Chicken Little (2005) – DVD

March 27, 2006Posted in2000s, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Disney, DVD, Family, Sci-Fi

*/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras C
screenplay by Ron Anderson, Steve Bencich and Ron J.Friedman
directed by Mark Dindal

Chickenlittlecapby Walter Chaw Frantic, frenetic, anxious, obnoxious: the ideal audience for Chicken Little should be in bed by seven, and Disney's umpteenth cry of "sure-fire comeback project" looks, appropriately, like another convulsive episode of corporate crying-wolf. Chicken Little, for instance, makes pop culture references that don't mean anything in the context of a film whose sole purpose appears to be instructing your children to be fearful and hyper. They're just there to give parents, alternately stunned and bored, a little rootless pleasure in the middle of epileptic flash; what's left isn't clever (or kinetic) enough for us to ignore its essential emptiness. What Chicken Little is more than anything else is exhausting. You could by rights hope that it's is a send-up of the Fifties cycle of Martian invasion pictures (it name-checks War of the Worlds for no good reason) as The Incredibles was a send-up of Golden Age superhero comics, but even a cursory comparison between the two films shows that Disney's desperation to make Pixar's looming secession a non-issue is as limp and impotent as the Nevada State Boxing Commission.

The War of the Worlds (1953) [Special Collector’s Edition] – DVD

March 7, 2006Posted in1950s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD, Sci-Fi, Thriller

***/**** Image A Sound B Extras A+
starring Gene Barry, Ann Robinson, Les Tremayne
screenplay by Barré Lyndon, based on the novel by H.G. Wells
directed by Byron Haskin

by Walter Chaw Opening with a newsreel and ending with a peculiar bit of religiosity, Byron Haskin's (really George Pal's) The War of the Worlds runs the gamut of H.G. Wells's seminal bit of seriocosmic/pseudo-scientific allegory, assaulting colonialism by dooming spoilers to strange diseases in faraway places. You could call it "God;" I think Wells would have called it "kismet." In any case, the business in-between in this The War of the Worlds was as visually dazzling for its time as Steven Spielberg's frightening and reprehensible 9/11 redux version is for ours, and it holds the same sort of micro/macro fascination of Armageddon courtesy mysterious beings raining death from above. Obviously a cold war parable, the film arguably has as its best quality its sound design, which finds through an ominous thrum of silence a rattlesnake rattle in the noise the baddies produce once they finally emerge from their smouldering crater. It was the stuff of nightmares for me when I caught it on Saturday afternoon television as a child; revisiting it for a film series and now in conjunction with the long-awaited re-release of the film on DVD, I find most interesting the fact that screeching little girl Dakota Fanning replaces the Ann Robinson character in the remake in what can only be described as a horizontal substitution.

Ryan’s Daughter (1970) [Two-Disc Special Edition] + Dune (1984) [Extended Edition] – DVDs

February 23, 2006Posted in1970s, 1980s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Directors: David Lynch, Disability, Drama, DVD, Mexico, Romance, Sci-Fi, UK

RYAN’S DAUGHTER
***/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras A-
starring Robert Mitchum, Trevor Howard, Christopher Jones, Sarah Miles
screenplay by Robert Bolt
directed by David Lean

DUNE
***½/**** Image B Sound B+ Extras B
starring Francesca Annis, Leonardo Cimino, Brad Dourif, José Ferrer
screenplay by David Lynch, based on the novel by Frank Herbert
directed by David Lynch

DUNE (Extended Edition)
*½/**** Image B Sound B+ Extras B
starring Francesca Annis, Leonardo Cimino, Brad Dourif, José Ferrer
screenplay by Judas Booth, based on the novel by Frank Herbert
directed by Alan Smithee

by Bill Chambers The common charge levelled at Ryan’s Daughter when it was released in 1970 was that it seemed anachronistic within contemporary film culture. Indeed, what so infuriated the New York critics, in particular, was not just that Lean had strayed from his roots (thematically, Ryan’s Daughter in fact represents a throwback for the Brief Encounter director), but that he had lost all trace of humility in the bargain. One might say the English were finally getting a taste of their own medicine, as Lean had essentially become a Hollywood imperialist, intruding on cinema’s evolution towards minimalism by treating a rather insular love triangle–catnip to the infidelity-obsessed British realists–like a theme-park attraction, subjecting it to both hyperbole and an incongruous perfectionism.1 (“In general the only way for artists to work in the medium is frugality,” wrote Pauline Kael, thereby consigning Lean to the realm of not-artists.) This violation of an unspoken Prime Directive resonates in the current trend of giving A-list makeovers to grindhouse fare.

The X Files: Black Oil; The X Files: Colonization; The X Files: Super Soldiers [Four-Disc Mythology Collection] – DVDs

February 13, 2006Posted in1990s, 2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Television, Thriller

THE X FILES: BLACK OIL – FOUR-DISC MYTHOLOGY COLLECTION (1995-1997)
"Nisei," "731," "Piper Maru," "Apocrypha," "Talitha Cumi," "Herrenvolk," "Tunguska," "Terma," "Memento Mori," "Tempus Fugit," "Max," "Zero-Sum," "Gethsemane," "Redux," "Redux II"

THE X FILES: COLONIZATION – FOUR-DISC MYTHOLOGY COLLECTION (1998-2000)
"Patient X," "The Red and the Black," "The End," "The Beginning," "S.R. 819," "Two Fathers, One Son," "Biogenesis," "The Sixth Extinction," "The Sixth Extinction II: Amor Fati," "Sein Und Zeit," "Closure," "En Ami," "Requiem," "Within," "Without"

THE X FILES: SUPER SOLDIERS – FOUR-DISC MYTHOLOGY COLLECTION (2001-2002)
"Par Manum," "This is Not Happening," "Deadalive," "Three Words," "Vienen," "Essence," "Existence," "Nothing Important Happened Today," "Trust No 1," "Provenance," "Providence," "William," "The Truth"

Image A Sound A Extras B

by Walter Chaw Even if you're curious, you're probably not curious enough to wade through the sixteen DVDs that constitute "The X Files"' "mythology" (a.k.a. "Oh, no, not another one of these episodes"), compiled by creator Chris Carter in a quartet of four-disc collections that chronologically recap the ostensible "Truth" in the series' "The Truth is Out There" tagline. After the first set, "Abduction", comes "Black Oil", then "Colonization", then "Super Soldiers", the four of them parceling out the vital information that our government's struck a deal with aliens to turn us into human-alien hybrids; that most of the universe has been colonized by a virus that moves around in (or as) a black, oily substance; that some people are transformed by said alien entity into super-beings; and that there are other aliens out there hoping to prevent the spread of this contagion in the universe. That's it. Oh yeah, Scully and Mulder kiss–and it's dreamy. Happy?

Repo Man (1984) [Collector’s Edition] – DVD

February 6, 2006Posted in1980s, Action, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, Crime, DVD, Esoterica, Sci-Fi, Thriller

***/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B+
starring Harry Dean Stanton, Emilio Estevez, Tracey Walter, Olivia Barash
written and directed by Alex Cox

Repomanunicapby Travis Mackenzie Hoover SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. The question I ask after a screening of Repo Man is this: is it punk? And if it isn't punk, what is it? Those used to the anarcho-communitarian (i.e., "nice") ideals adopted by punk's intelligentsia would have no truck with the mentality of this film, whose hero, Otto Maddox (Emilio Estevez), is in it for cheap thrills and hasn't got an ideal in his head. Indeed, once he gets sucked into the more "intense" world of car repossessor Bud (Harry Dean Stanton) and thus gainful employment, he distances himself from his punk friends–as represented by the three mohawk'd chumps whose idea of "doing crimes" is "let's order sushi and not pay!" But the repo gig leads to another dead end, as Bud turns out to be a blowhard full of idiot rules and his compatriots prove more unstable than Otto's old friends. There is no future to Otto's dreaming–just the cul-de-sac of punk's dark flipside: nihilism.

Jerry Lewis: The “Legendary Jerry” Collection – DVD

January 27, 2006Posted in1950s, 1960s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Family, Music, Romance, Sci-Fi

Jerryondvdtitleby Travis Mackenzie Hoover If you're savvy enough to read film criticism, you probably know it's supposed to be funny that the French love Jerry Lewis. We all have a big, self-satisfied laugh when we first hear that, as if anyone could take Jerry Lewis seriously. (We certainly didn't.) But the thing is, there aren't a lot of people who will admit to actually seeing one of his movies–the Lewis hate-on has become so intense that the only thing remaining of him is the joke; he's the scapegoat of anti-French resentment and anti-intellectual hostility, as if only frogs and eggheads could possibly find anything redemptive in his work. Thus a generation has shunned his films, never to know if there really is a centre to the onion, something more than mugging to the Lewis mystique.

We at FILM FREAK CENTRAL have decided to put a stop to this. Over the next ten weeks, we will be interrogating the Lewis canon (as it relates to Paramount's recently released DVD box set "Jerry Lewis: The 'Legendary Jerry' Collection") for traces of artistic merit–assuming there are some to be found. We may come up with revelations; we may come up with suggestive patterns; or we may come up with nothing whatsoever. By the end, though, we hope to have definitively answered the question of whether the French are onto something–and if we can really point fingers in a culture that conversely embraces Betty Blue. And Luc Besson. And Amélie. Originally published: November 11, 2005.

The Flesh Eaters (1964) – DVD

January 9, 2006Posted in1960s, Authors: Alex Jackson, Comedy, DVD, Horror, Sci-Fi

*½/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
starring Byron Sanders, Barbara Wilkin, Rita Morley, Martin Kosleck
screenplay by Arnold Drake
directed by Jack Curtis

by Alex Jackson When I pan Jack Curtis's The Flesh Eaters, I want you to know that this isn't code to go see it anyway. Watching it, I found myself wondering from time to time if I was no longer capable of appreciating movies like The Flesh Eaters. Comparing my happy memories of Night of the Creeps and the collective work of Ed Wood to this, I've decided that they really do have something that The Flesh Eaters does not. This isn't a "good" bad movie, friends, it's just a bad one.

Godzilla: Final Wars (2004) – DVD

December 20, 2005Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Australia, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, China, DVD, Japan, Sci-Fi, Thriller

ゴジラ FINAL WARS
**½/**** Image B+ Sound A- Extras B+
starring Masahiro Matsuoka, Rei Kikukawa, Don Frye, Akira Takarada
screenplay by Wataru Mimura and Isao Kiriyama
directed by Ryuhei Kitamura

Godzillafinalwarscapby Travis Mackenzie Hoover Applying critical standards to Godzilla is a useless endeavour. You don’t have to be schooled in Kracauer and Mulvey to know there’s something cinematically delicious about grown men in rubber monster suits having at each other, nor do you have to have a seat at the Tisch School to figure out that everything surrounding that is gravy. So the most and least a critic can do is to note that the latest (and perhaps last) entry in the series is: a) a big dogpile on the Green One by most of his old adversaries; b) nearly upstaged by some hilariously derivative human/alien backstory; and c) that you probably know before renting or buying whether you’ll come away thinking Godzilla: Final Wars is the greatest movie ever. You could quibble that nobody bothered to shoot Godzilla with the iconic artistry he deserved, but the monster has never been merely represented by cinema. Like John Wayne or Marlene Dietrich, he’s cinema all on his own.

Serenity (2005) [Widescreen] – DVD

December 12, 2005Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD, Sci-Fi

***/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras B+
starring Nathan Fillion, Alan Tudyk, Adam Baldwin, Summer Glau
written and directed by Joss Whedon

Serenitycapby Walter Chaw A key speech arrives towards the end of Joss Whedon's freewheeling space opera Serenity. The captain of an incongruous hunk of interplanetary junk–dubbed "Serenity" for said captain's transformative moment during a civil war in a valley of the same, ironic name–stands in a shaft of light and asks his disciples if, in essence, they're willing to follow him into Hell for a belief that their martyrdom will be in the cause of a greater glory. He's asking his crew, but he's also asking a slavering fanboy audience that has followed the good ship Serenity here to the big screen after the braintrust at Fox ("We'd rather focus on 'Stacked'–I'm sure you understand") cancelled Whedon's "Firefly" just eleven episodes into its run. The show found new life as a bestseller on DVD, of course, and this feature-length treatment acts as both the series finale it never got and a hopeful audition for a movie franchise. If it's still laden with such Whedonisms as thick, sometimes-inscrutable (certainly unspeakable) dialogue and a political cant worn, bleeding, on its sleeve, Serenity is also home to the kind of passion and belief in a cause worth fighting for with which the good ship's crew is infused at the bitter end.

War Gods of the Deep (1965)/At the Earth’s Core (1976) [Double Feature] – DVD

November 29, 2005Posted in1960s, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD, Fantasy, Sci-Fi, UK

War-Gods of the Deep
The City Under the Sea
½*/**** Image A Sound B
starring Vincent Price, Tab Hunter, Susan Hart, David Tomlinson
screenplay by Charles Bennett and Louis M. Heyward
directed by Jacques Tourneur

AT THE EARTH'S CORE
½*/**** Image A Sound B
starring Doug McClure, Peter Cushing, Caroline Munro, Cy Grant
screenplay by Milton Subotsky, based on the novel by Edgar Rice Burroughs
directed by Kevin Connor

by Walter Chaw Jacques Tourneur kicks all kinds of ass. He shone in the Forties with his Val Lewton collaborations and his magnificent, atmosphere-laden pictures Night of the Demon and Out of the Past. Having turned his attention primarily to moody Joel McCrea westerns and adventure pulpers in the Fifties, Tourneur, by the time the Sixties rolled around, unfortunately found himself outside his black-and-white comfort zone (his last great work is probably an episode of the original "The Twilight Zone", "Night Call") and at the helm of productions starring people like Steve Reeves and Vincent Price. One of his last pictures–1965's abominable War-Gods of the Deep–finds its way onto DVD via MGM's admirable "Midnite Movies" line as the front end of a double feature. It's a flat, fish-eyed stinker that positions itself as a ripper of both the Price-anchored Roger Corman/Edgar Allan Poe films and the bona fide cycle of Jules Verne spectacles that began with Disney's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954), continued through From the Earth to the Moon (1958) and Journey to the Center of the Earth (1959), and culminated in 1964's still-creepy First Men in the Moon, to which this film might owe its greatest debt. Ostensibly based on a Poe poem called "The City in the Sea," War-Gods of the Deep grafts its gothic settings (complete with another voiceover intro of Price reading a poem) to a Verne-like tale of a mysterious egomaniac (named "The Captain," of course, and played by Price) living in a giant, velvet-lined mansion beneath the sea, just off the coast of Cornwall.

Sky High (2005) + Stealth (2005)|Sky High [Widescreen] – DVD

November 28, 2005Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Coming of Age, Disney, DVD, Sci-Fi, Superhero, Teen, Theatrical, Thriller

SKY HIGH
½*/****  Image A Sound B+ Extras C+
starring Michael Angarano, Danielle Panabaker, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Kurt Russell
screenplay by Paul Hernandez and Robert Schooley & Mark McCorkle
directed by Mike Mitchell

STEALTH
**/****
starring Josh Lucas, Jessica Biel, Jamie Foxx, Sam Shepard
screenplay by W.D. Richter
directed by Rob Cohen

Skyhighby Walter Chaw A kids movie for the stupid ones and a guys movie for the stupid ones of those, Sky High and Stealth are lowest-common-denominator entertainments that throw sense out the window in favour of clumsy one-liners, bad special effects, and an eye focused keen on demographics and the bottom line, which those demographics promise to fork over on opening weekend. It doesn't matter if they're good, just that they rake in enough moolah before people get a whiff of the noisome rot and ennui wafting on air-conditioned currents out of the friendly neighbourhood cineplex and start staying home again in droves. The dreadfulness of Sky High and Stealth can be measured by the extent to which this nation's timid, gaffed, untrained, dispassionate film critics equivocate in their reviews that it's for kids, that it's an enjoyable film if you check your brain at the door, and/or that it's "finally" the family/action/blockbuster you've been waiting for all summer long.

Monster High (1989) – DVD

November 14, 2005Posted in1980s, Authors: Alex Jackson, Comedy, DVD, Horror, Sci-Fi, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/**** Image D Sound D
starring Dean Iandoli, Diana Frank, David Marriott, D.J. Kerzner
screenplay by Roy Langsdon and John Platt
directed by Rudiger Poe

by Alex Jackson I do not use this analogy lightly: Watching Monster High is sort of like watching your wife get raped. I felt actual fear as it unspooled, and there were several times I had to hold back from melting into a crying fit. These were not tears of incredulity or even pain, but tears born of anger, existential despair, and finally an acknowledgment of one's own innate inadequacy. There is this feeling that the whole thing will go unpunished and unacknowledged. Director Rudiger Poe and screenwriters Roy Langsdon and John Platt have taken something vital from me, something I don't think I can ever get back. And they have done it for no reason. There is no sin I could have committed to prompt this atrocity, it's something that just happened, as random and as meaningless as life itself.

Frankenstein (2004) – DVD

November 10, 2005Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, DVD, Horror, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Television

½*/**** Image A Sound B Extras B
starring Parker Posey, Vincent Perez, Thomas Kretschmann, Adam Goldberg
screenplay by John Shiban
directed by Marcus Nispel

by Walter Chaw Marcus Nispel's Frankenstein, conceived by schlock-meister general Dean Koontz as the pilot for a stillborn USA Network series, is the very model of style over substance. Would that the style even belonged to Nispel: all of muted greens and bleached yellows, memories of Se7en swim, bidden, to the mind of the genre enthusiast. It's one thing to frame the American backcountry in shades of monumentalized sepia (as Nispel did in his Texas Chain Saw Massacre redux), another altogether to throw a haze of music-video mute over the Big Easy. If the cinematography weren't enough, the title sequence and faux–Nine Inch Nails score take it the rest of the way, establishing the picture as a police procedural of a certain kind while the (misleading) title announces a supernatural bent. The real bogeys haunting the piece, though, are the careers of Parker Posey and Michael Madsen, together rattling chains disinterestedly as the former slides into her third decade as someone who's not very good but has managed to continue working based on some misconception of early indie-queen dividends, the latter too comfortable being both cast the crooked cop and mistaken for Tom Sizemore.

Save the Green Planet! (2003) – DVD

November 3, 2005Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Fantasy, Sci-Fi, South Korea, Thriller

Jigureul jikyeora!
***½/**** Image A Sound A Extras A
starring Shin Ha-gyun, Baik Yun-shik, Hwang Jung-min
written and directed by Jang Joon-hwan

by Walter Chaw The first third of hyphenate Jeong Joon-hwan's cinematic debut Save the Green Planet! (Jigureul jikyeora!) is sort of like Fargo if David Fincher had directed it, the second third like Sleuth if Terry Gilliam had directed it, and the final third like a mescaline hallucination, complete with a portly/heroic high-wire artist (Sooni (Hwang Jeong-min) and a swarm of murderous bees thrown into action by a jar of royal jelly. There's a crucifixion, entirely unspeakable and lawless references to 2001 and Blade Runner, and, without warning, a flashback to the unhappy childhood of our hero, Lee (Shin Ha-Kyun), composed with a lyrical sadness that brings a wholly-unexpected tear to the eye. Save the Green Planet! has been shot with scary confidence in a style long on provocative evocation and clarity and short on pyrotechnics for their own sake–something astonishing given that the plot revolves around alien invasion, gruesome torture, serial murder, corporate malfeasance, and Korea's tumultuous recent history. It's indescribable, is what I'm trying to say, but I do know that I was rapt through two screenings, seduced by its sprung logic and affected during its wordless epilogue of a child at play with his parents in a past unrecoverable full of light and love.

Doom (2005) + Stay (2005)

October 21, 2005Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Czech Republic, Drama, Germany, Horror, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, UK

DOOM
½*/****
starring The Rock, Karl Urban, Rosamund Pike, DeObia Oparei
screenplay by David Callaham and Wesley Strick
directed by Andrzej Bartkowiak

STAY
*½/****
starring Ewan McGregor, Naomi Watts, Ryan Gosling, Janeane Garofalo
screenplay by David Benioff
directed by Marc Forster

by Walter Chaw For a split second, the clouds part and I think I’ve kenned a glimmer of an idea in Andrzej Bartkowiak’s video game adaptation Doom that doesn’t involve homoerotic gun worship or ripping off everything from Aliens save its humanity. Semper Fi, gung ho, muscle-bound jarhead Sarge (Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson) takes it upon himself to order his own mini-Mai Lai because he’s a stickler for details, and his stock marines balk to varying degrees of morality-inspired mutiny. Suddenly, and just for that split second, Doom of all things becomes Casualties of War (and, in fact, literalizes that film’s tagline of “In war, innocence is the first casualty”), and although what’s leading up to the moment isn’t that great, I was ready to roll with this totally unexpected, thought-provoking tickle. Alas–it flees like hope so often does, leaving fifteen minutes of semi-gory first-person perspective to simulate the first-person perspective of the video game (marking this as the first–and probably last–time someone thought that ripping off Uwe Boll was a good idea), ending with the sort of mano-a-mano showdown between its warring alpha males that everyone’s seen enough of by now.

Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (2005)

October 7, 2005Posted in2000s, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Family, Horror, Mystery, Sci-Fi, UK

***/****
screenplay by Steve Box & Nick Park, Mark Burton and Bob Baker
directed by Nick Park and Steve Box

Wererabbitby Walter Chaw Perfectly innocuous even though it's (very) occasionally mildly naughty (a pair of melon jokes, a makeshift fig leaf labelled "contains nuts"), Aardman's Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (hereafter Were-Rabbit) doesn't break a lot of new ground in the claymated pair's misadventures in serving up a workmanlike tale of love, loyalty, gardening, gadgets, and misguided medical experimentation. It takes an unusually long time to get started, for one, re-establishing the best-pals relationship between cheese-loving, jug-eared inventor Wallace and his faithful mutt Gromit (theirs is an Inspector Gadget/Brain sort of dynamic) with the kind of leisurely pace that feels more like a valedictory procession than something born of necessity. "Wallace & Gromit" cartoons have, after all, become a standby on the festival circuit, functioning as buffers between films and the palette-cleanser in all-shorts programs. But it's that very function, as the whimsical interstitial, that makes a feature-length presentation just a charming diversion that outstays its welcome ever so slightly. Unlike its feature-length predecessor Chicken Run, there isn't the bite of satire in Were-Rabbit–no light shed on the British social caste system and, likewise, few inroads made in the traditional love vs. status romance. What coalesces is an appreciation for the craft involved in realizing the picture and a suspicion that you're going to be hungry again in about an hour.

Red Cockroaches (2003) – DVD

October 3, 2005Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Cuba, Drama, DVD, Sci-Fi

**/**** Image B Sound A- Extras B
starring Adam Plotch, Talia Rubel, Diane Spodarek, Jeff Pucillo
written and directed by Miguel Coyula

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover You have to give Red Cockroaches full props: it takes a no-budget budget, some half-understood ideas, and a whole lot of ingenuity and almost pulls off a movie. Alas, “almost” is as far as I’m willing to go, because the film never really understands what the hell it’s trying to say. Though it manages to make you forget its neophyte director’s sex fantasies and complaints, it’s more suggestive than articulate and gets your hopes up only to dash them with noncommittal execution. I have no idea where its combination of Blade Runner dystopia, Polanski perversity, and Sundance relationship drama was supposed to go, and it’s to writer-director Miguel Coyula’s credit that he can keep you praying that he isn’t going to take any sophomoric turns. Alas, he does, and Red Cockroaches does, and your rental night is done for.

A Sound of Thunder (2005)

September 7, 2005Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Czech Republic, Germany, Horror, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller, UK, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Edward Burns, Catherine McCormack, Ben Kingsley, Jemima Rooper
screenplay by Thomas Dean Donnelly & Joshua Oppenheimer and Gregory Poirier, based on the story by Ray Bradbury
directed by Peter Hyams

Soundofthunderby Walter Chaw Dr. Travis Ryer (Edward Burns) lives in 2055 Chicago, where he conducts hunting trips back to the same moment in the Cretaceous period to hunt the same dinosaur fated to die moments later in a tar pit. Cheap thrills for the future's bluebloods, the outfit is called "Time Safari," and it's owned by an evil capitalist, Hatton (Ben Kingsley), who, in trying to appease future-Chicago's strict time-travel regulatory agency, warns his clients to stay on the path and keep their hands to themselves lest the shockwaves of fucking with prehistory change the course of evolution. It's a term that A Sound of Thunder bandies about with some confidence, "evolution," but it does so without conveying the first idea of what evolution actually is or how it works. It's the kind of film that creationists and other retarded people will like because it mounts a pretty good case for the intelligent design-/flat earth-inspired "Heck, we don't know shit, anything could be true!" school of thought.

Lilo & Stitch (2002); Stitch! The Movie (2003); Lilo & Stitch 2: Stitch Has a Glitch (2005) – DVDs

August 29, 2005Posted in2000s, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Disney, DVD, Family, Sci-Fi

LILO & STITCH
***/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
written and directed by Chris Sanders & Dean DeBlois

by Bill Chambers Lilo (exceptionally well-voiced by Daveigh Chase) enjoys arts and crafts–she's in her "Blue Period"–and resents her vain classmates. Her homelife is less than ideal, since she has yet to become accustomed to thinking of her sister, Nani (Tia Carrere), as her dead mother's replacement. The dissent is mutual, and put in a pressure-cooker by child protective services, under whose watchful eye the siblings have fallen. Like a couple on the brink, Lilo and Nani try to patch things up by finding a use for their pet door, but what they bring home from the pound is not common and definitely not housebroken. Bent on destruction, Stitch (Chris Sanders, channelling Howie Mandel's Bobby), a six-limbed Miyazaki koala known on his planet as Experiment 626, escaped intergalactic incarceration and fell to Earth, only to be run over by a big-rig and placed in an animal shelter. The lenience and affection Lilo shows him deprograms Stitch, which in turn stuns his mad-scientist creator.

The Cave (2005)

August 25, 2005Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Horror, Mexico, Romania, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller

**½/****
starring Cole Hauser, Morris Chestnut, Lena Headey, Piper Perabo
screenplay by Michael Steinberg & Tegan West
directed by Bruce Hunt

Caveby Walter Chaw The comparisons are inevitable, but that's mostly because The Cave is about 80% identical to Anacondas: The Hunt for the Blood Orchid: the same throat-talking white hero (Jack (Cole Hauser this time)), complementary women (Lena Headey as the smart one and Piper Perabo as the bikini), black guy (Morris Chestnut in both films), Asian (Daniel Dae Kim), and egghead (Marcel Iures); the same fall from a giant waterfall; and the same various other good-looking male-model types who serve as chum for the same blurrily-shot CGI beast. There's even a cave in Anacondas, if you recall. But the 20% of The Cave that's different (no fraidy-cat Stepin Fetchit in this one), most notably the major plot twist (already spoiled in a doctored image in the film's trailers), make it the superior film. Not a good film, let's not go crazy, but not a terrible one, either–and if you can get into the idea that what the picture's really doing is rewriting the vampire mythos in biological/parasitical terms, you might even have a good time of the Reign of Fire variety.