Cars (2006)

Posted in2000s, 2006, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Family, Pixar, Sports

*½/****
screenplay by John Lasseter & Philip Loren & Kiel Murray
directed by John Lasseter

by Walter Chaw Soulless and anchorless, Pixar’s Cars is the company’s first all-around failure. It’s got something to do with the lack of a human grounding: the only other time Pixar stumbled was with its similarly bleak A Bug’s Life (that picture resorting, like Cars, to racial caricature as its primary tentpole), which is also the only other time the company has neglected to ground its story with homo sapien ballast. It’s telling that a company pioneering machine-tooled animation so relies on that hint of humanity for its effectiveness; in its place, Cars resorts to cheap name-games (all the cities are car-parts except, dubiously, Los Angeles) as its primary gag and relies on a string of racing in-jokes (Darrell Cartrip, get it? Yeah, me neither) to lubricate its worn-down gears. It’s the product of the “Larry the Cable Guy” school of redneck effacement tacked onto a tired redemption romantic comedy, even more tired fish-out-of-water malarkey, and finally an inexplicable blanket criticism of all things urban. Sub-vaudeville gags with weak payoffs and rudderless execution are the things one would rightly expect from a DreamWorks flick–pity that their strain of high-concept lack of inspiration seems to respect no host.

Dumbo (1941) [60th Anniversary] – DVD + Dumbo [Big Top Edition] – DVD

Dumbo (1941) [60th Anniversary] – DVD + Dumbo [Big Top Edition] – DVD

Posted in1940s, 2006, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Disability, Disney, Drama, DVD, Family, Musical

***/****
60TH ANNIVERSARY DVD – Image B Sound B Extras B
BTE DVD – Image B+ Sound B Extras B
screenplay by Joe Grant and Dick Huemer, based on the book by Helen Aberson & Harold Perl
directed by Ben Sharpsteen

by Bill Chambers With Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and Pinocchio, Walt Disney had established two narrative prototypes between which he would all but vacillate over the next couple of decades. In 1937’s Snow White, the eponymous heroine trusts that Prince Charming will one day steal her away from life’s ills, while in 1940’s Pinocchio, a misfit innocent is navigated by his surrogate conscience (Jiminy Cricket) through an unkind world back to the parental figure he left behind. Disney didn’t really return to the Prince Charming myth until the Fifties, when he began a run that includes Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, and Peter Pan (a movie that arguably promotes the suitor-saviour (swashbucklin’ Pete) to a leading role); Pinocchio‘s template just seemed to have more resonance during the war years.

The Champ (1931) – DVD

The Champ (1931) – DVD

Posted in1930s, 2006, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Family, Sports

*/**** Image B Sound C Extras C
starring Wallace Beery, Jackie Cooper, Irene Rich, Rosco Ates
screenplay by Francis Marion and Leonard Praskins
directed by King Vidor

by Walter Chaw So dated now as to seem nigh prehistoric, King Vidor’s silent era-bound The Champ is broad melodrama of the underdog-uplift/precocious-kid variety, and though it’s sorely tempting to condescend to it by placing it within its historical context, watching it now is like getting a screw drilled into your forehead. Doing road work with his lovable boy Dink (Jackie Cooper, more than a marionette, less than a creature of flesh and blood), The Champ (Wallace Beery) is a cartoon of a lush and a punch-drunk boxer who makes silly shadow-boxing gestures in long, unbroken takes, requiring Beery to ad-lib business that segues uneasily late in the film when the same Beery shtick must carry pathos. We can’t think that a Vaudevillian’s conception of a retarded drunk and a compulsive gambler is adorable and then reorient ourselves into thinking he’s feeble without confronting the same conundrum the film itself presents a modern viewer. Either The Champ is fabulous–for a picture made in 1931, that is–or it’s only accessible for a theoretical, contemporaneous audience, lacing any ascriptions of quality with that one major caveat and thus rendering them exactly as useless as that kind of equivocation always is.

RV (2006)

Posted in2000s, 2006, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Family, Germany, Theatrical, UK

½*/****
starring Robin Williams, Jeff Daniels, Cheryl Hines, Kristin Chenowith
screenplay by Geoff Rodkey
directed by Barry Sonnenfeld

by Walter Chaw Shit, feral raccoons, hillbillies, tits, white-boy Ebonics, more shit, and oodles of forced sentimentality to propel the septic stew down our collective throat as we strain towards it, baby bird-like. Or so the theory goes. In the interest of complete disclosure, the reason Barry Sonnenfeld’s excrescent RV dodged a zero-star rating from me is that I actually laughed at a perversely perfect sewage geyser. It’s one thing when you’re all about the slapstick gross-out gag; another when, National Lampoon’s Vacation-style (the film that, structurally, RV, Johnson Family Vacation, Are We There Yet?, and so on most resemble), your trip across the middle of the United States yields insights into the caste and racial strata of our expansive country. Then you have a feckless relic like this that pulls its punches even in regards to the bigotry it directs at rednecks. There’s nothing to hold onto in RV, and it tries so hard to please that there’s not much joy in taking it down. It’s like kicking a puppy, with the puppy trying to lick your boot as you do it.

Howl’s Moving Castle (2005) – DVD

Howl’s Moving Castle (2005) – DVD

Posted in2000s, 2005, 2006, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Disney, DVD, Family, Fantasy, Japan

*½/**** Image B Sound A- Extras B
screenplay by Hayao Miyazaki (American adaptation by Cindy Davis Hewitt & Donald H. Hewitt), based on the novel by Diana Wynne Jones
directed by Hayao Miyazaki

by Walter Chaw I’ve never liked it much when the Japanese are drawn to Victoriana, finding parallels as they sometimes seem to between that reserved, sexually repressive culture and their own, because it most often results in garbage like Katsuhiro Ôtomo’s exhausting Steamboy and now master Hayao Miyazaki’s disappointing Howl’s Moving Castle. Slow, not terribly interested in lore or internal logic, and fatally hamstrung by the choice of actors like Billy Crystal and a zombified Emily Mortimer to voice its American dub, it’s a regression for Miyazaki from his last two films (Princess Mononoke and Spirited Away) in almost every sense, starting with his decision to have a lonely young woman as the central character in place of the prepubescent little girls front and centre in most of his masterpieces (the last two films, Kiki’s Delivery Service, Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, and My Neighbor Totoro) and ending with a gross simplification of his usually complex themes of confidence and actualization into a colourless, flavourless drone about the hard-to-dispute badness of war.

Whisper of the Heart (1995) – DVD

Whisper of the Heart (1995) – DVD

Posted in1990s, 2006, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Family, Japan, Music, Romance

***/**** Image B Sound B- Extras D
screenplay by Hayao Miyazaki
directed by Yoshifumi Kondo

by Walter Chaw Three years after directing Studio Ghibli’s Hayao Miyazaki-scripted Whisper of the Heart, and before he was able to complete a second picture for the venerable Japanese institution, ace animator and Miyazaki protégé Yoshifumi Kondo passed away of an aneurysm at the age of 47. Knowledge of Kondo’s fate colours the already wistful Whisper of the Heart with another layer of blue (especially if you’re a fan of Kondo’s behind-the-scenes work on landmark anime like Grave of the Fireflies and Princess Mononoke), but it doesn’t completely rescue its remarkable humanity from frequent descents into culturally alien specificity. The obsession with reworking John Denver’s hilljack schmaltz classic “Country Road” into an un-ironic ode to the “concrete roads” of the picture’s Tokyo-bound little girl protagonist (Shizuku (Youko Honna)), for instance, almost by itself renders Whisper of the Heart a Hello Kitty! for that particular brand of Japanese, Yank-ophile, cross-eyed badger shit. It’s a better film if you’re Japanese–kind of an amazing thing to say, I know, but the moments that don’t reconstitute American “popular” culture through a Nipponese filter manage a fair-to-amazing job of evoking the overwhelming rush of first love. Shame, then, that John Denver appears at regular intervals to remind us of how peculiar a beast cultural diffusion can be.

Bee Season (2005) – DVD

Bee Season (2005) – DVD

Posted in2000s, 2005, 2006, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Family, Germany

*/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B-
starring Richard Gere, Juliette Binoche, Flora Cross, Max Minghella
screenplay by Naomi Foner Gyllenhaal, based on the novel by Myla Goldberg
directed by Scott McGehee & David Siegel

by Walter Chaw A lot of mortal liberties were taken with Myla Goldberg’s Bee Season on its way to the big screen under the pen of Naomi Foner Gyllenhaal and direction of Scott McGehee and David Siegel, most of them having to do with softening the suffocating fanaticism and sensuality of the novel in favour of the soothing neutral tones of the fearful doorstop demographic. It’s not that the book is better, it’s that the book is entirely different: the one has a point of view, while the other mainly boasts an air of pusillanimous equivocation that turns a vaguely threatening story concerning Kaballah and Hebrew mysticism into Searching for Bobby Fischer. The problem might be that Richard Gere’s Saul is a hotshot college professor in this version, and completely reasonable and charming to boot. The problem might be, in other words, that Gere is too good for this movie.

Chicken Little (2005) – DVD

Chicken Little (2005) – DVD

Posted in2000s, 2005, 2006, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Disney, DVD, Family, Sci-Fi

*/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras C
screenplay by Ron Anderson, Steve Bencich and Ron J.Friedman
directed by Mark Dindal

by Walter Chaw Frantic, frenetic, anxious, obnoxious: the ideal audience for Chicken Little should be in bed by seven, and Disney’s umpteenth cry of “sure-fire comeback project” looks, appropriately, like another convulsive episode of corporate crying-wolf. Chicken Little, for instance, makes pop culture references that don’t mean anything in the context of a film whose sole purpose appears to be instructing your children to be fearful and hyper. They’re just there to give parents, alternately stunned and bored, a little rootless pleasure in the middle of epileptic flash; what’s left isn’t clever (or kinetic) enough for us to ignore its essential emptiness. What Chicken Little is more than anything else is exhausting. You could by rights hope that it’s is a send-up of the Fifties cycle of Martian invasion pictures (it name-checks War of the Worlds for no good reason) as The Incredibles was a send-up of Golden Age superhero comics, but even a cursory comparison between the two films shows that Disney’s desperation to make Pixar’s looming secession a non-issue is as limp and impotent as the Nevada State Boxing Commission.

Dimples (1936) + Mad Hot Ballroom (2005) – DVDs

Dimples (1936) + Mad Hot Ballroom (2005) – DVDs

Posted in1930s, 2000s, 2005, 2006, Authors: Alex Jackson, Documentary, DVD, Family, Musical

DIMPLES
**/**** Image F (colorized)/C (b&w) Sound C
starring Shirley Temple, Frank Morgan, Robert Kent, Stepin Fetchit
screenplay by Arthur Sheekman and Nat Perrin
directed by William A. Seiter

MAD HOT BALLROOM
*/**** Image B Sound B
directed by Marilyn Agrelo

by Alex Jackson When Chuck Workman juxtaposed Shirley Temple with Adolf Hitler in his underseen 1995 documentary The First 100 Years, he was dramatizing America’s suckling on the opium pipe of Temple musicals while Hitler rose to power in Germany. This is reflective of the general attitude towards Temple in the 1940s: not only was she no longer cute, she also embodied a sense of brain-dead frivolousness in American film that the zeitgeist started snuffing out through soppy sentimentality, hardened disillusionment, or some combination of the two. Movies got heavy in the Forties, and Temple could not keep up with them.

Bambi II (2006) – DVD

Posted in2000s, 2006, Adventure, Animation, Australia, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Disney, Drama, DVD, Family, Romance

Bambi 2: The Great Prince of the Forest
**/**** Image A Sound A- Extras C-
screenplay by Alicia Kirk
directed by Brian Pimental

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover It would be faintly disingenuous to cry bloody murder over a straight-to-video Bambi sequel: given Uncle Walt’s own propensity for denaturing children’s classics (and milking the new “classics” for cash), it’s only fitting that the cream of his own canon would be whored out for what the market will bear. Still, Bambi is no ordinary Disney movie, but one whose awesome craft is matched only by its singular horror of the adult world. It’s ludicrous, then, to pick up the story after the deer-kid has learned to talk and show him that being a grown-up isn’t so bad. Not only does it generally contradict the original, but it also blows off the primal fear and sadness that make Bambi as potent as it is.

Eight Below (2006)

Posted in2000s, 2006, Adventure, Antarctica, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Disney, Drama, Family, Theatrical

½*/****
starring Paul Walker, Bruce Greenwood, Moon Bloodgood, Jason Biggs
screenplay by David DeGilio
directed by Frank Marshall

by Walter Chaw There are situations and statements, questions and propositions, that are so stupid by their nature that they actually approach Zen. And then there’s Frank Marshall’s arctic dogs-and-dude melodrama Eight Below, which plays for all the world like not only the world’s most unwelcome sequel (to Snow Dogs), but also a companion piece to March of the Penguins. It is, in simplest terms, a pandering blight–a straight line (nay, flatline) from unsurprising set-up to unsurprising resolution, every bit the equivalent of a line of footprints in the snow between two known points. Opening with one of film history’s most wooden leading men, Paul Walker, and “nice Jewish boy” comic relief Jason Biggs sitting in a hundred-degree steam room before running out into a 30-below autumn day in Antarctica, Eight Below immediately teaches us that human beings heated to a toasty 110 degrees do not steam when exposed to sub-zero temperatures and, more, that if you should ever visit the South Pole, your breath will never, ever show. It’s full of fun facts like that, but it saves its most fascinating revelations for the intricacies of canine interactions, including their complex gift-giving behaviours, advanced speech, abstract philosophical concepts, and eerie ability to go for at least fifteen days at a time without food or water. It even wrests an explanation from the universal loam as to what Walker was put on this earth for: to be upstaged by eight dogs, someone named Moon Bloodgood, Jason Biggs, and miles of white. It goes without saying that those scenes Walker plays against Bruce Greenwood have the queasy, guilty fascination of a baby seal getting mauled by a polar bear.

Jerry Lewis: The “Legendary Jerry” Collection – DVD

Posted in1950s, 1960s, 2006, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Family, Music, Romance, Sci-Fi

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover If you’re savvy enough to read film criticism, you probably know it’s supposed to be funny that the French love Jerry Lewis. We all have a big, self-satisfied laugh when we first hear that, as if anyone could take Jerry Lewis seriously. (We certainly didn’t.) But the thing is, there aren’t a lot of people who will admit to actually seeing one of his movies–the Lewis hate-on has become so intense that the only thing remaining of him is the joke; he’s the scapegoat of anti-French resentment and anti-intellectual hostility, as if only frogs and eggheads could possibly find anything redemptive in his work. Thus, a generation has shunned his films, never to know if there really is a centre to the onion, something more than mugging to the Lewis mystique.

The PianoTuner of EarthQuakes (2006); Mutual Appreciation (2006); Unknown (2006)

Posted in2000s, 2006, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, Esoterica, Family, Fantasy, France, Germany, Music, Mystery, Romance, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

THE PIANOTUNER OF EARTHQUAKES
*½/****
starring Amira Casar, Gottfried John, Assumpta Serna, César Saracho
screenplay by Alan Passes and The Quay Brothers
directed by The Quay Brothers

MUTUAL APPRECIATION
***½/****
starring Justin Rice, Rachel Clift, Andrew Bujalski, Seung-Min Lee
written and directed by Andrew Bujalski

UNKNOWN
½*/****
starring Jim Caviezel, Greg Kinnear, Bridget Moynahan, Joe Pantoliano
screenplay by Matthew Waynee
directed by Simon Brand

by Walter Chaw The Quay Brothers, Stephen and Timothy, are marvellous animators, having shepherded stop-motion and a disquieting biomechanical ethic into a series of notably discomfiting shorts, more than one of which pays tribute to their hero/mentor Jan Svankmajer. I met their 1995 transition to live-action features (Institute Benjamenta) with equal parts excitement, curiosity, and trepidation–I believed they'd be a little like either fellow animator-turned-director Tim Burton or those masters of a form who overreach by switching to a different medium, à la Michael Jordan. The truth is somewhere in-between, as the Quays have retained a bit of their glacial patience and a marked affection for created environments but have miscalculated the extent to which our fascination with animate clockworks translates into a commensurate fascination with people sitting around, staring at a wall. The former inspires existential thoughts on the nature of sentience; the latter generally inspires boredom. No question in my mind that something's lurking in the Quays' underneath, but it's important to mark that fine line distinguishing fascination from obtuseness for the sake of itself. Exploring the waking/dreamlife divide is interesting–but it's neither original nor terribly useful when the main tactic seems to be to conjure up pomposity-inspired sleepiness.

Kronk’s New Groove (2005) – DVD

Kronk’s New Groove (2005) – DVD

Posted in2000s, 2005, 2006, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, Disney, DVD, Family, Musical, Philippines, Romance

*½/**** Image A+ Sound B+ (DD)/A- (DTS) Extras C
screenplay by Tom Rogers
directed by Saul Andrew Blinkoff & Elliot M. Bour

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover You know you’re watching a family film when: a) father issues dominate the plot; b) it talks down to the parents in the guise of speaking on their level; and c) the whole thing is larded with pseudo-in-jokes intended to make everybody feel smart. So it is with Kronk’s New Groove, a straight-to-disc sequel (to an original unseen by yours truly) that posits the Emperor Kuzco’s one-time adversary Kronk (voice of Patrick Warburton) in a race against time to impress his “Papi” with the classic wife/kids/house-on-hill bellwethers of success. Alas, it’s an indifferently-concocted affair, with the minor character pushing more charismatic presences to the side and leaving nothing to distract from some feeble jokes, obvious plotting, and a total refusal to bring something new to the table.

Cheaper by the Dozen 2 (2005)

Posted in2000s, 2005, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, Family, Theatrical, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Steve Martin, Bonnie Hunt, Piper Perabo, Tom Welling
screenplay by Sam Harper
directed by Adam Shankman

Cheaperbythedozen2by Walter Chaw I spent altogether too much time during Cheaper by the Dozen 2 anticipating the moment when Hilary Duff would snuffle some sugar cubes out of a little girl’s hand–but in my defense, what else was there to do? I feel strange saying that this film is unwatchable because, hey, I’m proof that, technically, it is watchable; I guess I should say that it’s highly inadvisable to watch this film. I want to be clever, to turn a phrase that better illustrates the point, but in cases like these it’s probably better to be straightforward. If you find yourself in a theatre with this film, leave. It’s awful. Director Adam Shankman is the Uwe Boll of family movies: he doesn’t know how to pace a picture, he has no idea what to do with a camera (check out an outdoor banquet sequence that looks like it was shot under muddy water), and his use of John Debney’s atrocious, hate-crime of a score should set off Amnesty International’s radar. This is film as punishment, I’m serious. It’s never funny, never insightful, never valuable in any way. Kids might like it in the way that kids like anything that’s short and kinetic, yet the film preys upon a consistent mass hunger for “family” entertainment, and children and idiots deserve better supervision. Family films in the United States seem defined only as having no “objectionable” content, such as non-cartoon violence, a whiff of poetry, or any hint of sexuality. At the risk of being a rebel, let me offer the heretical view that the only content that’s truly objectionable is witless sludge like Cheaper by the Dozen 2.

Valiant (2005) – DVD

Posted in2000s, 2005, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Disney, DVD, Family, War

½*/**** Image A Sound B+ Extras D
screenplay by Jordan Katz, George Webster, George Melrod
directed by Gary Chapman

Valiantcapby Walter Chaw The animation is flat, the screenplay is insipid, the pacing is mortally off, and the voice acting is the mixed bag you generally get when you hire movie stars instead of professional voice talent (this is already the second animated film Ewan McGregor's tackled this year–third if you count Lucas's folly) to breathe life into your pixellated creations. But other than that, Valiant's fantastic. Its setting (WWII, circa D-Day) isn't as imaginative as that of Robots (this year's other glaring animated failure), and its CGI housefly sidekicks don't talk, as they did in Racing Stripes (this year's other glaring made-for-kids animal-related failure), but if you can overlook its obvious and subtle and inescapable deficiencies, well, what you have here is a blockbuster simply waiting to have its destiny fulfilled by the same group that flocked to the inexplicably popular Shrek films. Valiant's central marketing point is that it's from the same producer, John H. Williams, as the Shrek franchise, which, while technically true, ignores the movie's ten other producers.

Curly Top (1935) – DVD

Posted in1930s, 2005, Authors: Alex Jackson, DVD, Family, Musical, Romance

*½/**** Image F (colorized)/C (b&w) Sound C
starring Shirley Temple, John Boles, Rochelle Hudson, Jane Darwell
screenplay by Arthur J. Beckhard and Patterson McNutt
directed by Irving Cummings

by Alex Jackson It's funny how a film like Curly Top can feel so weird and so derivative at the same time. Starting with the writing, there is barely any plot to speak of. Shirley Temple is Curly Top, the orphaned child of two circus performers who has only her older sister Mary (Rochelle Hudson) to protect her from mean headmistress Mrs. Higgins (Rafaela Higgins). After becoming enchanted with Curly during a visit to the orphanage, wealthy benefactor Edward Morgan (John Boles) seeks to adopt her under the alias "Mr. Jones." Mary insists that she be adopted along with Curly, as she had promised her parents that the two would never separate. Morgan agrees, but as he spends more time with them he begins to fall in love with Mary. Though Mary likes Morgan back, she's engaged to the handsome Jimmie Rogers (Maurice Murphy). It's up to Curly to bring her "two favourite grown-ups" together.

The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (2005)

Posted in2000s, 2005, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Disney, Family, Fantasy, Theatrical, UK

**½/****
starring Georgie Henley, Skandar Keynes, William Moseley, Anna Popplewell
screenplay by Ann Peacock and Andrew Adamson and Christopher Markus & Stephen McFeely
directed by Andrew Adamson

by Walter Chaw I'm offended by the marketing for The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (hereafter Narnia 1)–not the trailers (which are pedestrian) or the print ads, per se, but the campaign to pre-screen reels to churches and church groups, including Colorado's wildly divisive rightwing activist organization Focus on the Family. It's not something I'm terribly surprised to see from Walden Media–but it's something that strikes me as peculiar coming from the gay-friendly Walt Disney Pictures, a studio currently "suffering" a boycott from Focus on the Family that aims, in part, to force Disney to explain their "Jekyll and Hyde" products and policies. Of the two hypocrisies, fiduciary vs. ideological, I guess I'd favour one over the other, not being in the business of weighing sins, as it were.

Herbie: Fully Loaded (2005) – DVD

Posted in2000s, 2005, Adventure, Comedy, Disney, DVD, Family, Romance, Sports

**/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B-
starring Lindsay Lohan, Justin Long, Breckin Meyer, Michael Keaton
screenplay by Thomas Lennon & Robert Ben Garant and Alfred Gough & Miles Millar
directed by Angela Robinson

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover There’s this girl, Maggie Payton (Lindsay Lohan), who wants to be a NASCAR driver. That much I got. Her father (Michael Keaton) is, of course, an overprotective wuss who wants to shield Maggie from masculine pursuits. I’m right with you up to there. The only way to prove she can handle the danger is…to drive a self-propelled VW Bug that does all the work for her? Such is the logical conundrum of Herbie: Fully Loaded, which comes on like a female-empowerment comedy-melodrama while depriving its heroine of autonomy over the career she so desperately craves. As the damned Beetle completely destroys any attempt to make its pilot a prime mover, there’s really nothing at stake for anyone behind the wheel–and while this is fine if you’re a schlep like Dean Jones, it doesn’t do much if you’re trying to sneak in feminist subtext.

Cheaper by the Dozen (2003) [Baker’s Dozen Edition] – DVD

Posted in2000s, 2005, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD, Family

½*/**** Image A- Sound B Extras C
starring Steve Martin, Bonnie Hunt, Piper Perabo, Tom Welling
screenplay by Craig Titley, based on the book by Frank B. Gilbreth Jr. and Ernestine Gilbreth Carey
directed by Shawn Levy

by Walter Chaw Walter Lang's 1950 version of Frank B. Gilbreth and Ernestine Gilbreth Carey's semi-autobiographical Cheaper by the Dozen ends with patriarch Frank (Clifton Webb) kicking the bucket, and seat-warmer Shawn Levy's (fresh off the triumph Just Married) 2003 adaptation of the same ends with patriarch Tom (Steve Martin) capitulating to his simpering children. Such is the decline of courage in western popular culture that even sickening cultural artifacts like Lang's Cheaper by the Dozen out-balls an updated version fifty-three years hence. Infantile regression the rule of the day in a climate increasingly desperate to shoehorn its post-modern anti-narratives into comfortable family fare, it's interesting to consider that the original was already seen as something of a throwback to Depression-era family values at the time of its release. In conflict with the popular wag that people are stupider now than they've ever been, the excrescent original was also defended as good old-fashioned escapist fare. People are exactly as stupid as they've always been, it seems, but the lords of our popular entertainment have been noticeably castrated.