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."

Green Acres: The Complete First Season (1965-1966) – DVD

March 30, 2004Posted in1960s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD, Television

Image B- Sound B+
"Oliver Buys a Farm," "Lisa's First Day on the Farm," "The Decorator," "The Best Laid Plans," "My Husband, the Rooster Renter," "Furniture, Furniture, Who's Got the Furniture?," "Neighborliness," "Lisa the Helpmate," "You Can't Plug in a 2 with a 6," "Don't Call Us, We'll Call You," "Parity Begins at Home," "Lisa Has a Calf," "The Wedding Anniversary," "What Happened in Scranton?," "How to Enlarge a Bedroom," "Give Me Land, Lots of Land," "I Didn't Raise My Husband to Be a Fireman," "Lisa Bakes a Cake," "Sprained Ankle, Country Style," "The Price of Apples," "What's in a Name?," "The Day of Decision," "A Pig in a Poke," "The Deputy," "Double Drick," "The Ballad of Molly Turgis," "Never Look a Gift Tractor in the Mouth," "Send a Boy to College," "Horse? What Horse?," "The Rains Came," "Culture," "Uncle Ollie"

by Walter Chaw A sort of old-fashioned dedication to the all-power of the paterfamilias that seems appalling now and probably seemed more than a little quaint by 1965, "Petticoat Junction" (and The Egg and I) spin-off "Green Acres" has a surprisingly good nature that forgives it a lot of its contemporary offensiveness, locating the series as a belated, often surreal continuation of television's "Golden Age" that saw father knowing best and mother knowing next to nothing. Oliver Wendell Douglas (Eddie Albert), the eternal Pollyannaish optimist, uproots his high society wife Lisa (Eva Gabor), the archetypical dingbat, from her beloved Park Avenue penthouse view and plants them both square in the middle of provincial Hooterville on 160 acres of the rundown old Haney farm. There are moments in the series' first season when it's apparent that series writers Jay Sommers and Dick Chevillat have something subversively weird on their minds; "Green Acres" is like a grassroots "The Prisoner" at times–it's just that brilliantly peculiar.

Secondhand Lions (2003) [New Line Platinum Series] – DVD

March 26, 2004Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Family

**½/**** Image A- Sound A Extras A+
starring Michael Caine, Robert Duvall, Haley Joel Osment, Kyra Sedgwick
written and directed by Tim McCanlies

by Walter Chaw A conservative imperialist fable, the peculiar Secondhand Lions can't quite decide between the polarizing siren songs of the NRA and the AARP. Scylla and Charybdis had nothing on the rock and a hard place of the two most powerful lobbies in the United States, so it was only a matter of time before an ostensible children's film (set in Texas, natch) founded on the tenets of old people shooting guns at young people (and waxing rhapsodic about their days oppressing the dark-skinned denizens of sandy places) stumbled onto the silvering screen starring, naturally, Robert Duvall and, unnaturally, Michael Caine. Speaking of unnatural, Osment, taking his first tentative steps into adult Method hell, looks a little like a poorly articulated marionette engaged in a puppet theatre where the only instruction is mad, mechanical gesticulation. To see him react to a door closing is akin to watching someone get defibrillated.

The Heart of Me (2003) – DVD

March 23, 2004Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Drama, DVD, Germany, Romance, UK

**½/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras C+
starring Helena Bonham Carter, Olivia Williams, Paul Bettany, Eleanor Bron
screenplay by Lucinda Coxon, based on the novel The Echoing Grove by Rosamond Lehmann
directed by Thaddeus O’Sullivan

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover There’s nothing especially wrong with The Heart of Me, a professional, handsomely mounted, beautifully shot film featuring good performances from an attractive cast and a script that can at least be described as well-written. Unfortunately, that same screenplay doesn’t go far enough in pondering the ramifications of its narrative events: people fall in and out of love arbitrarily, make decisions because the plot requires it, and do horrible things just to get a rise out of the audience. There’s no real artistic purpose beyond the sound and fury of the story–it’s more designed and photographed than written and directed, with no real thematic exploration going on behind the devastatingly gorgeous goings-on. Thus The Heart of Me is craftsman-like enough to keep you watching, but it leaves you with nothing beyond a bunch of people being melodramatic while surrounded by sumptuous décor.

Dr. Seuss’ The Cat in the Hat (2003) [Widescreen] + Gothika (2003) [Widescreen Edition] – DVDs

March 22, 2004Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD, Family, Horror, Mystery, Thriller

The Cat in the Hat
½*/**** Image A Sound A Extras C+
starring Mike Myers, Alec Baldwin, Kelly Preston, Dakota Fanning
screenplay by Alec Berg & David Mandel & Jeff Schaffer, based on the Dr. Seuss book
directed by Bo Welch

GOTHIKA
*/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
starring Halle Berry, Robert Downey Jr., Charles Dutton, John Carroll Lynch
screenplay by Sebastian Gutierrez
directed by Mathieu Kassovitz

Catinthegothikaby Walter Chaw The vaguely infernal Dr. Seuss classic is given an overtly infernal treatment in the most excruciating rape of a beloved childhood memory since The Grinch (another Brian Grazer abomination), the replacement of director Ron Howard for production designer Bo Welch a case of bad for worse. I’d love to be able to say that The Cat in the Hat is inexplicable because I’d love to be able to be naïve about why and how films like this are made, but I fear by now I’m all too familiar with ideas of populism, condescension, the supremacy of opening weekend box-office, and the toxic belief that entertainment for children needn’t hold up to the same kind of scrutiny as entertainment for non-children. Byzantine in the number of ways in which it declares its disdain for film and moviegoers, The Cat in the Hat is also crude, low, and proof at last (with Pieces of April) that Sean Hayes should stick to television, where it’s easier to change the channel. There’s a built-in audience for this picture (most of which will feel a little ill afterwards), it’s going to gross an obscene amount, and it’s proof positive that when large amounts of money are at stake, there are really no depths to which some people will sink to try to grow it.

Wuthering Heights (2003) – DVD

March 22, 2004Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Musical, Romance, Teen, Television, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/**** Image C Sound C
starring Erika Christensen, Mike Vogel, Katherine Heigl, Johnny Whitworth
screenplay by Max Enscoe & Annie De Young, based ever-so-loosely on the book by Emile Brontë
directed by Suri B. Krishnamma

by Walter Chaw Consider this time-capsule exchange from the horrifically-misguided mess Suri Krishnamma has made of Wuthering Heights and shudder:

"I swear to God if you ever leave me I'll kill you."

"Then I'd have to come back and kill you so we could be together."

"If you kill me then I'd haunt you. Forever."

"You promise?"

How about I just kill myself while you two sort it out?

Taking Lives (2004) [Widescreen Edition – Unrated Director’s Cut] – DVD|[Extended Cut] – Blu-ray Disc + Gia (1998) [Unrated] – DVD

March 19, 2004Posted in1990s, 2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Drama, DVD, Mystery, Television, Thriller

TAKING LIVES
***/****
DVD – Image A- Sound A- Extras C+
BD – Image B+ Sound A Extras C+
starring Angelina Jolie, Ethan Hawke, Kiefer Sutherland, Gena Rowlands
screenplay by Jon Bokenkamp, based on the novel by Michael Pye
directed by D.J. Caruso

by Walter Chaw The more cynical among us would note that the title might also refer to the time that movies exactly like Taking Lives have stolen from hapless audiences, but the fact of it is that if not for our mortal curiosity, we might have missed genuinely good mad-dog killer flicks like Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, Manhunter, The Untold Story, and Se7en. On a reptile level, I think it behooves the herd to slow down at the scene of a gory end, the flock imprinting another’s messy mortal lesson as an explanation for our fascination with train wrecks and splatter flicks. But where a film like The Silence of the Lambs perversely reassures its captive audience that no matter the procreative ingenuity of a predator’s unslakeable bloodlust, there’s always a corn-fed, buttermilk-scrubbed farm girl there to put him away (and Taking Lives falls into this camp), there are films like granddaddy In Cold Blood (and great-grandpappy Psycho) that disdain the easy treatment of societal cancers. The one is appeasement and equivocation-bordering-on-exploitation, the other is always disquieting and sometimes even thought-provoking.

Dawn of the Dead (1978) [Divimax] – DVD

March 18, 2004Posted in1970s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: George A. Romero, DVD, Horror, Italy, Thriller, Zombie

**½/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring David Emge, Ken Foree, Scott H. Reiniger, Gaylen Ross
written and directed by George A. Romero

Dawnofthedead1978cap

by Walter Chaw There's a shopping mall in Colorado called "Colorado Mills" that bubbles with the kind of nameless existential dread generally reserved for terrariums and introspective box turtles. Its architecture–a mountain womb of logs and waterfalls–seeks to replicate the feeling of a village, so that the impulsive consumerism it encourages is disguised as foraging in some fantasy of frontier life and the mob of co-capitalist pilgrims shuffling along appear as a murmuring throng of fellow villagers–wayfarers with whom you have a polite agreement to neither speak to nor make eye contact with. Human interaction is dangerous, for it dispels the illusion of comfort.