Fun with Dick & Jane (1977) – DVD

December 12, 2005Posted in1970s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, Crime, DVD

Fun with Dick and Jane
*/**** Image C+ Sound A-
starring George Segal, Jane Fonda, Ed McMahon, Dick Gautier
screenplay by David Giler and Jerry Belson and Mordecai Richler, based on the novel by Gerald Gaiser
directed by Ted Kotcheff

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Although Hollywood and Big Statements have gone hand-in-hand since the very beginning, it's usually a match made in artistic Hell. Being virtuous and fun taxes the tiny minds of the movie colony, resulting in unpleasant "entertainments" that frequently cancel themselves out. Case in point: the original Fun with Dick and Jane, which races through some liberal subtext concerning economic hardships and "materialism" while slinging lame jokes that trivialize everything the film name-checks. That Ted Kotcheff isn't the right guy for pointed satire should have been obvious from the rest of his fuzzy career, but the complete lack of seriousness (or black absurdism) from all quarters reduces the film to just another naughty crime comedy that isn't even very funny–a fact made all the more puzzling by the presence of Canada's acid wit Mordecai Richler among the writing credits.

Serenity (2005) [Widescreen] – DVD

December 12, 2005Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD, Sci-Fi

***/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras B+
starring Nathan Fillion, Alan Tudyk, Adam Baldwin, Summer Glau
written and directed by Joss Whedon

Serenitycapby Walter Chaw A key speech arrives towards the end of Joss Whedon's freewheeling space opera Serenity. The captain of an incongruous hunk of interplanetary junk–dubbed "Serenity" for said captain's transformative moment during a civil war in a valley of the same, ironic name–stands in a shaft of light and asks his disciples if, in essence, they're willing to follow him into Hell for a belief that their martyrdom will be in the cause of a greater glory. He's asking his crew, but he's also asking a slavering fanboy audience that has followed the good ship Serenity here to the big screen after the braintrust at Fox ("We'd rather focus on 'Stacked'–I'm sure you understand") cancelled Whedon's "Firefly" just eleven episodes into its run. The show found new life as a bestseller on DVD, of course, and this feature-length treatment acts as both the series finale it never got and a hopeful audition for a movie franchise. If it's still laden with such Whedonisms as thick, sometimes-inscrutable (certainly unspeakable) dialogue and a political cant worn, bleeding, on its sleeve, Serenity is also home to the kind of passion and belief in a cause worth fighting for with which the good ship's crew is infused at the bitter end.

Herbie: Fully Loaded (2005) – DVD

December 8, 2005Posted in2000s, Adventure, Comedy, Disney, DVD, Family, Romance, Sports

**/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B-
starring Lindsay Lohan, Justin Long, Breckin Meyer, Michael Keaton
screenplay by Thomas Lennon & Robert Ben Garant and Alfred Gough & Miles Millar
directed by Angela Robinson

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover There’s this girl, Maggie Payton (Lindsay Lohan), who wants to be a NASCAR driver. That much I got. Her father (Michael Keaton) is, of course, an overprotective wuss who wants to shield Maggie from masculine pursuits. I’m right with you up to there. The only way to prove she can handle the danger is…to drive a self-propelled VW Bug that does all the work for her? Such is the logical conundrum of Herbie: Fully Loaded, which comes on like a female-empowerment comedy-melodrama while depriving its heroine of autonomy over the career she so desperately craves. As the damned Beetle completely destroys any attempt to make its pilot a prime mover, there’s really nothing at stake for anyone behind the wheel–and while this is fine if you’re a schlep like Dean Jones, it doesn’t do much if you’re trying to sneak in feminist subtext.

The Devil’s Rejects (2005) [Two-Disc Director’s Cut] – DVD

December 7, 2005Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD, Germany, Horror

***/**** Image A- Sound A Extras A+
starring Sid Haig, Bill Moseley, Sheri Moon Zombie, William Forsythe
written and directed by Rob Zombie

by Walter Chaw The Devil's Rejects is a minor grindhouse classic that betrays writer-director Rob Zombie as a self-hating cinephile (he inserts a movie critic character only to abuse him) who saddles his villains with Marx Brothers aliases and cribs scenes from sources as varied as The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and Taxi Driver. His family of Ed Geins (Baby (Sheri Moon Zombie), her brother Otis (Bill Moseley), their uncle Captain Spaulding (Sid Haig)) proceed to Petrified Forest a family of rodeo cowboys (Geoffrey Lewis and Priscilla Barnes and others) at a motor inn after a rousing break from a siege on their farmhouse of horrors, then get hunted down and tortured by avenging angel Sheriff Wydell (William Forsythe). His tongue firmly in cheek, Zombie casts a couple of '80s sitcom queens from TV shows worried about family dynamics (Barnes of "Three's Company" and Deborah Van Valkenburgh of "Too Close for Comfort") in meatbag roles while spinning southern rock classics like The Allman Brothers' "Midnight Rider" over a virtuoso credit sequence (shades of Scott Caan's exceptional debut Dallas 362) and Lynrd Skynrd's "Free Bird" during its conclusion in a way that actually manages not to feel ironic or snarky. That's the tightrope Zombie walks here and he walks it with a surplus of style and skill: it's an exploitation flick about audience culpability, a splatter flick about morality, and a post-modern film that actually cares about movies.

The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants (2005) [Widescreen Edition] – DVD

December 7, 2005Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Coming of Age, Drama, DVD, Romance, Teen

*½/**** Image A- Sound B Extras B-
starring Amber Tamblyn, America Ferrera, Blake Lively, Alexis Bledel
screenplay by Delia Ephron and Elizebth Chandler, based on the novel by Ann Brashares
directed by Ken Kwapis

by Walter Chaw The quartet of best pals portrayed in The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants are, we're told, complementary parts of one consciousness, which goes some way towards explaining why it is that individually they seem like machine-tooled fonts of tween didacticism. They're Judy Blume-spawned pods: the fat, brassy one with speeches about the importance of being fat and brassy; the slut with mother issues and speeches about regret; the frigid one who lightens up; and the morose one who learns to set aside her barbed irony at the expense of a disease-of-the-week urchin with a message of her own. Although the whole thing's too long as it is, there's barely enough room in the picture for each of the girls to have a complete narrative arc, and so we're given preachy shorthand speechifying in lieu of character complexity. It's a TIGER BEAT quiz about puberty and it's astonishingly irritating, even if you can spot glimmers of truth in there amid the weeping and screeching.

The Tales of Hoffmann (1951) [The Criterion Collection] – DVD

December 6, 2005Posted in****/****, 1940s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, DVD, Fantasy, FFC Must-Own, Music, Musical, Romance, The Criterion Collection, UK

Mustown****/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Moira Shearer, Robert Helpmann, Leonide Massine, Robert Rounseville
written and directed by Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger

Talesofhoffmancapby Travis Mackenzie Hoover No doubt thinking of their gushy ballet epic The Red Shoes, Pauline Kael once dismissed the pretensions of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger by declaring the duo “the Franco Zefferellis of their day.” This annoyed me intensely. Putting aside the fact that the erotic-sadist Archers seem natural Kael material, her smug put-down completely misapprehends their levelling approach to popular and elite art. A poser, Zefferelli reduces Shakespeare to soap opera and pretends it’s still Shakespeare. His ideas are schlocky and titillating, yet he insists that they’re the citadel of culture, in effect dishonouring both the articulation of what used to be called “high” art and the honest reasons we keep wallowing in trash. The Archers, meanwhile, were aware of the high/low distinction–they simply refused to enforce it, instead commingling with the sublime and the ridiculous as though they were equally critical to a healthy aesthetic diet, thus upholding Kipling’s dictum (frequently repeated in Powell’s memoirs) that “all art is one, man–one!”

Cinderella Man (2005) [Widescreen] – DVD

December 5, 2005Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Drama, DVD, Sports

*/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B
starring Russell Crowe, Renée Zellweger, Paul Giamatti, Craig Bierko
screenplay by Cliff Hollingsworth and Akiva Goldsman
directed by Ron Howard

by Walter Chaw Of the many ways that you can read the ending of Michelangelo Antonioni's Blow-Up, the one I like is the suggestion that the artist will disappear when the masses decide to gratify themselves at the trough of empty spectacles and popular melodramas that do nothing to feed the soul. Ron Howard is at the forefront of greasing that along. Not entirely unexpectedly, his current work in television (he's the producer and narrator of "Arrested Development"), where he got his start, is, at least for the medium, complex and sophisticated. Yet his philosophy for the silver screen seems to have something to do with those three no-evil monkeys: His films have all the edge and subtext of a greeting card. They're handsome, big-budget productions with big, pretty, empty faces, and they're Pollyannaish and generally awful, uniformly, with Splash still the lone bright spot in his career. It is, after all, the only one of his films to feature an ambiguous protagonist and an existentially disquieting conclusion. The only one that acknowledges a possibility for the guys in the white hats to have a shadow as black as coal.

Seven Deaths in the Cat’s Eye (1973) – DVD

December 2, 2005Posted in1970s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Blue Underground, DVD, France, Horror, Italy, Mystery, Thriller, West Germany

Seven Deaths in the Cat's Eyes
La morte negli occhi del gatto
***/**** Image A Sound A Extras C+
starring Jane Birkin, Hiram Keller, Anton Diffring, Serge Gainsbourg
screenplay by Antonio Margheriti and Giovanni Simonelli
directed by Anthony M. Dawson

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover You could complain–and someone surely has–that Seven Deaths in the Cat's Eye is a rote, decadent-rich-people intrigue with a bit of roving-camera patina for flavour. But that kind of sexy fluff has its qualities late at night when you're not interested in explanations–and really, the sight of elfin Jane Birkin looking befuddled at a string of murders in the family castle doesn't require much in the way of an excuse. What's refreshing about this bit of giallo naughtiness is that it commits totally to the sensuality of its milieu: rather than mete out absurd Catholic punishment for loose living, it feels for its damaged freaks like Douglas Sirk trapped somewhere on the Scottish moors. None of this adds up to more than good, racy fun, but it's genuinely enjoyable as opposed to insanely earnest. It gives you illicit pleasure instead of tearing a strip off you with nastiness.

The Skeleton Key (2005) [Widescreen] – DVD

December 1, 2005Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD, Horror, Mystery, Thriller

*/**** Image B+ Sound A Extras C
starring Kate Hudson, Gena Rowlands, John Hurt, Peter Sarsgaard
screenplay by Ehren Kruger
directed by Iain Softley

Skeletonkeycapby Walter Chaw Wait, let me get this straight: black folks want to be white folks? Or is it that black folks have to be white folks because the black folks who could potentially be possessed are too afraid of ghosts to hang around long enough? Screenwriter Ehren Kruger's latest illiterate piece of crap (the degree to which his script for the legitimately effective The Ring was doctored is now the stuff of Hollywood legend) addresses these and other pressing plantation-era questions when he deposits snowflake buttercup Caroline (Kate Hudson) into the heart of bayou country, deep in Angel Heart Louisiana, where every phonograph spins a Dixie Cups platter and every cobwebbed attic has a secret hoodoo room. (Who do? You do.) That it's racist in the way that a lot of privileged white people are racist (casually and ignorantly–see also: Georges Lucas and President Bush) could possibly be defended by arguing that it reflects the naivety of the film's main character, hospice nurse Caroline, positioned as sensitive because she reads Robert Louis Stevenson to her charges until they die.

War Gods of the Deep (1965)/At the Earth’s Core (1976) [Double Feature] – DVD

November 29, 2005Posted in1960s, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD, Fantasy, Sci-Fi, UK

War-Gods of the Deep
The City Under the Sea
½*/**** Image A Sound B
starring Vincent Price, Tab Hunter, Susan Hart, David Tomlinson
screenplay by Charles Bennett and Louis M. Heyward
directed by Jacques Tourneur

AT THE EARTH'S CORE
½*/**** Image A Sound B
starring Doug McClure, Peter Cushing, Caroline Munro, Cy Grant
screenplay by Milton Subotsky, based on the novel by Edgar Rice Burroughs
directed by Kevin Connor

by Walter Chaw Jacques Tourneur kicks all kinds of ass. He shone in the Forties with his Val Lewton collaborations and his magnificent, atmosphere-laden pictures Night of the Demon and Out of the Past. Having turned his attention primarily to moody Joel McCrea westerns and adventure pulpers in the Fifties, Tourneur, by the time the Sixties rolled around, unfortunately found himself outside his black-and-white comfort zone (his last great work is probably an episode of the original "The Twilight Zone", "Night Call") and at the helm of productions starring people like Steve Reeves and Vincent Price. One of his last pictures–1965's abominable War-Gods of the Deep–finds its way onto DVD via MGM's admirable "Midnite Movies" line as the front end of a double feature. It's a flat, fish-eyed stinker that positions itself as a ripper of both the Price-anchored Roger Corman/Edgar Allan Poe films and the bona fide cycle of Jules Verne spectacles that began with Disney's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954), continued through From the Earth to the Moon (1958) and Journey to the Center of the Earth (1959), and culminated in 1964's still-creepy First Men in the Moon, to which this film might owe its greatest debt. Ostensibly based on a Poe poem called "The City in the Sea," War-Gods of the Deep grafts its gothic settings (complete with another voiceover intro of Price reading a poem) to a Verne-like tale of a mysterious egomaniac (named "The Captain," of course, and played by Price) living in a giant, velvet-lined mansion beneath the sea, just off the coast of Cornwall.

Sky High (2005) + Stealth (2005)|Sky High [Widescreen] – DVD

November 28, 2005Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Coming of Age, Disney, DVD, Sci-Fi, Superhero, Teen, Theatrical, Thriller

SKY HIGH
½*/****  Image A Sound B+ Extras C+
starring Michael Angarano, Danielle Panabaker, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Kurt Russell
screenplay by Paul Hernandez and Robert Schooley & Mark McCorkle
directed by Mike Mitchell

STEALTH
**/****
starring Josh Lucas, Jessica Biel, Jamie Foxx, Sam Shepard
screenplay by W.D. Richter
directed by Rob Cohen

Skyhighby Walter Chaw A kids movie for the stupid ones and a guys movie for the stupid ones of those, Sky High and Stealth are lowest-common-denominator entertainments that throw sense out the window in favour of clumsy one-liners, bad special effects, and an eye focused keen on demographics and the bottom line, which those demographics promise to fork over on opening weekend. It doesn't matter if they're good, just that they rake in enough moolah before people get a whiff of the noisome rot and ennui wafting on air-conditioned currents out of the friendly neighbourhood cineplex and start staying home again in droves. The dreadfulness of Sky High and Stealth can be measured by the extent to which this nation's timid, gaffed, untrained, dispassionate film critics equivocate in their reviews that it's for kids, that it's an enjoyable film if you check your brain at the door, and/or that it's "finally" the family/action/blockbuster you've been waiting for all summer long.

Cheaper by the Dozen (2003) [Baker’s Dozen Edition] – DVD

November 24, 2005Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD, Family

½*/**** Image A- Sound B Extras C
starring Steve Martin, Bonnie Hunt, Piper Perabo, Tom Welling
screenplay by Craig Titley, based on the book by Frank B. Gilbreth Jr. and Ernestine Gilbreth Carey
directed by Shawn Levy

by Walter Chaw Walter Lang's 1950 version of Frank B. Gilbreth and Ernestine Gilbreth Carey's semi-autobiographical Cheaper by the Dozen ends with patriarch Frank (Clifton Webb) kicking the bucket, and seat-warmer Shawn Levy's (fresh off the triumph Just Married) 2003 adaptation of the same ends with patriarch Tom (Steve Martin) capitulating to his simpering children. Such is the decline of courage in western popular culture that even sickening cultural artifacts like Lang's Cheaper by the Dozen out-balls an updated version fifty-three years hence. Infantile regression the rule of the day in a climate increasingly desperate to shoehorn its post-modern anti-narratives into comfortable family fare, it's interesting to consider that the original was already seen as something of a throwback to Depression-era family values at the time of its release. In conflict with the popular wag that people are stupider now than they've ever been, the excrescent original was also defended as good old-fashioned escapist fare. People are exactly as stupid as they've always been, it seems, but the lords of our popular entertainment have been noticeably castrated.

The Beautiful Country (2004); Me and You and Everyone We Know (2005); The World (2005)|The Beautiful Country – DVD

November 23, 2005Posted in****/****, 2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, China, Comedy, Drama, DVD, France, Japan, Norway, Theatrical

THE BEAUTIFUL COUNTRY
**½/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
starring Nick Nolte, Tim Roth, Bai Ling, Temeura Morisson
screenplay by Sabina Murray
directed by Hans Petter Moland

ME AND YOU AND EVERYONE WE KNOW
*½/****
starring John Hawkes, Miranda July, Miles Thompson, Brandon Ratcliff
written and directed by Miranda July

Shijie
****/****
starring Zhao Tao, Chen Taisheng, Jing Jue, Jiang Zhong-wei
written and directed by Jia Zhang-ke

Beautifulcountrycapby Walter Chaw Norwegian director Hans Petter Moland makes films about isolated individuals trapped in simulacra of motion, and his best work is savage and melancholic: a trip taken by broken people to the bedside of a dying mother in Aberdeen; a pilgrimage made by a poet to locate his masculinity in the company of a maniac in Zero Kelvin. Even his first film, the quiet Secondløitnanten, touches on men oppressed by the caprice of nature–of other men driven to their natural state and the situations that melt away the lies that keep our lives liveable. Moland's films are beautifully framed (picaresque, it's not too much to say), capturing in their sprawling, austere landscapes the plight of individuals dwarfed by the mad, engulfing entropy of existence. He's a good fit with American auteur Terrence Malick, in other words–so it's without much surprise that Malick approached Moland to direct The Beautiful Country, a project he'd worked on, on and off, for a period of years before deciding that the producer's role would better suit him in this instance. The result is a picture that looks, sounds, often feels like a Malick film–even more so, it goes without saying, than Moland's early output does, leaving the project something that feels uncomfortably like ventriloquism. And though I'm a fan of both puppet and master, I find that I prefer the one drawing a line to the other rather than pulled around by the master's strings.

Hammett (1982) – DVD

November 22, 2005Posted in1980s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Crime, Drama, DVD, Mystery

**/**** Image A- Sound A-
starring Frederic Forrest, Peter Boyle, Marilu Henner, Roy Kinnear
screenplay by Ross Thomas and Dennis O'Flaherty, based on the novel by Joe Gores
directed by Wim Wenders

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Wim Wenders nominally directed Hammett, and its famous recutting by the studio depressed him to the point of taking revenge with a lovely film called The State of Things. (Hammett sat in limbo for so long that the two actually came out at the same time.) Indeed, you'd be hard-pressed to connect this overdesigned, hermetically-sealed, zestily cynical movie with the director's gently disappointed, free-ranging, existing-location-dependent masterpieces. More accurately, Hammett is a Francis Ford Coppola film, a Zoetrope film, and a landmark in the failure of '80s cinephilia. It does for Dashiell Hammett what Raiders of the Lost Ark did for Flash Gordon, which is to say it reproduces surfaces without a shred of critical distance or analytical incisiveness. It's a non-stop reference orgy that loves the idiotic conventions it ought to be deconstructing–Chinatown, as seen through the prism of Sin City: a series of hyper-real, hard-boiled requirements to be fulfilled rather than a summing up of what they represent.

The Buddy Holly Story/La Bamba – DVD

November 21, 2005Posted in1960s, 1970s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Biopic, Drama, DVD, Music

THE BUDDY HOLLY STORY (1978)
***/**** Image B Sound B+ Extras A
starring Gary Busey, Don Stroud, Charles Martin Smith, Conrad Janis
screenplay by Robert Gittler
directed by Steve Rash

LA BAMBA (1987)
**/**** Image B+ Sound A Extras B-
starring Esai Morales, Lou Diamond Phillips, Rosana DeSoto, Elizabeth Peña
written and directed by Luis Valdez

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover I don't know enough about music to pass judgment on the legacies of Buddy Holly and Ritchie Valens. Everybody knows they had their mutual rendezvous with destiny (and Don McLean) in a plane crash that helped end the first phase of rock-and-roll, but their legends are the distorted shotgun marriage of crazy fame and early death that makes totalling their actual achievements a tad difficult. Strangely, their movie biopics (now available on DVD in a two-pack) don't really try. The Buddy Holly Story is really an ode to people sitting in rooms playing music regardless of anyone's relative fame, while La Bamba is a family story hinged on the rise of a credit to his community. The real pleasures of these films are strangely incidental to hero worship, and passing judgment on them is a matter of aesthetics: where Buddy triumphs by attempting something modest and nailing it with a vengeance, La Bamba bites off more than it can chew and sails into the waters of respectable mediocrity.

Leave It To Beaver: The Complete First Season (1957-1958) – DVD

November 21, 2005Posted in1950s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Coming of Age, Drama, DVD, Television

Image A- Sound B+ Extras C
"Beaver Gets 'Spelled'," "Captain Jack," "The Black Eye," "The Haircut," "New Neighbors," "Brotherly Love," "Water, Anyone?," "Beaver's Crush," "The Clubhouse," "Wally's Girl Trouble," "Beaver's Short Pants," "The Perfume Salesmen," "Voodoo Magic," "Part-Time Genius," "Party Invitation," "Lumpy Rutherford," "The Paper Route," "Child Care," "The Bank Account," "Lonesome Beaver," "Cleaning Up Beaver," "The Perfect Father," "Beaver and Poncho," "The State vs. Beaver," "The Broken Window," "Train Trip," "My Brother's Girl," "Next-Door Indians," "Tenting Tonight," "Music Lesson," "New Doctor," "Beaver's Old Friend," "Wally's Job," "Beaver's Bad Day," "Boarding School," "Beaver and Henry," "Beaver Runs Away," "Beaver's Guest," "It's a Small World"

by Bill Chambers "Leave It To Beaver" was the first TV series to show a toilet. That sort of illustrates a point I want to make that while it may be an idealized portrait of the nuclear family, it's not a lie. Indeed, there's a touch of neo-realism in the show's emphasis on the bathroom, on laundry, on haircuts and making the bed. It's the only series I can think of where the characters are seen grooming themselves on a regular basis, and this almost blithe disregard for fourth-wall etiquette extends to not only frank discussions of hygiene, money, faith, and morality, but also an aesthetic that eventually supports 360º blocking. You won't, in other words, see the standard set-up of four people all sitting on the same side of the dinner table, except in the earliest episodes.

Monster High (1989) – DVD

November 14, 2005Posted in1980s, Authors: Alex Jackson, Comedy, DVD, Horror, Sci-Fi, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/**** Image D Sound D
starring Dean Iandoli, Diana Frank, David Marriott, D.J. Kerzner
screenplay by Roy Langsdon and John Platt
directed by Rudiger Poe

by Alex Jackson I do not use this analogy lightly: Watching Monster High is sort of like watching your wife get raped. I felt actual fear as it unspooled, and there were several times I had to hold back from melting into a crying fit. These were not tears of incredulity or even pain, but tears born of anger, existential despair, and finally an acknowledgment of one's own innate inadequacy. There is this feeling that the whole thing will go unpunished and unacknowledged. Director Rudiger Poe and screenwriters Roy Langsdon and John Platt have taken something vital from me, something I don't think I can ever get back. And they have done it for no reason. There is no sin I could have committed to prompt this atrocity, it's something that just happened, as random and as meaningless as life itself.

Frankenstein (2004) – DVD

November 10, 2005Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, DVD, Horror, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Television

½*/**** Image A Sound B Extras B
starring Parker Posey, Vincent Perez, Thomas Kretschmann, Adam Goldberg
screenplay by John Shiban
directed by Marcus Nispel

by Walter Chaw Marcus Nispel's Frankenstein, conceived by schlock-meister general Dean Koontz as the pilot for a stillborn USA Network series, is the very model of style over substance. Would that the style even belonged to Nispel: all of muted greens and bleached yellows, memories of Se7en swim, bidden, to the mind of the genre enthusiast. It's one thing to frame the American backcountry in shades of monumentalized sepia (as Nispel did in his Texas Chain Saw Massacre redux), another altogether to throw a haze of music-video mute over the Big Easy. If the cinematography weren't enough, the title sequence and faux–Nine Inch Nails score take it the rest of the way, establishing the picture as a police procedural of a certain kind while the (misleading) title announces a supernatural bent. The real bogeys haunting the piece, though, are the careers of Parker Posey and Michael Madsen, together rattling chains disinterestedly as the former slides into her third decade as someone who's not very good but has managed to continue working based on some misconception of early indie-queen dividends, the latter too comfortable being both cast the crooked cop and mistaken for Tom Sizemore.

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005) – DVD

November 9, 2005Posted in2000s, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Directors: Tim Burton, DVD, Family, Fantasy

**½/**** Image A Sound A Extras C
starring Johnny Depp, Freddie Highmore, David Kelly, Helena Bonham Carter
screenplay by John August, based on the novel by Roald Dahl
directed by Tim Burton

Charlieandthecapby Walter Chaw The first hour is so obsessively faithful to the Roald Dahl source material that I was lulled into believing that Tim Burton's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was going to be a classic, a magnificent return to form for the dark fantasist who, once upon a time, denied Edward Scissorhands a happy ending, and let the Headless Horseman come back for the little kid under the floorboards. The set design of little Charlie's hovel on the edge of an industrial town is stunning–a throwback to the German Expressionism of Burton's Vincent and, in its canted walls, the best of its kind since The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Thus the tragedy and the irony of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory's return to earth is that its ultimate mediocrity has a lot to do with the addition of a worthless backstory that draws it closer to Burton's auteur tendencies and away from Dahl's cruel, austere master plots. Burton's loner-punk heroes (Edward Scissorhands, Bruce Wayne, Pee-Wee, Ichabod Crane, Ed Wood), see, live alone or in a metaphor for isolation, divorced from their horror-legend father figures (Vincent Price, Martin Landau as Bela Lugosi, now Christopher Lee) and largely failing to hide their disfigurements while struggling to achieve a semblance of "ordinariness" in their familial relationships. (Even the demon Beetlejuice has a moment where he throws his arms around his victims and yells, "C'mon, we're simpatico here!") At their core, Burton's films are by and large hopeful–bittersweet or piquant, they're consistently portraits of misfits with dreams. But until Big Fish and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, they hadn't been trite or, perish the thought, fearful.

A Farewell to Arms (1957) + Francis of Assisi (1961) – DVDs

November 8, 2005Posted in1950s, 1960s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Drama, DVD, Romance, War

A FAREWELL TO ARMS
½*/**** Image B Sound B- Extras D
starring Rock Hudson, Jennifer Jones, Vittorio De Sica, Mercedes McCambridge
screenplay by Ben Hecht, based on the novel by Ernest Hemingway
directed by Charles Vidor

FRANCIS OF ASSISI
*/**** Image B Sound B- Extras D
starring Bradford Dillman, Dolores Hart, Stuart Whitman, Pedro Armendariz
screenplay by Eugene Vale, James Forsyth and Jack Thomas
directed by Michael Curtiz

by Walter Chaw One of David O. Selznick's many attempts to shape the largely immutable mug of lady-love Jennifer Jones into the face that launched a thousand cinematic ships, the badly-fumbled Hemingway adaptation A Farewell to Arms finds Jones, about two decades past the age of her Red Cross nightingale Catherine, paired opposite the not-quite-long-in-the-tooth-but-almost Rock Hudson as her doomed love Lt. Henry. The setting is Italy during The Great War; playboy Lt. Henry falls for mad "Cat," who, as written by the legendary Ben Hecht (himself a decade removed from his best work and well on his way to becoming king of cheese epics), comes off as an entirely inappropriate nod to Blanche Dubois. Selznick served John Huston–the right man for this picture–his walking papers early on for correctly identifying the love story in Hemingway's novel as just a metaphor for the tragedy and irony of WWI's carnage, subbing Huston with second-stringer Charles Vidor, who meekly agreed to amplify the alleged love between Lt. Henry and Cat while pushing all manner of hysterical spectacle to the wings of the proscenium.