We Live Again (1934) – DVD

April 21, 2005Posted in1930s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Drama, DVD, Romance, War

**½/**** Image A Sound B+
starring Anna Sten, Fredric March, Jane Baxter, C. Aubrey Smith
screenplay by Maxwell Anderson, Leonard Praskins and Preston Sturges, based on Leo Tolstoy's novel Resurrection
directed by Rouben Mamoulian

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover The wrong side of the tracks is a bad place to be, unless you're in Hollywood and see a way to make a buck: hence We Live Again, an adaptation of Tolstoy's Resurrection that looks past the niggling period details to go straight for the selfless-sacrifice weeper at its core. As melodrama, it has its qualities, including half a good Frederic March performance and stellar cinematography by the great Gregg Toland, but as anything other than a soaking-wet emotional sponge, it's largely ridiculous. It knows its audience wants to see rich boy/poor girl working things out, and how much you get out of the film depends on how much you can respond to that device–though anyone else will either be outraged or on the floor. Which is not to say that We Live Again is entirely without merit.

Closer (2004) [Superbit] – DVD

April 19, 2005Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Romance, UK

***/**** Image A- Sound A+
starring Natalie Portman, Jude Law, Julia Roberts, Clive Owen
screenplay by Patrick Marber, based on his play
directed by Mike Nichols

by Walter Chaw A girl takes off and cleans a guy’s glasses on her jacket as he’s talking, then gently replaces them. She asks him what a euphemism for her would be, and he tells her: “Disarming.” “That’s not a euphemism.” But he assures her that it is. A girl takes a picture of a guy, a guy talks to another guy through the anonymity of a computer screen, a guy visits a girl performing at a peepshow and offers her a large amount of money to tell him her real name. A guy meets a girl at an aquarium where she’ll go to steal pictures of strangers as they look at the captive marine life in the blue glow of sharks circling. Mike Nichols’s Closer is beautifully directed from Patrick Marber’s adaptation of his own play, shot with an extraordinary amount of verve and resonance around the loaded themes of ways of seeing (glasses, cameras, correspondence) and their connection to voyeurism, objectification and confinement, and forms of physical and emotional abuse. A scene in the middle set at a photo exhibit crystallizes every thread: people milling about, buffeted by giant projected reproductions of ‘disarmed’ subjects, coming and going and talking of Michelangelo. It’s overwritten but clever, too, doing a dangerous little dance along the edge of relevance and camp like a film from the 1970s (Nichols’s own Carnal Knowledge, sure, but more like another film from 1971, Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs), only really failing in one performance and a seeming inability to follow through on its central punch. It’s a courageous mainstream picture, no question, though it’s mainly courageous in comparison to its contemporaries. Was a time when films like this and more toothsome were the norm and not the semi-quailing exception.

The Lone Gunmen: The Complete Series (2001) – DVD

April 19, 2005Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Canada, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Television, Thriller

Image A- Sound A- Extras B+
"Pilot," "Bond, Jimmy Bond," "Eine Kleine Frohike," "Like Water for Octane," "Three Men and a Smoking Diaper," "Madam, I'm Adam," "Planet of the Frohikes," "Maximum Byers," "Diagnosis: Jimmy," "Tango De Los Pistoleros," "The Lying Game," "The "Cap'n Toby" Show," "All About Yves"

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover To paraphrase your high school guidance counsellor: respect for yourself is essential for respect from your audience. Let's say you have a show called "The Lone Gunmen". It's a spin-off from the successful (and successfully self-serious) "The X Files", which took somewhat far-fetched material and sold it, most of the time, with a straight face and a stern look. It deals with much the same subject matter but features nerdy misfits John Byers (Bruce Harwood), Melvin Frohike (Tom Braidwood), and Richard Langly (Dean Haglund), to whom you're somehow unwilling to commit total sympathy. So you make excuses by mocking them, as if apologizing for their unworthiness of the attention–which raises the question of why you're bothering in the first place. Complete self-deprecation usually results in discomfort, shunning, and, in this case, premature cancellation.

Normal Life (1996) – DVD

April 17, 2005Posted in1990s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Crime, Drama, DVD, Romance, Thriller

***½/**** Image A Sound A
starring Ashley Judd, Luke Perry, Bruce Young, Jim True
screenplay by Peg Haller & Bob Schneider
directed by John McNaughton

by Bill Chambers I might be apocryphally attributing this to Pauline Kael, but I’m fairly confident that it was she who said there’s no such thing as bad acting, only bad casting. When people hear that John McNaughton’s Normal Life stars Luke Perry and Ashley Judd, they tend to lose interest, but to quote another of my favourite critics, Alex Jackson, “a great performance incorporates and molds a persona. It deals with it. Their body, voice, and persona are inescapable facts [and] the greatness of a performance lies in nothing more [than] the acknowledgment of these facts.” It’s interesting that the contemporary actors most likely to be credited with soul-searching to find the emotional truths of a character–Johnny Depp, Sean Penn, even Mark Ruffalo–are heirs apparent to Lon Chaney, gradually transforming themselves from without. In the same piece quoted above, a review of Midnight Express published just prior to last year’s Academy Awards, Jackson says he values Christina Ricci’s work in Monster over that of her co-star Charlize Theron: Where Ricci plumbs the depths of her established screen persona, Theron’s aesthetically-assisted turn is so anomalous in terms of her career as to register as standoffish. “I suspect that it takes more courage to be an icon than an actor,” Jackson brilliantly surmises.

House of Flying Daggers (2004) – DVD

April 17, 2005Posted in****/****, 2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, China, Drama, DVD, Hong Kong, Martial Arts, Romance

****/**** Image A- Sound A+ Extras B-
starring Takeshi Kaneshiro, Andy Lau, Ziyi Zhang, Song Dandan
screenplay by Li Feng & Zhang Yimou & Wang Bin
directed by Zhang Yimou

Mustownby Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. For the dozen or so eye-bleedingly beautiful sequences in Zhang Yimou's new wuxia pian, the encapsulating image is that of the incandescent Ziyi Zhang prostrate beneath a would-be paramour, her delicate, ivory hand pressed against his lips in an eloquently ineffective ward. It's a tableau introduced in a more overt attempted rape in a brothel and revisited in a stream where a quartet of thugs nearly succeed in literally/metaphorically piercing Ziyi with their long spears. House of Flying Daggers (its title in Chinese the loaded "Ambush from Ten Directions"–essentially an ambush from everywhere) is at its essence an allegory for rape and the Chinese tradition of concubinage that Zhang has already explored to varying degrees in Raise the Red Lantern, Ju Dou, Shanghai Triad, and, of course, Red Sorghum, in which a young woman played by Gong Li (Ziyi's predecessor as Zhang's muse) is saved from rape by a young man with whom she later runs a winery. But the conceit of a young woman teaming with her knight in shining armour is complicated in House of Flying Daggers by the fact that she is more than capable of taking care of herself, except, fascinatingly, when the attacks against her are sexualized.

Incident at Loch Ness (2004) – DVD

April 13, 2005Posted in2000s, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD, Horror, Mystery, Pseudo-Documentary, Sci-Fi, Thriller

**½/**** Image A Sound B Extras A
directed by Zak Penn

by Walter Chaw You could say that Werner Herzog has been hunting monsters for the whole of his career. (Chasing demons: even better.) Find in that the reason the satirical Incident at Loch Ness works to the extent that it does. The picture locates the mad German on the Scottish loch, where he's ostensibly shooting a documentary on Nessie under the auspices of Hollywood wunderkind Zak Penn while a film crew, led by veteran cinematographer John Bailey, shoots Herzog for a piece on the director's method called "Herzog in Wonderland." It's a fake documentary about the making of a fake documentary, in other words, commenting at several points about authenticity in a way that pings off the whimsical existentialism of Being John Malkovich at its best–and off the sudden shift into darkness of the same at its worst. Mocking the capricious ignorance of Hollywood moneymen is always sporting, I guess, and as Penn simultaneously acts the monster (he insists on the crew wearing matching jumpsuits) and surreptitiously slips a plastic monster-bot into the wake, the picture can be satisfying in a familiar way. But by this point in our progressive cynicism, anyone watching the film–and, more particularly, anyone at all familiar with Herzog–could say the same things regarding the venality of the blockbuster mentality with less effort. This doesn't mean that the film's closing shot of a sunglasses-wearing Herzog walking in front of his team in a Michael Bay heroic slow-motion is any less funny, but it does add up to a generally empty, if fitfully amusing, experience.

Hawaii (1966) – DVD

April 13, 2005Posted in1960s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Drama, DVD

**½/**** Image B+ Sound A
starring Julie Andrews, Max Von Sydow, Richard Harris, Gene Hackman
screenplay by Dalton Trumbo and Daniel Taradash, based on the novel by James A. Michener
directed by George Roy Hill

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover As a movie, Hawaii isn't very good, but in a way it's great. While it's hard not to grow weary with its 161 minutes of leaden historical pageantry, especially as there's not a single interesting shot in the whole thing, it's equally difficult to not be amazed by its acid take on colonial arrogance–or by its lead, one the most astoundingly unsympathetic in Hollywood history. You can't help but wonder what comes next, even as the filmmakers botch the execution and you grow impatient for what's-next to show its tardy face. They're not naturals, but they're not hypocrites, either, and if all fusty quality pictures were like this I'd have considerably less to complain about.

The Letter (1940) – DVD

April 11, 2005Posted in1940s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Crime, Drama, DVD, Mystery, Romance

***/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Bette Davis, Herbert Marshall, James Stephenson, Frieda Inescort
screenplay by Howard Koch, based on the play by W. Somerset Maugham
directed by William Wyler

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Andrew Sarris once defended American film by saying "it completely dominates in the middle ranges, particularly in the good-bad movies and genres." The Letter represents that glorious middle range in all its good-bad glory. Keeping it from the top is its refusal to be anything but surface: despite its origins as a sociopolitical W. Somerset Maugham play, it's played as a straight melodrama, and that reliable workhorse William Wyler ensures that you feel the "basic human drama" without noticing sticky details like issues of class and race. But the surface is smooth, sleek, and shapely and the craftsmanship shows loving care, if not obsession, for rendering the mood and evoking the characters. It's less than a masterpiece, more than a time-killer, and an excellent argument for excursions into the middle.

p.s. (2004) + Birth (2004)|Birth (2004) – DVD

April 10, 2005Posted in****/****, 2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Esoterica, FFC Must-Own, France, Germany, Mystery, Romance, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

p.s.
**½/****
starring Laura Linney, Topher Grace, Gabriel Byrne, Marcia Gay Harden
screenplay by Helen Schulman and Dylan Kidd, based on the novel by Helen Schulman
directed by Dylan Kidd

BIRTH
****/**** Image A Sound A
starring Nicole Kidman, Cameron Bright, Danny Huston, Lauren Bacall
screenplay by Jean-Claude Carrière, Milo Addica, Jonathan Glazer
directed by Jonathan Glazer

Psbirthby Walter Chaw Second chances, erasing memories, manipulating perception–films this year like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Code 46, The Forgotten, The Manchurian Candidate, The Village, The Butterfly Effect, Before Sunset, 50 First Dates, The Final Cut, and so on suggest a collective desire to wash the slate clean, put on blinkers, and regain a little of that sweet, blithe ignorance of the day before yesterday. It's never as easy as all that, of course, since things have a tendency of coming back–and when an artifact of the past intrudes on the present it carries with it (along with all those memories of green) an aggressive payload of unexpected reactions. You can never go home again, nor can home ever return to you. Nevertheless, it tries to in a pair of films, two sophomore efforts, as it happens: Dylan Kidd's p.s. and Jonathan Glazer's Birth. Curiously, just the idea of the first film after a triumphant debut is tangled with the desire to recapture a little of the magic of the past.

Venus in Furs (1969) – DVD

April 7, 2005Posted in1960s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Blue Underground, DVD, Esoterica, Italy, Thriller, UK, West Germany

Paroxismus
**/**** Image A Sound A Extras A-
starring James Darren, Barbara McNair, Maria Rohm, Klaus Kinski
screenplay by Jess Franco & Malvin Wald
directed by Jess Franco

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Masterpiece is such a relative term. The keepcase for Venus in Furs (a.k.a. Paroxismus) anoints this rough jewel in Jess Franco's crown as "the one fans and critics alike call his masterpiece," but all this means is that next to some of the other films in Franco's dissipated oeuvre, Venus in Furs is comparatively competent, hangs together decently, and won't cause the intense eye-rolling of something like the same year's The Girl from Rio. But though it's slick and watchable, it's still a conceptual mess, combining a blithe pretentiousness with a total inability to suggest cause and effect–not to mention Franco's usual sophomoric sexuality. Or does being propositioned by Dean Martin while on acid count as a masterpiece?

Ocean’s Twelve (2004) [Widescreen Edition] – DVD

April 5, 2005Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Directors: Steven Soderbergh, DVD, Thriller

**/**** Image A- Sound B+
starring George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Matt Damon, Catherine Zeta-Jones
screenplay by George Nolfi
directed by Steven Soderbergh

Oceanstwelvecap

by Walter Chaw It's all so very beautiful that it's easy to be seduced by it. The people, of course, are gorgeous. The locations in Amsterdam and Lake Como, Italy are gorgeous. The soundtrack? Gorgeous. Cinematography, direction: gorgeous, gorgeous. None too pretty, though, is that sniffy feeling of crashing a party where you stick out like a sore thumb–where everybody knows everybody else and you keep asking the wrong questions. In that, at least, Steven Soderbergh's Ocean's Twelve is more faithful to the Rat Packer Ocean's Eleven than his own remake of the same–this picture's prequel–was. Ocean's Twelve amounts to a martini-and-lounge party at which everybody's having a really great time as you watch from your chair in the corner, daydreaming of looking like Julia Roberts, talking like brandy in a warm snifter, having more fame than The Beatles, and being richer than God.

Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason (2004) [Widescreen] – DVD

April 4, 2005Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD, France, Germany, Ireland, Romance, UK

½*/**** Image B Sound B+ Extras C+
starring Renée Zellweger, Hugh Grant, Colin Firth, Jim Broadbent
screenplay by Andrew Davies and Helen Fielding and Richard Curtis and Adam Brooks, based on the novel by Fielding
directed by Beeban Kidron

Bridgetjonesedgecapby Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. The gusto with which a certain audience will guffaw at Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason (henceforth Bridget Jones 2)–will buffet each other on the back in robust bonhomie at a joke well told and a prejudice indulged in appropriate company–says all there really is to say about the class schism that the film itself broaches but stops short of actually addressing. (If you squint, you can see them rendered satiric as swine in top hats, smoking cheap cigars and playing cards in their pearls and print dresses.) We reunite with our porcine heroine (Renée Zellweger) a little more than a month after the end of the first film, at which point she's shagged her new boyfriend Darcy (Colin Firth) a lot but remains saddled with her suspicions that he's a prick. He's a lawyer, see, and clearly too good for her, so Bridget, as is her wont, proceeds to embarrass herself in polite stuffed-shirt company, scoffing at the prig who suggests that giving to charity is bad and pretending to be able to ski whilst wrapped in a dreadful pink jumper. The resulting delightfully-patronizing humiliations are the sort of thing generally installed as the engine in romance novels, the main audience for which is one that looks like Bridget, is probably ten years older, and would be surprised to see that, were a film ever actually made of their fantasy projection of themselves onto the heroine role of their little pulp bodice-rippers, would look just as preposterous as Bridget Jones 2.

Call Northside 777 (1948) – DVD

April 4, 2005Posted in1940s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Drama, DVD

**½/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B+
starring James Stewart, Richard Conte, Lee J. Cobb, Helen Walker
screenplay by Jerome Cady and Joy Dratler
directed by Henry Hathaway

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Call Northside 777 is far less virtuous than it wants to be, but we can overlook its delusions and enjoy it anyway. Its uneasy combination of working-man drama and noir cynicism does less for the former than it does for the latter, but that manages to give it its unique punch: into the crime-movie soup goes chunks of would-be reality, and if the film is less real than it advertises, it expands the self-contained genre universe to make it more vivid. Call Northside 777 is otherwise unremarkable as a piece of writing and only marginally exciting as picture-making, but its interesting clash of sensibilities makes it highly watchable as a curio–as well as a suggestion of what happens on the recombinant road less travelled.

Undertow (2004) – DVD

April 3, 2005Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Coming of Age, Drama, DVD, Road Movie, Thriller

**½/**** Image A Sound B- Extras A-
starring Jamie Bell, Josh Lucas, Dermot Mulroney, Devon Alan
screenplay by Joe Conway and David Gordon Green
directed by David Gordon Green

Undertowdvdcapby Walter Chaw David Gordon Green's collaboration with cinematographer Tim Orr has borne George Washington and All the Real Girls–fruit from the tree of Americana, nourished at its roots by the twilit legacy of Terrence Malick. Taking its cue from another source, Malick's progenitor Charles Laughton and Laughton's only film as a director, Night of the Hunter, Green's latest, Undertow, just isn't as good as his previous work: it's too sunny at its end, too mannered in its middle, and it fails to live up to the standards both it sets for itself and the limited oeuvre of Green sets for it.

What the Bleep Do We Know!? (2004) – DVD

March 30, 2005Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, Documentary, Drama, DVD, Esoterica, Mystery, Sci-Fi

What the #$*! Do We (K)now!?
*/**** Image B+ Sound A Extras D
starring Marlee Matlin, Elaine Hendrix, Robert Bailey Jr., John Ross Bowie
screenplay by William Arntz, Betsy Chasse and Matthew Hoffman
directed by William Arntz, Betsy Chasse and Mark Vicente

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Watching a bunch of young actresses knock themselves out with their Method masochism, Pauline Kael astutely noted how they “tried to find the motivation [where] actresses of an earlier generation would have merely provided it.” Little did she know that you could extend the exercise to philosophy: in its dogged attempt to confer genius on commonplace ideas, What the Bleep Do We Know!? proves that Method metaphysics is eminently possible. What the film doesn’t do is give us any point of view outside our own noggins, oversimplifying human experience as much as it mystifies it and dressing up self-involvement as enlightenment. It’s a movie that can’t let you see the man behind the curtain, lest you discover that he’s actually Dr. Phil.

Miss Congeniality (2000) [Deluxe Edition] – DVD

March 30, 2005Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, DVD, Romance

*/**** Image B Sound B Extras B-
starring Sandra Bullock, Michael Caine, Benjamin Bratt, Candice Bergen
screenplay by Marc Lawrence & Katie Ford & Caryn Lucas
directed by Donald Petrie

by Walter Chaw It starts pretty early on when a waitress at a Russian restaurant stands in front of a surveillance camera, causing the boys in the van to exclaim that "this broad has two asses!" (hey, if it's good enough for Porky's, right?)–and it's all downhill from there. Donald Petrie's Miss Congeniality has something to do with an ugly, bitter, uncouth woman discovering true happiness (love, career success, respect) by waxing her area and strutting down a runway. Confused? At least. Especially when the ugly woman in question is Sandra Bullock, who has made a career, more or less, out of being the beauty queen you think you have a shot at. The girl who binge eats like a hot dog eating contestant, records SportsCenter, and can still shimmy into her size 4 nightgown becomes a different kind of pornographic fantasy when you need a quick reminder of who has a real penis and who just has a gun–think There's Something About Mary without the irony. A scene before mutt becomes mah-vellous, in which she's watching past beauty queens for tips on how best to go undercover as a pageant contestant and offers a litany of comments on the women's intelligence, isn't so much hilarious as it is mean. And it's made worse by the end of the film, when all of the convenient bimbo stereotypes are bolstered and magnified rather than shown to be unkind shorthand.

After the Sunset (2004) [New Line Platinum Series] – DVD

March 30, 2005Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Drama, DVD, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/**** Image B+ Sound A- Extras B
starring Pierce Brosnan, Salma Hayek, Woody Harrelson, Don Cheadle
screenplay by Paul Zbyszewski and Craig Rosenberg
directed by Brett Ratner

Afterthesunsetdvdcapby Walter Chaw Hard to know by their films whether Michael Bay or Brett Ratner is the bigger asshole, but when cold reaches a certain level it's just cold, so I'm comfortable calling it a draw. Ratner's latest, After the Sunset, is Trouble in Paradise by way of the Pierce Brosnan version of The Thomas Crown Affair: a joyless exercise in the sex-play heist genre featuring a plastic couple for whom, when they first met, it was grand larceny. Along the way, there's enough leering misogyny to satisfy a legion of folks either too young or too afraid of God to go rent some good old-fashioned, red-blooded porn. Audiences for this garbage choose instead to slake their venal lusts, to for a moment calm the roil of inadequacy and self-doubt at the public trough of screaming homophobia, queer gun-fondling, and enough women making bad decisions in front of a camera-wielding man to fill a "Girls Gone Wild" video.

Firewalker (1986) – DVD

March 24, 2005Posted in1980s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, DVD

*½/**** Image A- Sound A
starring Chuck Norris, Lou Gossett, Melody Anderson, Will Sampson
screenplay by Robert Gosnell
directed by J. Lee Thompson

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Of the many right-wing cinematic fantasies of the 1980s, by far the most flagrant and shameless were those of Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus. The Cannon Pictures magnates specialized in white folk dropped in the middle of jungles urban and outback: they gave us freedom fighters in Vietnam (Missing in Action), vigilante crime-fighters (the later entries in the Death Wish saga), and Indiana Jones cross-referenced with his colonial ancestors (King Solomon's Mines, et al). But though they were naked and blatant in their retrograde daydreams, they were also impossible to take seriously: Golan-Globus weren't just jerks, they were inept jerks–slovenly to the point of awe and stupefaction. Firewalker doesn't find them in top ludicrous form, but its childlike belief in both outdated stereotypes and papier-mâché sets facilitates a drinking game quite nicely.

The Cat Returns (2002) – DVD

March 24, 2005Posted in2000s, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD, Family, Japan, Romance

***/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
screenplay by Reiko Yoshida
directed by Hiroyuki Morita

by Walter Chaw With the frantic, infernal energy (and cats) and even a little of the barbed social satire of Mikhail Bulgakov's Master and Margarita, Hayao Miyazaki protégé Hiroyuki Morita's directorial debut The Cat Returns is undone a little by its hysteria but salvaged by its artistry and smarts. A familiar tale for fans of Studio Ghibli, the film follows plucky schoolgirl Haru (Chizuru Ikewaki in the Japanese track, Anne Hathaway in the English dub) as she saves a mysterious grey cat from certain flattening, thus earning her the dubious boon of eternal gratitude from the Cat King (Tetsuro Tamba & Tim Curry). After being cursed with a yard-full of cattails, a pocketful of catnip, and a locker-full of gift-wrapped mice, Haru receives the ultimate prize of betrothal to the Cat Prince (Takayuki Yamada & Andrew Bevis)–a fate she seeks to avoid with the help of portly kitty Muta (Tetsu Watanabe & Peter Boyle) and the stately Baron (Yoshihiko Hakamada & Cary Elwes). Haru's journey is essentially one of perspective as she evolves from a silly sort of girl into a person who's learned to trust that her instincts are good and that her courage is, indeed, up to snuff.

Fat Albert (2004) – DVD

March 23, 2005Posted in2000s, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Family, Fantasy

***/**** Image A Sound A- Extras C
starring Kenan Thompson, Kyla Pratt, Dania Ramirez, Bill Cosby
screenplay by William H. Cosby, Jr. & Charles Kipps
directed by Joel Zwick

by Bill Chambers The memory I have of watching Bill Cosby's "Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids" as a wee lad is that it always left me a little bit depressed, like listening to Jim Croce's "Time in a Bottle" or dining at the Ponderosa restaurant. (Doesn't "ponderosa" mean "weighty" in English?) Subtext is a kind of phantom presence when you're five or six years old: you're too young to be able to read it but also young enough that you've not yet been blinded by anti-intellectualism to everything below the surface. I realize now that it was probably through the Saturday-morning buzzkill of "Fat Albert…" that I became cognizant of poverty, and just the fact that the show was populated with an all-black cast of ragamuffins (almost all of whom suffered from learning disabilities) took the patronizing sting out of its NBC Life Lessons–it was less pious than it was possessed of an old soul. I'm happy to report that Fat Albert, an anachronism of a live-action feature film based on the long-running (and long-cancelled) cartoon, captures a lot of its source's melancholy appeal. Moreover, its ideas are provocative verging on profound, although they're shackled to a sketchy screenplay (by Cosby and Charles Kipps) and an aesthetic that is as paint-by-numbers as the animation that inspired it. No surprise that director Joel Zwick hails from television–multi-camera sitcoms, to be precise.