Lethal Weapon Collection – Blu-ray Disc

August 12, 2012Posted in1980s, 1990s, 2012, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Christmas, Comedy, Thriller, ZERO STARS

Lethalweapon2cap

LETHAL WEAPON (1987)
**/**** Image B- Sound B Extras D
starring Mel Gibson, Danny Glover, Gary Busey, Tom Atkins
screenplay by Shane Black
directed by Richard Donner

LETHAL WEAPON 2 (1989)
**½/**** Image B Sound B Extras D
starring Mel Gibson, Danny Glover, Joe Pesci, Joss Ackland
screenplay by Jeffrey Boam
directed by Richard Donner

LETHAL WEAPON 3 (1992)
ZERO STARS/**** Image B+ Sound B Extras D
starring Mel Gibson, Danny Glover, Joe Pesci, Rene Russo
screenplay by Jeffrey Boam and Jeffrey Boam (sic) & Robert Mark Kamen
directed by Richard Donner

LETHAL WEAPON 4 (1998)
*/**** Image A Sound B+ Extras D
starring Mel Gibson, Danny Glover, Joe Pesci, Rene Russo
screenplay by Channing Gibson
directed by Richard Donner

by Walter Chaw It’s tough to convey exactly how fresh Lethal Weapon seemed in 1987. The leap that Woody Boyd’s girlfriend–half-naked in frilly bloomers–takes off a high-rise in the early going, the character of unstable police sergeant Martin Riggs (Mel Gibson, before we knew he wasn’t acting), even the buddying up of Riggs with “too old for this shit” partner Murtaugh (Danny Glover), were smart and groundbreaking. I must’ve watched this movie thirty times in those halcyon days when VHS made stuff like this and porn middle-class pursuits to be pursued in private. Lethal Weapon holds for me, still, this gritty, dirty allure: sexy, violent, nihilistic–like the first time a kid truly reads the Old Testament.

The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 1 (2011)

July 11, 2012Posted in2011, Authors: Walter Chaw, Romance, Teen, Theatrical, Vampire, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Kristen Stewart, Robert Pattinson, Taylor Lautner, Billy Burke
screenplay by Melissa Rosenberg, based on the novel by Stephenie Meyer
directed by Bill Condon

Twilight4by Walter Chaw Appalling by pretty much every measure, The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 1 (hereafter Twilight 4.1) is the predictable end result of a film based on a book written by an illiterate Mormon housewife mistaking her profound ignorance for profundity. It's about a really old guy who talks a really young girl into marrying him and enduring really, really painful childbirth as her portion of God's judgment on her kind; and then it's about another kind of pedophilia, wherein a 19-year-old badly in need of acting lessons gets turned on by a baby and decides he's going to marry that infant once she's old enough to breed. Still with me? So, yes, I knew it was going to be bad and, yes, I went anyway. And you know what? For as girded as I was to the raw incompetence of this franchise, Twilight 4.1 still managed to plumb a few new depths. See, Twilight 4.1 is an apologia for spousal abuse and a clumsy pro-life screed (what about this crap isn't clumsy?) before turning into cartoon Grand Guignol horseshit meant to freak out an audience of pre-teens and lonely housewives who think that this object of their devotion is selling them anything except loneliness and delusion. It's sledgehammer racist in its depiction of a native housekeeper cast as Maria Ouspenskaya, and it has a moment in which a circle of wolves "think-talk" to each other in some ineffable evocation of an Optimus Prime pep talk. It's completely inexplicable, in other words, and irritating for it.

Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter (2012)

June 20, 2012Posted in2012, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Fantasy, Horror, Russia, Superhero, Vampire, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Benjamin Walker, Dominic Cooper, Anthony Mackie, Mary Elizabeth Winstead
screenplay by Seth Grahame-Smith and Simon Kinberg, based on the novel by Seth Grahame-Smith
directed Timur Bekmambetov

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by Walter Chaw That idiot Timur Bekmambetov continues his reign of terror with Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, an adaptation of a Seth Grahame-Smith novel co-written by Grahame-Smith himself that tries to walk the Pride and Prejudice and Zombies line between reverence and camp but only manages to be ugly and stupid. Abe's (Benjamin Walker) superpower is honesty, natch–and a silver-coated axe. One night, as a child, after witnessing a vampire kill his mother but somehow not turn her into a vampire (vampires don't fear the sunlight in this one, either, or at least fear it only as much as Edgar Winter does), Abe embarks on a vengeance-crusade aided by vampire hunter-trainer Henry (Dominic Cooper). Henry has a secret! It doesn't matter. Nothing matters. Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter inspires a sense of absolute despair and hopelessness in the viewer, as it's not just bad, it's misguided in every way a film can be misguided, from conception to execution. There's a horse-stampede fight, a burning bridge and a train, grotesque misuse of slow-motion and CGI, and nary a naked Angelina Jolie anywhere to leaven the stew. I want to muster up some outrage at the portrayal of Confederate soldiers as bloodsucking legions of the damned, but that actually strikes me as the least offensive of the film's myriad offenses.

Project X (2012)

April 17, 2012Posted in2012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Comedy, Teen, Theatrical, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Thomas Mann, Oliver Cooper, Jonathan Daniel Brown, Dax Flame
screenplay by Matt Drake and Michael Bacall
directed by Nima Nourizadeh

Projectxby Angelo Muredda With Bridesmaids, Judd Apatow made the case for the producer as auteur–a spiritual godparent to screenwriters' Kristen Wiig and Annie Mumulo's every deferred comedic beat. It's only taken one try–the perfunctorily- titled, written, and staged Project X–but Todd Philips can now claim the same, to everyone's great detriment. Late in the game, protagonist Thomas's dad surveys the wreckage of his vanilla son's soiree and says, with something like pride, "I didn't think you had it in you." It's a callback to the strained thematic machinations of The Hangover Part II, where straight-laced Stu (Ed Helms) recognizes he has a "demon" in him, and if that makes him a horrible spouse, then so be it. While Project X is suffused with the same deep misogyny and awe before Dionysian dickishness as its producer's directorial work, it's also a testament to Helms's grounded performance as those films' mild-mannered demon-in-wait–and proof of how unsustainable Philips's poisonous alchemy is in the hands of the truly useless. That would be first-time director Nima Nourizadeh, who has no instinct for narrative, characterization, or composition, and whose licentious camera unfailingly roves up the skirt of every 18-year-old extra lassoed in what the press notes eerily call a "nationwide talent search." Woe and hilarious Taser gags to anyone who searches for talent here.

The Rum Diary (2011)

October 28, 2011Posted in2011, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Theatrical, UK, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Johnny Depp, Aaron Eckhart, Michael Rispoli, Giovanni Ribisi
screenplay by Bruce Robinson, based on the novel by Hunter S. Thompson
directed by Bruce Robinson

Rumdiaryby Walter Chaw Sad, solipsistic hagiography of a hero painted by a child, Johnny Depp's passion project The Rum Diary reveals the actor to be not only dedicated now to delivering selfish shtick in place of interesting characters, but also apparently completely in the dark as to what it is that was dangerous about his idol. This adaptation of Hunter S. Thompson's long-shelved first novel–written in 1960 during a quintessential fit of hubris in which Thompson jetted to Puerto Rico to become Ernest Hemingway and published in 1998 after being discovered as paper booty in a trunk by Jack Sparrow–has at its misbegotten helm Withnail & I auteur Bruce Robinson, jerked out of retirement to reimagine a piece-of-shit novel as a piece-of-shit movie. So, mission accomplished.

Seven Days in Utopia (2011)

September 7, 2011Posted in2011, Drama, Family, Sports, Theatrical, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Robert Duvall, Lucas Black, Melissa Leo, Kathy Baker
screenplay by David L. Cook & Rob Levine & Matthew Dean Russell & Sandra Thrift, based on Cook's novel Golf's Sacred Journey: Seven Days at the Links of Utopia
directed by Matthew Dean Russell

Sevendaysinutopiaby Ian Pugh SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Bursting at the seams with God/daddy issues but evincing no desire to confront (or even acknowledge) them, Matthew Dean Russell's Seven Days in Utopia is something like a hyper-wholesome, hyper-mainstream response to The Tree of Life. And what do you know? It's awful. After suffering a major breakdown during an important game, disgraced young golfer Luke Chisholm (Lucas Black) retreats to the small town of Utopia, Texas, where he meets an old landowner named Johnnie (Robert Duvall), who just happens to be a former golf champion. Johnnie is willing to teach Luke the ropes and maybe remind him of what's important, i.e., living for yourself and all of that good sports-movie stuff. Putting your faith in the Almighty figures in there somewhere, too, but while the film was made with an unavoidable Christian slant, the problem with Seven Days in Utopia is hardly a matter of ideology. Look past the squeaky-clean landscape promised by its G rating and you'll find it has no ideology at all.

The Fox and the Hound (1981) [25th Anniversary] + The Little Mermaid (1989) [Platinum Edition] – DVDs|The Fox and the Hound/The Fox and the Hound II (2006) [2 Movie Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

August 22, 2011Posted in1980s, 1990s, 2000s, 2011, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Disney, Drama, DVD, Family, Musical, Romance, ZERO STARS

THE FOX AND THE HOUND
***½/**** Image C- Sound B Extras C
uncredited screenplay, based on the novel by Daniel P. Mannix
directed by Art Stevens, Ted Berman, Richard Rich

THE LITTLE MERMAID
*½/**** Image B- Sound C Extras A
written and directed by John Musker and Ron Clements

by Bill Chambers SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. With The Fox and the Hound and The Little Mermaid bookending an especially turbulent decade for a studio mortally locked in a struggle to reconcile its animation pedigree with its crass commercial instincts, the former has come to be regarded in the Disney mythology as the Good Friday to the latter’s Easter Sunday. It’s therefore fitting that the two films they most emulate are 1942’s Bambi and 1950’s Cinderella, respectively, as the Forties marked the last time the Mouse House was on the brink of foreclosure. (The Fox and the Hound goes so far as to recycle cels from Bambi.) Much like The Little Mermaid represented a somewhat cynical reboot of the fairytale default, so, too, was Cinderella a glorified salvage operation following the money-/audience-hemorrhaging pro bono work Uncle Walt did on behalf of FDR’s Good Neighbor policy. Alas, the Good Friday and Easter Sunday analogy applies to not just Disney’s phoenix-like resurrection but also the tonal and moral disparity between the two pictures: one is the sad truth; the other is wishful thinking.

She’s Out of My League (2010) – Blu-ray Disc

July 6, 2011Posted in2000s, 2010, Authors: Jon Thibault, Comedy, Romance, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/**** Image A Sound A Extras D
starring Jay Baruchel, Alice Eve, T.J. Miller, Mike Vogel
screenplay by Sean Anders & John Morris
directed by Jim Field Smith

by Jon Thibault

What happens when a beautiful, wealthy event planner meets a scrawny, socially maladroit, uneducated TSA security guard who's too uncoordinated to shave his own balls?

Love!

Transformers: Dark of the Moon (2011)

June 29, 2011Posted in2011, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: Michael Bay, Spielberg, Theatrical, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Shia LaBeouf, Josh Duhamel, John Turturro, Frances McDormand
screenplay by Ehren Kruger
directed by Sir Michael Bay

Transformers3by Walter Chaw It starts, maybe, with the moment Frances McDormand, as an NSA bigwig, declares that evil alien robot Decepticons should pass through customs. No–earlier, when noble alien robot Autobots infiltrate some nameless Arab state to murder Arabs. It might begin when fucking asshole Michael Bay does a long tracking shot following–in 3-D!–the toned, tanned ass of impossible-looking Carly (Victoria's Secret model Rosie Huntington-Whiteley) as she climbs a flight of stairs to straddle her ugly mutt boyfriend Sam (Shia LaBeouf)–a pairing that at least in part explains the decades-long appeal of Ron Jeremy as a porn icon. Or maybe it's the extended profanity ("dick, asshole, clusterfuck, bitch, shit" in a long-playing loop), the wholesale and semi-graphic murder of innocents by both sides, the way the robots bleed in crimson arterial sprays in this PG-13 movie, that instigates the realization that Transformers: Dark of the Moon (hereafter Transformers: Asshole) is a new low watermark for Bay and this naughty-little-boy franchise that highlights Bay's misogyny, puerility, and imbecility for all the world to see. Better, it works as a fine illustration of how this industry of ours that I spend a lot of time defending is in bed completely with the Michael Bays of the world, who represent, I think, the money-making potential of any industry that consents to peddle vice and venality to children. Think of the cash a live-action hardcore porno based on the Barbie license would bring in. Let's get on that, Bay and Zack Snyder, and give out heroin with the purchase of a ticket while we're at it. The first one's free, little girl.

Green Lantern (2011)

June 16, 2011Posted in2011, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Sci-Fi, Superhero, Theatrical, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Ryan Reynolds, Blake Lively, Peter Sarsgaard, Tim Robbins
screenplay by Greg Berlanti & Michael Green & Marc Guggenheim and Michael Goldenberg
directed by Martin Campbell

Greenlanternby Walter Chaw Martin Campbell's Green Lantern is just awful. It's a mess, a boring mess, featuring boring Ryan Reynolds in a skin-tight green super suit (and not-boring Blake Lively, not) trying to "grow up" and accept the responsibility of becoming an intergalactic Dudley Do-Right–a titular "Green Lantern," which in the DC UNIVERSE parlance apparently means that you say crap about will being stronger than fear and manifest a giant Matchbox race set as the best way to save a crashing helicopter. Cool? Cool if your concept of cool is The Last Starfighter as written by Tony Robbins. There's just so much empowerment going on in this thing, and unresolved daddy issues that are raised without any clue as to how to parallel the dysfunction in the characters or honour what is fast turning out to be this year's driving thematic force. It's no wonder, really, that the bad guy in this one is a giant mess of cosmic goo called "Parallax": the picture jumps around from one point-of-view to another with no sense to bridge the turbid gulfs between them. Worse, Green Lantern's threat to go the ambiguous, Dark Knight, fight-fear-with-fear route fails to materialize in the loudest possible way with an unintentionally-hilarious nonsense soliloquy delivered before a council of detached Kuato. I didn't think I'd see a movie this bad before Transformers: Euphemism for Asshole docks next month.

Red Riding Hood (2011)

March 11, 2011Posted in2011, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Fantasy, Horror, Mystery, Romance, Theatrical, Thriller, Werewolf, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Amanda Seyfried, Gary Oldman, Billy Burke, Julie Christie
screenplay by David Leslie Johnson
directed by Catherine Hardwicke

Redridinghoodby Walter Chaw That Catherine Hardwicke keeps getting jobs speaks to a deep, ugly dysfunction in the Hollywood dream factory. Not the thought that money talks, but the idea that people like Hardwicke and Adam Sandler and Michael Bay are handed the keys to the executive washroom because they understand what it is that certain critically-deficient demographics want and proceed to provide it in massive, deadly draughts. In other industries, there would be regulatory agencies–though it’s fair to consider that checking the poster for Red Riding Hood would give you all the nutritional information you probably need. Namely that Hardwicke is the main ingredient, and that had I remembered this before the screening, I never, ever would have gone, in exactly the same way I wouldn’t eat scrapple again. I’m sure a lot of people like that shit, but grey pig-mush is grey pig-mush. Red Riding Hood is easily the worst movie I’ve seen since probably all the way back to A Sound of Thunder, and in a lot of the same ways: horribly written; horribly performed (but they didn’t have a chance); directed by someone that cameras should file a restraining order against; and edited by a cast-iron moron (make that pair of morons: long-time Hardwicke accomplice Nancy Richardson and poor Julia Wong). At least there’s Gary Oldman along for the ride to order his Moorish henchmen to, at one point, “put him in the elephant!”

The Romantics (2010) – DVD

March 8, 2011Posted in2000s, 2010, 2011, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Romance, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/**** Image C Sound B Extras D
starring Katie Holmes, Josh Duhamel, Anna Paquin, Elijah Wood
screenplay by Galt Niederhoffer, based on her novel
directed by Galt Niederhoffer

by Walter Chaw Though technically correct, I much prefer the term “Romanticists” to “Romantics,” but that’s a fussy kind of neither here nor there in a film, hyphenate Galt Neiderhoffer’s The Romantics, that suffers from nothing like precision, elegance, or, crucially, poetry. It’s a nightmare–a handheld, artfully ugly mash-up of Rachel Getting Married and Dead Poets Society that starts with credits in Wes Anderson’s favourite font and slogs on through with Lilith Fair/coffee-shop folk and a character played by Katie Holmes who’s jealous of a character played by Anna Paquin’s boobs. Let’s call it a draw, ladies, and discuss instead this variety of faux-prestige romcom, which hijacks Lloyd Dobler’s holding of a boombox blaring Peter Gabriel over his head by having frickin’ Josh Duhamel hoist an iPhone with Keats’s “To a Nightingale” on its screen. It features idiots like dollar-store Cameron Diaz Malin Akerman and an increasingly Gollum-esque Elijah Wood in awkward supporting roles; allows scenarios like the nightmare rehearsal-dinner toast montage; and tasks Candace Bergen’s team of handlers and feeders to drag her out to yet again fulfill the role of Tyrannosaurus Reaction Shot. Good job, Ms. Neiderhoffer, for not only mistaking Catch & Release for Noah Baumbach or Lars Von Trier, for not only setting your indie emoti-fest in the Dan in Real Life bizarre-verse, but for borrowing a bad burlesque from the lame 27 Dresses, too.

The Green Hornet (2011)

January 14, 2011Posted in2011, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Superhero, Theatrical, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Seth Rogen, Jay Chou, Christoph Waltz, Tom Wilkinson
screenplay by Seth Rogen & Evan Goldberg
directed by Michel Gondry

Greenhornetby Walter Chaw Lenore Case (Cameron Diaz) asks chauffer Kato (Taiwanese pop star Jay Chou) out on a date in Michel Gondry's excrescent The Green Hornet, and then, once on that date, acts surprised when Kato makes a pass at her whilst tickling the ivories. It's the only thing of mild interest in a film that's otherwise the obvious front-runner for a few worst-of-2011 lists–a fate it'll probably avoid only because no one will remember the benighted thing an hour or two after screening it. Give The Green Hornet this, though: it's the first mainstream American film to even flirt with the idea of Yellow/White miscegenation since maybe the 18-year-old Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story, Rob Cohen's biopic about Chou's hero and the true antecedent to the Kato role. It's funny to me that men from one of the most populated places on the planet have, in the American cinema, been reduced to hilarious, impotent sidekicks or wise old men who know kung fu–or is there some kind of Little Richard image-castration going on here to protect delicate Caucasian egos from bedroom Yellow Peril? No, more likely the instinct that makes it funny to cast someone like Jackie Chan as Chris Tucker's bitch in the United States is the same one that fuels Chou's eventual rescue in this piece of shit by the titular lummox, played by Seth Rogen (make that rescues–the first coming when The Green Hornet tosses poor, dumb Kato a lobster-shaped inflatable to save his drowning ass). It's the same one that casts Mexicans as chulo drug-dealers hanging out on the East Side and poor Christoph Waltz, Oscar still warm, as an insecure crime lord given to monologues and bemoaning his mid-life crisis. The Green Hornet is bad stand-up, all improvisation and flop sweat you get to endure for over two full, agonizing, distended hours.

Eat Pray Love (2010) – Blu-ray Disc

January 4, 2011Posted in2000s, 2010, 2011, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Road Movie, Romance, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/**** Image B Sound B+ Extras D
starring Julia Roberts, James Franco, Richard Jenkins, Javier Bardem
screenplay by Ryan Murphy & Jennifer Salt, based on the book by Elizabeth Gilbert
directed by Ryan Murphy

by Walter Chaw It's a little tempting to not take the piss out of this latest instalment of How Julia Got Her Tube Packed, but the sins of Ryan Murphy's unwatchable Eat Pray Love are such that it's nigh impossible for any sentient human to resist. More interesting might be to chart the route America's sweetheart has taken to becoming one of the most irritating and hateful personas in the modern pantheon–how the once top-earning female star is lately this pinched, drawn, graceless thing trying her best and in vain to recapture the sociopathic sprightliness of her early successes. It could simply be the natural process of aging that makes it harder for her wronged-woman act to cull any sympathy: a 43-year-old woman making pouty lips and acting out is a much different animal than her 23-year-old self doing same. If she were to poison her husband or steal her best friend's bridegroom now, it would play very differently. And play differently it does as she dumps her non-descript/non-character hubby (Billy Crudup, typecast), buys an Italian phrasebook ("Every word in Italian is like a truffle!" the moron says), and travels to Bali in search of wisdom at the feet of adorably helpful minorities who only exist in movies like this to help coddled, rich, white people be content with their unimaginable privilege. If On the Waterfront was Kazan's apologia for singing like a canary, then Julia's late career seems an apologia for buying someone else's husband and getting away with it, for the most part, in the court of public opinion.

Lost in Translation (2003) – Blu-ray Disc + Anything Else (2003) – DVD

December 6, 2010Posted in2000s, 2010, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Directors: Sofia Coppola, Drama, DVD, France, Japan, Romance, Scarlett Johansson, UK, ZERO STARS

LOST IN TRANSLATION
***½/**** Image B- Sound A- Extras B
starring Bill Murray, Scarlett Johansson, Giovanni Ribisi, Anna Faris
written and directed by Sofia Coppola

ANYTHING ELSE
ZERO STARS/**** Image A- Sound B+
starring Woody Allen, Jason Biggs, Christina Ricci, Danny DeVito
written and directed by Woody Allen

Lostintranslationby Walter Chaw It feels a lot like life is an endless succession of heartsickness and anticipation of heartsickness. After a while, taking a line from Tender Mercies, it's hard to trust happiness anymore when happiness feels so ephemeral compared to the weight of grief. Sofia Coppola's Lost in Translation is about the wear of time and the unbearable burden of experience–it's about how even what's new and fresh is darkened by the ghosts of regret and time. When Bill Murray's fading star Bob Harris arrives in Tokyo to lend his image to a top-shelf whiskey, he is suffused with so much of the sadness of living that the surprise of life has become something to be viewed with suspicion. Newness fades and that familiar malaise, weary and grey, inevitably takes its place, sometimes even before the exhilaration of newness can reinvigorate. Bob meets Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson) in the hotel bar; she's in town with her photographer husband (Giovanni Ribisi), and together Bob and Charlotte paint the town blue.

Disney’s A Christmas Carol (2009) [Blu-ray + DVD] + The Fourth Kind (2009)

November 9, 2010Posted in2000s, 2010, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Ian Pugh, Blu-ray Disc, Christmas, Directors: Robert Zemeckis, DVD, Family, Horror, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller, UK, ZERO STARS

DISNEY'S A CHRISTMAS CAROL
**½/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B
screenplay by Robert Zemeckis, based on the novel by Charles Dickens
directed by Robert Zemeckis

THE FOURTH KIND
ZERO STARS/****
starring Milla Jovovich, Will Patton, Corey Johnson, Elias Koteas
written and directed by Olatunde Osunsanmi

by Ian Pugh If Robert Zemeckis hasn't quite left the Uncanny Valley behind, at the very least, the heart missing from his latest effort–what seems like the trillionth retelling of Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol, and the billionth animated one–correlates directly to its absence of personality, rather than to an absence of humanity. A backhanded compliment, to be sure, but the character designs finally resemble something closer to artistic interpretation than to a failed attempt at replicating human beings exactly as they are, with Marley (Gary Oldman) and Scrooge (Jim Carrey), for example, rendered almost expressionistically to evoke rotten apples and hunched skeletons. From that standpoint, the actors' sudden bursts of acrobatic grace, no longer so incongruous, capture some of computer-animated cinema's wonder, the kind at which Zemeckis has grasped since The Polar Express–a true example of bringing the impossible to life. The only problem is that Zemeckis's own script isn't worth more than a shrug, and the film relies too much on its visuals to carry the extra weight.

Sex and the City 2 (2010) + Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (2010) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

October 3, 2010Posted in2000s, 2010, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Disney, Drama, DVD, Fantasy, Romance, Theatrical, ZERO STARS

SEX AND THE CITY 2
ZERO STARS/****
starring Sarah Jessica Parker, Cynthia Nixon, Kristin Davis, Kim Cattrall
written and directed by Michael Patrick King

PRINCE OF PERSIA: THE SANDS OF TIME
ZERO STARS/**** Image A Sound A Extras C
starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Ben Kingsley, Gemma Arterton, Alfred Molina
screenplay by Doug Miro & Carlo Bernard
directed by Mike Newell

Sexandpersiaby Walter Chaw One may be a misguided liberal screed and the other a misguided conservative screed, but Sex and the City 2 and Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (hereafter Prince of Persia) are very much alike in that they're what a Tea Party meeting would look like with a budget. They're politically-confused hodgepodges of bad ideas and misplaced, incoherent outrage–most of it gleaned from the one or two times some idiot accidentally read the A-section of a newspaper, the rest gathered from Dummies primers on how to be cursorily informed in the Information Age. They're similarly infused with healthy doses of arrogance and cultural empiricism that speak directly to the reasons the United States is the target of fundamentalist whackos convinced we're all just like the randy quartet of aging bitches on a hedonism bender in the Middle East in Sex and the City 2. Hateful, vile, both films are also indicated by a distinct lack of artistry, representing a world post-Michael Bay in which a goodly portion of movies are dependent on not only other cultural touchstones (a TV series, a videogame) for the entirety of their alleged appeal, but on some of the most vapid cultural touchstones in the brief history of our popular culture, period.

Valentine’s Day (2010) – Blu-ray Disc

August 10, 2010Posted in2000s, 2010, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Romance, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/**** Image B Sound B Extras C
starring Jessica Alba, Kathy Bates, Jessica Biel, Bradley Cooper
screenplay by Katherine Fugate
directed by Garry Marshall

by Walter Chaw There are worse directors working today than Garry Marshall, but not many and then not much worse. I've vowed on a few occasions (like after Beaches, Pretty Woman, Exit to Eden, The Other Sister, Raising Helen, Georgia Rule) to never subject myself to another Marshall joint–certainly to never bother reviewing another one. What's the point, really, of taking the piss out of this guy and his movies? They're consistently, stridently tone deaf; unfailingly saccharine; morally suspect; visually uninteresting; casually racist/misogynist/classist/homophobic; and dangerously enervating to the point of meriting some kind of warning label. Marry Marshall's adorable dog/kid reaction shots and wholesale white-rape of Motown standards to a bloated ensemble cast (everyone from Jamie Foxx to Kathy Bates–yes, it's horrific) enacting a two-hour version of Marshall's career-launching TV series "Love, American Style" and what you get is every bit the horror movie the title Valentine's Day suggests.

The Box (2009) [Digital Copy Special Edition] – Blu-ray Disc

February 15, 2010Posted in2000s, 2010, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Sci-Fi, Thriller, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/**** Image A- Sound A Extras C
starring Cameron Diaz, James Marsden, Frank Langella, James Rebhorn
screenplay by Richard Kelly, based on the short story "Button, Button" by Richard Matheson
directed by Richard Kelly

by Walter Chaw As if to dispel any whisper of a doubt after Richard Kelly's Southland Tales that whatever ephemeral magic was captured in his Donnie Darko was completely accidental, along comes Kelly's third film as writer-director, The Box. I don't know yet whether it's the worst film of the year, but I will say that next to it Alex Proyas' similar disaster Knowing seems like a goddamn masterpiece. It's excruciatingly written, for starters, with the all-timer coming when vanilla paterfamilias Arthur (James Marsden), fresh from a 2001 light tunnel, says to vanilla materfamilias Norma (Cameron Diaz) first that "it's beyond words," then, a few dozen words later, that it's "neither here, nor there…but somewhere in between" and that it's a place "where despair is not the governor of the human soul." It was around this time that I bore down like a Civil War soldier getting a limb sawed off and watched as The Box magically made its 115-minute running time feel like a day spent undergoing oral surgery. It's that bad. Badly edited, too, as the awful script (based on a pretty good Richard Matheson short story)–which already jumps around haphazardly between cheap, moronic comparisons of itself to Sartre's No Exit and egregious exposition that makes M. Night Shyamalan's leisurely verbal masturbations look like Mamet by comparison–is matched by bizarre jump-cuts and senseless, arrhythmic pacing. Despite how long it feels, it's over before it really begins.

Dear John (2010)

February 5, 2010Posted in2000s, 2010, Authors: Ian Pugh, Drama, Mystery, Romance, Theatrical, Thriller, War, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Channing Tatum, Amanda Seyfried, Henry Thomas, Richard Jenkins
screenplay by Jamie Linden, based on the novel by Nicholas Sparks
directed by Lasse Hallström

by Ian Pugh Movies based on Nicholas Sparks novels–sentimental drivel, functionally identical–usually just bounce off my chest, but we all have our limits. Once more into the breach as Princess Prettygirl (Seyfried) falls head over heels for Johnny Bluecollar (Tatum) in a spectacularly awful Harlequin romance that juggles metaphors about coins and the size of the moon while boasting only the vaguest understanding of the English language. Dear John is little more than a rehash of The Notebook, a movie I found tedious but, again, ultimately innocuous. Yet there’s a mysterious “x” factor at work in this one that attacked some vital nerve and reduced my brain to petroleum jelly. Could be that Lasse Hallström finally found the perfect vessels for the source author: Amanda Seyfried and Channing Tatum–actors, both, whose deadwood talents fail to stretch past sheer bewilderment. (I kind of hate Ryan Gosling as an actor, but he undoubtedly elevated The Notebook.) There’s a point very early on where Seyfried remarks, “Wow, you made a fire,” as her future beau demonstrates his ability to jumpstart a little kindling–and the complete lack of sarcasm (or really any emotion) in her voice led me to wonder if Tatum was going to club her over the head and drag her back to his cave. It’s not an unreasonable conclusion: most of these movies forge conflict out of the idea that women are property, and Dear John is no different.