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.

Pretty Woman (1990) – Blu-ray Disc

March 2, 2009Posted in1990s, 2016, Authors: Alex Jackson, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Drama, Romance

Prettywoman3

***½/**** Image B- Sound A- Extras C+
starring Richard Gere, Julia Roberts, Ralph Bellamy, Hector Elizondo
screenplay by J.F. Lawton
directed by Garry Marshall

by Alex Jackson SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Well, I'm willing to admit this much: Pretty Woman has a ridiculous premise. Corporate raider Edward Lewis (Richard Gere) buys up struggling companies and liquidates their assets. While in Los Angeles planning the purchase of ship manufacturer Morse Industries, he gets lost on the way back to his Beverly Hills hotel and stops on Hollywood Blvd. to ask for directions. This is where he meets Vivian Ward (Julia Roberts), a hooker desperate to pay off a few debts. She subsequently drives him to his hotel; as Edward recently broke up with his girlfriend in New York and feels bad about making Vivian take the bus home, he invites her to spend the night. They bargain over her price, arrive at the figure of three-hundred dollars, and sleep together. In the morning, Edward has a phone conversation with his lawyer, Philip Stuckey (Jason Alexander), who suggests he have dinner with James Morse, the owner and founder of Morse Industries, and that he bring a date to keep things social. Still on the phone, Edward walks in on Vivian singing along to Prince in the bathtub and offers to pay her for the entire week to be at his "beck-and-call."

Meet Dave (2008) – DVD

March 2, 2009Posted in2000s, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD, Eddie Murphy, Family, Romance, Sci-Fi

*½/**** Image N/A Sound B- Extras F
starring Eddie Murphy, Elizabeth Banks, Gabrielle Union, Scott Caan
screenplay by Rob Greenberg & Bill Corbett
directed by Brian Robbins

by Walter Chaw I’m eternally grateful to the infernal chemistry alchemized betwixt Mephistophlean Eddie Murphy and chowderhead Faust Brian Robbins for sparking the second-funniest headline in THE ONION’s gallery of classic one-liners: “Eddie Murphy fucks self for $20M.” (The funniest, for the record, is Gene Siskel’s obit headline: “Ebert Victorious.”) Who knew that Robbins’ extraordinary inability to contribute anything of value to anything he’s ever turned his baleful attention towards would be the mendacity needed to allow a couple of the gags in the latest Mur-Bins collaboration Meet Dave to work to whatever extent they do? Also helping is that the rampant misogyny and racism that marked their previous film together, Norbit, is toned down to a family-friendly sizzle this time around. Of course black people dance to hip hop and love processed meat stuffs; of course women like to cry and hold hands; and of course gay men come out not long after witnessing their first Broadway revue. Nothing says Grand Old Family Values like merrily sanctioning divisive stereotypes.

High School Musical (2007) [Remix]; High School Musical 2 (2008) [Extended Edition]; High School Musical 3: Senior Year (2009) [Deluxe Extended Edition] – Blu-ray Discs

February 25, 2009Posted in2000s, Authors: Ian Pugh, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Disney, Musical, Romance, Teen, Television

HIGH SCHOOL MUSICAL
**/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras C+
starring Zac Efron, Vanessa Hudgens, Ashley Tisdale, Lucas Grabeel
written by Peter Barsocchini
directed by Kenny Ortega

HIGH SCHOOL MUSICAL 2
½*/**** Image B Sound B+ Extras C-
starring Zac Efron, Vanessa Hudgens, Ashley Tisdale, Lucas Grabeel
written by Peter Barsocchini
directed by Kenny Ortega

HIGH SCHOOL MUSICAL 3: SENIOR YEAR
*½/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B-
starring Zac Efron, Vanessa Hudgens, Ashley Tisdale, Lucas Grabeel
screenplay by Peter Barsocchini
directed by Kenny Ortega

by Ian Pugh Not exactly the cultural apocalypse its Disney Channel roots and preteen popularity would have you believe, High School Musical is no worse, really, than any other cookie-cutter musical in recent memory. A by-product of pandering to a young, young audience, its biggest sin is that it alleges a greater basis in reality than its more "adult" contemporaries: The movie endeavours to give credence to the familiar tropes of storybook romance and rags-to-riches by applying them to the politicized zoo known as high school. Troy (Zac Efron) is captain of the basketball team and Gabriella (Vanessa Hudgens) is a brainiac, but all it takes is one happenstance karaoke duet for them to discover they both enjoy singing a whole lot, and their pursuit of that mutual interest throws the entire clique-driven society of East High into disarray. Although it's bolstered by a few genuine chuckles, the premise can't hide the fact that the high-school backdrop actively highlights how inconsequential the whole blasted thing truly is.

Nights in Rodanthe (2008) – Blu-ray Disc

February 24, 2009Posted in2000s, Australia, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Romance

½*/**** Image A- Sound A Extras C
starring Richard Gere, Diane Lane, Scott Glenn, Christopher Meloni
screenplay by Ann Peacock and John Romano, based on the novel by Nicholas Sparks
directed by George C. Wolfe

by Walter Chaw I will say this about Nights in Rodanthe: spoken Nicholas Sparks is preferable to written Nicholas Sparks, because when people speak, complete sentences and thoughts that go somewhere aren't necessarily at a premium. If there was ever an artist ill-suited for his chosen medium, it's Sparks; and if there was ever proof (as if proof were needed after the success of Robert James Waller, Tom Clancy, John Grisham, and Dean Koontz) that cuddling ignorance was a growth industry, well, there's Sparks again. And here, as further cause for divorce from the great nation of culturally-retarded people who have always comprised our metaphorical heartland, is the fourth adaptation of a bound stable of Sparks's saccharine logorrhoea (Gertrude Stein in practice in the unlikeliest of places), Nights in Rodanthe, which, in the great tradition of pieces of shit, is exactly like every other piece of shit in every other genre. (Be thankful, at least, that the picture, in a futile attempt to separate itself from The Notebook, jettisons the novel's framing device, that great staple of books by people like Sparks and Mitch Albom–in so doing depriving some dusty, geriatric, beloved television star one last paycheck.) Helpless before the towering majesty of the formula god it worships, the picture plays out like a slasher pic for girls, where the only sport is trying to figure out which of the heroes is going to die, how, when, and by what grievous hand. I'd argue that the catharsis parceled out by garbage like this is identical to the "happy ending" whored out by lower-aspiring slasher cinema: the curiosity about the hows is delicious–and perverse. If you think I've dropped a spoiler, by the way, you haven't seen Message in a Bottle, A Walk to Remember, or The Notebook, and–more than likely–you're not going to see Nights in Rodanthe, either.

Gomorrah (2008) + Slumdog Millionaire (2008)

February 20, 2009Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Best Picture (Academy Awards), Crime, Drama, Germany, Italy, Romance, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

Gomorra
***½/****
starring Salvatore Abruzzese, Simone Sacchettino, Salvatore Ruocco, Vincenzo Fabricino
screenplay by Maurizio Braucci & Ugo Chiti & Gianni Di Gregorio & Matteo Garrone & Massimo Gaudioso & Roberto Saviano, based on the book by Saviano
directed by Matteo Garrone

SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE
*/****
starring Dev Patel, Freida Pinto, Madhur Mittal, Anil Kapoor
screenplay by Simon Beaufoy, based on the novel Q & A by Vikas Swarup
directed by Danny Boyle and Loveleen Tandan

by Walter Chaw Dropping us in the middle of Italian slum Scampia, itself smack dab in the middle of nothing, Matteo Garrone's Gomorrah (Gomorra) is the Hud of gangster flicks, all deglamourized, harsh, expressionist stripping-away of illusions and idealism to reveal the gasping, grasping emptiness underneath. Like Hud, the source of that idealism is years of cinema supporting a romanticized iconography: the American western in Martin Ritt's film, the collected works of Francis Coppola and Martin Scorsese in Garrone's peek inside the ways of this thing of ours. Unlike Hud, there's no intimation of a "happy" ending for the sociopaths of Gomorrah–no feeling that for whatever the cost to a normalized (idealized?) existence, the outcasts and opportunists living their lives in imitation of Tony Montana are doomed to their tough-guy surfaces and the anonymous deaths predicted for them during a brutal prologue. Non-narrative and populated by a non-professional cast of locals and unusual suspects, the picture, however steeped in naturalism, is finally a formalist piece about as free of structure as Sartre–and every bit as meticulous. This "No Exit" (and the French title of Sartre's play fascinatingly translates, when applied to a discussion of a film, as "In Camera") and its unlocked oubliette is Scampia: The players in organized crime are imprisoned there by choice, trapped by the validation they desire from one another.

The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor (2008) [2-Disc Deluxe Edition]; Wanted (2008) [2-Disc Special Edition]; Mamma Mia! [2-Disc Special Edition] – DVDs

February 17, 2009Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, China, Crime, DVD, Fantasy, Germany, Musical, Romance, Thriller, UK, War, ZERO STARS

THE MUMMY: TOMB OF THE DRAGON EMPEROR
ZERO STARS/**** Image A Sound A Extras D
starring Brendan Fraser, Jet Li, Maria Bello, Michelle Yeoh
screenplay by Alfred Gough & Miles Millar
directed by Rob Cohen

WANTED
*/**** Image A Sound A Extras D
starring James McAvoy, Morgan Freeman, Terence Stamp, Angelina Jolie
screenplay by Michael Brandt & Derek Haas and Chris Morgan, based on the comic books by Mark Millar and J.G. Jones
directed by Timur Bekmambetov

MAMMA MIA!
ZERO STARS Image B Sound A Extras C-
starring Meryl Streep, Pierce Brosnan, Colin Firth, Stellan Stellan Skarsgård
screenplay by Catherine Johnson, based on the songs of ABBA
directed by Phyllida Lloyd

by Walter Chaw Fast becoming the post-Welles RKO without a commensurate Val Lewton to grease the transition from art to filthy lucre, today's Universal Pictures finds itself a long, long way from Psycho with a bumper crop of genuinely bad movies reverse-engineered from past box-office champions. Each of them–The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor, Wanted, and Mamma Mia!–broke the golden 100-million dollar mark, since they were made with just the Benjamins in mind; sadly, only the criticism of flaccid attendance was likely to curb an endless march of identical pictures this year. For the simpleminded, the success of these films despite the near-universal condemnation of them by anyone with a working prefrontal lobe is proof positive that critics are out of touch with the common man. On the contrary, I'd offer that, asked whether he thought the atrocious The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor (hereafter The Mummy 3) would be financially successful, the average critic would have said he'd be surprised if it didn't do a hundred-mil in its first three weeks of release. Out of touch is believing that something is good because it makes a lot of money.

Groundhog Day (1993) [Special Edition] – DVD|Blu-ray Disc

February 10, 2009Posted in1990s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, DVD, Romance, Time Travel

***½/****
DVD – Image B Sound B+ Extras B-
BD – Image A- Sound A Extras B
starring Bill Murray, Andie MacDowell, Chris Elliot, Stephen Tobolowsky
screenplay by Danny Rubin and Harold Ramis
directed by Harold Ramis

by Bill Chambers I've heard the argument that Groundhog Day fails because it proposes the redemption of world-class crank Bill Murray–but, boy, does redemption fight an uphill battle against him. I suspect the criticism is misdirected at the prolific cinéma du redemption in general. Maybe the finest film yet directed by Harold Ramis (who's unfortunately been stuck in a high-concept rut since–his own personal Groundhog Day), Groundhog Day turns the titular Americana celebration into an existential abyss for Phil Connors (Murray), a self-centred weatherman for a TV station he considers a pit stop on the way to bigger and better things.

He’s Just Not That Into You (2009)

February 5, 2009Posted in2000s, Authors: Ian Pugh, Comedy, Drama, Romance, Theatrical

*/****
starring Ben Affleck, Jennifer Aniston, Drew Barrymore, Jennifer Connelly
screenplay by Abby Kohn & Marc Silverstein, based on the book by Greg Behrendt and Liz Tuccillo
directed by Ken Kwapis

Hesjustnotthatintoyouby Ian Pugh It starts off as a puerile game of "Six Degrees of Separation" and just goes downhill from there: Janine (Jennifer Connelly) is married to Ben (Bradley Cooper), who's attracted to Anna (Scarlett Johansson), who has an awkward relationship with Conor (Kevin Connolly), who went on a date with Gigi (Ginnifer Goodwin), who gets dating advice from Alex (Justin Long), who killed the rat that ate the malt that lay in the house that Jack built. There are about five more movie stars inhabiting He's Just Not That Into You, but one would be hard-pressed to recall their characters' names without consulting the IMDb, and that's pretty much all there is to them. (The combined talents of Ben Affleck and Jennifer Aniston result in a force so monumentally bland that it's either not surprising or very surprising that no casting director ever thought of it before.) My colleague Walter Chaw once wrote that you'll never refer to the characters in Crash by anything other than their broadest generalities, which is exactly how this movie would have it, since it makes it that much easier to project yourself onto these pale stereotypes and reduce the gender divide to a showdown between insensitive assholes and hypersensitive maniacs. Men are from Mars, women are from Venus, and it's a small world after all. Too easy–too tempting–to call He's Just Not That Into You the romcom equivalent of Paul Haggis's Oscar-winning disaster, but it doesn't give you a reason to think otherwise.

Ghost Town (2008) – Blu-ray Disc

February 3, 2009Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Drama, Romance

***/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras A
starring Ricky Gervais, Téa Leoni, Greg Kinnear, Billy Campbell
screenplay by David Koepp & John Kamps
directed by David Koepp

by Walter Chaw It's appropriate that at the end of these cycles of films portraying New York as a convalescence ward (25th Hour, In the Cut, Synecdoche, New York, Hellboy II), we have a movie like David Koepp's Ghost Town that literalizes our wounded Metropolis as a graveyard. The picture joins Hancock among the year's more pleasant surprises, both loaded as they are with small payloads packed with little, unexpected explosions of pathos and intimate observation. Koepp's hyphenate stints (Stir of Echoes, Secret Window) have tended towards the supernatural by way of private dislocations, his spooks the manifestation of things left too long in the underneath. No less so Ghost Town, wherein asshole dentist Pincus (Ricky Gervais) survives a near-death colonoscopy only to find himself capable of conversing with the dearly departed–at least, those still tied to loved ones incapable of letting them go. Groundwork for a clumsy bit of pretentious tripe, no question, but Koepp lightens his avowed affection for overreaching by striving no farther than romantic-comedy rewards, balancing them with an admirable amount of leash turned over to Gervais's acerbic improvisations. It's interesting that the traditionally charming characters are cast as irritants or cads, their social facility viewed as defense mechanisms. Suddenly, the dental X-rays that unspool beneath the opening credits make perfect sense; Ghost Town is partly about a suspicion of surfaces.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008)

December 25, 2008Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: David Fincher, Drama, Fantasy, Romance, Theatrical

*/****
starring Brad Pitt, Cate Blanchett, Taraji P. Henson, Tilda Swinton
screenplay by Eric Roth, based on the short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald
directed by David Fincher

Curiouscaseby Walter Chaw Based on an evergreen F. Scott Fitzgerald short story that had the decency to be a short story, David Fincher’s extravagant, OCD-extruded The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is less one of this year’s astounding ruminations on loss, regret, melancholy, and the ephemeral nature of love than it is a remake–tonally, structurally–of Forrest Gump. It highlights just how good, how complex and ambitious, Coppola’s similar Youth Without Youth is–and it clarifies, if clarification were needed, how a high-concept becomes a gimmick without a core of gravity to keep it from spinning off into butter. The picture is thick with exploitive gestures, from its comic-relief mammy all the way through to Hurricane Katrina being used as the catastrophic backdrop that lends…what, gravitas?…to the melo-tragic love story that is the end-all of its Titanic framing story. How best to unite an ossified granny with her long-lost love than the mass-drowning and general devastation of a lot of people who don’t matter one iota to our central drama? It’s not deplorable in the traditional sense, I guess, but it’s so saccharine and dumbed-down that it’s aggressively offensive anyway. Benjamin Button painfully articulates everything subtle, melancholic, and beautiful about stuff like Synecdoche, New York, A Christmas Tale, and The Wrestler in broad pronouncements for the slowest students in class. When dealing with existential matters, it’s best not to go the Celestine Prophecy/Jonathan Livingston Seagull route with platitudes and easy solutions to thorny, baseline questions about what it is to love, to age, to die. There’s a scene in the film, probably more than halfway through, where one character says to the other that things pass too quickly and, more, isn’t that a shame. A little later, those same two hold each other in front of a mirror and one says he’d like to remember how they are, right at this moment, as time plays its tricks on our affections. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is Fincher’s own Se7en, except it shows the head in the box.

Seven Pounds (2008)

December 19, 2008Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Romance, Theatrical, Will Smith

*/****
starring Will Smith, Rosario Dawson, Woody Harrelson, Michael Ealy
screenplay by Grant Nieporte
directed by Gabriele Muccino

Sevenpoundsby Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. I'm gonna take a stab at the title: Seven pounds is how much an Oscar weighs, am I right? Will Smith reunites with his Pursuit of Happyness director Gabriele Muccino to fashion another awards-season failure that proves every bit as icky and misguided. An extended episode of "Secret Millionaire", Seven Pounds transforms a Melvin and Howard conceit into the story of an undercover Samaritan intent on changing the lives of seven worthy strangers. Why? It doesn't really matter, does it? Not when Smith, as Ben Thomas, a guilt-wracked IRS agent/aerospace engineer trying to atone for the tragedy that is his life, turns on the red-rims and the waterworks, all quivery lips like the box jellyfish Ben keeps as a pet. There's poor little Emily (Rosario Dawson), with a rare blood type and an enlarged heart (four sizes too big!); and poor little Ezra (Woody Harrelson), who can't get a second look from a truck-stop waitress because, eww, he's blind!; and poor Connie Tepos (Elpidia Carrillo), who's afraid to leave her abusive boyfriend even though her two small children are in peril. Enter Bagger Vance–er, Ben Thomas–to sweep Emily off her feet, insult Ezra to see if he has a temper (or a spine), and give Connie his house. Throughout, we're treated to flashes of the calamity that's brought Ben so low as Smith's charisma and innate likeability remain the only things keeping the film remotely compelling to the extent that it is. It's an old-timey melodrama at its heart, nothing on its mind except tugging at the heartstrings and bothering awards-season viewers with the irritating tickle that they're being diddled without their consent by another smooth-talking, empty-headed bit of unforgivable–and gross–treacle.

The Heartbreak Kid (2007) [Widescreen] – DVD|Blu-ray Disc

December 15, 2008Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, DVD, Romance

*½/****
DVD – Image B- Sound A- Extras B
BD – Image A Sound A- Extras B
starring Ben Stiller, Michelle Monaghan, Malin Akerman, Rob Corddry
screenplay by Scot Armstrong and Leslie Dixon and Bobby Farrelly & Peter Farrelly & Kevin Barnett, based on the short story "A Change of Plan" by Bruce Jay Friedman
directed by Peter Farrelly & Bobby Farrelly

Heartbreakkidcapby Walter Chaw Elaine May used to be the comedy writing and performing partner of Mike Nichols, and because I like her 1972 film The Heartbreak Kid so much, I've always wondered how much better The Graduate would have been had May directed it. Indeed, a May-helmed Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? could be excruciating–well, more so. For a while, anyway, May was the brave one, ethnically and otherwise, and I don't know of many people who could've turned the premise that drives the original The Heartbreak Kid into such a delicate, even sensitive (certainly human) piece. If it were going to be remade (and it has, with Ben Stiller in the Charles Grodin role and Malin Akerman in the Jeannie Berlin role), Peter and Bobby Farrelly would seem to be the right ones for the job.

The Go-Getter (2008) – DVD

December 8, 2008Posted in2000s, Authors: Alex Jackson, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Road Movie, Romance

**½/**** Image B Sound C Extras C+
starring Lou Taylor Pucci, Zooey Deschanel, Jena Malone, Maura Tierney
written and directed by Martin Hynes

Gogettercap

by Alex Jackson Martin Hynes's The Go-Getter is a sweet but thin wafer of a movie. It isn't great art, it doesn't evoke an especially strong or complex emotional reaction, and it doesn't ask any difficult questions. It doesn't aspire to do anything more than pleasantly and efficiently eat up an hour-and-a-half of your time. That's the very definition of faint praise, but praise I'm offering it all the same. When I first saw the film at Sundance in 2007, I felt rejuvenated. This had come after a string of bad movies that nonetheless demanded a lot from me. The sheer frivolousness and good cheer of The Go-Getter was a kind of tonic that helped me remember why I love the movies in the first place. Still, I knew enough to only give it two-and-a-half stars, and my second viewing pretty much confirms that two-and-a-half stars is about right.

Stranger Than Fiction (2006) – Blu-ray Disc

December 1, 2008Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Drama, Esoterica, Romance

**/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Will Ferrell, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Dustin Hoffman, Emma Thompson
screenplay by Zach Helm
directed by Marc Forster

by Walter Chaw Harold Crick (Will Ferrell) is a thinly-sketched IRS agent who obsessively measures out his life in coffee spoons. One day he hears the stentorian, patrician voice of his own personal narrator, reclusive author Kay Eiffel (Emma Thompson), providing him an interiority with Douglas Adams-like serendipitous surreality. Marc Forster's Stranger than Fiction even winks at the Adams connection with a sentient wristwatch and a moment where Crick's apartment gets demolished, Arthur Dent-like, by an uncommunicated work order. It also features sudden, unexpected love at the end of the universe with Crick's opposite, a free spirit baker named Ana (Maggie Gyllenhaal) who falls under the eye of Crick's glum audit and, as literature professor Jules Hilbert (Dustin Hoffman) informs Crick, only hates him until she loves him if Crick's narrator is writing a romantic comedy. The struggle within the film is the same as the struggle without, then, as Crick tries to determine whether or not Eiffel's calm (and, as it happens, excellently-written) exposition will result in his poignant death or–good for him, bad for us–in his resurrection as a bland, non-descript leading man in another piece too frightened to allow itself the most appropriate ending. One way leads to a surprise masterpiece that soars on the chemistry (surprise again) between Ferrell and Gyllenhaal–the other leads to a film that's a lot better than I expected it to be, weighed down by a resolution that it itself comments on as equivocal, cowardly, and disappointing. To crib the analysis of Prof. Hilbert, Stranger than Fiction is just "okay."

Australia (2008)

November 26, 2008Posted in2000s, Adventure, Australia, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Romance, Theatrical, UK, War, Western

*/****
starring Nicole Kidman, Hugh Jackman, David Wenham, Bryan Brown
screenplay by Baz Luhrmann & Stuart Beattie & Ronald Harwood & Richard Flanagan
directed by Baz Luhrmann

Australiaby Walter Chaw Baz Luhrmann's Titanic begins–as you know that it must–with fusty, dusty-britches Mrs. Sarah Ashley (Nicole Kidman) tumbling out of a plane into the wilds of WWII Australia and the brawny arms of fair dinkum frontiersman The Drover (Hugh Jackman). They hate each other–she his disgustingly rugged physique and brusque manner, he her high-falutin' snobbery and belief that all men want to shag her. How miraculous, then, that the two come to love one another before the one-hour mark of the longest two weeks you'll spend in a theatre this year. But first, in a nod to Australia's "Lost Generation," of course, but more directly in most viewers' minds to Rabbit-Proof Fence, introduce pint-sized product of settler/aboriginal miscegenation Nullah (Brandon Walters), who lives on Sarah's late husband's cattle farm. Nullah is the emotional glue of the film (besides more importantly being the one who brings the cast's collective age down from AARP levels), the character imperilled, monumentalized, sought after, lost, recovered, hugged over, longed over, kissed over, and, in a stupid film's deeply stupid end titles, patronized with trivia about how the POME government at last apologized to the Aborigine people for their policy of forced intermarriage. How this saccharine, torpid love saga ends as a bromide is one of those things only the genuinely gifted can achieve: set in Darwin, Australia earns a Darwin Award for its dedication to self-destruction.

Girl on the Bridge (1999) – DVD

November 19, 2008Posted in1990s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD, France, Romance

***½/**** Image C+ Sound B
starring Vanessa Paradis, Daniel Auteuil, Frédéric Pfluger, Demetre Georgalas
screenplay by Serge Frydman
directed by Patrice Leconte

by Walter Chaw Patrice Leconte's immaculately-constructed Girl on the Bridge is a lovely, hopelessly romantic little bauble that catches the light no matter how you turn it. The picture stars gamine Vanessa Paradis as Adèle, a suicide girl broken by the lack of a soul mate and a flurry of Parisian bedsheets contemplating a George Bailey-style leap off the edge of a bridge. Her Clarence is Gabor (Daniel Auteuil), a professional knife-thrower who trolls for winsome targets looking to ride the eternity express; and together they paint the world a Fellini shade of red. The similarity is more than cosmetic: in its carnival-of-life (or better, life-as-carnival) atmosphere, the romance that develops between Gabor and Adèle is sublimated into the act of extended, trembling foreplay–lots of knives hurled at naked thighs and only a few nicks here and there to show for it. The act of actual sex is seen as something less than penetrating (Adèle pillow-hops like an adrenalized bunny), but when the pair rushes off to an abandoned train car to be alone, true intimacy only comes once Gabor starts in with the cutlery. Breathless in love like P.T. Anderson's Punch-Drunk Love or Fellini's Nights in Cabiria (which likewise sports a woman of loose morals looking for love in Rome), Girl on the Bridge, Leconte's lightest confection, manages still to convey the director's themes of the mystery of luck as it governs chance meetings and meaningful hits and misses.

Zack and Miri Make a Porno (2008)

October 30, 2008Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Romance, Theatrical, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Seth Rogen, Elizabeth Banks, Craig Robinson, Jason Mewes
written and directed by Kevin Smith

Zackandmiriby Walter Chaw There's something wrong with Kevin Smith. Which is not to say that there isn't something wrong with most artists, just that in the case of Smith, it's become steadily apparent that whatever's wrong with him is manifesting itself in genuinely sad ways. Zack and Miri Make a Porno (hereafter Zack and Miri) is dreadful in the unique style of that guy who traps you in a conversation and proceeds to drop lame Star Wars references and ancient race riffs laced with pathetic interludes about his syrupy, jejune concept of romantic love. Afraid to seem "uncool," this guy will leaven his horny-dork shtick with dusty "blue" material–but every step along the way, all Smith does is demonstrate that he's not funny anymore (if he ever was), and that if there was a time that he slipped in under the zeitgeist, that time is over.

Fox Horror Classics, Vol. 2 – DVD

October 17, 2008Posted in1930s, 1940s, Adventure, Authors: Alex Jackson, Drama, DVD, Fantasy, Horror, Mystery, Romance, Sci-Fi, Thriller

CHANDU THE MAGICIAN (1932)
***½/**** Image B- Sound C Extras A-
starring Edmund Lowe, Bela Lugosi, Irene Ware, Henry B. Walthall
directed by Marcel Varnel and William Cameron Menzies

DRAGONWYCK (1946)
**/**** Image A Sound A Extras B+
starring Gene Tierney, Walter Huston, Vincent Price, Glenn Langan
screenplay by Joseph L. Mankiewicz, based on the novel by Anya Seton
directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz

DR. RENAULT’S SECRET (1942)
*/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B
starring J. Carrol Naish, John Shepperd, Lynne Roberts, George Zucco
story by William Bruckner and Robert F. Metzler
directed by Harry Lachman

by Alex Jackson SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. I confess to feeling a little insecure while reading the entry for Chandu the Magician in Leonard Maltin’s Movie & Video Guide, wherein the learned film historian derides Chandu as “disappointing” and “not as good as most serials in this genre, and even sillier.” The suggestion is that he’s wholly sympathetic to the material and was actually hoping to see a good movie before being “disappointed.” Mr. Maltin may very well be in a better position than me to determine the relative merits of Chandu the Magician. Speaking as a layman, I found it to be sublime pulp fiction. Prototypical of George Lucas’s Indiana Jones and Star Wars franchises, the film is remarkably shameless in its goofiness, never veering into self-deprecation or camp. It’s one of those rare pop entertainments that genuinely make you feel like a kid again.

The Big Bang Theory: The Complete First Season (2007-2008) – DVD

October 15, 2008Posted in2000s, Authors: Ian Pugh, Comedy, DVD, Romance, Television

Image B Sound B Extras D
"Pilot," "The Big Bran Hypothesis," "The Fuzzyboots Corollary," "The Luminous Fish Effect," "The Hamburger Postulate," "The Middle Earth Paradigm," "The Dumpling Paradox," "The Grasshopper Experiment," "The Cooper-Hofstadter Polarization," "The Loobenfeld Decay," "The Pancake Batter Anomaly," "The Jerusalem Duality," "The Bat Jar Conjecture," "The Nerdvana Annihilation," "The Pork Chop Indeterminacy," "The Peanut Reaction," "The Tangerine Factor"

by Ian Pugh I absolutely love the fact that "The Big Bang Theory"'s episode titles refer to throwaway gags buried in the show's worn-out sitcom scenarios. In "The Jerusalem Duality" (1.12), theoretical physicist Sheldon Cooper (Jim Parsons) is flummoxed by the presence of a North Korean wunderkind who threatens to steal his thunder; eager to upstage him, Sheldon proposes to end to the conflict in the Middle East by building an exact replica of Jerusalem in the Mexican desert. Within this seemingly arbitrary naming convention, find everything "The Big Bang Theory" is attempting to accomplish–a jovial elbow to the ribs directed at the smart guys who can't see the forest through the trees in their approach to life.