***½/****
DVD – Image A- Sound A-
SCE DVD – Image B+ Sound A- Extras B+
starring Kevin Costner, Charles Martin Smith, Andy Garcia, Sean Connery
screenplay by David Mamet
directed by Brian De Palma
by Vincent Suarez Will the real Brian De Palma please stand up?
Image A- Sound B+
"The Mork & Mindy Special," "Mork Moves In," "Mork Runs Away," "Mork in Love," "Mork's Seduction," "Mork Goes Public," "To Tell the Truth," "Mork the Gullible," "A Mommy For Mork," "Mork's Greatest Hits," "Old Fears," "Mork's First Christmas," "Mork and the Immigrant," "Mork the Tolerant," "Young Love," "Snowflakes Keep Dancing On My Head," "Mork Goes Erk," "Yes Sir, That's My Baby," "Mork's Mixed Emotions," "Mork's Night Out," "In Mork We Trust," "Mork Runs Down," "It's a Wonderful Mork," "Mork's Best Friend"
by Travis Mackenzie Hoover When you're a kid, you're introduced to the movies and TV shows that pleased your elders and think: did people really believe in this stuff? You see the stilted acting, the forced situations, the alien ways of relating and decide that we've made progress–that we'll never be that dumb again. Then the years go by, and you forget the things you watched as a kid, and for a while, you think you're still living in that sensible golden age–until you revisit those childhood pleasures and gasp in horror. At that point, you realize not only that some of the things you worshipped as a young pup are as stilted, forced, and alien as the aged entertainment you once derided, but also that there are kids alive today who are scoffing at these museum pieces and writing you off the way you wrote off your parents. Such is the case with "Mork & Mindy", a Garry Marshall sitcom to which I was religiously devoted as a credulous six-year-old; now, after enduring all ten-plus hours of season one, I'm forced me to ask: did I really eat this stuff up? And will I burn in cultural hell as a result?
*/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
written and directed by Will Finn & John Sanford
by Walter Chaw It opens with a musical number and a rabbit with a peg leg–and what feels like days later, Home on the Range ends with an ear-splitting action sequence featuring Cuba Gooding Jr. typecast as an over-animated pack animal. Meanwhile, a crass two-dimensional cow is typecast as Roseanne, her prize heifer Maggie introduced onscreen udder-first: "Yeah, they're real, quit staring." Real nice. And the intrigue, such as it is, revolves around yodeling cattle rustler Alameda Slim (Randy Quaid) narrowing his sights on the bucolic Patch of Heaven ranch, no-kill home of stock chickens ("It's a chick thing," hardy har har), a duck, a goat, and some swine.
ZERO STARS/**** Image B Sound A-
starring Linda Hamilton, Brian Kerwin, John Ashton, Peter Michael Goetz
screenplay by Ronald Shusett and Steven Pressfield
directed by John Guillermin
by Travis Mackenzie Hoover There are times when a critic watches a movie and realizes why he got into the racket–when, for instance, the film is made with intelligence and grace and humanity, and manages to bring him back to the world instead of forcing him into a false one. Then there are times when the critic watches King Kong Lives. This is a film that: has no reason to live; creates career opportunities for B-list actors and journeyman hack directors without a second thought for the paying audience; involves special effects that looked cheesy at the time and now, nearly 20 years later, look like a pantomime horse stomping on an electric train set; and is such a colossal waste of time and effort, you feel bitter and resentful towards the people who foisted it upon you for the purpose of mentioning it in print. The best thing to say about sitting through King Kong Lives is that you’ll know better than to ever do it again.
***/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras B+
starring Lindsay Lohan, Rachel McAdams, Tim Meadows, Ana Gasteyer
screenplay by Tina Fey, based on the book Queen Bees and Wannabes by Rosalind Wiseman
directed by Mark S. Waters
by Walter Chaw Plastics instead of Heathers; Lindsay Lohan instead of Winona Ryder; director Mark Waters instead of screenwriter brother Daniel; lunchtime poll: same. The biggest difference between Mean Girls and Heathers is the lack of that unmistakable spark of dark, playful genius. Both the Waters brothers made a splash with their initial public offerings (Mark with the fantastic The House of Yes, Daniel with Heathers), but while Daniel's portfolio is sprinkled with lead balloons like The Adventures of Ford Fairlane and the fitfully interesting Demolition Man, he did score with Batman Returns; Mark, alas, has a Freddie Prinze Jr./Monica Potter, a Jason Priestly/Mariel Hemingway, and a pair of Lohans in his deck, making The House of Yes an anomaly, it seems–as outcast from its comrades as Waters's imperfect characters are from his vision of a perversely stolid normality. Not to say that Waters's work post-The House of Yes is without unifying vision, just that his tendencies betray themselves as desperately wanting to be popular. It's a yen that makes Mean Girls actually a little autobiographical, and, probably as a direct result of that transparency, better than it should be.
½*/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras B-
starring Jena Malone, Mandy Moore, Macaulay Culkin, Patrick Fugit
screenplay by Brian Dannelly & Michael Urban
directed by Brian Dannelly
Hot on the heels of Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen and Mean Girls, Saved! presents the same evil-girl-clique-victimizes-good-girl formula that is still defined by the wicked Machiavellian brilliance of Heathers, the last word on eloquence and intelligence in the bully sub-genre of teensploitation. In the wake of Columbine and the end-of-the-millennium spate of school mayhem, the greatest disappointment isn't the unabated gratification of the jock set, but the fact that school-based satires have yet to find the courage to address the absurdity of reaction post-atrocity while continuing to produce school-based satires at an unabated clip. If anything speaks to the ultimate triumph of the guilty bourgeoisie and the ineffectual leadership in charge of our nation's public schools, it's the glaring inadequacy of our cinema, that most agile and sensitive of our cultural barometers, in reproducing the voice of the oppressed. It's up to television's "Freaks and Geeks" (was, anyway) and NPR's stable of gifted monologists (Sarah Vowell, Dave Eggars, David Sedaris, and so on) to pick up the considerable slack.
KAENA: THE PROPHECY
*/**** Image A Sound B Extras C
screenplay by Tarik Hamoine and Chris Delaporte
directed by Chris Delaporte
THE LION KING II: SIMBA'S PRIDE
½*/**** Image B Sound B- Extras C+
screenplay by Flip Kobler and Cindy Marcus
directed by Rob LaDuca & Darrell Rooney
by Walter Chaw There's a timorous, resonant quality to Kirsten Dunst's voice. It's amazing, really: it vibrates at a contralto as tense and lovely as a cello string drawn–I think it's her most attractive feature. She's tailor-made, then, to be a vocal performer, and finds herself as such in French filmmaker Chris Delaporte's plodding misfire of a movie Kaena: The Prophecy. Completely computer-animated, it's every bit as ugly and prosaic as its American cousin Ice Age (insomuch as it even includes a prehistoric-squirrel vignette towards the end) and obsessed with the jiggle dimensions of Kaena (or is that me, obsessed?), who must save her tree-world Axis from destruction at the hands of the evil Selenites (whose queen is voiced by Anjelica Huston). The story is so Joseph Campbell hero's journey-obsessed, so humourless and–how do I say it delicately?–Bakshi in its execution, that poor Dunst, in the title role, is wasted on plucky pronouncements and grunts of exertion as her .gif alter-ego leaps hither and yon.
*/**** Image A Sound B Extras C-
starring Robert Englund, Ted Levine, Daniel Matmor
screenplay by Tobe Hooper, Stephen Brooks and Peter Welbeck
directed by Tobe Hooper
by Walter Chaw I think there's probably profit in taking the tactic that Tobe Hooper's The Mangler is his shot at the lurid comic book genre and, more specifically, the weird self-abnegating prosthetics opera of Warren Beatty's Dick Tracy. But I'm not the guy to do it. Sufficed to say that Robert Englund appears in fright latex, affecting equal parts Dr. Strangelove and Lionel Barrymore's Mr. Potter as Mr. Gartley, the decrepit, despotic owner of an old industrial steam laundry that features as its centerpiece the massive, four-story long Hadley Watson Model-6 Steam Ironer & Folder, which sits in the middle of his brick sweatshop belching steam like the boiler in The Overlook Hotel.
**/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B-
starring Tom Hanks, Irma P. Hall, Marlon Wayans, J.K. Simmons
written for the screen and directed by Joel Coen & Ethan Coen
by Walter Chaw There's a great line in the Coen Brothers' The Ladykillers: The General (Tzi Ma), asked for his Buddhist perspective on a caper gone awry, offers, "Be as leaf floating down river. Kill old lady." Still, it's a poor blueprint for a film, as the picture locates its narrative rhythm in a desultory, listless noodle that ends right when it threatens to begin. With Tom Hanks playing the Alec Guinness role of affected cad with larceny–eventually murder–on his mind, The Ladykillers feels like an inside joke. (A slapstick gag featured prominently in the previews, for instance, sees Hanks plucking bills from the air in what has become the defining image of his career, from Forrest Gump's feather inanity to Hanratty's dollar bill futility in Catch Me If You Can.) Returning in a way to more familiar ground after the screwball shrine of Intolerable Cruelty, it's nice to see the Coens, credited as co-directors for the first time in their twenty-year collaboration, tackling another caper noir, but it feels more than a little stale this time around, contrived in the way that genius starts to feel when inspiration flags.
½*/**** Image B- Sound B-
starring Rock Hudson, Gayle Hunnicutt, Bernie Casey, Roddy McDowell
screenplay by Richard Matheson, based on the novel by Ray Bradbury
directed by Michael Anderson
by Walter Chaw There is and probably always will be a warm place in my heart for Ray Bradbury. The author of my childhood in many ways, Bradbury taught me about poetry in "April Witch," about fear in The Dark Carnival and Something Wicked This Way Comes, about dry irony in "A Sound of Thunder" and "There Will Come Soft Rains," and about vengeance reptilian and cold in "The Veldt." His only real work of science-fiction, Fahrenheit 451, remains an interesting touchstone of unintentional messages couched in seriomythic terminologies, but his output is moored deep, intractably deep, in the literary. Bradbury doesn't transpose well to different mediums (and a book of poetry, When Elephants Last in the Dooryard Bloomed, was somehow even more disastrous than the multiple attempts to export the author to television and film)–he's too purple, his philosophies too immature, his worldview embarrassingly simplistic and only really current for children or the childish. I'll never be able to exactly express the thrill, the horror, of my first reading of "Mars is Heaven" when I was in third grade. Nor have I been able to replicate it by reading it again since.
**½/**** Image C+ Sound C+ Extras B-
starring Jane Wyman, Marlene Dietrich, Michael Wilding, Richard Todd
screenplay by Whitfield Cook; adaptation by Alma Reville; additional dialogue by James Bridie, based on a novel by Selwyn Jepson
directed by Alfred Hitchcock
by Walter Chaw Blame it on the subject matter: Stage Fright, especially for postwar Hitchcock, is all elbows. Its technique is its narrative, plot, character, and motive–something that's a relative rarity in the master's oeuvre despite his notoriously stringent preparation and acumen. And though it works pretty well as an academic inquiry into how the artificiality of the stage can comment with eloquence, "Hamlet"-like, on the bigger picture, the film stumbles along in fits and starts, pulled forward by its mechanism instead of anything like momentum or logic. In truth, I wonder if the "play-within-a-play" trope doesn't work better as either microcosm (as in the final confession of I Confess) or leitmotif (as in the numerous references to performance in North by Northwest, which most likely owes its title to a line about pretending to be crazy from "Hamlet"). Of particular issue is one of Marlene Dietrich's mannered turns, which is potentially excusable (given the staginess of the piece), and a horrible score by Leighton Lucas, which isn't. Still a Hitchcock film in his middle-period, however, Stage Fright, no doubt owing to its nature, is particularly focused in on disguises, perceptions, mirrors, eyeglasses, and cigarettes–finding our hero, Eve (Jane Wyman, fantastic), taking on the guise of a Dorothy Parker-esque reporter at one moment and a maid infiltrating a fatale's lair at another, all for the cause of a suspect flashback from an unreliable narrator.
***/**** Image B Sound B Extras B-
starring Joel McCrea, Laraine Day, Herbert Marshall, George Sanders
screenplay by Charles Bennett, Joan Harrison; dialogue by James Hilton, Robert Benchley
directed by Alfred Hitchcock
by Walter Chaw Largely dismissed as a jingoistic anomaly in the generally anti-establishment Hitchcock canon (and dwarfed by the meatier fort/da of the same year's Rebecca), Foreign Correspondent is arguably a superior representation of the screwball genre to which the later Mr. and Mrs. Smith aspired. That it has political undertones is undeniable (its spies and hunters plot a throwback to Hitch's Gaumont years), but most conspicuous is the kind of macabre visual wit that would define the bulk of Hitchcock's early American output. Consider a haunting sequence with titular journalist Huntley Haverstock (Joel McCrea) trying to find a missing getaway car in a Dutch field dotted with windmills that begins with a gust of wind blowing off his hat (a castration metaphor–the film is full of them) as his girl-Friday Carol Fisher (Laraine Day) laughs uncontrollably, proceeds to the inside of a false mill where Haverstock is nearly discovered when he gets his coat caught in gears, and ends with an exchange with non-English speaking Dutch police resolved by one of Hitch's precocious little-girl characters. With an intimidating self-possession, an already mature Hitchcock presents in fast fashion a dizzying series of technical gags (the suspicious windmill suspicious because it's turning in the wrong direction–compare to the tennis crowd of Strangers on a Train and this film's own chase beneath a canopy of umbrellas); a preoccupation with birds as representatives of the corruption of social order (introduced in Young and Innocent, it became a central throughline in Hitchcock's career); a serio-comic scene of near-discovery; and a slapstick vignette that makes asses of the police, Hitch's favourite target.
**½/**** Image A Sound B Extras B
starring Cary Grant, Joan Fontaine, Sir Cedric Hardwicke, Nigel Bruce
screenplay by Samson Raphaelson, Joan Harrison and Alma Reville
directed by Alfred Hitchcock
by Walter Chaw In truth, watching any of Alfred Hitchcock’s American films is like hearing the voice of your master. So it is even with 1941’s Suspicion: Probably the most compromised of Hitchcock’s major pictures, it nevertheless sports a trio of sequences that rank among his best. An early flirtation between Cary Grant’s layabout playboy Johnnie Aysgarth and Joan Fontaine’s unlikely take on a dowdy spinster, for instance, looking for all the world like a rape and featuring brilliant, Lubitsch-esque purse-play, is as dense a five minutes as whole pictures. (The second virtuoso sequence involves a staircase and a glass of milk lit from inside the liquid while the third is a fantasy that transforms laughter into the howls of a dying man.) So coy and hesitating that it’s a lot like courting a eunuch, Suspicion is not easy to like, but it does offer a glimpse of what’s possible within a studio system that won’t allow one of its marquee players to play a villain. The picture gives lie to the idea that creative people suddenly lose their creativity when they move to Hollywood: It’s still there, it just goes (in this case, deep) underground.
THE VANISHING
**½/**** Image A Sound B+
starring Jeff Bridges, Kiefer Sutherland, Nancy Travis, Sandra Bullock
screenplay by Todd Graff, based on the novel The Golden Egg by Tim Krabbé
directed by George Sluizer
HARDCORE
***/**** Image A- Sound B
starring George C. Scott, Peter Boyle, Season Hubley, Ilah Davis
written and directed by Paul Schrader
by Bill Chambers 1993 was the year that American remakes of two estimable foreign thrillers became instant poster boys for Hollywood condescension. While John Badham’s Point of No Return is every bit as egregious as they said it was (although I prefer its “Cleaner” sequence with Harvey Keitel to Nikita‘s field test of Jean Reno’s Léon persona), George Sluizer’s The Vanishing, an Americanization of his own Spoorloos, often stands shoulder-to-shoulder with its forerunner–or is at the very least too provocative in its departures to dismiss out of hand. A lot of people wondered how Sluizer could desecrate what had been the crowning achievement of his career in this way, but what artist wouldn’t jump at the chance to view a piece of work through the looking glass without physically altering the original? (A kindred impulse drives novelists to sell the screen rights to their books.) All I can say is that the end result is more seductive than, say, Vanilla Sky, or Christopher Nolan’s Insomnia.
½*/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B
starring Ashley Judd, Samuel L. Jackson, Andy Garcia, David Strathairn
screenplay by Sarah Thorp
directed by Philip Kaufman
by Walter Chaw Ashley Judd's stab at In the Cut, Twisted washes out to be closer to a distaff Tightrope. It's just another Judd film co-starring Morgan Freeman, here played by Samuel L. Jackson. Once again humiliated and physically abused for her sexuality, Judd has this perverse penchant for self-mortification legitimized by yet another contractually required African-American mentor. What really wounds is that it's a movie with a pedigree and a little promise (unlike Judd's constant dalliances with the best of the airport bookrack), what with Philip Kaufman, back on the west coast in his favourite American setting of San Francisco, at the reins. A love of the City by the Bay is on display in a gorgeously-composed opening sequence that finds the Golden Gate Bridge floating on a bed of fog and, later, when the first body is discovered in Twisted's requisite corpse gallery against the nighttime backdrop of Pac Bell Ballpark, and there's an underlying menace to San Francisco that no one aside from Hitchcock has been able to capture quite like Kaufman, especially in Invasion of the Body Snatchers. So the possibility that this ostensibly dark psychological thriller might actually be good springs eternal for a full five minutes, exactly the amount of time that passes until someone utters the first of screenwriter Sarah Thorp's tragically over-written lines–and for us to rediscover Judd as an extremely limited actress whose best film remains the grossly underestimated Eye of the Beholder.
****/**** Image B Sound B Extras A+
starring Rutger Hauer, John Hurt, Craig T. Nelson, Dennis Hopper
screenplay by Alan Sharp, adaptation by Ian Masters, based on the novel by Robert Ludlum
directed by Sam Peckinpah
by Walter Chaw
"We rely too much on sight, don't you think? Appearances being what they are."
And so encapsulates the genius and the madness of Sam Peckinpah's final film, the contentious, still-relevant The Osterman Weekend. Serving as a bridge of sorts between the psychosexual circus of Brian De Palma's Dressed to Kill (1980) and the technology/media fear of Ridley Scott's Blade Runner (1982) and David Cronenberg's Videodrome (1983), the film strikes a balance between the paranoia cinema of the 1970s and the technophilic sci-fi wonderland of the 1980s. It's brilliant–mark the ways that Peckinpah implies that every shot in the film is taken from a hidden camera for the pleasure of the audience. (A picture hasn't been this successful in indicting the criminal aspect of watching a movie since Hitchcock's heyday.) More than brilliant, like the best of Peckinpah's films, it gets under your skin with scalpel-grace. He made films of intimate violation–of rape, essentially; when you stare into the abyss of Peckinpah's pictures, Peckinpah stares into you.
Mickey, Donald, Goofy: The Three Musketeers
*½/**** Image B Sound A- Extras C-
screenplay by Evan Spiliotopoulos and David Mickey Evans
directed by Donovan Cook
by Bill Chambers I must confess to something like a fetish for the joint screen ventures of Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, and Goofy, animation's answer to The Ritz Brothers. Their 1937 short Lonesome Ghosts is one of the essential building blocks in my love of cinema: I used to own a silent 8mm cartridge of it that could be viewed by handcranking a to-the-eye projector, and I unwittingly taught myself persistence of vision through bored frame-by-frame dissections of Mickey tiptoeing across the floor and Donald losing his cool. And as far as Mickey Mouse is concerned, he has Donald and Goofy in tow in his best colour outings–with a handful of exceptions (such as 1941's guardedly wistful The Nifty Nineties, or the Sorcerer's Apprentice sequence from Fantasia) that cast Mickey as an emblem of virtue rather than as a virtuous individual (thus seizing on the iconic resonance of the character's design), Mickey's solo shorts circa the war years are far too polite for their own good. Mercurial Donald and accident-prone Goofy add a much-needed pinch of salt.
½*/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras B-
starring The Rock, Neal McDonough, Johnny Knoxville, Kristen Wilson
screenplay by David Klass and Channing Gibson and David Levien & Brian Koppelman
directed by Kevin Bray
by Walter Chaw Kevin Bray's remake of Walking Tall is so empty of substance, so full of nihilistic bile, that it makes the shorthand of First Blood seem like an Ibsen play in its complexity and character development. A mysterious vet proves Thomas Wolfe correct, going home to a town completely changed by a corrupt local government and a posse of redneck law enforcers. Our red-blooded desire to take the law into our own hands drives the instinct to cheer once he resorts to the Neanderthal brutality of "eye for an eye" or, as the case may be, "a truck for a truck."
Iki-jigoku
**½/**** Image C- Sound B+ Extras B+
starring Hirohito Honda, Yoshiko Shiraishi, Rumi, Kazuo Yashiro
written and directed by Shugo Fujii
by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Hype sometimes expects too much of a film, forcing it into boxes where it doesn't belong and dressing it up as something it's not. Thus the keepcase for Living Hell had me worried: it references not only luminaries like Hitchcock and DePalma, but also cult faves Evil Dead 2, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and Dead Alive. To be sure, Living Hell lacks the visionary quality that makes the abovementioned figures and movies so memorable to so many people, and yet, taken on its own terms, this debut feature has plenty to offer the attentive viewer, starting with a supremely jaundiced take on the family and a stylistic intelligence that surprises for such a low-budget effort. Miraculous it's not, but given the budget ($100,000) and the length of the shoot (nine days!), it's astonishing how effective Living Hell really is. Despite the occasional borrowing from better movies, its deliciously cruel sense of humour gets to you in the end.