Fatal Attraction (1987) + Indecent Proposal (1993) – Blu-ray Discs

September 9, 2009Posted in1980s, 1990s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Romance, Thriller

FATAL ATTRACTION
**/**** Image B+ Sound B Extras A
starring Michael Douglas, Glenn Close, Anne Archer, Stuart Pankin
screenplay by James Dearden
directed by Adrian Lyne

INDECENT PROPOSAL
½/**** Image C+ Sound B Commentary C-
starring Robert Redford, Demi Moore, Woody Harrelson, Oliver Platt
screenplay by Amy Holden Jones
directed by Adrian Lyne

by Walter Chaw Adrian Lyne films live and die by the success of their moments of poignant epiphany. It’s why 9½ Weeks and Jacob’s Ladder work and Flashdance and Indecent Proposal do not–why his obvious and constant pandering to cultural stereotypes and softcore eroticism identifies him as the premiere commercial director of his time (more so than even Ridley Scott, who sometimes tries not to be a ponce), trafficking in easy images and the kind of strained tableaux you’d expect to see in a first-year photography classes (explanation as well for why his films are almost invariably blockbusters): a pair of Converse sneakers on a lonesome, foldout kitchen table; seagulls on a fog-shrouded pier; long shots down cluttered, penthouse-suite corridors; rubbing off to a slideshow1; dogs and bunnies… Adrian Lyne flicks are about what happens when dicks slip into chicks, oops; it’s not possible to make fun of them, because how do you make fun of an artifact that has no intrinsic weight, tells no compelling tale, and imparts no particular insight?

Adventureland (2009) + Alien Trespass (2009)|Adventureland (2009) – Blu-ray + Digital Copy

September 1, 2009Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Ian Pugh, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Coming of Age, Drama, Horror, Romance, Satire, Sci-Fi, Teen, Theatrical, Thriller

ADVENTURELAND
***½/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B
starring Jake Eisenberg, Kristen Stewart, Martin Starr, Margarita Levieva
written and directed by Greg Mottola

ALIEN TRESPASS
***/****
starring Eric McCormack, Jenni Baird, Robert Patrick, Dan Lauria
screenplay by Steven P. Fisher
directed by R. W. Goodwin

by Ian Pugh In everyone's life there's a summer of '42, but of course it was never as wonderful as you remember. Although Greg Mottola's Adventureland is set in 1987, that's almost incidental–it really takes place in that hazy cloud known as "the past," full of fly-by-night jobs rife with fraud and deceit, fairweather friends who sock you in the crotch, and, of course, the music that brings to mind painful experiences perhaps best left forgotten. (Funny to think that this might be the ideological inverse of another great 2009 film about memory, The Uninvited: unhealthily obsessive instead of unhealthily in denial.) The key to understanding the film, I think, lies in Falco's New Wave anthem "Rock Me Amadeus," here serving as an inescapable nightmare at the titular amusement park, where it's pumped through the sound system ad nauseam ("Can you give me an ice pick that I can just jam into my ears?"). But then the romantic confusion driving the plot unravels in a series of betrayals, and that same song becomes a damning elegy. Seems strange that the director of Superbad, an instant classic of maturity-through-childishness and nostalgia-without-precedent, should deliver something so angry and contradictory for a follow-up. Perhaps it is strange–but Adventureland is also a more honest, more personal, and, most importantly, more mature film than Superbad.

Starman (1984) – Blu-ray Disc

August 10, 2009Posted in1980s, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: John Carpenter, Romance, Sci-Fi

***½/**** Image A- Sound A-
starring Jeff Bridges, Karen Allen, Charles Martin Smith, Richard Jaeckel
screenplay by Bruce A. Evans & Raynold Gideon
directed by John Carpenter

Starmancap

by Bryant Frazer Strange as it may sound, back in the early-1980s this gentle yet seriously weird fantasy about a woman who drives a socially-challenged clone of her dead husband across the U.S. (so he can rendezvous with his spaceship) was actually considered a safe commercial bet for the embattled director John Carpenter. Carpenter was always an avowed fan of traditional Hollywood entertainments, and he claimed to be attracted to making Starman as a contemporary version of It Happened One Night, Frank Capra's prototypical screwball comedy about an antagonistic couple who learn to love one another on the road. It seemed like an unlikely gearshift for Carpenter, who had recently remade The Thing from Another World as a tense, supremely chilling, and truly horrific metaphor for paranoia. But for the man who had his ass handed to him when that masterpiece had the bad luck to open not only in a moviegoing environment that had turned hostile to horror, but also directly opposite the ripely sentimental box-office juggernaut E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, Starman represented something else. It wasn't merely an opportunity for Carpenter to helm a fundamentally good-natured, optimistic science-fiction film–it was possibly a chance to rehabilitate his career.

Paper Heart (2009)

August 6, 2009Posted in2000s, Authors: Ian Pugh, Comedy, Drama, Esoterica, Romance, Theatrical

*½/****
starring Charlyne Yi, Jake Johnson, Michael Cera
screenplay by Nicholas Jasenovec & Charlyne Yi
directed by Nicholas Jasenovec

Paperheartby Ian Pugh The twain where mainstream comedy conventions and a certain vogue-ish indie aesthetic meet, Paper Heart is desperate to be seen as an earnest exploration of love but done in by an almost suffocating desire to please. Any emotion or profundity to be taken from this hybrid documentary is rendered irrelevant by its attempts to increase its entertainment value through cheap laughs. Comic Charlyne Yi (Knocked Up) is touring the nation asking passersby from all walks of life their thoughts on the nature of love when a chance encounter with young gadabout Michael Cera (Michael Cera)–more or less Yi's ideological soul mate–convinces her documentary's director, Nick Jasenovec (played on camera by an affable Jake Johnson), that they've found the perfect opportunity for romantic skeptic Yi to experience love first hand. It's a prefab narrative scenario meant to complement the documentary footage, though it's not exactly a "standard" love story since it casts doubt on whether anyone is actually in love. The problem is that it employs the worn-out tactics of pretty much every lame juvenile laffer from the last four years: bad jokes are told, then let out in the air to die–and everyone stares at each other for longer than is deemed socially acceptable. Because even the documentary aspects aren't enough to stand on their own, each story of true love is recreated by one of Yi's intentionally-amateurish puppet shows/third-grade dioramas, with the major players represented by Popsicle-stick people and every metaphor literalized to the point of ridiculousness.

What Makes Sammy Run? (1959) – DVD

July 20, 2009Posted in1950s, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Biopic, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Music, Romance, Television

***½/**** Image C Sound C Extras B-
starring Larry Blyden, John Forsythe, Barbara Rush, Dina Merrill
teleplay by Budd & Stuart Schulberg, based on Budd's novel
directed by Delbert Mann

by Jefferson Robbins In adapting his hit 1941 novel What Makes Sammy Run? for a planned live TV broadcast, writer Budd Schulberg dropped two elements: driven Hollywood producer Sammy Glick as union-buster; and Glick as self-hating Jew. In an interview with Schulberg featured on the telecast's DVD release, he cops to scrubbing the former but not the latter. "I didn't think I would have enough time and space to adequately describe what the Writers Guild was and what the whole problem was," he says. Though Schulberg's not queried on Sammy's Judaism, it's safe to assume that throughline was a non-starter for a network (NBC) trying to capture Middle-American living rooms in 1959.

(500) Days of Summer (2009)

July 17, 2009Posted in2000s, Authors: Ian Pugh, Comedy, Drama, Romance, Theatrical

*½/****
starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Zooey Deschanel, Geoffrey Arand, Chloe Moretz
screenplay by Scott Neustadter & Michael H. Weber
directed by Marc Webb

500daysofsummerby Ian Pugh (500) Days of Summer is another entry in a bizarre trend of films expecting a medal and a cookie for recognizing romcom clichés and concluding that relationships are difficult (see also: He's Just Not That Into You, Whatever Works, the upcoming Paper Heart, and the narrative distractions from the raw emotional power of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince), respectively, although there is, admittedly, some instinct that makes you want to play along with this one. You'd like nothing more than some assurance that the smug asshole hitting on the protag's girlfriend will get punched in the mouth–but attendant to that is a peculiar desire to see said asshole defy convention by rising up from the floor and slugging the guy right back. Each of these scenarios plays out in (500) Days of Summer: In an admirable attempt to strike at both the base of the spine and the depths of the brain, hopeless romanticism shares time with intellectual cynicism without ever pretending they can be truly reconciled in matters of romance. But grabbing your attention with this tactic is the film's idea of a trump card–and the apparent intention to dig a little deeper only results in uncovering the same old revelations imparted dozens of times before by much more eloquent voices. And then there's the question of who, in this day and age, needs to be reminded that the greeting-card industry is built on banal emotional shorthand.

Chick Flick Politick – DVDs + Blu-ray Disc

July 12, 2009Posted in2000s, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Disney, Drama, DVD, Family, Fantasy, Musical, Romance, ZERO STARS

BRIDE WARS (2009)
ZERO STARS/**** Image N/A Sound C Extras F
starring Kate Hudson, Anne Hathaway, Kristen Johnston, Candice Bergen
screenplay by Greg DePaul and Casey Wilson & June Diane Raphael
directed by Gary Winick

CATCH AND RELEASE (2007)
ZERO STARS/**** Image B Sound B Extras C
starring Jennifer Garner, Timothy Olyphant, Kevin Smith, Juliette Lewis
written and directed by Susannah Grant

WHAT HAPPENS IN VEGAS (2008)
[JACKPOT EDITION]
***/**** Image N/A Sound B Extras B+
starring Cameron Diaz, Ashton Kutcher, Rob Corddry, Dennis Miller
screenplay by Dana Fox
directed by Tom Vaughan

27 DRESSES (2008)
[WIDESCREEN EDITION]
**/**** Image N/A Sound B Extras B+
starring Katherine Heigl, James Marsden, Malin Akerman, Edward Burns
screenplay by Aline Brosh McKenna
directed by Anne Fletcher

ENCHANTED (2007)
**/**** Image A Sound A Extras D
starring Amy Adams, Patrick Dempsey, James Marsden, Susan Sarandon
screenplay by Bill Kelly
directed by Kevin Lima

Bridewars

by Walter Chaw I’m not kidding: Bride Wars is reptilian, hateful stuff, biologically engineered to disrespect–with maximum efficiency–the precise demographic to which it targets itself. It’s like an antibody to the middle-class, medium-attractive girl by virtue of encouraging her to associate herself with upper-middle-class, gorgeous avatars and, through that agency, act in ways completely hostile towards common sense and decency. It’s an epidemic of bad taste: there’s no other way to read the suggestion that size-zero Kate Hudson is a fat, disgusting swine for gaining five pounds pounding chocolate and cookies for a couple of weeks, is there? What’s harder to explain is a scene in the middle where rivals/best friends Liv (Hudson) and Emma (Anne Hathaway) do a slutty dance-off in a strip-club for the crown of “sexiest bride.” Here’s the weird part: one of them actually cares when the other one wins. In the middle of a movie that can only hope to attract women as its audience, here’s a scenario that physically exploits women as opposed to just emotionally or situationally (as is more to be expected). It’s like a soul kiss and a reach-around between Vin Diesel and Paul Walker to cap off a nice street race. But does it have the same chilling effect on its would-be audience, or does it instead feed into the electric lesbian tension that serves as the motor for all these “Sex and the City” knock-offs? Never mind, it’s not important. What is somewhat important is that Gary Winick, the heir-apparent to Garry Marshall’s chick-flick throne, be discouraged from ever directing another movie.

Whatever Works (2009)

July 2, 2009Posted in2000s, Authors: Ian Pugh, Comedy, Drama, France, Romance, Theatrical

**/****
starring Ed Begley, Jr., Patricia Clarkson, Larry David, Conleth Hill
written and directed by Woody Allen

Whateverworksby Ian Pugh Whatever Works, Woody Allen's latest stinker, at least has the advantage of starting a conversation about who Allen is and what he stands for at this stage in the game. Dusting off a decades-old script that apparently underwent very minor revisions, the director makes his first attempt to flummox you by evidently declaring himself too old/inappropriate for the role of an aging, neurotic, egomaniacal ephebophile. There's no longer any currency in saying that Allen makes movies for himself in the most literal sense, and I've always considered the man to be the best purveyor of his own shtick–considering how transparent his writing is to that end, why bother settling for pale imitations? What prevents a total dismissal of his latest proxy is the notion that Allen might actually be right in this instance, as his own stammering delivery lacks the acidic edge required for Boris Yellnikoff (Larry David), a nuclear physicist and self-proclaimed genius with contempt for everything and everyone around him. When the film does work, in fact, it's because David is so quick and sharp with his insults ("simpleton," "inchworm," "moron"). (The part was apparently written with Zero Mostel in mind, and he would have been perfect for it.) But then, everything else about the character harks back to the old standbys that, seemingly, would make Allen ideally cast: the obsession with suicide and death, the rambling nihilist diatribes about man's inhumanity to man, the intoxication with New York culture–all wrapped up in a relentlessly meta package that finds Boris's friends whispering with consternation as he casually breaks the fourth wall to tell us things we already know.

Roxanne (1987) – Blu-ray Disc

June 24, 2009Posted in1980s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Canada, Comedy, Romance

*½/**** Image A- Sound A-
starring Steve Martin, Daryl Hannah, Shelley Duvall, Rick Rossovich
screenplay by Steve Martin, based on the play “Cyrano de Bergerac” by Edmond Rostand
directed by Fred Schepisi

by Walter Chaw After The Devil’s Playground and The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith–both appearing in the middle of the Australian New Wave–the conventional wisdom was that Fred Schepisi was someone to watch. Then Hollywood called and he did what fellow ‘wavers Peter Weir and Phillip Noyce did, punching the timecard on shit like Patriot Games, Sliver, and Dead Poets Society. A re-telling of Cyrano de Bergerac, Edmund Rostand’s play about a proboscis-challenged swordsman armed with the Blarney (in spades), Schepisi’s noxious Roxanne stars a downhill-sliding Steve Martin and a Daryl Hannah who didn’t yet know that Blade Runner and Splash would be the only things anyone would know her for until a career resurrection of sorts some 15 years later with Kill Bill. I used to love this film. Time has been unkind.

Easy Virtue (2008)

June 16, 2009Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, Romance, Theatrical, UK

***½/****
starring Jessica Biel, Colin Firth, Kristin Scott Thomas, Ben Barnes
screenplay by Stephan Elliott & Sheridan Jobbins, based on the play by Noël Coward
directed by Stephan Elliott

by Walter Chaw At first glance, it would seem that Stephan Elliott’s pictures follow no conventional line. Start with 1993’s Frauds, starring Hugo Weaving and (yes, that) Phil Collins, then proceed to Elliott’s landmark The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. Then it’s on to that film’s tonal antidote (think an Outback Woman in the Dunes with Rogers & Hammerstein interludes), Welcome to Woop Woop; a Hollywood sojourn (the criminally-underestimated serial killer/FBI procedural Eye of the Beholder); and finally, one near-fatal ski accident later, an oddly appropriate return to form in the Noël Coward adaptation Easy Virtue. These movies are almost Billy Wilder-ian in their variety–literally, in that Elliott seems above all keenly attuned to the comic opportunity–the Lubitsch, if you will–in relational dynamics, but also in that he begins with something like a thriller, goes to camp, goes to camp thriller, returns to thriller, and now does something almost entirely genre-peculiar. It’s a vertiginous enough trajectory that for the first half-hour of Easy Virtue, I’d forgotten I was watching a Stephan Elliott film–that the fact that Elliott directed it was indeed the only reason I was interested in seeing Jessica Biel spar with Kristin Scott Thomas on a sprawling English estate in the 1920s.

Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (1991) [Extended Version] – Blu-ray Disc + Waterworld (1995) [2-Disc Extended Edition] – DVD

June 15, 2009Posted in1990s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, DVD, Romance, Sci-Fi, UK

ROBIN HOOD: PRINCE OF THIEVES
½*/**** Image C Sound B Extras B
starring Kevin Costner, Morgan Freeman, Christian Slater, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio
screenplay by Pen Densham & John Watson
directed by Kevin Reynolds

WATERWORLD
***/**** Image B Sound B
starring Kevin Costner, Dennis Hopper, Jeanne Tripplehorn, Tina Majorino
screenplay by Peter Rader and David Twohy
directed by Kevin Reynolds

by Walter Chaw In the “careful what you wish for” sweepstakes, here’s Kevin Costner, fresh off an Oscar victory for his naïve idyll Dances with Wolves, spending his hard-won Hollywood currency indulging best buddy Kevin Reynolds in a trilogy of pictures (Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, Rapa Nui, Waterworld) he produced for the express purpose of giving Reynolds more than enough rope. If you’re in the sport of charting the positively Greek decline of the late-’80s box-office king, mark 1991 as Exhibit A, as his sad attempt at an English accent for Robin of Loxley was notoriously overdubbed in post-production after being deemed the stuff of legend in initial cuts. Aside from providing schadenfreudians endless fodder, it was the first real evidence that the Golden Boy’s tragic flaw was the belief that his charm was based on something other than Gary Cooper’s mantle of Everybody’s All-American Doofus.

Revolutionary Road (2008) + Doubt (2008) – Blu-ray Discs

June 1, 2009Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Mystery, Romance, UK

REVOLUTIONARY ROAD
*½/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras B
starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Kate Winslet, Michael Shannon, Kathy Bates
screenplay by Justin Haythe, based on the novel by Richard Yates
directed by Sam Mendes

DOUBT
**/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B-
starring Meryl Streep, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Amy Adams, Viola Davis
written and directed by John Patrick Shanley

by Walter Chaw Impeccably acted and playing out what seems to be a collective cultural fascination with the pre-Flower Power '60s (not quite Ward and June, not quite Jimi and Janis), Sam Mendes' Revolutionary Road and John Patrick Shanley's Doubt help 2008 meet its quota of prestige-y actor's studio pieces. Both are based on well-regarded (renowned, in the case of the first) literary sources, both sport high-octane casts in the pursuit of that delicate balance in adaptations between literal and spiritual faithfulness, and both, ultimately, have considerably less to say than the surrounding hullabaloo would suggest. Revolutionary Road plots another point on the graph of Mendes's steeply-declining returns–he's a stage director whose greatest weakness is his desire for little epiphanies that play like Everest off the boards, and he's guilty of too much intoxication with the medium besides. Mendes spends so much time fiddling around with his camera to a noodling Thomas Newman score that you feel like giving him some privacy.

Paul Blart: Mall Cop (2009) – Blu-ray Disc + Bedtime Stories (2008) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

May 26, 2009Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Ian Pugh, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Crime, DVD, Family, Fantasy, Romance, Sci-Fi, ZERO STARS

PAUL BLART: MALL COP
*/**** Image B+ Sound B Extras C
starring Kevin James, Jayma Mays, Keir O'Donnell, Shirley Knight
screenplay by Kevin James & Nick Bakay
directed by Steve Carr

BEDTIME STORIES
ZERO STARS/**** Image A Sound A Extras D
starring Adam Sandler, Keri Russell, Guy Pearce, Russell Brand
screenplay by Matt Lopez and Tim Herlihy
directed by Adam Shankman

by Ian Pugh For Kevin James and his co-writer, the talking cat from "Sabrina the Teenage Witch", it's not enough that Paul Blart (James) is a fat moron prone to knocking things over with the sheer force of his girth–he must also be completely oblivious, fully convinced that he possesses more power and responsibilities as a mall cop than any reasonable person would believe. So what to do when Paul's newest trainee (Keir O'Donnell) turns out to be a Hans Gruber wannabe who takes over the mall with his hip young gang in a bid to clean it out? A feature-length parody of Die Hard has long stopped being an enticing prospect, given that Die Hard itself has been deconstructed to death by the fact of its enormous influence on the action genre (to the degree that the "Die Hard in an X" template actually became the dominant model for action movies in the 1990s), with the proverbial final nail driven in by a third sequel, Live Free or Die Hard, that concluded there was no point in still pretending our everyman hero was anything but invincible. As Paul Blart: Mall Cop sees it, the only way to endue the John McClane archetype with any tension is to make him fat and stupid. The first time we see Paul, he's shovelling food into his mouth, his sweater stained with perspiration from beneath his man-boobs, shortly before his hypoglycaemia kicks in and sidelines him from joining the police academy. But he's got a big heart or something, and that's what counts, right?

Yes Man (2008) [Digital Copy Special Edition] – Blu-ray Disc

May 21, 2009Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Romance, UK

½*/**** Image A- Sound A Extras D
starring Jim Carrey, Zooey Deschanel, Bradley Cooper, Terence Stamp
screenplay by Nicholas Stoller and Jarrad Paul & Andrew Mogel, based on the novel by Danny Wallace
directed by Peyton Reed

by Walter Chaw I look at Jim Carrey nowadays with a little bit of bittersweetness, in that his attempts to go "legit" in movies like Man on the Moon and especially Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind were essentially swatted aside, dismissed as brief indulgences between talking-asshole gigs. I believe that Carrey is a serious guy, possibly a melancholy guy, certainly a smart guy–and I believe the closest anyone's come to finding the right vehicle for his elasticity is Charlie Kaufman. Maybe they'll work together again. Until then, Carrey's fate is to shoehorn into endlessly reducible slapstick romcoms like Peyton Reed's Yes Man–easy cash-grabs with an ephemeral shelf-life doomed to be referenced for its one or two scenes that make any impact before becoming ancient history. The formula for this shit is etched in tintype by now: the Lovesick Dork Protag is Carl (Carrey), the High Concept is that he pathologically rejects everything, and the object of his l'amour fou is avant-garde punk band frontwoman Allison (Zooey Deschanel™). Can this button-up, white-collar stiff (Carl's a loan officer) learn to embrace spontaneity and break free of the workaday while setting up his own quirky business and saving the world in the process? Yes, man.

Seattle International Film Festival ’09: Humpday

May 15, 2009Posted in2000s, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Comedy, Drama, Film Festivals, Romance
***/****starring Mark Duplass, Joshua Leonard, Alycia Delmorewritten and directed by Lynn Shelton by Jefferson Robbins SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. The difference in intimacy between male friendship and married companionship gets laid bare in the opening minutes of Humpday. There's the comfortable, cuddled body contact shared by young Seattle office drone Ben (Mark Duplass) and his wife, Anna (Alycia Delmore). And then there's the bellowing, clenching reunion of Ben and free-spirited old buddy Andrew (Joshua Leonard), who, not seen in a decade, arrives unannounced on the redeye from Mexico. "I respect the FUCK outta you, man!" Andrew declares, and it's both…

Ghosts of Girlfriends Past (2009)

May 1, 2009Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Christmas, Comedy, Romance, Theatrical, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Matthew McConaughey, Jennifer Garner, Breckin Meyer, Michael Douglas
screenplay by Jon Lucas & Scott Moore
directed by Mark Waters

Ghostsofgirlfriendsby Walter Chaw Watching Ghosts of Girlfriends Past, a musty relic of Eisner's reign at Disney that first dreamed Ben Affleck as its star and a decade later settled on Matthew McConaughey (opposite, in some weird nepotistic recompense, Mrs. Affleck, Jennifer Garner), is excellent justification for the crib death of cynical, Eisner-hijacked, RKO-minted philosophies like Commerce over Genius. It's a retelling, I'm embarrassed to need to articulate, of Dickens's A Christmas Carol that substitutes Scrooge with serial womanizer Connor Mead (McConaughey) and Marley with old philanderer Uncle Wayne (Michael Douglas, doing a broad lounge-lizard caricature the spitting image of a mummified hybrid of Robert Evans and Howard Hefner). On the eve of brother Paul's (Breckin Meyer) marriage to shrill harridan Sandra (Lacey Chabert), Connor is visited by Wayne and the Ghosts of Girlfriends Past/Present/Future to show him that true love exists in the world beyond one-night-stands with supermodels–that it in fact exists between oily Connor and first love Jenny (Garner). What this means for the audience gaping in slack-jawed awe at this thing is a good thirty minutes of unearned sentiment tacked onto the end of a noxious payload of open misogyny, fag jokes, and gags that fall square on their face. Very simply, it's the most appalling, hateful, reptilian, inept film I've seen since Love Actually, and I wish I could say that I'm surprised that it was directed by Mark Waters and written by the braintrust behind Four Christmases.

Gigi (1958) – Blu-ray Disc

April 20, 2009Posted in1950s, Authors: Alex Jackson, Best Picture (Academy Awards), Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Musical, Romance

GIGI (1958)
**½/**** Image A Sound A- Extras A-
starring Leslie Caron, Maurice Chevalier, Louis Jourdan, Hermione Gingold
screenplay by Alan Jay Lerner, based on the novel by Colette
directed by Vincente Minnelli

GIGI (1949)
**/**** Image C+ Sound C
starring Gaby Morlay, Danièle Delorme, Jean Tissier, Yvonne de Bray
scteenplay by Pierre Laroche, based on the novel by Colette
directed by Jacqueline Audry

by Alex Jackson How weird is it that Vincente Minnelli's Gigi won the Academy Award for Best Picture in 1958, when four years later Stanley Kubrick's adaptation of Lolita barely got the seal of approval? I suppose we shouldn't underestimate the power of sex to scandalize when it isn't disguised as love. In Gigi, wealthy Parisian playboy Gaston Lachaille (Louis Jourdan) is fixated on 15-year-old Gigi (27-year-old Leslie Caron), the granddaughter of family friend Madame Alvarez (Hermione Gingold). He likes her precisely because she is still a child. Most of the women Gaston goes with are accustomed and entitled to a certain standard of living. By contrast, Gigi can appreciate being spoiled. Gaston also admires her irreverence–how she can cheat at cards and tease him about it, or how she can effortlessly tell him off after he insults her dress. She hasn't learned how to be a lady yet; her rough edges haven't been smoothed out and she's capable of challenging him. There's a life to her that's drained out of most of the other women he meets long before he gets there.

How to Lose Friends & Alienate People (2008) – DVD + Beverly Hills Chihuahua (2008) – Blu-ray Disc

March 23, 2009Posted in2000s, Adventure, Authors: Ian Pugh, Biopic, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Disney, Drama, DVD, Family, Mexico, Romance, UK

HOW TO LOSE FRIENDS & ALIENATE PEOPLE
**/**** Image B- Sound A Extras B+
starring Simon Pegg, Kirsten Dunst, Danny Huston, Jeff Bridges
screenplay by Peter Straughan, based on the book by Toby Young
directed by Robert Weide

BEVERLY HILLS CHIHUAHUA
½*/**** Image B Sound B+ Extras B-
starring Piper Perabo, Manolo Cardona, Jamie Lee Curtis, José María Yazpik
screenplay by Analisa LaBianco and Jeffrey Bushell
directed by Raja Gosnell

by Ian Pugh Tipping its hat to Godard through a poster on the wall of disillusioned magazine editor Clayton Harding (Jeff Bridges), How to Lose Friends & Alienate People (hereafter How to Lose Friends) owes an enormous debt to the success of The Devil Wears Prada, but it may be more accurate to describe it as Contempt as told by Elizabethtown-era Cameron Crowe. Which is to say, it argues that the only way to beat the entertainment industry at its game of media-manipulation is to play by the rules. The idealistic writer has to sell out, temporarily at least; and when he loses the girl to some asshole "in the know," the audience can rest assured that they'll be reunited soon enough. Simon Pegg ostensibly plays boorish journo Sidney Young, a British transplant in New York City come to shake the foundations of a thinly-veiled VANITY FAIR clone only to endure several rude awakenings. Pegg really plays the part of the wacky Kirsten Dunst pixie from Elizabethtown, though, come from merry old England with a fistful of snark to teach strait-laced Kirsten Dunst (here essaying the Orlando Bloom role) about the fruitlessness of obsessing over ridiculous establishments beyond your control. Well, that and the joys of Con Air.

I Love You, Man (2009) + The Great Buck Howard (2009)

March 19, 2009Posted in2000s, Adventure, Authors: Ian Pugh, Comedy, Drama, Romance, Theatrical

I LOVE YOU, MAN
***/****
starring Paul Rudd, Jason Segel, Rashida Jones, Andy Samberg
screenplay by John Hamburg and Larry Levin
directed by John Hamburg

THE GREAT BUCK HOWARD
***/****
starring John Malkovich, Colin Hanks, Emily Blunt, Ricky Jay
written and directed by Sean McGinly

by Ian Pugh SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. It hits the familiar marks–gross-out gags, frank sex-talk, pop-culture references–but it's still too difficult to slot I Love You, Man in with all the other Apatow-era "dick flicks" to which it will inevitably be compared, simply because it seems so dead-set on bucking their reliance on traditional values in favour of something more ambiguous. Its attempt at a comic centrepiece is a one-two punch of projectile vomiting and the, like, totally gross idea of two dudes kissing. This early homophobic recoil comes back to haunt the painstakingly-calculated bromances and lengthy discussions of "male protocol" that take up the rest of the film's runtime. The cultural lines between "gay" and "straight" already left somewhat abstract (the protagonist's gay brother (Andy Samberg, playing against effeminate stereotypes) declares their father (J.K. Simmons) to be an "honorary homo"–which means what, exactly?), the film has plenty of fun toying with the concepts of frat-boy immaturity and unspoken sexuality.

Dan in Real Life (2008) + Rachel Getting Married (2008) – Blu-ray Discs

March 17, 2009Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Directors: Jonathan Demme, Drama, Romance

DAN IN REAL LIFE
*/**** Image A Sound B Extras D
starring Steve Carell, Juliette Binoche, Dane Cook, Dianne Wiest
screenplay by Pierce Gardner and Peter Hedges
directed by Peter Hedges

RACHEL GETTING MARRIED
**/**** Image A Sound A Extras C
starring Anne Hathaway, Rosemarie DeWitt, Bill Irwin, Debra Winger
screenplay by Jenny Lumet
directed by Jonathan Demme

by Walter Chaw The Darwin chart of this breed of American indie, otherwise known as unlikely shrines to The Celebration (or Festen, if you prefer), follows in the United States with something like Margot at the Wedding near the top as most-evolved down mid-way to Rachel Getting Married and its histrionic Demme-tasse reduction, down to ankle-deep–we’re talking primordial muck–with Dan in Real Life. That last one, from Pieces of April perpetrator Peter Hedges, squanders an unusual amount of currency in Steve Carell (at his melancholic zenith), pairing him with Juliette Binoche in a bittersweet romantic imbroglio that absolutely does not deserve the happy horseshit ending slathered on it to apologize for its occasional poignancy. It’s not that I enjoy being sad, it’s that I enjoy getting a condescending handjob even less. I’m willing to forgive the bad slapstick of a group aerobics session, the casting of Dane Cook, and the set-up/knock-down mentality of it that, in fairness, mars more honest films like Rachel Getting Married, too. The picture begins in the title’s “real life,” only to sail away to a privileged, impossible Rhode Island wonderland that may as well be the setting of every Nicholas Sparks book ever written and to-be-written. It’s a movie that makes you feel good, like a barium enema, or Rolfing. What I’m saying is that a lot of things make you feel good in a dumb, animal way–not a lot of them are also art.