Fresh Horses (1988) – DVD

March 5, 2004Posted in1980s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Drama, DVD, Romance, Teen

*½/**** Image D+ Sound B-
starring Molly Ringwald, Andrew McCarthy, Patti D'Arbanville, Ben Stiller
screenplay by Larry Ketron
directed by David Anspaugh

by Bill Chambers As Tipton, best friend of Matt (Andrew McCarthy), Ben Stiller whispers in Andrew McCarthy's ear, "Look, when the horse underneath us drops, we take a fresh one." Yes, and the wet duck flies at midnight. Fresh Horses is all too effortlessly characterized as Pretty in Pink by way of Cormac McCarthy, or a Walker Evans BOP spread. Hot off of Hoosiers, director David Anspaugh seems to be aiming for something even folksier and more naturalistic this time around, but his three leads–McCarthy, Stiller, and Molly Ringwald–are the least likely actors he could've cast. The effect is a movie from Mars.

Lilies of the Field (1963) + For Love of Ivy (1968) – DVDs

March 4, 2004Posted in1960s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Romance

LILIES OF THE FIELD
*½/**** Image A- Sound A-
starring Sidney Poitier, Lilia Skala, Stanley Adams
screenplay by James Poe, based on the novel by William E. Barrett
directed by Ralph Nelson

FOR LOVE OF IVY
*/**** Image A Sound A
starring Sidney Poitier, Abbey Lincoln, Beau Bridges, Nan Martin
screenplay by Robert Alan Aurthur, based on a story by Sidney Poitier
directed by Daniel Mann

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Two steps forward, one step back. It's hard to know how to read the career of Sidney Poitier, who was America's premier black actor during the '60s and is often held up as a standard bearer for those trying to break through Hollywood's white ceiling. Is he a figure of uncommon dignity in an industry that trafficked in insulting stereotypes, or is he the "nice" black man-made palatable to a white audience eager to flatter itself for its liberalism? The answer is a complex one, requiring an examination of his films–two of which have recently been reissued on DVD. Both Lilies of the Field and For Love of Ivy are tedious, uncontroversial filmmaking, but they afford an interesting glimpse into the compromised mind of liberal Hollywood when faced with the task of "integrating" its product.

Cheaper by the Dozen (1950) + Belles on Their Toes (1952) – DVDs

March 3, 2004Posted in1950s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Biopic, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Family

CHEAPER BY THE DOZEN
**/**** Image B+ Sound B+
starring Clifton Webb, Jeanne Crain, Myrna Loy, Betty Lynn
screenplay by Lamar Trotti, based on the novel by Frank B. Gilbreth, Jr. and Ernestine Gilbreth Carey
directed by Walter Lang

BELLES ON THEIR TOES
**/**** Image B Sound B
starring Jeanne Crain, Myrna Loy, Debra Paget, Jeffrey Hunter
screenplay by Phoebe and Henry Ephron, based on the book by Frank B. Gilbreth, Jr. and Ernestine Gilbreth Carey
directed by Henry Levin

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Periodically, one comes across a critic who yearns for the qualities of golden-age studio filmmaking. This person will point to the technical proficiency that has since vanished from our cinema and appeal to something other than brutal, instant gratification in their narrative makeup. In response, I offer 1950's Cheaper by the Dozen and its sequel, Belles on their Toes, as examples of how these elements can be used for evil and not for good. Aesthetically, there's nothing especially wrong with them: Though directors Walter Lang and Henry Levin aren't masters, they're solid professionals, and they help the saga of an enormous family go down fairly easy. But what they're sending down is something conformist and ugly, making a phoney harmony out of ingredients that would under normal circumstances repel each other and fly off into space. Thus the initial film is about being crowded into one space under the rule of a benign despot, and the sequel, though backed into a mildly subversive corner, still manages to minimize the dark undertones of the family unit.

House of the Dead (2003) – DVD

March 3, 2004Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, DVD, Germany, Horror, ZERO STARS, Zombie

ZERO STARS/**** Image B Sound A- Extras B+
starring Jonathan Cherry, Tyron Leitso, Clint Howard, Ona Grauer
screenplay by Dave Parker & Mark Altman
directed by Uwe Boll

by Walter Chaw With Jürgen Prochnow (the production too cheap and/or ignorant to provide him even his umlaut in the closing credits) dressed like his Das Boot U-boat commander and Clint Howard dressed like the Morton’s fisherman, Uwe Boll’s wearying House of the Dead positions itself as one of those snarky post-modern slasher flicks that isn’t nearly so smart as it thinks it is. An early gag about Prochnow’s sea captain being named “Kirk” is one of those lifeless jokes that speaks to the desperation and incompetence driving the piece in equal measure; sad to say that after its unpromising opening minutes, the film defies the odds by getting progressively worse. I don’t really know how House of the Dead found distribution–pictures piggybacking on the success of both a video game franchise and another film that piggybacked on a video game franchise (Resident Evil) usually go straight to video. But as one of the death rattles of Artisan Entertainment, ’nuff said, I guess.

Under the Tuscan Sun (2003) [Widescreen] + Death in Venice (1971) – DVDs

March 2, 2004Posted in1970s, 2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Esoterica, France, Italy, Romance

UNDER THE TUSCAN SUN
*/**** Image A Sound A Extras C+
starring Diane Lane, Sandra Oh, Lindsay Duncan, Raoul Bova
screenplay by Audrey Wells, based on the book by Frances Mayes
directed by Audrey Wells

DEATH IN VENICE
**/**** Image A Sound B Extras D+
starring Dirk Bogarde, Mark Burns, Björn Andrésen, Silvana Mangano
screenplay by Luchino Visconti, Nicola Badalucco, based on the novel by Thomas Mann
directed by Luchino Visconti

by Bill Chambers Can't afford that trip to Italy? Consider the next best thing: a jaunt to your local video store, where you can pick up the diametrically opposed but concurrently-released travelogues Under the Tuscan Sun and Death in Venice. I confess I'm only covering them together because it struck me as funny to do so–it's doubtful there's a lot of overlap between the pictures' fanbases, though I'd sooner recommend Under the Tuscan Sun to a Death in Venice admirer than vice-versa: in my experience, devotees of so-called "chick flicks" are notoriously unadventurous moviegoers, while it should go without saying that anyone high on Death in Venice lives by the benefit of the doubt. Both vastly overrated by their supporters, they at least beat watching somebody's vacation slides.

The Damned (1969) – DVD

February 27, 2004Posted in1960s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Drama, DVD, Italy, West Germany

La caduta degli dei (Götterdämmerung)
***/**** Image A- Sound A-
starring Dirk Bogarde, Ingrid Thulin, Helmut Griem, Helmut Berger
screenplay by Nicola Badalucco, Enrico Medioli, Luchino Visconti
directed by Luchino Visconti

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover It's hard to know what to think of a film as divided against itself as Luchino Visconti's The Damned. A portrait of corrupted aristocracy during the Nazi era that drags in sensational elements unrelated to its stated subject matter, it feels like a tabloid exposé in that it's more fascinated than critical of what it claims to repudiate. But once you get past the kink factor of jet-black uniforms and transvestite SA gatherings, you see what's really on Visconti's mind: an examination of how the privileged class was headed off at the pass by a fascist movement that rose from the lower orders. It's a weird smash-up between Visconti's class loyalties and his Nazi tormentors, and if their implications don't exactly impress, they make for a fairly absorbing exercise in rise-and-fall horror.

Fight for Your Life (1977) – DVD

February 26, 2004Posted in1970s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blue Underground, Crime, DVD, Thriller

*½/**** Image A Sound B Extras B+
starring William Sanderson, Robert Judd, Reginald Bythewood, Lela Small
screenplay by Straw Weisman
directed by Robert A. Endelson

by Bill Chambers The package containing Fight for Your Life drew me towards it the way a pie cooling on the windowsill draws fugitives from chain gangs. Something I hate about myself is my susceptibility to ironic temptation: Here was this DVD with one third of "Newhart"'s Larry, Darryl, and Darryl having a barechested brawl with a Famous Amos look-alike on the cover, and like a not-so-metaphorical rat to cheese, I had to spin it immediately. Further patronizing me was a pull quote from All Movie Guide declaring Fight for Your Life "the least politically correct movie ever seen in American theaters." Coupled with my foreknowledge of the film's ongoing ban in the United Kingdom, why, that's "I gots ta know" territory. The film was now in the challenging position of having to meet a set of lopsided expectations: If it turned out to be anything less than transcendent schlock, I'd feel cheated.

Allan Quatermain and the Lost City of Gold (1987) – DVD

February 24, 2004Posted in1980s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, DVD, Israel

*½/**** Image B+ Sound A
starring Richard Chamberlain, Sharon Stone, James Earl Jones, Henry Silva
screenplay by Gene Quintano and Lee Reynolds
directed by Gary Nelson

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Bad-film enthusiasts will surely remember King Solomon's Mines, the 1985 H. Rider Haggard adaptation (and Indiana Jones rip-off) starring Richard Chamberlain and a pre-fame Sharon Stone. A fetid mixture of ridiculous situations, papier-mâché production design, and hopeless dialogue that takes off for camp heaven within minutes of unspooling, it was a moderate-sized hit for the late lamented hack studio Cannon Pictures, meaning that two years later emerged Allan Quatermain and the Lost City of Gold. But though the sequel is just as shoddy as its predecessor, it lacks a certain visionary quality that blasted King Solomon's Mines into the stratosphere of corn. While the original had the purity of madness backing up its tacky sets and costumes, Allan Quatermain and the Lost City of Gold is merely tacky, seeming just as tired, in the end, as the strip of polyester leopard skin that's wound around Quatermain's signature fedora.

Out of Time (2003) [Special Edition] – DVD

February 24, 2004Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, DVD, Mystery, Thriller

**½/**** Image B Sound B Extras B
starring Denzel Washington, Eva Mendes, Sanaa Lathan, Dean Cain
screenplay by Dave Collard
directed by Carl Franklin

by Walter Chaw If Carl Franklin were going to reunite with Denzel Washington, I wish he would've just made a follow-up to their exceptional adaptation of Walter Mosley's Devil in a Blue Dress–and while we're taking a stroll through fantasyland, I really wish that Franklin would make another film the equal of his astonishing One False Move. Not to say that Out of Time is a bad film (given the fatigue of the premise, it's a remarkably good film), just to say that it's only good enough to remind (unlike Franklin's excrescent High Crimes) of the kind of filmmaker that Franklin has been and, hope springing eternal, could be again. What translates well is a sense of breezy professionalism in a preposterous film put together so well that it gives the illusion of being entirely effortless and occasionally great. Out of Time reminds of the superior Confidence in the same way that Franklin reminds of James Foley: they're genuinely gifted neo-noir directors at the top of the game when they're at the top of their games, but too often given to undertaking projects of convenience. For Franklin, Out of Time is something like a return to form but more like a skilled director trying hard to find his way back to the true path.

The Order (2003) – DVD

February 23, 2004Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD, Germany, Horror, Mystery, Thriller

*½/**** Image B- Sound B Extras B
starring Heath Ledger, Shannyn Sossamon, Mark Addy, Benno Fürmann
written and directed by Brian Helgeland

by Walter Chaw Somewhere between the good-bad of Lost Souls and the bad-bad of Bless the Child is the medium-bad of The Order (just north of the medium-bad of Stigmata), a Brian Helgeland film that, using much of the same cast from his A Knight's Tale, squanders a pretty interesting concept and a handful of powerful scenes on so much confused exposition that it's nigh impossible to get too invested in the thing. More of a shame is that the foundation for the piece is such a strong one, revolving as it does around the idea that the Catholic Church would be hateful towards a personage who could absolve sin outside the Church proper, allowing sinners a "backdoor" into salvation. Since it's a simple conceit and a thorny one, it's easy to see why Helgeland thought he had something here. It's only with the ponderous details the hyphenate loads onto this cart that The Order gets irretrievably bogged down.

The Animal (2001) [Uncut Special Edition] – DVD

February 20, 2004Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, DVD, Sci-Fi

*/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras D+
starring Rob Schneider, Colleen Haskell, John C. McGinley, Guy Torry
screenplay by Tom Brady & Rob Schneider
directed by Luke Greenfield

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover There's not much to say about The Animal that hasn't been said a million times before about a million other cheap and lazy comedies. If you're even moderately discerning, you'll be groaning at the story of yet another nerdy schlub who once again achieves magical powers and, sure enough, finally gets the girl of his dreams; you'll also be rolling your eyes at the old jokes, tired scatological references, and boring un-PC swipes that dot the narrative like bird droppings. I know that I'm groaning and rolling my eyes at the prospect of writing about them, because there's not much to be proved here that isn't blindingly obvious: that making a comedy is no excuse for taking a holiday from wit and intelligence, and that bad filmmakers are seldom as funny on screen as they seem to themselves between takes.

Dying Young (1991) – DVD

February 19, 2004Posted in1990s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Romance

½*/**** Image A Sound B
starring Julia Roberts, Campbell Scott, Vincent D’Onofrio, Colleen Dewhurst
screenplay by Richard Friedenberg
directed by Joel Schumacher

by Walter Chaw If you ever wondered, like I never did, what a movie scored by Kenny G (actually James Newton Howard–Kenny G is just the “featured saxophone performer”) would be like, director Joel Schumacher and star Julia Roberts, in the middle of her big-hair era, hold the answer. “Dying Young,” nothing–this thing was dead before it got there. Seems to me that while Schumacher’s films were always terrible, puerile ennoblement fantasies, there was a time–at least in the ’90s–when his titles had a bit of honesty about them: Flatliners, Falling Down, and the ironically-dubbed Flawless and Batman Forever.

They Drive by Night (1940) – DVD

February 18, 2004Posted in1940s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Crime, Drama, DVD, Thriller

**½/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras B
starring George Raft, Ann Sheridan, Ida Lupino, Humphrey Bogart
screenplay by Jerry Wald & Richard Macaulay
directed by Raoul Walsh

by Bill Chambers At first an earnest but cheerful portrait of two brothers trying to make ends meet as Depression-era truckers, Raoul Walsh’s They Drive By Night does a complete about-face in terms of tone about halfway through that’s almost guaranteed to cause intellectual whiplash. It might therefore be an effective salve to think of this sea change as analogous to our road-bound heroes’ plight, but it’s business as usual for both distributor Warner Bros. (here combining two disparate pieces of source material–A.I. Bezzerides’s novel The Long Haul and the 1935 Bette Davis vehicle Bordertown–simply to get mileage out of pre-owned properties) and Walsh, since Walsh seemed to gravitate towards cross-pollinated screenplays. (I’m thinking of his Pursued, a western that flirts haphazardly (yet rewardingly) with noir conventions, or his gangsters-go-camping yarn High Sierra (written by John Huston).) Nevertheless, the film’s U-turn is so radical that it arguably transforms They Drive By Night into one of the U.S. cinema’s earliest experiments in portmanteau–adequate absolution, really, for this borderline social-conscience picture’s zany mutation into a gothic melodrama.

Pather Panchali (1955) + The World of Apu (1959) – DVDs

February 17, 2004Posted in1950s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Coming of Age, Drama, DVD, India

PATHER PANCHALI
***½/**** Image C+ Sound C+
starring Kanu Bannerjee, Karuna Bannerjee, Subir Bannerjee, Uma Das Gupta
screenplay by Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay & Satyajit Ray, based on Bandyopadhyay's novel
directed by Satyajit Ray

Apur Sansar
***/**** Image B- Sound B
starring Soumitra Chatterjee, Sharmila Tagore, Alok Chakravarty, Swapan Mukherjee
screenplay by Satyajit Ray, based on the novel by Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay
directed by Satyajit Ray

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Through some strange executive decision, FFC was given the option of reviewing only two-thirds of Satyajit Ray's Apu Trilogy. Note that the word "trilogy" generally indicates three parts; note also that the omitted film, Aparajito, constitutes the middle of this particular trilogy, making the experience of watching movies one (Panther Panchali) and three (The World of Apu) in conjunction seem weirdly disconnected. No matter: Complete or not, revisiting even just the pair helped me to better appreciate the achievement of two of the most hallowed films ever made, each of which I had underrated when I saw them initially on VHS some years ago. And while The World of Apu seems to me to be the weakest of the lot, Pather Panchali more than justifies its position as a precious jewel in the world-cinema crown.

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde [Classic Double Feature] – DVD

February 16, 2004Posted in****/****, 1930s, 1940s, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD, Horror, Sci-Fi, Thriller

DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE (1931)
****/**** Image B Sound B Extras A+
starring Fredric March, Miriam Hopkins, Rose Hobart, Holmes Herbert
screenplay by Samuel Hoffenstein and Percy Heath, based on the novel by Robert Louis Stevenson
directed by Rouben Mamoulian

DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE (1941)
**½/**** Image A Sound B Extras A+
starring Spencer Tracy, Ingrid Bergman, Lana Turner, Donald Crisp
screenplay by John Lee Mahin, based on the novel by Robert Louis Stevenson
directed by Victor Fleming

by Walter Chaw Owing a tremendous debt to German Expressionism and the silent era that the cinema had only recently left behind, Rouben Mamoulian’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is a surprisingly disturbing and enduring take on Robert Louis Stevenson’s dark tale of the id. Opening with a point-of-view shot, something that the director referred to as a first in the American cinema, the prologue’s build to a medical amphitheatre reveals the connection between this film and Mel Brooks’s classic satire Young Frankenstein, illustrating that it’s as important a headwater of the horror genre as the Universal monster features. Mamoulian and veteran cinematographer Karl Struss (the DP on F.W. Murnau’s Sunrise) themselves owe a great debt to Robert Weine’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, indulging in claustrophobic, expressionistic sets, long wipes, slow dissolves (in one case, extremely slow), extended floating takes, and matching shots that use statuary and illness to offset love and ecstasy. This Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is fever delirium; it’s stagy, no question, exhibiting a distinct discomfort with dialogue as well, but its images, including Jekyll’s transformation into Hyde (the first stage of which resembles Conrad Veidt from Caligari), remain powerful seven decades later.

Matchstick Men (2003) [Widescreen Edition] – DVD

February 15, 2004Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Directors: Ridley Scott, Drama, DVD, Nicolas Cage

**/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras B+
starring Nicolas Cage, Sam Rockwell, Alison Lohman, Bruce McGill
screenplay by Nicholas Griffin & Ted Griffin, based on the novel by Eric Garcia
directed by Ridley Scott

by Walter Chaw The defining Nicolas Cage performance is still the one he delivered in Vampire’s Kiss, an indescribably strange film that saw the actor affecting some sort of Algonquin accent and, in the picture’s most memorable scene, screaming at his therapist while wearing an ill-fitting set of plastic fangs. For Ridley Scott’s highly anticipated take on the dead-on-its-feet big con formula Matchstick Men (one last score for the grizzled shyster, a young apprentice who’s not what he seems, an unexpected and unwise late partner in crime, a big twist telegraphed from the first frame, and so on), Cage seems to have resurrected his perversely hammy turn in that underseen camp classic: screaming at another therapist (Bruce Altman, always good), donning another disguise with an astonishing number of distracting tics and affectations, and ultimately accepting his fate with a sort of fatigued, fatalistic resignation.

Spider-Man: The Animated Series (2003) – DVD

February 12, 2004Posted in2000s, Action, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD, Spider-Man, Superhero, Television

Image A Sound A+ Extras A Cheese A
"Heroes and Villains," "Royal Scam," "Law of the Jungle," "Sword of Shikata," "Keeping Secrets," "Tight Squeeze," "Head Over Heals," "The Party," "Flash Memory," "Spider-Man Dis-Abled," "When Sparks Fly," "Mind Games: Part One," "Mind Games: Part Two"

by Walter Chaw Taking place right where the Sam Raimi feature film leaves off, with Peter Parker, Mary Jane, and Harry Osborn off to college (Peter perplexed, MJ clueless, Harry seething), MTV's "Spider-Man: The Animated Series" is a completely CGI creation that has a pretty tough time finding a pulse in among all the whiz-bang. In truth, it took me a long time to thaw to the look of the series, so much like a nifty video game that I caught my thumbs twitching in unconscious sympathy with the gyrations of the coloured .gifs. And even when it stopped actively bugging me, I never completely bought into the piece as any kind of drama–the suspension of disbelief impossible when thoughts of the size of the mainframe, the insane processor rates, and how neat a video game all this was going to make one day keep running through the brain like a stock ticker. Worse, even if the look of the thing were not super-distracting, the voice acting by lead Neil Patrick Harris is more smug than the intended wry, sounding an awful lot like not only Doogie Howser (natch), but also Screech from "Saved by the Bell". Popstress Lisa Loeb is pretty much non-descript as Mary Jane, her absence from all the collection's voluminous special features conspicuous but probably due either to her being busy with a cooking show on the Food Network with boyfriend Dweezil Zappa or not feeling very confident about the series.

Wonderland (2003) [Limited 2-Disc Edition] – DVD

February 9, 2004Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Crime, Documentary, Drama, DVD, Mystery, Thriller

WONDERLAND
*/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B
starring Val Kilmer, Lisa Kudrow, Kate Bosworth, Dylan McDermott
screenplay by James Cox & Captain Mauzner and Todd Samovitz & D. Loriston Scott
directed by James Cox

by Walter Chaw A collision of vérité with the sort of Requiem for a Dream grind-cut quick-edits that have produced some of the worst films of the last couple of years (case in point: Spun), Wonderland sets out to tell the true story of 1981's Wonderland Murders, which left four scumbags dead and porn king John Holmes–King Scumbag, as it were–implicated in the lead pipe nastiness. It's a regurgitation in so many ways of so many things: neo-Boogie Nights, neo-noir, neo-Val Kilmer's own strung-out performance in the superior The Salton Sea–and therein lies the problem, as Kilmer is altogether too likeable an anti-hero, typecast as the strung-out simpleton too good-looking to be at the bottom, too drunk on himself to be anywhere else. A section where the passage of time is represented by a montage of TV GUIDE listings provides the only spark in the midst of this spastic spectacle, demonstrating a knowledge of its cathode tube parentage as cannily as the use of Duran Duran's "Girls on Film" tune that defined the MTV-made hit, dancing on the edge of art and porn. It happens early, it raises hopes, and then Wonderland runs itself well past the point of caring.

Hell Up in Harlem (1973) [Soul Cinema] – DVD

February 7, 2004Posted in1970s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Crime, Drama, DVD, Thriller

**½/**** Image A Sound B+ Commentary A+
starring Fred Williamson, Julius W. Harris, Gloria Hendry, Margaret Avery
written and directed by Larry Cohen

by Bill Chambers There have been wiser marketing decisions: MGM leaves Black Caesar out of their "Best of Soul Cinema" DVD set while including the film's sequel, Hell Up in Harlem. Having not yet managed to see Black Caesar for myself, I wondered if that's why Hell Up in Harlem left me as confused as I was entertained. But according to writer-director Larry Cohen in his DVD commentary, one of the finest I've ever listened to (and worth a purchase by itself), that ain't the half of it. In their infinite wisdom, AIP cashed in on a follow-up to Black Caesar so soon after its release that Cohen and star Fred Williamson–whose title character had perished at the end of the original, not that anyone seemed to care–had to shoot it in tandem with It's Alive! and That Man Bolt, respectively. Since those productions were situated on opposite coasts, Williamson couldn't film his lead role in Hell Up in Harlem until one or the other wrapped, resulting in a shake-and-bake screenplay whose main dramatic consideration was how to get away with an abundance of over-the-shoulder shots of the star. This is also why Williamson's character inexplicably decides to move to L.A., and why he boards a flight to Los Angeles at L.A.X. International.

Marci X (2003) [Widescreen] – DVD

February 6, 2004Posted in2000s, Comedy, DVD, Germany, Music

**½/**** Image B+ Sound A
starring Lisa Kudrow, Damon Wayans, Richard Benjamin, Christine Baranski
screenplay by Paul Rudnick
directed by Richard Benjamin

by Walter Chaw Long about the time Lisa Kudrow and her JAP posse wrap scarves around their heads in a hip-hop club and engage in a tribal dance they learned at The Seven Sisters, it becomes apparent that, while Richard Benjamin's Marci X is sort of terrible, it's also sort of brave. The places that it goes with its observations about race relationships in the United States are places that films rarely go on purpose anymore, and I admire the hell out of it for that. If most of the jokes fall flat while too much of the runtime is given over to musical numbers starring Lisa Kudrow that go nowhere, when the barbs hit their target, they do so with a kind of timeliness that defeats Paramount's decision to shelve the thing for a couple of years before dumping it in theatres last summer without much fanfare to a chorus of pre-written pans.