Copacabana (1947) – DVD

July 24, 2003Posted in1940s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, DVD, Musical, Mystery, Romance

*½/**** Image B Sound B
starring Groucho Marx, Carmen Miranda, Steve Cochran, Andy Russell
screenplay by Alan Boretz, Howard Harris, Laslo Vadnay, Sydney R. Zelinka
directed by Alfred E. Green

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Like many great comedians, Groucho Marx was punished for being too good. One can't actually make movies like Horse Feathers, Animal Crackers and the great Duck Soup and not expect to pay a price, so the studio, in its infinite wisdom, decided to impose normalcy onto The Marx Brothers' films in an attempt to restore public order. This, of course, marked the beginning of his team's decline, so that by 1947 he was reduced to making unsalted soda crackers like Copacabana just to pay the rent. And what a reduction it is: Groucho and hapless co-star Carmen Miranda are the only things worth watching in this limp backstage musical, and while they work all the wonders they can with limited material, it's not enough to keep it from seeming more than a woeful desecration of a great comic's talent.

Brigham Young (1940) – DVD

July 23, 2003Posted in1940s, Adventure, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Biopic, Drama, DVD, Romance, Western

**/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B+
starring Tyrone Power, Linda Darnell, Brian Donlevy, Dean Jagger
screenplay by Lamar Trotti, based on a story by Louis Bromfield
directed by Henry Hathaway

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover I was hoping, prior to watching Brigham Young, that the film would be a twisted smash-up of subject matter and Hollywood convention. I was sure that the touchy matter of Mormon ritual would send the movie in all directions at once, trying to salvage a normal film but twisting itself through ever more bizarre hoops. But while it does indeed get the production team scrambling to deal with that pesky polygamy issue, Brigham Young is mostly just a dull problem-picture crossed with a boring western, with no real surprises to offer anyone who was born a little before yesterday.

Irma la Douce (1963) – DVD

July 23, 2003Posted in1960s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Directors: Billy Wilder, DVD, Romance

***½/**** Image A Sound B
starring Jack Lemmon, Shirley MacLaine, Lou Jacobi, Bruce Yarnell
screenplay by Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond
directed by Billy Wilder

by Walter Chaw Until Irma la Douce (1963), movie prostitutes were of the touch-me-not variety, the Holly Golightly breed who invariably paid the (sometimes ultimate) price for the oldest profession–they were never happy, bright, and chirpily philosophical. The casting of Shirley MacLaine as the titular poule makes sense in that just three years after Billy Wilder's The Apartment, it brought her and Jack Lemmon back together as lovers divided by sordid circumstance (and cohabiting an apartment again, as it happens), but Wilder's wish to cast Marilyn Monroe instead would have been the better choice. She is, after all, far less burdened by the weight of intelligence and melancholy than MacLaine (or, at least, her screen persona is)–qualities that serve MacLaine extremely well in the darkly-hued The Apartment, and much less so in what is literally a gauzy Technicolor slapstick musical sans song-and-dance numbers. Still, what works about Irma la Douce is the sprightliness of the interplay between the elfin Irma and her arguably more elfin beau/benefactor Nestor (Lemmon), both finding in Wilder the sort of director who understood the quality of the "attractive goons, winsome losers, and sympathetic heels" Ethan Mordden described as comprising the prototypical Wilder hero. And it is that marriage of paradoxes, particularly the one which finds MacLaine cast as the bimbo, that gives Irma la Douce the kind of dark, self-reflexive undercurrent that defined the unrest of '60s cinema.

Dracula II: Ascension (2003) – DVD

July 22, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD, Horror, Romania, Vampire, Wes Craven

*½/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras B
starring Jason Scott Lee, Jason London, Craig Sheffer, Stephen Billington
screenplay by Joel Soisson & Patrick Lussier
directed by Patrick Lussier

by Walter Chaw As far as direct-to-video sequels to awful franchise films go, Patrick Lussier’s ponderously dubbed Wes Craven Presents Dracula II: Ascension (hereafter Dracula II) is better than Hellraiser 3 and Children of the Corn V, but really just a vampire knock-off of Suicide Kings, of all things. After tackling the mummy mythos in Russell Mulcahy’s dreadful Tale of the Mummy, poor Jason Scott Lee takes on the vampire canon, assuming the Van Helsing role of self-flagellating holy vamp hunter Uffizi, all decked-out in priestly black and doing his Bruce Lee berserker song-and-dance, this time armed to the nines with obscure weaponry. A shame that the film spends so much of its time watching a suddenly Aryan Dracula (Stephen Billington, Gerard Butler apparently not available) tied to a table between banks of ultraviolet lights while mumbling dreamy phrases in a Count Chocula accent, as the potential is there for a campy cheap-o action/gore piece.

Felicity: Season Two Six-Disc Set [Sophomore Year DVD Collection] (1999-2000) – DVD

July 20, 2003Posted in1990s, 2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Coming of Age, Drama, DVD, Romance, Television

Image A- Sound B Extras A-
“Sophomoric”, “The List”, “Ancient History”, “The Depths”, “Crash”, “The Love Bug”, “Getting Lucky”, “Family Affairs”, “Portraits”, “Great Expectations”, “Help for the Lovelorn”, “The Slump”, “Truth or Consequences,” “True Colors”, “Things Change”, “Revolutions”, “Docuventary II”, “Party Lines”, “Running Mates”, “Ben Was Here”, “The Aretha Theory”, “Final Answer”, “The Biggest Deal There Is”

by Bill Chambers

FelicityseasontwohaircapWhat is a haircut?

According to Merriam-Webster, it is “the act, process, or result of cutting and shaping the hair.” Maybe the definition should be expanded to account for the transmogrifying impact a haircut can have on public perception of the vehicle for a fictional character. I encountered my own follicular prejudices when I went to see Lethal Weapon 4 and found myself even more put off by the absence of Martin Riggs’s signature mullet than by the film’s idiotic script, abject racism, and incongruous delivery-room hijinks–none of which were quite so indicative of Richard Donner’s undisciplined direction as his electing to leave Mel Gibson’s ‘do as short as it always is outside the Lethal Weapon franchise. Perhaps we can trace this back to the Sunday funnies: imagine how disconcerting it would be if Ziggy or Charlie Brown suddenly had hair. With the ingratiation of comic books, motion pictures, and television in the latter half of the twentieth century, our escapist figures got deported from the realm of imagination; transmuted into visual icons, they consequently became far less malleable.

May (2003) – DVD

July 19, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Horror, Thriller

***/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B-
starring Angela Bettis, Jeremy Sisto, Anna Faris, James Duval
written and directed by Lucky McKee

by Walter Chaw Lucky McKee takes a look at the end of the world and it comes half-blinded before a student version of Claire Denis’s Trouble Every Day and a poster-shrine to Dario Argento’s Opera. The apocalypse in May is the end of cinema, a self-consuming contemplation of itself as the product of genre, and so its touchstones are films that consider the horror of unnatural progeny, inappropriate consumption, and, of course, the literariness of “Frankenstein”‘s exhumation and reconstitution tropes. When May (Angela Bettis) pleads at the picture’s conclusion to be seen, more than the plaintive cry of a child molded by fear into something strange, it’s an understanding that the life of cinema is like the span of any beast: naivety into optimism into cynicism into contemplation into, finally, a breed of facile irony fed by the mordancy of existence at its extremity.

Blood, Guts, Bullets & Octane (1998) – DVD

July 18, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, Crime, DVD, Thriller

Blood, Guts, Bullets and Octane
*/**** Image B+ Sound A-
starring Joe Carnahan, Dan Leis, Ken Rudolph, Dan Harlan
written and directed by Joe Carnahan

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover It’s not the band I hate, it’s their fans. The celebrated (if overrated) efforts of both David Mamet and Quentin Tarantino spawned a lot of half-baked imitators in their heyday in the ’90s, people who didn’t understand the masters’ cruel ironies or obsessive cinephilia, respectively, but sure thought that it was cool wear a suit while pointing a gun and saying “fuck.” Few of them, however, made films as dire and unpleasant as Joe Carnahan’s Blood, Guts, Bullets & Octane (hereafter Octane), which takes the male territorial-pissing formula of scores of Mamet-tino flicks and pushes it to an astonishingly crude extreme. There’s no wit to the dialogue, no style to the imagery and no grace in the performances–just eff this and eff that and oh-God-I’m-shot. If you needed a reason for the Nineties to end, here it is; the passing of this kind of cinema is ample incentive to enter the new century.

Miranda (2002) – DVD

July 17, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, DVD, Germany, Romance, Thriller, UK

**/**** Image B Sound A- Extras D+
starring Christina Ricci, John Simm, Kyle MacLachlan, John Hurt
screenplay by Rob Young
directed by Marc Munden

Mirandadvdcapby Travis Mackenzie Hoover There was a time (from the late-'70s to the late-'80s) when the UK cranked out tart, intelligent films that put their American counterparts to shame. People like Stephen Frears, Hanif Kureshi, Alan Clarke, Mike Leigh, Terence Davies, Neil Jordan, Derek Jarman, and Sally Potter could be counted on to raise hell in the name of motion pictures; whatever their relative merits, they were interested in cinema and not career opportunities, and their commitment to a reality outside of their aesthetics gave them soul and punch. (Even when they made a thriller, like John Mackenzie's The Long Good Friday, it was an anti-Thatcher thriller.) Then the '90s happened, and what was called "the multiplex generation" sprang up: suddenly we were doomed to the likes of Danny Boyle and Guy Ritchie, who made films with flashy visuals that failed to obscure their essential vacuity. And so it is with Marc Munden's Miranda, a well-shot, smartly-designed film with an empty space where its brain should be, leaving us with something that looks good, goes down easy, and is instantly forgotten.

Loving (1970) – DVD

July 14, 2003Posted in1970s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Drama, DVD

***½/**** Image B+ Sound B-
starring George Segal, Eva Marie Saint, Sterling Hayden, Keenan Wynn
screenplay by Don Devlin, based on a novel by J.M. Ryan
directed by Irvin Kershner

by Bill Chambers The top ten winners in TOTAL FILM’s recent poll on the cinema’s greatest “bastards” (that would be in front of the camera, not behind it) were a fairly stock bunch: old faithfuls like The Sweet Smell of Success‘ JJ Hunsecker (Burt Lancaster) and Get Carter‘s Carter (Michael Caine)–who placed first–joined such choices that pander to currency while feigning esoterica as Internal Affairs‘ Dennis Peck (Richard Gere) and As Good As It Gets‘ Melvin Udall (Jack Nicholson). But you will find few bigger bastards than the overlooked protagonist of Irvin Kershner’s Loving, Brooks Wilson (George Segal), a lousy husband and father who has to be among the most self-absorbed suburbanites ever to despoil the screen. In our introduction to him, he decides to have a smoke instead of watching his daughter perform in the school Christmas pageant–an event for which he was made late by a fight with his mistress. One of them, anyway.

Continental Divide (1981) – DVD

July 13, 2003Posted in1980s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, DVD, Romance, Spielberg

**½/**** Image B+ Sound B
starring John Belushi, Blair Brown, Allen Gorwitz
screenplay by Lawrence Kasdan
directed by Michael Apted

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover The broad outline for Continental Divide is so suggestive, at least by Hollywood standards, that I wish I liked the movie more than I did. As the story of a city-slicker misogynist transformed by love for a bush-roughing woman, it's surprisingly progressive: when the annoying city mouse/country mouse gimmick falls away, we have a story of two lovers trying to reconcile their disparate lifestyles without costing one or the other their independence. As this topic seldom comes up in serious movies, it's doubly refreshing to see it in a cheesy romantic comedy, and had the production team been up to the challenge this could have been one for the genre-studies books. Unfortunately, the film is so lacking in nuance and conviction that one never quite believes what is going on; the dialogue is so tin-eared and the direction so listless that they trivialize the story's implications and squander a golden opportunity.

Curly Sue (1991) – DVD

July 11, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Family, John Hughes, Romance, Spielberg

**/**** Image B Sound B+ Commentary B-
starring James Belushi, Kelly Lynch, Alisan Porter, John Getz
written and directed by John Hughes

by Bill Chambers John Hughes almost returned to directing with last year’s Maid in Manhattan, and Curly Sue, the last film with Hughes at the helm, perhaps offers some explanation beyond his reported displeasure with having to cast Jennifer Lopez as to why the torch was ultimately passed to Wayne Wang. In Curly Sue‘s best bit, the housekeeper (Viveka Davis, a genuine comic find) of an upscale Manhattan apartment gambles away her paycheck playing poker against the two derelicts who’ve mostly conned their way into staying there. Davis has everything that Lopez doesn’t in Maid in Manhattan: modesty, natural beauty, charisma, a wry sense of humour–you could watch a whole movie about this persona, which is probably what Hughes had in mind, and her one sequence ends with a joke that also happens to be a far more accurate representation of the subtle fear that aristocracy puts in the minimum-wager than any of the Cinderella markers you’ll find in Maid in Manhattan. Or anything else you’ll find in Curly Sue, for that matter.

Big Trouble (1986) – DVD

July 11, 2003Posted in1980s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, DVD

**/**** Image B+ Sound B
starring Peter Falk, Alan Arkin, Beverly D'Angelo, Charles Durning
screenplay by Warren Bogle
directed by John Cassavetes

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover From the depths of the files marked "for completists only" comes John Cassavetes's Big Trouble, a film that defies all but the most determined attempts to fit it into the master's canon. Not only is the director's raw emotionality nowhere in evidence here, but the unforced aesthetics that are his hallmark are totally unsuited to the broad and dialogue-dependant farce screenplay by Andrew Bergman (writing under the pseudonym Warren Bogle). It's hard to think of a bigger mismatch of director and material–unless it's Robert Altman doing a teen comedy called O.C. and Stiggs (which, regrettably, happened the following year). I'd suggest a double bill for the diehard auteurists among us, but the disillusionment would be so shattering that I doubt that any of them would survive the experience.

Spun (2003) – DVD (R-rated)

July 8, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Drama, DVD, Esoterica

*/**** Image A- Sound A Extras C
starring Jason Schwartzman, John Leguizamo, Mena Suvari, Patrick Fugit
screenplay by Creighton Vero & William De Los Santos
directed by Jonas Åkerlund

by Walter Chaw I don't have anything in particular against music-video directors making the transition to feature films, except that so often strobe-lighting and images-per-second are the only lessons about film craft they've ever learned. Swedish wunderkind Jonas Åkerlund, who cut his teeth as a chop-horse for Madonna and Moby, makes his feature film debut with jittery crystal meth opera Spun, a picture so misconstrued and haphazardly slapped together that it doesn't so much suggest the sensation of being "spun" on meth as it does getting thrown off a tall building in a washing machine. It strives for a sort of grimy realism but succeeds mainly in being Ken and Barbie Take a Shit-Bath: the young and the beautiful are covered in a patina of grotesquerie, it's true, but the filth isn't taking

Cowboy Bebop: The Movie (2001) [Special Edition] – DVD

July 6, 2003Posted in2000s, Action, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, DVD, Japan, Sci-Fi, Thriller

***/**** Image A Sound A Extras C
screenplay by Keiko Nobumoto
directed by Shinichiro Watanabe

by Walter Chaw Yôko Kanno’s soundtrack for Cowboy Bebop: The Movie (hereafter Cowboy Bebop) is a jubilant a blend of funk, jazz, blues, soul, and punk that soars even though it’s a pale shadow of the “bebop” innovated by Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, and Bud Powell (and Kenny Clarke and Max Roach) in Minton’s Playhouse in the early 1940s. It functions as something of a brilliantly mellifluous backbone to the film and the series that spawned it–chimeric and socially significant, again like Bird’s bebop, in that the 26-episode Japanese television series became one of the most recognized and revered crossovers in animated series history. The bebop idea of riffing on a melody to the extent that the melody becomes unrecognizable (with an attendant introduction of dozens of beats to the standard four-beat bar) carries through in the frenetic kineticism of series that also, by its format, mirrors jazz bebop’s compact agility (generally carried by quartet and quintet arrangements)–making a feature-length film, then, a strange place for the “Cowboy Bebop” franchise to go.

It’s My Party (1996) [Special Edition] – DVD

July 6, 2003Posted in1990s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Romance

*/**** Image B- Sound B Extras C
starring Eric Roberts, Margaret Cho, Lee Grant, Gregory Harrison
written and directed by Randal Kleiser

by Walter Chaw The only way to explain how disjointed and patchwork is Randal Kleiser’s It’s My Party, is by presuming out loud that the director is trying to simulate the vertiginous feel of a weekend of revelry culminating in the auto-euthanasia of a mortally ill man. As it is, the picture can only be taken in terms of theory and possibility–the piece, as it sits extant, is puerile in a self-obsessed sort of way, from performance to scripting to organization. The presence of Bruce Davison in a minor role serves mainly to remind that there are better films out there about the AIDS epidemic in its early days, recalling Longtime Companion (starring Davison) and the genuine emotions found therein that stand as sharp indictment of the dreadful, manufactured pathos of It’s My Party. Any movie trying this hard to get me misty is a lot more likely to make me angry.

Shanghai Knights (2003) – DVD

July 1, 2003Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD, Hong Kong, Jackie Chan, Martial Arts, Western

**/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras A-
starring Jackie Chan, Owen Wilson, Aidan Gillen, Fann Wong
screenplay by Alfred Gough & Miles Millar
directed by David Dobkin

by Walter Chaw Crossing the Big Pond hasn’t exactly done wonders for the heroes of the halcyon days of Hong Kong cinema. Lured by the prestige and mythology of the Hollywood dream factory, folks like Chow Yun Fat, Jet Li, Michelle Yeoh, John Woo, Ringo Lam, Tsui Hark, and so on have transformed the honesty of their craft into the same sort of boom crash opera we’ve been churning out on Yankee shores for decades now. Without a strong sense of how to film action, of the martial arts tradition in Chinese cinema, nor of the particular strengths of a particular artist, even as this genre has taken a dramatic upturn in popularity in the West, the folks most responsible for its sophistication have become sidekicks (Michelle Yeoh in Tomorrow Never Dies), B-list hunks (Yun Fat), villains (Li), failures (Lam, Hark), starfuckers (Woo), and, in the sad case of Jackie Chan, broad racial caricatures at the mercy of people like Brett Ratner, Kevin Donovan, and Tom Dey. Chan has made over 100 films over the course of forty years as an actor, director, writer, producer, and stuntman; the first thing that happens to him when he comes to the United States is that he’s placed in the company of idiots and neophytes. It feels like racism.

From the Terrace (1960) – DVD

June 30, 2003Posted in1960s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Romance

*/**** Image A Sound B Extras D+
starring Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward, Myrna Loy
screenplay by Ernest Lehman
directed by Mark Robson

by Walter Chaw The term “melodrama” comes from the Greek and the French, finding its literal meaning in something like “musical drama,” and Mark Robson’s From the Terrace (1960)–packed front to back with Elmer Bernstein’s gorgeous but intrusive and, in at least a few moments, hysterical orchestrations–fits the bill nicely. Adapted from a John O’Hara bodice-ripper by chronic adaptor Ernest Lehman and released during the gap between the Lehman-scripted marvels North by Northwest and West Side Story, the picture drips with the charged sexual innuendo of the former (and of Robson’s Peyton Place, come to think of it) while falling short of the caustic social commentary of the latter.

Family Reunion: The Movie (2003) – DVD

June 24, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/**** Image D Sound C+ Extras D
starring Red Grant, Reynaldo Rey, Bebe Drake, Sommore Jamal
written and directed by Red Grant

by Walter Chaw The sort of movie where Klansman dressed in the Teletubby rainbow are brutally beaten in a Southern Methodist church when they submit themselves to the mercy of the Lord, Red Grant’s Family Reunion: The Movie is a scattershot Def Comedy Jam routine filmed with a noxious, hostile artlessness made all the more impotent by its desire to be whimsical. Rather than being the sort of amateurish gut-rot that can make a claim to activism through its nihilistic misanthropy and racism, it’s the redheaded stepchild of the Friday series: screwball ethnic humour long on volume and short on laughs.

The Big Trail (1930) – DVD

June 24, 2003Posted in1930s, Adventure, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Drama, DVD, Romance, Western

**½/**** Image B Sound B
starring John Wayne, Marguerite Churchill, El Brendel, Tully Marshall
screenplay by Hal G. Evarts
directed by Raoul Walsh

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover The Big Trail is the kind of movie that comes wrapped in a big piece of butcher’s paper with the word WESTERN stamped on it. It offers the barest structural skeleton of the genre, with pioneers fulfilling their Manifest Destiny over terrain both harsh and unforgiving, and it sticks with its forward march to Oregon with only minor narrative flourishes to distract from the standard-issue myth of America. Later westerns would meditate on the nature of both the lone-wolf cowboy hero and the value of the westward expansion, but this early John Wayne vehicle is quaintly naïve in its taking it all for granted, making for great film-historical fascination when the drama and the intrigue flag.

Phone Booth (2003) – DVD

June 22, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, DVD, Mystery, Thriller

**½/**** Image B+ Sound A Commentary A
starring Colin Farrell, Kiefer Sutherland, Forest Whitaker, Radha Mitchell
screenplay by Larry Cohen
directed by Joel Schumacher

by Walter Chaw Responsible for some of my favourite weirdo low-tech cult films (Q, God Told Me To, It’s Alive!), underground auteur Larry Cohen’s output is a lollapalooza of high-concept hokum invested equally in the Catholic and the apocalyptic. Joining forces with master hack Joel Schumacher (who’s made a mean schlock classic or two himself–Flatliners, The Lost Boys, The Incredible Shrinking Woman) on the unfortunately-timed sniper fantasy Phone Booth, Cohen’s script reveals the man up to his old tricks: a barely feature-length product (about seventy-five minutes without credits) set inside a confessional-cum-8th Avenue phone booth that mires an anti-hero in an old-school oasis amidst our sterile technological wasteland. What should have been an agreeable bit of nonsense, however, gets tangled up in Cohen’s desire to proselytize, transforming the potential for a paranoid piece of B-sociology into something empty and pretentious–a tale directed by an idiot, full of some admittedly innovative sound design and a surplus of Method fury.