Mystery Archives - Page 19 of 28

House M.D.: Season One (2004-2005) – DVD

September 6, 20052000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Drama, DVD, Mystery, Television

Image C+ Sound A- Extras C+
"Pilot," "Paternity," "Occam's Razor," "Maternity," "Damned if You Do," "The Socratic Method," "Fidelity," "Poison," "DNR," "Histories," "Detox," "Sports Medicine," "Cursed," "Control," "Mob Rules," "Heavy," "Role Model," "Babies & Bathwater," "Kids," "Love Hurts," "Three Stories," "Honeymoon"

by Bill Chambers The high-concept premise of "House M.D." is, like that of executive producer Bryan Singer's The Usual Suspects, ultimately fraudulent. After all, for us plebes, there's no way of knowing whether the "Sherlock Holmes of Medicine" lives up to his billing, save his addiction to an opiate. (I'm reminded of that inside-baseball wannabe Brown Sugar, in which the characters cringe at the alleged awfulness of a hip-hop act that sounds to the untrained ear exactly like every other hip-hop act.) As the head of "diagnostics" at the fictitious Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital, unorthodox Dr. Gregory House (Hugh Laurie) uses an informed process of elimination to cure anomalous illnesses (one per week, it's self-reflexively pointed out), but as the patients invariably go from bad to worse to healed, civilian audiences are denied the basic level of interactivity that is the raison d'être of the whodunit. "House M.D." is a "C.S.I." clone–right down to the impromptu Innerspace tours of the bloodstream–with science no longer the pretext but the text itself.

The Brothers Grimm (2005)

August 26, 20052000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Czech Republic, Directors: Terry Gilliam, Fantasy, Horror, Mystery, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

*/****
starring Matt Damon, Heath Ledger, Peter Stormare, Lena Headey
screenplay by Ehren Kruger
directed by Terry Gilliam

by Walter Chaw A film with all the drama and flair of a Tuesday Morning tchotchke shop, The Brothers Grimm is the only Terry Gilliam film since Jabberwocky that I've actively disliked. It's the star-crossed director's most conventional, most compromised work, the first to betray the behind-the-scenes strife–the desperation that has defined Gilliam's career to this point. Already pre-emptively disowning the finished product (citing various impasses with the Brothers Weinstein), Gilliam doesn't, this time around, have the aegis of a subversive finished product to hide behind. There may be a lot of people responsible for what's wrong with The Brothers Grimm, but the bulk of the responsibility for its failure is parked square at Gilliam's doorstep–and the rest of it belongs to nitwit screenwriter Ehren Kruger, whose flavour-of-the-month status might finally be souring. It's perhaps unfair to expect the director to constantly pull his Waterloos out of the woods, but The Brothers Grimm is finally the film that his detractors have always accused him of making: busy, unfocused, obnoxious, and lousy.

The Constant Gardener (2005)

August 25, 20052000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, France, Germany, Kenya, Mystery, Romance, Switzerland, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

**/****
starring Ralph Fiennes, Rachel Weisz, Danny Huston, Bill Nighy
screenplay by Jeffrey Caine, based on the novel by John Le Carré
directed by Fernando Meirelles

by Walter Chaw An interesting companion piece to both Philip Noyce’s The Quiet American and Andrew Niccol’s upcoming Lord of War, non-antipodean Fernando Meirelles’s follow-up to City of God, the John Le Carré adaptation The Constant Gardener, is beautifully shot in the murky style of David Fincher or high-fashion photography. Not a bad thing–indeed, The Constant Gardener is one of the most technically proficient pictures of the year–but not a great thing, either, when talking about children killing children in Brazil’s favelas or, as is the case here, a British diplomat confronting his culture’s pathological politeness in the plague-fields of Kenya. What recommends The Constant Gardener is the uniform tonal perfection of the performances, and even if the film itself seems to glamorize (and condescend to) the plight of starving and exploited African nations, it at least demonstrates, along with its cinematic brethren (add The Interpreter and Stephen Gaghan’s forthcoming Syriana to that list), cinema’s willingness to take a more global stance. A paternalistic one, for the most part, but a global one just the same.

Dracula III: Legacy (2005); Hellraiser: Deader (2005); The Crow: Wicked Prayer (2005) – DVDs

August 17, 20052000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD, Fantasy, Horror, Mystery, Revenge, Romania, Thriller, Vampire, Wes Craven

DRACULA III: LEGACY
**½/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Jason Scott Lee, Jason London, Alexandra Westcourt, Rutger Hauer
screenplay by Joel Soisson & Patrick Lussier
directed by Patrick Lussier

HELLRAISER: DEADER
*/**** Image A- Sound B- Extras B
starring Kari Wuhrer, Paul Rhys, Simon Kunz, Doug Bradley
screenplay by Neal Marshall Stevens and Tim Day
directed by Rick Bota

THE CROW: WICKED PRAYER
½*/**** Image B+ Sound A Extras B
starring Edward Furlong, Tara Reid, David Boreanaz, Emmanuelle Chriqui
screenplay by Lance Mungia & Jeff Most and Sean Hood
directed by Lance Mungia

by Walter Chaw This is the game plan if you’re in the business of producing direct-to-video schlock for Dimension: go to Romania (the poor man’s Czech Republic, itself the poor man’s Toronto–itself the poor man’s New York), show some tits, throw buckets of blood against the wall, and scrimp, wherever possible, on niceties like script and direction. It’s sure-fire–particularly if you can skim a month or two off the shooting schedule and lure a few has-beens in serious decline. But the question with urgency is, “Sure-fire what?” Not good art–because they seldom have anything to say about the society that spawned them (and because the directors of these messes are generally assclowns)–and not good travelogues, either, these little straight-to-home penny dreadfuls tend to be tired variations on the same quasi-Christian mythos, tarted up with surprisingly good production values and the kind of cheap thrills that kept EC Comics, then Hammer Films, then Italian giallos, in business.

Broken Flowers (2005)

August 4, 20052000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, France, Mystery, Road Movie, Romance, Theatrical

***½/****
starring Bill Murray, Jeffrey Wright, Sharon Stone, Frances Conroy
written and directed by Jim Jarmusch

by Walter Chaw I think that humour is a sharply-honed defense mechanism: something ingratiating in its ability to transcend taboo and thus, through laughter, enlist others in a secret club where the only law of membership is mutual transgression. And I think that comedians–the good ones–work from a well of demons deep and dire. It's no surprise to me that Robin Williams can actually manage a human performance in Dead Again, or that Jim Carrey can be brilliant in The Truman Show and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, since so much of comedy is knowing what's acceptable and, more importantly, what's not. More to the point, it's no surprise that Bill Murray could refashion his career from the drunken bully of "Saturday Night Live" into this aging penitent, seeking absolution from some unnameable sin forever regenerating itself like a Promethean liver. It only took a couple of decades, but Murray has finally become Somerset Maugham's pilgrim Larry Darrell (whom he played in 1984's underestimated The Razor's Edge)–true maturity having a lot to do with the understanding that it doesn't take a shake-up as seismic as WWI to turn a man to blue moods. Often the first step in an existential journey is spurred by something as simple as a realization of how big of an asshole you used to be.

Target (1985) – DVD

August 3, 20051980s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, DVD, Mystery, Thriller

½*/**** Image D+ Sound D+
starring Gene Hackman, Matt Dillon, Gayle Hunnicutt, Josef Sommer
screenplay by Howard Berk and Don Petersen
directed by Arthur Penn

by Walter Chaw Of the myriad disappointments of Arthur Penn's atrocious Target, one of the smaller ones is the appalling score by Michael Small, who, in the Seventies, was doing very fine work on Penn films like Night Moves and Alan Pakula flicks like The Parallax View and Klute. His music for Target reminds of the incidental cues on "Scarecrow and Mrs. King". The rest runs the gamut from flat direction from one of the prime architects of the amazing cinema of the American '70s, an unspeakable screenplay by non-native speaker José Luis Navarro and some idiot named Don Petersen, a pair of squandered (if only mediocre) performances from the great Gene Hackman and the badly-miscast Matt Dillon, and a plot that's an unapologetic ripper of John Schlesinger's Marathon Man. It's such a bad film, in fact, that the only enjoyment to be had from the thing is through the cruel deconstruction of its gaping implausibility. If Target finally provides a few chuckles, it does so at the expense of one of the United States' genuinely important actors (Hackman, natch) and directors.

The X Files: Abduction (1993-1995) [Four-Disc Mythology Collection] – DVD

August 3, 20051990s, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Television, Thriller

Image B Sound B Extras D
"Pilot," "Deep Throat," "Fallen Angel," "E.B.E.," "The Erlenmeyer Flask," "Little Green Men," "Duane Barry," "Ascension," "One Breath," "Red Museum," "Colony," "End Game," "Anasazi," "The Blessing Way," "Paper Clip"

by Walter Chaw I used to, like every other dork I know, love "The X Files"–used to look forward to its mythology episodes as though series creator Chris Carter actually had something up his sleeve in terms of a long-term plan for his show, never suspecting until the middle seasons that the emperor was nude. (Desperate, too.) See, "The X Files" is guilty of giving the public what it wanted, forgetting that the public never really knows what it wants (would it have asked for a show about two platonic FBI agents investigating UFOs in the first place?) and that once it gets what it thinks it wants, it tends to stop waiting around for it. "The X Files"' slogan "The Truth is Out There" became something of an early-Nineties pop-cultural mantra akin to "Keep On Truckin'" of the mid-'60s to mid-'70s and "Shit Happens" of Reagan-era id suppression (the biggest surprise of "The X Files" may be how creaky and antiquated it is a mere twelve years out of the can)–and like other shorthands for real thinking, it has a bumper-sticker hookiness to it but not a lot of meat upon closer examination. That kind of lack of substance dooms it to cultural specificity, with camp immortality and flea-market coffee mugs its only eternal footmen. In retrospect, "The X Files" couldn't have had a better tagline.

Hustle (1975) – DVD

July 20, 20051970s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Crime, Drama, DVD, Mystery, Thriller

½*/**** Image B+ Sound A-
starring Burt Reynolds, Catherine Deneuve, Ben Johnson, Paul Winfield
screenplay by Steve Shagan
directed by Robert Aldrich

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover In 1955, Robert Aldrich directed Kiss Me Deadly. Ending in a fiery conflagration that suggested the end of civilization, its chief selling point was the chance to watch a bunch of degenerates lose their last shred of decency. And because it transgressed norms that would not be fully shattered until a decade-plus later, it had a nasty kick that was hard to shake. Flash forward twenty years to 1975, and the director is in a bit of a bind: with norms everywhere falling like a stripper's pasties, it's clear that civilization has, indeed, come to an end–not with the bang of Kiss Me Deadly, but with the whimper of Hustle, a film that flaunts its creep credentials with such pathetic stridency that you can't even raise the enthusiasm to take offense. You're merely bored with a director whose raison d'être had been rendered obsolete.

The Machinist (2004) [Widescreen] + Enduring Love (2004) [Widescreen] – DVDs

July 4, 20052000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, France, Mystery, Romance, Spain, Thriller, UK

THE MACHINIST
***/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B
starring Christian Bale, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Aitana Sanchez-Gijon, Michael Ironside
screenplay by Scott Kosar
directed by Brad Anderson

ENDURING LOVE
***/**** Image A Sound A
starring Daniel Craig, Rhys Ifans, Samantha Morton, Bill Nighy
screenplay by Joe Penhall, based on the novel by Ian McEwan
directed by Roger Michell

by Walter Chaw Sickness sweats out of every pore of Brad Anderson's The Machinist. It's leprous green, corpse flesh lit by sulphur light, marking the end of a progression that took Anderson from the sunny Happy Accidents to the sepia-inflected Session 9 to the bleak and subterranean–Plutonian, really–The Machinist. But like all of Anderson's work, the current film seems best described as coitus interruptus–congress interrupted at the moment of climax by the director's peculiar fixation on mendacity in favour of the supernatural. It's all about the tease for Anderson's genre explorations: time travel in Happy Accidents, haunted asylums in Session 9, and now–what, possession? Murderous blackouts? By plumbing the depths of human failings in a literal-minded fashion, one after the other (obsession, then greed, and finally guilt), Anderson ignores the possibility that genre is sharpest when wielded as metaphor for the same. Even the profession of machining speaks to the idea of precision and craftsmanship over flights of fancy or suspicions of otherness. It's a shame that The Machinist isn't ultimately more than an elaborate Rubik's Cube: not that hard to solve, not high on replay value.

I, Robot (2004) [Widescreen + All-Access Collector’s Edition] – DVDs

July 3, 20052000s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD, Germany, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Thriller, Will Smith

*/****
DVD – Image A Sound A+ Extras C
DVD (CE) – Image A Sound A+ Extras B-
starring Will Smith, Bridget Moynahan, Bruce Greenwood, James Cromwell
screenplay by Jeff Vintar and Akiva Goldsman
directed by Alex Proyas

by Walter Chaw Alex Proyas makes movies about men who don’t know who they are. The Crow, Dark City, and, to an extent, his underachieving small-band-doesn’t-make-good dramedy Garage Days, feature main characters forced to come to terms with their identities before becoming empowered by them. It would appear, then, that Proyas is the perfect fit for the faux-philosophical science-fiction epic I, Robot, wherein a Luddite detective, played by Will Smith, struggles with his stupid past while an Aryan robot, played by Alan Tudyk, wonders if it’s a person. But instead of the existential grief of 2001: A Space Odyssey, Blade Runner, or even A.I., I, Robot is a mess of spare parts cannibalized from superior models and victimized by bad wiring. Poor Isaac Asimov is sparking in his grave–good thing the movie was only “suggested by a book by,” which at some point simply means “has the same title as.”

Electra Glide in Blue (1973) – DVD

June 13, 20051970s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Crime, Drama, DVD, Mystery, Thriller

***½/**** Image A Sound A- Extras A-
starring Robert Blake, Billy "Green" Bush, Jeannine Riley, Elisha Cook
screenplay by Robert Boris
directed by James William Guercio

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover There's a priceless scene in Albert Brooks's Lost in America where our white-collar hero David Howard (played by Brooks himself) has to deal with a motorcycle cop. About to be ticketed for a minor infraction, David informs his tormentor that he's living out the dream of Easy Rider in his Winnebago–whereupon the cop, incredibly, professes the same with regards to being a bike cop, and tears up the ticket. The joke is that a lumpy bourgeois in a camper and a policeman in anything can bend the rebellious ways of that film to their own establishment end, cancelling out both sides in a puff of semiotics. But what was a throwaway in Lost in America is the whole movie in Electra Glide in Blue, a film centred around motorcycle cops that owes a serious debt to Easy Rider while blowing its us-vs.-them dichotomy out of the water from the other side of the line.

November (2005); Brothers (2004); Ladies in Lavender (2005)

June 9, 20052000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Denmark, Drama, Music, Mystery, Romance, Theatrical, Thriller, UK, War

NOVEMBER
*/****
starring Courteney Cox, James LeGros, Michael Ealy, Nora Dunn
screenplay by Benjamin Brand
directed by Greg Harrison

Brødre
**½/****
starring Connie Nielsen, Ulrich Thomsen, Nikolaj Lie Kaas, Bent Mejding
screenplay by Anders Thomas Jensen
directed by Susanne Bier

LADIES IN LAVENDER
*½/****
starring Judi Dench, Maggie Smith, Natascha McElhone, Daniel Brühl
screenplay by Charles Dance, based on the short story by William J. Locke
directed by Charles Dance

by Walter Chaw There are as many middling to miserable movies in the foreign and domestic independent market as in the oft-maligned mainstream. If there are around five hundred films released in a twelve-month period, after all, only thirty or so are ever in contention for the best of the year–and of those, maybe three will be remembered once the hosannas have died down. The vast majority of pictures are just rest areas between elation and outrage; capturing lightning in a bottle is as unlikely for movies as for any product of any other branch of the arts. Here, then, are three smaller films in fast succession caught in the twilight zone of instant forgetfulness and doomed to spend eternity as either the film that was the long lonesome whistle stop for someone's career, or the promising picture that pointed the way to bigger and brighter things.

The Dead Zone: The Complete Second Season (2003) – DVD

June 6, 20052000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Fantasy, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Stephen King, Television

Image B+ Sound A- Extras A
“Valley of the Shadow,” “Descent,” “Ascent,” “The Outsider,” “Precipitate,” “Scars,” “Misbegotten,” “Cabin Pressure,” “The Man Who Never Was,” “Dead Men Tell Tales,” “Playing God,” “Zion,” “The Storm,” “Plague,” “Deja Voodoo,” “The Hunt,” “The Mountain,” “The Combination,” “Visions”

by Walter Chaw I’ll say this at the get-go, that “The Dead Zone”, the television series, will never completely escape the shadow of David Cronenberg’s enduring feature film adaptation of the Stephen King source novel, and that Anthony Michael Hall is a pale substitute for Christopher Walken, particularly for Walken at what might be the actor’s finest hour. Luckily, Hall has an easier time shedding his John Hughes days, having doubled in size (he’s still trim, just not Farmer Ted), donned a black leather pea coat (mine found the Salvation Army bin about five episodes in–I never, ever want to look like Hall in Vancouver playing Johnny Smith), and acquired a Vulcan arch to his brow that all but screams “serious actor.” Yet there’s something since “The X-Files” that rubs me wrong about most American shows shot north of the 49th Parallel: the genericness of the setting doesn’t scream Anytown, USA so much as “Canada: it’s cheaper and blander up here.” Lacking atmosphere and vibrancy, “The Dead Zone” is an extrapolation, especially in Season Two, of the further adventures of John Smith, a reluctant clairvoyant who can touch any person or thing (including air, which raises its own set of problems/questions) and summon up visions of past or future that inevitably put Johnny in the position of a powder-dipped saint in a Mexican parade.

Saving Face (2005) + High Tension (2003)

May 26, 20052000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, France, Horror, Italy, Mystery, Romance, Romania, Theatrical, Thriller, Will Smith

SAVING FACE
**/****
starring Joan Chen, Lynn Chen, Jin Wang, Guang Lan Koh
written and directed by Alice Wu

Haute tension
***/****
starring Cécile De France, Maïwenn Le Besco, Philippe Nahon, Franck Khalfoun
screenplay by Alexandre Aja, Grégory Levasseur
directed by Alexandre Aja

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Lesbians are pretty much invisible in American culture–banished, actually, to the ghetto that gay men tend to complain about even though, in truth, gay men were never more visible than they are now that they've been gifted with the lofty honour of being the only minority everyone can agree to hate with hilarious impunity. A couple of programs on Showtime notwithstanding, lesbians in the popular conversation are still either flannel-wearing she-males, the other daughter, or male fantasies of the voracious woman desperate for a good therapeutic dick to set her back on the straight and narrow. When a lesbian appears in a Western film (like in Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason), the audience, myself included, regards her appearance as a kind of alien visitation. For a while, it's possible to forget that she's a sexual creature at all, so foreign are her Sapphic ways in our cultural conversation. Thus a pair of films featuring lesbian heroes front and centre happening upon these strange shores almost simultaneously is cause for some sort of modest celebration despite that one of them, Alice Wu's Saving Face, is a lot like an ethnic sitcom and the other, Alexandre Aja's High Tension, appears to hate lesbians with an unusual ugliness.

Suspect Zero (2004) [Widescreen] – DVD

May 23, 20052000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, DVD, Germany, Horror, Mystery, Thriller, UK

***½/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Aaron Eckhart, Ben Kingsley, Carrie-Anne Moss, Harry J. Lennix
screenplay by Zak Penn and Billy Ray
directed by E. Elias Merhige

by Walter Chaw A metaphysical serial killer film, E. Elias Merhige's Suspect Zero is implications and shadows married to exploitation and shock: a queasy stew dredging the well of archetype that disturbs with the blasted nihilism of its vision. With its wastelands and its bloated, appallingly fertile cadavers reaching into their own wounds, it reminds of Merhige's own avant-garde silent film Begotten; and it reminds of Dario Argento's Deep Red, literally in the reveal of a wallpaper-palimpsest and figuratively in the intrusion of the supernatural into the mendacity of a crime story. This is the only kind of police procedural film possible after Se7en, one that doesn't go over the same theological ground but rather forges paths through more philological terrain–the serial killer genre as Thomas Harris tried to redefine it for the literary elite. Suspect Zero is smart and anxious.

Mindhunters (2005)

May 17, 20052000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Finland, Horror, Mystery, Netherlands, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

*/****
starring LL Cool J, Jonny Lee Miller, Kathryn Morris, Val Kilmer
screenplay by Wayne Kramer and Kevin Brodbin
directed by Renny Harlin

by Walter Chaw Based ever so loosely on Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None, Renny Harlin’s latest disasterpiece finds the Finnish fool at the helm of a slasher-cum-“CSI” episode, oiled-up and ready to apply a dangerous level of nihilism in the pursuit of cheap thrills and bad splatter effects. In Mindhunters, a few of the FBI’s finest criminal profilers-in-training congregate for one last test under the Al-Pacino-in-The Recruit tutelage of crackpot Harris (Val Kilmer) at a remote military facility that’s home to a phantom cinema where The Third Man plays on an eternal loop.

Pooh’s Heffalump Movie (2005) – DVD

May 17, 20052000s, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Disney, DVD, Family, Musical, Mystery

**½/**** Image A Sound A- Extras C-
screenplay by Brian Hohlfeld and Evan Spiliotopoulos
directed by Frank Nissen

by Bill Chambers Pretty much everything I wrote about Piglet's Big Movie applies to Pooh's Heffalump Movie: it's inoffensive but laborious, and the soundalike replacements for the original vocal talent know the notes but not the music. (Think that friend of yours whose Homer Simpson impersonation is perfect in every way except for its inability to make you laugh.) Carly Simon contributes another pallid batch of stopgap ditties to another frail narrative in which Pooh Bear is again hustled off to the sidelines. But melancholy has returned to the fold (because, I suspect, a certain Britishness informs the tone this time around), and since that was key to the resonance of Pooh's early screen and literary outings alike, we should be grateful that Pooh's Heffalump Movie deals with more urgent themes than is customary.

Boogeyman (2005) [Special Edition] – DVD

May 15, 20052000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Horror, Mystery, Thriller

**/**** Image A Sound A Extras C+
starring Barry Watson, Emily Deschanel, Skye McCole Bartusiak, Lucy Lawless
screenplay by Eric Kripke and Juliet Snowden & Stiles White
directed by Stephen Kay

by Walter Chaw Unusually ambitious for a film that seems to have no intention other than to be the celluloid equivalent of Jokey Smurf, Boogeyman is tremendously dislocating at times, even existentially surreal. It posits that a child's worst fears are only conquerable if "faced," leading our hero through the loss of his parents, the rejection of his object choice, and the expulsion from his sanctuary in a children's asylum, until finally he's forced into a situation where he must destroy the totems of his youth to embrace the lonely demystification of his adulthood. There's something really sad going on in Boogeyman: It's about shining a light on the dark corners of the past and vanquishing ghosts, but in the hero's triumph over his nightmares, he casts himself adrift from some of the magic of being a kid.

The Lone Gunmen: The Complete Series (2001) – DVD

April 19, 20052000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Canada, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Television, Thriller

Image A- Sound A- Extras B+
"Pilot," "Bond, Jimmy Bond," "Eine Kleine Frohike," "Like Water for Octane," "Three Men and a Smoking Diaper," "Madam, I'm Adam," "Planet of the Frohikes," "Maximum Byers," "Diagnosis: Jimmy," "Tango De Los Pistoleros," "The Lying Game," "The "Cap'n Toby" Show," "All About Yves"

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover To paraphrase your high school guidance counsellor: respect for yourself is essential for respect from your audience. Let's say you have a show called "The Lone Gunmen". It's a spin-off from the successful (and successfully self-serious) "The X Files", which took somewhat far-fetched material and sold it, most of the time, with a straight face and a stern look. It deals with much the same subject matter but features nerdy misfits John Byers (Bruce Harwood), Melvin Frohike (Tom Braidwood), and Richard Langly (Dean Haglund), to whom you're somehow unwilling to commit total sympathy. So you make excuses by mocking them, as if apologizing for their unworthiness of the attention–which raises the question of why you're bothering in the first place. Complete self-deprecation usually results in discomfort, shunning, and, in this case, premature cancellation.

Incident at Loch Ness (2004) – DVD

April 13, 20052000s, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD, Horror, Mystery, Pseudo-Documentary, Sci-Fi, Thriller

**½/**** Image A Sound B Extras A
directed by Zak Penn

by Walter Chaw You could say that Werner Herzog has been hunting monsters for the whole of his career. (Chasing demons: even better.) Find in that the reason the satirical Incident at Loch Ness works to the extent that it does. The picture locates the mad German on the Scottish loch, where he's ostensibly shooting a documentary on Nessie under the auspices of Hollywood wunderkind Zak Penn while a film crew, led by veteran cinematographer John Bailey, shoots Herzog for a piece on the director's method called "Herzog in Wonderland." It's a fake documentary about the making of a fake documentary, in other words, commenting at several points about authenticity in a way that pings off the whimsical existentialism of Being John Malkovich at its best–and off the sudden shift into darkness of the same at its worst. Mocking the capricious ignorance of Hollywood moneymen is always sporting, I guess, and as Penn simultaneously acts the monster (he insists on the crew wearing matching jumpsuits) and surreptitiously slips a plastic monster-bot into the wake, the picture can be satisfying in a familiar way. But by this point in our progressive cynicism, anyone watching the film–and, more particularly, anyone at all familiar with Herzog–could say the same things regarding the venality of the blockbuster mentality with less effort. This doesn't mean that the film's closing shot of a sunglasses-wearing Herzog walking in front of his team in a Michael Bay heroic slow-motion is any less funny, but it does add up to a generally empty, if fitfully amusing, experience.