Munich (2005) – DVD

Posted in2000s, 2006, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Drama, DVD, France, Spielberg, Thriller

**/**** Image A Sound A
starring Eric Bana, Daniel Craig, Ciaran Hinds, Mathieu Kassovitz
screenplay by Tony Kushner and Eric Roth
directed by Steven Spielberg

Munichcap

by Walter Chaw Violence begets violence, terrorism begets terrorism, corruption begets corruption, and on and on up and down the self-righteous homily scale. Some time during the third hour of Steven Spielberg's slapdash Munich, the small lessons of this huge picture begin to feel like a ten-penny nail pounded into the middle of your forehead. There's possibly no other director who could have brought this film to fruition with such speed (principal photography began on the day Spielberg's other 2005 release, War of the Worlds, opened in the United States), but for as remarkable as that accomplishment is from a brinkmanship standpoint (about $250M-worth of film in one calendar year? Priceless), the stress begins to show in Munich–the first Spielberg film in memory so hamstrung with amateurish thematic visual concepts that you begin to wonder whether an editor fresh off the bus took over the picture's composition. Still, credit is due Spielberg, almost as well-known for his inability to resist tacking on unearned happy endings as for his savant-like conversance with the medium, for crafting a picture that's morally ambiguous (if only fitfully, and then torturously, so) as well as for daring to whisper that as a direct result of the best intentions of the bloodlust of "civilization" and Old Testament logic employed by the "good guys," the world may actually be a more dangerous place now than it was thirty years ago.

The Champ (1931) – DVD

Posted in1930s, 2006, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Family, Sports

*/**** Image B Sound C Extras C
starring Wallace Beery, Jackie Cooper, Irene Rich, Rosco Ates
screenplay by Francis Marion and Leonard Praskins
directed by King Vidor

by Walter Chaw So dated now as to seem nigh prehistoric, King Vidor's silent era-bound The Champ is broad melodrama of the underdog-uplift/precocious-kid variety, and though it's sorely tempting to condescend to it by placing it within its historical context, watching it now is like getting a screw drilled into your forehead. Doing road work with his lovable boy Dink (Jackie Cooper, more than a marionette, less than a creature of flesh and blood), The Champ (Wallace Beery) is a cartoon of a lush and a punch-drunk boxer who makes silly shadow-boxing gestures in long, unbroken takes, requiring Beery to ad-lib business that segues uneasily late in the film when the same Beery shtick must carry pathos. We can't think that a Vaudevillian's conception of a retarded drunk and a compulsive gambler is adorable and then reorient ourselves into thinking he's feeble without confronting the same conundrum the film itself presents a modern viewer. Either The Champ is fabulous–for a picture made in 1931, that is–or it's only accessible for a theoretical, contemporaneous audience, lacing any ascriptions of quality with that one major caveat and thus rendering them exactly as useless as that kind of equivocation always is.

Quintet (1979) [Robert Altman Collection] – DVD

Posted in1970s, 2006, Authors: Bill Chambers, Directors: Robert Altman, Drama, DVD, Esoterica, Mystery, Sci-Fi

**/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B-
starring Paul Newman, Bibi Andersson, Fernando Rey, Vittorio Gassman
screenplay by Frank Barhydt & Robert Altman and Patricia Resnick
directed by Robert Altman

Robertaltmanquintetcapby Bill Chambers Set during another Ice Age (in a featurette on the DVD, co-writer/director Robert Altman makes the even loopier suggestion that the action takes place on another planet, perhaps to either demonstrate what little use he has for prologue or account for a total absence of people of colour), Quintet stars Paul Newman–never particularly well-matched with the iconoclasts–as Essex, a seal hunter trekking across the frozen tundra with pregnant wife Vivia (Brigitte Fossey) in search of his brother Francha (Tom Hill), who lives in candlelit ruins that now constitute a metropolis. Francha greets Essex by inviting him to play Quintet, a glyphic board game that has developed a religious following in these joyless times (some of Quintet's adjudicators have even adopted the names of patron saints, and they all wear makeshift Tudor caps), and when Essex goes off to fetch firewood, Altman pulls a Psycho and kills off every member of his party. It turns out that latter-day Louis XIV Grigor (Fernando Rey) has turned this dystopia into a human Quintet board by orchestrating the deaths of losing players. For largely nebulous reasons, Essex assumes the identity of Francha's assassin and joins a high-stakes tournie; Grigor sees through this ruse but decides to humour him, if only because to do otherwise would be unsportsmanlike.

Mae West: The Glamour Collection [The Franchise Collection] – DVD

Mae West: The Glamour Collection [The Franchise Collection] – DVD

Posted in1930s, 1940s, 2006, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Music, Musical, Romance, Western

NIGHT AFTER NIGHT (1932)
*½/**** Image A- Sound A-
starring George Raft, Constance Cummings, Wynne Gibson, Mae West
screenplay by Vincent Lawrence and Kathryn Scola, based on the novel Single Night by Louis Bromfield
directed by Archie Mayo

I’M NO ANGEL (1933)
***½/**** Image A Sound A-
starring Mae West, Cary Grant, Gregory Ratoff, Edward Arnold
screenplay by Mae West
directed by Wesley Ruggles

GOIN’ TO TOWN (1935)
***/**** Image B+ Sound A-
starring Mae West, Paul Cavanagh, Gilbert Emery, Marjorie Gateson
screenplay by Mae West
directed by Alexander Hall

GO WEST YOUNG MAN (1936)
*½/**** Image A- Sound B+
starring Mae West, Warren William, Randolph Scott, Alice Brady
screenplay by Mae West, based on the play Personal Appearance by Lawrence Riley
directed by Henry Hathaway

MY LITTLE CHICKADEE (1940)
**½/**** Image B+ Sound B
starring Mae West, W.C. Fields, Joseph Calleia, Dick Foran
screenplay by Mae West & W.C. Fields
directed by Edward F. Cline

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Flower Belle Lee reads some words off a school blackboard: “‘I am a good boy. I am a good man. I am a good girl.’ What is this, propaganda?” Thusly does My Little Chickadee sum up the appeal of its female star, Mae West, who invited all of us (but mostly women) to reject the nice behaviour we learned in school and chart a course based on glory and gratification. You can keep your Bette Davises and your Katharine Hepburns, so often punished for their lively behaviour or pushed into the arms of some man; rest assured that men found their way into West’s arms and not the other way around. Certain proto-feminist elements are inescapable: long before Laura Mulvey was a gleam in her mother’s eye, West would dare to return the male gaze and demand a sexual appetite equal to, if not exceeding, the men bound to use it against her in a double standard. There was only one standard in West’s world, and she set it.

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

Posted in2000s, 2006, Authors: Bill Chambers, Coming of Age, Dawson's Creek, Drama, DVD, Teen, Television

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

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

Howl’s Moving Castle (2005) – DVD

Howl’s Moving Castle (2005) – DVD

Posted in2000s, 2006, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Disney, DVD, Family, Fantasy, Japan

*½/**** Image B Sound A- Extras B
screenplay by Hayao Miyazaki (American adaptation by Cindy Davis Hewitt & Donald H. Hewitt), based on the novel by Diana Wynne Jones
directed by Hayao Miyazaki

by Walter Chaw I’ve never liked it much when the Japanese are drawn to Victoriana, finding parallels as they sometimes seem to between that reserved, sexually repressive culture and their own, because it most often results in garbage like Katsuhiro Ôtomo’s exhausting Steamboy and now master Hayao Miyazaki’s disappointing Howl’s Moving Castle. Slow, not terribly interested in lore or internal logic, and fatally hamstrung by the choice of actors like Billy Crystal and a zombified Emily Mortimer to voice its American dub, it’s a regression for Miyazaki from his last two films (Princess Mononoke and Spirited Away) in almost every sense, starting with his decision to have a lonely young woman as the central character in place of the prepubescent little girls front and centre in most of his masterpieces (the last two films, Kiki’s Delivery Service, Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, and My Neighbor Totoro) and ending with a gross simplification of his usually complex themes of confidence and actualization into a colourless, flavourless drone about the hard-to-dispute badness of war.

Rescue Me: The Complete Second Season (2005) – DVD

Posted in2000s, 2006, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Television

Image A Sound A Extras C
"Voicemail," "Harmony," "Balls," "Twat," "Sensitivity," "Reunion," "Shame," "Believe," "Rebirth," "Brains," "Bitch," "Happy," "Justice"

by Walter Chaw If we proceed from the premise that the first season of FX's firefighter series "Rescue Me" is an overt metaphor for the reconfiguration of society post-9/11 along tribal/machismo lines, the second season sees the rules established, leaving only the playing-out of über-civilization's system of justice. It's post-apocalyptic in the same manner as Walter Hill's The Warriors: a diary of urban demolition and the erosion of decorum; the crude, reductive barbarism of its survivors is worn as a badge of honour. They're martyrs in uniform flying the banner of the underpaid and overworked–credit the series for acknowledging their position on the cross a time or two through the firefighter's natural archenemy, the bulls. The world as we knew it ended one day, and from its ashes rose cowboys, cowboy crusades, and a "bring it on" attitude towards loss of life and the dealing of death. If the show gets progressively more unpleasant and hard to justify, it also charts the same arc in our culture and society. And it makes perfect sense in this way (if in no other) that Season Two's cliffhanger revolves around the senseless death of a child enlisted in a war not of his making and certainly beyond his comprehension.

The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio (2005) – DVD

Posted in2000s, 2006, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Biopic, Drama, DVD

***/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B
starring Julianne Moore, Woody Harrelson, Laura Dern, Trevor Morgan
screenplay by Jane Anderson, based on the novel by Terry Ryan
directed by Jane Anderson

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Writer-director Jane Anderson says of The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio in her DVD commentary, “There are no villains in this film.” This is a bit of a feat considering that said film is about real-life Evelyn Ryan (Julianne Moore), whose husband Kelly (Woody Harrelson) was a chronic, self-piteous alcoholic; so disastrous was his handling of the family finances that Evelyn was forced to keep their ten-child brood together by entering jingle-writing contests. But instead of painting Kelly as a monster, the film shows him to be merely a broken and disappointed man as confused by his assigned role of patriarch and provider as he is about the accident that claimed his singing career. Of course, it’s just as pointed in its reclamation of the stifled talents of its titular prizewinner, detailing how she managed to become a breadwinner and a commercial poet when her assigned role was to keep her head down and go unnoticed. Everybody may lose in this scenario, but Anderson is certain that the heart’s desire bursts through ironclad roles.

The New World (2005) – DVD

Posted in****/****, 2000s, 2006, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Drama, DVD, FFC Must-Own, Romance

****/**** Image A- Sound A+ Extras B+
starring Colin Farrell, Christopher Plummer, Christian Bale, Q'Orianka Kilcher
written and directed by Terrence Malick

Mustownby Walter Chaw Terrence Malick opens The New World with "come spirit, help us," invoking the muse before embarking on a spoken history part rapturous, part hallucinogenic, all speculative, reverent, and sanctified hearsay. Malick is the post-modern American epic poet of the division ploughed through the middle of America, telling our history with one voice, painting it in golden shades of romance and poesy. It's the only viable approach to the Captain John Smith/Pocahontas story in a minefield of debris strewn by not only our Western genre tradition, but also our newer guilt at how American Indians have been (and continue to be) portrayed in our culture: the most bestial, savage notions of the Natural have come around to their personification as an unsullied, Edenic embodiment of an impossibly harmonious nature. It's an organic progression from bigotry to paternalism, and Malick charts these dangerous waters with the audacity of an artist well and truly in the centre of his craft. He makes the doomed love between Smith and the much younger Pocahontas function as a metaphor for the decimation of the Native American population–and in so doing suggests the possibility that all human interaction can be analyzed along the lines of love and misunderstanding. Routinely described as inscrutable or remote, Malick's The New World presents history as something as simple as two people who come together, fall in love, and betray one another because their cultures are too different, too intolerant, to coexist with one another. It's history as a progression of human tragedy.

Whisper of the Heart (1995) – DVD

Posted in1990s, 2006, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Family, Japan, Music, Romance

***/**** Image B Sound B- Extras D
screenplay by Hayao Miyazaki
directed by Yoshifumi Kondo

by Walter Chaw Three years after directing Studio Ghibli's Hayao Miyazaki-scripted Whisper of the Heart, and before he was able to complete a second picture for the venerable Japanese institution, ace animator and Miyazaki protégé Yoshifumi Kondo passed away of an aneurysm at the age of 47. Knowledge of Kondo's fate colours the already wistful Whisper of the Heart with another layer of blue (especially if you're a fan of Kondo's behind-the-scenes work on landmark anime like Grave of the Fireflies and Princess Mononoke), but it doesn't completely rescue its remarkable humanity from frequent descents into culturally-alien specificity. The obsession with reworking John Denver's hilljack schmaltz classic "Country Road" into an un-ironic ode to the "concrete roads" of the picture's Tokyo-bound little girl protagonist (Shizuku (Youko Honna)), for instance, almost by itself renders Whisper of the Heart a Hello Kitty! for that particular brand of Japanese, Yank-ophile, cross-eyed badger shit. It's a better film if you're Japanese–kind of an amazing thing to say, I know, but the moments that don't reconstitute American "popular" culture through a Nipponese filter manage a fair-to-amazing job of evoking the overwhelming rush of first love. Shame, then, that John Denver appears at regular intervals to remind us of how peculiar a beast cultural diffusion can be.

The Tenants (2006) – DVD

Posted in2000s, 2006, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Crime, Drama, DVD, Germany, Romance, Thriller

**½/**** Image A- Sound A-
starring Dylan McDermott, Snoop Dogg, Rose Byrne, Seymour Cassel
screenplay by David Diamond, based on the novel by Bernard Malamud
directed by Danny Green

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Parts of The Tenants are very good indeed. Most of them involve the live-wire presence of Snoop Dogg, who, as an angry black writer named Willie Spearmint, acts as conscience/spur/romantic rival to Jewish novelist Harry Lesser (Dylan McDermott). While Snoop doesn't quite convince as a product of the film's '70s milieu, he's right on the money as a resentful, easily-provoked hard case seeking humiliating assistance from Lesser. Every time he has to flip-flop on some bit of respect or contempt for the cringing whitey, he shoots the movie straight through the ceiling–so much so that The Tenants often seems to have more to it than it actually does. As it stands, the film doesn't know what to do with source novelist Bernard Malamud's mash-up between a dithering Jew and a motor-mouthed black with nothing in common except their oblivious monomania for writing.

High Anxiety (1977) – DVD

High Anxiety (1977) – DVD

Posted in1970s, 2006, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, DVD, Mystery, Satire, Thriller

**/**** Image B Sound B
starring Mel Brooks, Madeline Kahn, Cloris Leachman, Harvey Korman
screenplay by Mel Brooks, Ron Clark, Rudy DeLuca, Barry Levinson
directed by Mel Brooks

by Bill Chambers There are three clever sight gags in Mel Brooks’s disingenuous love letter to Alfred Hitchcock High Anxiety, all of which poke fun at Hitchcock’s invasive camera. As far as I can tell, the remaining laughs have no real precedent in the Master’s work, while riffs on signature moments from Vertigo, Psycho, and The Birds elicit nary a titter. (It doesn’t help that filmmakers straight-faced and tongue-in-cheek alike had plundered those pictures long before Brooks came along; the movie was destined to be impotent in a Brian De Palma world.) Choosing the misbegotten Spellbound, oddly, as its jumping-off point, High Anxiety stars Brooks as acrophobic Dr. Richard H. Thorndyke, the new Chief of Staff at “The Psycho-Neurotic Institute for the Very, Very Nervous.” After stumbling upon some corrupt bookkeeping, Thorndyke is hustled off to a psychiatric convention by the scheming Nurse Diesel (Cloris Leachman, perhaps doing Rebecca‘s Mrs. Danvers) and her S&M-craving toady Dr. Charles Montague (Harvey Korman, doing Harvey Korman), where he meets the requisite blonde bombshell (Madeline Kahn) and becomes a murder suspect.

Wet Asphalt (1958) – DVD

Posted in1950s, 2006, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Thriller, West Germany, ZERO STARS

Nasser Asphalt
ZERO STARS/**** Image D+ Sound C-
starring Horst Buccholz, Martin Held, Maria Perschv, Gert Frobe
screenplay by Will Tremper
directed by Frank Wisbar

by Walter Chaw Unbearably padded with stock footage and stilted segues around the alleged intrigue of newspaper ethics, Frank Wisbar's abominable Wet Asphalt might discover contemporary relevance for the conceit that a lie about war becomes the biggest story in the world–but probably only if you're so blinded by rage that the picture's shortcomings are secondary. Directed by the obscure Frank Wisbar and starring the recalcitrant punk (Horst Buchholz) from The Magnificent Seven and One, Two, Three, the film follows the trials of a ghost-written young reporter who gets his name attached to a bit of nonsense about Germans living underground after the war. Maybe it's an offshoot of the apocryphal tales of Japanese soldiers crawling out of the Pacific bush years after VJ-Day; more likely, it's the product of a belief that cheapo genre horseshit like this would earn its investment back before people got wise and stayed away in droves. Oh, and there's also some claptrap revolving around a perfunctory love story with wallpaper Bettina (Maria Perschy), to say nothing of the sitting room moralizations with smarmy boss Cesar (Martin Held).

C.R.A.Z.Y. (2005) – DVD

Posted in2000s, 2006, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Canada, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Morocco

***½/**** Image A Sound A- Extras N/A
starring Michel Côté, Marc-André Grondin, Danielle Proulx, Pierre-Luc Brillant
written and directed by Jean-Marc Vallée

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover The emotional epic that Canada deserves but never gets has finally arrived. There are no finger-wagging lessons here, no sluggish trudges through masochistic misery, no pointless abstractions hammered home a few too many times–only the sense that, despite the constant, agonizing gauntlet one runs in a lifetime, it's all worth it in the long, ecstatic view. C.R.A.Z.Y. isn't interested in wallowing in misery, though its narrative has plenty of that: instead, it's cheerleading the endless struggle to get what you need, and its refusal to acquiesce or admit defeat makes it a special movie. That it comes from Quebec is entirely predictable (although their last crossover success, The Barbarian Invasions, was about a suicide); what isn't predictable is how charged, how unpretentious, and how light on its feet it is even for Canada's provincial hotbed of film talent. C.R.A.Z.Y. suggests we might be good for something other than fictional defeat and documentaries on Paul Anka.

Derailed (2005) [Widescreen Edition (Unrated)] – DVD

Posted in2000s, 2006, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, DVD, Thriller, UK, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/**** Image B Sound B+ Extras D+
starring Clive Owen, Jennifer Aniston, Vincent Cassel, Melissa George
screenplay by Stuart Beattie
directed by Mikael Håfström

Derailed2005capby Walter Chaw Okay, here's the deal: if I tell you that Derailed has a big plot twist, you're going to figure it out from the trailers; and if I don't, you're going to figure it out at around the ten-minute mark–it's just that stupid. So I'm simply going to say that Jennifer Aniston is like an old studio starlet trying on her ill-fitting acting shoes in a thriller that wants to turn her into a bad girl done wrong but quails at every moment of truth. The ultimate effect of her "metamorphosis" from America's sweetheart is the uncomfortable feeling that you just saw Donna Reed (or your best friend's mom) in an S&M outfit. It makes the already-spoiled rape scene (unless ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY is an underground publication nowadays) a non-event because as you're watching it, tickling at the back of your head is the knowledge that they'd never rape Rachel in a mainstream middlebrow thriller (even if professional creep Vincent Cassel is the rapist). More, because the whole thing unfolds from the point of view of a very groggy paramour Charles (Clive Owen), the rape becomes something that's only very inconvenient for our married white male adulterer. It's despicable is what it is–compounded by a lie later on and ultimately invalidated by our tired twist, which finds at the end our Charles the spitting image of Travis Bickle but without any trace of irony.

How to Kill a Judge (1971) – DVD

Posted in1970s, 2006, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Blue Underground, Crime, Drama, DVD, Italy

Perché si uccide un magistrato?
***/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras B+
starring Franco Nero, Françoise Fabian, Marco Guglielmi, Mico Cundari
screenplay by Damiano Damiani, Fulvio Gicca-Palli, Enrico Ribulsi
directed by Damiano Damiani

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. There's no way to discuss the thematic failure of How to Kill a Judge without discussing the tacky success that makes it possible. As either a political thriller or a social document, the movie doesn't fare terribly well, priming you for a massive exposé that never arrives and delivering a trickle of an ending that doesn't even begin to compensate. Yet I found myself enjoying the sight of Franco Nero in various clunky '70s outfits, sporting a massive orange caterpillar on his upper lip in a role that allows him to be dashing. The film basically facilitates opportunities for our hero to arrive at the scene of various terrible events looking horrified and then question people while looking swank–and the spectacle turns out to be big, cheesy fun in spite of itself.

Chariots of Fire (1981) [Two-Disc Special Edition] – DVD

Chariots of Fire (1981) [Two-Disc Special Edition] – DVD

Posted in1980s, 2006, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Best Picture (Academy Awards), Biopic, Drama, DVD, Sports, UK

**/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Ben Cross, Ian Charleson, Nigel Havers, Cheryl Campbell
screenplay by Colin Welland
directed by Hugh Hudson

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Crushed by the upset win at this year’s Oscars, a critic friend of mine bemoaned the fact that “until the Earth crashes into the sun, Crash will have won Best Picture.” I couldn’t help thinking of that while watching Chariots of Fire, a film that would have been forgotten long ago had it not copped its own surprise Oscar in 1981. I still can’t wrap my head around its slipping through the cracks: though there’s an awesome professionalism at work, it’s remote and inhuman enough to push you far outside the action, making it seem as if its rather primitive story is being viewed by astronauts looking in the opposite direction. The film is so obsessed with the dead surfaces of period detail that it winds up stifling its simple underdog narrative. Watching the virtuous come out on top isn’t much fun when the filmmakers appear to be thinking of anything other than that triumph over whatever.

Fun with Dick and Jane (2005) – DVD

Fun with Dick and Jane (2005) – DVD

Posted in2000s, 2006, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, DVD

½*/**** Image B Sound A- Extras B
starring Jim Carrey, Téa Leoni, Alec Baldwin, Richard Jenkins
screenplay by Judd Apatow & Nicholas Stoller
directed by Dean Parisot

by Walter Chaw Dean Parisot’s remake of Ted Kotcheff’s 1977 Fun with Dick and Jane is simultaneously lifeless and desperate, a collection of horrid eleventh-hour edits that result in jokes without punchlines and Carrey’s old physical-comedy riffs trotted out in the service of a half-assed redux of a half-assed original. The one nod to freshening up the original’s full-frontal assault on capitalism as a means towards happiness (a satirical slot machine tugged to better effect by the act and allure of playing “The Sims”) is that it’s set in the year 2000 and deals with corporate malfeasance of the kind most conspicuously indulged in by Enron. (In case you don’t get that, the last rimshot of the film is taken at Enron’s expense, while the first closing credit is a “special thanks” to Ken Lay and his lieutenants.) The fictional big bad fiscal wolf of the piece is Globodyne, presided over by Jack McAllister (Alec Baldwin, in his second corporate bigwig turn after Elizabethtown), a southerner mainly because “southerner” is one of the last cultural groups (along with, say, Asians and gays) you can mock without much fear of backlash. On the day before it’s revealed that “Big Jack” has stripped the corporate coffers (including pensions), Dick (Carrey) is promoted to VP of something or another, inspiring wife Jane (Leoni) to quit her job and pushing Dick before the cameras on some Lou Dobbs’s “Moneyline” show, where he discovers, in a very public way, that his steed is a paper tiger.

Huff: The Complete First Season; Masters of Horror: Dreams in the Witch House; Masters of Horror: Cigarette Burns – DVDs

Huff: The Complete First Season; Masters of Horror: Dreams in the Witch House; Masters of Horror: Cigarette Burns – DVDs

Posted in2000s, 2006, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Directors: John Carpenter, Drama, DVD, Horror

HUFF: THE COMPLETE FIRST SEASON (2004-2005)
Image A Sound B Extras C
“Pilot,” “Assault and Pepper,” “Lipstick on Your Panties,” “Control,” “Flashpants,” “Is She Dead?,” “That Fucking Cabin,” “Cold Day in Shanghai,” “Christmas Is Ruined,” “The Good Doctor,” “The Sample Closet,” “All the King’s Horses,” “Crazy Nuts & All Fucked Up”

MASTERS OF HORROR: H.P. LOVECRAFT’S DREAMS IN THE WITCH HOUSE (2005)
Image A Sound A Extras A+
starring Ezra Godden, Chelah Horsdal
teleplay by Dennis Paoli & Stuart Gordon, based on the story by H.P. Lovecraft
directed by Stuart Gordon

MASTERS OF HORROR: CIGARETTE BURNS (2005)
Image A Sound A Extras A+
starring Norman Reedus, Udo Kier
teleplay by Drew McWeeny & Scott Swan
directed by John Carpenter

by Walter Chaw In an effort to step out from the shadow of HBO’s remarkable run of original programming, Showtime contributes to the noise pollution with sub-par retreads like the inexplicably-lauded hour-longs “Weeds”, “The L Word”, and the puffed-up psychodrama “Huff”. I’m a big fan of Hank Azaria, for no good reason, I guess, beyond his long-term involvement with “The Simpsons”, but cast herein as the titular shrink (Craig “Huff” Huffstodt) who witnesses a gay patient (Noel Fisher) commit suicide in his office in the pilot episode, Azaria finds more than just his character neutered and ineffectual. The writing is the first problem with “Huff”, leaning hard as it does on the Dr. Phil Handbook for Fake Shrinks in its therapy sessions (leave out the dead gay kid, incidentally, and until episode four’s guy-who-refuses-to-shit Huff’s patients all appear to be beautiful women) and making the bad mistake of thinking that castrating bitch goddess mothers (Blythe Danner, playing Estelle Getty), nymphomaniac wives (Paget Brewster), and precious/precocious kids (Anton Yelchin) will write themselves out of narrative Bermuda Triangles. Its lack of originality and stultifying obviousness isn’t what I hate (it’s too boring to hate), though: what I hate is the intrusion of the supernatural in the character of a Hungarian panhandler (Jack Lauger) Huff helps in ways so astonishingly altruistic as to suggest religious mania–not to mention an aesthetic that applies edits and score with the feckless aggression of the genuinely clueless. It looks cool, it sounds sage, and it leaves characters stranded in the middle of a whole lot of slick, iMovie-crunched, amateurish bullshit.

Bill Hicks: Sane Man (1989) – DVD

Posted in1980s, 2006, Authors: Alex Jackson, Concert Doc, DVD

**½/**** Image D/C Sound D/B Extras C-
directed by Kevin Booth

by Alex Jackson For anybody who reads a lot of my work, it may seem as if I can’t get through an entire review without lodging this same complaint–but for the record, rebelliousness for the sake of rebelliousness should not be a characteristic of anybody’s art. Once you become a full-time professional rebel, you’ll eventually start telling the people who listen to you not to do so, and then what are we to do? You can’t fulfill that request without violating it and you can’t violate it without fulfilling it. Artists and consumers of the arts need to come up with their own ideas of what’s good and what’s not. If these ideas happen to coincide with the popular consensus, then that’s perfectly fine; and if they happen to go against the popular consensus, that’s fine, too. The opinion of the popular consensus should not really come into play, period. The professional rebel, as you could probably surmise, is a distinctly adolescent creation, but I do not denounce him because I wish to distinguish myself from adolescents. I denounce him because he’s vapid. He’s all for show and not serious about arriving at any fruitful universal truths.