The Royal Tenenbaums (2001)

December 26, 2001Posted in****/****, 2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Directors: Wes Anderson, Drama, Theatrical

****/****
starring Gene Hackman, Anjelica Huston, Ben Stiller, Gwyneth Paltrow
screenplay by Wes Anderson & Owen Wilson
directed by Wes Anderson

Royaltenenbaumsby Walter Chaw Royal Tenenbaum (Gene Hackman) is the estranged patriarch of the Tenenbaums, a family of child prodigies that, beset by a series of “accidents and disasters,” has never again attained the heights of its early glories. Chas (Ben Stiller), an economics wizard, Margot (Gwyneth Paltrow), a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, and Richie (Luke Wilson), a tennis star, return after years of fecklessness to the home of their mother, Etheline (Anjelica Huston), drawn there by the news that Royal is mortally afflicted with stomach cancer. In his words, he has “six weeks to set things right” with his disenchanted, wounded kin, trying all the while to undermine Etheline’s budding relationship with their accountant, Mr. Sherman (Danny Glover).

The Affair of the Necklace (2001)

December 26, 2001Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Romance, Theatrical

½/****
starring Hilary Swank, Simon Baker, Adrien Brody, Jonathan Pryce
screenplay by John Sweet
directed by Charles Shyer

Affairofthenecklaceby Walter Chaw Alternately boring and hilarious, The Affair of the Necklace is high cheese of the French Revolution variety, delighted by its own creamery version of ribaldry (there are more stifled titters in Affair than at an Oscar Wilde convention) and infatuated with the passion that ripping bodices has failed to imply for over two centuries. It is inadvertently self-critical (at various points in the film characters breathily intone, “It is amazing how quickly you have become tedious,” or “It is a monument to vanity,” or “The public found her guilty of excess”), and credit is due, I suppose, to poor, gaffed Hilary Swank for being either too daffy to see that irony or a better actress than she appears in concealing any self-aware mirth. The Swank of The Affair of the Necklace is the Swank of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which is of course the only Swank, her stunt turn in Boys Don’t Cry notwithstanding. The most astonishing thing about The Affair of the Necklace, though, is how with a cast that includes Brian Cox, Christopher Walken, and Jonathan Pryce, it manages to be jaw-droppingly awful; had I not squirmed in mute horror, transfixed before the film’s appalling majesty, I would not have believed it myself.

The Majestic (2001)

December 21, 2001Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Romance, Theatrical

*½/****
starring Jim Carrey, Martin Landau, Laurie Holden, Allen Garfield
screenplay by Michael Sloane
directed by Frank Darabont

Majesticby Walter Chaw The Majestic begins promisingly enough; I wondered for a while if it was riffing on the short story “Mars is Heaven” (from Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles), wherein Martians recreate a bucolic midsummer’s evening in Springfield for visiting astronauts, only to murder the terrestrial interlopers in their blissful sleep. I actually held out hope that the Rockwellian Lawson, CA of The Majestic was going to be like that for amnesiac screenwriter Peter Appleton (Jim Carrey), who washes ashore there after a whimsical bridge accident. If only The Majestic were some kind of Truman Show/“Twilight Zone” construct along these lines, but no such luck: Frank Darabont’s latest film, a creepily painstaking reproduction of Frank Capra’s Americana and Capra’s wide-eyed vision of American justice, betrays not a hint of invention. The Majestic is a manipulation so fearful of controversy that it inadvertently forgives both the film industry it apparently mocks and the witch hunters it seeks to excoriate.

Kate & Leopold (2001)

December 21, 2001Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Romance, Theatrical, Time Travel

**½/****
starring Meg Ryan, Hugh Jackman, Liev Schreiber, Breckin Meyer
screenplay by James Mangold and Steven Rogers
directed by James Mangold

by Walter Chaw That the consistently grating Meg Ryan, now milking her second decade as a suspect princess of perk, stars in yet another variation on the When Harry Met Sally, “opposites in love against all odds” scenario augers ill, to be certain. But Kate & Leopold is a decent addition to the beleaguered and overcrowded romantic comedy genre (think Somewhere in Time meets Splash); look for an explanation in James Mangold’s steady direction, the clever, deconstructive screenplay he wrote with Steven Rogers, and a rock-steady performance by Hugh Jackman that is confident and unembarrassed.

Intimacy (2001)

December 7, 2001Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, France, Germany, Romance, Spain, Theatrical, UK

**½/****
starring Mark Rylance, Kerry Fox, Susannah Harker, Timothy Spall
screenplay by Patrice Chéreau, Hanif Kureishi, Anne-Louise Trividic
directed by Patrice Chéreau

Intimacyby Walter Chaw Jay (Mark Rylance) is a sour bar manager who, six years previous, walked out on his wife and two young boys. Claire (Kerry Fox) is a dour acting teacher and mother of one married to an oafish Cockney cabbie (Andy, played by Timothy Spall like the refugee from a Mike Leigh film he is). Every Wednesday at two in the afternoon, Jay and Claire couple in Jay’s austere, unfurnished flat. As a homosexual French bartender–the too-awkward representation of uninhibited sagacity–helpfully supplies, “It’s rare that two people meet one another who have the same needs.” But Jay appears to have needs different from Claire’s: Trailing her after they rendezvous, he watches her as she drops off her dry-cleaning, takes public transportation, and finally ends up at a hole-in-the-wall drama company to perform badly in a Tennessee Williams revival. Striking up a mine-strewn conversation with his lover’s husband over pints of bitter and a game of billiards, Intimacy seismically shifts from one powerful cinematic symbol (sex) to another (theatre), and in so doing demonstrates a remarkable courage in its nakedness; and an exasperating lack of focus in its thrust.

The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001)

December 6, 2001Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Fantasy, Theatrical

***½/****
starring Elijah Wood, Ian McKellen, Viggo Mortensen, Sean Astin
screenplay by Fran Walsh & Philippa Boyens & Peter Jackson, based on the novel The Fellowship of the Ring by J.R.R. Tolkien
directed by Peter Jackson

Fellowshipoftheringby Walter Chaw At the heart of Peter Jackson’s brilliant The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring–the first of three cinematic adaptations of Tolkien’s beloved fantasy, shot simultaneously for release in consecutive years–is a favourable melancholy, a despair born of two things: the crucial feeling of desperation that infests a small band of heroes striving against an invincible evil; and the knowledge that this film will soon end, its sequel twelve months away. Jackson has translated nearly every element of Tolkien’s universe, from a vast, sprawling history implied in the language and the actions of its multi-specied characters, to a completely immersive fantasy realm with nary a seam to spoil the illusion, to a quest that’s worthy of epic attention. He’s captured the sadness and moral weight of Tolkien with the kind of deep reality that seems effortless but is born of a meticulous preparation and all-consuming vision. It takes a certain skill to make things look good; it takes genius to keep the pretty pictures from overwhelming the narrative of what is, in this case, a universally familiar story. Ridley Scott never quite got the hang of it.

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (2001)

November 16, 2001Posted in2000s, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Family, Fantasy, Theatrical, UK

Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone
**/****
starring Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint, Emma Watson, John Cleese
screenplay by Steven Kloves, based on the novel by J.K. Rowling
directed by Chris Columbus

Harrypottersorcererby Walter Chaw There is such a dedicated lack of controversy and tension in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone that all of its benefit as a children’s fiction is lost to the machinery of Hollywood spectacle. Gone is the dread uncertainty, the persecution of a child because of parents or class, and any true appreciation of consequences in the various action scenarios that lockstep unfold to the strict dictates of the plot; it’s Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory without the candy. At a bloated 152 minutes, the film depends to a peculiar degree on our familiarity with J.K. Rowling’s outrageously popular series of books: it does little to establish the characters and has such a feeling of clockwork inevitability that it’s shocking when the finale comes and goes with almost nothing resembling purpose, much less resolution. Though it’s arguably faithful to the major movements of the book (thus satisfying a large population of its tyke fans until they begin to develop discretion), Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone suffers from what I like to call the “Wizard of Oz” malady: no brain, no heart, no courage.

Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust (2001)

November 9, 2001Posted in2000s, Action, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Fantasy, Hong Kong, Horror, Japan, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Vampire

***½/****
screenplay by Yoshiaki Kawajiri, based on the novel by Hideyuki Kikuchi
directed by Yoshiaki Kawajiri

Vampirehunterdbloodlustby Walter Chaw Yoshiaki Kawajiri’s name is probably not as familiar to anime’s United States fanbase as Hayao Miyazaki, Katsuhiro Ôtomo, Mamoru Oshii, Isao Takahata, or Shinichirô Watanabe, but amid those in the “know,” his Ninja Scroll is among the best pure action/fantasy films of the last fifty years in any medium. Tightly plotted and drawn in a style that crosses Bernie Wrightson with Kelley Jones’s work in Neal Gaiman’s Sandman comic series, Ninja Scroll is one of few eloquent stand-alone justifications for Japanese animation as a movement of true cinematic value and lasting merit. Perhaps accounting for his relatively anonymous standing, Kawajiri’s other films veer wildly from the sloppily drawn though viscerally intriguing Wicked City to the frankly awful Demon City Shinjuku. With Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust, Kawajiri’s first film since Ninja Scroll six years back, the director takes on Hideyuki Kikuchi’s popular manga D–yousatsukou (the sequel to Kyuuketsuki Hantaa ‘D’, made into 1985’s Vampire Hunter D by Toyoo Ashida), and produces something that falls in quality somewhere between the dizzying heights of Ninja Scroll and the occasionally weak Wicked City, while borrowing images and elements from both.

Jump Tomorrow (2001)

October 31, 2001Posted in****/****, 2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Romance, Theatrical

****/****
starring Tunde Adebimpe, Natalia Verbeke, Hippolyte Girardot, Patricia Mauceri
written and directed by Joel Hopkins

by Walter Chaw An unlikely romance, an unlikely road movie, and an unlikely buddy picture all in one that somehow works (and with a surplus of charm and sweetness), Joel Hopkins’s debut feature Jump Tomorrow could be described as either Harold Lloyd by way of Jacques Tati or Jim Jarmusch by way of Thirties screwball. Or just simply “fantastic.” It is hopelessly romantic and subversively funny, a Being There-esque collection of guileless characters left to interact in ways that are so nobly old-fashioned and innocent, it takes a good half-hour before we realize that Jump Tomorrow doesn’t have a baseball bat clutched in the hand behind its back. It doesn’t have a hand behind its back at all.

K-Pax (2001)

October 26, 2001Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Theatrical

K-PAX
*/****
starring Kevin Spacey, Jeff Bridges, Mary McCormack, Alfre Woodard
screenplay by Charles Leavitt, based on the novel by Gene Brewer
directed by Iain Softley

Kpaxby Walter Chaw Madman Prot (Kevin Spacey) has been incarcerated for months at various state-run mental institutions. Because psychotropic drugs do not affect Prot, he’s sent to Dr. Mark Powell (Jeff Bridges); presumably, Powell is the authority on madmen unaffected by psychotropic drugs. Prot, however, can also see ultra-violet light, map the orbits of undiscovered planets around undiscovered solar systems (begging a few questions), and talk to dogs by barking at them. Prot believes himself an alien from the distant planet K-Pax, and it’s up to Dr. Powell to uncover the trauma that has unhinged this man. Along the way, Prot’s unconventional (and wiseass) view of our foibles teaches us all a little about ourselves, leading to cuddly Patch Adams moments wherein this dangerous fruitbar repairs Dr. Powell’s crumbling familial relationships and reverses insanity by urging his fellow inmates to look for bluebirds and attempt to kill one another. K-Pax is derivative, populist, feel-good trash of the first order–it’s tailor-made for a populace gone daft from decades of insipid soup generally starring Robin Williams.

Bones (2001)

October 24, 2001Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Horror, Theatrical
*/****
starring Snoop Doggy Dogg, Pam Grier, Michael T. Weiss, Clifton Powell
screenplay by Adam Simon & Tim Metcalfe
directed by Ernest R. Dickerson

by Walter Chaw Bones, from Spike Lee’s former cinematographer Ernest Dickerson (director of the underestimated horror-comedy Tales from the Crypt: Demon Knight), is torpedoed first and foremost by rapper/felon Snoop Doggy Dogg’s monstrous ego and lack of anything resembling a sense of humour about himself. The result is a film that merely rip-offs Hellraiser (down to the reconstituted corpse), A Nightmare on Elm Street (down to the floppy-hat-wearing vengeful ghoul), and, most peculiarly of all, Dario Argento’s Inferno and Suspiria (burning hellmouth, rain of maggots, man-eating dog). Bones also borrows liberally from the blaxploitation flicks of the Seventies in Snoop’s period pimp outfit and the presence of Pam Grier in her Foxy Brown attire, yet it lacks the camp appeal that excuses miniscule budgets and a lack of craft. The one thing that separates Bones from all the films it’s trying to emulate is its noteworthy inability to muster either fear or fun.

My First Mister (2001)

October 22, 2001Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Coming of Age, Drama, Germany, Romance, Teen, Theatrical

*/****
starring Albert Brooks, Leelee Sobieski, John Goodman, Michael McKean
screenplay by Jill Franklyn
directed by Christine Lahti

Myfirstmisterby Walter Chaw Something’s fatally off about My First Mister, veteran character actor Christine Lahti’s feature-length directorial debut. Awkward and atonal, it appears to be some strange cross between a reverse-gendered Harold and Maude and a mainstream Ghost World, and despite its desperation to appear so, it’s neither as intelligent nor edgy as either. Jill Franklyn’s screenplay (her first produced) just doesn’t work. It’s hollow to the ear and disagreeable to the taste, only ringing true occasionally through the Herculean intervention of Albert Brooks, here in his most restrained and affecting performance since Broadcast News. That noise you hear when Leelee Sobieski’s weary (and wearying) voiceover confides, “My clothes are not all black. Some of them are blue. Sometimes I wear them together so I look like a bruise,” is an audience’s worth of eyeballs rolling skyward. The problems Franklyn’s script presents to the rest of the cast, however, particularly the Helen Hunt-ishly smug (and similarly limited) Sobieski and Carol Kane as another gnomish manic eccentric, are insurmountable. They’re crushed beneath the weight of convenience, contrivance, Lahti’s unfortunate impulse towards the cutesy, and a score that is as insulting and invasive as any to be found in a Chris Columbus film or from the recently-flaccid baton of the once-great John Williams.

The Last Castle (2001)

October 18, 2001Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Prison, Theatrical, Thriller

*/****
starring Robert Redford, James Gandolfini, Mark Ruffalo, Steve Burton
screenplay by David Scarpa and Graham Yost
directed by Rod Lurie

by Walter Chaw As I walked out of the theatre after a screening of part infinity-plus-one of Robert Redford’s “I am an American Icon” film series (adding three-star general to his playboy, cowboy, investigative journalist, and baseball pitcher), a grey old lady exclaimed for our consideration: “Fantastic film. Just perfect for the time.” I assumed that by “the time” she meant “our post-September 11th, anthrax-paranoia time.” That much was clear. What bothers me is that while I was watching a film about a prison uprising resulting in multiple guard fatalities led by a megalomaniacal and disgraced army man (who proudly confesses his bad judgment in leading eight of his men to their demise), this woman was seeing a battle hymn “perfect for the time.” How does one address this difference in perception, and how do these two readings intersect in the idea of what is distinctly American?

Iron Monkey (1993)

October 12, 2001Posted in1990s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, Hong Kong, Martial Arts, Theatrical

***½/****
starring Yu Rong Guang, Donnie Yen, Jean Wang, Tsang Sze Man
screenplay by Tsui Hark, Elsa Tang, Lau Tai Mok
directed by Yuen Wo Ping

by Walter Chaw I first saw Yuen Woo-ping’s Iron Monkey on what must have been a third-generation bootleg: it was in unsubtitled Cantonese and fullscreen pan-and-scan, brought home unlabeled on a cheap Maxell videotape from a Vietnamese grocery down on South Federal. As a native Mandarin speaker, I didn’t understand a word of it, and the quality of the tape was such that it was impossible to decipher any shadow detail, but it was clear to me even then that Iron Monkey was something extremely special. Long a cult favourite in the United States (although it didn’t do particularly well when released theatrically in Asia), Iron Monkey received an extremely nice DVD transfer in 1998 from Media Asia; it is a disc that holds a place of honour in my personal collection. With the massive popularity of The Matrix and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (both choreographed by Woo-ping), as well as the surprising success of Americanized re-issues of Jackie Chan’s old Hong Kong films, Iron Monkey has been cleaned up, freshly subtitled, and booked in American moviehouses in an attempt to capitalize on the sudden popularity of wire-fu in particular and the dizzying HK cinema in general.

Va savoir (2001)

October 12, 2001Posted in****/****, 2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Drama, France, Germany, Italy, Romance, Theatrical

Who Knows?
****/****
starring Claude Berri, Catherine Rouvel, Hélène de Fougerolles, Jeanne Balibar
screenplay by Luigi Pirandello, Jacques Rivette, Pascal Bonitzer, Christine Laurent
directed by Jacques Rivette

by Walter Chaw

"I hate symbolic art in which the presentation loses all spontaneous movement in order to become a machine, an allegory – a vain and misconceived effort because the very fact of giving an allegorical sense to a presentation clearly shows that we have to do with a fable which by itself has no truth either fantastic or direct; it was made for the demonstration of some moral truth."
-Luigi Pirandello from Playwrights on Playwriting, ed. by Toby Cole, 1961

Serendipity (2001)

October 5, 2001Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, Romance, Theatrical

***/****
starring John Cusack, Kate Beckinsale, Molly Shannon, Jeremy Piven
screenplay by Marc Klein
directed by Peter Chelsom

by Walter Chaw Dense with the hip references and list-making that have become trademarks of John Cusack’s films, Serendipity is a sweet confection just smart enough to be considered tasteful and just dumb enough to be forgotten. Set in the same New York as every bad Nora Ephron film (which is all of Nora Ephron’s films), Serendipity is awash in a twinkling yuletide cheer and the kind of magical realism that South American authors have made their stock in trade. Perhaps not so peculiarly, then, it appears to be very loosely based on Gabriel García Márquez’s star-crossed temporal love song Love in the Time of Cholera, a first edition of which plays a crucial role in the film. The book details a pair of young people who fall in love with each other over passionate letters and coded telegrams, but part when the woman falls ill upon their first meeting. Seeing it as an act of destiny, she marries a man within her own social caste, only coming back to her true love years after their initial opportunity was lost.

Liam (2001)

October 5, 2001Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Coming of Age, Drama, France, Germany, Italy, Theatrical, UK

**½/****
starring Ian Hart, Claire Hackett, Anthony Borrows, David Hart
screenplay by Jimmy McGovern
directed by Stephen Frears

by Walter Chaw Liam is an Irish coming-of-age story that has more in common with John Boorman’s The General and Hope and Glory than it does with Alan Parker’s Angela’s Ashes. It balances the deprivation and desperation of growing up with crippling unemployment, a peculiarly sadistic brand of Irish Catholicism, and rising anti-Semitism with a good sense of humour and a lively feeling for pace that better captures the seesawing emotion of childhood than unrelenting horror or unleavened bliss. The truth of childhood, after all, lies somewhere in the grey liminal spaces between William Blake’s songs of innocence and songs of experience, though liberal time is spent in both extremes. In other words, the true power of Liam is not in the now-familiar images of scrounging for bread and cigarettes while enduring whippings at the hand of Sadeian priests, but in the shame of a little boy who walks in on his mother bathing and the embarrassment of a stuttering child unable to say his own name.

Our Lady of the Assassins (2000)

October 5, 2001Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Colombia, Crime, Drama, France, Spain, Theatrical

La virgen de los sicarios
**½/****
starring Germán Jaramillo, Anderson Ballesteros, Juan David Restrepo, Manuel Busquets
screenplay by Fernando Vallejo
directed by Barbet Schroeder

by Walter Chaw At his best (Barfly, Idi Amin Dada, Reversal of Fortune), Barbet Schroeder is mercilessly unblinking. He delves into the sundry with such a dedicated nihilism that it makes the horror of his situations palatable somehow. The same kind of thing Cronenberg does with grotesquery, Schroeder does with atrocity: we are led behind the curtain to where the real ugliness lies with a casual air that defuses sensationalism and murders prurience through protagonists–at least the best ones (Charles Bukowski, Idi Amin, Claus von Bulow)–drawn from the insipid impiety of real life. That’s perhaps the source of my discomfort with the anti-hero of Our Lady of the Assassins (La virgen de los sicarios“), an only semi-autobiographical writer first brought to life in Fernando Vallejo’s 1994 novel of the same name and now embodied in the lanky frame of Latin actor Germán Jaramillo. He is an existentialist philosopher torn by the eternal conflict between passion for life and passion for destruction, but he has no grounding in the mundane that would make the character something more than a wandering gadfly. If Vallejo, a jaded chronicler of a train-wreck who has no connection to the evolving horror, is the projection of a first-world consciousness observing the travails of a disintegrating third world, the greatest irony of the failure and success of the film is in its own triumphant disconnection.

Happy Accidents (2001)

October 5, 2001Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Romance, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Time Travel

**/****
starring Marisa Tomei, Vincent D’Onofrio, Nadia Dajani, Holland Taylor
written and directed by Brad Anderson

by Walter Chaw Too long by at least the length of an unwelcome framing device and an expert but superfluous performance by Holland Taylor as a therapist, Brad Anderson’s Happy Accidents is invested in the 16th-century ideal that Love is the abeyance of Entropy, in the idea that true romantic bliss is the key to staving off chaos in a world eternally falling into it. The phenomena of time flying when one’s having fun is spoken of early in the film as a scientific verity rather than as a cozy homily, and Happy Accidents is likewise best defined as a familiar love story stretched to justify old Heinlein and Wells pulp. A series of still-photograph interludes recalling Chris Marker’s La Jetée are handled with skill and a surprising poignancy but give too much away as to the ultimate resolution of the film to those familiar with the experimental French short.

Glitter (2001)

September 26, 2001Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Music, Romance, Theatrical, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Mariah Carey, Max Beesley, Eric Benet, Vondie Curtis Hall
screenplay by Kate Lanier and John Wilder
directed by Vondie Curtis Hall

Glitterby Walter Chaw About halfway through Glitter’s bloated running time (105 minutes of unique hell), a foreign video director sagely complains: “The glitter can’t overpower the artist!” The two problems with Glitter are that the glitter does overpower the artist, and that the glitter itself is preposterous, dreary, and dull. Billie (Mariah Carey) is enlisted as the backup singer for an entirely talentless woman, and her voice is hijacked in a Singin’ in the Rain intrigue, natch. But even as I was resigning myself to a customary “VH1 Movies That Rock” piece of dreck about the girl singing behind the curtain getting rewarded for her saintliness on the opening night of a national tour, Dice the DJ (Max Beesley) swoops in and makes Glitter an interracial version of screenwriter Kate Lanier’s own What’s Love Got To Do With It?. Only Glitter‘s Ike is a pretty nice guy, despite his jealousy/management problems, and this Tina is as expressive as a person on a horse’s ration of Thorazine. When Billie told Dice, after some very chaste lovemaking, that she has trouble trusting people, I whispered to the screen, “Honey, you probably shouldn’t start at a guy named ‘Dice’ who sports a large gold pendant that says ‘DICE.'”