The Greatest American Hero: Season Three (1982-1983) – DVD

August 29, 2005Posted in1980s, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD, Superhero, Television

Image A Sound A Extras C
"The Price is Right," "30 Seconds Over Little Tokyo," "Divorce Venusian Style," "Live at Eleven," "The Resurrection of Carlini," "Wizards and Warlocks," "Heaven is in Your Genes," "This is the One the Suit Was Meant For," "The Newlywed Game," "Desperado," "Space Ranger," "It's Only Rock 'n Roll," "Vanity, Says the Preacher"

by Walter Chaw Aliens come to earth in a giant metal calamari ring and give a nebbish schoolteacher a red superhero outfit with the Chinese symbol for "centre" on the centre of its chest. They also give him an instruction booklet he promptly loses, leading to a couple of seasons of Ralph (William Katt) trying his best to figure out how to use his special jammies with the help of his attorney girlfriend Pam (Connie Selleca) and rogue FBI agent Bill (Robert Culp). It's on-the-job training, though, as the reluctant crime-fighting trio find themselves, weekly, pitted against a Saturday morning cartoon's rogue's gallery of two-bit hoodlums that reek, somehow simultaneously, of desperate invention and formula contrivance. (How else to explain the second-season search for a sea monster in the Caribbean?) But there's something that remains effective–sticky, even–about a show more at home in the Shazam! posture than in the prime time slot it was asked to fill. (Indeed, I discovered the show in syndication, seeing as I was too busy during its regular run watching "Knight Rider" and "The A-Team" on a rival network.) It's wish-fulfillment of the flavour towards which most superhero creations tend, sure, but it also speaks to what is essential in the American ethos: that the least of us believes we can be heroes under the right circumstances.

The Blues Brothers (1980) [25th Anniversary Edition (Widescreen)] – DVD

August 29, 2005Posted in1980s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, Crime, DVD, Music, Musical, Road Movie

**/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B
starring John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd, James Brown, Cab Calloway
screenplay by Dan Aykroyd and John Landis
directed by John Landis

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Long before Quentin Tarantino would run a tear across the super soul sounds of the '70s, there was the strange case of John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd in the deadly "Blues Brothers" affair. Sitting somewhere at the low end of White Negro trickle-down, the Blues Brothers were two conspicuously white soul singers who made up for in enthusiasm what they lacked in talent–though their "Saturday Night Live" clowning conveniently omitted this bit of information, half-expecting us to take them seriously as they tumbled and caterwauled their way through various musical numbers. Where a true hipster would have meticulously re-created their favoured forms, Joliet Jake Blues (Belushi) and his brother Elwood (Aykroyd) had nothing but "heart" and "sincerity"–a nice way of saying they were rank amateurs doing primitive karaoke. They were compellingly frantic performers, but they weren't the blues and never would be.

Illegally Yours (1988) – DVD

August 23, 2005Posted in1980s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, Crime, DVD

*/**** Image B Sound B
starring Rob Lowe, Colleen Camp, Kenneth Mars, Kim Myers
screenplay by M.A. Stewart & Max Dickens
directed by Peter Bogdanovich

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover The '80s drove a lot of talented filmmakers to desperate lengths, but few sank to the levels of depravity that Peter Bogdanovich did with Illegally Yours. Like so many before him, the once-unstoppable cineaste was forced to rethink his auteurism along cheesy romantic-comedy lines; unlike so many before him, he chose to ignore the ugly implications of a disturbingly infantile screenplay, instead committing to a literal interpretation as tedious as it is unpleasant. Watching Rob Lowe pester a suffering woman on the flimsiest of pretexts isn't at all funny (it's like watching a stalker get rewarded for his predations), and as he's surrounded by some of the most irritating "hilarious" types ever to grace the screen, the only variation is in the switch from creepiness to frustrated annoyance.

The Transporter (2002) [Special Edition] – DVD|[Special Delivery Edition] – DVD

August 22, 2005Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, DVD, France, Thriller

**/****
DVD – Image A Sound A Extras C
SDE DVD – Image B- Sound A+ Extras C
starring Jason Statham, Shu Qi, Francois Berleand, Matt Schulze
screenplay by Luc Besson & Robert Mark Kamen
directed by Cory Yuen

by Walter Chaw That Cory Yuen's The Transporter is unapologetically misogynistic, badly plotted, and poorly acted isn't so much a criticism as a recognition that one of Jet Li's favourite Chinese directors has made a French film in many ways identical to the chop-socky/gun-fu flicks China was churning out throughout the eighties and into the nineties. Where the film fails is in its resemblance, ironically, to Yuen's own work on The Bodyguard from Beijing (and even the awful Women on the Run), and in its uncomfortable similarity to John Woo's Hong Kong output–a cribbing owed as much to Yuen as producer Luc Besson, who has made it something of a closet industry in his action films to borrow liberally from The Killer and Hard-Boiled (and, in this particular instance, A Better Tomorrow II). The Transporter is too slick and winking, then–a post-modern take on the "heroic bloodshed" genre that already had one foot in self-satire, with the other dancing in operatic melodrama. The foot shouldn't be keeping time with a techno beat; it should be tapping to a lonesome harmonica.

Dracula III: Legacy (2005); Hellraiser: Deader (2005); The Crow: Wicked Prayer (2005) – DVDs

August 17, 2005Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD, Fantasy, Horror, Mystery, Revenge, Romania, Thriller, Vampire, Wes Craven

DRACULA III: LEGACY
**½/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Jason Scott Lee, Jason London, Alexandra Westcourt, Rutger Hauer
screenplay by Joel Soisson & Patrick Lussier
directed by Patrick Lussier

HELLRAISER: DEADER
*/**** Image A- Sound B- Extras B
starring Kari Wuhrer, Paul Rhys, Simon Kunz, Doug Bradley
screenplay by Neal Marshall Stevens and Tim Day
directed by Rick Bota

THE CROW: WICKED PRAYER
½*/**** Image B+ Sound A Extras B
starring Edward Furlong, Tara Reid, David Boreanaz, Emmanuelle Chriqui
screenplay by Lance Mungia & Jeff Most and Sean Hood
directed by Lance Mungia

by Walter Chaw This is the game plan if you’re in the business of producing direct-to-video schlock for Dimension: go to Romania (the poor man’s Czech Republic, itself the poor man’s Toronto–itself the poor man’s New York), show some tits, throw buckets of blood against the wall, and scrimp, wherever possible, on niceties like script and direction. It’s sure-fire–particularly if you can skim a month or two off the shooting schedule and lure a few has-beens in serious decline. But the question with urgency is, “Sure-fire what?” Not good art–because they seldom have anything to say about the society that spawned them (and because the directors of these messes are generally assclowns)–and not good travelogues, either, these little straight-to-home penny dreadfuls tend to be tired variations on the same quasi-Christian mythos, tarted up with surprisingly good production values and the kind of cheap thrills that kept EC Comics, then Hammer Films, then Italian giallos, in business.

Weekend at Bernie’s (1989) – DVD

August 16, 2005Posted in1980s, Adventure, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, Crime, DVD

*½/**** Image A- Sound A-
starring Andrew McCarthy, Jonathan Silverman, Catherine Mary Stewart, Terry Kiser
screenplay by Robert Klane
directed by Ted Kotcheff

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Film comedy ceased to be the realm of the inventive and the stylish some time ago–about 30 years ago, to be precise, after wit and flair gave way to the Brightly-Lit Comedy (BLC). In order to domesticate the laffer, the architects of the BLC invented a lighting style that a) ensured that every stick of poorly-chosen furniture was impossible to miss, and b) destroyed the possibility of shadow play or other flourishes that might call attention to themselves. The BLC flooded the set with white light, banishing nuance and paving the way for stuff like Weekend at Bernie's–a black hole from which not even humour itself can escape.

Now, Voyager (1942) – DVD

August 15, 2005Posted in1940s, Authors: Alex Jackson, Drama, DVD

**/**** Image A Sound B Extras D
starring Bette Davis, Paul Henreid, Claude Rains, Gladys Cooper
screenplay by Casey Robinson, based on the novel by Olive Higgins Prouty
directed by Irving Rapper

by Alex Jackson I'll admit to being rather tickled by Now, Voyager, but I frankly believe that the movies should have higher aspirations than to tickle. Though getting tickled is sort of fun for a short while, in any long duration it simply becomes obnoxious. Now, Voyager is trash, but it's not particularly great trash. There is nothing in its straight-faced inanity that successfully works as critical commentary on the material. This is camp at its most superficial; scratch off the simple surface pleasures and you're left with one black void.

Possessed (1947) – DVD

August 14, 2005Posted in1940s, Authors: Alex Jackson, Crime, Drama, DVD, Thriller

***/**** Image B- Sound B Extras C+
starring Joan Crawford, Van Heflin, Raymond Massey, Geraldine Brooks
screenplay by Silvia Richards and Ranald MacDougall, based on a story by Rita Weiman
directed by Curtis Bernhardt

by Alex Jackson Although it’s both talky and obvious (problems, I think, that have always threatened the noir genre), Possessed is propelled by a brilliant prologue and achieves momentum through an abundance of positively electric individual moments. Possessed is not strong enough to initiate any new addictions or produce any new highs, but it’s enough to qualify as a fix for the existing addict of cinema. After watching it, I felt that I could go on and face another day.

Nightmare Alley (1947) – DVD

August 11, 2005Posted in1940s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Drama, DVD, Thriller

***½/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras A-
starring Tyrone Power, Joan Blondell, Coleen Gray, Helen Walker
screenplay by Jules Furthman, based on the novel by William Lindsay Gresham
directed by Edmund Goulding

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover The great thing about Edmund Goulding's Nightmare Alley is its refusal to show you The Way. Its noir-sap hero is all about The Way, you see (in his case, an amalgam of grifting and a genuine psychic ability), but when he places his total faith in it, he inevitably loses everything. Of course, he's not the only sap looking for an absolute answer: his victims are all too willing to ditch intellectual self-defense in favour of a god/shaman/big know-it-all to relieve them of the burden of making their own choices. The film is smart enough to lay waste to not just the traditional target of spiritualists, but also the modern voodoo science of psychology–both in their own way valid, but with powers blown so far out of proportion that they become vivid media for drawing the long con.

Monster-in-Law (2005) [Platinum Series] – DVD

August 7, 2005Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD, Germany, Romance, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/**** Image A Sound A- Extras D
starring Jennifer Lopez, Jane Fonda, Michael Vartan, Wanda Sykes
screenplay by Anya Kochoff
directed by Robert Luketic

by Walter Chaw I felt real pain as Monster-in-Law unfolded. It was the variety of headache that begins behind the eyes before settling somewhere in the gorge. Two whole lines in my notebook were devoted to the word "hate," and true enough, it took all of five minutes for me to know that I despised this film. Five minutes being the same amount of time it takes for the picture to resort to a dog-humping gag, something that has never been funny in any incarnation and is always, always a sign that the oft-dredged barrel bottom is getting scraped once more, with feeling. Monster-in-Law has Jane Fonda playing a fossilized Barbara Walters manqué who attacks a Britney Spears manqué on the day that Fonda's Viola Fields is fired. (The faux-Britney has mistaken Roe Vs. Wade for a boxing match, a crime of ditz maybe less egregious than, say, cheerfully having your picture taken on a North Vietnamese gun battery circa 1972.) Meanwhile, Jennifer Lopez continues to do a whinier, Puerto Rican Melanie Griffith. But the picture isn't about the age issue or the class issue or the race issue–how could it be when Viola owns an eye-rolling, foolishness-talking mammy slave archetype named Ruby (Wanda Sykes)? No, Monster-in-Law isn't about anything on purpose except Fonda's too-real desperation, great draughts of random ugliness, and extorting money from people who will say once the dust settles that I'm out of touch.

Kung Fu Hustle (2004) [Widescreen] – DVD

August 7, 2005Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, China, Comedy, DVD, Hong Kong, Martial Arts

***/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras B-
starring Stephen Chow, Yuen Wah, Yuen Qiu, Lam Tze Chung
screenplay by Stephen Chow, Tsang Kan Cheong, Lola Huo, Chan Man Keung
directed by Stephen Chow

by Walter Chaw There's a moment near the beginning of Stephen Chow's Shaolin Soccer where a reverie about sweet buns turns into a spontaneous, slightly Asian-fied street recreation of the zombie shuffle from Michael Jackson's "Thriller" video. If Chow is going to break through into the American mainstream with more success than fellow Hong Kong émigrés Jackie Chan, Chow Yun Fat, John Woo, Jet Li, Ringo Lam, and Sammo Hung, it'll be because of his savvy and respect for Western pop archetypes. Evidence of this has surfaced with some regularity in all of his pictures to date, no less so in Kung Fu Hustle, a delirious-verging-on-surreal send-up of Kung Fu attitudes and traditions mutated with a Tex Avery cartoon. It's the film Joe Dante has been trying to make for the whole of his career: a multi-cultural pop explosion cross-pollinated to produce a fevered hybrid of the post-industrial standard of Asian innovation of Western invention. Chow is Asia's answer to hip-hop: fugitive poetry primed to gratify the Yankee ruling culture while laying out a subtext of Chinese pride that would feel like a threat if it didn't get your hips shaking and your fingers snapping.

Code 46 (2004) – DVD

August 7, 2005Posted in****/****, 2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Romance, Sci-Fi, Thriller

****/**** Image B+ Sound A- Extras B-
starring Tim Robbins, Samantha Morton, Om Puri, Emil Marwa
screenplay by Frank Cottrell Boyce
directed by Michael Winterbottom

Code46dvdcapby Walter Chaw Visually, Michael Winterbottom's Code 46 locates its textures somewhere between the supple romanticism of Wong Kar-wai and the grimy lyricism of Lynne Ramsay. (Indeed, one of the film's two cinematographers, Alwin H. Kuchler, is also Ramsay's DP.) It's a science-fiction film in J.G. Ballard's barest definition of the genre–an exploration of time, space, and identity set in the near future in a cloud of languages and ideas–that periodically soars like invention can when it's raised from a foundation of familiar catastrophe and intimate calamity. Flanked in theatres by Michel Gondry's Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Joseph Ruben's The Forgotten, Code 46 represents one of three 2004 releases to deal with memory-tampering. Curious zeitgeist we find ourselves in, this mad desire to erase the past (and note a recent run of disaster flicks as well) and start anew.

Fantastic Four: The Complete 1994-1995 Animated Television Series – DVD

August 7, 2005Posted in1990s, Action, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD, Sci-Fi, Superhero, Television

Image C- Sound C- Extras D
"The Origin of the Fantastic Four, Part One," "The Origin of the Fantastic Four, Part Two," "Now Comes the Sub-Mariner," "Incursion of the Skrulls," "The Silver Surfer and the Coming of Galactus, Part One," "The Silver Surfer and the Coming of Galactus, Part Two," "Superskrull," "The Mask of Doom, Part One," "The Mask of Doom, Part Two," "The Mask of Doom, Part Three," "Mole Man," "Behold the Negative Zone," "The Silver Surfer and the Return of Galactus," "And a Blind Man Shall Lead Them," "And the Wind Cries Medusa," "The Inhumans Among Us," "Beware the Hidden Land," "Worlds Within Worlds," "To Battle the Living Planet," "Prey of the Black Panther," "When Calls Galactus," "Nightmare in Green," "Behold, a Distant Star," "Hopelessly Impossible," "The Sentry Sinister," "Doomsday"

by Walter Chaw Watching the short-lived "Fantastic Four" animated series from the mid-'90s is a lot like sticking forks in your eyes. It's terribly animated, terribly written, and generally uninspired. The only thing more depressing than hunkering down for a prolonged exposure to this mess is the prospect of actually having to write about it. People who think that what we do isn't a job haven't had the experience of not only being forced to endure something they never would have thought to endure on their own, ever, but also of later having to find the will to write something like an analysis of said experience for the appreciation of the handful of people in the world lonely and pathological enough to start hateful correspondence in defense of it. Think about it: by agreeing to review "Fantastic Four", I'm all but consenting to a conversation with the small tribe of Morlocks who consider this shit gold, mainly because a nine-year-old version of themselves used to like it when they watched it in their footed pyjamas and helmets. So, as a pre-emptive strike (as if it matters): yes, I was a child once; no, I don't hate happiness; no, I don't think that everything has to be Citizen Kane; and, oddly, thinking is not something I believe to be mutually exclusive from pleasure.

Please Don’t Eat the Daisies (1960) – DVD

August 5, 2005Posted in1960s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, DVD, Family, Romance

***/**** Image A- Sound A-
starring Doris Day, David Niven, Janis Paige, Spring Byington
screenplay by Isobel Lennart, based on the book by Jean Kerr
directed by Charles Walters

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Please Don't Eat the Daisies is not a seismic work of filmic mastery, but instead a rather modest (if well-upholstered) domestic comedy with Doris Day thanklessly holding down the fort as she so often used to. David Niven is her husband, recently hired as one of the "Butchers of Broadway" who decides which shows live or die; he's British enough to be classy, yet Hollywood enough to believe that a play's first mission is "to entertain." And there are the "four little monsters," the children who go through babysitters and hugely inconvenience poor Doris. But as you wait for Please Don't Eat the Daisies to turn condescending or cute, it somehow never does–creeping up and gently holding you until the curtain finally falls. Sometimes we critics thank heaven for small mercies.

Target (1985) – DVD

August 3, 2005Posted in1980s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, DVD, Mystery, Thriller

½*/**** Image D+ Sound D+
starring Gene Hackman, Matt Dillon, Gayle Hunnicutt, Josef Sommer
screenplay by Howard Berk and Don Petersen
directed by Arthur Penn

by Walter Chaw Of the myriad disappointments of Arthur Penn's atrocious Target, one of the smaller ones is the appalling score by Michael Small, who, in the Seventies, was doing very fine work on Penn films like Night Moves and Alan Pakula flicks like The Parallax View and Klute. His music for Target reminds of the incidental cues on "Scarecrow and Mrs. King". The rest runs the gamut from flat direction from one of the prime architects of the amazing cinema of the American '70s, an unspeakable screenplay by non-native speaker José Luis Navarro and some idiot named Don Petersen, a pair of squandered (if only mediocre) performances from the great Gene Hackman and the badly-miscast Matt Dillon, and a plot that's an unapologetic ripper of John Schlesinger's Marathon Man. It's such a bad film, in fact, that the only enjoyment to be had from the thing is through the cruel deconstruction of its gaping implausibility. If Target finally provides a few chuckles, it does so at the expense of one of the United States' genuinely important actors (Hackman, natch) and directors.

The X Files: Abduction (1993-1995) [Four-Disc Mythology Collection] – DVD

August 3, 2005Posted in1990s, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Television, Thriller

Image B Sound B Extras D
"Pilot," "Deep Throat," "Fallen Angel," "E.B.E.," "The Erlenmeyer Flask," "Little Green Men," "Duane Barry," "Ascension," "One Breath," "Red Museum," "Colony," "End Game," "Anasazi," "The Blessing Way," "Paper Clip"

Xfilesmyth1by Walter Chaw I used to, like every other dork I know, love "The X Files"–used to look forward to its mythology episodes as though series creator Chris Carter actually had something up his sleeve in terms of a long-term plan for his show, never suspecting until the middle seasons that the emperor was nude. (Desperate, too.) See, "The X Files" is guilty of giving the public what it wanted, forgetting that the public never really knows what it wants (would it have asked for a show about two platonic FBI agents investigating UFOs in the first place?) and that once it gets what it thinks it wants, it tends to stop waiting around for it. "The X Files"' slogan "The Truth is Out There" became something of an early-Nineties pop-cultural mantra akin to "Keep On Truckin'" of the mid-'60s to mid-'70s and "Shit Happens" of Reagan-era id suppression (the biggest surprise of "The X Files" may be how creaky and antiquated it is a mere twelve years out of the can)–and like other shorthands for real thinking, it has a bumper-sticker hookiness to it but not a lot of meat upon closer examination. That kind of lack of substance dooms it to cultural specificity, with camp immortality and flea-market coffee mugs its only eternal footmen. In retrospect, "The X Files" couldn't have had a better tagline.

Little Caesar (1931) – DVD

August 2, 2005Posted in1930s, Action, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Crime, Drama, DVD, Gangster, Romance

***/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras A-
starring Edward G. Robinson, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., Glenda Farrell, William Collier, Jr.
screenplay by Francis Edwards Faragoh, based on the novel by W.R. Burnett
directed by Mervyn LeRoy

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover At first glance, Little Caesar doesn’t appear to have too much going for it. Its dramatics are primitive, its style is unremarkable and hobbled by early sound limitations, and its supporting cast plays things so broadly as to strain credulity. But none of this matters. The incomparable Edward G. Robinson renders glorious the immorality of gangster Caesar Enrico Bandello, and his cruel, conceited portrayal is cinema enough for this critic. The shortish, nasal actor would seem the unlikeliest subject for demimonde glamour if that weren’t exactly the point: he’s every brutal schemer with nothing going for him but drive and a lack of scruples–and his terrible triumph is twisted inspiration for everyone else on the outside looking in. Robinson flaunts his lack of matinee grace, opening your eyes to the joy of beating the system.

National Lampoon’s Movie Madness (1983) – DVD

August 1, 2005Posted in1980s, Authors: Alex Jackson, Comedy, DVD, Satire

National Lampoon Goes to the Movies
Movie Madness
*/**** Image C- Sound C+
starring Robby Benson, Richard Widmark, Diane Lane, Candy Clark
screenplay by Tod Carroll, Shary Flenniken, Pat Mephitis, Gerald Sussman and Ellis Weiner
directed by Bob Giraldi and Henry Jaglom

by Alex Jackson There is a Japanese restaurant in Beverly Hills called Ginza Sushi-Ko where some dishes are only in season for two days. The owner imports 90-95 percent of his fish from Japan and so his menu is contingent upon the current geographic conditions of the country. If the fishermen can't go out because of a typhoon, he'll close down his restaurant and cancel reservations. National Lampoon's Movie Madness is a film like that: it's as hyper-topical as a late-show monologue–every reference is isolated in 1981 and unable to expand itself onto a greater context. By the time the picture was actually released a mere two years later (direct-to-video in most territories), many of its jokes had already become dated. Just think of what an additional twenty-two years has done. Reviewing this thing isn't film criticism, it's archaeology.

Million Dollar Baby (2004) [2-Disc Widescreen Edition] – DVD

July 28, 2005Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Best Picture (Academy Awards), Clint Eastwood, Drama, DVD, Sports

**/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras C+
starring Clint Eastwood, Hilary Swank, Morgan Freeman, Jay Baruchel
screenplay by Paul Haggis, based on stories from Rope Burns by F.X. Toole
directed by Clint Eastwood

Milliondollarbabycap

by Walter Chaw As a fighter, Clint Eastwood's boxing flick Million Dollar Baby telegraphs its punches, demonstrates some muddy footwork, and, when all's said and done, doesn't pack much of a wallop no matter how many roundhouses it throws to the rafters. It stretches for timelessness, which Eastwood seems to equate with poor lighting and a lack of coverage, and it casts Morgan Freeman in another one of those Morgan Freeman roles where he contextualizes, in his homey, lightly-accented basso profundo warmth, the life and times of the white iconoclast for whom he is the catalyzing agent and confidante (The Shawshank Redemption, Driving Miss Daisy, Bruce Almighty, Clean and Sober). The picture has a framing story and a movie-long narration, two more ingredients in the neo-noir/American Gothic stew that Eastwood has continued to perpetuate long after his twin Americana triumphs A Perfect World and Unforgiven rendered the conversation–at least inasmuch as Eastwood is capable of carrying it–moot. Not to say that Million Dollar Baby is a total mutt, just that it's an obvious, self-important, overwritten thing designed to appeal to specific, stodgy, awards-season prestige audiences that love film so much, this will be the first movie they see this year.

Premonition (2004) – DVD

July 26, 2005Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, DVD, Horror, Japan

Yogen
*½/**** Image B Sound A- Extras C-
starring Hiroshi Mikami, Noriko Sakai, Maki Horikita, Mayumi Ono
screenplay by Noboru Takagi, Norio Tsuruta, based on the comic by Jiro Tsunoda
directed by Norio Tsuruta

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover I could spin many a yarn about the kernel of goodness trapped inside Premonition. As the tale of a teacher named Hideki Satomi (Hiroshi Mikami) who finds supernatural newspapers that predict horrible events, it's poised to say plenty about the information age, the anxiety of which is manifested in the fact that Hideki is either helpless to stop the events or winds up physically wasted as a result of trying. But the point of mentioning that is scotched by the production team's total obliviousness to thematics, which makes any exegesis purely symptomatic. There's a swell sociology paper somewhere in Premonition's context within the rest of the J-Horror canon, but its pleasures are largely as an artifact rather than as something to be enjoyed on its own terms.