Theatrical Archives - Page 37 of 65

Reign Over Me (2007) + TMNT (2007)|TMNT – DVD

August 5, 20072000s, Action, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Family, Hong Kong, Sci-Fi, Theatrical

REIGN OVER ME
**/****
starring Adam Sandler, Don Cheadle, Jada Pinkett Smith, Liv Tyler
written and directed by Mike Binder

TMNT
*/****
written and directed by Kevin Munroe

by Walter Chaw In response to the charge that critics are "downers" because they're too judgmental, a colleague and friend said on a panel that I participated in that some films only deserve judgment. It's a wonderfully bleak declaration, and dead on–think of it as an expansion of Pauline Kael's belief that no one ever takes the time to bash terrible pictures. But there's more to it than simply that brittle shattering of cinema's impregnable mythic mystique. I think certain movies deflect even judgment–movies that are the exact equivalent of, say, Michael Bolton and Kenny G collaborating on a cover of a Richard Marx song. Rail against them if you must, but there's no sport in it, and definitely no swaying of the assembled masses. There are films that are what they are, deserving neither praise nor condemnation in providing precisely the comfort of a tattered terry cloth robe worn ritualistically until disintegration. It's possible to meticulously, ruthlessly, intellectually deconstruct the aesthetic and functional properties of a favourite pair of sneakers, you know, but it's masturbatory and redundant and like swatting a fly with a Buick. I suspect that deep down everyone knows films like Reign Over Me and TMNT are as worthless as a plug nickel, that their appeal lies entirely in the fact that they'll present no surprises along with their usual meek payload of cheap emotional prattle and pocket uplift. And I'm not saying there's nothing wrong with that, either–I'm just saying I feel like I don't have much more to say after reviewing the same fucking movie about a dozen times a year.

The Bourne Ultimatum (2007)

August 2, 20072000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Espionage, France, Germany, Mystery, Spain, Theatrical, Thriller

***/****
starring Matt Damon, Julia Stiles, David Strathairn, Joan Allen
screenplay by Tony Gilroy and George Nolfi, based on the novel by Robert Ludlum
directed by Paul Greengrass

by Walter Chaw I look at the first film in this very fine trilogy as Jason Bourne embodying Harrison Ford’s Deckard character from Blade Runner: someone with hidden potential and a certain confusion about his place in the world–and the kind of figure Matt Damon is best at portraying, as it happens. I see the second film as Bourne-as-Roy Batty: robotic, violent, inexorable, and at the end of his string, valuing life and looking to make what amends he can. This third film, The Bourne Ultimatum, directed again by Paul Greengrass and welcoming several key players (Joan Allen, Julia Stiles, Damon, screenwriter Tony Gilroy, DP Oliver Wood) back into the fold, ties both strings together: Bourne inhabiting his potential as something of an unparalleled killing machine while, simultaneously, becoming more human in his machine-like purposefulness. If there’s a feeling we’ve been here before, mark that down as the inevitable side-effect of staying just a little too long with a series that, to this point, had yet to make any missteps, minor or otherwise. Consequently this film, more than the other two, feels like a straight line: less improvisation, more inevitability, all of it leading to the moment where our hero, the merciless assassin, decides whether his training to be an instrument overrules his instinct to be a human. It can’t be a surprise anymore, so all that’s left is that it be true.

Hairspray (2007)

July 19, 20072000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, Drama, Musical, Romance, Teen, Theatrical, UK

***/****
starring Nikki Blonsky, John Travolta, Michelle Pfeiffer, Queen Latifah
screenplay by Leslie Dixon
directed by Adam Shankman

by Walter Chaw It's pretty easy to take the neo-hipster stance of having been there when Divine ate dog shit and, because of status conferred by said endurance of John Waters at his most insouciantly "fuck you," to denounce the Broadway-ification of his already-mainstream-courting Hairspray–now turned into a movie based on a musical based on the original movie–as "Waters-lite." Except that Waters's satire at its best has always been a gloss on cults of pop (this is a guy who made an iconic cameo on "The Simpsons", for God's sake)–and after Polyester, all of his movies run like book for the plastic-fantastic of the Great White Way anyway. Artificiality is actually the point, affectedness another; like Italian, the only way to speak the language is to exaggerate past the point of embarrassment. Still, the key to Waters is the requirement that by assembling a collection of misfits to play his assembly of misfits, not a one of them takes to their duty ironically. Waters is the same kind of archivist as Quentin Tarantino in that way: the casting can be interpreted as a post-modern joke, but the performances need to be true to the essential nostalgia driving the casting. John Travolta in Pulp Fiction, in other words, needed very much to play it as straight as John Travolta is capable of playing it.

Live Free or Die Hard (2007) + Transformers (2007)

July 3, 20072000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Directors: Michael Bay, Sci-Fi, Spielberg, Theatrical, Thriller

LIVE FREE OR DIE HARD
***½/****
starring Bruce Willis, Justin Long, Timothy Olyphant, Cliff Curtis
screenplay by Mark Bomback
directed by Len Wiseman

TRANSFORMERS
*/****
starring Shia LaBeouf, Tyrese Gibson, Josh Duhamel, Jon Voight
screenplay by Roberto Orci & Alex Kurtzman
directed by Michael Bay

by Walter Chaw I remember the way I felt as a lad of fifteen when I saw John McTiernan's Die Hard, that tingly excitement of not being able to figure out how we were going to get out of this fine mess. The bad guys were smarter than the good guys, their plan was perfect, the henchmen were ruthless eurotrash, and the hero didn't have shoes. Understand it wasn't fear that the baddies would win, but trust that the filmmakers knew what they were doing even though their methods were mysterious: I could let myself relax because the heavy-lifting was already done for me. I felt the same way as Live Free or Die Hard (hereafter Die Hard 4) unspooled its tale of computer hackers running the world from the basements of their mothers' homes: if the bad guys could hijack anything controlled by a computer (that is, pretty much everything), then what hope would a bald, 52-year-old, Luddite cop with an estranged family and a worn-out smirk have? The film plays on that despair and, unlike in the second (awful) and third (excellent) instalments of this series, John McClane (Bruce Willis) seems fresh again, a walking revelation that even action heroes get old and obsolete to the point where they're cautionary tales for young studs and metaphors for their own careers. Remember Harrison Ford in Firewall? Instead of acknowledging that the world eventually passes you by, leaving you embittered and bellicose (as Die Hard 4 shows), Ford's character in Firewall is not only good with a knuckle sandwich, but also a "with it" computer stud. As miscalculations go, that's more pathetic than most.

Sicko (2007)

July 3, 20072000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Documentary, Theatrical

**/****
directed by Michael Moore

by Walter Chaw There's a moment that stands out in my mind about Fahrenheit 9/11, which tied with The Passion of the Christ as my pick for the worst film of 2004 (one for the left, one for the right): it's the moment when Michael Moore, in the middle of a riff about the "coalition of the willing" backing the United States into Iraq, descends through archival footage and rinky music to mock the countries that were actually our allies. The point being that America pretty much took matters into their own hands while breaking international law and flaunting its power over a largely impotent United Nations–and the effect being that Moore is a complete fucking asshole so concentrated on making a narrow, obvious point that he handily proves the widespread perception of Americans as xenophobic, arrogant, ignorant, and loudmouthed. Going after the Bush administration is enough like shooting fish in a barrel that most of Bush's own party has turned against him (not helping, probably, is that a majority of soldiers losing their lives in Iraq come from economically-disadvantaged families). Likewise, going after lax gun-control laws and a society of fear following the Columbine High School shootings; likewise corporate superciliousness in the rise and fall of industry in industrial America. I think, in other words, that Moore has made a living shooting fish in barrels, and that his latest target in Sicko, the United States' inhuman health care industry (and its lobbyists–four per congressman!, Moore informs), is just another one of those arguments no one is taking the other side on.

Ratatouille (2007)

June 29, 2007****/****, 2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Pixar, Theatrical

****/****
written and directed by Brad Bird

by Walter Chaw Brad Bird’s latest film Ratatouille is the auteur’s affirmation that it’s possible, no matter the station, to find genius among the rabble. It’s charmingly egalitarian, this idea that any class or creed can produce the next Einstein or Baryshnikov, and it seems a direct response to the critics of his The Incredibles who would say that that superhero film’s mantra of “if everyone is super, no one is” is an embodiment of intolerance and classism. Ratatouille‘s answer is a lot like the one offered by Bird’s feature debut, The Iron Giant: that not only is it possible to overcome one’s basic programming, but also that choice supersedes predestination and, moreover, that a basic morality governs the actions of all things. A lot to put on the doorstep of a film about a rat, Remy (voiced by Patton Oswalt), who wishes he could be a chef in the kitchen of idol Gasteau (Brad Garrett)–but Bird, in the course of just three films (and stints with “The Simpsons” and “The Critic”), has forged a pretty formidable ideology based on, of all alien things, the sociology of common sense. Some people are more gifted than others, some people are assholes, and most people are idiots; just as an understanding of race and gender comes with the acceptance of basic differences, so, too, does understanding within a culture only come through a similar acceptance that some people are super and others are simply background.

A Mighty Heart (2007)

June 27, 20072000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Drama, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

**/****
starring Angelina Jolie, Dan Futterman, Irrfan Khan, Archie Panjabi
screenplay by John Orloff, based on the book by Mariane Pearl
directed by Michael Winterbottom

by Walter Chaw An avowed Michael Winterbottom fan, I think he's amazing even when he fails. I marvel at his Thomas Hardy adaptations–the devastating Jude and the redemptive The Claim (his take on The Mayor of Casterbridge)–and I hadn't thought, before I actually saw him do it, that anyone but Charlie Kaufman would have a shot at turning Tristram Shandy into a viable film. When the extremely prolific Winterbottom decided to explore how music and sex evolve sympathetically in culture, he turned out a little unofficial trilogy (24 Hour Party People, Code 46, 9 Songs) in the span of two years. And now that he's become politicized–something he would say he always was, with 1997's vérité Welcome to Sarajevo as evidence–he's turned out, in the same span, In This World, The Road to Guantanamo, and now A Mighty Heart. This is the story of Mariane Pearl, widow of WALL STREET JOURNAL reporter Daniel Pearl, who was infamously beheaded while covering Al-Qaeda in Pakistan in the early days leading up to our current boondoggle. As that fan of Winterbottom's, I'm inclined to give the picture a benefit of a doubt I nevertheless wonder if it deserves. First run through my head, A Mighty Heart strikes me as pointless and unsurprising; Winterbottom is of course a better anthropologist than he is a political philosopher: if he's trying to apply Donald Symons's models of cultural evolution to ethics instead of more immediately compatible pursuits (music, or literature), then what's emerged from the experiment is the revelation that ethics and morality appear to have nothing to do with the base nature of man–and, moreover, that Angelina Jolie will never be Nicole Kidman in her ability to be both herself and someone else.

1408 (2007)

June 22, 20072000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Horror, Stephen King, Theatrical

*½/****
starring John Cusack, Samuel L. Jackson, Mary McCormack, Tony Shalhoub
screenplay by Matt Greenberg and Scott Alexander & Larry Karaszewski, based on the story by Stephen King
directed by Mikael Håfström

by Walter Chaw Boy, do I like John Cusack. He has scary, earnest intensity. No one does the nervous pit-pat like he does; no one else could have been Lloyd Dobler, or Martin Blank. Then there’s The Sure Thing, Better Off Dead, Being John Malkovich, and hey, I liked The Ice Harvest (most of it, anyway). And boy, I guess Samuel L. Jackson is sometimes not terrible. The one scene he and Cusack have together in the prestige horror flick 1408 plays like seriomythic garbage-pop poetry: everything’s good–the cadence, the words; what I’m saying is that I was well and truly on board with this dumbathon all the way up to the point where Jackson’s hotel manager Olin (and as an aside, King has a special place in my heart for opening The Shining with “Officious little prick,” referring to a different hotel manager) offers that the titular room in question isn’t haunted, it’s just an “evil fucking room.” Cusack is haunted landmark guide writer Mike (the landmark guides aren’t haunted, and neither is he, he documents haunted locations…never mind), not only a bit of a lush who looks like he’s gained a few pounds on his liquid diet but a surfer, too, making this one of a sudden slew of films to deal with surfing (Surf’s Up, Evan Almighty, Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer) while providing 1408 (it adds up to “13,” get it?) its Jacob’s Ladder/”Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” escape clause. Yes, it’s that kind of film–what kind of film did you think it was going to be?

Surf’s Up (2007)

June 12, 20072000s, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, Family, Sports, Theatrical

**½/****
screenplay by Don Rhymer and Ash Brannon & Chris Buck & Chris Jenkins
directed by Ash Brannon & Chris Buck

by Walter Chaw I guess it's fair to say that Ash Brannon (Toy Story 2) and Chris Buck's mockumentary Surf's Up is a successful send-up of the Endless Summer-style documentary recently revived by Stacy Peralta's Riding Giants–but its triumph as such is relegated to so microscopic a genre that its usefulness as satire is negligible. It might delight a few guys who revere Bruce Brown's waterlogged hagiographies or, closer to the vein, the handful of folks who'll actually recognize that surf legends Kelly Slater and Rob Machado make cameos–but we're a long way here from a roomful of toys coming to life when their owner is gone, and while it's tempting to laud Surf's Up for being ambitious, it's frustrating that the picture has to dedicate a tedious amount of time to the usual slapstick gags just to apologize for its obscure premise. Far from condemning it as the next Shrek, though, I'd say the worst thing about Surf's Up is that it's clever enough to leave you expecting more–and inoffensive enough (unless scenes of a primitive tribe of cannibal penguins can somehow be traced back to Native-fear flicks or intolerance towards Polynesians) to leave you wishing some of the "nuggets" its anachronistic Chicken Joe (Jon Heder, in the first performance of his career that didn't leave me wanting to punch his mother) mentions were in more obvious display in the filmmakers.

Knocked Up (2007)

June 6, 20072000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Romance, Theatrical

***/****
starring Seth Rogen, Katherine Heigl, Paul Rudd, Leslie Mann
written and directed by Judd Apatow

by Walter Chaw As a dyed-in-the-wool fan of Judd Apatow’s work with Paul Feig on “Freaks and Geeks”, I mark in his solo efforts (The 40 Year Old Virgin and now Knocked Up) a preoccupation with going to Hell. (“Freaks and Geeks”, on the other hand, is mainly about not drowning whilst wallowing in hell.) I mean that not only theologically but also biologically and emotionally–Apatow’s are comedies about worrying that you’re not where you’re meant to be at certain milestones in your life and, moreover, that you might never get there. Being 40 the critical point in his last picture, here it’s articulated in an exchange between slacker king Ben (Seth Rogen) and his sad-eyed father (Harold Ramis), where the expectations of embracing responsibility are passed as fear and regret from a man to his son.

Shrek the Third (2007)

May 17, 20072000s, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Eddie Murphy, Family, Fantasy, Japan, Romance, Theatrical

½*/****
screenplay by Jeffrey Price & Peter S. Seaman and Chris Miller & Aron Warner
directed by Chris Miller

by Walter Chaw A bad franchise reaches its nadir as DreamWorks Animation's flat-awful Shrek the Third (hereafter Shrek 3) tackles the King Arthur mythos in eighty unwatchable minutes of thunderously boring and occasionally moralizing shit, puke, and hitting gags. The only thing mildly entertaining in the whole mess is a prolonged death scene for a frog followed by a chorus of the things singing a Wings song–entertaining, though not in any way inspired or satirical. As calling the movie dumb would constitute a recommendation for people actually interested in seeing it, better to call it the kind of life-suck where you can feel the irretrievable minutes siphoning out your eyes. To say that children would enjoy it is a smokescreen for the mentally-underdeveloped and emotionally immature to indulge in lowest-common-denominator slapstick and the type of hollow banter that passes for wit in great swaths of greater primate societies. All else fails and toss in a cover of Heart's "Barracuda" by that champion of women's rights and humps Fergie–paired in facile shorthand with a throwaway gag featuring one of the pantheon of fairy tale princesses burning her bra. (Describing it is already more funny and clever than the action itself is in the film.) Prescribing medieval Ever After revisionist feminism to something as essentially useless and inert as Shrek 3 is jarring to the point of total incoherence. If anything, this film is the prime example of what happens when the aim of crafting something for the express purpose of entertaining dullards, mental defectives, and toddlers results in something so middlebrow that it tends toward a vacuum. In its "defense," it's more likely to cause naps than to cause hyperactivity.

Inland Empire (2006)

April 27, 2007****/****, 2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: David Lynch, Drama, Esoterica, Horror, Mystery, Theatrical, Thriller

****/****
starring Laura Dern, Jeremy Irons, Justin Theroux, Grace Zabriskie
written and directed by David Lynch

by Walter Chaw Nikki (Laura Dern) is an actress landing her dream role opposite Devon (Justin Theroux) in a film directed by the great Kingsley Stewart (Jeremy Irons). Alas the project, "On High in Blue Tomorrows", has a history in which a previous, doomed production ended as reality seeped into its fiction and the film's onscreen/offscreen lovers were killed. For a moment, it seems as though David Lynch's Inland Empire might be as straightforward as a haunted Hollywood genre exercise–but time slips, it's suddenly the next day, and as one character says to another, you're sitting over there. Displaced, distracted, the picture is a masterpiece that, for the patient, the active, and the curious, may be the most literal definition of "dread" captured on film. That feeling you get when Henry Spencer contemplates his feral baby in Eraserhead is the same species of disgusted, familiar fascination that infects this film like a murder of maggots.

Hot Fuzz (2007)

April 20, 20072000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, France, Mystery, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

***/****
starring Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, Jim Broadbent, Timothy Dalton
screenplay by Edgar Wright & Simon Pegg
directed by Edgar Wright

by Walter Chaw Edgar Wright, Simon Pegg, and Nick Frost return after the triumph of Shaun of the Dead with the nominal success of Hot Fuzz: the one a dead-on skewering of/homage to the zombie genre, the latter an equally-dead-on skewering of/homage to the buddy-cop genre that leads one to conclude that the zombie genre is infinitely more fulsome a target than the buddy-cop genre. Though it's clearly the product of smart guys who care about the films they lampoon, there's obviously a difference between making a movie that can stand proudly alongside George Romero's body of work and making one that could keep good company with Michael Bay's. (There's a lot of meat to be mined in a clever dissection of the zombie genre, in other words, whereas most action flicks of this type are already self-parodying exercises in excessive hetero-affirmation amidst much piece-fondling and weeping.) What works best about Hot Fuzz isn't its admirable respect for and similarly keen understanding of films like Robin Hardy's The Wicker Man and Richard Rush's fondly-remembered Freebie and the Bean, but that it, like Shaun of the Dead, functions remarkably well as an example of the genre–something of which most parodies (i.e. arbitrary garbage like Shrek) are completely incapable.

Color Me Kubrick (2006) + The Hoax (2007)

April 10, 20072000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Comedy, Drama, France, Isle of Man, Theatrical, UK

Colour Me Kubrick: A True…ish Story
½*/****
starring John Malkovich, Jim Davidson, Richard E. Grant, Luke Mably
screenplay by Anthony Frewin
directed by Brian W. Cook

THE HOAX
**½/****
starring Richard Gere, Alfred Molina, Marcia Gay Harden, Stanley Tucci
screenplay by William Wheeler
directed by Lasse Hallström

by Walter Chaw Suffice it to say that any picture featuring a sped-up version of the "William Tell Overture" is so drunk on its own whimsy that it most likely sucks with a dedicated vigour. Case in point: Brian W. Cook's twee Color Me Kubrick, which chronicles, sort of, the life and times of impostor Alan Conway (John Malkovich) as he sashays through days of getting free drinks and the occasional hummer by telling people he's the eponymous director. Never mind that Conway doesn't appear to know the difference between Stanleys Kubrick and Kramer, or that Malkovich's portrayal of him is so offensively fey that it could be used as a fright vid at "Focus on the Family" scare revivals–Color Me Kubrick is a grand drag revue without a rudder, and because it's not particularly entertaining, it harbours no purpose great or small. Malkovich is only ever Malkovich in all his alien glory, neatly eclipsing his supporting cast, any momentum in the script or direction, and, ultimately, any pathos in Conway's sad need to be someone else. (More egregiously unexamined is everyone else's sadder need to be in the orbit of celebrity.) Unimaginatively shot and, it can't be reiterated enough, abominably written (one scene has Conway suggesting he's cast John Malkovich in 3001: A Space Odyssey, to which his dinner mate asks, "John who?"–droll, no?), the picture is mainly interesting because, after having sat on the shelf for a while, it's finally surfaced in tandem with Lasse Hallström's similarly-mothballed film about another fabulist, Clifford Irving.

Grindhouse (2007)

April 5, 2007****/****, 2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Esoterica, Horror, Theatrical, Thriller

***/****
Planet Terror (**/****): starring Rose McGowan, Freddy Rodriguez, Michael Biehn, Jeff Fahey
written and directed by Robert Rodriguez
Death Proof (****/****): starring Kurt Russell, Rosario Dawson, Vanessa Ferlito, Zoe Bell
written and directed by Quentin Tarantino

by Walter Chaw Robert Rodriguez is better at making an old exploitation movie and Quentin Tarantino is better at capturing the joy of watching old exploitation movies, meaning that the Rodriguez half of Grindhouse is exuberant, post-modern camp and the Tarantino half is, as Tarantino's films usually are, pure delight. Rodriguez winks and tries maybe too hard; Tarantino, being the sui generis of a very specific kind of film, proceeds to create something that resembles Vanishing Point and Two-Lane Blacktop while steering clear of irony, self-indulgence, and post-modernism in its reverence. The mistake is in seeing some of Tarantino's casting choices as ironic: what's wrong with the careers of the world's Travoltas and Pam Griers and even De Niros is that they started cashing in on the ironic value of their brand. No, what Tarantino does is remember why they became a brand in the first place. A moment where Kurt Russell, as Tarantino's bogey Stuntman Mike, flashes a giant, shit-eating grin right through the fourth wall doesn't come off as self-congratulatory so much as it shows an old genre vet excited to be back in the saddle. While Rodriguez's Planet Terror is fun in a back-clapping way, Tarantino's Death Proof is a profound insight into the sort of dick-raising entertainments that made Tarantino who he is as fanboy artist. Rodriguez likes to show off–Tarantino can only make the movies he makes: it's not the pulpiness of the subject matter that feels like the true faith in Tarantino's films, it's the sense that for all the artificiality of his aesthetic, there's not an ounce of pretense in his decisions. In short, Rodriguez is the Salieri to Tarantino's Mozart.

The Lookout (2007)

March 29, 20072000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, Theatrical, Thriller

***/****
starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Jeff Daniels, Matthew Goode, Isla Fisher
written and directed by Scott Frank

by Walter Chaw Perfectly workmanlike in execution, Scott Frank's hyphenate debut The Lookout is a mash of admirable capers (A Simple Plan, Memento, and Fargo are high in its pantheon of giants' shoulders), but it lacks suture in its crime arc, making one wish that its small character moments–highlighted by a superlative cast–were allowed to anchor its climax and epilogue. As Chris Pratt, a brain-damaged youth suffering after an act of high school chutzpah that resulted in the annihilation of his golden life, Joseph Gordon-Levitt continues to cement his claim as the best young actor of his generation, delivering a performance revolving around the life and death of the mind that is heartbreaking in its observation and subtlety. I think a lot about a moment near the end of the film where he makes change for an old acquaintance and lament that the twenty minutes or so that precede its conclusion–twenty minutes that drag The Lookout into convention and cheap formula–even happened. Until then, the picture drags some seriously dark shit out from under the psychic bed, such as how being a sports hero in high school can hide the fact that you're maybe an asshole setting yourself up for a fall, and how robbing anyone of virility and self-esteem (not to mention Everybody's All-American) can lead to dangerous explosions involving women and long firearms. Once exposed to this genre's sputtering arc light, however, all that darkness in The Lookout is suddenly at the mercy of a lot of travel-worn underdog revenge bullshit. The tightrope of genre pictures is that the first time I can predict what's going to happen is usually when it loses me for good.

Blades of Glory (2007)

March 29, 20072000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Sports, Theatrical

*/****
starring Will Ferrell, Jon Heder, Will Arnett, Craig T. Nelson
screenplay by Jeff Cox & Craig Cox and John Altschuler & Dave Krinsky
directed by Will Speck & Josh Gordon

by Walter Chaw A goodly portion of Will Ferrell's fame has to do with his complete comfort with his body and sexuality. No surprise, then, that Blades of Glory's one-trick pony is straight men doing gay things in what is widely regarded as the gayest sport at the Winter Olympics. Not necessarily that figure skating is dominated by gay men (aside: isn't it?), but that the sight of men in spandex and codpieces pretending to be swans is uncomfortable for great swaths of middle-America and thus subject to ridicule and hatred. The first shot of the film suggests the divide as little Jimmy MacElroy (Zachary Ferrin as a child, the untalented Jon Heder as an adult) joyfully Salchows on an ice rink segregated from the "normals" playing hockey below. Recognized for his nascent useless talent, he's adopted by a megalomaniacal millionaire (William Fichtner in too small a role) who grooms little Jimmy into an Olympic champion whose only rival on the ice is portly sex machine Chazz (Will Ferrell). When the two get into a fistfight on the awards stanchion, they're banned from competing in their division–leading, of course, to their decision to return to glory in the pairs division. I'm not suggesting that Blades of Glory is hateful, really, so much as facile and easy. If you think Ferrell not wearing much as one half of the first man-man figure skating team is hysterical, and if you consider the gag of straight men touching each other's groins for the sake of a spectacle that's already beyond parody to be comedy gold, then have I got a movie for you.

Premonition (2007)

March 15, 20072000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Mystery, Theatrical, Thriller, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Sandra Bullock, Julian McMahon, Nia Long, Peter Stormare
screenplay by Bill Kelly
directed by Mennan Yapo

by Walter Chaw There's a scene in the middle of Mennan Yapo's thunderously bad Premonition where two little moppets do a little "Who Killed Cock Robin?" hopscotch that is meant, I think, to mirror their mother's tripping back and forth through time to before and after her husband's timely/untimely death. See? I get it. Premonition, with its faux-spiritual, quasi-pretentious, Hallmark Hall of Fame-enshrined machinations, not only thinks pretty highly of itself in its Lake House fashion, but also corroborates a whole new genre behind the ample wake generated by newly-solemn Sandra Bullock involving fractured narratives (see also: Crash), often time travel (The Lake House), and pat morals having to do–like the ironic moral to another time travel fable–with being excellent to one another. Not even the sight of a severed head rolling around at a funeral or Peter Stormare as the voice of reason lends the picture the slightest flicker of life. It's less damning than Bullock's primary career as the poor man's Julia Roberts in vaguely misogynistic romantic comedies, I suppose, though the best that could be said about Bullock's dreary new path is that while the films are still appallingly bad, at least they're not especially popular. This predilection for knocking off Nicholas Sparks master plots should be a short-lived one.

The Number 23 (2007)

February 23, 20072000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Mystery, Theatrical, Thriller

*/****
starring Jim Carrey, Virginia Madsen, Logan Lerman, Danny Huston
screenplay by Fernley Phillips
directed by Joel Schumacher

by Walter Chaw The wilted potential part of it reminding a great deal of Ramsey Campbell's The Count of Eleven, the new Jim Carrey vehicle The Number 23 finds professional hack Joel Schumacher returning to his Flatliners camp/schlock phase: a sort of supernatural thriller (sort of) that goes the Secret Window route towards absolute stunning mediocrity. Hardest to watch isn't Schumacher's umpteenth treatise on how to shine any project to a frictionless, dimwit, burlesque sheen, but rather Carrey's betrayal of himself by following Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind with a limp Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events, a dreadful Fun with Dick and Jane, and now this. It suggests to me a lot of things, most of all the impression that Carrey, despite still wanting at least in part to be taken seriously as an actor, may have lost the critical facility first to avoid Schumacher projects and second to differentiate between high-concept dreck and Charlie Kaufman existential inspiration. Neither mysterious nor enthralling, The Number 23 is ridiculous, not for its complexity, but for its belief in its complexity–not for its Byzantine twists and turns, but for its utter self-delusion. It's READER'S DIGEST: the presumption that people who actually read would prefer to read this truncated, pandering, aggressively-neutered pap.

Because I Said So (2007)

February 2, 20072000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Romance, Theatrical, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Diane Keaton, Mandy Moore, Gabriel Macht, Stephen Collins
screenplay by Karen Leigh Hopkins & Jessie Nelson
directed by Michael Lehmann

by Walter Chaw From the guy who once upon a time made Heathers–a film that remains the pithiest commentary on school violence and the sea of troubles faced by adolescents lost in the blackboard jungle–comes a fearsome rampage against mankind and art, the excrescent Because I Said So. The best that can be said about this early contender for the worst film of 2007 is that it’s properly keystone’d by Diane Keaton, who, between this and The Family Stone, cements her position as the most smug, insufferable, unwatchable persona in a long and tumescent line of such personae. She embodies the absolute worst of every single stereotype of the domineering mother: dotty, ditzy, Luddite, sexless/oversexed, cruel, racist, otherwise intolerant, and above all hysterical. Throw her psychotic mommy dearest from The Other Sister into the stew and it’s hard to find a more stalwart movie monster in the last ten years than Keaton, who’s gone from a charming neurotic to a cobwebbed, cell-phone-wielding vagina dentata.