by Joseph Stein, based on his play
directed by Norman Jewison

Fiddlerontheroofcapby Travis Mackenzie Hoover Fiddler on the Roof is sort of the transition point between the late-'60s Twilight of Old Hollywood and the American Renaissance of the '70s. In one sense, it's the very last of the king-sized Broadway adaptations the industry kept churning out to no avail before the advent of Easy Rider, and there's no denying that the film is over-scaled and over-orchestrated in that manner. Yet there's a genuine sensibility going on here beyond masonry and screeching violins: incredibly, director Norman Jewison has managed to infuse the expensive proceedings with a certain emotional honesty–enough to keep you rapt in fascination without sending your blood-sugar level through the roof, if not enough to make Fiddler on the Roof the masterpiece its status as a home-video perennial would suggest.

Running with Scissors (2006) – DVD

January 22, 2007Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, Drama, DVD

**/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Annette Bening, Joseph Cross, Brian Cox, Evan Rachel Wood
screenplay by Ryan Murphy, based on the novel by Augusten Burroughs
directed by Ryan Murphy

Runningwithscissorscapby Travis Mackenzie Hoover It would be hard to not be a little moved by the traumatic goings-on of Running with Scissors. The film is based on Augusten Burroughs's best-selling memoir, and the author has plenty to forget: not merely the failure of his real family, consisting of a distant alcoholic father and a self-righteous failed-poet mother, but also the nightmare of moving out of that home and into that of Mommy's quack psychiatrist. Yet as the horrors pile up, one wonders what's being learned in the midst of all this unburdening. I haven't read Burroughs's book, but Ryan Murphy's screen translation fails completely to draw conclusions from the facts–we're simply dropped in the midst of some seriously unhappy people and left to fend for ourselves. Perhaps the memoirist felt the same way, but without any generalizations drawn it seems rather like that money-grubbing head-shrinker, making hay with other people's depression.

The Promise (2005) – DVD (U.S. version)

January 19, 2007Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, China, Drama, DVD, Fantasy, Martial Arts, South Korea

*/**** Image A Sound A- Extras C
starring Hiroyuki Sanada, Jang Dong Gun, Cecilia Cheung, Nicholas Tse
screenplay by Chen Kaige and Zhang Tan
directed by Chen Kaige

Promisecapby Walter Chaw Any fad reaches its nadir in due time and the Western wuxia infatuation, which started somewhere around Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and more or less peaked with Zhang Yimou's exceptional Hero, has found its basement in the truncated version of Chen Kaige's already-pretty-embarrassing The Promise. Somewhere, King Hu is spinning in his grave. An abomination just about any way you slice it, this ultra-expensive, CGI'd-to-exhaustion wire-fu epic–especially as sanitized for North America's consumption–suggests the world's saddest public display of penis envy. Chen, hailing from the same Fifth Generation school as Zhang, produces a show-offy, self-indulgent bit of flamboyant one-upsmanship destined to become a queer camp classic. When the Crimson General (Hiroyuki Sanada) trades in his fabulous duds for a lavender muumuu in which to trade barbs with archenemy Wuhuan (Nicholas Tse, suspended somewhere between pretty girl and Japanese anime hero), a bad guy garbed in white feathers who wields a gold staff topped with a bronze hand, index finger extended in proctological menace, the homoeroticism of the piece–already distracting in the subtext–suddenly becomes the main event. It's probably this unfathomable cut of the film's Rosetta Stone, in fact, pared down to some half-assed companion piece to Chen's own Farewell My Concubine. Without much strain you can see The Promise being transformed, in all its kitsch excess, into a Broadway pop-opera: Memoirs of a Geisha: The Musical.

7 Men from Now (1956) [Special Collector’s Edition] – DVD

January 17, 2007Posted in1950s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, DVD, Western

Seven Men from Now
***½/**** Image B+ Sound A Extras A-
starring Randolph Scott, Gail Russell, Lee Marvin, Walter Reed
screenplay by Burt Kennedy
directed by Budd Boetticher

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Like most Budd Boetticher movies, Seven Men from Now is supremely modest. Despite my high star rating, I fear overselling its virtues–it's not a searing, world-shattering masterpiece that leaves you devastated. But for a sort of chamber western, it's lovely and uncommonly sensitive. The film doesn't dig on the adventure and violence that are the major selling points of the genre: it's about an ex-lawman's guilty torment; a failed husband's obliviousness to the trials of his wife; and a kind-of outlaw who's sort of a friend but also sort of not. There is of course a revenge plot and the occasional incursion of marauding Indians, but you barely notice them over the nuances of the characters and their various sadnesses. It's less than genius but somehow more than the action oater you know the studio wanted.

The Girls Next Door: Season One (2005) + Stacked: The Complete Series (2005-2006) – DVDs

January 15, 2007Posted in2000s, Authors: Ian Pugh, Comedy, DVD, Romance, Television

THE GIRLS NEXT DOOR: SEASON ONE
Image A Sound A Extras D+
"Meet the Girls," "New Girls in Town," "Happy Birthday, Kendra," "What Happens in Vegas," "Fight Night," "Operation Playmate," "Just Shoot Me," "Midsummer Night's Dream," "Under the Covers," "Ghostbusted," "Grape Expectations," "I'll Take Manhattan," "My Kind of Town," "Clue-Less," "It's Vegas Baby!"

STACKED: THE COMPLETE SERIES
Image B+ Sound C Extras D
"Pilot," "Beat the Candidate," "A Fan for All Seasons," "Gavin's Pipe Dream," "The Ex-Appeal," "Nobody Says I Love You," "Two Faces of Eve," "Darling Nikki," "Crazy Ray," "iPod," "Heavy Meddle," "Goodwizzle Hunting," "After Party," "Romancing the Stones," "You're Getting Sleepy," "The Third Date," "The Day the Music Died," "Poker," "The Headmaster"

by Ian Pugh I'm pretty sure it was Jon Stewart who described "lad mags" like MAXIM and STUFF as "porn for people too timid to buy porn," and under that category we could probably also file PLAYBOY reality series "The Girls Next Door" and the Pamela Anderson sitcom "Stacked": softcore pap for those too afraid to have God's honest filth appear on their rental history or cable bill. I'm inclined to believe those same people are apt to use the phrase "turn your brain off" while justifying their love of these silicone parades–which in this case means, what, "shut up and masturbate"? PLAYBOY and Anderson are both cultural artifacts and thus demand scrutiny; protest, however, and you'll just be dismissed as a double-plus-bad thought cop bringing intelligence to a discussion where it isn't wanted. You know, the brainiac killjoy who has to say, "Why are you watching this garbage?" The programs themselves shout you down, in fact, before you have a chance to complain: each invokes Shakespeare on a whim ("Girls" in a party and episode named for "A Midsummer Night's Dream", "Stacked" in one of its sarcastic faux-intellectual quotations)–not for any genuine comparison, but as a surrogate for intelligence, introduced for the sole purpose of deriding it as impertinent. You're the idiot, apparently, for harbouring the desire for something substantial out of one of the most widespread and influential media of the last century.

See No Evil (2006) – DVD

January 12, 2007Posted in2000s, Authors: Alex Jackson, DVD, Horror

*/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B
starring Kane, Christina Vidal, Luke Pegler, Samantha Noble
screenplay by Dan Madigan
directed by Gregory Dark

Seenoevilcap

by Alex Jackson SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Gregory Dark started out directing adult films–I've been told that his award-winning Let Me Tell Ya 'Bout White Chicks is a classic of the miscegenation genre–and had moved up to music videos when he was offered See No Evil, his first feature film (as well as the first film produced under the WWE banner). The idea that Dark sees this movie as his ticket to the big leagues is as good an explanation as any for its smarmy tone. Still embarrassed about making a slasher picture (and, by extension, his stigmatic beginnings), he distances himself from the material by condescending to it: If he's better than B-movie claptrap, then that means he's an A-list filmmaker, right? I have no idea where Dark wants to be near the end of his career, but the attitude he brings to See No Evil is that of a climber and not of a serious artist who happens to be relegated to the periphery of the mainstream.

Dane Cook’s Tourgasm (2006) – DVD

January 5, 2007Posted in2000s, Authors: Ian Pugh, Comedy, Documentary, DVD, Television

Image A Sound A- Extras D
"The First Laugh," "Working It Out," "The United States of Insanity," "It Was The Best of Times…," "Determined and Injured," "Competitively Speaking," "Beginning of the End," "Back in the Day," "The Curtain Call"

by Ian Pugh It's not that I don't get Dane Cook. In fact, it's difficult not to occasionally chuckle when looking over his repertoire, as in ruminating on the general inconvenience of having the Kool-Aid Man burst through your wall and the fact that no one can ever finish a game of Monopoly, or wondering who would write racial epithets while sitting on the toilet, he represents a strict literalization of that old sarcastic summation of stand-up comedy: "He's sayin' what we're all thinkin'!" It's not that funny, but we all laugh, anyway, partially for Cook's enthusiasm, partially because he's a reflection of us at our most vulnerable (that is, at our stalest creative moments), proudly transcribing the idle thoughts and half-attempts at wit that pass through our minds on a daily basis. We laugh, painfully, because we've all contemplated what Cook has to say.

A Star is Born (1976) – DVD

January 3, 2007Posted in1970s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Drama, DVD, Music, Romance

**/**** Image B+ Sound A- Extras B+
starring Barbra Streisand, Kris Kristofferson, Gary Busey, Oliver Clark
screenplay by John Gregory Dunne & Joan Didion and Frank Pierson
directed by Frank Pierson

Starisborn76capby Travis Mackenzie Hoover It was no doubt celestially preordained that Barbra Streisand would unleash herself on some cherished Old Hollywood warhorse. But while the Janet Gaynor/Judy Garland hand-me-downs that ultimately felt her musical wrath were nobody's idea of untouchable masterpieces, they at least played their cards right in terms of credulity towards celebrity and damaged spouses. The Streisand/Kristofferson A Star is Born lacks genuine investment in its central relationship between alcoholic rock star John Norman Howard (Kris Kristofferson) and his protégé/lover Esther Hoffmann (Streisand). We're supposed to take their epic love on faith, to say nothing of the burned-out cynicism of the descendant rocker; there's a lot of talk about disaffection and anguish, but Frank Pierson's camera never catches it and the actors never quite express it.

That’s My Bush! [The Definitive Collection] – DVD

January 2, 2007Posted in2000s, Authors: Ian Pugh, Comedy, DVD, Satire, Television

Image B+ Sound B+ Extras B-
"An Aborted Dinner Date," "A Poorly Executed Plan," "Eenie Meenie Miney MURDER!," "S.D.I.-AYE-AYE!," "The First Lady's Persqueeter," "Mom 'E' D.E.A. Arrest," "Trapped in a Small Environment," "Fare Thee Welfare"

"What we're sick of–and it's getting even worse–is: You either like Michael Moore or you wanna fuckin' go overseas and shoot Iraqis. There can't be a middle ground. Basically, if you think Michael Moore's full of shit, then you are a super-Christian right-wing whatever. And we're both just pretty middle-ground guys. We find just as many things to rip on on the left as we do on the right. People on the far left and the far right are the same exact person to us."
— Trey Parker, "Interview of the Meanest"; IN FOCUS, October 2004

by Ian Pugh I think "South Park" boasts the occasional flash of brilliance, but I resent that its more flagrantly political messages, particularly in the past few seasons, essentially boil down to 'both sides are fucking crazy: here's how it really is.' Trey Parker and Matt Stone strike me less as philosophers than as contrarians who force their perceived sensible alternatives down our throats as the infallible Solution. It's a shame, too, because Parker and Stone remain two of the most talented satirists of our generation, if not in terms of hot-button topics: The ending of the recent "South Park" episode "Stanley's Cup," for instance, attacked sports movies by reminding us that every game involves two teams with similar aspirations, and, of course, Team America: World Police's caustic parody of "Rent" is as concise and shocking a criticism of that musical as one will find. I'm not taking the stupidly dismissive "I like you better when you're funny" position that Tucker Carlson had towards Jon Stewart on CNN's "Crossfire", but in the world of "South Park", there are only three options when it comes to world events: left, right, and middle, the latter being invariably correct. Compared to the innumerable increments in the political spectrum of reality, three extremes are no better than two.

Conversations with Other Women (2005) – DVD

January 2, 2007Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Romance, UK

**½/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B
starring Aaron Eckhart, Helena Bonham Carter, Nora Zehetner, Eric Eidem
screenplay by Gabrielle Zevin
directed by Hans Canosa

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover There's no real arguing with Conversations with Other Women–you either buy into its common program of relationship angst and mid-life crisis or you don't. Although director Hans Canosa tries to juice things up with a split-screen technique that's less unctuous than the description might suggest, it's still the same Woody Allen-ish trip through romantic failure via witty banter. There's an extent to which this can be entirely watchable, and at no point does the film grind to a halt and become a chore to sit through. Its concept is a tad far-fetched, however, and the insights gleaned from the chance encounter of two people at a wedding reception are nothing you can't find in the pages of any major glossy mag.

The Year Without a Santa Claus (2006) – DVD

December 21, 2006Posted in2000s, Authors: Ian Pugh, Christmas, Comedy, DVD, Family, Musical, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/**** Image B- Sound B
starring John Goodman, Ethan Suplee, Delta Burke, Chris Kattan
written by Larry Wilson and Tom Martin, based on the book by Phyllis McGinley
directed by Ron Underwood

by Ian Pugh I'm not really sure how anyone could consider Santa Claus the cure for December commercialism in this day and age, but it appears to be a popular sentiment right now. Before I knew that the network-television abortion The Year Without a Santa Claus existed, I suffered through The Santa Clause 3: The Escape Clause, a film that carries the same awful message in a way that's worth mentioning. Tricked by Martin Short's Jack Frost into relinquishing the job of Santa Claus to him, Tim Allen's Scott Calvin returns to the North Pole to discover that Christmas has become "Frostmas," an overwrought celebration of capitalism with all the child-screaming and toy-grabbing that implies. With Jack-Santa having literally taken the "Christ" out of Christmas, Tim Allen strangely becomes a surrogate Jesus figure attempting to reclaim his holiday from the money-grubbing fat man of false jolliness, who of course represents the holiday season as we know it in reality. The Santa Clause 3 essentially amounts to an episode of Allen's sitcom "Home Improvement", which is to say not only that it's terrible, but also that its attempt at a metaphor is crude and obvious–come on, Santa Claus saving Christmas from himself? In retrospect, though, I have to admit that its joyfully malevolent predisposition to be such a balls-out hypocrite is a real head-scratcher worthy of further dissection.