Sordid Lives (2001) – DVD

April 2, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD, Romance, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/**** Image D Sound D Extras C
starring Olivia Newton-John, Beau Bridges, Delta Burke, Bonnie Bedelia
written and directed by Del Shores

by Walter Chaw Essentially an extended drag shtick captured on surveillance-quality DV, Del Shores’s Sordid Lives finds the playwright’s stage production translated literally to the big screen (well, to the television screen) without, one presumes, the pace and the busyness that would have made it bearable. Poorly-aimed pot-shots at dysfunction (sexual, familial) share the stage with the classic “gathered for a funeral” plot that forms the basis of so many community theatre productions, mainly because no matter how ribald the comedy becomes, there will always be the opportunity for a sickening dose of sentiment at the final curtain. There’s nothing suburban middlebrow consumers like better than a shot of the ol’ pulpit to forgive all sins: round-in-the-round as buffet-dinner confessional.

Evelyn (2002) [Special Edition] – DVD

April 2, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Family, Germany, Ireland, Netherlands, UK

*/**** Image C+ Sound B- Extras B+
starring Pierce Brosnan, Julianna Margulies, Aidan Quinn, Stephen Rea
screenplay by Paul Pender
directed by Bruce Beresford

by Walter Chaw It seems as though “inspired” in the phrase “inspired by a true story” is the operative word as the 2002 Christmas season presents to us a rotten couplet of films “inspired” by true stories that, in all likelihood, were pretty interesting prior to the whitewashed variety of “inspiration” dished out in most high profile biopics. Headliner Antwone Fisher (a rancid piece of garbage I like to refer to as “Good Antwone Fishing” or “Finding Fisher-er”) gains esteem just by the association of twinkly-eyed Denzel Washington behind the camera (and stentorian Denzel in front), while small foreign film Evelyn will probably gain esteem by dint of its small and foreign status. (Just like its cute-as-a-button titular waif.) Like so many horrible movies of this mongrel breed, however, both Antwone Fisher and Evelyn are so uncompromising in their saccharine manipulations that nurses should stand at theatre entrances, passing out hypodermics of insulin.

Far from Home: The Adventures of Yellow Dog (1995) – DVD

March 30, 2003Posted in1990s, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD, Family

**/**** Image B Sound B
starring Bruce Davison, Mimi Rogers, Jesse Bradford, Tom Bower
written and directed by Phillip Borsos

by Walter Chaw Though shot with a nice eye for vistas, Phillip Borsos’s ponderously titled Far From Home: The Adventures of Yellow Dog (hereafter Yellow Dog) is decidedly modest in scope. It’s a wilderness fantasy/adventure involving a boy and his dog that follows along so closely to the set-up/pay-off structure that the build-up to the inevitable marooning is almost sadistic in its inevitability. Think of every moment dad teaches his boy to build a fire as the children’s-movie equivalent of a green foot soldier in a war flick showing a picture of his sweetheart to his buddy right before a big action scene.

Gentlemen’s Agreement (1947) [Studio Classics] – DVD

March 28, 2003Posted in1940s, Best Picture (Academy Awards), Directors: Elia Kazan, Drama, DVD, Romance

*/**** Image A Sound B+ Extras C
starring Gregory Peck, Dorothy McGuire, John Garfield, Celeste Holm
screenplay by Moss Hart, based on the novel by Laura Z. Hobson
directed by Elia Kazan

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Gentleman’s Agreement is a painful film to sit through. Not only is its construction long-winded and lopsided, not only is its look only marginally more attractive than life insurance fine print, but it is part of that horrible genre of liberal “message” movies that haunts us to this day. I’d like to say that post-post-modern cynicism has rendered it obsolete, and thus quaint and unthreatening, but what angered me most about it was that its particular strain of self-satisfaction continues to ravage the Hollywood corpus. Rather than depict the cruelty of prejudice, the film is determined to give the audience untouched by prejudice something over which to feel superior, and it acts as a model for all the cynical do-gooding fools who have followed in its wake.

Malevolent (2002) – DVD

March 28, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, DVD, Thriller

½*/**** Image B- Sound C+
starring Lou Diamond Phillips, Kari Wuhrer, Edoardo Ballerini, Gwen McGee
screenplay by Dennis Shryack & Peter Bellwood
directed by John Terlesky

by Walter Chaw A castration/redemption picture with the most ineffectual central character in any film south of Polanski, direct-to-video thriller Malevolent casts Lou Diamond Phillips as an eternally-framed homicide detective and Kari Wuhrer as an ex-softcore goddess now reduced to acting badly in a variety of scoop-necked blouses.

Abandon (2003) + Dawson’s Creek: The Complete First Season (1998) – DVDs

March 27, 2003Posted in1990s, 2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Coming of Age, Drama, DVD, Teen, Television, Thriller

ABANDON
***½/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Katie Holmes, Benjamin Bratt, Charlie Hunnam, Zooey Deschanel
written and directed by Stephen Gaghan

DAWSON’S CREEK: THE COMPLETE FIRST SEASON
Image C+ Sound B- Extras B-
“Pilot,” “Dance,” “Kiss,” “Discovery,” “Hurricane,” “Baby,” “Detention,” “Boyfriend,” “Road Trip,” “The Scare,” “Double Date,” “Beauty Contest,” “Decisions”

by Bill Chambers Abandon is a damn good movie detested in some quarters because, he hypothesized, it’s not very comforting, because it subverts the entrenched John Landis approach to depicting college life, and because it’s determined to be meaningful within the framework of a supernatural potboiler. The film stars Katie Holmes, whose career has caught its second wind with the near-simultaneous DVD releases of Abandon and the first season of “Dawson’s Creek”, in addition to the title role in 2003’s Sundance favourite Pieces of April and upcoming appearances in Keith Gordon’s The Singing Detective and the Joel Schumacher thriller Phone Booth. She’s also seeing the end of her aforementioned TV series “Dawson’s Creek”, which sails into the sunset this May after five years on the air. It will leave her more time for movies, and with her remarkable taste in film projects (see also: The Gift, Go, and The Ice Storm), I’m anxious to see where that freedom takes her. Especially if it’s anywhere near the territory of her poised work in Abandon.

Bang the Drum Slowly (1973) – DVD

March 26, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Robert De Niro, Sports

**/**** Image B- Sound C+
starring Robert De Niro, Michael Moriarty, Vincent Gardenia
screenplay by Mark Harris, based on his novel
directed by John Hancock

by Walter Chaw Almost fatally hamstrung by an appalling score by Stephen Lawrence, John D. Hancock’s Bang the Drum Slowly is a character-driven adaptation of Mick Harris’s novel (Harris also wrote the screenplay) that evokes the odd twilit detachment of professional sports in general and baseball in particular with a tale made suddenly popular in 1973 by the success of Brian’s Song. Its baseball scenes almost tertiary to the friendship between a pitcher and his catcher (and the catcher and his hooker girlfriend), the picture feels a little like Of Mice and Men (complete with Steinbeck’s low American primitivism) in the doomed relationship between a blue-collar man and his retarded friend. The film is riddled with pitfalls from the start: the potential for maudlin excess, the trap of overwriting, and the allure of some sort of overriding message for humanity. And though Bang the Drum Slowly dances along the edge of those pitfalls for a good portion of its running time, ultimately it’s just another one of those films better remembered than revisited.

West Side Story (1961) [Special Edition – DVD Collector’s Set] – DVD

March 23, 2003Posted in****/****, 1960s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Best Picture (Academy Awards), Crime, Drama, DVD, FFC Must-Own, Musical, Romance

****/**** Image A Sound A Extras B+
starring Natalie Wood, Richard Beymer, Rita Moreno, George Chakiris
screenplay by Ernest Lehman, based on the play by Arthur Laurents and Jerome Robbins
directed by Robert Wise & Jerome Robbins

Mustownby Walter Chaw With apologies to Frank Zappa, Jerome Robbins and Robert Wise’s West Side Story is dancing about the tumultuous social architecture of Manhattan’s West Side in the 1950s–a picture as political as it is ephemeral and, consequently, as timeless as it is exhilarating. It is one of those rare pictures that feels like the first time I’ve seen it every time I see it–renewing itself endlessly through its rare energy and meticulously choreographed nihilism. That it doesn’t hold together particularly well as a drama, much of the emotional power of its doomed love affair sapped by Richard Beymer’s amazingly bad performance as lead Tony, is secondary to the enduring effectiveness of the Leonard Bernstein score (with Sondheim’s amazingly current lyrics and Saul Chapin’s bright orchestration); Jerome Robbins’s ebullient dance sequences; Rita Moreno and George Chakiris; and the revelatory location work and lighting design.

Jonah: A VeggieTales Movie (2002) [2-Disc Collector’s Edition] – DVD

March 22, 2003Posted in2000s, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Family, Musical, UK

***/**** Image A Sound A Extras A+
written and directed by Paul Vischer and Mike Nawrocki

by Walter Chaw Sort of Monty Python-lite with a Christian message, the VeggieTales direct-to-video series of didactic sketches is, I’m told, the top-selling home video series in history, speaking at once to the creepy rise of grotesquely hypocritical religiosity in the United States and the fact that VeggieTales, judging by its first feature-length film Jonah, is extremely clever and entertaining. Packed with visual gags and semi-subtle references (a “Moby Blaster” video game in a seafood reference recalls Melville’s fondness for the Jonah tale), Jonah: A VeggieTales Movie is a bouncy Christian animated musical with a handful of compulsively catchy tunes and some crisp computer-imaging work. It occurred to me a few times during the course of the picture that as far as Christian entertainment goes, this is the first product that didn’t disqualify the term as an oxymoron.

Drumline (2002) [Widescreen Edition] – DVD

March 21, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Music, Romance

**½/**** Image B+ Sound A Extras B-
starring Nick Cannon, Zoë Saldaña, Orlando Jones, GQ
screenplay by Tina Gordon Chism and Shawn Schepps
directed by Charles Stone III

by Bill Chambers Appealing newcomer Nick Cannon stars in Drumline as Devon, a Harlem high-school graduate making the transition from a big fish in a small pond to a guppy in the ocean that is Atlanta A&T. Devon begins his gruelling training for A&T’s mostly-black drumline on the wrong foot, wearing dark colours when white was demanded, failing to get his roommate to the first tryout on time, and claiming an instrument reserved for upper-tier members of the drumline–and refusing to give it back until he’s shown some respect by veritable drill sergeant Sean (Leonard Roberts). The one bold move that works in Devon’s favour at the start is hitting on Laila (Zoë Saldaña), captain of the cheerleading squad; she and Devon’s superiors, including the drumline’s manager, Dr. Lee (Orlando Jones), aim to turn the boy into a man through demonstrations of tough love peppered with encouragement.

8 Mile (2002) [Widescreen w/Uncensored Bonus Features] – DVD

March 19, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Germany, Music

*/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras B-
starring Eminem, Kim Basinger, Brittany Murphy, Mekhi Phifer
screenplay by Scott Silver
directed by Curtis Hanson

by Walter Chaw I was of a mind once that Kim Basinger is pretty good at playing a milquetoast and a sexual victim (I liked her in 9½ Weeks, and she won the Oscar, after all, for L.A. Confidential), but I stand corrected. As a milquetoast sexual victim (not to Eminem, surprisingly) and mother to a steel worker-cum-rapper, Ms. Basinger’s every moment in Curtis Hanson’s 8 Mile is a moment that the film, an otherwise serviceable underdog Flashdance intrigue, grinds to a halt. In reprising her abominable cornpone accent from the aptly named No Mercy, she fails to understand that “country-fried bayou redneck” makes a lot less sense in the liminal “8 Mile” section of Michigan than it does in New Orleans.

Bushwhacked (1995) – DVD

March 19, 2003Posted in1990s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, DVD, Family, Mystery

*/**** Image B- Sound B-
starring Daniel Stern, Jon Polito, Brad Sullivan, Ann Dowd
screenplay by John Jordan & Danny Byers and Tom Swerdlow & Michael Goldberg
directed by Greg Beeman

by Walter Chaw The Yang to the distaff Yin of Troop Beverly Hills, Bushwhacked, Greg Beeman’s endlessly irritating slapstick take on High Sierra, finds the bird-faced actor Daniel Stern doing his best to milk the hysterical simpleton shtick of his hapless Home Alone villain. Nicknaming Stern’s character “Spider” for no real reason but to, eight years after its release and just now finding its way to DVD, connect it in a disturbing way to David Cronenberg’s thirteenth film by way of arrested Freudian developmental phases and fixations on body function, Bushwhacked, as it happens, is also about as funny as Spider–not a particularly shining endorsement of something that’s ostensibly a comedy.

Das Boot: The Director’s Cut (1981/1997) [Superbit] – DVD

March 19, 2003Posted in1980s, 1990s, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Czech Republic, Drama, DVD, Thriller, War, West Germany

***½/**** Image A Sound A+
starring Jürgen Prochnow, Herbert Grönemeyer, Klaus Wennemann, Hubertus Bengsch
screenplay by Wolfgang Petersen, based on the novel by Lothar G. Buchheim
directed by Wolfgang Petersen

by Walter Chaw The curious mental state of German submariners in the waning days of the Second World War is reflected in the general malaise of the United States in the weeks following September Eleventh and the hours preceding our unpopular pre-emptive strike against Iraq. Caught in the maddening doldrums between one act of unimaginable violence and its inevitable aftershocks, America’s implacable disquiet is one part anticipation of the inevitable, multiple parts cynicism, and, for a large portion of the population, a dollop of distinct lack of faith in the motives and competency of our leadership. A closer examination of the similarities pithy but perhaps unfruitful, sufficed to say that revisiting Wolfgang Petersen’s masterpiece Das Boot (in its Director’s Cut form) at this suspended moment in time is not only rewarding as great cinema can be, but also current and amazingly poignant.

Roger Dodger (2002) – DVD

March 17, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Drama, DVD

***½/**** Image A Sound A- Extras A
starring Campbell Scott, Jesse Eisenberg, Mina Badie, Jennifer Beals
written and directed by Dylan Kidd

by Bill Chambers There’s a clever moment in Roger Dodger destined to slip past viewers that underscores the precision with which the film was conceptualized. Roger (Campbell Scott), the lady-killer whose nickname (which he shares with the stooge in Sidney Lumet’s Q&A) lends the picture its title, walks up to one of the glass walls of a meeting room inside his workplace to communicate with two colleagues on the other side–one of whom sticks the word “incubator” to his own forehead just as the scene cuts. Coming on the heels of a prologue in which Roger has demonstrated his persuasive albeit highly misogynistic grasp of sexual politics to his dazzled peers, this tableau is the movie in a nutshell: With a man of such confidence around, all others are hatchlings hanging on his tutelage. The film is subsequently about Roger passing a certain torch to his visiting 16-year-old nephew, Nick (Jesse Eisenberg), and Nick fighting his moral instinct to extinguish it, as when he practices Roger’s art of seduction on a couple of bar-hopping older women played by the pitch-perfect duo of Elizabeth Berkley and Jennifer Beals.

Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988) [VISTA Series] – DVD

March 17, 2003Posted inAdventure, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Crime, Directors: Robert Zemeckis, DVD, Esoterica, Family, Mystery, Spielberg

***½/**** Image A Sound B Extras A+
starring Bob Hoskins, Christopher Lloyd, Joanna Cassidy, Charles Fleischer
screenplay by Peter S. Seaman & Jeffrey Price, based on the novel Who Censored Roger Rabbit by Gary K. Wolf
directed by Robert Zemeckis

by Bill Chambers Who Framed Roger Rabbit opens with an animated short (“Somethin’s Cookin'”) starring Roger Rabbit (voice of Charles Fleischer) and Baby Herman (Lou Hirsch) in which Roger, sitting for the lady of the house, is thwarted in his attempts to keep his young charge from climbing the refrigerator. You’d hardly know it, but we’re seeing these characters for the first time–and the ineffable period authenticity of “Somethin’s Cookin’,” a cartoon commissioned specifically for Who Framed Roger Rabbit, betrays the scrupulous eye of director Robert Zemeckis almost immediately. Animated by the legendary Richard Williams, “Somethin’s Cookin'” is fashioned in Tex Avery’s mix of elegance and elasticity; later, when Bugs Bunny makes an appearance in the movie proper, he still has the slopey head of yore. (Warner actually insisted on the modern versions of Looney Tunes appearing in the film, so Zemeckis had dummy footage mocked up to get their approval that he had no intention of using in the finished product.) The prologue ends prematurely when Roger sees bluebirds instead of stars–in the picture, cartoons are shot on soundstages: Roger Rabbit exists for real, as do Mickey Mouse, Bugs, et. al, and they hail from a Hollywood subdivision called Toontown. They are invincible, but they are also actors who bring their personal lives to work, so sometimes they just can’t generate stars on command.

Secretary (2002) – DVD

March 14, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Romance

***/**** Image B- Sound B- Extras C
starring James Spader, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Jeremy Davies, Patrick Bauchau
screenplay by Erin Cressida Wilson, based on the short story by Mary Gaitskill
directed by Steven Shainberg

by Walter Chaw Pleasantville for the sadomasochism set, Steven Shainberg’s Secretary is a gentle sexual-awakening fable set in a peculiar fairytale hyper-reality reminiscent of the saturated inward-gazing milieu of David Cronenberg’s Spider. Featuring a courageous, social-convention-shattering performance by Maggie Gyllenhaal, the picture is The Graduate by way of humiliation and water sports–the hallmark pool scenes feature Gyllenhaal’s Benjamin Braddock character Lee Holloway festooned with water-wings, her position just on the surface the mordant reflexivity of Sunset Blvd.‘s doomed Joe Gillis rather than of Braddock’s bottom-of-the-drink disconnection. Between Secretary and the Jake Gyllenhaal starrer Moonlight Mile, the Gyllenhaal siblings seem intent on tackling their generation’s particular alienations by way of Mike Nichols’s counterculture classic, but where Jake takes a conventional route in Moonlight Mile, Maggie’s exploration of plastics-vs.-individualized happiness embraces the essential shadows of our nasty sexual ids in a Solondz-lite waltz with seething suburbia.

Ghost Ship (2002) – DVD

March 13, 2003Posted in2000s, Australia, Authors: Bill Chambers, DVD, Horror, Mystery, Thriller

**/**** Image A Sound A- Extras C+
starring Julianna Margulies, Desmond Harrington, Isaiah Washington, Gabriel Byrne
screenplay by Mark Hanlon and John Pogue
directed by Steve Beck

by Bill Chambers Ghost Ship is better than its director Steve Beck’s previous film for Robert Zemeckis and Joel Silver’s “Dark Castle,” the repugnant Thir13en Ghosts–but we’re talking incrementally. Somewhere in between the two pictures, Beck learned that even though the AVID editing machine makes an infinite number of cuts possible, he shouldn’t take that as a dare, and in Ghost Ship, he embraces the démodé in a way that he ironically didn’t in Thir13en Ghosts, the one of them that’s a remake. Ghost Ship opens with large, dissolving titles drawn in pink cursive script that would be at home in a Fifties movie with Vic Damone on the soundtrack. It’s a striking touch (if not entirely appropriate for The Treasure of the Sierra Madre aboard a sinking, possessed ocean liner), and it precedes a dazzling, disgusting prologue wherein the passengers on the deck of the Antonia Graza are slaughtered like so much cattle.

Le6ion of the Dead (2001) – DVD

March 11, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD, Germany, Horror, Vampire, Zombie

Legion of the Dead
½*/**** Image B Sound B+ Extras B
starring Michael Carr, Russell Friedenberg, Kimberly Liebe, Matthias Hues
written and directed by Olaf Ittenbach

by Walter Chaw Sort of like how I imagine Samuel Beckett would read while huffing accelerant, Olaf Ittenbach’s Le6ion of the Dead rips off a couple of Tarantino screenplays en route to winning the title of the most arbitrary and impossible-to-follow film that isn’t composed primarily of stock footage. Though the director has tried to have his name removed from the picture, citing unapproved edits made in the struggle for an “R” rating, unless the studio wrote the screenplay, pointed the camera, and hired the actors…sufficed to say that there’s enough blame here to go around.

Moonlight Mile (2002) – DVD

March 10, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Romance

**½/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras A-
starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Dustin Hoffman, Susan Sarandon, Holly Hunter
written and directed by Brad Silberling

by Walter Chaw There is a delicacy to the dusk of the early-Seventies, poised as those years were on the lip of paranoia and disquiet as the psychic scars of the Sixties assassinations, Watergate, and Vietnam worked like rough puberty on an infant nation's whored naiveté. Capturing that space in the disintegration of individuals, traditions, hopes, faiths, is something best left in the hands of casualties of war (Tim O'Brien) and outsider perspectives (Ang Lee and his The Ice Storm). That Brad Silberling, writer-director of Moonlight Mile, appears to be making the death-by-stalker of his actress fiancé Rebecca Schaeffer the metaphor for that twilight time is cause for some concern.

Inspector Gadget 2 (2003) – DVD

March 10, 2003Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Crime, Disney, DVD, Family, Sci-Fi

*½/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
starring French Stewart, Elaine Hendrix, Caitlin Wachs
sceenplay by Ron Anderson and William Robertson & Alex Zamm
directed by Alex Zamm

by Bill Chambers Edited with the Cuisinart clarity of a car commercial, designed with a balloon-animal colour palette similar to that of last year’s psychedelic Thomas in Love, Inspector Gadget 2 (henceforth IG2–incidentally, the on-screen logo reads Inspector 2 Gadget) has style in theory, like Avril Lavigne, but is monotonous and exasperating–also like Avril Lavigne. I haven’t seen the original film, but I did watch the cartoon every morning before school as a kid (we used to sing our own version of the theme song in the playground: “Doo doo doo doo do, Inspector Goo-head“–ah, those halcyon days), so I recognize certain touchstones the sequel, um, touches: faceless supervillain with the pussycat emblem Dr. Claw (who, robbed of his synthetic speech in addition to his lap kitty, looks and acts like Truman Capote in IG2); Inspector Gadget’s niece, Penny (Caitlin Wachs), and her dog Brain (in IG2, a beagle without the flexibility of his animated counterpart), both fledgling detectives; and the always-fuming Chief Quimby (Mark Mitchell), who does not pop out of mailboxes and such things here to deliver messages to Gadget that self-destruct. More disappointingly, he does not have a moustache.