Ultimate X: The Movie (2002) – DVD

Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, DVD, Sports

ESPN’s Ultimate X
**/**** Image B- Sound B Extras B
written and directed by Bruce Hendricks

by Bill Chambers Notoriously anti-sports (or at the very least sports-agnostic), I thought maybe the X-Games would win me over–so much colour, so much thunder, like Hal Needham’s rushes out of context. Alas, they’re yet another not-for-me athletics event. I was made painfully aware of this fact while watching ESPN’s Ultimate X, an IMAX production: In a sight fertile with joy, a man mounts a plastic shovel not much bigger than the one that comes with children’s sandpails and slides down a snowy hilltop; but then you find out that “Super Modified-Shovel Racing” besmirched the X-Games in the eyes of its organizers and has since been gonged. With it went a new sport’s sense of humour, and I am definitely the genre of film buff more entertained by the dancing mascots at half-time than by the repetitive “thrill” of competition.

Little Secrets (2002) – DVD

Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Family, Music

**/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras B
starring Evan Rachel Wood, Michael Angarano, David Gallagher, Vivica A. Fox
screenplay by Jessica Barondes
directed by Blair Treu

by Bill Chambers Little Secrets, a movie about the fear of honesty we have when we’re children, begins in the vein of a Joe Dante suburban satire but ends, oh so detrimentally, like a nightmare of Chris Columbus pap. Directed with genuine zest by Blair Treu, a man whose resume includes a film with the title “Just Like Dad” and episodes of the quickly-jettisoned television adaptation of Chicken Soup for the Soul, Little Secrets grows so self-involved that the dial of its own moral compass comes off its hinge: Treu (ironic spelling, don’t you think, for the director of a film dealing with the subject of lying?) and screenwriter Jessica Barondes steer their picture irreversibly south in the final minutes in what amounts to an act of belligerence–the filmmakers are too proud to admit they’ve made a gross miscalculation of plot, leading not only to the most aggravating closing smooch in a kids’ flick since Columbus’s own Adventures in Babysitting, but also Little Secrets‘ misogynistic aftertaste.

Stargate (1994) [Ultimate Edition – Director’s Cut] – DVD

Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, DVD, France, Sci-Fi, Time Travel

**/**** Image B Sound A Extras B-
starring Kurt Russell, James Spader, Jaye Davidson, Viveca Lindfors
screenplay by Dean Devlin & Roland Emmerich
directed by Roland Emmerich

by Bill Chambers Spawning a television show and solidifying the Hollywood career of German director Roland Emmerich, 1994’s Stargate was the last movie to get the memo that Abyss-ian water walls and morphing technology no longer evoked World’s Fair awe. These special effects are merely the epitome of Stargate‘s second-hand wonder; part of the film’s value as a curiosity piece is its New York street-merchant vibe: like peddlers of the Rolux watch or Parda handbag, Emmerich and co-producer/co-writer Dean Devlin are selling us an approximation of a blockbuster by a licensed hitmaker, and we excuse them the same way we allow for the smudgy print of carbon copies or the colour bleed on VHS dubs. It must be a human impulse to absolve a facsimile of its absence of novelty.

blind date: UNCENSORED (2002) – DVD

Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Documentary, DVD, Television

**½/**** Image B+ Sound B+

by Bill Chambers The only reality-TV (whatever that oxymoron means) series I watch, “blind date” has a crack writing staff, photogenic–and certifiable–‘contestants,’ and editing that’s breezy without feeling clipped. For the uninitiated: Cameras follow a couple apparently arbitrarily but more often, one imagines, cruelly matched on their first date and, in the vein of pop-up video, word balloons and subtitles provide patronizing though often uproarious and surreal commentary on the proceedings. My personal favourite moment of the show to date is the oblivious bodybuilder who is asked what he is thinking by his companion: a thought-bubble appears above his head containing a chicken smoking a cigarette. Mostly these asides are, as Homer Simpson would say, funny ’cause they’re true.

Monster’s Ball (2001) – DVD|Monster’s Ball [Lions Gate Signature Series] – DVD

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

***½/****
DVD – Image A+ Sound A Extras A-
DVD (SIGNATURE SERIES) – Image A+ Sound A Extras A-
starring Billy Bob Thornton, Halle Berry, Peter Boyle, Heath Ledger
screenplay by Milo Addica & Will Rokos
directed by Marc Forster

by Walter Chaw Two men tell poor Leticia Musgrove (Halle Berry) that she’s beautiful during the course of Marc Forster’s pitch-black Monster’s Ball. The first is her condemned husband Lawrence (Sean Combs), and the second is Hank (Billy Bob Thornton), the head of the death-row guard team responsible for bringing Lawrence to the electric chair. The circumstances and timing of their compliments, separated by almost the entire body of the film, says a great deal about where Monster’s Ball has gone in the interim. Lawrence says it as his last words to his wife during their last time together on the last day of his life. Hank says it over a pint of ice cream, just after an important revelation has been claimed without his knowledge. In both instances, there is a simple, fated truth to the words: the first utterance represents the realization that there’s nothing left to say, the second the recognition that some things are best left unspoken.

Q&A (1990) + I’ll Do Anything (1994) – DVDs

Posted in1990s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Directors: Sidney Lumet, Drama, DVD, Satire, Thriller

Q&A
***/**** Image A- Sound B
starring Nick Nolte, Timothy Hutton, Armand Assante, Luis Guzman
written and directed by Sidney Lumet, based on the novel by Edwin Torres

I’LL DO ANYTHING
***/**** Image A- Sound A-
starring Nick Nolte, Albert Brooks, Julie Kavner, Joely Richardson
written and directed by James L. Brooks

by Bill Chambers When news of Nick Nolte’s arrest for driving under the influence of the date-rape drug hit the Toronto International Film Festival last year, just days after he’d made a strong showing there with Neil Jordan’s The Good Thief, I immediately flashed back to the time I met Nolte–“met,” alas, a figure of speech in this case: We crossed paths in the lobby of the Park Hyatt Hotel. His beanstalk frame sheathed in an emasculating banana-yellow housecoat, Nolte wore a pair of bookish specs that offset his craggy mug, and his snow-coloured hair stood unnaturally on end, as though he’d just seen a ghost. On his way to record interviews for Breakfast of Champions (and looking a lot more like that film’s Kilgore Trout than like the erstwhile Tom Wingo), Nolte growled this to a gawping me in passing:

Swept Away (2002) – DVD

Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Italy, Romance, UK

**/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Madonna, Adriano Giannini, Jeanne Tripplehorn, Bruce Greenwood
screenplay by Guy Ritchie, based on the screenplay by Lina Wertmüller
directed by Guy Ritchie

by Bill Chambers No, it's not a masterpiece, but the deck was already stacked against Guy Ritchie's Swept Away long before anyone saw the picture. That it was a remake (of Lina Wertmüller's squirm-inducing Swept Away… by an Unusual Destiny in the Blue Sea of August) was strike one; that it starred Madonna, a lousy film actress considered box-office poison, strike two; that Ritchie is married to Madonna, marking Swept Away as the kind of vanity project that power couples make to spend more time together than their private life allows, strike three. And every review you read of Swept Away–that I read, at least–parroted these three strikes, sizing them to fit a column's allotment; there's no doubt in my mind that, even though it became the whipping-boy of late-night talk-show hosts and assured its victory at the 2003 Golden Raspberrys with near-universal placement on year-end worst-of lists, you haven't any meaningful clue as to what's actually wrong with Swept Away.

Sweet Home Alabama (2002) – DVD

Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD, Romance

½*/**** Image A Sound A- Extras C+
starring Reese Witherspoon, Josh Lucas, Patrick Dempsey, Fred Ward
screenplay by C. Jay Cox
directed by Andy Tennant

by Walter Chaw The first clue as to the vileness of Andy Tennant's Sweet Home Alabama is that it's named after a Lynyrd Skynrd song (paving the way, one supposes, for Freebird: The Movie and Smokestack Lightning); the second clue is that it's the first Reese Witherspoon picture in a while to find a way to squander her almost preternatural ability to salvage terrible scripts and spent concepts floating her way post-Election. Extraordinarily boring and unfunny while redolent with the sort of bad behaviour-made-cutesy that made stars of Julia Roberts and Ashley Judd, Sweet Home Alabama at least has the unlikely distinction of rendering Witherspoon shrill, dull, and during one ugly drunken tirade, irredeemable.

Blue Crush (2002) [Collector’s Edition] (Widescreen) – DVD

Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Germany, Romance, Sports

***/**** Image A- Sound A+ Extras B-
starring Kate Bosworth, Michelle Rodriguez, Matthew Davis, Sanoe Lake
screenplay by Lizzy Weiss & John Stockwell, based on the article "Surf Girls of Maui" by Susan Orlean
directed by John Stockwell

by Walter Chaw Bob Marley sings "Could You Be Loved" as a quartet of surf girls in a finned vintage powder-blue ride, yellow surfboards strapped to its roof, chase the dawn to catch the perfect pipe breaking over Hawaii's sand bars and coral reefs. There is possibly no finer capsule of the adrenaline of early morning and youth in recent memory, and while Blue Crush, the movie surrounding this moment, can't sustain that feeling of hope springing eternal, what it manages is an estrogen opera so intensely feminine that it serves as the antidote (and cannier doppelgänger) to Diesel's xXx flex-a-thon.

My Big Fat Greek Wedding (2002) – DVD

Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Drama, DVD, Romance

**/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras C
starring Nia Vardalos, John Corbett, Michael Constantine, Lainie Kazan
screenplay by Nia Vardalos
directed by Joel Zwick

by Walter Chaw Destined to be one of those much-touted Hollywood discovery stories, Nia Vardalos's one-woman play "My Big Fat Greek Wedding" was seen by Rita Wilson (Mrs. Tom Hanks) and ultimately conceived as a film for veteran bad-TV director Joel Zwick (Hanks's "bosom buddy," as it were). The results are predictably sloppy: all expansive gestures, big emotions, and ethnic sitcom generalities that were handled with more intelligence and wit by Moonstruck. The sad reality of My Big Fat Greek Wedding's stultifying predictability and stand-up sensibility–what plays well as a monologue translates clumsily as film narrative–is that there are enough broad stabs at overbearing mothers and in-law tensions that folks will come away from the film mistaking a warmth for their own experiences with an overabundance of affection for My Big Fat Greek Wedding.

Dreamers (1999) – DVD

Posted in1990s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, Drama, DVD

½*/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras B-
starring Jeremy Jordan, Courtney Gains, Portia Dawson
written and directed by Ann Lu

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover There's a film-within-the-film in Ann Lu's Dreamers that underlines everything that makes Dreamers itself so terrible. Ethan (Mark Ballou), Dreamers' chief wannabe auteur, shoots a fantasy sequence involving an asylum-style treatment program for those who suffer from movie love; the idea would seem to be that would-be filmmakers are martyrs, regardless of talent. It becomes obvious that this aspirant has nothing else to put on film but annoyance at his frustrated ambitions, and we'd wonder who'd watch such an empty exercise in self-pity if we were not, in fact, watching one just like it at the time. I don't recommend that you become part of that elite club of Dreamers-watchers, because, despite an incidental evocation of squalid life on the fringes of film, it has little reason to live–save as a warning to all indie dreamers not to follow its shabby path to destruction.

S1m0ne (2002) – DVD

Posted in2000s, Al Pacino, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Satire, Sci-Fi

***½/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras C+
starring Al Pacino, Catherine Keener, Jason Schwartzman, Winona Ryder
written and directed by Andrew Niccol

“Pygmalion saw so much to blame in women that he came at last to abhor the sex, and resolved to live unmarried. He was a sculptor, and had made with wonderful skill a statue of ivory, so beautiful that no living woman came anywhere near it… His art was so perfect that it concealed itself and its product looked like the workmanship of nature.” – Bulfinch’s Mythology

by Walter Chaw Andrew Niccol’s brilliant S1m0ne is an updating of the Pygmalion myth substituting a sculptor of clay for a sculptor of film and his disdain for women for disdain towards the peccadilloes of actors. The ending, however, stays the same.

Python II (2002) – DVD

Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Bulgaria, DVD, Horror, Sci-Fi, Thriller

Python 2
*/**** Image C Sound A
starring William Zabka, Dana Ashbrook, Alex Jolig, Simmone Mackinnon
screenplay by Jeff Rank
directed by L.A. McConnell

by Walter Chaw Though I’ve never seen Python I, I had a surprisingly easy time following Python 2, a direct-to-Sci Fi Channel CGI worm-fest that at least has the distinction of featuring a terrible-looking monster no worse than the one in its higher-profile cousin, Anaconda. It seems that a huge snake (two of them, in fact, making the title “clever”) is running around in cheap-to-film-in faux Russia, chomping digital comrades to the accompaniment of mirth-inspiring crunchy sound effects as a heroic CIA agent (Billy Zabka, who appears to also have been in the first of the Python epic) is sent to capture the beastie.

One Hour Photo (2002) [Widescreen] – DVD

Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Thriller

**/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B
starring Robin Williams, Connie Nielsen, Michael Vartan, Gary Cole
written and directed by Mark Romanek

by Walter Chaw There is a keystone moment in the middle of One Hour Photo where lonely SavMart photo-technician Sy (Robin Williams) mourns his impending layoff by providing uncanny approximations of the comedy and tragedy masks in fast succession. Long our weeping velvet-clown chronicler of the twee ironic comedy of life in balance with death (hence his affection for misusing cancer-riddled kids and turning every film, including this one, into a Jacko-esque kid-love pulpit), Williams isn’t stretching here to play a lonely and disturbed old guy who becomes fixated on a pretty family so much as he’s indulging yet again in an aspect of his persona always fluttering under the surface of his more frenetic characterizations.

X-Men (2000) + X-Men 1.5 – DVDs

Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, DVD, Sci-Fi, Superhero

***½/****
X-MEN DVD – Image A Sound A- Extras B+
X-MEN 1.5 DVD – Image A Sound A+ (DTS)/A- (DD) Extras B+
starring Hugh Jackman, Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellen, Famke Janssen
screenplay by David Hayter
directed by Bryan Singer

by Bill Chambers While fans of the periodical on which it’s based carp away about the shade of Jean Grey’s hair colour and the composite personality of Rogue, I, not nearly as much a comic-book fan as I am a comic-book-movie fan, champion director Bryan Singer’s sober approach to potentially silly material. X-Men is respectful in tone when not letter-faithful to the Marvel legend, if I understand secondhand descriptions correctly.

Shampoo (1975) – DVD

Posted in1970s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Romance

***½/**** Image B- Sound B
starring Warren Beatty, Julie Christie, Goldie Hawn, Lee Grant
screenplay by Robert Towne and Warren Beatty
directed by Hal Ashby

by Bill Chambers SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. To put things in perspective, Tootsie is, arguably, a remake of Hal Ashby’s carefully cultivated 1975 classic Shampoo, except that it goes one step farther in feminizing the lead by putting him in drag–and takes a step backward in deciding the fallout of his deceptions. Making fantasy out of Tootsie‘s ending, Shampoo comes to terms with the reality of a lothario getting his foot caught in his own trap by giving the last word to The Beach Boys: “You know it seems the more we talk about it,” they sing of unfeasible marital bliss in the film’s closing song (“Wouldn’t It Be Nice”), “it only makes it worse to live without it.”

About a Boy (2002) [Widescreen] – DVD

Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD, France, Germany, Romance, UK

**½/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B
starring Hugh Grant, Toni Collette, Rachel Weisz, Isabel Brook
screenplay by Peter Hedges and Chris Weitz & Paul Weitz, based on the novel by Nick Hornby
directed by Paul Weitz & Chris Weitz

by Walter Chaw Will Freeman (Hugh Grant) is a philanderer and a playboy. Independently wealthy because of residuals from his father’s authorship of an inexplicably successful Christmas tune, he spends his feckless days in carefully scheduled thirty-minute “units.” (One unit for taking a bath; three for lunch.) Finally feeling a void in the middle of his rootless life at the tender age of thirty-eight, Will–after a scheme to feign single-parentage backfires roughly–finds himself involved with a mordant thirteen-year-old named Marcus (Nicholas Hoult) and Marcus’s suicidally-depressed mother, Fiona (Toni Collette). Rachel Weisz plays the girl too good for the pre-evolution rapscallion, her late appearance ultimately best described as the plot point that drives act three.

Secret Admirer (1985) – DVD

Posted in1980s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, DVD, Romance, Teen

***/**** Image B+ Sound B
starring C. Thomas Howell, Lori Loughlin, Kelly Preston, Fred Ward
screenplay by Jim Kouf & David Greenwalt
directed by David Greenwalt

by Bill Chambers Blessed with one of the best non-Tangerine Dream synth scores of the 1980s, Secret Admirer arrives on DVD this month to remind such movies as Just Married and Kangaroo Jack just how a formulaic laff riot with a risqué slant is done. I confess I still adore this seminal film of my youth while conceding that its machinations seemed far more clever to me at the age of ten. On the other hand, when was the last time you saw a teen-targeted comedy that aspired to any cleverness? Or that opened with a piece as alternately mysterious and wistful as Jan “Miami Vice” Hammer’s lyrical main theme?

The Bourne Identity (2002) – DVD

Posted in****/****, 2000s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Czech Republic, DVD, FFC Must-Own, France, Germany, Mystery, Thriller

****/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B
starring Matt Damon, Franka Potente, Clive Owen, Chris Cooper
screenplay by Tony Gilroy and William Blake Herron, based on the novel by Robert Ludlum
directed by Doug Liman

Mustownby Walter Chaw The Bourne Identity is a composition of gestures stripped of romance and presented in their barest forms. It is the most cannily cinematic film of the year and one that, during its first half-hour, boasts blissfully of but one minute of dialogue. The picture recognizes that Matt Damon is best as an everyman with potential by presenting him as a character born at the age of thirty-three. And the Oedipal detective story that forms the centre of the tale (“Who am I?”) is so ripe for examination that it may flower in time to be as debated and revered a fantasy as Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (which likewise features the murder of The Father prior to a kind of manhood and subsequent mate choice). Very loosely based on Robert Ludlum’s novel of the same name, indie punk Doug Liman (director of Swingers) has constructed a parable of self-discovery that can as easily be read as a subversion of the conventions of the thriller genre, a discussion of the ways in which the audience participates in the process of genre fiction, or as a science-fiction piece in which strangely robotic über menschen run amuck in a technocratic world metropolis.

Freddy Vs. Jason (2003) [New Line Platinum Series] – DVD

Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, DVD, Horror, Thriller

***/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras A+
starring Robert Englund, Monica Keena, Ken Kirzinger, Kelly Rowland
screenplay by Damian Shannon & Mark Swift
directed by Ronny Yu

by Walter Chaw Though it doesn’t work at all as a scary movie (with even its jump scares curiously tepid), there is the possibility with Freddy Vs. Jason to engage in an anagogical discussion as rich and fascinating as any offered before by the already meaty respective franchises, Friday the 13th and A Nightmare on Elm Street. Pitting Freddy Krueger–razor-fingered child murderer, victim of vigilante justice, and avatar of the sins of the literal fathers–against Jason Voorhees, hockey-masked victim of the cruelty of adolescence and the fear of sensuality, is amazingly fertile ground and handled herein with a seriousness that understands the death that post-modern cleverness represents for horror’s slasher subgenre. This is not to say that the film doesn’t make nods to Signs and 2001: A Space Odyssey, just to suggest that its story proper is firmly grounded in its own hermetic mythology, the curiously heady equation of its titular bogeys to some sort of modern holy pantheon.