Stella: Season One (2005) – DVD

Posted in2000s, 2006, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, DVD, Esoterica, Television

Image B- Sound A- Extras B
"Pilot," "Campaign," "Office Party," "Coffee Shop," "Paper Route," "Camping," "Meeting Girls," "Novel," "Vegetables," "Amusement Park"

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover There's a difference between being smart and being "smart." Smart involves the recombination of concepts into some kind of thesis or analysis; "smart" is the mere name-checking of said concepts and the class trappings they afford. The problems begin when people act "smart" and feel they're actually smart–when the pose of intelligence becomes the real thing. And despite many contortions in a vaguely surrealist direction, the masterminds behind "Stella" clearly belong in the poser category. Although their juxtaposition of overgrown children against a world somewhat less mad than they are is fastidiously groomed and played to the hilt, it's not really smart about anything: by putting these naïf characters next to the supposed intelligence of the people who write their lines, they only reveal their "smarts" in comparison to a very limited test group.

Slither (2006) – DVD

Slither (2006) – DVD

Posted in2000s, 2006, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD, Horror, Sci-Fi

***½/**** Image B+ Sound A- Extras B+
starring Nathan Fillion, Elizabeth Banks, Michael Rooker, Gregg Henry
written and directed by James Gunn

by Walter Chaw Paying tribute to his Lloyd Kaufman roots with a shot in which The Toxic Avenger is on TV in the background, James Gunn’s Slither is more in line with the hipster revisionism of his screenplay for Zack Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead. Postmodernism its point, then, drying up the musty cellars somewhat of the films it riffs on, Slither misses when it does only because it has little resonance beyond the basic Cronenbergian sexual-parasites thing and the shopworn idea that Americans are voracious, disgusting, ignorant swine. (In truth, the one moment that really bugs me is a fairly demented rape sequence (involving more infant-menace than anything in the new The Hills Have Eyes) and its played-for-giggles fallout.) In place of useful sociology, it does for redneck archetypes what Shaun of the Dead did for workaday slobs, poking fun at the thin line between slack-jawed yokels (initiating deer season with a barn-busting hoedown) and beef-craving, slug-brained zombies (recalling that NASCAR now boasts its own brand of meat). The biggest surprise is that Gunn appears to have seen and liked Night of the Creeps, and that, like that film, Slither does what it does without sacrificing too much of its good-natured, self-deprecating sense of humour along the way.

Marie Antoinette (2006) + Tideland (2006)

Posted in2000s, 2006, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Canada, Coming of Age, Directors: Sofia Coppola, Directors: Terry Gilliam, Drama, France, Horror, Japan, Theatrical, UK

MARIE ANTOINETTE
**½/****
starring Kirsten Dunst, Jason Schwartzman, Judy Davis, Rip Torn
screenplay by Sofia Coppola, based on the novel Marie Antoinette: The Journey by Antonia Fraser
directed by Sofia Coppola

TIDELAND
***½/****
starring Jodelle Ferland, Jeff Bridges, Brendan Fletcher, Jennifer Tilly
screenplay by Terry Gilliam & Tony Grisoni, based on the novel by Mitch Cullin
directed by Terry Gilliam

by Walter Chaw In going from The Virgin Suicides to Lost in Translation to Marie Antoinette, Sofia Coppola appears to be charting the arc of her own soft, unstructured dive into the morass of melancholia and regret, discovering her voice along the way in the bell tones of Kirsten Dunst, who plays a fourteen-year-old in The Virgin Suicides and, at the start of Coppola’s latest film, a fourteen-year-old again, the Austrian Archduchess Marie Antoinette. Coppola’s “Fast Times at Palais Versailles” opens with Marie loping through her Austrian palace, just another sleepy, stupid girl with a tiny dog, one poised to have the fate of two countries riding on her ability to produce a male offspring. Betrothed to nebbish French King Louis XVI (Jason Schwartzman), she’s put into a French court ruled by gossip and bloodline (in one of the film’s few literal moments, Marie offers that her waking ritual attended by what seems the entire family plot is “ridiculous”) and, while crowned with the mantle of governance, thrust into the role of most popular girl in school, sprung fully-grown as the captain of the football team’s best girl. It’s impossible for me to not see something of Coppola’s own premature coronation as the emotional centre of her father’s own royal court, the third Godfather film–and to see in the intense media scrutiny afforded her in the wake of that fiasco the source of all these films about lost youth and the pain of hard choices made on her behalf. Marie Antoinette isn’t a historical film so much as it’s a dress-up picture; and like most any work of honesty, it’s autobiographical (as indicated by its selection of ’80s punk-influenced pop) and intensely vulnerable–at least for most of its first hour.

Little Children (2006)

Posted in2000s, 2006, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Esoterica, Romance, Theatrical

*½/****
starring Kate Winslet, Patrick Wilson, Jennifer Connelly, Gregg Edelman
screenplay by Todd Field & Tom Perrotta, based on Perrotta’s novel
directed by Todd Field

by Walter Chaw Kate Winslet is a joy if no longer a revelation, and in Todd Field’s Little Children, she demonstrates the kind of courage that has made her the most essential actress of her generation. Aside from Winslet, Little Children feels like a burlesque of deep-feeling pictures: the lesser of two possible sophomore efforts from the guy who brought us In the Bedroom, which was, in 2001, my since-regretted pick for best of the year. (I can be a sucker for well-played big emotions, I guess.) But Little Children is icy, stentorian, and patrician in its staginess and self-consciousness, and its disdain for its subject matter is front and centre. The picture presents its tale of suburban woe as the world’s most condescending fairytale, inserting an omniscient narrator in a way that, along with the upcoming Stranger Than Fiction, makes me wonder what it is about unseen movers that is so seductive in the modern conversation. I also wonder how Field and co-screenwriter Tom Perrotta (adapting his own book) could have rationalized the amount of bile mustered in reconfiguring American Beauty to include a raincoat perv (Jackie Earle Haley, the heart and soul of the film–if also its patsy and mule) and a sweaty adultery punctuated fatally by a winking nod to Madame Bovary.

Over the Hedge (2006) [Widescreen] – DVD

Over the Hedge (2006) [Widescreen] – DVD

Posted in2000s, 2006, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD, Family

**/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B-
screenplay by Len Blum and Lorne Cameron & David Hoselton and Karey Kirkpatrick, based on the comic strip by Michael Fry and T Lewis
directed by Tim Johnson & Karey Kirkpatrick

by Walter Chaw It’s just a largely inoffensive, vaguely environmentalist (inasmuch as being anti-sprawl is pro-environment) assembly-line animation featuring the usual passel of aging and/or second-run celebrities subbing for trained voice performers as anthropomorphic CGI animal bodies engaged in slapstick, stink jokes, and other interchangeable ephemera for the delight of our toddlers. If you feel as though you’ve seen Over the Hedge a hundred times already, that’s because it’s been cobbled together from a hundred other identical pictures; and if you have a little trouble afterwards remembering a thing about it, well, it’s only natural that something with no nutritional value would pass right through you. That’s not to say there’s no fertile ground to be mined here in exploring the line between the natural-natural and the human natural (a line that the Japanese puzzler Pom Poko attempts to describe to similar effect)–safe to say, in fact, that a great satire lies in the suburban morass as viewed through the eyes of the “un-civilized.” But Over the Hedge is a slave to the theoretical peanut gallery, resorting to manufacturing a villain and then staging a series of boom/crash operas. Though Pixar’s Cars can pretty fairly be described as awful, it’s Pixar’s legacy of brilliant children’s entertainments that DreamWorks has tried to ape with its puerile, art-destroying, post-pop Shrek series, and if Over the Hedge at least resists the scatology that marks Shrek as low entertainment for the lowest common denominator, it still can’t quite make that jump from loud noises to real insight and value.

Hard Candy (2006) + The King (2006) – DVDs

Hard Candy (2006) + The King (2006) – DVDs

Posted in2000s, 2006, Authors: Bill Chambers, Drama, DVD, Esoterica, Thriller, UK

HARD CANDY
**/**** Image A Sound A Extras A
starring Patrick Wilson, Ellen Page, Sandra Oh, Odessa Rae
screenplay by Brian Nelson
directed by David Slade

THE KING
*½/**** Image B+ Sound C+ Extras C+
starring Gael García Bernal, Laura Harring, Paul Dano, William Hurt
screenplay by Milo Addica & James Marsh
directed by James Marsh

by Bill Chambers SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Arriving on DVD with its cult status in the bag, Hard Candy was inspired by a Japanese crime wave that found underage girls posing as prostitutes to bait wealthy businessmen they subsequently drugged, robbed, and in some cases tortured. I think I’d rather see that movie–in dealing more with entrapment than with vigilantism, it probably wouldn’t want for integrity like this one does. Hard Candy pulls its punches too often for its own good (mainly, it would appear, in the interest of sustaining momentum, pendulum-like), and its literalmindedness only makes things worse. The picture’s chiaroscuro tableaux brazenly paraphrase Edward Hopper, for instance, and lest there be any doubt about artistic intentionality, the two lost souls at the centre of this chamber piece arrange to meet at Nighthawks Diner. But then a T-shirt with Hopper’s seminal “Nighthawks” silkscreened onto it turns up as part of the narrative, which is overkill and self-defeating besides, as in reducing Hopper to a decal, Hard Candy itself becomes kitsch.

Dark Passage (1947) – DVD

Dark Passage (1947) – DVD

Posted in1940s, 2006, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Crime, DVD, Thriller

**½/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B-
starring Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Bruce Bennett, Agnes Moorehead
screenplay by Delmer Daves, based on the novel by David Goodis
directed by Delmer Daves

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Dark Passage not only begins but also keeps going with the tricky technique of subjective camera. Vincent Parry, you see, is an escaped convict framed for the murder of his wife; he’s also about to get plastic surgery, which necessitates obscuring the fact that he’s played by Humphrey Bogart until the bandages come off. There were surely better ways to make the concealment of Vincent’s face some kind of metaphor, or at least give it a measure of aesthetic unity, but writer-director Delmer Daves merely sees that he has to hide Bogie’s visage and throws in subjectivity as a catch-all. Thing is, he’s very slick (as in spit-shine clean) about how he does it, so it doesn’t really hurt too much; you’re dissatisfied because he didn’t dig deeper. And that pretty much sums up the Dark Passage experience.

Shogun Assassin (1980) – DVD

Shogun Assassin (1980) – DVD

Posted in1980s, 2006, Action, Adventure, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, DVD, Japan

**½/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B
starring Tomisaburo Wakayama, Masahiro Tomikawa, Kayo Matsuo, Minoru Ohki
screenplay by Kazuo Koike, Robert Houston & David Weisman
directed by Robert Houston and Kenji Misumi

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Timing is everything when it comes to certain movies. Had I been one of the many who paid to see Shogun Assassin in 1980 or thrilled to it on video for years afterward, I might, too, have a cult attachment to its slick camerawork and delightfully bloodthirsty nature. But as it turns out, I saw the films from which it was culled–the Lone Wolf and Cub epics Sword of Vengeance and Baby Cart at the River Styx–first: no matter how expertly distilled is Robert Houston’s scratch remix version, it was never going to match the elegant construction of those Kenji Misumi classics. If you find yourself in a hurry and can only squeeze in one film with a pudgy ronin and his small, indestructible son, then Shogun Assassin is the one you want; and it immediately gains half a star if you aren’t familiar with the originals. But for those with time, patience, and a love of arterial spray, the main event is probably the better bet. Which is not to say that Shogun Assassin is without its virtues.

The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) + Shock Treatment (1981) [Bodice-Ripping Fabulous 3-Disc Set] – DVD

Posted in1970s, 1980s, 2006, Authors: Alex Jackson, Comedy, DVD, Esoterica, Musical

THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW 
***½/**** Image A Sound A Extras A-
starring Tim Curry, Susan Sarandon, Barry Bostwick, Richard O’Brien
screenplay by Jim Sharman and Richard O’Brien
directed by Jim Sharman

SHOCK TREATMENT
**½/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras B+
starring Jessica Harper, Cliff De Young, Patricia Quinn, Richard O’Brien
screenplay by Richard O’Brien and Jim Sharman
directed by Jim Sharman

by Alex Jackson SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. I have never attended an actual theatrical showing of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, and for the longest time, I doubted that I was completely receptive to every significant nuance and intricacy of the film, what with its name-dropping of Michael Rennie and the presence of a performer called “Little Nell” who wears Mickey Mouse ears during the “Touch-A, Touch-A, Touch Me” number. The picture’s esoteric quotient has always eluded my radar, preventing me from fully identifying with it, much less condescending to it. This idea of familiarity with extra-textual elements or training in a specific method of watching as essential in the evaluation process is a perennial issue in film criticism for me. My default position is that the two things don’t have that much to do with each other: Learning more about a film can deepen an appreciation that was already there, but the initial call of yea or nay is one that every king, scholar, and prole is equally qualified to make. Beautiful idea, I think–it helps me sleep at night and keeps me from being too scared to see and write about films outside my realm of experience. So why is it that I am so intimidated by this movie?

Blade Runner – The Director’s Cut (1982/1992) – DVD

Blade Runner – The Director’s Cut (1982/1992) – DVD

Posted in1980s, 2006, Action, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Directors: Ridley Scott, Drama, DVD, Sci-Fi, Thriller, UK

***½/**** Image A Sound A-
starring Harrison Ford, Rutger Hauer, Sean Young, Edward James Olmos
screenplay by Hampton Fancher and David Peoples, based on the novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick
directed by Ridley Scott

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Ridley Scott is quite obviously no auteur. Not notable for returning to a series of themes and tropes, he’s more for gazing at a pretty set and ladling on the chiaroscuro. The man is less Orson Welles than Michael Curtiz, presiding stylishly over writers and actors and, crucially, designers, bringing them together in harmony instead of imposing some personal meaning on the whole shooting match. But just as Curtiz will be rescued from obscurity by the fluke triumph of Casablanca, Scott’s Euro-trash imagery will always seem like more because of his resonant cult fave Blade Runner. This is a film that unites all manner of disparate elements to produce something greater than the sum of its parts, one that speaks to the displacement we feel in a technocratic world far more succinctly than if the filmmakers were conscious of what they were doing.

Feast (2006) [Unrated] + The Woods (2006) – DVDs

Posted in2000s, 2006, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, DVD, Germany, Horror, Mystery, Thriller

FEAST
**/**** Image C+ Sound B+ Extras C+
starring Balthazar Getty, Henry Rollins, Navi Rawat, Clu Gulager
screenplay by Patrick Melton & Marcus Dunstan
directed by John Gulager

THE WOODS
***½/**** Image A Sound A+
starring Agnes Bruckner, Patricia Clarkson, Rachel Nichols, Bruce Campbell
screenplay by David Ross
directed by Lucky McKee

by Walter Chaw I’m surprised that more great films aren’t shuttled to the direct-to-video twilight zone, seeing as how mainstream taste-makers, particularly in regards to genre pictures, seem primarily invested in churning out the same pre-masticated gruel. At the very least, prefab garbage like School for Scoundrels might as well have been dumped on the home market without a ripple in the fabric of daily life. (Something like Liliana Cavani’s Ripley’s Game, on the other hand, deserved a theatrical release: Disguised as a dtv unload, it’s the best thriller in years.) Between their low budgets, how they perform without bankable leads, and how they pretty much guarantee a healthy return on their investments, it’s almost inexplicable that horror movies get exiled to Blockbuster as often as they do. You can learn a lot about a people from the mythologies they construct to frighten and warn, although because horror films are bankable product (and always were), they fall prey to the same venal, filthy lucre-inspired pitfalls of formula drudgery. Still, I like to refer to them as the “indicator species” of our cultural swamp in that they’re not only ugly, dirty, bottom-feeding, what have you, but also the first species of entertainment to reflect the elements polluting the spirit of this exact moment in our social history. If you can find the pulse of it, a horror movie will tell you a lot about that quickening in your own chest when you watch the evening news.

The Departed (2006)

Posted in2000s, 2006, Authors: Walter Chaw, Best Picture (Academy Awards), Crime, Directors: Martin Scorsese, Drama, Gangster, Hong Kong, Jack Nicholson, Theatrical, Thriller

***/****
starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Matt Damon, Jack Nicholson, Mark Wahlberg
screenplay by William Monahan
directed by Martin Scorsese

by Walter Chaw Martin Scorsese’s The Departed is his funniest–and most nihilistic–film since After Hours, which remains for me the most enjoyable of his pictures, not the least for its travelogue of the Wasteland, complete with a gallery of freaks and grotesque statuary. It’s a bleak, Kirkegaardian thing more oppressive as fraught cityscape than Travis Bickle’s New York, seeing as how there’s no filter of the unreasonable to buffer against the assertion that scum does, indeed, need to be washed off those mean streets. That city finds a doppelgänger in the blasted, depressed Boston of The Departed, whose set-pieces unfurl inside dives, abandoned warehouses, and condemned buildings, and in which we find the only relationship worth saving is between a brilliantly profane Massachusetts State Trooper Sergeant, Dignam (Mark Wahlberg), and his captain in the Special Investigations Unit, Queenan (Martin Sheen). The brutality with which that relationship is preserved, in fact, ultimately delineates this as a rare comedy (in the traditional sense) among Scorsese’s long legacy of American tragedies, albeit one that’s laced with poison and the unmistakable taint of a post-millennial/post-apocalyptic stench.

All the King’s Men (1949) – DVD

All the King’s Men (1949) – DVD

Posted in1940s, 2006, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Best Picture (Academy Awards), Drama, DVD, Germany, Thriller

**½/**** Image B- Sound B
starring Broderick Crawford, John Ireland, Joanne Dru, John Derek
screenplay by Robert Rossen, based on the book by Robert Penn
directed by Robert Rossen

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover All the King’s Men is an entertainingly blunt-witted exploration of Hollywood’s favourite activist cause: Corruption Bad. Taken from Robert Penn Warren’s Pulitzer-winner (the inspiration for the current remake, recently trounced by our own Walter Chaw), it finds a juicy if pointless target in Willie Stark (Broderick Crawford), the Huey Long stand-in who rises from earnest, clueless nobody to governor of the state, leaving a trail of graft and destruction in his wake. Nobody ever stops to consider what cynical lessons we’re learning about the futility of social change and the corruptibility of the individual: as its paragons of decency are a wealthy blueblood family with political ties, it’s not exactly a Marxist/Leninist extravaganza. But no matter, as it allows a collection of people to sound off with the kind of melodramatic bull that only Tinseltown can provide.

Weeds: Season One (2005) – DVD

Posted in2000s, 2006, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Drama, DVD, Television

Image B+ Sound B Extras C
“You Can’t Miss the Bear,” “Free Goat,” “Good Shit Lollipop,” “Fashion of the Christ,” “Lude Awakening,” “Dead in the Nethers,” “Higher Education,” “The Punishment Light,” “The Punishment Lighter,” “The Godmother”

by Walter Chaw Showtime Entertainment chief Roger Greenblatt told the PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER in August of this year that he was surprised “Weeds”, the pay channel’s latest attempt to catch the HBO original series tiger by the tail, had generated no controversy whatsoever. The ongoing saga of a soccer mom, recently widowed, selling pot to her friends and neighbours, “Weeds” has apparently aroused no ire from the traditionally prickly right-wing groups that make it their stock and trade to get their panties in a bunch over this sort of thing. Credit “Weeds”‘ decidedly non-controversial make-up and storylines for its complete inconsequence; its weak writing and suffocating air of self-congratulation very quickly metastasizes into a lump of middlebrow prestige. Seen by many as the blue-state response to the red-state Stepford conformity of the allegedly subversive “Desperate Housewives”, “Weeds” is more accurately a comedy that uses the very same neo-conservative fear-mongering and race-baiting its satirical targets use but re-deploys them to ostensibly satirical effect. Yet there’s so little weight to its happy serial horseshit that what’s probably meant as smarty-pants sociology comes off as limp and pandering. I see “Weeds” as an Ayn Rand piece, its straw men stuffed with dolled-up ganja and its slack grasp on the legitimately subversive hidden under a pile of insubstantial, terrified condescension.

Alien Nation: The Complete Series (1989-1990) + Doctor Who: The Complete First Series (2005) – DVDs

Alien Nation: The Complete Series (1989-1990) + Doctor Who: The Complete First Series (2005) – DVDs

Posted in1980s, 1990s, 2000s, 2006, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Drama, DVD, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Television, UK

ALIEN NATION: THE COMPLETE SERIES
Image C Sound C Extras C
“Alien Nation: The TV Movie (Pilot),” “Fountain of Youth,” “Little Lost Lamb,” “Fifteen with Wanda,” “The Takeover,” “The First Cigar,” “Night of the Screams,” “Contact,” “Three to Tango,” “The Game,” “Chains of Love,” “The Red Room,” “The Spirit of ’95,” “Generation to Generation,” “Eyewitness News,” “Partners,” “Real Men,” “Crossing the Line,” “Rebirth,” “Gimme, Gimme,” “The Touch,” “Green Eyes”

DOCTOR WHO: THE COMPLETE FIRST SERIES
Image A Sound B Extras B
“Rose,” “The End of the World,” “The Unquiet Dead,” “Aliens of London,” “World War Three,” “Dalek,” “The Long Game,” “Father’s Day,” “The Empty Child,” “The Doctor Dances,” “Boom Town,” “Bad Wolf,” “The Parting of the Ways”

by Walter Chaw I’m a fan of Graham Baker’s dreadful Alien Nation from 1988. Run the words of the title together and you get a not-terribly-clever yet not-entirely-awful summary of what the film is getting at when it’s not busy being a ludicrous high-concept buddy cop flick pairing your typical crusty old vet with an earnest rookie who happens to be an alien with a spotted pate instead of a hilarious racial minority. (Shades of Dead Heat, where Joe Piscopo played a bug-eyed zombie.) It’s a schlocky B-concept, granted, but the parallax view suggests that lurking in Alien Nation is a neat parable about the Chinese-American experience in San Francisco around the turn of the century and on through to the modern day.

G Men (1935) – DVD

G Men (1935) – DVD

Posted in1930s, 2006, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Crime, Drama, DVD, Thriller

‘G’ Men
**½/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B+
starring James Cagney, Margaret Lindsay, Ann Dvorak, Robert Armstrong
screenplay by Seton I. Miller
directed by William Keighley

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover I feel sorry for anyone who’s never seen James Cagney in a movie. Those fanboys who moon over stuff like Goodfellas, The Godfather, and the 1983 Scarface without checking out their forebears aren’t just ignorant, they’re cheating themselves cruelly: Cagney was the sort of performer capable of lighting up a bad script and becoming the focal point of a room full of dead-weight actors suddenly ennobled by his presence. Such is the case with G Men, a not-terribly-brilliant scenario and some average support staff electrified by a few choice shootouts, punchy William Keighley direction, and Cagney’s ball of fire burning up the screen. If he’s ultimately miscast as a lawman, Cagney can make any role his own in ways that shouldn’t make sense but do.

Inside Man (2006) [Widescreen] + Thank You for Smoking (2006) [Widescreen] – DVDs

Inside Man (2006) [Widescreen] + Thank You for Smoking (2006) [Widescreen] – DVDs

Posted in2000s, 2006, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Directors: Spike Lee, Drama, DVD, Mystery, Satire, Thriller

INSIDE MAN
***/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B
starring Denzel Washington, Clive Owen, Jodie Foster, Christopher Plummer
screenplay by Russell Gewirtz
directed by Spike Lee

THANK YOU FOR SMOKING
***/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras B
starring Aaron Eckhart, Maria Bello, Adam Brody, Sam Elliott
screenplay by Jason Reitman, based on the novel by Christopher Buckley
directed by Jason Reitman

by Walter Chaw You make mistakes as a film critic sometimes, and, unlike a lot of professions, when you flub, you do it for the record. I underestimated Spike Lee’s 25th Hour badly upon its release a few years ago, misunderstanding it, fearing it, seeing it as a mediocre film when, in fact, subsequent viewings have revealed it as possibly Lee’s tonal masterpiece. My inclination, then, is to overcompensate with Inside Man by offering it every benefit of the doubt beforehand, during, and now–by trying hard to overlook the first bad Jodie Foster performance I can remember as well as a mishandled denouement that stretches the picture past the point of recoil. But even with a jaundiced eye, Inside Man cements Lee as one of the few filmmakers with the brass ones to comment on the race schism, and to shoot (with assistance from ace cinematographer Matthew Libatique) a post-9/11 New York with the gravity of a heart attack. In his individualism, though, that almost-shrill dedication to pumping fists up familiar channels, Lee raises a few eyebrows (and elicits a couple of grins) for posing his Nazi villain in various desktop-photo tableaux with other twentieth-century, profiteering, conservative ogres like George and Barbara Bush and Margaret Thatcher. It’s an interesting companion piece to V for Vendetta in that way, at once a melodramatic throwback and a progressive scalpel. It’s blaxploitation, Seventies paranoia, and the latest Spike Lee Joint from Ground Zero.

School for Scoundrels (2006) + The Guardian (2006)

Posted in2000s, 2006, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Theatrical, ZERO STARS

SCHOOL FOR SCOUNDRELS
ZERO STARS/****
starring Billy Bob Thornton, Jon Heder, Jacinda Barrett, Luis Guzman
screenplay by Todd Phillips & Scot Armstrong
directed by Todd Phillips

THE GUARDIAN
*½/****
starring Kevin Costner, Ashton Kutcher, Neal McDonough, Melissa Sagemiller
screenplay by Ron L. Brinkerhoff
directed by Andrew Davis

by Walter Chaw What the woefully, dreadfully, desperately unfunny School of Scoundrels has going for it is the casting of fetching Jacinda Barrett as the leading lady; what it squanders is the opportunity to present anything resembling intelligence or wit in favour of achingly uninsightful jabs at the gender rift and the presentation of idiot Jon Heder in exhibit, oh, about ‘E’ or ‘F’ by now, of how he has no known function. Billy Bob Thornton continues his blue W.C. Fields bit (next up, Mr. Woodcock), here as “Dr. P,” the head of the titular finishing school that specializes in molding the losers and milquetoasts of the world into sunglasses-wearing assholes fond of comparing themselves to lions. His prize student is meter maid Roger (Heder), who, because the script demands it, transforms himself from a doofus into a doofus in a suit, finally mustering up the courage to ask out neighbour Amanda (Barrett). Inexplicably, she has all along been pining for this hermetic, feminized, saccharine troll–after all, what beautiful, smart, funny woman doesn’t want to be dating someone with the looks of Napoleon Dynamite and the personality of a serial-killing child molester? Sarah Silverman is wasted (though given her track record, it could very well be that there’s nothing left to waste) as Amanda’s evil roommate, written with snarky commentary you’d think a perfect fit for her.

Smokey and the Bandit (1977) [Special Edition] – DVD

Smokey and the Bandit (1977) [Special Edition] – DVD

Posted in1970s, 2006, Action, Adventure, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, DVD, Road Movie

*/**** Image B Sound B+ (DD)/A (DTS) Extras B
starring Burt Reynolds, Sally Field, Jerry Reed, Jackie Gleason
screenplay by James Lee Barrett and Charles Shyer & Alan Mandel
directed by Hal Needham

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover One thing is inescapably true: Smokey and the Bandit was not aimed at people like me. Only the most casual, least demanding filmgoer need apply to this good-ol’-boy version of Vanishing Point–people with as much beer in them as possible, ready to laugh at cheap jokes and root for a speed demon. They are welcome to the movie, but the fact remains that anyone with even a scintilla of interest in film as art is pretty much left out in the cold. As I can hear a mountain of e-mail forming denouncing me for my perceived elitism, let me be perfectly clear: anyone in the market for Burt Reynolds driving fast and making Jackie Gleason apoplectic will find this the sort of thing that they like.

The Science of Sleep (2006) + Jet Li’s Fearless (2006)

Posted in2000s, 2006, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, China, Comedy, Drama, Esoterica, France, Hong Kong, Italy, Martial Arts, Romance, Theatrical

THE SCIENCE OF SLEEP
*½/****
starring Gael García Bernal, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Alain Chabat, Miou-Miou
written and directed by Michel Gondry

Fearless
**/****
starring Jet Li, Nakamura Shidou, Sun Li, Dong Yong
screenplay by Chris Chow, Christine To
directed by Ronny Yu

by Walter Chaw A cacophony of cascading whimsy, Michel Gondry’s exercise in Freudian bric-a-brac The Science of Sleep plays like a movie based on a thrift store specializing in Harlequin novels–French Harlequin novels. It adheres to the music-video director’s maxim of maximum images per second, and it casts Gael García Bernal as Stéphane, a useless lug endlessly working on a calendar of calamitous events and pining after his across-hall neighbour Stéphanie (Charlotte Gainsbourg), with whom he is too smitten to confess that his mother is her landlord. His dreams take the form of a one-man variety show, while Gondry revels in scenes where he inflates his hero’s hands and has him ride an animated patchwork horse. But The Science of Sleep is more exhausting than illuminating–more a loud masturbation than any kind of intercourse with the audience. The difference between the Gondry of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and the Gondry of The Science of Sleep, it seems obvious to say, is the difference between a film scripted by Charlie Kaufman and one not, though it’s more complicated than that in that the Kaufman of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is an artist who finally struck a balance between affectation and a much finer connective tissue. Gondry is still just engaged in the twist.