The Santa Clause (1994) [Widescreen Special Edition] – DVD

October 27, 2002Posted in1990s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Christmas, Comedy, Disney, Drama, DVD, Family, Fantasy

½*/**** Image A Sound B+ Extras D+
starring Tim Allen, Judge Reinhold, Wendy Crewson, Eric Lloyd
screenplay by Leo Benvenuti & Steve Rudnick
directed by John Pasquin

by Bill Chambers Julia Roberts’s male equivalent in persecution vanity, if not box-office viability, Tim Allen has a ‘Cinderfella’ complex that vividly unveiled itself in the first big-screen vehicle built for the comedian-turned-sitcom star, The Santa Clause, a holiday stinker mysteriously elevated to instant-classic status after managing to outgross Speed, The Mask, Pulp Fiction, and Interview with the Vampire. That it spoke to the zeitgeist is just one of those things, ultimately beyond comprehension; why it actually sucks, that’s a little easier to break down.

Beauty and the Beast: Special Edition (1991|2002) [Platinum Edition] – DVD

October 22, 2002Posted in1990s, 2000s, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Disney, DVD, Family, Fantasy, Musical, Romance

*½/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B
screenplay by Linda Woolverton
directed by Gary Trousdale & Kirk Wise

This review was popular for its contrarianism, but to my current thinking it’s insubstantial and hurries through the movie to get to the DVD; I’d like to take another crack at it someday.-Ed. (6/14/17)

by Bill Chambers Disney solidified the comeback of 2-D animation after the success of The Little Mermaid with Beauty & the Beast, a throwback to the fairytale reimaginings that defined the studio in its heyday. Uncle Walt himself had, in fact, kicked around the idea of adapting the “song as old as rhyme” during his reign but threw in the towel when he couldn’t figure out a way to sustain kiddie interest in what is, in its classical tellings, the story of a monster and a hottie who dine together in the evenings.

Wishmaster: The Prophecy Fulfilled (2002) – DVD

October 21, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, DVD, Fantasy, Horror, Romance

**/**** Image B Sound B+ Extras B-
starring Michael Trucco, Tara Spencer-Nairn, Jason Thompson, John Novak
screenplay by John Benjamin Martin
directed by Chris Angel

by Bill Chambers You’ve got to love a movie (trust me, you do) that opens with a sex scene, brings up a title card to read “3 Years Later,” and mere moments after that flashes back to the opening sex scene. The dumbitude of Wishmaster: The Prophecy Fulfilled, frankly, excited me–this is not a dull bad film, but one chirpy and alive. Shot like an episode of “Red Shoe Diaries”, rendering the goblin-featured title genie an always-jarring sight (you keep expecting to see him in lingerie), the picture reveals itself to be on autopilot (the Airplane! kind that’s inflatable and winks) when it can’t even offer up a clever resurrection of the Djinn except to have some schlub hand our heroine a box capped by a fire opal and say, “Here, I bought this for you.” She peers into it, sees a creature screaming against a backdrop of flames, and suggests he have it appraised.

The Mummy: Quest for the Lost Scrolls (2002) – DVD

October 6, 2002Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD, Fantasy, Horror, Mystery, Television, Thriller

*/**** Image A Sound B- Extras C-

by Walter Chaw Universal and Kids’ WB present the abominable and derivative The Mummy: Quest for the Lost Scrolls, the first three episodes of a tragically bad action-adventure cartoon based on characters from Stephen Sommers’s live-action blockbuster The Mummy Returns. After Aryan-izing Fraser’s Rick O’Connell and his irritating moppet Alex (who is, predictably, the star of the show), the animators proceed to rip-off sources as disconcertingly varied as The Evil Dead, Star Wars, and Sommers’s Mummy saga, natch, all while perpetuating myths of the wilting femme and the foppish Brit that, shockingly, its adult counterparts never did.

Dragonfly (2002) [Widescreen] – DVD

July 24, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Fantasy, Germany, Mystery, Romance, Thriller

*/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras B-
starring Kevin Costner, Joe Morton, Kathy Bates, Ron Rifkin
screenplay by David Seltzer and Brandon Camp & Mike Thompson
directed by Tom Shadyac

by Walter Chaw Emergency-room sawbones Joe Darrow (Kevin Costner) loses his do-gooder wife Emily (Susanna Thompson) when she’s killed in a rockslide in Venezuela. Soon he and his bald parrot believe that Emily has returned from the dead with a message about rainbows. I like Kevin Costner and his oeuvre. I find him to be a charming simpleton in the Gary Cooper mould. Until Dragonfly, his films never felt condescending to me, largely because Costner appears to be learning things at the same pace as his screenplay. His guileless wonder (‘Can you believe we did this to the Indians? Holy smokes!‘) sits well with me and makes him peculiarly suited to play the traditional American hero: good-looking, witless, and dull as dishwater. Casting Costner as a doctor is a mistake: the other person he played who had an advanced degree was New Orleans DA Jim Garrison in Oliver Stone’s JFK, and that character was clearly insane. Costner just doesn’t have the spark of erudition necessary to convince as a serious individual with letters after his name (not unless those letters are LHP), and his performance in Dragonfly is unconvincing, joyless, and scattershot.

The Films of John Sayles (1980-2002)

July 6, 2002Posted in****/****, 1980s, 1990s, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Disability, Drama, Family, Fantasy, Ireland, Mexico, Mystery, Romance, Sci-Fi, Sports, Thriller, Western

Filmsofjohnsayles

Return of the Secaucus Seven (1980)
**/****
Buy DVD at Amazon.com
John Sayles's directorial debut has taken on the aura of a folk tale, the details of its genesis are that well known: With a $40,000 budget raised largely from the quadruple-threat's (writer/editor/director/actor) work for the scripts for Roger Corman's Battle from Beyond the Stars, Piranha, and Alligator, Sayles shot a film at a rented lake house with friends possessed of neither experience nor know-how and redefined the American indie movie scene. Return of the Secaucus Seven had two separate New York runs, made appearances on several year-end lists, and became a cause célèbre for snobs "in the know" deriding Kasdan's The Big Chill as a Secaucus rip-off. Twenty-some years later and the bloom is off the rose, so to speak: Return of the Secaucus Seven reveals itself to be sloppily made, overwritten, and horrendously performed (with the exception of David Strathairn and Gordon Clapp). Still, there are moments of truth in the picture that are pure: an embarrassing interlude when two old friends pass on their way to an unfortunately placed bathroom, and another during a feverish pick-up basketball sequence that steadily develops a delicious subtext. Gathering for what might be an annual reunion, the titular seven reminisce about characters who never appear, discuss past indiscretions (legal and sexual), and locate themselves on the verge of their third decade unmoored from the virulent liberalism of their flower-powered youth. Stealing the show is nerdy "straight" man Chip (Clapp), demonstrating the kind of unaffected naturalism indicative of Sayles's later work but a naturalism buried for the most part here by oodles of hanging plots, mismanaged character moments, odd editing choices, and a peculiarly literate lack of focus indicative of a brilliant novelist moonlighting as a filmmaker. 104 minutes

The Powerpuff Girls Movie (2002)

July 2, 2002Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Family, Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Theatrical

The Powerpuff Girls
**/****
screenplay by Craig McCracken, Charlie Bean, Lauren Faust, Paul Rudish, Don Shank
directed by Craig McCracken

by Walter Chaw I remember this Nora Dunn skit on “Saturday Night Live” where she plays a French chanteuse draped over a piano singing “Send in the Clowns” translated into French and then back into English again. The result was incomprehensible and funny–for a while. Craig McCracken’s The Powerpuff Girls Movie (based on his Cartoon Network series “Powerpuff Girls”, natch) is American animation translated into Japanese animé back into American animation: similarly incomprehensible, not quite so funny, and it overstays its welcome, too. Because the humour of the piece is reliant on the slow burn and the extended take, when a joke doesn’t work there’s a lot of downtime (Men in Black II suffers a similar malady), and because most of the jokes don’t work, even for the bib-and-diaper set, at around seventy minutes The Powerpuff Girls Movie is powerfully boring stuff.

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.

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.

The Scorpion King (2002)

April 18, 2002Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Belgium, Comedy, Fantasy, Germany, Theatrical

*/****
starring The Rock, Steven Brand, Kelly Hu, Michael Clarke Duncan
screenplay by David Hayter and Wil Osborne and Stephen Sommers
directed by Chuck Russell

by Walter Chaw I stopped marking the rip-offs perpetrated in The Scorpion King once Kelly Hu’s jiggle priestess recreated a scene entire from Mike Hodges’s legendary craptavaganza Flash Gordon. Sadly, The Scorpion King doesn’t have the benefit of a Queen soundtrack to push the “just bad” into campy. It steals the rolling gong gag from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, the cave murders and human bow-hunting of Rambo III, the feral kid of The Road Warrior, and its overriding ethos, apparently unintentionally, from Sergio Aragonés’s comic book barbarian “Groo.” If you manage to stifle a chuckle when Dwayne Johnson (a.k.a. The Rock) suffers all manner of horrendous falls and physical mortifications with a confused expression that all but screams, “Did I err?”…well, you’re a better man than I.

Black Knight (2001) – DVD

April 9, 2002Posted in2000s, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD, Fantasy, Romance, Time Travel

**/**** Image B Sound A- Extras B
starring Martin Lawrence, Tom Wilkinson, Marsha Thomason, Vincent Regan
screenplay by Darryl J. Quarles and Peter Gaulke & Gerry Swallow
directed by Gil Junger

by Walter Chaw Jamal Walker (Martin Lawrence) is a groundskeeper at an all-black amusement park who, just prior to falling in a stagnant moat, is given a dressing down for being “selfish” and not community-minded enough. (“Community” referring to the African-American populace of South Central Los Angeles.) Sharp-eyed viewers should instantly recognize that Black Knight will at some point metastasize from a farce to a public service announcement. (Luckily, we’re given a solid first act and a few moments in the second before it does.) When Jamal goes into the moat in pursuit of a golden medallion, he surfaces from a fetid stew in a never-never land where the plain protagonist becomes the keystone in a kingdom-wide intrigue.

Highlander (1986) [The Immortal Edition] – DVD

April 7, 2002Posted in1980s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD, Fantasy, UK

*½/**** Image A Sound B Extras B
starring Christopher Lambert, Roxanne Hart, Clancy Brown, Sean Connery
screenplay by Gregory Widen and Peter Bellwood & Larry Ferguson
directed by Russell Mulcahy

by Walter Chaw It is perhaps the very definition of a cult classic: a film so bad it breaks through that fetid envelope into the heady climes of “camp.” So much is forgiven when a picture’s earnest ineptness translates into that subterranean rhythm heard by those “in the know,” and the twelve-year-old in me remembers the derision I ladled upon those who just didn’t “get” the coolness of Russell Mulcahy’s Highlander. The passage of seventeen years brings the realization that not only have I gotten very old very fast, but that I may have arrived at the age where it is no longer wise to revisit films that I liked as a child.

The Starz Independent FilmCenter Project, Vol. 1

April 5, 2002Posted in****/****, 1950s, 1990s, 2000s, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Czech Republic, Drama, Fantasy, France, Horror, Japan, Mexico, Mystery, Netherlands, Satire, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

by Walter Chaw

BOB LE FLAMBEUR (1956)
***½/****
starring Isabelle Corey, Daniel Cauchy, Roger Duchesne, Guy Decomble
screenplay by Jean-Pierre Melville, dialogue by Auguste Le Breton
directed by Jean-Pierre Melville

With every minute of Henri Decaё’s cinematography looking like a Eugène Atget photograph, Jean-Pierre Melville’s Bob Le Flambeur is a visually stunning film from a director who influenced filmmakers as diverse as Jean-Luc Godard (who quotes Bob Le Flambeur at least twice in Breathless) and John Woo (whose The Killer takes its basic plot from Melville’s Le Samourai). It is film noir of the highest order, reminding in its ensemble intricacy of Kubrick’s The Killing (released a year later in 1956) and evoking the kind of chiaroscuro, gin-joint, smoke-drenched milieu where every ashtray has a name. It’s a love letter to the grim American gangster drama of the Forties that subverts the genre even as it reinvents it as a lyrical ballad to gamblers, losers, hoods, and wayward dames–a snapshot of the Montmarte district of Paris 47 years before Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s reinvention of the same.

Cinderella II: Dreams Come True (2002) – DVD

March 17, 2002Posted in2000s, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Disney, DVD, Family, Fantasy, Romance

Cinderella 2: Dreams Come True
*½/**** Image A Sound A Extras D
written by Jill E. Blotevogel, Tom Rogers, Jule Selbo
directed by John Kafka

by Walter Chaw Split into three parts, aptly like the anthology horror films The Monsters Club and Trilogy of Terror, Disney’s own direct-to-video horrorshow Cinderella II: Dreams Come True reeks of corners cut and the kind of flaccid inspiration fuelled by the urge towards filthy lucre. The animation is an embarrassment to the Disney imprint, a half-step above the cut-and-paste style of Cartoon Network’s “Space Ghost”, and the writing is so lifeless, so feckless, it does nothing to forgive the paucity of attractive, liquid images. The backgrounds are static at all times, the characters move in stiff fits and starts (jittering and freezing just prior to edits), and the colours are lustreless. I would forgive a ballroom dance sequence, recycled no fewer than ten times over the course of the film (and serving as the DVD release’s menu motif), not to mention the multiple rancid “remixes” of “Bibbidy, Bobbidy, Boo,” if there were one moment in the enterprise that didn’t make me want to lie down in a dark room with something cool to my brow.

Thumbelina (1994) – DVD

March 10, 2002Posted in1990s, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD, Family, Fantasy, Musical, Romance

*/**** Image D Sound B
screenplay by Don Bluth
directed by Don Bluth, Gary Goldman

by Walter Chaw A predictably disturbing take on Hans Christian Andersen’s cautionary tale of the importance of conformity and the dangers of female sexual awakening, the diminutive heroine of Don Bluth and Gary Goldman’s Thumbelina arrives in the slow blossoming of a rose. After brief stops in which a hyper-sexualized, Charo-voiced frog teaches Thumbelina to shake her tiny money-maker, a sleazy moustachioed junebug (Gilbert Gottfried) abducts her to be its wife, and Bluth presents phallic stems and pregnant bulbs to the point of indecency, the message of “there’s someone for everyone” (or, closer to the mark, an “Eye of the Beholder”-like “stick with your kind, freak”) comes ham-fisting home.

A Troll in Central Park (1994) – DVD

March 10, 2002Posted in1990s, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD, Family, Fantasy, Musical

½*/**** Image D+ Sound B
screenplay by Stu Krieger
directed by Don Bluth, Gary Goldman

by Walter Chaw So Gnorga (voiced by Cloris Leachman), the queen of the trolls, hates flowers, outlawing them in her forsaken trolldom. Kindhearted simple-troll Stanley (Dom DeLuise) finds himself and his green thumb in quite the pickle: What’s a horticulturally inclined troll to do when everything his olive digit touches turns to a badly-animated flower? Get banished to Central Park in New York, of course–the only place in the universe more unpleasant (according to Gnorga) than Trolldom. Not content to be a worm in the Big Apple, fish-out-of-water intrigue, Don Bluth’s excrescent A Troll in Central Park also manages to shoehorn in a Mary Poppins, “parents too busy to fly a kite” bit of nonsense. It seems too much to wrap up in just under seventy-six minutes, but not only does it manage to do just that in its trundling, underdeveloped way, A Troll in Central Park also wastes what feels like hours on aimless and appalling musical numbers.

Jack and the Beanstalk: The Real Story (2001) – DVD

February 19, 2002Posted in2000s, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Fantasy, Television

***/**** Image A Sound A Extras C
starring Matthew Modine, Vanessa Redgrave, Mia Sara, Daryl Hannah
teleplay by James V. Hart and Brian Henson & Bill Barretta
directed by Brian Henson

by Walter Chaw Visually fascinating and texturally dark, Jim Henson Studios’ Jack and the Beanstalk: The Real Story (henceforth Jack and the Beanstalk), directed by Henson heir Brian, is a hallucinogenic take on the tale of Jack the Giant Killer that posits Jack as a liar and a thief–the bad guy. Set in modern times with a descendant of the legendary Jack (also named Jack (Matthew Modine)) being the head of a large multinational corporation (shades of co-writer James V. Hart’s Hook), Jack and the Beanstalk presents an occasionally captivating point of view that mythologizes big-business malfeasance as it manifests through environmental atrocity and unchecked expansion. It suggests that Jack’s theft of the goose that laid the golden eggs and the singing harp results in 374 days of famine for the denizens of the giant’s world–and that the giant Thunderdell (Bill Barretta) was in fact a beneficent and much-loved keeper of his people.

Atlantis: The Lost Empire (2001) [2-Disc Collector’s Edition] – DVD

February 6, 2002Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Disney, DVD, Family, Fantasy, Sci-Fi

**/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras A
screenplay by Tab Murphy
directed by Gary Trousdale & Kirk Wise

by Walter Chaw Clearly trying to gain some anime credibility by aping the mystical mumbo jumbo of Akira in an unfathomable third act, jettisoning the musical romantic comedy format, and inserting a few subtitles, Disney’s Atlantis: The Lost Empire (henceforth Atlantis) has moments of true grandeur, though it has a good many more of pure Disney. It gets hip genre credibility from the story contributions of “Hellboy” creator Mike Mignola and “Buffy” scribe Joss Whedon, but the best of intentions often lead to the worst of eventualities, and Atlantis is ultimately less “wow” than “oh, boy” and, eventually, “huh?”

Willow (1988) [Special Edition] – DVD

December 26, 2001Posted in1980s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Fantasy, Romance, UK

*/**** Image B+ Sound A- Extras B
starring Val Kilmer, Joanne Whalley, Warwick Davis, Jean Marsh
screenplay by Bob Dolman
directed by Ron Howard

by Walter Chaw It shouldn’t be surprising that Willow fails as it does considering that the creative forces behind it were George Lucas (who has never had a good idea of his own) and Ron Howard (who’s never met an opportunity for cleverness he didn’t miss), neither of whom should ever have been entrusted with a fantasy film as late as 1988, as their work since (and just before) will attest. It is shamelessly derivative, raping countless sources to come up with what is essentially a limp riff on the Tolkien quest married to things as divergent as The Living Daylights, all three original Star Wars films, all three Indiana Jones films, Gulliver’s Travels, The Bible, Masters of the Universe, and Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001)

December 6, 2001Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Fantasy, Theatrical

***½/****
starring Elijah Wood, Ian McKellen, Viggo Mortensen, Sean Astin
screenplay by Fran Walsh & Philippa Boyens & Peter Jackson, based on the novel The Fellowship of the Ring by J.R.R. Tolkien
directed by Peter Jackson

Fellowshipoftheringby Walter Chaw At the heart of Peter Jackson’s brilliant The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring–the first of three cinematic adaptations of Tolkien’s beloved fantasy, shot simultaneously for release in consecutive years–is a favourable melancholy, a despair born of two things: the crucial feeling of desperation that infests a small band of heroes striving against an invincible evil; and the knowledge that this film will soon end, its sequel twelve months away. Jackson has translated nearly every element of Tolkien’s universe, from a vast, sprawling history implied in the language and the actions of its multi-specied characters, to a completely immersive fantasy realm with nary a seam to spoil the illusion, to a quest that’s worthy of epic attention. He’s captured the sadness and moral weight of Tolkien with the kind of deep reality that seems effortless but is born of a meticulous preparation and all-consuming vision. It takes a certain skill to make things look good; it takes genius to keep the pretty pictures from overwhelming the narrative of what is, in this case, a universally familiar story. Ridley Scott never quite got the hang of it.