The Tenants (2006) – DVD

April 20, 2006Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Crime, Drama, DVD, Germany, Romance, Thriller

**½/**** Image A- Sound A-
starring Dylan McDermott, Snoop Dogg, Rose Byrne, Seymour Cassel
screenplay by David Diamond, based on the novel by Bernard Malamud
directed by Danny Green

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Parts of The Tenants are very good indeed. Most of them involve the live-wire presence of Snoop Dogg, who, as an angry black writer named Willie Spearmint, acts as conscience/spur/romantic rival to Jewish novelist Harry Lesser (Dylan McDermott). While Snoop doesn't quite convince as a product of the film's '70s milieu, he's right on the money as a resentful, easily-provoked hard case seeking humiliating assistance from Lesser. Every time he has to flip-flop on some bit of respect or contempt for the cringing whitey, he shoots the movie straight through the ceiling–so much so that The Tenants often seems to have more to it than it actually does. As it stands, the film doesn't know what to do with source novelist Bernard Malamud's mash-up between a dithering Jew and a motor-mouthed black with nothing in common except their oblivious monomania for writing.

High Anxiety (1977) – DVD

April 17, 2006Posted in1970s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, DVD, Mystery, Satire, Thriller

**/**** Image B Sound B
starring Mel Brooks, Madeline Kahn, Cloris Leachman, Harvey Korman
screenplay by Mel Brooks, Ron Clark, Rudy DeLuca, Barry Levinson
directed by Mel Brooks

Melhighanxietycapby Bill Chambers There are three clever sight gags in Mel Brooks's disingenuous love letter to Alfred Hitchcock High Anxiety, all of which poke fun at Hitchcock's invasive camera. As far as I can tell, the remaining laughs have no real precedent in the Master's work, while riffs on signature moments from Vertigo, Psycho, and The Birds elicit nary a titter. (It doesn't help that filmmakers straight-faced and tongue-in-cheek alike had plundered those pictures long before Brooks came along; the movie was destined to be impotent in a Brian DePalma world.) Choosing the misbegotten Spellbound, oddly, as its jumping-off point, High Anxiety stars Brooks as acrophobic Dr. Richard H. Thorndyke, the new Chief of Staff at "The Psycho-Neurotic Institute for the Very, Very Nervous." After stumbling upon some corrupt bookkeeping, Thorndyke is hustled off to a psychiatric convention by the scheming Nurse Diesel (Cloris Leachman, perhaps doing Rebecca's Mrs. Danvers) and her S&M-craving toady Dr. Charles Montague (Harvey Korman), where he meets the requisite blonde bombshell (Madeline Kahn) and becomes a murder suspect.

Wet Asphalt (1958) – DVD

April 12, 2006Posted in1950s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Thriller, West Germany, ZERO STARS

Nasser Asphalt
ZERO STARS/**** Image D+ Sound C-
starring Horst Buccholz, Martin Held, Maria Perschv, Gert Frobe
screenplay by Will Tremper
directed by Frank Wisbar

by Walter Chaw Unbearably padded with stock footage and stilted segues around the alleged intrigue of newspaper ethics, Frank Wisbar's abominable Wet Asphalt might discover contemporary relevance for the conceit that a lie about war becomes the biggest story in the world–but probably only if you're so blinded by rage that the picture's shortcomings are secondary. Directed by the obscure Frank Wisbar and starring the recalcitrant punk (Horst Buchholz) from The Magnificent Seven and One, Two, Three, the film follows the trials of a ghost-written young reporter who gets his name attached to a bit of nonsense about Germans living underground after the war. Maybe it's an offshoot of the apocryphal tales of Japanese soldiers crawling out of the Pacific bush years after VJ-Day; more likely, it's the product of a belief that cheapo genre horseshit like this would earn its investment back before people got wise and stayed away in droves. Oh, and there's also some claptrap revolving around a perfunctory love story with wallpaper Bettina (Maria Perschy), to say nothing of the sitting room moralizations with smarmy boss Cesar (Martin Held).

Edward Scissorhands (1990) [Anniversary Edition] – DVD

April 11, 2006Posted in1990s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Directors: Tim Burton, Drama, Fantasy, Romance

***/**** Image A- Sound B Extras C+
starring Johnny Depp, Winona Ryder, Dianne Wiest, Anthony Michael Hall
screenplay by Caroline Thompson
directed by Tim Burton

Edwardscissorhandscap

by Walter Chaw Edward (Johnny Depp), all of Edward Gorey blacks and angles, is the product of a variation on the Frankenstein myth, his mad scientist creator (Vincent Price) dying before he can replace Edward's scissor-hands with wax appendages. Marooned at a child's emotional development, he's thus unburdened by the sort of rage for usurpation of Mary Shelly's creation; when he kills his "father" by neither accident nor design, find in Edward an adolescent's existential angst in an Oedipal split interrupted at the moment he was to be given the instruments of his ascension into "humanity" by his creator. The irony of his condition is expressed by the Stan Winston-designed shears with which he's burdened, lost on the edges of civilization (Tim Burton's twisted view of suburbia), cutting out articles from scavenged magazines and junk mail flyers and arranging them in a collage that includes a story about a boy without eyes, an ad for the kind of prefab-furniture favoured by Burton's suburbanites, and a Madonna-and-child. Our introduction to Edward, facilitated by chirpy Avon sales lady and housewife Peg (Dianne Wiest), is the film's signature set-piece, allowing as it does this twisted, tragic figure to emerge as both effrontery and holy effigy. For Burton, Edward glows with the romance of an eternal child–Peter Pan in love with a memory of Wendy for eternity, adrift with the Lost Boys and working with ice.

C.R.A.Z.Y. (2005) – DVD

April 10, 2006Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Canada, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Morocco

***½/**** Image A Sound A- Extras N/A
starring Michel Côté, Marc-André Grondin, Danielle Proulx, Pierre-Luc Brillant
written and directed by Jean-Marc Vallée

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover The emotional epic that Canada deserves but never gets has finally arrived. There are no finger-wagging lessons here, no sluggish trudges through masochistic misery, no pointless abstractions hammered home a few too many times–only the sense that, despite the constant, agonizing gauntlet one runs in a lifetime, it's all worth it in the long, ecstatic view. C.R.A.Z.Y. isn't interested in wallowing in misery, though its narrative has plenty of that: instead, it's cheerleading the endless struggle to get what you need, and its refusal to acquiesce or admit defeat makes it a special movie. That it comes from Quebec is entirely predictable (although their last crossover success, The Barbarian Invasions, was about a suicide); what isn't predictable is how charged, how unpretentious, and how light on its feet it is even for Canada's provincial hotbed of film talent. C.R.A.Z.Y. suggests we might be good for something other than fictional defeat and documentaries on Paul Anka.

Friends with Money (2006)

April 6, 2006Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Romance, Theatrical

**/****
starring Jennifer Aniston, Joan Cusack, Catherine Keener, Frances McDormand
written and directed by Nicole Holofcener

Friendswithmoneyby Walter Chaw Nicole Holofcener follows her marginal success Lovely and Amazing with the equally marginal failure Friends with Money, presenting a series of interpersonal apocalypses as awkward dinner parties and scenes made unwisely at Old Navy by super-successful fashion designers. It's not subtle in its broad strokes, and once the layers of Angelino self-mortification and obfuscation are plumbed, it's not subtle in its character strokes, either. What it is is a caesura in the middle of those pictures that don't care about their characters that's only interested in its characters–a film that might be shorthanded as "European" in that nothing much happens as words and glances billow in carefully ventriloquited clouds. It's about how people talk to one another among friends and then lover/confidants on the drive home, and as such it provides a clearer look at conversation in any single exchange than does the whole of Crash. Friends with Money is a comparison of our intimate with our open lives; in the comparison, it suggests a third persona, an interiority–though not entirely successfully, making it only as good, really, as the conversation that it may itself inspire on the ride home.

Derailed (2005) [Widescreen Edition (Unrated)] – DVD

April 6, 2006Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, DVD, Thriller, UK, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/**** Image B Sound B+ Extras D+
starring Clive Owen, Jennifer Aniston, Vincent Cassel, Melissa George
screenplay by Stuart Beattie
directed by Mikael Håfström

Derailed2005capby Walter Chaw Okay, here's the deal: if I tell you that Derailed has a big plot twist, you're going to figure it out from the trailers; and if I don't, you're going to figure it out at around the ten-minute mark–it's just that stupid. So I'm simply going to say that Jennifer Aniston is like an old studio starlet trying on her ill-fitting acting shoes in a thriller that wants to turn her into a bad girl done wrong but quails at every moment of truth. The ultimate effect of her "metamorphosis" from America's sweetheart is the uncomfortable feeling that you just saw Donna Reed (or your best friend's mom) in an S&M outfit. It makes the already-spoiled rape scene (unless ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY is an underground publication nowadays) a non-event because as you're watching it, tickling at the back of your head is the knowledge that they'd never rape Rachel in a mainstream middlebrow thriller (even if professional creep Vincent Cassel is the rapist). More, because the whole thing unfolds from the point of view of a very groggy paramour Charles (Clive Owen), the rape becomes something that's only very inconvenient for our married white male adulterer. It's despicable is what it is–compounded by a lie later on and ultimately invalidated by our tired twist, which finds at the end our Charles the spitting image of Travis Bickle but without any trace of irony.

Adam & Steve (2006)

April 5, 2006Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, Drama, Music, Romance, Theatrical

*/****
starring Craig Chester, Malcolm Gets, Parker Posey, Chris Kattan
written and directed by Craig Chester

Adamandsteveby Travis Mackenzie Hoover This site's editor Bill and I were on the phone one night, and we came up with a pleasant dream: What if a movie's stereotypical gay character–the one who gets all the bitchy repartee–actually wasn't funny? Be careful what you wish for: Adam & Steve is all stereotypes, all the time, and none of them are remotely funny. Only not by design, like in our fantasy–it's meant to be hilarious, meaning that you die of embarrassment on behalf of everyone involved. Although the film is supposed to be about a gay romance, its real theme is failure, and it's so terrified to seem like anything less than an outrageous good time that it tries too hard. (That the film's lone comedienne generally performs to crickets pretty much sums up the self-flagellant tone of the whole enterprise.) Hostile, ugly, and generally unpleasant to endure, it engenders fear intense enough to snuff out whatever lightness it might have had.

How to Kill a Judge (1971) – DVD

April 3, 2006Posted in1970s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Blue Underground, Crime, Drama, DVD, Italy

Perché si uccide un magistrato?
***/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras B+
starring Franco Nero, Françoise Fabian, Marco Guglielmi, Mico Cundari
screenplay by Damiano Damiani, Fulvio Gicca-Palli, Enrico Ribulsi
directed by Damiano Damiani

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. There's no way to discuss the thematic failure of How to Kill a Judge without discussing the tacky success that makes it possible. As either a political thriller or a social document, the movie doesn't fare terribly well, priming you for a massive exposé that never arrives and delivering a trickle of an ending that doesn't even begin to compensate. Yet I found myself enjoying the sight of Franco Nero in various clunky '70s outfits, sporting a massive orange caterpillar on his upper lip in a role that allows him to be dashing. The film basically facilitates opportunities for our hero to arrive at the scene of various terrible events looking horrified and then question people while looking swank–and the spectacle turns out to be big, cheesy fun in spite of itself.

Chariots of Fire (1981) [Two-Disc Special Edition] – DVD

April 3, 2006Posted in1980s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Best Picture (Academy Awards), Biopic, Drama, DVD, Sports, UK

**/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Ben Cross, Ian Charleson, Nigel Havers, Cheryl Campbell
screenplay by Colin Welland
directed by Hugh Hudson

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Crushed by the upset win at this year's Oscars, a critic friend of mine bemoaned the fact that "until the Earth crashes into the sun, Crash will have won Best Picture." I couldn't help thinking of that while watching Chariots of Fire, a film that would have been forgotten long ago had it not copped its own surprise Oscar in 1981. I still can't wrap my head around its slipping through the cracks: though there's an awesome professionalism at work, it's remote and inhuman enough to push you far outside the action, making it seem as if its rather primitive story is being viewed by astronauts looking in the opposite direction. The film is so obsessed with the dead surfaces of period detail that it winds up stifling its simple underdog narrative. Watching the virtuous come out on top isn't much fun when the filmmakers appear to be thinking of anything other than that triumph over whatever.

Fun with Dick and Jane (2005) – DVD

April 2, 2006Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, DVD

½*/**** Image B Sound A- Extras B
starring Jim Carrey, Téa Leoni, Alec Baldwin, Richard Jenkins
screenplay by Judd Apatow & Nicholas Stoller
directed by Dean Parisot

Funwdickandjane2005capby Walter Chaw Dean Parisot's remake of Ted Kotcheff's 1977 Fun with Dick and Jane is simultaneously lifeless and desperate, a collection of horrid eleventh-hour edits that result in jokes without punchlines and Carrey's old physical-comedy riffs trotted out in the service of a half-assed redux of a half-assed original. The one nod to freshening up the original's full-frontal assault on capitalism as a means towards happiness (a satirical slot machine tugged to better effect by the act and allure of playing "The Sims") is that it's set in the year 2000 and deals with corporate malfeasance of the kind most conspicuously indulged in by Enron. (In case you don't get that, the last rimshot of the film is taken at Enron's expense, while the first closing credit is a "special thanks" to Ken Lay and his lieutenants.) The fictional big bad fiscal wolf of the piece is Globodyne, presided over by Jack McAllister (Alec Baldwin, in his second corporate bigwig turn after Elizabethtown), a southerner mainly because "southerner" is one of the last cultural groups (along with, say, Asians and gays) you can mock without much fear of backlash. On the day before it's revealed that "Big Jack" has stripped the corporate coffers (including pensions), Dick (Carrey) is promoted to VP of something or another, inspiring wife Jane (Leoni) to quit her job and pushing Dick before the cameras on some Lou Dobbs's "Moneyline" show, where he discovers, in a very public way, that his steed is a paper tiger.

W.W.: FFC Interviews Wim Wenders

April 2, 2006Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Germany, Interviews

WwendersinterviewtitleWim, with vigour

April 2, 2006|It was my great honour to speak with Wim Wenders, one the three principal architects of the German New Wave (along with the late Rainer Werner Fassbinder and the bulletproof Werner Herzog) on his recent swing through Denver. Sitting at a large, round, glass table (he at two o'clock, me at four), he reached over by way of introduction and examined my decrepit tape recorder, made sure it was on, and turned the built-in microphone towards his voice before folding his hands and looking at me expectantly. I took it as tacit approval of either my poverty or my Ludditism from a man whose mature work has consistently addressed the idea of spectatorship–leaving his late-American films (like The End of Violence and Million Dollar Hotel) essays on Modernism in the Eliot mold: the poet stranded between Rat's Alley and the riverbank. His Dennis Hopper-as-Tom-Ripley The American Friend still the finest screen adaptation of a Patricia Highsmith novel (with work like Purple Noon, Strangers on a Train, and Ripley's Game, versions of the same story, all hot on its heels), it is, like his best-known Paris, Texas and best-loved Wings of Desire, a transcendental odyssey through an existential wasteland, its blasted psychic landscape manifesting itself in the empty American dreaming Wenders has made his milieu.

Huff: The Complete First Season; Masters of Horror: Dreams in the Witch House; Masters of Horror: Cigarette Burns – DVDs

March 30, 2006Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Directors: John Carpenter, Drama, DVD, Horror

HUFF: THE COMPLETE FIRST SEASON (2004-2005)
Image A Sound B Extras C
"Pilot," "Assault and Pepper," "Lipstick on Your Panties," "Control," "Flashpants," "Is She Dead?," "That Fucking Cabin," "Cold Day in Shanghai," "Christmas Is Ruined," "The Good Doctor," "The Sample Closet," "All the King's Horses," "Crazy Nuts & All Fucked Up"

MASTERS OF HORROR: H.P. LOVECRAFT'S DREAMS IN THE WITCH HOUSE (2005)
Image A Sound A Extras A+
starring Ezra Godden, Chelah Horsdal
teleplay by Dennis Paoli & Stuart Gordon, based on the story by H.P. Lovecraft
directed by Stuart Gordon

MASTERS OF HORROR: CIGARETTE BURNS (2005)
Image A Sound A Extras A+
starring Norman Reedus, Udo Kier
teleplay by Drew McWeeny & Scott Swan
directed by John Carpenter

by Walter Chaw In an effort to step out from the shadow of HBO's remarkable run of original programming, Showtime contributes to the noise pollution with retarded, sub-par retreads like the inexplicably-lauded hour-longs "Weeds", "The L Word", and the puffed-up psychodrama "Huff". I'm a big fan of Hank Azaria, for no good reason, I guess, beyond his long-term involvement with "The Simpsons", but cast herein as the titular shrink (Craig "Huff" Huffstodt) who witnesses a gay patient (Noel Fisher) commit suicide in his office in the pilot episode, Azaria finds more than just his character neutered and ineffectual. The writing is the first problem with "Huff", leaning hard as it does on the Dr. Phil Handbook for Fake Shrinks in its therapy sessions (leave out the dead gay kid, incidentally, and until episode four's guy-who-refuses-to-shit Huff's patients all appear to be beautiful women) and making the bad mistake of thinking that castrating bitch goddess mothers (Blythe Danner, playing Estelle Getty), nymphomaniac wives (Paget Brewster), and precious/precocious kids (Anton Yelchin) will write themselves out of narrative Bermuda Triangles. Its lack of originality and stultifying obviousness isn't what I hate (it's too boring to hate), though: what I hate is the intrusion of the supernatural in the character of a Hungarian panhandler (Jack Lauger) Huff helps in ways so astonishingly altruistic as to suggest religious mania–not to mention an aesthetic that applies edits and score with the feckless aggression of the genuinely clueless. It looks cool, it sounds sage, and it leaves characters stranded in the middle of a whole lot of slick, iMovie-crunched, amateurish bullshit.

Bill Hicks: Sane Man (1989) – DVD

March 29, 2006Posted in1980s, Authors: Alex Jackson, Concert Doc, DVD

**½/**** Image D/C Sound D/B Extras C-
directed by Kevin Booth

by Alex Jackson For anybody who reads a lot of my work, it may seem as if I can't get through an entire review without lodging this same complaint–but for the record, rebelliousness for the sake of rebelliousness should not be a characteristic of anybody's art. Once you become a full-time professional rebel, you'll eventually start telling the people who listen to you not to do so, and then what are we to do? You can't fulfill that request without violating it and you can't violate it without fulfilling it. Artists and us consumers of the arts need to come up with our own ideas of what's good and what's not. If these ideas happen to coincide with the popular consensus, then that's perfectly fine; and if they happen to go against the popular consensus, that's fine, too. The opinion of the popular consensus should not really come into play, period. The professional rebel, as you could probably surmise, is a distinctly adolescent creation, but I do not denounce him because I wish to distinguish my self from adolescents. I denounce him because he's vapid. He's all for show and not serious about arriving at any fruitful universal truths.

Elizabethtown (2005) [Widescreen Edition] – DVD

March 28, 2006Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Romance

*/**** Image B- Sound A- Extras D+
starring Orlando Bloom, Kirsten Dunst, Susan Sarandon, Alec Baldwin
written and directed by Cameron Crowe

Elizabethtowncapby Walter Chaw Casting about wildly for that elusive "Lubitsch Touch" so prized by his hero Billy Wilder, underdog-uplift auteur Cameron Crowe has patched together Elizabethtown: an awkward, shambling, Frankenstein's monster of a romantic screwball farce that, for all its slickness, shows off every one of its bolts and stitches in monstrous bas relief. Crowe piles on the pathos in this tale of fallen shoe designer Drew (Orlando Bloom), who travels from the West Coast to the semi-Deep South (the titular Elizabethtown, KY) to collect the ashes of his freshly-dead father for the purposes of a maudlin (and interminable) eleventh-hour road trip. "We should have done this years ago," says Drew to his dad's earthly remains, wiping away a brave tear, but for as machine-calibrated as the scene is to pluck at the heartstrings, there isn't–as there isn't at any moment in this film–a hint of authenticity to the sentiment. It's hard to question Crowe's earnestness, but it's easy to point at the alien remove of this picture and speculate as to whether the mom-dependent Crowe (has anyone checked to see if he's still attached to her umbilically?) has ever had a genuinely examined emotion regarding his pop.

Chicken Little (2005) – DVD

March 27, 2006Posted in2000s, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Disney, DVD, Family, Sci-Fi

*/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras C
screenplay by Ron Anderson, Steve Bencich and Ron J.Friedman
directed by Mark Dindal

Chickenlittlecapby Walter Chaw Frantic, frenetic, anxious, obnoxious: the ideal audience for Chicken Little should be in bed by seven, and Disney's umpteenth cry of "sure-fire comeback project" looks, appropriately, like another convulsive episode of corporate crying-wolf. Chicken Little, for instance, makes pop culture references that don't mean anything in the context of a film whose sole purpose appears to be instructing your children to be fearful and hyper. They're just there to give parents, alternately stunned and bored, a little rootless pleasure in the middle of epileptic flash; what's left isn't clever (or kinetic) enough for us to ignore its essential emptiness. What Chicken Little is more than anything else is exhausting. You could by rights hope that it's is a send-up of the Fifties cycle of Martian invasion pictures (it name-checks War of the Worlds for no good reason) as The Incredibles was a send-up of Golden Age superhero comics, but even a cursory comparison between the two films shows that Disney's desperation to make Pixar's looming secession a non-issue is as limp and impotent as the Nevada State Boxing Commission.

Bee Season (2005) – DVD

March 27, 2006Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Family, Germany

*/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B-
starring Richard Gere, Juliette Binoche, Flora Cross, Max Minghella
screenplay by Naomi Foner Gyllenhaal, based on the novel by Myla Goldberg
directed by Scott McGehee & David Siegel

Beeseasoncapby Walter Chaw A lot of mortal liberties were taken with Myla Goldberg's Bee Season on its way to the big screen under the pen of Naomi Foner Gyllenhaal and direction of Scott McGehee and David Siegel, most of them having to do with softening the suffocating fanaticism and sensuality of the novel in favour of the soothing neutral tones of the fearful doorstop demographic. It's not that the book is better, it's that the book is entirely different: the one has a point of view while the other mainly boasts an air of pusillanimous equivocation that turns a vaguely threatening story concerning Kaballah and Hebrew mysticism into Searching for Bobby Fischer. The problem might be that Richard Gere's Saul is a hotshot college professor in this version, and completely reasonable and charming to boot. The problem might be, in other words, that Gere is too good for this movie.

Grey’s Anatomy: Season One (2005) + Arrested Development Season: Two (2004-2005) – DVDs

March 26, 2006Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Romance, Television

GREY'S ANATOMY: SEASON ONE
Image A Sound B Extras C
"A Hard Day's Night," "The First Cut Is the Deepest," "Winning a Battle, Losing the War," "No Man's Land," "Shake Your Groove Thing," "If Tomorrow Never Comes," "The Self Destruct Button," "Save Me," "Who's Zoomin' Who?"

ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT: SEASON TWO
Image A Sound B+ Extras B
"The One Where Michael Leaves," "The One Where They Build a House," "Amigos," "Good Grief!," "Sad Sack," "Afternoon Delight," "Switch Hitter," "Queen for a Day," "Burning Love," "Ready, Aim, Marry Me," "Out on a Limb," "My Hand to God," "Motherboy XXX," "The Immaculate Election," "The Sword of Destiny," "Meet the Veals," "Spring Breakout," "Righteous Brothers"

by Walter Chaw A show so odious, so repugnant, that it's impossible not to have predicted its newly-minted role as the most popular program in the land, Shonda Rhimes's "Grey's Anatomy" has the singular distinction of transforming the adorable Ellen Pompeo into a shallow, whorish version of Doogie Howser, practiced in the art of interspersing extraordinary, near-savant leaps of medical intuition with rolling in the hay with her boss, the hipster-dubbed Dr. McDreamy (Patrick Dempsey). When Dr. Meredith Grey meets a new patient, lay you even money that his/her pain and suffering will be used to augment Meredith's face-swallowing, thirtysomething pout, which is one thing–making her brilliant ex-doctor mother a victim of prime time soap opera Alzheimer's for the same ends is something else altogether. Other alternatives include Dr. Meredith babysitting a severed penis in a Coleman cooler and, better, her lingerie model-turned-MD cohort intervening on behalf of a man undergoing erection-threatening prostate surgery. What better way to end the season, then, but to do a whole episode about a syphilis epidemic sleazing like wildfire through the show's Seattle Grace Hospital?

The Losers (1970) – DVD

March 23, 2006Posted in1970s, Action, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Drama, DVD, Thriller, War

Nam's Angels
**/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring William Smith, Bernie Hamilton, Adam Roarke, Houston Savage
screenplay by Alan Caillou
directed by Jack Starrett

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Figuring out the ideology of an exploitation movie is a tricky proposition. The libertarian leanings of a form generally concerned with sex, violence, and loose living lend themselves to right and left interpretations, often within the same movie. Consider The Losers: in one corner, it's a biker exploitation number given to sticking it to the man and getting it on in mass quantities, but in the other, it's one of the few pre-Rambo movies to be unambiguously positive about the Vietnam war. This cross-genre mélange basically charts the right-left mix of biker gangs themselves, which could ally themselves with the counterculture or claim themselves to be the real free Americans in the same breath. Pity, then, that they have to do their free living at the expense of "slopes" and "slants"–evidence that freedom is a one-way street.

The Squid and the Whale (2005) + The Weather Man (2005)|The Squid and the Whale [Special Edition] – DVD

March 23, 2006Posted in****/****, 2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Coming of Age, Drama, DVD, FFC Must-Own, Nicolas Cage, Theatrical

THE SQUID AND THE WHALE
****/**** Image B Sound A- Extras A
starring Laura Linney, Jeff Daniels, Jesse Eisenberg, Owen Kline
written and directed by Noah Baumbach

THE WEATHER MAN
½*/****
starring Nicolas Cage, Michael Caine, Hope Davis, Michael Rispoli
screenplay by Steven Conrad
directed by Gore Verbinski

Mustownby Walter Chaw The title refers to a New York Museum of Natural History diorama called "Clash of the Titans" that proposes what a tussle between a sperm whale and a giant squid would look like–and it functions as the final, stirring tableaux of a 16mm film self-consciously shot in the manner of early Jim Jarmusch or Spike Lee joints. But The Squid and the Whale, Noah Baumbach's fourth film as writer-director, has inspired more conversation about the degree to which it does or does not tell the story of his own childhood–more specifically, the divorce of his parents, novelist Jonathan Baumbach and former VILLAGE VOICE film critic Georgia Brown–than about the self-reflexive canniness of the filmmaking itself.