Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events (2004)

December 17, 2004Posted in2000s, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Family, Fantasy, Germany, Theatrical

A Series of Unfortunate Events
**½/****
starring Jim Carrey, Jude Law, Liam Aiken, Emily Browning
screenplay by Robert Gordon, based on the books The Bad Beginning, The Reptile Room, and The Wide Window by "Lemony Snicket"
directed by Brad Silberling

Lemonysnicketby Walter Chaw The best children's entertainments accentuate a child's strengths, encouraging the pursuit of aptitude and bliss instead of impossible pipe dreams. It's the lesson of The Incredibles, one of the bravest, most subversive films the year–and it seems to be the lesson of Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events as well until the picture caves in to kid-flick conventions and worse. But while it's humming along with the freshly-orphaned Baudelaires–Violet (Emily Browning), Klaus (Liam Aiken), and little Sunny (Kara and Shelby Hoffman)–doing what they do best (Violet the engineer, Klaus the reader, Sunny the biter), Lemony Snicket, with its gothic sets and grotesque gallery of rogues, offers up a brilliant antidote to the saccharine blather of traditional holiday fare. Fleetingly effective or no, it's a shot of insulin in a season that generally offers up bloated prestige items for the grown-ups and freakishly genial, accidentally perverse fare for the kiddies.

Elf (2003) [Infinifilm] – DVD

November 8, 2004Posted in2000s, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Christmas, Comedy, DVD, Family, Fantasy, Romance

**/**** Image A Sound A- Extras A
starring Will Ferrell, James Caan, Zooey Deschanel, Mary Steenburgen
screenplay by David Berenbaum
directed by Jon Favreau

by Walter Chaw Some of the preview spots for Jon Favreau's Elf are hysterical, leading me to think that the film's failure to be very funny has a lot to do with bad direction, editing, or maybe both. It's a lightweight, unapologetically warm-hearted picture that earns a lot of respect for avoiding scatological humour en route to honouring nearly every other ingredient of the The Jerk bumpkin-out-of-water formula. Like Steve Martin, Will Ferrell announces himself with this film (and Old School) as a smart comedian unusually committed to effect and the directions his performance might take him. Ferrell isn't a chaotic jester. His clowning compels because it has the quality of internal logic, enough so that it's somehow possible to accept his man-raised-by-elves creation at face value.

Mulan (1998) [Special Edition] – DVD

October 28, 2004Posted in1990s, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, China, Comedy, Disney, DVD, Eddie Murphy, Family, Fantasy, Musical, War

**/**** Image B+ Sound A Extras B-
screenplay by Rita Hsiao, Christopher Sanders, Philip LaZebnik, Raymond Singer & Eugenia Bostwick-Singer
directed by Barry Cook and Tony Bancroft

by Bill Chambers If Disney’s animated features can be reduced to a stable of alternating boy movies and girl movies, then the studio’s decision to make the cross-dressing fable Mulan at a juncture when they really needed mass approval (that is, after striking out post-Katzenberg with Pocahontas, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and Hercules) comes across as conspicuously non-partisan–and the hero’s androgyny isn’t the only bet-hedging the filmmakers practice. A meticulous recreation of Imperialist China, for instance, is compromised by anachronisms cultural and temporal (the eponymous Mulan (voice of Ming-Na Wen), a pre-Tang Dynasty Chinese maiden, is introduced to us wearing a tank top and what resemble capri pants; later, she is served bacon and eggs for breakfast), while musical numbers, subversive humour, and Spielbergian spectacle perpetually collide like bumper cars. The end-product is neither fish nor fowl, though it certainly leans towards foul.

Aladdin (1992) [Platinum Edition] – DVD

October 5, 2004Posted in1990s, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Disney, DVD, Family, Fantasy, Musical, Romance

***½/**** Image A+ Sound A+ Extras A+
screenplay by John Musker & Ron Clements and Ted Elliott & Terry Rossio
directed by John Musker & Ron Clements

Aladdincapby Bill Chambers Jeffrey Katzenberg may have revived the American animated feature while he was at Disney, but only one of the hits his reign yielded is worth a second viewing. Where 1989's The Little Mermaid and especially 1991's nauseating Beauty and the Beast tried to pass themselves off as Golden Age Disney (1937 (Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs)-1950 (Cinderella), for argument's sake), before a certain stateliness loosened its grip on the house style, 1992's Aladdin took its cue from Uncle Walt's twilight years, the Sixties, when he was interested in telling–as he geared up to pass the torch, perhaps–mentor stories (The Sword in the Stone and The Jungle Book) and pop culture had finally caught up with his incongruous predilections for psychedelia and bohemianism. It's a risk to emulate the period considered the birth of the studio's Dark Ages, and Aladdin is the least spurious movie of Disney's renaissance because of it.

Kaena: The Prophecy (2003) + The Lion King II: Simba’s Pride (1998) [2-Disc Special Edition] – DVDs

September 20, 2004Posted in1990s, 2000s, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Disney, Drama, DVD, Family, Fantasy, France, Musical, Romance, Sci-Fi

KAENA: THE PROPHECY
*/**** Image A Sound B Extras C
screenplay by Tarik Hamoine and Chris Delaporte
directed by Chris Delaporte

THE LION KING II: SIMBA'S PRIDE
½*/**** Image B Sound B- Extras C+
screenplay by Flip Kobler and Cindy Marcus
directed by Rob LaDuca & Darrell Rooney

by Walter Chaw There's a timorous, resonant quality to Kirsten Dunst's voice. It's amazing, really: it vibrates at a contralto as tense and lovely as a cello string drawn–I think it's her most attractive feature. She's tailor-made, then, to be a vocal performer, and finds herself as such in French filmmaker Chris Delaporte's plodding misfire of a movie Kaena: The Prophecy. Completely computer-animated, it's every bit as ugly and prosaic as its American cousin Ice Age (insomuch as it even includes a prehistoric-squirrel vignette towards the end) and obsessed with the jiggle dimensions of Kaena (or is that me, obsessed?), who must save her tree-world Axis from destruction at the hands of the evil Selenites (whose queen is voiced by Anjelica Huston). The story is so Joseph Campbell hero's journey-obsessed, so humourless and–how do I say it delicately?–Bakshi in its execution, that poor Dunst, in the title role, is wasted on plucky pronouncements and grunts of exertion as her .gif alter-ego leaps hither and yon.

Wizards (1977) – DVD

August 4, 2004Posted in1970s, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, DVD, Fantasy, Sci-Fi

**½/**** Image B+ Sound A- Extras A-
written and directed by Ralph Bakshi

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover I like Ralph Bakshi movies. I wish I didn’t, because they’re shrill and vulgar and slightly immature, and not even examples of brilliant cartooning. But they’ve got a working-class desperation to them that most American movies are too posh and moneyed to accurately capture. Hollywood filmmakers typically see poverty as an occasion for condescension from above; Bakshi sees it at ground level–consider the generations of failure that littered American Pop, or the chaotic skid-row scramble that defined Heavy Traffic. Thus I find myself in the unenviable position of guardedly praising his 1977 Wizards, which in the hands of any other director would have been merely a sleazy Tolkien-meets-Heavy-Metal fantasy riff. This is not to say that it isn’t a sleazy Tolkien-meets-Heavy-Metal fantasy riff, but it’s one with moments that resonate beyond simplistic sex and violence and wipe the goofy grin off of the normally flighty and gossamer-draped genre.

Young Sherlock Holmes (1985) – DVD

July 5, 2004Posted in1980s, Adventure, DVD, Fantasy, Mystery, Spielberg, Thriller

**/**** Image A Sound A
starring Nicholas Rowe, Alan Cox, Sophie Ward, Anthony Higgins
screenplay by Chris Columbus
directed by Barry Levinson

by Walter Chaw Fresh from The Natural and with a couple of films to go until Rain Man, Barry Levinson snuck in Young Sherlock Holmes, another adventure of a gawky idiot savant hero, which I initially saw as a lad of twelve one afternoon with my best friend before either of us had developed much discretion. Touted as the first picture to feature a completely computer-generated character and featuring a post-end credits epilogue that we found out about however it was that dorks found out about stuff like that before the Internet, the picture came to me the winter after the summer I'd spent reading the collected works of Arthur Conan Doyle, and the entire experience left me thoroughly enchanted. But in revisiting this slightly sadistic boy's tale, what emerges is less a sense of thrill and awe than a recognition of the oppressive influence that executive producer Steven Spielberg had on this and all of the projects under his pre-DreamWorks aegis, Amblin Entertainment.

Bandolero! (1968); Myra Breckinridge (1970); Mother, Jugs & Speed (1975); One Million Years B.C. (1966) – DVDs

June 20, 2004Posted in1960s, 1970s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Drama, DVD, Esoterica, Fantasy, Romance, UK, Western

BANDOLERO!
**/**** Image A Sound B
starring James Stewart, Dean Martin, Raquel Welch, George Kennedy
screenplay by James Lee Barrett
directed by Andrew V. Mc Laglen

MYRA BRECKINRIDGE
**/**** Image A Sound A- Extras A+
starring Mae West, John Huston, Raquel Welch, Rex Reed
screenplay by Michael Sarne and David Giler
directed by Michael Sarne

MOTHER, JUGS & SPEED
***/**** Image B+ Sound B
starring Bill Cosby, Raquel Welch, Harvey Keitel, Allen Garfield
screenplay by Tom Mankiewicz
directed by Peter Yates

by Walter Chaw Very much the product of its time, Andrew V. McLaglen's Bandolero!, the last of the three westerns the director made with Jimmy Stewart, appeared in 1968, the same year as the end of Sergio Leone's Spaghetti Western cycle (Once Upon a Time in the West) and alongside such seminal generational discomfort flicks as Rosemary's Baby and Night of the Living Dead. And while it's not nearly so good as McLaglen/Stewart's devastating Civil War idyll Shenandoah, Bandolero! is still better than it probably should be, saved by its above-the-line talent. With Raquel Welch as a freshly widowed Mexican woman ("I was a whore when I was 12–my family never went hungry"–and so it went in Welch's career) and a good, if woefully miscast Dean Martin as Stewart's no-account, bank-robbin' outlaw brother, the picture is a border film, the basis in many ways for Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove and one that contents itself with tepid character melodrama unfolding at a snail's pace along the road to Ensenada.

Jim Henson’s The Storyteller: The Complete Collection (1987) – DVD

June 16, 2004Posted in1980s, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Family, Fantasy, Horror, Muppets, Television, UK

Image C Sound B
“The Soldier and Death,” “Fearnot,” “The Luck Child,” “A Story Short,” “Hans My Hedgehog,” “The Three Ravens,” “Sapsorrow,” “The Heartless Giant,” “The True Bride”

by Walter Chaw For the span of nine delirious, enchanted episodes, “The Storyteller”, Jim Henson’s too-brief foray into mature anthology fantasy television, is gorgeous for its faithfulness to its mythic source material. Although the show’s longevity was certainly not helped by Henson’s hard-to-shake reputation as the benevolent primogenitor of “Sesame Street” and “The Muppet Show”, looking closer at Henson’s twin, sterling blue masterpieces The Muppet Movie (which he didn’t direct but definitely spearheaded) and The Dark Crystal reveals an artist steeped in a tradition of stung, existential melancholy. It’s easy to laugh at Kermit’s swamp lament or to dismiss, albeit less easily, the heroism of a soon-to-be-extinct species desperate to save a dying world that has all but snuffed them out, but from a perspective of legacy, it’s unwise to file Henson under “kid’s stuff” and leave well enough alone.

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004)

June 4, 2004Posted in****/****, 2000s, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Family, Fantasy, Mystery, Theatrical, Time Travel, UK

****/****
starring Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint, Emma Watson, Gary Oldman
screenplay by Steven Kloves, based on the novel by J.K. Rowling
directed by Alfonso Cuarón

Harrypotterprisonerazkabanby Walter Chaw There's real poetry in Alfonso Cuarón's Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (hereafter Harry Potter 3), encapsulated in a moment where Harry mistakes a vision of himself for the phantom of his dead father. It's another of the Mexican director's magic-realism conversations about children coming of age emotionally and sexually, marking the picture as a lovely companion piece to his A Little Princess and identifying Cuarón as a gifted, eloquent voice for the rage and the rapture of adolescence. Opening with the 13-year-old Harry (Daniel Radcliffe) fiddling with his wand beneath a blanket, the theme of self-discovery unfolds along jagged, de-romanticized lines like the rough rhythms of an Irish lyric or, more to the heart of the matter, a Mexican folk tale, all of blood, dirt, and heroic fervour.

The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003) [Widescreen] – DVD

June 1, 2004Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Best Picture (Academy Awards), Drama, DVD, Fantasy, New Zealand

**½/**** Image A+ Sound A+ Extras B-
starring Elijah Wood, Ian McKellen, Viggo Mortensen, Sean Astin
screenplay by Fran Walsh & Philippa Boyens & Peter Jackson, based on the novel by J.R.R. Tolkien
directed by Peter Jackson

Returnofthekingeecap2

by Walter Chaw For the uninitiated few, Frodo (Elijah Wood) and Sam (Sean Astin) are diminutive hobbits making their way, with the treacherous Gollum (Andy Serkis) as their guide, through perilous lands on a quest to destroy the One Ring of power, forged by evil Sauron in a volcano called Mount Doom. Their story is set against a series of epic military manoeuvres and intimate Machiavellian machinations engaged in by elf Legolas (Orlando Bloom), dwarf Gimli (John Rhys-Davies), wizard Gandalf (Ian McKellen), and the once and future human king, Aragorn (Viggo Mortensen).

Shrek 2 (2004)

May 18, 2004Posted in2000s, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Eddie Murphy, Family, Fantasy, Japan, Romance, Theatrical

*½/****
screenplay by Andrew Adamson and Joe Stillman and J. David Stem & David N. Weiss
directed by Andrew Adamson, Kelly Asbury, Conrad Vernon

Shrek2by Walter Chaw Neither better nor worse than its predecessor, think of Shrek 2 as a step sideways–it doesn’t so much earn an audience as inherit one. A DreamWorks/PDI production, Shrek 2 transplants the first picture’s bitterness towards Disney, though the characters it skewers are in the public domain (Sleeping Beauty, the three little pigs, Hansel & Gretel, Pinocchio, and so on) and happen to be among the icons that Disney, by and large, never dishonoured. Without a viable target, then, the film is the kind of satire-less satire that mistakes being a self-congratulatory trivia game designed for beginning players for being a post-modern commentary on fairytales and, more specifically, the traditional Disney animated feature. There’s no sharpness inherent in making reference to Spider-Man or Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings saga (just as there was no sharpness in referencing The Matrix in the original), and imitation has no point of view, just a brief rush of pride and bemusement for folks generally unused to catching the allusions. To say the picture functions best for the lowest common denominator (note a trio of flatulence gags) isn’t entirely fair–but it’s accurate.

Give My Regards to Broad Street (1984) + Paul McCartney: The Music and Animation Collection – DVDs

May 13, 2004Posted in1980s, 1990s, 2000s, Animation, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Family, Fantasy, Music, Short Films, UK

GIVE MY REGARDS TO BROAD STREET
**/**** Image B Sound B+
starring Paul McCartney, Bryan Brown, Ringo Starr, Barbara Bach
screenplay by Paul McCartney
directed by Peter Webb

PAUL McCARTNEY: THE MUSIC AND ANIMATION COLLECTION
*½/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras B+
directed by Geoff Dunbar

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Self-absorption is probably an occupational hazard at a certain level of fame: once the world lays itself at your feet, pelts its money at you, and replaces your mirrors with airbrushed portraits, it's well-nigh impossible not to be nudged a little closer to the realm of the narcissistic. Such is the case with Paul McCartney, who, having been canonized during his stint with The Beatles, apparently came to believe that anything involving his personage would be a celestial experience for all. The ego trips of 1984's Give My Regards to Broad Street and his more current forays into animation show a McCartney trapped in his own private hall of mirrors, one whose past musical triumphs are looking ever more distant from the tepid easy-listening of his present-day output.

Sword of the Valiant (1984) – DVD

May 10, 2004Posted in1980s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD, Fantasy, Romance, UK, ZERO STARS

Sword of the Valiant: The Legend of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
ZERO STARS/**** Image D+ Sound C-
starring Miles O'Keefe, Cyrielle Claire, Leigh Lawson, Sean Connery
screenplay by Stephen Weeks and Philip M. Breen and Howard C. Pen
directed by Stephen Weeks

by Walter Chaw A film that is actually exactly bad enough to be uproariously funny, Stephen Weeks's Sword of the Valiant: The Legend of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (hereafter Sword of the Valiant)–peculiarly, Weeks's second adaptation (after 1973's Gawain and the Green Knight) of The Rose Poet's fourteenth century Arthurian epic "Gawain and the Green Knight"–is one of those Golan-Globus productions that helped redefine the bottom of the barrel in the early Eighties. It gives Miles O'Keefe of Tarzan the Ape Man fame a short-lived and wholly unjust stay of career execution (decking him out in a Prince Valiant wig that makes him look suspiciously like Mary Worth with abs), and it furthers my contention that Sean Connery is pretty much just the Scottish Burt Reynolds. I'm not sure what Weeks and company had in mind when embarking on this project, but the result is something so deeply stupid as to inspire hopefulness and hopelessness in equal draughts: anyone can do it, apparently–but is it worth doing if it turns out to be Sword of the Valiant?

Millennium Actress (2002) + Tokyo Godfathers (2003)

May 9, 2004Posted in2000s, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Fantasy, Japan, Romance

MILLENNIUM ACTRESS
***½/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B
screenplay by Satoshi Kon and Sadayuki Murai
directed by Satoshi Kon

TOKYO GODFATHERS
**½/**** Image A Sound A Extras C+
screenplay by Keiko Nobumoto and Satoshi Kon
directed by Satoshi Kon and Shôgo Furuya

by Walter Chaw Four years separate Satoshi Kon's astonishing Perfect Blue and his astonishing Millennium Actress; it seems that what the intervening period brought to Kon's palette is a strong sense of visual humour and an affecting pathos to cut the existential dread of his identity crises–the year or two distancing Tokyo Godfathers from Millennium Actress further refining Kon as a humorist even as it blunted his razor's edge. Where Perfect Blue is the first film in decades to use Hitchcock correctly in a sentence, it still fails for the most part to jump from horror to hilarity on the turn of a heel, making its story of an actress being stalked by a doppelgänger brilliant, no question, but also relentlessly grim. Millennium Actress takes many of the same themes (down to the same basic structure) of performance and meta-reality, stage and screen, cradling them in a story about a man's lifetime of unrequited love for an actress, herself suffering from a lifetime's unrequited love for a mysterious revolutionary. Both threads entwine in a mutual affection for the life of the cinema, which, by film's end, serves as the ends and the means by which their respective love stories are resolved. Like Perfect Blue, Millennium Actress is about living with ghosts, but where the one is all shadow, Millennium Actress is all alight.

The Last Unicorn (1982) – DVD

April 28, 2004Posted in1980s, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Family, Fantasy, France, Japan, UK, West Germany

*/**** Image D Sound D
screenplay by Peter S. Beagle, based on his novel
directed by Arthur Rankin, Jr. and Jules Bass

by Walter Chaw Rankin & Bass’ typically sloppy adaptation of Peter S. Beagle’s classic The Last Unicorn (adapted for the screen by Beagle himself) is terribly voiced and animated, even by the ’70s Bakshi/flash-frozen/Saturday-morning conveyor belt standard. The melancholy poetry of Beagle’s novel, rife with dread and the vertiginous feeling of falling into chaos, is notable for its similarity to the big eye, little mouth of traditional anime but falls short of that gold standard in terms of performance and detail. Mouths don’t move, backgrounds are static and recycled, and it doesn’t help that the colours on the print making it to the DVD format look as though they’d been left in the front window for too long.

Bulletproof Monk (2003)

April 15, 2004Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, Fantasy, Theatrical

*/****
starring Chow Yun-Fat, Seann William Scott, Jamie King, Karel Roden
screenplay by Ethan Reiff & Cyrus Voris
directed by Paul Hunter

Bulletproofmonkby Walter Chaw There is a moment in the middle of Bulletproof Monk: Chow Yun-Fat leaps to the top of a car, brandishing two pistols, his overcoat flaring in slow-motion as he rains down bullets on the bad guys. It's an homage to Brother Chow's work with John Woo, of course, in the seminal HK action flicks The Killer, Hard-Boiled, and A Better Tomorrow–and Woo is listed among the film's producers. It sort of makes you wonder why the pair doesn't stop dancing around and just make another movie together already, particularly since neither Chow nor Woo has really made a film worth a damn since sailing over to a Hollywood that doesn't understand them. The American film industry would rather marginalize them into racial caricatures than take advantage of their unique talents.

Hellboy (2004)

April 2, 2004Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Superhero, Theatrical

***/****
starring Ron Perlman, Selma Blair, Jeffrey Tambor, Karel Roden
screenplay by Guillermo del Toro, based on the comics by Mike Mignola
directed by Guillermo del Toro

Hellboyby Walter Chaw A bona fide auteur in an age of facile pretenders, Guillermo del Toro is the pulp genre’s Martin Scorsese, his films filtering devout Catholic imagery through a lurid colour palette and obsessed with insectile machineries and mentor relationships between boys and old men. Del Toro’s pictures are deeply personal explorations of faith, of redemption and resurrection–he made of Blade II a tale of the prodigal son, and now with Hellboy he’s crafted a story of an evolving passion.

Peter Pan (2003)

December 25, 2003Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Australia, Authors: Walter Chaw, Family, Fantasy, New Zealand, Romance, Theatrical, UK

***½/****
starring Jason Isaacs, Jeremy Sumpter, Rachel Hurd-Wood, Lynn Redgrave
screenplay by P.J. Hogan and Michael Goldenberg, based on the play by James M. Barrie
directed by P.J. Hogan

Peterpanby Walter Chaw A perverse lollapalooza of loaded images and disquieting implications, P.J. Hogan's live-action Peter Pan is this year's most intriguing Freudian shipwreck, resurrecting the darkness and poetic pessimism of J.M. Barrie's play–and Peter and Wendy, Barrie's own novelization–that has been all but forgotten since Disney's well-regarded 1953 treatment. (While nowhere near as saccharine as something as mendacious as Brother Bear, that animated version is still of a Disney tradition that washes dangerous source material mostly clean of credible malice.) At its heart, consider that the Pan story is about child seduction/abduction in the Yeatsian "Stolen Child" tradition, and a colony of "lost boys" that have forgotten their parents and, crucially, been forgotten in turn. The mirror of a parent's love discarded in this way renders the film's heart-warming conclusion a touch bitter, with the spectre of the question "but what about their parents?" hanging over it.

Journey to the Center of the Earth (1959) – DVD

December 24, 2003Posted in1950s, Adventure, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, DVD, Family, Fantasy, Romance, Sci-Fi

***/**** Image A Sound A
starring Pat Boone, James Mason, Arlene Dahl, Diane Baker
screenplay by Walter Reisch and Charles Brackett
directed by Henry Levin

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover By any rational standards, the 1959 version of Jules Verne's Journey to the Center of the Earth is swill, an all-pro hackjob that marshalls a vast array of technicians and designers in the hopes that the money and effort expended will mask the total artistic void at its, um, centre. There's no sense of cinema to its mechanical vision of life beneath the surface–and yet somehow, despite Henry Levin's non-direction and the bizarre casting of James Mason alongside Pat Boone, the film works like gangbusters. Watching it is like being a kid at Christmas and getting a thoroughly useless but fun piece of plastic to play with. It won't do you any good in the long run, but as a mass-produced waste of 129 minutes, it has the steel-and-chrome charm of a bloated '50s gas-guzzler.