Bear in the Big Blue House: Tidy Time with Bear! + Bear in the Big Blue House: Everybody’s Special – DVDs

Image A Sound A
Tidy Time With Bear!: “Working Like A Bear,” “Woodland House Wonderful,” “We Did It Our Way”
Everybody’s Special: “As Different As Day and Night,” “Bats Are People Too,” “The Yard Sale”

by Jarrod Chambers For those of you who have never seen it, “Bear in the Big Blue House” is a children’s show about a bunch of animals (two bears, two otters, a mouse, and a lemur) who live in a big blue house and get along famously, thanks to the gentle leadership of the bigger of the two bears, named simply Bear. They are produced by Jim Henson Television, who, with Columbia TriStar Home Video, have put together two fabulous DVD packages, “Tidy Time with Bear!” and “Everybody’s Special!”, each with three loosely related episodes of the show from 1997 on plus a few extras.

On the Edge (2001) – DVD

**½/**** Image A Sound A
starring Cillian Murphy, Tricia Vessey, Stephen Rea, Jonathan Jackson
screenplay by Daniel James and John Carney
directed by John Carney

by Walter Chaw John Carney’s On The Edge is sort of a Gaelic One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest: an irreverent teen Murphy (“Cillian Murphy” as it happens, playing a character named Jonathan Breech) inspires a batch of ruined adolescents in a County Dublin asylum to restore themselves through the healing power of petty rebellion. It’s formulaic and derivative at the least, but the soundtrack, performances, and smooth look of the piece elevate its stagnant material into something–at least fitfully–emotionally engaging, if not intellectually involving.

How High (2001) [Widescreen] – DVD

***/**** Image A Sound A Extras A
starring Method Man, Redman, Obba Babatundé, Mike Epps
screenplay by Dustin Lee Abraham
directed by Jesse Dylan

by Walter Chaw A surprisingly smart and wacky weed opus that gives the Messrs. Chong and Cheech a run for their money, How High is a crafty subversion of the endlessly offensive Soul Man collegiate race comedy. Its dis-contest mentality carried off with a lively disregard for the demagogues of political correctness, the film reaches a pinnacle of sorts with Spalding Gray’s bit as an unflappable Harvard professor of Black History. I don’t know that I’ve laughed that long or hard in ages–at least since the last episode of Robert Smigel’s “TV Funhouse”.

The Temp (1993) – DVD

***/**** Image A- Sound B
starring Timothy Hutton, Lara Flynn Boyle, Dwight Schultz, Oliver Platt
screenplay by Kevin Falls
directed by Tom Holland

by Walter Chaw The Temp borders on brilliant. A thriller from director Tom Holland, he of the “better than they ought to be” Fright Night and Child’s Play, the picture plays with corporate and gender politics in a fashion similar to the first half of Mike Nichols’s Wolf. Similarly, neither can The Temp hold its centre through to the end, resorting to cheap genre tactics and fright gags where a more faithful treatment of its workplace paranoia would far better serve the rapier instincts and execution of the rest of the piece.

The Gambler (1974) – DVD

**½/**** Image A- Sound B+
starring James Caan, Paul Sorvino, Lauren Hutton
screenplay by James Toback
directed by Karel Reisz

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Somewhere near the beginning of The Gambler, we see Axel Freed (James Caan) teaching a college course in literature. Taking his cues from Dostoevsky, he announces that any idiot can say that two plus two equals four, but the man who says that they equal five is riding on sheer will. Whether he knows that the declaration is false or not is irrelevant–he is transcending truth to make his own rules. This deliciously summarizes not only The Gambler itself, but also the whole shaky decade of art-pop that was the Seventies. This was the era in which cartoon heroes jousted improbably with literature and politics and when a torrent of homages created whole films piece by appropriated piece. The Gambler‘s Freed is all too typical of the type, with its literary pretensions mixed in with a helping of macho declarations that could only come from a lifetime of hero-worship at the movies.

Watership Down (1978) – DVD

***/**** Image B Sound B
screenplay by Martin Rosen, based on the novel by Richard Adams
directed by Martin Rosen

by Walter Chaw Unsentimental and terrifying and set against lovely, John Constable-esque watercolour backgrounds, Martin Rosen’s adaptation of the Richard Adams novel Watership Down arose in that extended lull between Disney’s heyday and its late-Eighties resurrection. (This period also saw, in addition to Rosen’s film of Adams’s The Plague Dogs, Rankin & Bass’s The Last Unicorn and Ralph Bakshi’s most productive period, which included 1978’s The Lord of the Rings.) Watership Down points to the dwindled potential for American animation to evolve into what anime has become: a mature medium for artistic expression of serious issues. A shame that this flawed piece is possibly the pinnacle of animation’s ambition on these shores, Richard Linklater’s Waking Life notwithstanding.

High Heels and Low Lifes (2001) – DVD

½*/**** Image A Sound A Extras C+
starring Minnie Driver, Mary McCormack, Kevin McNally, Mark Williams
screenplay by Kim Fuller
directed by Mel Smith

by Walter Chaw Mel Smith’s feminist crime farce High Heels and Low Lifes blares Aretha Franklin and the Eurythmics‘ “Sisters are Doin’ It For Themselves” over its closing credits, always a bad sign. Trying desperately to combine the only two types of British films that have seen commercial success in the last decade (the gangster farce and the Jane Austen empowerment fable), this product from the director of Bean and the screenwriter of Spice World is so rote that its frantic attempts at good natured quirk come off as grotesque and uncomfortable.

Waking Life (2001) – DVD

****/**** Image A Sound A Extras A-
starring “Wiley Wiggins and an ensemble of 74 other actors”
written and directed by Richard Linklater

Mustownby Walter Chaw It begins with a child’s game that ends with the chilling premonition “Dream is destiny” and closes with what appears to be the fulfillment of that statement. Richard Linklater’s Waking Life is an anti-narrative with no discernible story arc: The film’s conflict arises between its characters’ varying cosmologies and the challenge that presents to the viewer’s own existential verities, such as Descartes’s dictum cogito ergo sum (“I think, therefore I am”). Waking Life is one of the most interesting and engaging films of a year that sports its fair share of complex, fascinating fare (Mulholland Drive, Va Savoir).

Brewster’s Millions (1985) [Widescreen] – DVD

*½/**** Image B+ Sound D+
starring Richard Pryor, John Candy, Lonette McKee, Stephen Collins
screenplay by Herschel Weingrod & Timothy Harris, based on the book by George Barr McCutcheon
directed by Walter Hill

by Bill Chambers The 1985 remake of Brewster’s Millions is a failed high-concept fable not for its dearth of laughs (which is disappointing, what with Richard Pryor and John Candy headlining) or its overfamiliarity (it will remind you of not only Brewster’s Millions past, but also every underdog comedy ever made), but because you wouldn’t really want to wear the shoes of the eponymous Monty Brewster, a millionaire whose inheritance is shackled by so many caveats as to deny Monty–when we know him, anyway–a sense of wish-fulfillment.

Hard Lessons (1986) – DVD

The George McKenna Story
*/**** Image C- Sound C
starring Denzel, Lynn Whitfield, Akosua Busia, Richard Masur
screenplay by Charles Eric Johnson
directed by Eric Laneuville

by Walter Chaw Hot on the heels of Denzel Washington’s second Oscar–which was sort of a relieved, honorary accolade for avoiding the umpteenth resurrection of his Glory performance, another collaboration with Spike Lee, and a third slain civil rights leader–comes Artisan’s hasty repackaging of 1986’s TV movie The George McKenna Story, ironically dubbed Hard Lessons and refurbished with new promotional art.

Taking Care of Business (1990) – DVD

½*/**** Image D Sound D
starring James Belushi, Charles Grodin, Anne De Salvo, Loryn Locklin
screenplay by Jill Mazursky & Jeffrey Abrams
directed by Arthur Hiller

by Walter Chaw Proving that hope springs eternal in the hearts of idiots and madmen, Taking Care of Business features the Cubs in a World Series and Jim Belushi in one of those showcase roles in which a nominal comedian gets to demonstrate his alleged madcap skills. Occurring in that weird twilight zone of cinema where once-topical humour is briefly funny again in a retro-Gen-X way (Jim’s exclamation upon entering a mansion, “I’m on freakin’ ‘Dynasty’!” would find a home in any neo-Tarantino screenplay), Taking Care of Business also features two “Star Trek: The Next Generation” stars (Gates McFadden and John de Lancie)–the one making a joke out of her breasts, the other nodding quietly in appreciation of them. The flick is, to summarize, interesting in a surreal sort of way.

Flesh and Bone (1993) – DVD

****/**** Image B Sound A-
starring Dennis Quaid, James Caan, Meg Ryan, Gwyneth Paltrow
written and directed by Steve Kloves

by Walter Chaw Steve Kloves’s follow-up to his exceptional The Fabulous Baker Boys is Flesh and Bone, a dark-hued journey through the Southern Gothic that represents career pinnacles for Meg Ryan and (until The Royal Tenenbaums) Gwyneth Paltrow. That Flesh and Bone–a doom-filled piece that glowers with malevolence from its horrifying opening sequence to its unsettling conclusion–never received a great deal of attention upon its initial release isn’t as much of a surprise as the fact that not even the passage of time has cemented it as a minor classic. There are few pictures more deserving of critical revisionism.

From Hell (2001) [Director’s Limited Edition] – DVD

***/**** Image A- Sound A+ Extras A
starring Johnny Depp, Heather Graham, Ian Holm, Paul Rhys
screenplay by Terry Hayes and Rafael Yglesias, based on the graphic novel by Alan Moore & Eddie Campbell
directed by Albert Hughes & Allen Hughes

by Walter Chaw Alan Moore’s brilliant graphic novel From Hell is first a work of Romanticism (in that it evolves from a mistrust of industry, a demonizing of all that the rail represents to the continued corruption of nature), then a nostalgia for a hopelessly idealized past. Once his Romantic roots are established, Moore clarifies the evolutionary link between British Romanticism and Modernism by lifting a quote from Jack the Ripper’s infamous letter: “One day, men will look back and say I gave birth to the twentieth century.” As it’s employed by Moore and in consideration of the author’s grasp of literary theory, this one quote eloquently juxtaposes the impact of Bloody Jack’s Grand Guignol rampage in London of 1888 with the fin de siècle (The French Revolution) that marked the actual birth of Romanticism in the Lake District of 1789. In simpler terms, From Hell is a work of incomparable incandescence–smart stuff for smart people and theoretically the easiest of Moore’s works to translate to the big screen.

Performance (1970) – DVD

Performancecap

***½/**** Image B+ Sound C Extras C
starring James Fox, Mick Jagger, Anita Pallenberg, Michele Breton
screenplay by Donald Cammell
directed by Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg

by Walter Chaw Emerging in the middle of one of the most experimental, challenging periods in cinematic history, Performance–completed in 1968 but shelved until 1970–is a product at once ahead of its time and two years too late. Had its trippy-dippy, anachronistic cross-cutting and madly-inappropriate scoring appeared in 1968 (the year of Rosemary’s Baby, Night of the Living Dead, If…, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and the film to which it perhaps owes its greatest allegiance, Once Upon a Time in the West), Performance would’ve found traction and good company as a foundational film for the American New Wave instead of as a picture that, for all its foment and formal revolution, seemed hysterical against a maturing, more sedate(d) mainstream avant-garde parade of stuff like El Topo, Zabriskie Point, MASH, and Five Easy Pieces.

Metropolis (2001) – DVD

***½/**** Image A+ Sound A+ Extras A
screenplay by Katsuhiro Ôtomo, based on the comic book by Osamu Tezuka
directed by Rintaro

by Walter Chaw There is a sense of wonder inherent in the exploration of new mediums. A young Maxim Gorky’s 1896 review of one of the first Lumiére Cinématographe shows in Russia begins, “Last night I was in the Kingdom of Shadows.” As I began exploring the anime medium (not a “genre,” I am assured, and I have come to concur) a scant couple of years ago, I felt similarly the interloper in a dreamscape conjured by a culture steeped in tradition, mythology, and the sort of artistic sensibility that could only evolve from the only people victimized by the most terrible weapon of mass destruction humans have devised. Anime is–perhaps predictably, then–often-post-apocalyptic (its themes exploring the existential by way of William Gibson’s cyberpunk and Philip K. Dick’s identity crisis) finding elements of the rapture in such rapturous fantasies as the lyrical Princess Mononoke, the viscerally charged Ninja Scroll, and the ferocious yet delicate Nausicaä of the Valley of Wind.

Three Fugitives (1989) – DVD

½*/**** Image B Sound B-
starring Nick Nolte, Martin Short, Sarah Rowland Doroff, James Earl Jones
written and directed by Francis Veber

by Walter Chaw Written and directed by Francis Veber, remaking his own Les Fugitifs from two years previous, Three Fugitives is one of the middle-period films under Disney’s Touchstone imprint, although the growing pains are still obvious. What works in a French farce is wearying and disturbing in a purportedly “light-hearted” American comedy (see also: Three Men and a Baby, The Birdcage, and Cousins); not helping, of course, is a screenplay in English by a non-English speaker and a performance by Nick Nolte that is by turns unnecessarily terrifying and unintentionally grotesque. It is not as terrifying and grotesque, however, as the implications of a man released from prison after five years cuddling a little girl in an abandoned warehouse, nor of that same man demanding that little Martin Short dress up in drag.

Ocean’s Eleven (2001) [Widescreen Edition] – DVD

**½/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B
starring George Clooney, Matt Damon, Andy Garcia, Brad Pitt
screenplay by Ted Griffin
directed by Steven Soderbergh

by Walter Chaw Impeccably-costumed and impossibly-handsome action figures are arranged in cool poses throughout Ocean's Eleven, Steven Soderbergh's updating of the same-named Rat Pack caper. A throwback to the star-driven cinema of the Fifties and a reflection of our own fanatical interest in cults of personality, the film features transparent performances (with the exception of Don Cheadle, each performer in Ocean's Eleven is playing his- or herself), and the same kind of sadistic voyeurism that impels us to simultaneously deify and find fault with our favourite actors keeps our peepers glued to the screen as George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Matt Damon, Elliot Gould, and Carl Reiner revolve around one another in a loose heist intrigue intended to relieve Andy Garcia of both his millions and his girlfriend.

Not Another Teen Movie (2001) [Special Edition] – DVD

ZERO STARS/**** Image B+ Sound B Extras B+
starring Chyler Leigh, Chris Evans, Jaime Pressly, Deon Richmond
screenplay by Mike G. Bender & Adam Jay Epstein & Andrew Jacobson and Phil Beauman & Buddy Johnson
directed by Joel Gallen

by Walter Chaw The first thing one notices about Joel Gallen’s Not Another Teen Movie is that it appears to have been shot on 16mm stock off the back of someone’s truck–grainy and shaky, it’s easily the cheapest-looking major studio release of the year. After a brief prologue in which our heroine Janey Briggs (Chyler Leigh, whose character’s name appears to spoof “Jason Biggs,” the star of American Pie–that’s as clever as the film gets) is caught by her entire extended family and clergy en flagrante with a giant mechanized dildo, the second thing one notices about Not Another Teen Movie is that it has no sense of timing, no sense of shame, and no reason for being.

Mulholland Drive (2001) – DVD

Mulholland Dr.
****/**** Image A- Sound A

starring Justin Theroux, Naomi Watts, Laura Elena Harring, Ann Miller
written and directed by David Lynch

by Walter Chaw

Was it a vision, or a waking dream?
Fled is that music — Do I wake or sleep?
John Keats, Ode to a Nightingale

MustownDavid Lynch’s Mulholland Drive contends that the answer to the eternal struggle between what is real and what is fantasy comes in the form of a Keatsian confusion–it’s the difference between Adam’s dream and Eve rendered flesh, blurred in the mind of the creator and his audience. A film is a dream of the director made tangible, a conceit familiar from the fourth-wall-breaking in Ingmar Bergman’s Persona (banishing any mystery there might have been regarding the visual references to that film in Lynch’s piece), and a movie’s characters therefore become projections of its maker’s sublimated longing (clarifying too the auteur’s use of wardrobe and colour schemes from Hitchcock’s meditation on objectification, Vertigo, as well as those of his first collaboration with inamorata Tippi Hedren, The Birds).

Less Than Zero (1987) – DVD

***/**** Image A- Sound B-
starring Andrew McCarthy, Jami Gertz, Robert Downey Jr., James Spader
screenplay by Harley Peyton, based on the novel by Bret Easton Ellis
directed by Marek Kanievska

by Walter Chaw The quality of dislocation in Marek Kanievska’s Less Than Zero is startling and sinister. It creeps up on you after a confusing opening that skips forward six months from a high school graduation before flashing back a month and then reorienting itself again in Beverly Hills at Christmastime in 1987. But by the middle of the film, the temporal decisions made during its disorienting prologue suddenly make perfect sense: while Less Than Zero will never be as narratively jumpy again, the pervasive mood of the piece remains disconnected and frightened. It feels breathless in a way that movies about drug addiction must. Though Less Than Zero seems, despite its sterile apocalyptic blight, almost naïve in the wake of Aronofsky’s Requiem for a Dream, it retains (especially in retrospect, given the lost spirit of the Eighties and Robert Downey Jr.’s offscreen problems), something approaching the laden nostalgia of Romanticism. Something by Thomas de Quincey, no doubt.