Dark Angel: The Complete First Season (2000-2001) – DVD

November 4, 2003Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Television

Image B+ Sound A Extras C
“Pilot,” “Heat,” “Flushed,” “C.R.E.A.M.,” “411 on the DL,” “Prodigy,” “Cold Comfort,” “Blah Blah Woof Woof,” “Out,” “Red,” “Art Attack,” “Rising,” “The Kidz Are Aiight,” “Female Trouble,” “Haven,” “Shorties in Love,” “Pollo Loco,” “I and I Am a Camera,” “Hit a Sista Back,” “Meow,” “…And Jesus Brought a Casserole”

by Walter Chaw Ah, the Apocalypse. Terrorists set off a nuclear bomb in orbit, and the resultant electromagnetic pulse cripples the mighty United States’ information highway, plunging Seattle 2019 into what the morose voiceover introduction proclaims is the Third World. The mean streets of the Emerald City are teeming with grungy, coffee-addled youth culture, aggressive panhandlers, and Russian gangsters milling beneath a constant drizzle while bike messengers zip around with insouciant wet flying off their natty dreadlocks–and then the catastrophic energy pulse, after which we meet Max (Jessica Alba). With a beauty-mark bespecked-chin, a pouting leer, and a penchant for delivering every line with a head wobbling “oh no you did-ent” undead inner-city spunk (which not only gets tired, but also dates the piece almost instantly–recall the airless jingo-ese of “What’s Happenin'”), Alba struts into and out of her fifteen minutes as lead terminator in the James Cameron-conceived (and occasionally scripted) series “Dark Angel”.

Finding Nemo (2003) [2-Disc Collector’s Edition] – DVD

November 3, 2003Posted in****/****, 2000s, Adventure, Animation, Australia, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Disability, DVD, Family, FFC Must-Own, Pixar

****/**** Image A+ Sound A+ Extras A-
screenplay by Andrew Stanton & Bob Peterson & David Reynolds
directed by Andrew Stanton

Findingnemohirescap

Mustownby Walter Chaw The perfect American parable for an anxious new millennium, Andrew Stanton's Finding Nemo is riddled with nightmares and weighted by the existential smallness of its heroic pair, finding a certain immutable gravity in the fear and hope represented by children, rekindled, both, by the spate of child-on-child violence ending our last thousand years. Following hot on horror films that, like the horror films of the late-'60s/early-'70s, focus on unapologetically evil children (then: Night of the Living Dead, Rosemary's Baby, Don't Look Now, The Exorcist, now: The Ring, Identity, Soft for Digging), what Finding Nemo does is present generational paranoia from a parent's point of view, opening as it does with an act of senseless, heartbreaking violence in the middle of an idyllic suburbia. It's not the horror (at this point) of a child facing social ostracism in the school environment, but the horror of making a choice to escape a bad environment only to find oneself in the middle of an upper middle-class tinder pile about to light.

The Cat in the Hat (1971) + The Lorax (1972) – DVDs

November 3, 2003Posted in1970s, 1980s, Animation, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, DVD, Family, Television

THE CAT IN THE HAT
**½/**** Image B Sound A- Extras C
directed by Hawley Pratt

THE LORAX
***/**** Image B+ Sound A- Extras C
directed by Hawley Pratt

PONTOFFEL AND HIS MAGIC PIANO (1980)
Pontoffel Pock, Where Are You?
**/**** Image B- Sound B+ Extras C
directed by Gerard Baldwin

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Adapting for the screen a sensibility as singular as that of Dr. Seuss is a desperately tricky thing. It simply won't do to faithfully transpose the narrative, because narrative is hardly the point: Seuss is about nonsense wit both visual and verbal, and to fit it into a standard teleplay box is to destroy everything that makes his books special and unique. Nevertheless, the urge to bring the madness of Dr. Seuss to life is an understandable one, and so it should come as no surprise that in the Sixties and Seventies, CBS commissioned a series of animated specials designed to do just that.

The House That Dripped Blood (1972) – DVD

October 31, 2003Posted in1970s, Authors: Bill Chambers, DVD, Mystery

**½/**** Image B Sound B Extras D+
starring Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing, Nyree Dawn Porter, Denholm Elliot
screenplay by Robert Bloch
directed by Peter Duffell

by Bill Chambers Anthology films are by their very nature self-defeating–especially, it seems, when the individual stories are linked by a framing device rather than by a thematic spine. (The majority of Hammer also-ran Amicus' output vs. Pulp Fiction, for example.) As the Amicus production The House That Dripped Blood draws to a close, you can't contain the urge to crown a favourite chapter; the rest of the picture becomes a useless husk. Based on the works of Psycho author Robert Bloch, The House That Dripped Blood stars genre stalwarts Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing, John Pertwee, and still others (including an unrecognizably young Joss "Diplomatic Immunity!" Ackland) in separate tales all set inside a gothic manse that, we determine from interstitial vignettes, is unloaded on some steel-nerved rich dude roughly once a week by shifty real estate agent A.J. Stoker (John Bryans).

Watchers/Watchers II [Double Feature] – DVD

October 31, 2003Posted in1980s, 2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, DVD, Horror, Sci-Fi, Thriller, ZERO STARS

WATCHERS (1988)
*/**** Image C- Sound C
starring Corey Haim, Barbara Williams, Michael Ironside
screenplay by Bill Freed and Damian Lee, based on Watchers by Dean R. Koontz
directed by Jon Hess

WATCHERS II (2002)
ZERO STARS/**** Image C Sound C
starring Marc Singer, Tracy Scoggins, Jonathan Farwell, Irene Miracle
screenplay by Henry Dominic
directed by Thierry Notz

by Walter Chaw Lassie vs. Link in what amounts to one of the stupidest films ever made: an adaptation of a Dean Koontz (one of the stupidest novelists ever made) novel, Watchers looks cheap, plays cheap, and stars Corey Haim as a Lita Ford-looking, ambiguously gay teen who’s upstaged by a dog yet again (see: The Lost Boys and, in a way, Silver Bullet). At least he’s not upstaged by Corey Feldman this time around, which, frankly, can’t be good for anyone’s career or self-respect. A tale of a genetically engineered orangutan warring with a genetically engineered golden retriever in the upscale suburbs of Anywhere, America that looks like Vancouver and boasts of the entire Mayberry police force, Watchers is aided now and again by a trademark ridiculous performance from Michael Ironside, the poor man’s Jack Nicholson, but is generally an unredeemable tale of military paranoia and dog love. As the mutt gazes intently off-screen at the commands of his invisible handler (and Haim the same), the film has as its only vaguely interesting moment one where a fat kid named “Piggy” and Jason Priestly try to out-bike the killer monkey, restaging The Lord of the Flies as a BMX downhill derby. Oh, the humanity.

Halloween (1978) [25th Anniversary Divimax Edition] – DVD

October 30, 2003Posted in****/****, 1970s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: John Carpenter, DVD, FFC Must-Own, Horror, Thriller

****/**** Image B- Sound A Extras A
starring Donald Pleasence, Jamie Lee Curtis, Nancy Kyes, P.J. Soles
screenplay by John Carpenter & Debra Hill
directed by John Carpenter

by Walter Chaw As tempting as it is to write the umpteenth dissertation on the importance and brilliance of John Carpenter’s Halloween, it’s almost enough to say that there is very possibly no other seminal Seventies film–not The Godfather, not Star Wars, perhaps not even Jaws–that has had a greater influence on popular culture. It’s a movie about a fishbowl that exists now only in a fishbowl, a picture so examined that its sadistic ability to maintain an atmosphere of horrified anticipation is consumed by the intellectualization of its hedonism=death equation. A screening with fresh eyes reveals a picture and a filmmaker owing incalculable debts to Alfred Hitchcock and Howard Hawks.

Bride of Re-Animator (1990) – DVD

October 30, 2003Posted in1980s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD, Horror, Japan, Sci-Fi, Thriller

**½/**** Image C Sound C
starring Bruce Abbott, Claude Larl Jones, Fabiana Odento, David Gale
screenplay by Woody Keith and Rick Fry
directed by Brian Yuzna

by Walter Chaw Screaming Mad George is a genius. Make-up artist extraordinaire, his legacy is born of Stan Winston and Tom Savini, but his touch is more witty than the former and more perverse than the latter, resulting in a body of work that, by itself, makes the third Children of the Corn film a winner, the climax of Brian Yuzna’s Society unspeakably sticky, and this, Yuzna’s sequel to Stuart Gordon’s classic splatter flick Re-Animator, a gore flick of unusual visual wit and energy. A continuation of the sad events at H.P. Lovecraft’s doomed Miskatonic University, the tale of mad Herbert West (B-movie legend Jeffrey Combs) and his experiments in reanimating living tissue (undaunted, apparently, by his run-in with an over-eager intestinal tract in the first film) with hapless assistant Dan (Bruce Abbott), Bride of Re-Animator captures a lot of the gleeful lack of boundaries of the first film without, predictably, the attendant surprise and freshness. Still, what emerges is a genre picture that, for all of its lack of psychosexual subtext and subtlety, gains for its jubilant indulgence in the wetworks.

Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (2003) [2-Disc Widescreen Edition] – DVD

October 29, 2003Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD, Germany, Schwarzenegger, Sci-Fi, UK

**½/**** Image A- Sound A+ Extras B
starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Nick Stahl, Claire Danes, Kristanna Loken
screenplay by John D. Brancato & Michael Ferris
directed by Jonathan Mostow

by Walter Chaw Where the first film banked on romantic melancholy, and the second on a literalization of both techno-paranoia and the Oedipal split, Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (hereafter T3)–the first in the Terminator trilogy to be directed by someone other than James Cameron (U-571‘s Jonathan Mostow)–is essentially a mega-budgeted slasher flick rematted as a hero mythology, but without the sociological significance of the genre. What T3 is, at its core, is a post-modern picture with a few agreeable moments of self-knowing humour that devolve into a self-worshipping reverence. With Arnold Schwarzenegger threatening to jettison his foundering movie career (something of a disaster since the last Terminator film) to pursue a terrifying career in politics, the picture plays like an Academy highlight reel, with Arnie delivering three variations of his “I’ll be back” as well as a quick “I lied” for the dozen or so people who still remember Commando. T3 never gets more clever than that, really (though a moment where Arnie’s killer robot dons a pair of Elton John sunglasses is a classic image only missing a quick refrain of “The Bitch is Back”), and the picture resolves itself as derivative (I should say “slavishly, worshipfully derivative”) of the other films in the trilogy while adding a lot of loud “nothing new.”

Milk Money (1994) + I.Q. (1994) – DVDs

October 28, 2003Posted in1990s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD, Romance

MILK MONEY
*½/**** Image B Sound B
starring Melanie Griffith, Ed Harris, Michael Patrick Carter
screenplay by John Mattson
directed by Richard Benjamin

I.Q.
**/**** Image B+ Sound B
starring Meg Ryan, Tim Robbins, Walter Matthau, Charles Durning
screenplay by Andy Breckman and Michael Leeson
directed by Fred Schepisi

by Walter Chaw The first preteen sex comedy I’ve ever seen, Richard Benjamin’s inexplicable Milk Money is a fascinating example of a movie that was never a good idea brought to life in a presentation that is every bit as misguided as its appalling premise would suggest. Melanie Griffith is a hooker who flashes her goodies for a bag of change collected by a trio of pre-pubescent youngsters who seem to live in 1994 but act like they’re from 1950. They’ve idealized The City in an impossibly provincial “aw shucks” country-mouse sort of way, proclaiming it the place where anything can happen and, more importantly, anything can be bought. It’s stupid, but at least its naivety is echoed in the way they earn their cash, the cool “Fonzie” kid selling a brief turn with his leather jacket for a handful of change. I’m not certain what freakish netherworld Benjamin and writer John Mattson (responsible for this and two Free Willy sequels) dragged themselves out of, but Milk Money is a product of the same kind of autumnal bullshit-spring from which wells magnificent falderal like The Majestic.

To Live and Die in LA (1985) [Special Edition] – DVD

October 23, 2003Posted in1980s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Crime, Directors: William Friedkin, Drama, DVD, Thriller

To Live and Die in L.A.
***/**** Image B Sound A- Extras A
starring William L. Petersen, Willem Dafoe, John Pankow, Debra Feuer
screenplay by William Friedkin and Gerald Petievich, based on the novel by Petievich
directed by William Friedkin

by Bill Chambers William Friedkin's To Live and Die in L.A. sprang from the director's mid-'80s preoccupation with music-video nihilism, and as such has peaks and valleys depending on the degree of montage a sequence calls for. The tin-ear that Friedkin contracted sometime after the Seventies, which drove him to fatally second-guess Paul Brickman's Swiftian screenplay for Deal of the Century, imbues many an exchange in To Live and Die in L.A. with authenticity (only real people flounder this much trying to sound hard-boiled), but the stylish visuals in turn butt heads with the dialogue, prompting us to wish for a slicker whole. The silliest repartee also throws the symbolic-to-the-point-of-corny names of central figures Chance (William L. Petersen) and Masters (Willem Dafoe) into tautological relief: Chance is a Secret Service agent who thrives on risk (fittingly, a found poker chip decides him in pursuit of the bad guy), while Masters, who's like Patrick Bateman without the civility, is a painter who has mastered the art of making funny-money, as is demonstrated for us in a breathtaking collection of how-to shots that single-handedly justifies Friedkin's dabble in the MTV aesthetic.

Willard (2003) [New Line Platinum Series] – DVD

October 22, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Drama, DVD, Horror, Thriller

*½/**** Image A Sound A Extras A+
starring Crispin Glover, Laura Elena Harring, Jackie Burroughs, R. Lee Ermey
screenplay by Glen Morgan, based on the screenplay by Gilbert Ralston and Ralston's novel Ratman's Notebook
directed by Glen Morgan

by Walter Chaw If you're going to remake an Ernest Borgnine movie from the Seventies, I'd rather see a redux of The Devil's Rain. But Willard it is; for the blissfully uninitiated, Willard concerns the travails of a lonesome weirdo who makes friends with a bunch of rats, Phenomena-style (Argento not Travolta, which brings us back to The Devil's Rain, curiously), and sends them on a crusade against an evil boss who wants to buy Willard's house. Bruce Davison as the original Willard has a nice moment in that film where he implores his rat-kinder to "tear it up" good, but the film is probably best remembered for the theme song of its sequel, Ben, penned by Michael Jackson v.0.2. The theme song, and Davison, have stupid cameos in the new Willard.

The Whales of August (1987) – DVD

October 20, 2003Posted in1980s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Drama, DVD

**½/**** Image A- Sound A-
starring Bette Davis, Lillian Gish, Vincent Price, Anne Sothern
screenplay by David Berry, based on his play
directed by Lindsay Anderson

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Auteurists take note: sometimes, economic circumstances play hell with your theories. There is the example of Lindsay Anderson, who began in the '60s as a star of the new British realism (This Sporting Life, et al) and went surrealist with the celebrated Mick Travis trilogy. By the end of the '80s, his particular quirks were no longer commercial, and he was reduced to sausages like The Whales of August, which bears absolutely no resemblance to the work that made his reputation. Try as one might, the film won't fit the brash, cynical template of Anderson's best work and is instead polite and obsequious in ways that a free director would never be. The resulting film is workmanlike but hardly compelling and serves mainly as a showcase for a group of aged actors who deserved better material almost as much as their director.

The Ox-Bow Incident (1943) – DVD

October 17, 2003Posted in****/****, 1940s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Drama, DVD, FFC Must-Own, Western

****/**** Image A Sound B+ Extras A-
starring Henry Fonda, Dana Andrews, Mary Beth Hughes, Henry Morgan
screenplay by Lamar Trotti, based on the novel by Walter Van Tilburg Clark
directed by William A. Wellman

by Bill Chambers William A. Wellman's 1943 film The Ox-Bow Incident is so brave and piercing that you can overlook its gawky title. That star Henry Fonda had a knack for picking westerns goes without saying, but The Ox-Bow Incident has more gothic qualities than do most oaters made prior to the dawn of Europe staking its genre claim: it's the scene in cowboy flicks where a bunch of guys cheer on an unceremonious hanging expanded to feature-length. The movie has such definitive–and perhaps, given the climate, urgent–things to say about mob mentality, the sour side of fraternity, that the Navy-enlisted Fonda deferred his tour of duty in order to appear in it. What makes this doubly noble is that, despite his lead billing, he's really not The Ox-Bow Incident's leading man. With a cast of dozens granted comparable screen time, no one is.

House of 1000 Corpses (2003) + Waxwork/Waxwork II: Lost in Time [Double Feature] – DVD

October 16, 2003Posted in1980s, 2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD, Fantasy, Horror, Sci-Fi, UK, West Germany, ZERO STARS

HOUSE OF 1000 CORPSES
**/**** Image A Sound A Extras A
starring Sid Haig, Bill Moseley, Sheri Moon, Karen Black
written and directed by Rob Zombie

WAXWORK (1988)
*/**** Image D Sound D
starring Zach Galligan, Deborah Foreman, Michelle Johnson, Dana Ashbrook
written and directed by Anthony Hickox

WAXWORK II: LOST IN TIME (1991)
ZERO STARS/**** Image C Sound C
starring Zach Galligan, Alexander Godunov, Monika Schnarre
written and directed by Anthony Hickox

by Walter Chaw Curiously, compulsively watchable in a grindhouse exploitation sort of way, neo-glam shock-rocker Rob Zombie follows in Twisted Sister Dee Snider’s capering footsteps with a derivative flick that mainly goes a long way towards demonstrating how hard it is to make a coherent movie. More Richard Donner’s The Goonies than Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, House of 1000 Corpses is a shoestring series of hyperactive camera movements and disjointed images culled from what seems too many films to count, from Bloodsucking Freaks to Near Dark to Maniac to The Serpent and the Rainbow to Halloween to Hellbound: Hellraiser 2 and so on, with no reason except to demonstrate how many horror movies Zombie has seen. The only thing missing from the picture–besides actual dread–is a helpful annotation so that youngsters intrigued can check out the real deal.

Star Trek V: The Final Frontier (1989) – DVD|[Special Collector’s Edition] DVD

October 14, 2003Posted in1980s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Vincent Suarez, DVD, Sci-Fi, Star Trek, Thriller

**½/****
1999 DVD – Image B Sound A-
SCE DVD – Image A Sound A Extras A
starring William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, DeForest Kelly, James Doohan, Laurence Luckinbill
screenplay by David Loughery
directed by William Shatner

by Vincent Suarez On the heels of the wildly successful (and equally overrated) Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, the Trek franchise seemed poised to become, of all things, a crossover phenomenon. That changed with the release of the financially disappointing and generally reviled (by critics and Trek fans alike) fifth installment, Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, which nearly killed the film series. Wisely, Paramount and producer Harve Bennett asked Nicholas Meyer, director of the magnificent Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, to helm Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, putting the series back on warp drive.

Dawson’s Creek: The Series Finale (2003) – DVD

October 12, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Coming of Age, Drama, DVD, Teen, Television

**½/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras A-
starring James Van Der Beek, Katie Holmes, Michelle Williams, Joshua Jackson
screenplay by Kevin Williamson & Maggie Friedman
directed by James Whitmore, Jr. ("All Good Things…") and Greg Prange ("…Must Come to an End")

by Bill Chambers SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. When it first aired, I was fuming. But I've not only come to terms with the series finale of "Dawson's Creek", I've grown to appreciate it, too. What I realized on a second viewing (not as superfluous as you might think: the DVD that facilitated a reassessment restores 20 minutes of footage cut from the broadcast version) was that my own tenuous identification with the main character, a movie lover and amateur filmmaker prone to befriending unattainable hotties, was getting in the way of appreciating a perfectly laudable reversal of expectations. There's no sense beating around the bush: Joey (Katie Holmes) picked suave Pacey (Joshua Jackson). The first "Dawson's Creek" scripted by series creator Kevin Williamson since the second season's "…That Is the Question" (in tandem with which he announced he was stepping down as the show's Professor Marvel), the two-part capper–aired as a movie-of-the-week–leaves Dawson (James Van Der Beek) without a fallback girl, as Joey romantically rejects Dawson on the heels of the passing of her alternate: single-mother Jen (Michelle Williams), who dies from a rare heart condition.

Sunday Bloody Sunday (1971) – DVD

October 9, 2003Posted in1970s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Drama, DVD, UK

**½/**** Image B Sound B+
starring Peter Finch, Glenda Jackson, Murray Hedd, Peggy Ashcroft
screenplay by Penelope Gilliatt
directed by John Schlesinger

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover "Are you bourgeois?" asks a child in Sunday Bloody Sunday, hoping to catch an adult in an awkward moment, and the question is crucial to your enjoyment of the film. If you are well-off enough to have good taste and fine things, and are somewhat guilty about the freedom and power that entails, then it will seem a sober and mature work about life and love in the post-hippie '70s. If, on the other hand, you are just scraping by and worrying about where your next meal is coming from, the film will seem a self-piteous soap opera in love with the idea of defeat. There's no denying the skill and professionalism at work here–it's what mid-period Woody Allen wishes it were, but it never quite licks the question of what to do with bourgie liberal guilt, and thus waffles towards an underwhelming conclusion.

Legally Blonde 2: Red, White & Blonde (2003) [Special Edition] – DVD

October 7, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD

*½/**** Image B Sound A- Extras A-
starring Reese Witherspoon, Sally Field, Bob Newhart, Luke Wilson
screenplay by Kate Kondell
directed by Charles Herman-Wurmfeld

by Walter Chaw Recognizing that there's nothing more patriotic than rampant materialism, cultural ignorance, fast fashion, a steadfast lack of imagination, and disturbing dog-love, Charles Herman-Wurmfeld's Legally Blonde 2: Red, White & Blonde is essentially a blow-by-blow remake of its predecessor with a different setting and more Chihuahua. It tackles animal rights and congressional corruption with the same seriousness as Versace vs. Gucci, hoping against hope that Reese Witherspoon's considerable charm will smooth over the clumsy grafts and inevitable tissue rejection of a film with speaking roles for Jennifer Coolidge, Bob Newhart, and Sally Field. Harvard Law is replaced by the Beltway Boys, factoids about perms are replaced by factoids about facials, and all of it boils down to the importance of sorority sisters–particularly ironic in a picture so horrified by the evils of intractable nepotism amongst insular societies.

Holes (2003) [Widescreen] – DVD

September 30, 2003Posted in2000s, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Disney, Drama, DVD, Family, Mystery

**/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
starring Sigourney Weaver, Jon Voight, Patricia Arquette, Shia LaBeouf
screenplay by Louis Sachar, based on his novel
directed by Andrew Davis

by Walter Chaw A certain level of grotesquerie in a children's entertainment is essential, but at some point grotesquerie just becomes grotesque. Holes, adapted by Louis Sachar from his award-winning children's novel, is a cheerless little melodrama, dusty and marooned in the middle of nowhere with what is essentially a pint-sized version of the time-tripping buffoonery of The Hours. Its tale of destiny and stroking the sins of the fathers rattles along its rails like a rusted-out mine cart, going to where it's going with a lot of noise and broken-down drama but without anything like surprise.