The Last Unicorn (1982) – DVD

April 28, 2004Posted in1980s, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Family, Fantasy, France, Japan, UK, West Germany

*/**** Image D Sound D
screenplay by Peter S. Beagle, based on his novel
directed by Arthur Rankin, Jr. and Jules Bass

by Walter Chaw Rankin & Bass’ typically sloppy adaptation of Peter S. Beagle’s classic The Last Unicorn (adapted for the screen by Beagle himself) is terribly voiced and animated, even by the ’70s Bakshi/flash-frozen/Saturday-morning conveyor belt standard. The melancholy poetry of Beagle’s novel, rife with dread and the vertiginous feeling of falling into chaos, is notable for its similarity to the big eye, little mouth of traditional anime but falls short of that gold standard in terms of performance and detail. Mouths don’t move, backgrounds are static and recycled, and it doesn’t help that the colours on the print making it to the DVD format look as though they’d been left in the front window for too long.

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003) [New Line Platinum Series] – DVD

April 28, 2004Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, DVD, Horror

***/**** Image A+ Sound A+ Extras A+
starring Jessica Biel, Jonathan Tucker, Erica Leerhsen, Andrew Bryniarski
screenplay by Scott Kosar
directed by Marcus Nispel

Texaschainsawcap2003

by Walter Chaw With its low-angle compositions, gradual evolution of animalistic antagonists (from opossum to kid to crippled man to monster), discovery of a feral child, claustrophobic sets drenched in water, and neo-feminist slant, what Marcus Nispel’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre resembles most is not Tobe Hooper’s 1974 masterpiece, but James Cameron’s 1986 masterpiece, Aliens. In structure and execution, in fact, even in visual style, Nispel’s picture recasts Aliens with its cannibalistic hillbilly clan the insectile “other” and tight tank-top sporting Jessica Biel as stand-in for Sigourney Weaver’s tight tank-top sporting über-mater. The problem with the comparison is that where Hooper’s original presented its nihilism in detached tableau (the first attack is a classic in savage hopelessness), Nispel’s remake sports the intimate camerawork favoured by Cameron-inspired action films, replacing the existential desolation of Hooper’s vision with more standard flight and fight sequences. As genre exercises go, despite a decent amount of sadistic gore, the picture is better spoken of as a thrilling, beautifully shot action film that only flirts around with social significance.

Love Actually (2003) [Widescreen] – DVD

April 27, 2004Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Christmas, Comedy, Drama, DVD, France, Romance, UK, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/**** Image B+ Sound A- Extras A-
starring Alan Rickman, Bill Nighy, Colin Firth, Emma Thompson
written and directed by Richard Curtis

Loveactuallycap

by Walter Chaw I actively, aggressively dislike this film. Richard Curtis's Love Actually says something of its intentions in a subplot involving an aged rocker (Bill Nighy) who knows he's creating a reprehensible piece of garbage in an attempt to cash in on the gaffed demographic that champions boy bands as the pinnacle of the art. The picture is a sex comedy in the worst senses of the genre: It's puerile, misogynistic, and breathtakingly stupid, with a keen focus on pratfalls and serendipity–all the while hoping that you won't notice the inappropriateness of its plays for heart-warming uplift. Curtis, after scoring a couple of times in the genre as screenwriter with Notting Hill and The Tall Guy, chooses Love Actually as his directorial debut, and its hatefulness speaks to the source of the comprehensive misanthropy of Rowan Atkinson's Mr. Bean (Atkinson makes a cameo; Curtis is a writer for "Mr. Bean"). A shame that Curtis's hyphenate turn begins to betray the man as ugly and self-indulgent.

Ghosts of the Abyss (2003) – DVD

April 21, 2004Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Documentary, DVD, France

*½/**** (60-minute version) **/**** (90-minute version)
Image A Sound A Extras B-
directed by James Cameron

by Bill Chambers Not often given enough credit for his speedy learning curve (how many filmmakers, metaphorically speaking, have gone straight from Piranha 2 to The Terminator?), it stands to reason that James Cameron's next documentary will be a gem. But for the time being there is only Ghosts of the Abyss to deal with, and it's a washout. A few minutes into the film, Bill Paxton finds out that the battery powering the MIR submersible in which he's exploring the wreckage of "R.M.S. Titanic" is worth $250,000; it was then that I realized I'm vastly more interested in expensive batteries than in the famously-drowned luxury liner, exhumed on film almost as many times now as Dracula. Maybe it's an issue of the arcane vs. the mundane: Ghosts of the Abyss dutifully oohs and aahs over every inch of the ship's rusticled décor, but it stops short of edifying the secondary observer, who suspects a show is being put on for the grumpy Russians piloting the hi-tech underwater explorers. I was that way every time my parents took me to the zoo.

Prey for Rock & Roll (2003) – DVD

April 19, 2004Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Music

*½/**** Image A Sound A Extras D+
starring Gina Gershon, Drea De Matteo, Marc Blucas, Shelly Cole
screenplay by Cheri Lovedog & Robin Whitehouse
directed by Alex Steyermark

by Walter Chaw Released haphazardly in the same calendar year as Alex Proyas's endlessly disappointing Garage Days, Alex Steyermark's Prey for Rock & Roll travels similar garage band routes while taking the distaff trail and deciding to play it as if its central band, the cleverly monikered Clam Dandy, is better than horrible (in an L7 78-played-at-45 kind of way). My familiarity with grrrl rock begins and ends with a Seven Year Bitch concert at the base of Seattle's Space Needle about a decade ago, as well as a brief affection for Hammerbox, but I remember the genre being at its best full of anger and tempo. That Clam Dandy doesn't rock too terribly hard is a major stumbling block only exacerbated by director Steyermark's decision to feature a few of their listless, pop-inspired heavy metal tunes in their allegedly poignant entirety. It makes for rough-going in the not-so-proud Light of Day/Satisfaction tradition.

Ripley’s Game (2002) – DVD

April 19, 2004Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, DVD, FFC Must-Own, Italy, Mystery, Thriller, UK

**** Image A Sound A
starring John Malkovich, Dougray Scott, Ray Winstone, Lena Headey
screenplay by Charles McKeown and Liliana Cavani, based on the novel by Patricia Highsmith
directed by Liliana Cavani

Mustownby Walter Chaw When I heard that The Night Porter auteur Liliana Cavani was adapting one of Patricia Highsmith's Mr. Ripley novels, I knew to expect something more in line with René Clément's brilliant Purple Noon than Anthony Minghella's lavishly simpering The Talented Mr. Ripley. What I didn't anticipate was that this film, which never received any sort of domestic theatrical distribution before being summarily dropped, supplement-free, onto the home video market, would be one of the best of its year–indeed, of its kind. Ripley's Game is doomed to the "direct-to-video" label and an ignominious eternity buried in the Blockbuster shelves for the occasional stunned bemusement of the well traveled and the John Malkovich fetishist–it languishes there while over-masticated tripe like The Alamo finds its way to thousands of screens, its lingering impact to remind again that the slippery slope in Hollywood's distribution game just got steeper. Ripley's Game would have looked great on the big screen–and some genius robbed us of the opportunity to see it that way, thinking we'd prefer American Splendor or Along Came Polly.

The Office: The Complete Second Series (2002) – DVD

April 18, 2004Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Pseudo-Documentary, Television, UK

Image A Sound A- Extras C+

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Fans of "The Office" are in for a lopsided evening if they plan to do a marathon of both seasons. Much as I loved series one, there's no denying that it deals purely with the inertia of office life, of living with the petty nuisances of an obnoxious boss (Ricky Gervais as David Brent), a "weasel-faced ass" (Mackenzie Crook as Gareth Keenan) at the desk across from you, and a long stretch of boredom as the mindless work you do stretches on into infinity. Creators Gervais and Stephen Merchant could have easily riffed on this for years and run out of ideas along the way, but wanting to go out with a bang ("The Office" is, by all accounts, finished), they decided to play the series out by throwing the office environment into flux. Thus we have "The Office: The Complete Second Series", a brilliant and unlikely cross between Basil Fawlty and Arthur Miller that starts off subtly hilarious and ends as one of the most wrenching tragedies ever to crash through the small screen.

Desk Set (1957) [Studio Classics] – DVD

April 16, 2004Posted in1950s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, DVD, Romance

**½/**** Image A- Sound B- Extras C+
starring Spencer Tracy, Katharine Hepburn, Gig Young, Joan Blondell
screenplay by Phoebe and Henry Ephron, based on the play by William Marchant
directed by Walter Lang

by Bill Chambers One of the more effectively simple credits sequences opens Desk Set, with a telegraph situated on a Mondrian-inspired backdrop spitting out the names of cast and crew. This, it turns out, is the movie reduced to symbols. Modernities clash as Spencer Tracy's ironically oafish efficiency expert is deposited in the environment of Katharine Hepburn, who thinks and dresses geometrically but brings a splash of colour to the room. They're hip and as hip as each other, even if she's a Luddite and he pimps a supercomputer for IBM, because career comes first for both. Counterbalancing a general mistrust of the electronics revolution (and the typical politically-incorrect trappings of Fifties cinema), the movie embraces a progressive quality in its power-couple leads, who still seem remarkably contemporary because neither assumed aggressively gender-specific roles–they always played equals of different temperaments.

Reefer Madness (1938) [Special “Addiction”] – DVD

April 7, 2004Posted in1930s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, Crime, Drama, DVD, Esoterica

*/**** Image B (B&W) F (Colorized) Sound A- (DD) A (DTS) Extras D
starring Dorothy Short, Dave O'Brien, Thelma White, Carleton Young
screenplay by Arthur Hoerl
directed by Louis Gasnier

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover I don't really have much to say about Reefer Madness (original title: Tell Your Children) that hasn't been said a million times in a million hazy dorm rooms. Yes, the film is hysterical. Yes, it's inaccurate. Yes, it's stilted and clumsy and generally ridiculous. And still, I sat largely stone-faced throughout the entire film, barely snickering at some of its gaffes and performances. The truth is that while it has the ineptitude we look for in camp, it lacks a visionary quality that could elevate it to classic status–there is no virtuoso technical insanity in the manner of Ed Wood, no gorilla creature questioning its existence à la Robot Monster, no rending of the fabric of reality as only great bad filmmakers can. Though I imagine it improves after a few bong hits.

Ned Kelly (1970) – DVD

April 7, 2004Posted in1970s, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD, UK, Western

*/**** | Image B- Sound C
starring Mick Jagger, Clarissa Kaye-Mason, Mark McManus, Ken Goodlet
screenplay by Tony Richardson and Ian Jones
directed by Tony Richardson

by Walter Chaw Somewhere between the islets of McCabe and Mrs. Miller and Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, just off the coast of Performance and Mad Dog Morgan, floats Tony Richardson's less visited, incomprehensible, woefully miscalculated Ned Kelly. Edited with a cheese grater and scored with bizarre faux-Aussie folk by strange bedfellows Shel Silverstein and Waylon Jennings, all while giving lie to David Mamet-as-director's claims to originality in dispensing with exposition in favour of oblique, impenetrable dialogue and stilted performances, Ned Kelly is also home to one of the worst performances by a rock star in a world that knows Graffiti Bridge and Glitter. Really just the kissing cousin of such of its contemporary counter-cultural misfires as Myra Breckinridge and Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, the panicked 1970 policy of giving the kids what they want, whatever that might be, is filtered here through the disturbing prism of a 42-year-old Englishman's perspective. (Admittedly, as angry young men go, Mick Jagger is a better choice than Breckinridge's Rex Reed.) Curiously though, as it so often does, the rare convergence of everything gone wrong makes for pretty compulsive viewing.

Black Sunday (1977) – DVD

April 6, 2004Posted in1970s, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Directors: John Frankenheimer, Drama, DVD, Espionage, Thriller

***/**** Image A Sound B
starring Robert Shaw, Bruce Dern, Marthe Keller, Fritz Weaver
screenplay by Ernest Lehman, Kenneth Ross and Ivan Moffat
directed by John Frankenheimer

by Walter Chaw Before Thomas Harris created a genius shrink-turned-serial murderer, he wrote the everything-old-is-new-again terrorist saga Black Sunday, managing to incorporate the Super Bowl into its tale of good intelligence saving the day. How novel. What's constant between this and Harris's Hannibal Lecter trilogy is his interest in broken heroes: the inversion of the man of action archetype that germinated in the Fifties Western tradition and flowered in the voodoo ego-nomics of the Reagan-mad Eighties, locating Black Sunday firmly in the deep well of Seventies cinema–filthy with ineffectual champions and astringent endings. But where Harris's novel understood its place in the bittersweet, paranoid zeitgeist, Black Sunday, with its all-star cast (Robert Shaw two years after Jaws, Bruce Dern at his peak, Marthe Keller a year removed from Marathon Man), megalomaniacal producer Robert Evans, and blockbuster aspirations, proves to be another Star Wars-style harbinger of the impending end of what was possibly the most amazing period in film in history.

A Room with a View (1985) [Two-Disc Special Edition] – DVD

April 6, 2004Posted in1980s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Drama, DVD, Romance, UK

***/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B-
starring Maggie Smith, Denholm Elliot, Helena Bonham-Carter, Simon Callow
screenplay by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, based on the novel by E.M. Forster
directed by James Ivory

Roomwithaviewcapby Travis Mackenzie Hoover Somebody says to one of the more priggish characters in E.M. Forster's A Room with a View, "You were all right as long as you kept to things, but when it came to people…" It's a line that doubly applies to James Ivory's 1985 film version, which indeed has more to say about the things surrounding its characters than it does the characters themselves. Great care has been taken to tastefully capture the physical details of Italy and England circa 1908, and great care has been taken to provide the actors with the fashions to match. But when the lights come up, we don't really have a strong impression of the characters, who simply populate the period tableaux like mannequins.

My Fair Lady (1964) [Two-Disc Special Edition] – DVD

April 5, 2004Posted in1960s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Best Picture (Academy Awards), Drama, DVD, Family, Musical, Romance

**/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras B
starring Audrey Hepburn, Rex Harrison, Stanley Holloway, Wilfrid Hyde-White
screenplay by Alan Jay Lerner
directed by George Cukor

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover It has always astonished me how high cultural artifacts can be transformed into doltish Broadway musicals–how Cervantes could suffer the bastardization of "Man of La Mancha", how T.S. Eliot could inspire "Cats", or how Shakespeare could invite a cross-pollination with "juvenile delinquency" to become a deadly flower called West Side Story. It's a mystery best left to specialists, I guess, hence I can only look with amazement on Lerner and Loewe's My Fair Lady, which bears the distinction of sucking every ounce of irony out of George Bernard Shaw's "Pygmalion" to accommodate fabric and masonry in its place. I suppose that George Cukor's film version is some kind of achievement taken on its own terms, but the problem is, those terms are piddling: the issues of class and gender that were contemporary to Shaw are downplayed so relentlessly that what remains is nothing more than a funny story with occasional songs–which, sadly, is exactly what a musical audience is looking for.

Stuck on You (2003) [Widescreen] – DVD

April 4, 2004Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD

**½/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B-
starring Matt Damon, Greg Kinnear, Eva Mendes, Wen Yann Shih
screenplay by Peter Farrelly & Bobby Farrelly
directed by Bobby Farrelly & Peter Farrelly

by Walter Chaw It may not be funny in the slightest, but like Shallow Hal, the Farrelly Brothers' Stuck On You is often fascinating for the extent to which it seeks to dissect the exploitation of disability in film. The picture is surprisingly affecting when it's addressing the conjoined twins at its centre, pointing at once to where the Farrellys are headed with their art, and to the realization that where this picture really fails is in the fallacy that it needs to be a comedy at all. (The most glaring gaffe the casting of Cher as herself, a joke as out of tune as it is out of time.) What emerges from the film isn't the sort of scatological brinkmanship the brothers are credited with/derided for, but rather an often sharp examination of identity, the strength of familial bonds, and the courage to dream–elements each to be found woven in some fashion throughout the filmmakers' critically underestimated oeuvre.

The Prince & Me (2004)

April 2, 2004Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD, Romance, Theatrical

**/****
starring Julia Stiles, Luke Mably, Ben Miller, James Fox
screenplay by Jack Amiel & Michael Begler and Katherine Fugate
directed by Martha Coolidge

by Walter Chaw Surprisingly good not the same thing as genuinely good, Martha Coolidge's The Prince & Me returns the director to her Valley Girl formula of cross-cultural teen romantic hurlyburly with a few nice moments and the pleasing aura of a light fantasy, but the film finds itself weighed down at the end by the requirements of its exhausted genre. Moreover, The Prince & Me fails the courage test, needing desperately to have ended about ten minutes before it actually does, and though not a moment of it demands (nor could a moment of it bear) to be assessed through the prism of realism, the gadget of its finale is less "fairytale" than insipid. One cliffhanger is more than enough in most fables, so when The Prince & Me decides to follow twist fast with preordained turn, it exposes its structure as far too flimsy to support the burden of those contortions.

Wild Things 2 (2004) – DVD

April 2, 2004Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, DVD, Mystery, Thriller, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/**** Image A Sound A Extras D
starring Susan Ward, Leila Arcieri, Isaiah Washington, Tony Denison
screenplay by Ross Helford & Andy Hurst
directed by Jack Perez

by Walter Chaw Alligator swamps and high school, I get the comparison, but like the first film, Wild Things 2 is coy, smug, and not so much meta as a self-satisfied, misogynistic tease. Those looking for titillation will have to settle for a lot of slo-mo beach volleyball, multiple views of Susan Ward walking around slowly in such a way as to hide her alarming thighs, and a brief three-way featuring a body double for repulsive/hot (see also: Brittany Murphy) Leila Arcieri, who drops Arcieri down about two cup sizes while upping her pastiness by at least three Danes. Seriously here, how hard would it have been to find a couple of exhibitionistic starlets for a direct-to-video smut pic like Wild Things 2? The really disturbing thing about that is that Arcieri and Ward were apparently hired for their acting ability.

The Rundown (2003) [Widescreen] – DVD

April 1, 2004Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD, Schwarzenegger, Thriller

***/**** Image A+ Sound A+ Extras B+
starring The Rock, Seann William Scott, Christopher Walken, Rosario Dawson
screenplay by R.J. Stewart and James Vanderbilt
directed by Peter Berg

by Walter Chaw There’s an ebullient lustre to Peter Berg’s dedicatedly obnoxious The Rundown, an action film with so little pretension that it actually comes off as smart. It’s the same peculiar phenomenon that makes of Laurel & Hardy geniuses after the fact, banking on timing and carefully cultivated absurdity to at once define and rejuvenate the mismatched buddy-on-the-run genre. Consider a scene in which Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson fights a tribe of pygmy Brazilian freedom fighters, edited and choreographed like a Yuen Brothers wu xia married to a Weissmuller Tarzan flick. Delirious and ridiculous, exciting in spite of itself, The Rundown is the kind of adrenalized filmmaking that is, in fact, more intelligent and misanthropic than it seems. More, it’s not a fluke: Actor Berg’s directorial debut Very Bad Things remains, along with Doug Liman’s Go, one of the great underestimated time-capsule pitch-black comedies of the late-Nineties. If not for a few glaring moments where Berg displays the first symptoms of obfuscating Danny Boyle disease (CGI pullouts, nauseating zooms, and meaningless hyper-edits), particularly in its prologue, The Rundown would be something of a cult all-timer.

demonlover (2002) – DVD

March 30, 2004Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Drama, DVD, Esoterica, France, Mexico, Mystery, Thriller

***/**** Image D+ Sound D+
starring Connie Nielsen, Charles Berling, Chloë Sevigny, Gina Gershon
written and directed by Olivier Assayas

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Right now, I think I like Olivier Assayas's demonlover. I think. I don't always feel this way: after a couple of screenings and a lot of pondering, I have to say that this singularly dense and elliptical movie has a lot of things going against it. Like its lead, it's cold and austere to a fault, viewing its techno-financial milieu from a safe distance and attributing to it a number of traits that simply don't add up. But in the cold light of day, the film connects the dots about the business of cultural production that are normally hidden from view. Assayas may be grasping at straws in a number of instances, but his general framework is sound, and as he speaks of the disconnect of people from the industries that shape them, I'm inclined to look past demonlover's weaknesses. Right now, at least.

Wild Things (1998) [Unrated Edition] – DVD

March 30, 2004Posted in1990s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Crime, Drama, DVD, Mystery, Satire, Thriller

**/**** Image A- Sound A-
starring Kevin Bacon, Matt Dillon, Neve Campbell, Denise Richards
screenplay by Stephen Peters
directed by John McNaughton

by Bill Chambers I shepherded myself through puberty on a steady diet of Cinemax, and I’ve apologized for worse than this movie’s sins on behalf of director John McNaughton, whose Mad Dog and Glory almost sires a new genre: misogyny uplift. So I’ve always considered my indifference towards Wild Things to be something of an anomaly. A continuation of a theme that ran subtly through McNaughton’s powerful Normal Life, i.e., some inextricable link between carnal desire and pecuniary greed, Wild Things (originally titled Sex Crimes) opens with an aerial view of the ‘Glades that cleverly juxtaposes alligator-infested swampland with the grounds of a nearby high school. The implication is clear, but then again it’s too clear, and you can shut the movie off then and there without missing a beat.

Brother Bear (2003) [2-Disc Special Edition] – DVD

March 30, 2004Posted in2000s, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Disney, Drama, DVD, Family

½/**** Image B+ Sound A Extras B-
screenplay by Tab Murphy and Lorne Cameron & David Hoselton and Steve Bencich & Ron J. Friedman
directed by Aaron Blaise & Bob Walker

by Walter Chaw Deeply unentertaining and, at its heart of hearts, a quintessential example of a dishonest picture, Disney's Brother Bear is rock-bottom entertainment destined to be Pixar's best bargaining chip. It plugs bears and moose into a formula already plumbed Disney-style with lions and meerkats (and once before again with Earth Children stereotypes of Native Americans), boiling an entire culture and mythology down to an insultingly reductive pastiche and taking swipes at women along the way to telling one of the most inapplicable codas in the history of fable: "The story of a boy who became a man by becoming a bear."