I Confess (1953) – DVD

December 12, 2004Posted in****/****, 1950s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Crime, Directors: Alfred Hitchcock, Drama, DVD, Thriller

****/**** Image B Sound B Extras B
starring Montgomery Clift, Anne Baxter, Karl Malden, Brian Aherne
screenplay by George Tabori and William Archibald
directed by Alfred Hitchcock

by Walter Chaw Just the visual beauty of Alfred Hitchcock's I Confess speaks volumes for its inclusion on the short list of the master's masterpieces. This is one of the most astonishing-looking films in all of black-and-white cinematography, its palette of greys a veritable vice press on the already-quailing Montgomery Clift. A late, breathtaking montage wherein Clift, walking the streets of Quebec (filmed on location by the great Robert Burks), crosses a silhouette of a statue of Christ on His last walk to Calvary defines by itself character and theme: Hitchcock's wrong-man obsession clarified as Catholic guilt transference. The power of Hitchcock's best films is a potent mixture of audacious cinematic genius and the suspicion that original sin makes mistaken identity merely the intrusion of cosmic judgment. (It's inevitable and you must have done something at some point to deserve it, besides.) There's something greater at work in Hitchcock's films, the presence of the director asserting itself always–and a connection is struck in I Confess between that directorial control and a sort of implacable karmic omnipresence. For Hitch, filmmaking is Old Testament stuff, and I Confess is a little of that old-time religion.

Sleepover (2004) [Special Edition] – DVD

December 1, 2004Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD, Family, Romance

*/**** Image A Sound A Extras C-
starring Alexa Vega, Mika Boorem, Jane Lynch, Sara Paxton
screenplay by Elisa Bell
directed by Joe Nussbaum

Sleepoverdvdcapby Walter Chaw Okay, I admit it: I'm fascinated by Joe Nussbaum's squirmy, sleazy Sleepover, a comedy for kids so queasy in its conception and execution that I'm reasonably certain it qualifies as child abuse in most states. It's not as bad as the Olsen Twins' New York Minute, mainly because it isn't disgustingly racist in addition to disturbingly paedophilic–but I have a sneaking suspicion that Sleepover engages in with some measure of cunning what New York Minute engages in recklessly. It's thus better than the evil 13 Going on 30 as well, though not nearly as good as the only so-so Mean Girls, marking it as one of those pieces of swill whose chief claim to glory is that it's subversive for adult audiences. Tragically, Sleepover is pitched at 'tweens, and the only adults likely to see it are either parents stupid enough to rent it to watch with their children or critics stupid enough to review it themselves in lieu of running Kevin Thomas's predictably lonesome positive review off the wire.

National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation 2: Cousin Eddie’s Island Adventure (2003); National Lampoon’s Holiday Reunion (2003); Dorm Daze (2004) – DVDs

November 29, 2004Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Canada, Comedy, Crime, DVD, Mystery, Romance, Television

Christmas Vacation 2: Cousin Eddie's Island Adventure
½*/****
 Image B Sound B Extras F
starring Randy Quaid, Miriam Flynn, Dana Barron, Jake Thomas
screenplay by Matty Simmons
directed by Nick Marick

Thanksgiving Family Reunion
ZERO STARS/**** Image B+ Sound B
starring Bryan Cranston, Judge Reinhold, Hallie Todd, Penelope Ann Miller
screenplay by Marc Warren & Dennis Rinsler
directed by Neal Isreal

DORM DAZE
*/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras C
starring Tatyana Ali, Botti Bliss, James DeBello, Marieh Delfino
screenplay by Patrick Casey, Worm Miller
directed by David Hillenbrand and Scott Hillenbrand

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Did anybody ever actually read NATIONAL LAMPOON? That question occurred to me while contemplating the idea of reviewing three recent, awful exploitations of the magazine's name, and I came to the conclusion that I've never met anybody who in fact had. Maybe I was slightly too young to know the rag's heyday, for all I remember were the movies stamped with their logo–and it's largely through the popularity of Animal House and the Vacation series that most of the non-snarky population felt their influence. Whatever its content as a publication, it sold tickets for a good stretch–but decades have passed and the Lampoon brand has lost its currency, meaning it's been largely reduced to whoring itself out to low-grade imitations of past successes. Thus we have the ignominy of National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation 2 (relegated to television), Holiday Reunion (cable), and Dorm Daze (more or less straight-to-video), all of which cost money better spent on special editions of National Lampoon's glory-days titles.

Dawson’s Creek: The Complete Fourth Season (2000-2001) – DVD

November 29, 2004Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Coming of Age, Drama, DVD, Teen, Television

Image B- Sound B+ Extras B-
"Coming Home," "Failing Down," "Two Gentlemen of Capeside," "Future Tense," "A Family Way," "Great Xpectations," "You Had Me at Goodbye," "The Unusual Suspects," "Kiss Kiss Bang Bang," "Self Reliance," "The Tao of Dawson," "The Te of Pacey," "Hopeless," "A Winter's Tale," "Four Stories," "Mind Games," "Admissions," "Eastern Standard Time," "Late," "Promicide," "Separation Anxiety," "The Graduate," "Coda"

by Bill Chambers SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. "Dawson's Creek" recuperated from the departure of Kevin Williamson in time to mastermind the series' shrewdest tangent yet, that which brought Joey (Katie Holmes) and Pacey (Joshua Jackson) together as boyfriend/girlfriend. Stoking the fourth and smoothest season of the show, the growing pains of that initially illicit union are deftly drawn within the parameters of entertainment for–I shan't kid myself–the young and the docile. Indeed, year four of "Dawson's Creek" is arguably the first (and, unfortunately, indisputably the last) in which all of the protagonists are recognizably human at regular intervals–even the series floaters are not their customarily boorish selves, with the exception of a snobby yacht club proprietor (Carolyn Hennesy) whom the creators just as admirably demonstrate no urge to redeem. (Of course, they can't resist a few geek-revenge moments at her expense.) Most of the season's missteps are, tellingly, not only a by-product of striking out into fairly virgin territory (literally, in some cases), but also harbingers as ominous as black cats and broken mirrors of "Dawson's Creek"'s downward spiral once the action moved from fictional Capeside to refinished sets posing as Boston.

Eloise at Christmastime (2003) – DVD

November 26, 2004Posted in2000s, Adventure, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Christmas, Comedy, Disney, Drama, DVD, Family, Television, UK

***/**** Image B Sound B+ Extras B+
starring Julie Andrews, Sofia Vassilieva, Kenneth Welsh, Debra Monk
screenplay by Elizabeth Chandler, based on the book written by Kay Thompson & illustrated by Hilary Knight
directed by Kevin Lima

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Last year around this time, I was expressing my surprise (and perhaps embarrassment) at having actually enjoyed Disney's first Eloise TV movie, Eloise at the Plaza. For once, the Mouse House had perpetrated something that was cleverly conceived, skilfully shot, and lacking in the mushy sentiment that oozes out of many a Disney enterprise. But the jaded cynic in me was wary of the sequel, Eloise at Christmastime, which, if only to salvage my integrity, I hoped would be a cheap quickie riding on the success of the original. No such luck: Eloise at Christmastime is every bit the effervescent piece of fluff that its predecessor is. Once again director Kevin Lima has sized up the limitations of the material and obscured them with a fleet-footed visual wit, creating one of the few Christmas specials you can watch without wincing.

D.A.R.Y.L. (1985) – DVD

November 23, 2004Posted in1980s, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD, Family, Sci-Fi, UK

½*/**** Image B Sound D
starring Mary Beth Hurt, Michael McKean, Kathryn Walker, Colleen Camp
screenplay by David Ambrose & Allan Scott and Jeffrey Ellis
directed by Simon Wincer

by Walter Chaw D.A.R.Y.L. is nigh unwatchable mid-Eighties fantasy dreck–toss this one on the scrap pile with Condorman and Krull. Its main character, a "Data Analyzing Robot Youth Lifeform" acronymistically nicknamed Daryl (Barret Oliver), is lost in an opening helicopter chase like the dog in John Carpenter's The Thing before the film proceeds to rip-off every other '80s sci-fi flick that preceded it (Starman, E.T., The Last Starfighter, War Games, Firefox, and on and on). Daryl is discovered by a kindly elderly couple (the requisite Superman steal), placed in the foster care of preternaturally sunny Mr. & Mrs. Richardson (Michael McKean and Mary Beth Hurt), and then goes on to be really good at Atari, baseball, and picking up bad habits from his chubby, sewer-mouthed little pal Turtle (Danny Corkill). Then the MIBs come a-knockin', natch.

Chastity (1969) – DVD

November 23, 2004Posted in1960s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Drama, DVD, Road Movie, Romance

½*/**** Image B Sound B
starring Cher, Barbara London, Stephen Whittaker, Tom Nolan
screenplay by Sonny Bono
directed by Alessio de Paola

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover There is nothing more dangerous than a cuddly celebrity with avant-garde pretensions. The idea of a cheesy popular entertainer pouring his heart into something "serious" and "artistic" is wrong on so many levels: not only does it usually show him up as ignorant of the good work in the field he wants to hijack, but it also denigrates the deflationary appeal of what he actually does well. Normally the result just falls flat on its face, but with a little flamboyance–as in the case of William Shatner's "Transformed Man" album–the effort can result in a camp howler of uncommon magnitude. That would likewise be the fate of Chastity, a Sonny Bono-penned opus meant to endow his then-paramour Cher with the gravitas she clearly lacked on their variety show. With every (drunken, staggering) motion it takes towards significance, Chastity gets further and further away from it. We're talking planets.

Straw Dogs (1971) – DVD

November 22, 2004Posted in****/****, 1970s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, DVD, Horror, Revenge, Thriller, UK

****/**** Image B Sound B
starring Dustin Hoffman, Susan George, Peter Vaughan, T.P. McKenna
screenplay by David Zelag Goodman and Sam Peckinpah, based on the novel The Siege of Trencher's Farm by Gordon M. Williams
directed by Sam Peckinpah

by Walter Chaw Straw Dogs is about an evil man who has so divorced himself from animal logic that he's become monstrous. He's cruel to his wife, comparing her to a child when she's lonesome and an animal when she's amorous, and he blames her for his detachment from himself. She gets impatient during foreplay if he chooses to take a moment to set his alarm or remove his watch, ergo she must be a nymphomaniac of low breeding. At one point, she mischievously changes a "plus" sign on his chalkboard to a minus and he changes it back so that it looks like a crucifix: the instrument of his martyrdom, the faith of his castration–the ideology that seeks to isolate him from his bestial nature. Finally, when she wishes to run away, he loses his grip on carefully-nurtured civilization, slaps her across the face, and orders her upstairs to the bedroom in the same way that Victorian women were banished from the room upon outliving the delight provided by their servile domesticity. This monster moves to a small Cornish village, where he insists on the creature comforts of home, paid for by a grant to study mathematics, of all things. And in the village the monster ultimately finds himself amongst men of a truer nature.

The Complete Gidget Collection – DVD

November 19, 2004Posted in1950s, 1960s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD, Romance

GIDGET (1959)
***/**** Image F Sound C
starring Sandra Dee, Cliff Robertson, James Darren, Arthur O'Connell
screenplay by Gabrielle Upton, based on the novel by Frederick Kohner
directed by Paul Wendkos

GIDGET GOES HAWAIIAN (1961)
*/**** Image D+ Sound C
starring James Darren, Michael Callan, Deborah Walley, Carl Reiner
screenplay by Ruth Brooks Flippen
directed by Paul Wendkos

GIDGET GOES TO ROME (1961)
**/**** Image D+ Sound C
starring James Darren, Jessie Royce Landis, Cesare Danova, Danielle De Metz
screenplay by Ruth Brooks Flippen, Katherine and Dale Eunson
directed by Paul Wendkos

by Walter Chaw Breaking the cresting wave of surf films that ran as counter-programming to the medium-cool cinema of the early Sixties, 1959's Gidget, despite finding itself as the bane of the real surf counterculture, is a surprisingly dark-hued entry into the evolution of generational rebellion that heralded the new-real of the coming decade. It works as a sunnier mirror to the next year's West Side Story, likewise spinning off from a tomboy's infiltration of an insular boys' club to examine some of the friction that exists between the staged artificiality of Old Hollywood and the grittier verisimilitude of the American new wave. As grizzled beach bum The Big Kahuna, for instance, Cliff Robertson has a thousand-yard stare, a couple of tours in Korea under his belt, and a disturbing rape/pedophilia moment wherein he realizes that his life of retreat is all of glittering sun-kissed surfaces and carefully-waxed emptiness. Kahuna's surrender to the bourgeois is more The Wild One and Rebel Without a Cause than it is Psycho and Hud, but therein lies the embryonic hint of the theme that drives Sixties films: acceding to Mrs. Bates makes you a psycho.

Dolls (2002) – DVD

November 18, 2004Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Japan, Romance

***/**** Image B+ Sound B
starring Miho Kanno, Hidetoshi Nishijima, Tatsuya Mihashi, Chieko Matsubara
written and directed by Takeshi Kitano

by Walter Chaw Dolls is beautiful–that much can be expected from Japanese director Takeshi Kitano. It's meticulously-framed, interested in theatre, obsessed with the ocean, and stately in a way that re-establishes Kitano as a bridge of sorts between the formalism of Japanese cinema's past and the lawlessness of its present. But the film, the rare Kitano-directed piece in which he does not also appear, dispenses with hinting around at his absurdist auteur tendencies and sublimates his subtext into the text. To that end, it opens with an extended Bunraku performance–shot with a devouring fascination that hints at the ningyo (doll worship) suggested by the title and set to follow–concerning two doomed lovers that parallels the three barely-intersecting couples whose stories comprise the body of this anthology. The decision to make a film that is all subtext, however, is seldom successful: such pictures tend towards the pretentious, for one; and in emptying the basement, logic follows, they leave the basement empty. So it is with Dolls, which says everything it has to say, leaving only the speculation upon a repeat viewing (if one is necessary or desired) for how personal a project this might have been for Kitano and ultimately what this film tells us about the rest of Kitano's films. Then again, there's something that nags about Dolls, opening the possibility for another possible eventuality for this kind of piece.

The Rapture (1991) – DVD

November 17, 2004Posted in1990s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Drama, DVD, Mystery, Thriller

**½/**** Image A- Sound B+ (DD)/A (DTS) Commentary A
starring Mimi Rogers, David Duchovny, Patrick Bauchau, Will Patton
written and directed by Michael Tolkin

Rapturecapby Bill Chambers SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Based on a single viewing in the winter of 1993, I used to call Michael Tolkin's The Rapture a masterpiece. At the time, a friend of mine who felt the same way about the film wondered aloud how I could've connected with it, since he'd had a religious upbringing and I'd never even been to church. The question genuinely caught me off guard–nobody'd challenged my love of The Last of the Mohicans just because I didn't grow up on a reservation. Nevertheless, it's honestly taken me eleven years to formulate an adequate response: When I first saw The Rapture, which is more or less about the wait for Judgment Day to arrive, I was on the verge of graduating from high school; my future was presaged in university applications but no less unknowable or nerve-racking, and the movie leeched off that anxiety in a way that invoked empathy. Alas, many a "bell jar" of my youth–Taxi Driver, The Tenant, Boyz N the Hood–seems a little alien to me now that I've progressed beyond teen angst, and I can no longer subscribe to The Rapture outside its affecting portrait of bachelor ennui. Perhaps it's a true Heisenberg movie, changing with me.

Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice (1969) + The Pickle (1993) – DVDs

November 15, 2004Posted in1960s, 1990s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Romance

BOB & CAROL & TED & ALICE
*/**** Image B Sound B+ Extras B
starring Natalie Wood, Robert Culp, Elliott Gould, Dyan Cannon
screenplay by Paul Mazursky and Larry Tucker
directed by Paul Mazursky

THE PICKLE
*/**** Image B+ Sound A- Extras B-
starring Danny Aiello, Dyan Cannon, Shelley Winters, Jerry Stiller
written and directed by Paul Mazursky

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover There are certain talented but minor directors–"second-rank," as opposed to "second-rate"–who sadly manage to outlive their moment. John Frankenheimer was one of them, Alan J. Pakula another: both made key popular films of their time and then had nowhere to go once the cultural ground shifted beneath them. Add to this list the name of Paul Mazursky. Watch his 1969 comedy Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice and his 1993 summation The Pickle and you'll see two completely different people at work: one bases his work on observation and the mood of his times, and the other is so far behind the curve that his characters hardly seem human. Though it's painful to retrace Mazursky's slide and ultimately impossible to connect Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice to The Pickle, the juxtaposition of the two films is instructive in terms of what not to do when you're no longer the hot young thing and the industry contradicts your every single move.

The China Syndrome (1979) [Special Edition] – DVD

November 11, 2004Posted in1970s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Drama, DVD, Thriller

**½/**** Image B- Sound A- Extras A-
starring Jane Fonda, Jack Lemmon, Michael Douglas, Scott Brady
screenplay by Mike Gray & T.S. Cook and James Bridges
directed by James Bridges

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover For long passages, The China Syndrome is the usual Hollywood liberal tripe. A compendium of "social issues" more name-checked than dealt with, it was clearly assembled for the greater glory of a bunch of rich white entertainment professionals rather than for the oppressed and threatened individuals who have been forced from centre stage. So obsessed with the spectacle of the principal cast being heroic is The China Syndrome that for an agonizing stretch, it fails to communicate anything besides the nobility of Hanoi Jane. But though the film is boring to look at and painful to listen to for an hour or so, once it sorts out its priorities, it has a certain grip as a spooky end-of-days industrial thriller. What the film says about nuclear power could be fit into twenty words or less, but it says it loudly and clearly and with enough editorial skill to help you forget the sins of that sluggish first half. Whether that serves the "message" I leave entirely up to you.

I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead (2004) – DVD

November 11, 2004Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, DVD, Mystery, Thriller, UK

***½/**** Image A Sound B
starring Clive Owen, Charlotte Rampling, Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Malcolm McDowell
screenplay by Trevor Preston
directed by Mike Hodges

by Walter Chaw Mike Hodges has only made a handful of films in the last three decades, even disowning a couple of them along the way because they were taken from him and edited to accommodate someone else's vision. Hodges's first film is the legendary revenge flick Get Carter featuring a never-better Michael Caine, and his latest, I'll Sleep When I'm Dead, functions very much as a bookend to his directorial debut: it's the tale of a man of few words on a mission to avenge a wrong. Reuniting Hodges with Clive Owen, star of his modest hit Croupier, I'll Sleep When I'm Dead is beautifully-lensed by long-time DP Michael Garfath in a manner that, although the picture was shot in London, looks extraordinarily like an Edward Hopper painting. Hodges, beyond being a narrative stylist, has evolved into something of a visual stylist as well. In this way, he suggests a British Wim Wenders.

Mickey’s Twice Upon a Christmas (2004) + It’s a Very Merry Muppet Christmas Movie (2002) [Special Edition] – DVDs

November 10, 2004Posted in2000s, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Christmas, Comedy, Disney, DVD, Family, Muppets, Musical

*½/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras C
directed by Matthew O'Callaghan

by Bill Chambers 2-D animation is dead, long live 2-D. Mickey Mouse and his apostles move into the realm of 3-D with Mickey's Twice Upon a Christmas, cementing this maddeningly disposable gewgaw's place in the history books next to far more sublime firsts like 1928's Steamboat Willie (Mickey's debut) and 1935's The Band Concert (Mickey's colour debut). But while it's tempting to lob cheap shots along the lines of "Uncle Walt is spinning in his grave," fact is Disney's frosty remains were already a veritable "Price is Right" wheel by the early '70s, and if he'd lived to see the digital revolution, he probably would've been one of its pioneers. In other words, it's not sacrilege to experiment with a CGI Mickey, but the results probably never should've seen the light of day.

Mr. & Mrs. Smith (1941) – DVD

November 9, 2004Posted in1940s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Directors: Alfred Hitchcock, DVD, Romance

*½/**** Image B Sound B Extras C+
starring Carole Lombard, Robert Montgomery, Harry E. Edington, Gene Raymond
screenplay by Norman Krasna
directed by Alfred Hitchcock

by Walter Chaw Even a cursory glance at Alfred Hitchcock's favoured themes would find the idea of rules–particularly as they're expressed by written forms of communication–to be the ineffectual rein seeking to subdue the protean tumult of human identity, greed, and passion. The way that books hide the body in Rope, for instance; the newspaper headlines discovered too late in Shadow of a Doubt; the contracts and penny dreadfuls of Suspicion; Norman Bates's hotel book; the profession of Foreign Correspondent; Carlotta's engraved headstone and Mozart's mathematical structure in Vertigo; Melanie's birthday wishes in The Birds; the beckoning empty cages in Rutland's house in Marnie; or how the lines of a ledger page predict North by Northwest's astonishing play on humans reduced to numbers before a brilliant bit of business involving a message written inside a matchbook cover. In Mr. and Mrs. Smith, Hitchcock pairs with good friend Carole Lombard (on her second-to-last film before a plane crash ended her life), a prototypical Hitchcock blonde for whom the term "screwball comedy" was invented, to produce what's widely seen as an anomaly in Hitchcock's career: a slapstick romantic imbroglio. And indeed, the film is different from nearly anything Hitchcock ever did (though it shares a similar plot with Rich and Strange and a similar antic energy with The Trouble with Harry), but not because it deviates from his themes. Rather, Mr. and Mrs. Smith seems to be a film that outlines what it is exactly about rules and written communication that Hitchcock perceives to be so fundamentally unstable and misleading.

The Clearing (2004) + Before Sunset (2004) – DVDs

November 9, 2004Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: Richard Linklater, Drama, DVD, France, Germany, Mystery, Romance, Thriller, UK

THE CLEARING
*½/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras B-
starring Robert Redford, Helen Mirren, Willem Dafoe, Alessandro Nivola
screenplay by Justin Haythe
directed by Pieter Jan Brugge

BEFORE SUNSET
***½/**** Image A Sound B+ Extras B-
starring Ethan Hawke, Julie Delpy
screenplay by Richard Linklater & Julie Delpy & Ethan Hawke
directed by Richard Linklater

by Walter Chaw Nothing much happens in Pieter Jan Brugge's The Clearing–so little happens, in fact, that it's difficult to pinpoint what all the to-do was about by film's end. Laid-off everyman schlub Arnold Mack kidnaps car rental magnate Wayne Hayes (Robert Redford) from the front gate of his palatial estate. He leads Hayes through the woods to meet up with his partners-in-crime, having a heart-to-heart concerning the dissatisfactions of modern living along the way. Hayes's wife Eileen (Helen Mirren) and grown children (Alessandro Nivola and glassy-eyed Melissa Sagemiller) gather with disaffected FBI agent Fuller (Matt Craven) to field ransom demands and likewise have heart-to-hearts about the dissatisfactions of modern living. Brugge plays with time in interesting ways: the events of the first day with Wayne and Arnold are intercut with the events of several weeks with the Hayes clan. But the picture's biggest trick is making ninety minutes seem like an eternity.

Elf (2003) [Infinifilm] – DVD

November 8, 2004Posted in2000s, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Christmas, Comedy, DVD, Family, Fantasy, Romance

**/**** Image A Sound A- Extras A
starring Will Ferrell, James Caan, Zooey Deschanel, Mary Steenburgen
screenplay by David Berenbaum
directed by Jon Favreau

by Walter Chaw Some of the preview spots for Jon Favreau's Elf are hysterical, leading me to think that the film's failure to be very funny has a lot to do with bad direction, editing, or maybe both. It's a lightweight, unapologetically warm-hearted picture that earns a lot of respect for avoiding scatological humour en route to honouring nearly every other ingredient of the The Jerk bumpkin-out-of-water formula. Like Steve Martin, Will Ferrell announces himself with this film (and Old School) as a smart comedian unusually committed to effect and the directions his performance might take him. Ferrell isn't a chaotic jester. His clowning compels because it has the quality of internal logic, enough so that it's somehow possible to accept his man-raised-by-elves creation at face value.

Christmas in Connecticut (1992) + Jingle All the Way (1996) – DVDs

November 8, 2004Posted in1990s, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Christmas, Comedy, DVD, Family, Romance, Schwarzenegger, ZERO STARS

CHRISTMAS IN CONNECTICUT
ZERO STARS/**** Image C Sound C+
starring Dyan Cannon, Kris Kristofferson, Richard Roundtree, Tony Curtis
screenplay by Janet Brownell, based on the screenplay by Lionel Houser and Adele Comandini and story by Aileen Hamilton
directed by Arnold Schwarzenegger

JINGLE ALL THE WAY
ZERO STARS/**** Image B Sound C+
starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sinbad, Phil Hartman, Rita Wilson
screenplay by Randy Kornfield
directed by Brian Levant

by Walter Chaw A man of many talents (a jag-off of all trades, let’s say), the honourable Arnold A. Schwarzenegger made his directorial debut with the 1992 telefilm Christmas in Connecticut, a remake of a 1945 Barbara Stanwyck flick and the sort of unqualified failure that finds something like thirty dozen ways to redefine “fatuous.” Dyan Cannon, she of the toothy, shark-like grin, stars as Elizabeth Blane, a popular cooking-show host without any actual cooking skills who’s led around by her pert snoot by her queen of a producer, Alexander (Tony Curtis, playing Harvey Fierstein). When heroic Colorado park ranger Jefferson Jones (Kris Kristofferson, one definition of “fatuous” all by his own self) saves a kid from the wilderness, Alexander hatches the brilliant plan to capitalize on Grizzly Adams’s national hero status by inviting him to a live broadcast of a fake dinner at a fake house in Connecticut populated by a family of terrible actors and an unspeakable mammy stereotype. It’s hard to draw the line between fiction and reality sometimes, isn’t it?

Festival Express (2004) [2-Disc Set] – DVD

November 5, 2004Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Concert Doc, Documentary, DVD, Music, Netherlands, UK

***/**** Image A- Sound A (DD)/A+ (DTS) Extras B
directed by Bob Smeaton

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover JULY 30, 2004. We are so inundated with directives to be entertained that we've lost track of those few entertainments that don't smack us hard in the face with their laboured irrelevance. Simple, innocent pleasures have been replaced by exercises in industrial power that make you feel guilty for looking anywhere beyond them or for anything milder than their artificial amplifications. Surrounded as I find myself by these faceless giants (i.e., virtually every studio film released this summer), I find I am thankful for anything that features some fine music, a few good stories, and a wistful memory of a more innocent time before the entertainment industry was totally corrupted–something like the rock documentary Festival Express. If the film boasts of no miracles, neither does it have any pretenses of miracle-making. It asserts the pleasures of pleasure-making instead of the crushing weight of its force.