The Notebook (2004) [New Line Platinum Series] – DVD

February 15, 2005Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Romance

½*/**** Image A Sound A Extras A
starring Ryan Gosling, Rachel McAdams, James Garner, Gena Rowlands
screenplay by Jeremy Leven, based on the novel by Nicholas Sparks
directed by Nick Cassavetes

by Walter Chaw Ah, Nicholas Sparks. I once saw an interview with Nicholas Sparks in which he accused literary critics of envying his success, thus shedding light on the consistently bad reviews he's gotten throughout his career while failing to explain why he got terrible reviews for his debut novel as well. Nor does this explain how it is that someone who's barely literate himself could have understood his critics enough to feel offended–after all, Sparks's admirers certainly aren't reading the reviews. In fact, that movie executives appear to be among Sparks's biggest fans (The Notebook is the third faithfully awful adaptation of a Sparks opus–two more to go) says a lot about both movie executives and Sparks's books.

Gunga Din (1939) – DVD

February 10, 2005Posted in1930s, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD, War

*/**** Image B- Sound C Extras A
starring Cary Grant, Victor McLaglen, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., Joan Fontaine
screenplay by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, based on the poem by Rudyard Kipling
directed by George Stevens

by Walter Chaw To say that George Stevens's Gunga Din hasn't aged well overlooks the cold reality that the best one could ever say for it is that its hinges were once merely creaky instead of frozen. (It also presupposes that being a decent, moral person meant something different in 1939 than it does in 2005.) The picture is almost impossible to watch for a modern audience: the characterizations are broad and insulting; the dialogue strongly suggests that Rudyard Kipling's poems should be left untransmogrified (even by William Faulkner–deep in the sauce when it came his turn) into filmic narrative; and the attitude towards empiricism and oppressed native populations on display was always condescending and appalling for anyone not currently being shot at.

Mean Creek (2004) – DVD

February 9, 2005Posted in****/****, 2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Coming of Age, Crime, Drama, DVD, FFC Must-Own, Teen

****/**** Image A+ Sound A- Extras B-
starring Rory Culkin, Ryan Kelley, Scott Mechlowicz, Trevor Morgan
written and directed by Jacob Aaron Estes

Mustownby Walter Chaw Mean Creek is poised at the magic hour of the death of innocence. It deals in corruption like a maggot will, burrowing and gnawing its way through true fauna to take its sustenance in its blithe, indifferent way from the dying of the light. The film represents in its existence and function a transitional vehicle between the end of life and rebirth. In Mean Creek, a slug crawls across cold flesh in a quiet, crepuscular moment; a snail (similar/different) is punished an instant later by a clear-eyed little girl, completing her exile from Paradise in a stroke remarkably brutal not necessarily for the act, but for the freshness of the stain on the perpetrator. The picture's title refers not to malevolence, but to a nature metaphor that works as the centre-point–the protean "mean"–between two extremes. It is that ever-tilting line that marks childhood's end: mercurial, sure, yet as substantial and rude as a brick wall.

The American Astronaut (2001) – DVD

February 8, 2005Posted in****/****, 2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD, Esoterica, FFC Must-Own, Musical, Sci-Fi

****/**** Image B Sound A Extras A-
starring Cory McAbee, Rocco Sisto, Gregory Russell Cook, Annie Golden
written and directed by Cory McAbee

by Walter Chaw Opening with a mordant prologue that reminds of the expressionless absurdist sensibility of the late Douglas Adams and proceeding through something somewhere between Six-String Samurai and Dead Man (but a science-fiction musical), Cory McAbee’s The American Astronaut is dead brilliant. Demonstrating a truly dazzling level of technical proficiency (despite or due to what must have been a non-budget) and a breathless creativity fecund and macabre, the picture reminds of Harlan Ellison, Dr. Strangelove, and Dark Star in equal measure. Ultimately, The American Astronaut is something all its own, a film that sets itself up as an old-fashioned serial and goes on to explore cinematic and literary theory with a keen eye for composition and an ear for mad scenario and perverse dialogue. The reasoning is Beckett, the execution is Brecht and Weill, and the results are best described as an educational reel directed by David Lynch circa Eraserhead: self-aware and hallucinatory.

Project Runway: The Complete First Season (2004) – DVD

February 8, 2005Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD, Television

Image A Sound B+ Extras C+
"Innovation," "Vision," "Commercial Appeal," "Collaboration," "'Model' Clients," "Making a Splash," "Design a Collection," "Postal Uniform Challenge," "Design for the Red Carpet," "Reunion Show," "Fashion Week"

by Walter Chaw It's easy to get frustrated with the Brothers Weinstein and, to paraphrase someone wittier than me talking about Kevin Smith (one of Miramax's pet directors), how they single-handedly turned independent film into the Special Olympics, but I confess I like their "productive" reality shows, "Project Greenlight" and "Project Runway". The end-result may be no better than that of a "productive cough," but the processes in these shows–the labours the contestants are forced to endure and the idea that the product of those labours will be presented for us, the schadenfreudians, to take our pokes at–is brilliant. What better way to pass the time, after all, than to observe homosexual men and castrating women engaged in arcane pursuits and then judge the arcane outcome of said pursuits, with equal portions of disdain and rapture of the unknown the only qualifications with which we're armed?

Mulan II (2004) – DVD

February 7, 2005Posted in2000s, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, Disney, DVD, Family, Fantasy, Japan, Musical

**½/**** Image A Sound A Extras C-
directed by Darrell Rooney, Lynne Southerland

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Let it be known that Mulan II is out on DVD, and that it's surprisingly good. The House That Walt Built appears to have learned from its early, awful forays into the direct-to-video realm and decided to put a little elbow grease (not to mention money) into these glorified policy redemptions; once you get past its pitifully limited research of actual Chinese culture (no mean feat, believe me), you can't help but notice that the movie looks stellar. Content-wise, it's a decent, if not great, do-what-makes-you-happy message picture slightly curtailed by its minuscule running time and bolstered by a couple of songs that sound like somebody cared how they turned out. Nothing in Mulan II is brilliant, but it's a couple of notches above eyewash–and just smart enough not to drive unwilling parents completely insane. I can think of worse things to show your attention-deficient knee-biter.

Greg the Bunny (2002) + Crank Yankers – Uncensored: Season One (2002) – DVDs

February 3, 2005Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD, Television

GREG THE BUNNY
Image A Sound B Extras B
"Welcome to Sweetknuckle Junction," "Sock Like Me," "Dottie Heat," "SK-2.0," "Piddler on the Roof," "Rabbit Redux," "Father & Son Reunion," "Jimmy Drives Gil Crazy," "Greg Gets Puppish," "Surprise!," "The Jewel Heist," "The Singing Mailman," "Blah Bawls"

CRANK YANKERS – UNCENSORED: SEASON ONE
Image A Sound B Extras C-
episodes 1-10

by Walter Chaw What is it about puppets, exactly, that makes them the preferred avatars for children as they navigate the murky straits between childhood and adulthood? I'd hazard that there's a simplifying element to them, some sort of leavening of the peculiarities of human expression so that emotions aren't so subtle, so fraught with the landmines of nuance and subtlety. They're great teaching tools, the perfect bearer of allegory–hence the Japanese, with their tradition of sophisticated puppet theatre, have distilled it (as they have animation) into an adult medium. But in the western world, puppets are so embedded in our puerile, formative experiences (from "Sesame Street" to "Bear in the Big Blue House") that when they're subverted (as in Team America, for instance), there's something particularly naughty about it–above and beyond, perhaps, the specific offense. Alas, it can only hold its illicit thrill until the novelty and surprise of it wears off.

Ice Station Zebra (1968) – DVD

February 2, 2005Posted in1960s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, DVD, Thriller

**½/**** Image A- Sound A Extras C
starring Rock Hudson, Ernest Borgnine, Patrick McGoohan, Jim Brown
screenplay by Douglas Heyes, based on the novel by Alistair MacLean
directed by John Sturges

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Imagine a lobotomized, irony-free Antonioni relocating White Desert to the North Pole and you'll have a hint of the freakishly chilled formalism that drives John Sturges's Ice Station Zebra. So consumed is it with the gleam of grey steel and the snap of pale Styrofoam that it chucks all considerations of pacing, character development, and ideological orientation. It's a thriller without thrills, a drama without drama, a cold-war bromide barely aware of what hemisphere it's in; all it knows is that the cold, clean surfaces of metal and ice are pretty pretty pretty (please don't touch me). But despite its trouncing of the basics of pop excitement, the picture makes a surprisingly good case for its necrophiliac obsession. Considering the standard-issue material it has to work with, it at least succeeds as an anomaly where a regular production would have failed as hackwork.

Kingdom Hospital: The Entire Series (2004) – DVD

February 2, 2005Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Drama, DVD, Horror, Mystery, Stephen King, Television

Image A Sound A Extras B
"Thy Kingdom Come," "Death's Kingdom," "Goodbye Kiss," "The West Side Of Midnight," "Hook's Kingdom," "The Young And The Headless," "Black Noise," "Heartless," "Butterfingers," "The Passion Of Reverend Jimmy," "Seizure Day," "Shoulda Stood In Bed," "Finale"

by Walter Chaw The sort of program you want other people to see in the same way you want someone else to smell how spoiled the milk is, the 13-part, 10-hour, Stephen King-scripted adaptation of Lars Von Trier's brilliant Danish miniseries "Riget" (a.k.a. "The Kingdom") is only as bloated, ridiculous, and incompetent as the rest of the master of terror's last decade of work. Auto-cannibalistic like his protagonist in "Survivor Type" and pitched as a cross between "E.R." and, one presumes, the TV version of King's "The Shining" (while playing like a community theatre rendition of "The Singing Detective"), "Kingdom Hospital" is awkward at best and eye-clawing hokum at its worst. There's no other way to describe a talking CGI anteater called "Antubis" (after the Egyptian god of death Annubis, I'm thinking) that fights a Depression-era vampire in the bowels of the titular place of healing. A spooky little girl à la The Shining (played by a terrible kid actor à la Danny from Kubrick's The Shining) describes him this way: "He eats disease, he likes to be scratched behind the ears. He's horrible. Beautiful." Yep.

No Vacancy (1999) – DVD

January 26, 2005Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Romance

½*/**** Image B Sound B-
starring Lolita Davidovich, Timothy Olyphant, Christina Ricci, Tom Todoroff
written and directed by Marius Balchunas

by Walter Chaw You watch No Vacancy the same way you watch a triathlon, in that it's not an enjoyable viewing experience by any conventional standards, but you find the participants' dedication in completing what experiential evidence suggests is an odious, exceedingly unpleasant task stimulating just the same. As a normal person would quit five minutes in, it's the pluck that fascinates, that willingness to say and do fabulously stupid things during the audition process or the production itself to honour the craft of acting, even if the project that houses it dishonours the craft of filmmaking.

Random Harvest (1942) – DVD

January 25, 2005Posted in1940s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Drama, DVD, Romance

***/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras A-
starring Ronald Colman, Greer Garson, Philip Dorn, Susan Peters
screenplay by Claudine West, George Froeschell and Arthur Wimperis
directed by Mervyn LeRoy

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Random Harvest isn't really a good movie, but it's strangely satisfying. Though its double-amnesia contrivance would perhaps embarrass an episode of "Diff'rent Strokes", it's impossible not to be a little touched–if not by a literal interpretation of the plot, then by the yearning for the titanic reconciliation facilitated by its crisis. As it takes away, gives back, and takes away again in its narrative rush to final release, the film's grasp of the Freudian fort/da dynamic becomes prime fodder for a Psych-101 term paper. You're never sure which part of the equation is more important, but its primitive game of deprivation and wish fulfilment is too powerful to dismiss. And while Random Harvest borders on camp, it's sincere (or oblivious) enough not to cross the line.

Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence (2004); Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (2004); Time of the Wolf (2003)|Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (2004) [Special Collector’s Edition – Widescreen] – DVD

January 24, 2005Posted in****/****, 2000s, Action, Adventure, Animation, Austria, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

イノセンス
Innocence
Inosensu: Innocence
****/****
written and directed by Mamoru Oshii

SKY CAPTAIN AND THE WORLD OF TOMORROW
**½/**** Image A Sound A Extras A
starring Jude Law, Gwyneth Paltrow, Angelina Jolie, Giovanni Ribisi
written and directed by Kerry Conran

Le Temps du loup
****/****
starring Isabelle Huppert, Béatrice Dalle, Patrice Chéreau, Rona Hartner
written and directed by Michael Haneke

Skyghostwolfby Walter Chaw For me, the most intoxicating visions of the future are those in which we’re drowning in an ocean of our past–garbage, wreckage, Romes burned to a cinder and heaped against the new Meccas of our collective tomorrows. Star Wars proffered a kind of aesthetic of dirt that appealed: a wonderland where the spaceships looked like they’d been flown and there were places like Mos Eisley that reeked of stale liquor, sawdust, and cigarettes. (The distance that George Lucas has gone to disinfect his grubby vision of the future is the same distance that esteem for the franchise has fallen amongst all but the most die-hard chattel.) Among the spearhead of a group of artists who redefined the science-fiction genre in film the same way that Sergio Leone and Sam Peckinpah scuffed-up the western in the Sixties, Ridley Scott evolved the idea of a functional future, with his Alien and Blade Runner serving as visual echoes of T.S. Eliot’s broken stones and fragments shored against our ruins. Terry Gilliam defined the aesthetic when describing his rationale for the look of Brazil (1985): he wanted it to seem as though the whole century had been compacted into a single moment. The timeless “someday soon” that is always just around a corner that never comes.

Deep Impact (1998) [Special Collector’s Edition] – DVD

January 20, 2005Posted in1990s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Sci-Fi, Spielberg

*/**** Image B+ Sound A Extras B
starring Robert Duvall, Téa Leoni, Elijah Wood, Vanessa Redgrave
screenplay by Bruce Joel Rubin and Michael Tolkin
directed by Mimi Leder

by Walter Chaw Filthy as it is with TV stars past and present, it comes as no surprise that Deep Impact plays almost exactly like a movie-of-the-week grafted onto one of those stars-gone-to-seed-studded Seventies disaster flicks. Helmed by veteran TV director Mimi Leder in somehow small-screen-friendly Panavision (that she manages to make her panoramic establishing shots look like the stock transitions in any episode of "Hart to Hart" should be included in a textbook somewhere), the picture goes through the motions–from discovery of the peril by naïfs to the involvement of the Internet to the slow-in-coming participation of the powers that be–of a genre most recently (and faithfully) resurrected by The Day After Tomorrow. Both movies finding their way to DVD within a couple weeks of each other (Deep Impact in a freshly-minted "Special Collector's Edition") isn't, I'd wager, serendipity so much as an opportunity on the one side to capitalize on a semi-blockbuster.

Nobody’s Fool (1986) – DVD

January 19, 2005Posted in1980s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Romance

**/**** Image A- Sound A-
starring Rosanna Arquette, Eric Roberts, Mare Winningham, Jim Youngs
screenplay by Beth Henley
directed by Evelyn Purcell

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover I haven't very much to say about 1986's Nobody's Fool (no relation to the 1936 or 1994 films of the same name), a Southern-set romantic saga in which a young woman named Jessie (Rosanna Arquette) must either reconcile with lost ex-boyfriend Billy (Jim Youngs) and the dead-end small town he represents, or blow away into the frightening unknown with travelling stagehand Riley (Eric Roberts). No guessing how it ends up: as one suitor is played by Eric Roberts and the other is not, it's pretty obvious what's going to go down long before it actually does. Also in Riley's/Roberts's corner is that everyone in the town of Buckeye–a cultural backwater that's destructive to free souls like Jessie's–is either completely loathsome (such as Billy, who deserted poor Jessie when she got pregnant) or dismissive (such as Jessie's mother, played by Louise Fletcher with superb restraint). In a narrative sense, it's all as surprising as snow in January.

Family Guy: The Freakin’ Sweet Collection – DVD

January 18, 2005Posted in2000s, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD, Satire, Television

Image A+ Sound A Extras A
"When You Wish Upon a Weinstein," "Road to Rhode Island," "To Live and Die in Dixie," "I Am Peter, Hear Me Roar," "Lethal Weapons"

by Walter Chaw Possibly the most consistently appalling television show in the history of network television, Seth MacFarlane's "Family Guy" has a scary intelligence and a willingness to go places that most popular entertainment fears to tread. It's inspiring, is what I'm saying, and I put it on whenever I feel afraid to take my shots at the inexplicable sacred cow of the moment. I'm not sure how "Family Guy" survived for three seasons on Fox (actually, it sort of didn't: Bombarded with hate and diapers following the alleged series finale, the net allowed a selectively censored third season), but a precedent-setting fourth season, which will begin airing on Fox in May of this year, serves as a reminder that however many people have a conniption over Janet's tit, there are two million fewer of us who flinch at the moment of crisis, too, but in anticipation of the backlash instead of at the event itself. For what it's worth, "Family Guy" has picked up the baton from "The Simpsons" as the most relevant and daring adult entertainment. Take it with a healthy dose of "The Daily Show" and you're well on your way to developing pathos and irony.

Circle of Iron (1978) – DVD

January 11, 2005Posted in1970s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Blue Underground, DVD, Fantasy, Martial Arts

The Silent Flute
**½/**** Image A- Sound A Extras A-
starring David Carradine, Anthony De Longis, Carl Maynard, Erica Creer
screenplay by Stirling Silliphant and Stanley Mann
directed by Richard Moore

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover You can't exactly call The Silent Flute a good movie. This "mystical" martial-arts extravaganza, an early pet project of Bruce Lee that he abandoned after becoming too famous to care, is pompous in its pretensions and shallow in its follow-through, which under normal circumstances would damn it to well-deserved ridicule. But there's something strangely poignant about its stumblebum view of Zen, filtered as it is through a bunch of well-meaning Hollywood westerners bending over backwards to honour something they don't understand. The sheer earnestness of the thing wins your begrudging respect–it's brave enough to be what it wants to be even if it doesn't really know what that is. Somewhere, Jack Smith is smiling.

The Forgotten (2004) – DVD

January 10, 2005Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Thriller

**½/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
starring Julianne Moore, Dominic West, Gary Sinise, Alfre Woodard
screenplay by Gerald DiPego
directed by Joseph Ruben

Forgottendvdcapby Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. I couldn't really understand at the time why Dark City didn't arouse imaginations. I resented the following year's The Matrix for stealing some of Dark City's thunder; I blamed a lack of vision and a general disdain for genre. Now I wonder if it wasn't a matter of the film coming out a few years ahead of its time. Maybe it was just too light for the Age of Irony. Maybe it was too apocalyptic a vision for a people who had yet to experience an apocalypse in their own backyard. But there are certain prescient pictures that point north, films like The Truman Show that I underestimated like I thought everyone else underestimated Dark City, or films that remain underestimated, such as Strange Days and Twelve Monkeys, Terry Gilliam's most uncompromising film since Brazil. It's the duty of some movies to draw the outlines in chalk, set the groundwork, dig the foundation for the way that speculative fiction will seek to define this culture in the aftermath of an inflamed fault line even before the dime drops. Just before Y2K, we dug ourselves into cinematic bunkers in preparation for some kind of technological apocalypse. Who would have suspected that the shape of our crucible would be not faulty microchips and mainframes, but assault rifles, airplanes, leadership without vision, and children without protection from leadership without vision?

The Village (2004) [VISTA Series – Widescreen] – DVD

January 10, 2005Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: M. Night Shyamalan, Drama, DVD, Mystery, Thriller

½*/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras B
starring Bryce Dallas Howard, Joaquin Phoenix, Adrien Brody, William Hurt
written and directed by M. Night Shyamalan

by Walter Chaw M. Night Shyamalan’s films have become life support systems for his twists–empty, ponderous, self-righteous shells of ideas carried by cadaverous actors speaking in contraction-less sentences and spectral tones. He seems with Signs and now The Village to be espousing some kind of insane puritanical religion–call it the Church of Shyamalan, where the real world is too loutish a place for his gallery of close-mouthed martyrs, who exist in specially-created Hitchcockian microverses as airless as they are unlikely. It’s not too much of a stretch to begin to view his mission as one where he challenges his East Indian self to make his increasingly self-aggrandizing cameos as difficult as possible. Philadelphia? No problem. Hooterville, PA–a little tougher. Turn of the century Amish-town? Byzantine, to say the least.

Party of Five: The Complete First Season (1994-1995) – DVD

January 7, 2005Posted in1990s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Drama, DVD, Family, Television

Image B- Sound B+ Extras C+
"Pilot," "Homework," "Good Sports," "Worth Waiting For," "All's Fair," "Fathers and Sons," "Much Ado," "Kiss Me Kate," "Something Out of Nothing," "Thanksgiving," "Private Lives," "Grownups," "Not Fade Away," "It's Not Easy Being Green," "Aftershocks," "In Loco Parentis," "Who Cares?," "Brother's Keeper," "The Trouble with Charlie," "All-Nighters," "The Ides of March"

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover It's strange that the term "afterschool special" has hung on as a pejorative long after the death of the form it officially describes. But in a sense, it never really did leave us: hanging over much dramatic television is the spectre of issues raised but never dealt with, pain stated but never felt, emotions described without being expressed. There's a little Afterschool spirit in most hour-longs, hovering as they do over the abyss of controversy into which artistic personnel love to gaze and which the front office lives to deny. Still, the mid-'90s drama "Party of Five" is an especially bizarre example of this sort of bet-hedging and trading off, taking as it does hugely traumatic events and making them seem as threatening and life-changing as a trip to Disneyland. It's a spectacular display of cake-having and cake-eating-too that defines the Afterschool mentality, ensuring that it will raise issues without dealing with them honestly.

Judgment at Nuremberg (1961) [Special Edition] – DVD

January 6, 2005Posted in1960s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, War

***/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Spencer Tracy, Burt Lancaster, Richard Widmark, Marlene Dietrich
screenplay by Abby Mann
directed by Stanley Kramer

by Walter Chaw By the end of the Fifties, the toll of about two decades of mainstream entertainment steadfast in its studied inoffensiveness catalyzed a movement in film and televison ("The Twilight Zone", one of the most politically-charged TV series in history, launched in 1959) that, fuelled by the twin prods of the death of Louis B. Mayer (the last of the studio moguls) and the discovery of Ed Gein's naughtiness in his wood shed (both in 1957), began to redefine what it meant to be "real." (One freed the artists, the other seemed to inspire them.) The new turks of the New Hollywood were Steve McQueen and Paul Newman, a real jerk and a screen jerk, respectively–self-serving, self-satisfied Old Glory jackanapes-next-door who embodied the theory of the antihero. And they put it in context of the blue-eyed, milk-fed, horse-kicked average Joe, the guy you wanted to be or wanted to bed, not just because they were dead sexy, but also because they were the future. You cast your lot in the Sixties with the rebels and didn't do a lot of apologizing for it.