Vidocq (2001) [Signature Collection] – DVD

June 17, 2002Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Crime, DVD, France, Mystery, Thriller

*½/**** Image B Sound B Extras (see review)
starring Gérard Depardieu, Guillaume Canet, Ines Sastre, André Dussolier
screenplay by Jean-Claude Grange
directed by Pitof

by Bill Chambers Bona fide criminologist Eugene Francois Vidocq has been the subject of several films, including Douglas Sirk’s little-known A Scandal in Paris. What makes him ripe for mythologizing is his pre-detective career as a thief: he’d learned the streets so well as one of their own that he knew which rocks to turn over in his police work. Among his achievements as a purported inspiration for Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, master of disguise Vidocq pioneered the science of ballistics and founded the first detective agency. Little biographical detail finds its way into Francophone director Pitof’s anti-biopic Vidocq, but a cursory knowledge of the gumshoe’s legacy can’t hurt. You may otherwise find yourself doubting the layout of Vidocq’s office–which suggests Sam Spade’s circa 1830–or his talent for slipping in and out of corners unnoticed, even though he’s portrayed by the unmistakable Gérard Depardieu.

The Great American Songbook (2002) – DVD

June 17, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Documentary, DVD, Music, Television

***/**** Image A Sound A Extras C+
directed by Andrew J. Kuehn

by Walter Chaw Starting off fascinating and ending up feeling slightly overlong, the expansive musical travelogue The Great American Songbook traces the roots of “American” popular music from the War of 1812 through to the early Christy minstrel shows, Bessie Smith, Irving Berlin, George & Ira Gershwin, and beyond. If it’s true that things go in cycles on a grand scheme, it’s also true of an individual’s life: Reviewing The Great American Songbook for me coincides with my first reading of Griel Marcus’s brilliant Mystery Train; touches hands with my interview with Andrei Codrescu, who’s working on a documentary about the Mississippi blues; and follows fast my exposure to the brilliant Sarah Vowell’s brilliant piece on the “Battle Hymn of the Republic.” The piece found me, in other words, already on a journey into our heritage of American music, and if the picture is more travelogue than encyclopedia, its value is as timeline and supplement.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer: The Complete First Season (1997) + Friends: The Complete First Season (1994-1995) – DVDs

June 17, 2002Posted in1990s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Fantasy, Horror, Romance, Television, Vampire

BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER: THE COMPLETE FIRST SEASON
Image B- Sound B Extras B
"Welcome to Hellmouth," "The Harvest," "The Witch," "Teacher's Pet," "Never Kill a Boy on the First Date," "The Pack," "Angel," "I Robot – You Jane," "The Puppet Show," "Nightmares," "Out of Mind, Out of Sight," "Prophecy Girl"

FRIENDS: THE COMPLETE FIRST SEASON
Image B+ Sound A- Extras B+
"Pilot," "The One With the Sonogram at the End," "The One With the Thumb," "The One With George Stephanopoulos," "The One With the East German Laundry Detergent," "The One With the Butt," "The One With the Blackout," "The One Where Nana Dies Twice," "The One Where Underdog Gets Away," "The One With the Monkey," "The One With Mrs. Bing," "The One With the Dozen Lasagnas," "The One With the Boobies," "The One With the Candy Hearts," "The One With the Stoned Guy," "The One With Two Parts," "The One With All the Poker," "The One Where the Monkey Gets Away," "The One with the Evil Orthodontist," "The One with Fake Monica," "The One with the Ick Factor," "The One with the Birth," "The One Where Rachel Finds Out"

by Bill Chambers Like a child experiencing puberty, the first season of a television series hopes you don't notice that it hasn't settled into its voice yet, that it has no sense of style, that it's unprepared for the microscope of society. The pressures are great for a teenager, but the stakes for a TV show are similarly high: While going through its growing pains, it has a limited number of chances to catch ratings lightning in a bottle. Imagine saying to a gawky adolescent, "Impress me." With the near-simultaneous DVD releases of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer: The Complete First Season" and "Friends: The Complete First Season", there's an occasion to reflect on how a series becomes popular (although the zeitgeist is always such a mystery we can't ever hope for a demonstrable hypothesis) and, for fun's sake, to retrace the evolution of these unique TV-watching experiences.

Rollerball (2002) [Special Edition] – DVD

June 15, 2002Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD, Germany, Japan, Sci-Fi, Sports

½*/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
starring Chris Klein, Jean Reno, LL Cool J, Rebecca Romijn-Stamos
screenplay by Larry Ferguson and John Pogue
directed by John McTiernan

by Walter Chaw When John McTiernan’s Rollerball was scheduled for the summer 2001 movie season, it boasted of a full-frontal Rebecca Romijn-Stamos and some graphic violence. What it didn’t have was the confidence of MGM, who pushed the release of the film into the doldrums of the new year and presided over the cutting of the only two possible reasons (the nudity and the gore) that anyone would have for seeing the film in the first place. Doubtless the rationale was to garner a PG-13 rating and the expanded pre-teen first-weekend box-office it confers; they’d better hope for a whopper opening, because no one is seeing this turkey twice. It strikes me as telling that a major studio would have so little confidence in a film that it is deemed somehow too prurient and also not “good” enough for a summer audience. Rollerball proves the truism that a studio often doesn’t know if it has a winner–but almost always knows when it has a stinker. Saying that Rollerball is better than the simultaneously released Collateral Damage is likely the only praise it will garner this weekend.

Bad Company (1972) – DVD

June 15, 2002Posted in1970s, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Drama, DVD, Western

***½/**** Image A Sound B+
starring Jeff Bridges, Barry Brown, Jim Davis, David Huddleston
screenplay by David Newman and Robert Benton
directed by Robert Benton

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover How the mighty do fall. By the end of the '70s, Robert Benton had lowered himself to Oscar-whoring with the tepid Kramer vs. Kramer–a fact impossible to reconcile with the promise he showed in Bad Company, his smashing directorial debut. Utterly distinct amongst revisionist westerns, Benton's marvel ditches the genre's boilerplate cynicism and revels in the freedom of lawlessness; instead of a clumsy knee-jerk finger-pointer, we get the joys and sorrows of life amongst scavengers. Having more in common with My Own Private Idaho or Going Places than with the pseudo-critical genre on whose margins it skulks, Bad Company lets us roam the landscape instead of following the road to town, and in so doing makes us feel things that no mere western could possibly make us feel.

I Am Sam (2001) [New Line Platinum Series] – DVD

June 12, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Disability, Drama, DVD

½*/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Sean Penn, Michelle Pfeiffer, Dakota Fanning, Doug Hutchison
screenplay by Kristine Johnson & Jessie Nelson
directed by Jessie Nelson

by Walter Chaw I Am Sam‘s premise is a strange one: a mentally retarded* man (titular Sam, played by Sean Penn) impregnates a homeless woman he has invited to stay with him. After giving birth to the impossibly precocious Lucy (Dakota Fanning), the vagrant mom vamooses (“I never wanted this! I just wanted a place to sleep!”), leaving Sam solely responsible for the raising of the child. With the help of eccentric piano-playing recluse Dianne Wiest (perhaps fulfilling a bizarre ambition to play Madame Sousatzka), Sam learns an infant’s feeding schedule (by timing it to late-night Nickelodeon programming), shops for diapers, and realizes that he needs to find daycare if he wants to keep his job tidying sugar cozies at the local Starbucks. (Feel-good, politically-correct bullshit being a saltlick for corporate sponsors, Starbucks, International House of Pancakes, Target, and Pizza Hut all helped fund I Am Sam.) When Child Services finally collects Lucy into protective custody on her seventh birthday, Sam gets frosty type-A lawyer Rita (Michelle Pfeiffer) to take on his cause pro bono. In the process, of course, Sam’s infectious goodness teaches Rita, and us, a little about what’s really important in life.

Shallow Hal (2001) – DVD

June 8, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Romance

***½/**** Image A+ Sound A- Extras B-
starring Gwyneth Paltrow, Jack Black, Jason Alexander, Jimmy Badstibner
screenplay by Sean Moynihan & Peter Farrelly & Bobby Farrelly
directed by Bobby Farrelly & Peter Farrelly

by Walter Chaw Sadness saturates every frame of Peter and Bobby Farrelly’s Shallow Hal like a melancholy tune. It seeps into the corners of a scene–into the wounded eyes of a young woman who has never been asked for her phone number and the wary acceptance of a compliment by someone accustomed to casual abuse. The premise of the film is deceptively simple: an extremely shallow man, the titular Hal (Jack Black), is given the ability by self-help guru Tony Robbins to see the “inner beauty” of people. This means that suddenly for Hal, many beautiful people appear ugly and many physically unattractive people gorgeous. Some folks remain unchanged. In the case of the guarded and acerbic 300 lb Rosemary, she resembles Gwyneth Paltrow in Hal’s eyes.

The Pagemaster (1994) – DVD

June 4, 2002Posted in1990s, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD, Family, Fantasy, Mystery, Romance

*½/**** Image B- Sound B- Extras B-
starring Macaulay Culkin, Christopher Lloyd, Ed Begley, Jr., Mel Harris
screenplay by David Casci, David Kirschner, Ernie Contreras
live-action director Joe Johnston, animation director Maurice Hunt

by Walter Chaw Tailor-made as a public service announcement for going to the library and reading the classics, The Pagemaster makes up for what it lacks in grace with an admirable and perhaps misplaced faith in its audience. Clearly intended as an introduction to discussion rather than a particularly entertaining animated film, it becomes the role of the parents with The Pagemaster to point out the references it makes along the way: Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Melville’s Moby Dick, Shelley’s Frankenstein, Verne’s 20,000 Leagues, Hugo’s Hunchback of Notre Dame, and Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. The extent to which a parent is able to fulfill this obligation is the extent to which The Pagemaster is worthwhile; using this film as an eighty-minute babysitter-cum-opiate negates any possible positive effect conferred by the picture–raising the question, clearly, of how best to approach criticism of the piece.

Fidel (2002) – DVD

June 4, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Drama, DVD, Television

*½/**** Image B- Sound B
starring Victor Huggo Martin, Gael Garcia Bernal, Patricia Velasquez, Cecilia Suarez
screenplay by Stephen Tolkin, based on the books Guerrilla Prince by Georgie Anne Geyer and Fidel Castro by Robert E. Quirk
directed by David Attwood

by Walter Chaw Fidel is a very long, frustrating, exculpatory biopic of Cuba’s dictator that, in its near-fanatical dedication to even-handedness, provides a piece devoid of a moral compass. In certain instances, pacifism implies an endorsement of one side and director David Attwood is certainly guilty of not taking a stand on one of the most controversial, inflammatory, murderous, megalomaniacal, and charismatic figures in modern history. Beginning, intriguingly, in 1949 with a young Castro (Victor Huggo Martin) as a clean-shaven lawyer incensed by certain acts of vandalism perpetrated by the American Navy in Havana, the film promises to draw an interesting connection to Gandhi’s legal background and, most fascinatingly, the starkly different ways these two revolutionary leaders conduct their rebellions (and to what eventual purposes).

Hombre (1967) – DVD

June 3, 2002Posted in1960s, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD, Western

***½/**** Image B Sound B
starring Paul Newman, Fredric March, Richard Boone, Diane Cilento
screenplay by Irving Ravetch and Harriet Frank Jr., based on the novel by Elmore Leonard
directed by Martin Ritt

by Walter Chaw Paul Newman’s Hombre is his fourth and final “H” film of that decade–a quartet that includes The Hustler, Harper, and another of his six collaborations with Martin Ritt, the fantastic Hud. Each (and feel free to lump Cool Hand Luke and Paris Blues in with this esteemed crowd) features Newman as an outsider influence, a catalyst for change and a hero testing the boundaries of acceptable social mores (as was much of the cinema of the ’60s), made all the more shocking for his matinee idol good looks and all-American cool. Newman, arguably the biggest and best star of the Sixties, was the quintessential anti-hero for a dissenting cinematic age, and he brought that brooding outcast sensibility to what was perhaps the quintessential outsider role: a half-breed in a western in Ritt’s 1967 film Hombre.

Out Cold (2001) – DVD

June 3, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD, Sports

½*/**** Image B Sound B- Extras C
starring Jason London, Willie Garson, Lee Majors, Zach Galifianakis
screenplay by Jon Zack
directed by The Malloys

by Walter Chaw The Malloy Brothers’ ode to the “makin’ it” comedies of the mid-’80s (which reached their apex at the genre’s nascence with Bob Clark’s coming-of-age smut-fest Porky’s) is the flaccid snowboard epic Out Cold. Looking back at Porky’s (not that I would look back at Porky’s) reveals that its thrills are decidedly modest–but not nearly so modest as those in the disingenuously chaste Out Cold. The film is so much just a collection of puerile (and unfunny) pranks interspersed with extended cock-teases that the effect is akin to watching a Britney Spears concert with a fraternity.

The Wash (2001) – DVD

June 3, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/**** Image A Sound A Extras C
starring Snoop Dogg, Dr. Dre, George Wallace
written and directed by D.J. Pooh

by Walter Chaw A bit of free advice: if you undertake a drinking game in which the trigger word is “n***a” while watching D.J. Pooh’s The Wash, you’re probably going to die. Another word to the wise: if you don’t imbibe lethal doses of some variety of libation while watching The Wash, you’re probably going to die regardless. The only sensible way to approach The Wash is, apparently, with rubber gloves and one of those plastic bags dispensed at public walking trails.

Dark Blue World (2001) [Special Edition] – DVD

May 29, 2002Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Czech Republic, Denmark, Drama, DVD, France, Germany, Italy, Romance, UK, War

Tmavomodrý svet
**/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B+
starring Ondrej Vetchý, Krystof Hádek, Tara Fitzgerald, Charles Dance
screenplay by Zdenek Sverák
directed by Jan Sverák

by Walter Chaw Taking its name from a song sung during the course of the film, Oscar-winner (for 1996’s Best Foreign Language Film Kolya) Jan Sverák’s Dark Blue World is a historical melodrama set mostly in WWII-era Britain that’s notable because its elaborate battle sequences appear to have been carried off without the aid of CGI. The film is lacklustre and puzzlingly-paced–apologists would call it leisurely, I call it lugubrious–and though the story at its core is indeed compelling and rich for exploration, Sverák’s instinct towards sentimentality leads to one too many shots of sad-eyed dogs, exhausted under the weight of their status as beleaguered metaphors for loyalty and friendship. The picture could only have been salvaged by Dark Blue World focusing on the macrocosm of the plight of Czech pilots for which its tale of a doomed love triangle is the microcosm. As it is, Dark Blue World plays a good deal like Gregory Nava’s brooding A Time of Destiny: they mutually explore the bonds of friendship forged under war and tested by the crucible of love.

The Rambo DVD Trilogy [Special Edition] – DVD

May 28, 2002Posted in1980s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Drama, DVD, Stallone

FIRST BLOOD (1981)
**/**** Image B+ Sound B Extras A-
starring Sylvester Stallone, Richard Crenna, Brian Dennehy, Bill McKinney
screenplay by Michael Kozoll & William Sackheim and Sylvester Stallone, based on the novel by David Morrell
directed by Ted Kotcheff

RAMBO: FIRST BLOOD PART II (1985)
*½/**** Image A Sound B+ Extras A-
starring Sylvester Stallone, Richard Crenna, Charles Napier, Steven Berkoff
screenplay by Sylvester Stallone and James Cameron
directed by George P. Cosmatos

RAMBO III (1988)
**½/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras B+
starring Sylvester Stallone, Richard Crenna, Marc de Jonge, Kurtwood Smith
screenplay by Sylvester Stallone and Sheldon Lettich
directed by Peter MacDonald

by Bill Chambers Ted Kotcheff’s melancholy First Blood opens with Vietnam vet John Rambo looking up a fellow soldier and discovering that the man has died. Sullen, he hits the road, only to be harassed by the town sheriff (Brian Dennehy), who sees long-haired drifters wearing surplus jackets and thinks: Troublemaker. Possessed of a disposition similar to that of Bill Bixby’s David Banner, Rambo ‘Hulks out’ after being stripped of his dignity in the bowels of the police station, escaping his jailers’ clutches and squealing off into a mountainous region of the Pacific Northwest on a stolen motorcycle. His mission is one of self-preservation; Rambo doesn’t start committing premeditated murder until the sequel. (Unlike in the David Morrell source novel, where Rambo is a veritable serial killer, however justified his rage.)

Dunston Checks In (1996) – DVD

May 27, 2002Posted in1990s, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD, Family

*½/**** Image C Sound C
starring Jason Alexander, Faye Dunaway, Eric Lloyd, Rupert Everett
screenplay by John Hopkins and Bruce Graham
directed by Ken Kwapis

by Walter Chaw The old showbiz maxim of never working with children or animals is one violated with such regularity that I guess the otherwise sensible and talented Jason Alexander could be forgiven for Dunston Checks In. There is, in truth, very little else forgivable about the benighted exercise.

Century Hotel (2001) – DVD

May 20, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Drama, DVD, Esoterica

**½/**** Image B+ Sound A Extras A+
starring Joel Bissonnette, Lindy Booth, Colm Feore, David Hewlett
screenplay by David Weaver and Bridget Newson
directed by David Weaver

by Walter Chaw A little of Mystery Train, a little of Barton Fink and Hotel Room, a little of Million Dollar Hotel and Aria, and eventually too much of Four Rooms, Canadian David Weaver’s debut feature is the flawed Century Hotel. Rife with the Freudian implications of a hotel composed of one hall and one room (and all its attendant illicit sexual fixations), the picture carries seven storylines in seven different periods set in the same room of (presumably) the titular inn. Without a traditional framing story and united only by a common theme of individual freedoms as expressed through sexuality, Century Hotel is the very definition of representational ambition (though I could have done without a champagne bottle cork transition emerging out of a homosexual kiss). In a film aspiring to fable with its virgins and whores, the critical lack of mothers and crones speaks to a certain lack of balance to the piece.

It Came from Outer Space (1953) – DVD

May 20, 2002Posted in1950s, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD, Horror, Romance, Sci-Fi, Thriller

***/**** Image B+ Sound B Extras A+
starring Richard Carlson, Barbara Rush, Charles Drake, Russell Johnson
screenplay by Harry Essex, based on the story by Ray Bradbury
directed by Jack Arnold

by Walter Chaw The first Universal International science-fiction release, the first motion picture to be shot in 3-D “Nature Vision,” and the first genre film to primarily use the theremin in its score (by an unbilled Henry Mancini, Irving Gertz, and Herman Stein), Jack Arnold’s It Came From Outer Space is influential in so many ways that it would take twice and again the space allotted for this review to list them all. (A short list includes Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind and his statement to (again unbilled) screenwriter Ray Bradbury that it would not exist without this picture (Dreyfuss’s profession in that film pays homage to Russell Johnson’s profession in this one); The Abyss and its watery fish-eye point-of-view; and countless “desert” sci-fis, including such recent incarnations as Evolution and the opening sequence of Men In Black.) It Came from Outer Space is a prime example of how nuclear terror and the Red Scare informed the B-horror films of the Fifties, and that genre movies today would do well to take a few lessons from their predecessors.

Outta Time (2002) – DVD

May 20, 2002Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, DVD

*½/**** Image C Sound C Extras C
starring Mario Lopez, Tava Smiley, Carlos Mencia, Ali Landry
screenplay by Scott Duncan & Ned Kerwin
directed by Lorena David

by Walter Chaw A Latin blend of Charlie Sheen’s The Chase and Patrick Dempsey’s Run, Outta Time is a sometimes-frenetic, pleasantly ludicrous pursuit film that treats logic and continuity like roadkill on the highway of narrative. “Saved by the Bell”‘s Mario Lopez is David Morales, a Mexican-American going to school on a soccer scholarship who, after hurting his knee, loses his tuition. In desperate financial straits, David agrees to run untested drugs across the border into Tijuana for shady professor Darabont (John Saxon).

Five Aces (1999) – DVD

May 20, 2002Posted in1990s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD

**½/**** Image B+ Sound A- Extras C
starring Charlie Sheen, Christopher McDonald, David Sherrill, Jeff Cesario
screenplay by David Sherrill & David Michael O’Neill
directed by David Michael O’Neill

by Walter Chaw Men’s coming-of-age pictures fall into the categories of finding a dead body by the side of the train tracks, making a bet during a personal summer of ’69 concerning getting laid, or going away with the buddies on the eve of marriage (or the aftermath of a suicide, though some might say, “Same difference”). They are films, in other words, about courage, about a journey, and about sex and rituals of mortality. Hyphenate David Michael O’Neill’s Five Aces is another in that long-standing tradition of pseudo-nostalgic man-sensitive buddy flicks, this one free of the stultifying voice-over narration but not of the contracted timeframe and forced epiphanies. On these masculine journeys of self-discovery, you see, the spotlight shines on each pilgrim in his turn like a twisted middle-class milk dud version of The Canterbury Tales.

Which Way Is Up? (1977) – DVD

May 20, 2002Posted in1970s, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD

*½/**** Image B- Sound B–
starring Richard Pryor, Lonette McKee, Margaret Avery, Dolph Sweet
screenplay by Carl Gottlieb and Cecil Brown
directed by Michael Schultz

by Walter Chaw An embarrassing Being There conceit married to blaxploitation and unionization, the Richard Pryor vehicle Which Way Is Up? strikes a lot of notes but without much rhyme or reason. It is offensive without being funny (save a bondage scene that pays off flat but has a hilarious use of sound) and excessive seemingly just for the sake of it. Pryor becomes a predecessor with this picture to Eddie Murphy’s penchant for playing a bunch of loud-mouthed characters in different beards in stupid gross-out bits of celluloid rubbish…without the production values Murphy warrants. Director Michael Schultz’s follow-up to such amusing counter-cultural flicks as Cooley High and Car Wash (recently re-imagined with Snoop Dogg’s The Wash), Which Way Is Up? tracks the exploits of Leroy (Pryor), a fruit-picker who accidentally falls in with a Unionization movement that earns him a job in the city and some fine women. Can a wearying morality thread questioning the corrupting nature of power be far behind?