Fetching Cody (2005) – DVD

July 17, 2006Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Canada, Drama, DVD, Romance, Time Travel, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/**** Image B+ Sound A Extras C-
starring Jay Baruchel, Sarah Lind, Jim Byrnes, Robert Kaiser
written and directed by David Ray

Fetchingcodycapby Travis Mackenzie Hoover Canada is a nation of amateurs. Some terrible national weakness has taught us to be sheepishly inexact, as if trying to tell a story or form a coherent argument were about showing up and meekly filling in time as opposed to a complex array of intellectual and aesthetic decisions. We'll do the job, but we won't do it precisely–and frequently, the results are empty shells like Fetching Cody. I wouldn't be nearly so angry about its failure if I didn't know that there were more like it–long, unbroken streams of arrested preadolescents looking to get points for being "serious" and "meaningful"–coming down the pipeline. Critics are probably the largest segment of the population who'll see them, which probably accounts for why we're terse in our dismissals: we know we'll wind up talking to no one but ourselves.

The Lake House (2006)

June 16, 2006Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Fantasy, Romance, Theatrical, Time Travel

*/****
starring Keanu Reeves, Sandra Bullock, Dylan Walsh, Christopher Plummer
screenplay by David Auburn
directed by Alejandro Agresti

Lakehouseby Walter Chaw I couldn't help but conjecture, while watching the trailer for Alejandro Agresti's inexplicable The Lake House, that when Keanu Reeves's character is poring over a letter, a little thought bubble above his head would say, "Dude, I totally can't read." Continuing to think that is the only thing providing much of a distraction during the laggardly-paced, sloppily-scripted, hilariously-acted proceedings, which, as that same preview gives away, concern the romance of two people separated by two years, exchanging letters through the providence of a magic mailbox. Argentinean director Agresti's visual compositions are meticulous and his eye for architecture is almost as good as that of his protagonist, Alex Wyler (Reeves), but it's cold comfort against the raging inferno of illogic attending this scenic, stupid, Nicholas Sparks-ian shipwreck. Not helping things is Agresti's lamentable penchant for cornpone, exhibiting itself most stridently in the piano-tinkle, magical-elf-opening-a-treasure-chest score and a series of whimsical wipe-edits and dog reaction shots. Among its dedicated sub-genre of time-warp kiss-face (Somewhere in Time, Happy Accidents), The Lake House is a dud, too, frustrating first because its big gushy epiphany is solved by everyone with a working pre-frontal within a second of it happening, and second because Wyler, lagging two years behind his beloved Kate (Sandra Bullock), never once thinks to ask for a lotto number or a World Series winner.

Primer (2004)

October 8, 2004Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller, Time Travel

*½/****
starring Shane Carruth, David Sullivan, Casey Gooden, Anand Upadhyaya
written and directed by Shane Carruth

Primerby Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. There's something of the word walls of Gertrude Stein or Eugene Ionesco about Primer, the indie Sundance sensation that would have been rode out of town on a rail if it weren't about time travel in addition to being obscure (thus garnering it nervous intellectual comparisons to La Jetée instead of a more accurate likening to David Mamet-cum-István Szabó). I suspect that a lot of people are afraid to admit they don't understand what's happening in the film, which talks too much in too stultifying a fashion, obscuring its heart of glass with blizzards of expositive candy in the faint hope that people are too dazzled by the rhetoric to ever consider the little guy behind the curtain. Whatever genre can do to fabulize lizard fears into metaphorical eurekas!, it can also lend a pre-emptive weight to flimsy pieces presented for the approval of audiences perhaps unaccustomed to science-fiction. In truth, Primer is more Theatre of the Absurd than sci-fi, with yuppie iterations of Vladimir and Estragon having an endless circular conversation while waiting for a Godot who never really comes. Taken as such, there arises the possibility of seeing the film as commentary on the essential listless, deconstructive jingo-babble of engineers and white-shirt-print-tie professions–though I suspect Primer has a lot more to do with a decision somewhere along the line to make a "what if?" time-travel flick as dense and protracted as possible.

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004)

June 4, 2004Posted in****/****, 2000s, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Family, Fantasy, Mystery, Theatrical, Time Travel, UK

****/****
starring Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint, Emma Watson, Gary Oldman
screenplay by Steven Kloves, based on the novel by J.K. Rowling
directed by Alfonso Cuarón

Harrypotterprisonerazkabanby Walter Chaw There's real poetry in Alfonso Cuarón's Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (hereafter Harry Potter 3), encapsulated in a moment where Harry mistakes a vision of himself for the phantom of his dead father. It's another of the Mexican director's magic-realism conversations about children coming of age emotionally and sexually, marking the picture as a lovely companion piece to his A Little Princess and identifying Cuarón as a gifted, eloquent voice for the rage and the rapture of adolescence. Opening with the 13-year-old Harry (Daniel Radcliffe) fiddling with his wand beneath a blanket, the theme of self-discovery unfolds along jagged, de-romanticized lines like the rough rhythms of an Irish lyric or, more to the heart of the matter, a Mexican folk tale, all of blood, dirt, and heroic fervour.

13 Going on 30 (2004)

April 23, 2004Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Romance, Theatrical, Time Travel

**/****
starring Jennifer Garner, Mark Ruffalo, Judy Greer, Christa B. Allen
screenplay by Cathy Yuspa & Josh Goldsmith and Niels Mueller
directed by Gary Winick

13goingon30by Walter Chaw Threatening at any moment to veer off the populist tracks and become something legendarily, unpleasantly subversive, the middling 13 Going on 30 is really little more than a collection of "I Love the '80s" vignettes presided over by Jennifer Garner's peculiar mien. It's also peculiar that the genre of body-swapping/quick-aging jibber-jabber is making a resurgence now a couple of decades after the last spate (18 Again, Vice Versa, Big), and peculiar again that with Mark Waters's Freaky Friday and Gary Winick's 13 Going on 30, the genre is being re-imagined through the prism of young women. (Perhaps not so strange when you consider that the key demographic slavered over by studio wonks has shifted from the pre-adolescent boys of the mid-'80s to post-Titanic pre-adolescent girls.) It's clear that this film is meant to satisfy some sort of wish-fulfillment fantasy for 13-year-old members of the babysitters' club, but with Eighties references that can only be amusing to people who've passed the third-decade mark, it manages mostly to be a wish-fulfillment fantasy for thirtysomething men who want emotionally immature, sexually malleable women who happen to resemble television starlets.

The Butterfly Effect (2004)

January 23, 2004Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Drama, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller, Time Travel

***/****
starring Ashton Kutcher, Amy Smart, Kevin Schmidt, Melora Walters
written and directed by J. Mackye Gruber & Eric Bress

Butterflyeffectby Walter Chaw The Butterfly Effect is tidy, nifty even, a great little genre picture that wallows in ugliness, child abuse, animal abuse, classism, and misogyny but with a dirty polish that tends to distract a little from the nastiness. Evan (Ashton Kutcher) suffers from blackouts, has ever since he was a kid, and no wonder, as there seems to be some nasty bouts of molestation, baby murder, and dog immolation buried in there, desperately in need of some good old-fashioned repression. Now a psych student at State U (his research having something to do with memory, naturally), he discovers that he can "possess" himself at various stages of his youth after being triggered by the comp book journals he's been keeping ever since he started having his spells. His efforts at "fixing" the tragedies of his life all tend towards failure, however, as every little wrinkle he puts in the fabric of time results in catastrophic changes in the present. The Butterfly Effect owes a great debt, then, to Ray Bradbury's "A Sound of Thunder," Brian Aldiss's "Poor Little Warrior," William Goldman's Control, and Clive Barker's "The Inhuman Condition"; that it manages to honour to some degree each one of its sources (if only with the precision lavished on the telling of its dank tale) identifies the picture as a most difficult beast to embrace–and just as difficult to dislike. The craft above reproach, it's the content that worries.

Stargate (1994) [Ultimate Edition – Director’s Cut] – DVD

February 8, 2003Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, DVD, France, Sci-Fi, Time Travel

**/**** Image B Sound A Extras B-
starring Kurt Russell, James Spader, Jaye Davidson, Viveca Lindfors
screenplay by Dean Devlin & Roland Emmerich
directed by Roland Emmerich

by Bill Chambers Spawning a television show and solidifying the Hollywood career of German director Roland Emmerich, 1994’s Stargate was the last movie to get the memo that Abyss-ian water walls and morphing technology no longer evoked World’s Fair awe. These special effects are merely the epitome of Stargate‘s second-hand wonder; part of the film’s value as a curiosity piece is its New York street-merchant vibe: like peddlers of the Rolux watch or Parda handbag, Emmerich and co-producer/co-writer Dean Devlin are selling us an approximation of a blockbuster by a licensed hitmaker, and we excuse them the same way we allow for the smudgy print of carbon copies or the colour bleed on VHS dubs. It must be a human impulse to absolve a facsimile of its absence of novelty.

The Time Machine (2002) [Widescreen] – DVD

July 29, 2002Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD, Sci-Fi, Time Travel, United Arab Emirates

*/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B-
starring Guy Pearce, Jeremy Irons, Philip Bosco, Phyllida Law
screenplay by David Duncan and John Logan, based on the novel by H.G. Wells
directed by Simon Wells

by Walter Chaw A cacophonous mess of misguided revisionism and misplaced emphasis, Simon Wells’s (and an uncredited Gore Verbinski’s) updating of H.G. Wells’s poli-sci-fi schlock masterpiece The Time Machine is a miasmic disaster, a sinkhole of shrug-worthy special effects, matte paintings, relentless music, and dangling plotlines and motivations. It isn’t that The Time Machine is incoherent; it’s that the film aspires after several rewrites to one day become incoherent. Not even the best efforts of the always-excellent Guy Pearce can save what is in essence a pathetic cutting-room attempt to wrest the movie back from the abyss of a director suffering a nervous breakdown with eighteen days to go in the shooting schedule and a governing philosophy that believes Orlando Jones would make a good HAL-9000.

Black Knight (2001) – DVD

April 9, 2002Posted in2000s, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD, Fantasy, Romance, Time Travel

**/**** Image B Sound A- Extras B
starring Martin Lawrence, Tom Wilkinson, Marsha Thomason, Vincent Regan
screenplay by Darryl J. Quarles and Peter Gaulke & Gerry Swallow
directed by Gil Junger

by Walter Chaw Jamal Walker (Martin Lawrence) is a groundskeeper at an all-black amusement park who, just prior to falling in a stagnant moat, is given a dressing down for being “selfish” and not community-minded enough. (“Community” referring to the African-American populace of South Central Los Angeles.) Sharp-eyed viewers should instantly recognize that Black Knight will at some point metastasize from a farce to a public service announcement. (Luckily, we’re given a solid first act and a few moments in the second before it does.) When Jamal goes into the moat in pursuit of a golden medallion, he surfaces from a fetid stew in a never-never land where the plain protagonist becomes the keystone in a kingdom-wide intrigue.

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.

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.