Gunga Din (1939) – DVD

Posted in1930s, 2005, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD, War

*/**** Image B- Sound C Extras A
starring Cary Grant, Victor McLaglen, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., Joan Fontaine
screenplay by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, based on the poem by Rudyard Kipling
directed by George Stevens

by Walter Chaw To say that George Stevens's Gunga Din hasn't aged well overlooks the cold reality that the best one could ever say for it is that its hinges were once merely creaky instead of frozen. (It also presupposes that being a decent, moral person meant something different in 1939 than it does in 2005.) The picture is almost impossible to watch for a modern audience: the characterizations are broad and insulting; the dialogue strongly suggests that Rudyard Kipling's poems should be left untransmogrified (even by William Faulkner–deep in the sauce when it came his turn) into filmic narrative; and the attitude towards empiricism and oppressed native populations on display was always condescending and appalling for anyone not currently being shot at.

Mean Creek (2004) – DVD

Posted in****/****, 2000s, 2005, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Coming of Age, Crime, Drama, DVD, FFC Must-Own, Teen

****/**** Image A+ Sound A- Extras B-
starring Rory Culkin, Ryan Kelley, Scott Mechlowicz, Trevor Morgan
written and directed by Jacob Aaron Estes

Mustownby Walter Chaw Mean Creek is poised at the magic hour of the death of innocence. It deals in corruption like a maggot will, burrowing and gnawing its way through true fauna to take its sustenance in its blithe, indifferent way from the dying of the light. The film represents in its existence and function a transitional vehicle between the end of life and rebirth. In Mean Creek, a slug crawls across cold flesh in a quiet, crepuscular moment; a snail (similar/different) is punished an instant later by a clear-eyed little girl, completing her exile from Paradise in a stroke remarkably brutal not necessarily for the act, but for the freshness of the stain on the perpetrator. The picture's title refers not to malevolence, but to a nature metaphor that works as the centre-point–the protean "mean"–between two extremes. It is that ever-tilting line that marks childhood's end: mercurial, sure, yet as substantial and rude as a brick wall.

Aladdin II & III Collection – DVD

Posted in1990s, 2005, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, Disney, Family, Fantasy, Musical, Romance

THE RETURN OF JAFAR (1994)
Aladdin 2: The Return of Jafar
*½/**** Image B+ Sound B Extras C
written by Kevin Campbell and Mirith J.S. Colao & Bill Motz & Steve Roberts & Dev Ross & Bob Roth & Jan Strnad & Brian Swenlin
directed by Toby Shelton, Tad Stones, Alan Zaslove

ALADDIN AND THE KING OF THIEVES (1996)
*/**** Image B Sound B+ Extras C
screenplay by Mark McCorkle & Bob Schooley
directed by Tad Stones

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover About the only reason for Disney to send out their direct-to-video product to be reviewed is to accumulate free advertising. They know that no sensible critic will tolerate anything so obviously thrown together as a cash grab, just as they know that no reader of critics will willingly sign up to watch them; instead, the assumption is that said readers will have kids, and that the review will act as one more reminder (in concert with the saturation ad campaigns in print and on television) that those kids are undiscerning and will probably want the discs bad. So here's my link in the chain of avarice: two age-old attempts to cash in on Disney's Random Ethnic Stereotype Generator are back on the market, and if your children are lacking in aesthetic sense (they are), these might be right up their alley. Just make sure you bite down on a leather strap as you watch them with your goggle-eyed rugrat, and take heart in the knowledge that someone on the World Wide Web knows your pain.

Project Runway: The Complete First Season (2004) – DVD

Posted in2000s, 2005, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD, Television

Image A Sound B+ Extras C+
"Innovation," "Vision," "Commercial Appeal," "Collaboration," "'Model' Clients," "Making a Splash," "Design a Collection," "Postal Uniform Challenge," "Design for the Red Carpet," "Reunion Show," "Fashion Week"

by Walter Chaw It's easy to get frustrated with the Brothers Weinstein and, to paraphrase someone wittier than me talking about Kevin Smith (one of Miramax's pet directors), how they single-handedly turned independent film into the Special Olympics, but I confess I like their "productive" reality shows, "Project Greenlight" and "Project Runway". The end-result may be no better than that of a "productive cough," but the processes in these shows–the labours the contestants are forced to endure and the idea that the product of those labours will be presented for us, the schadenfreudians, to take our pokes at–is brilliant. What better way to pass the time, after all, than to observe homosexual men and castrating women engaged in arcane pursuits and then judge the arcane outcome of said pursuits, with equal portions of disdain and rapture of the unknown the only qualifications with which we're armed?

The American Astronaut (2001) – DVD

Posted in****/****, 2000s, 2005, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD, Esoterica, FFC Must-Own, Musical, Sci-Fi

****/**** Image B Sound A Extras A-
starring Cory McAbee, Rocco Sisto, Gregory Russell Cook, Annie Golden
written and directed by Cory McAbee

by Walter Chaw Opening with a mordant prologue that reminds of the expressionless absurdist sensibility of the late Douglas Adams and proceeding through something somewhere between Six-String Samurai and Dead Man (but a science-fiction musical), Cory McAbee’s The American Astronaut is dead brilliant. Demonstrating a truly dazzling level of technical proficiency (despite or due to what must have been a non-budget) and a breathless creativity fecund and macabre, the picture reminds of Harlan Ellison, Dr. Strangelove, and Dark Star in equal measure. Ultimately, The American Astronaut is something all its own, a film that sets itself up as an old-fashioned serial and goes on to explore cinematic and literary theory with a keen eye for composition and an ear for mad scenario and perverse dialogue. The reasoning is Beckett, the execution is Brecht and Weill, and the results are best described as an educational reel directed by David Lynch circa Eraserhead: self-aware and hallucinatory.

Mulan II (2004) – DVD

Posted in2000s, 2005, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, Disney, DVD, Family, Fantasy, Japan, Musical

**½/**** Image A Sound A Extras C-
directed by Darrell Rooney, Lynne Southerland

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Let it be known that Mulan II is out on DVD, and that it's surprisingly good. The House That Walt Built appears to have learned from its early, awful forays into the direct-to-video realm and decided to put a little elbow grease (not to mention money) into these glorified policy redemptions; once you get past its pitifully limited research of actual Chinese culture (no mean feat, believe me), you can't help but notice that the movie looks stellar. Content-wise, it's a decent, if not great, do-what-makes-you-happy message picture slightly curtailed by its minuscule running time and bolstered by a couple of songs that sound like somebody cared how they turned out. Nothing in Mulan II is brilliant, but it's a couple of notches above eyewash–and just smart enough not to drive unwilling parents completely insane. I can think of worse things to show your attention-deficient knee-biter.

The Hero’s Ambassador: FFC Interviews Dan Harris

Posted in2000s, 2005, Authors: Walter Chaw, Interviews

DharrisinterviewtitleFebruary 6, 2005|I misled Dan Harris. I didn't mean to, but had I meant to, it would've been with the best of intentions. This is how it went down:

I met the young Mr. Harris on the promenade of the Denver Center for the Performing Arts one autumn-touched evening last October. We shook hands and I took note of how furtive he looked–too small in a plain jacket, particularly for the wunderkind who, under the good graces of director Bryan Singer, has found himself as the screenwriter of not only X2, but also Singer's upcoming reimaginings of Logan's Run and Superman. He earned this luck in part based on the strength of his screenplay for Imaginary Heroes, now freshly-produced and opening wide as his hyphenate debut. Mr. Harris had, unfortunately, read my capsule review of Imaginary Heroes preparatory to meeting me (he confessed that he reads his press), and after we found a seat in an abandoned open air café, he thought it prudent to tell me so while sprinkling the rest of our conversation with evidence that he'd all but memorized the piece.

The Wedding Date (2005)

Posted in2000s, 2005, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Romance, Theatrical Release, UK

*/****
starring Debra Messing, Dermot Mulroney, Amy Adams, Holland Taylor
screenplay by Dana Fox, based on the novel Asking for Trouble by Elizabeth Young
directed by Clare Kilner

Weddingdateby Walter Chaw With Dermot Mulroney playing some kind of android gigolo and Debra Messing bronzed in her syndicated brand of humiliated never-a-bride shtick honed through years on "Must-See TV," The Wedding Date doesn't, at least, always accidentally resemble a horror flick, unlike director Clare Kilner's previous film, the creepy How to Deal. What it does is remind a lot of Pretty Woman if the whore in question were a charisma vacuum instead of Julia Roberts, and it finds work as a WASP bitch's-bitch of a mother for the hopelessly typecast Holland Taylor. It's the kind of film focus-grouped to such a precise dot that everyone in any audience that willingly attends the thing will not only be able to name each brand of luggage the characters use, but will do so with joy and pride.

The Chorus (2004)

Posted in2000s, 2005, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, France, Germany, Music, Switzerland, Theatrical Release

Les choristes
½*/****
starring Gérard Jugnot, François Berléand, Kad Merad, Jean-Paul Bonnaire
screenplay by Philippe Lopes-Curval, Christophe Barratier
directed by Christophe Barratier

Chorusby Walter Chaw The one good thing about Christophe Barratier's unbelievably inane, saccharine, and derivative The Chorus (Les Choristes) is that it offers the much put-upon American public a little comfort in the knowledge that the French mainstream (which made this film its top-grossing title of last year) has just as unquenchable a sweet tooth for pap. Useless to discuss at length, The Chorus is essentially another in a line of literally dozens of films in which an inspirational teacher changes the lives of a group of troubled/lower-class/underestimated children through will, kindness, and a rogue spark of crinkly-eyed genius that irks to no end the evil dean/headmaster/school board/community. It's not as bad as Filipino contribution Little Voices, nor is it as good as, say, Goodbye Mr. Chips–locating it somewhere in the neighbourhood of a disaster like Mr. Holland's Opus or the endlessly weird Wes Craven (!) picture Music of the Heart. Taken on its own merits, pretending that you've never seen Dead Poets Society, Stand and Deliver, The Blackboard Jungle, Conrack, Mona Lisa Smile, Dangerous Minds, Renaissance Man, Coach Carter, and so on and so on, The Chorus is still unspeakably maudlin and presented in so straightforward a fashion that if you did the right thing and asked for your money back after five minutes, you could reasonably fake having seen it to a circle of friends, who will admire your stamina in having sat through the whole benighted thing.

Rory O’Shea Was Here (2004)

Posted in2000s, 2005, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Disability, Drama, France, Ireland, Theatrical Release, UK

Inside I’m Dancing
*/****
starring James McAvoy, Steven Robertson, Romola Garai, Brenda Fricker
screenplay by Jeffrey Caine
directed by Damien O’Donnell

Roryosheawashereby Walter Chaw Looking for shock value, the more unkind would call Rory O’Shea Was Here “One Rolled Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”: the film is a straight-up rip-off that substitutes Randle McMurphy and Chief Bromden for plucky punk afflicted with Muscular Dystrophy Rory (James McAvoy) and his cerebral palsy-afflicted chum Michael (not Donnie Wahlberg). Because neither actor is actually afflicted, it can be said that their performances are at best affected; at their worst, and at the service of a condescending screenplay, the two come off as patronizing caricatures engaged in an insipid waltz around the real issues that arise when you’re thrust by disability into the full-time care of strangers. It’s a great idea to cast the disabled in lead roles, even romantic (gasp!) roles, in motion pictures, but it’s a terrible idea to do so for the express purpose of making them into noble savages from which we can suckle our portion of moral outrage and smug, shit-eating superiority. Best, the rebel that brings a sparkle into the lives of everyone he touches has the decency to croak as his last act of charity, allowing the much-maligned social order to go on ticking with one fewer annoying gadfly.

Greg the Bunny (2002) + Crank Yankers – Uncensored: Season One (2002) – DVDs

Posted in2000s, 2005, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD, Television

GREG THE BUNNY
Image A Sound B Extras B
"Welcome to Sweetknuckle Junction," "Sock Like Me," "Dottie Heat," "SK-2.0," "Piddler on the Roof," "Rabbit Redux," "Father & Son Reunion," "Jimmy Drives Gil Crazy," "Greg Gets Puppish," "Surprise!," "The Jewel Heist," "The Singing Mailman," "Blah Bawls"

CRANK YANKERS – UNCENSORED: SEASON ONE
Image A Sound B Extras C-
episodes 1-10

by Walter Chaw What is it about puppets, exactly, that makes them the preferred avatars for children as they navigate the murky straits between childhood and adulthood? I'd hazard that there's a simplifying element to them, some sort of leavening of the peculiarities of human expression so that emotions aren't so subtle, so fraught with the landmines of nuance and subtlety. They're great teaching tools, the perfect bearer of allegory–hence the Japanese, with their tradition of sophisticated puppet theatre, have distilled it (as they have animation) into an adult medium. But in the western world, puppets are so embedded in our puerile, formative experiences (from "Sesame Street" to "Bear in the Big Blue House") that when they're subverted (as in Team America, for instance), there's something particularly naughty about it–above and beyond, perhaps, the specific offense. Alas, it can only hold its illicit thrill until the novelty and surprise of it wears off.

Ice Station Zebra (1968) – DVD

Posted in1960s, 2005, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, DVD, Thriller

**½/**** Image A- Sound A Extras C
starring Rock Hudson, Ernest Borgnine, Patrick McGoohan, Jim Brown
screenplay by Douglas Heyes, based on the novel by Alistair MacLean
directed by John Sturges

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Imagine a lobotomized, irony-free Antonioni relocating White Desert to the North Pole and you'll have a hint of the freakishly chilled formalism that drives John Sturges's Ice Station Zebra. So consumed is it with the gleam of grey steel and the snap of pale Styrofoam that it chucks all considerations of pacing, character development, and ideological orientation. It's a thriller without thrills, a drama without drama, a cold-war bromide barely aware of what hemisphere it's in; all it knows is that the cold, clean surfaces of metal and ice are pretty pretty pretty (please don't touch me). But despite its trouncing of the basics of pop excitement, the picture makes a surprisingly good case for its necrophiliac obsession. Considering the standard-issue material it has to work with, it at least succeeds as an anomaly where a regular production would have failed as hackwork.

Kingdom Hospital: The Entire Series (2004) – DVD

Posted in2000s, 2005, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Drama, DVD, Horror, Mystery, Stephen King, Television

Image A Sound A Extras B
"Thy Kingdom Come," "Death's Kingdom," "Goodbye Kiss," "The West Side Of Midnight," "Hook's Kingdom," "The Young And The Headless," "Black Noise," "Heartless," "Butterfingers," "The Passion Of Reverend Jimmy," "Seizure Day," "Shoulda Stood In Bed," "Finale"

by Walter Chaw The sort of program you want other people to see in the same way you want someone else to smell how spoiled the milk is, the 13-part, 10-hour, Stephen King-scripted adaptation of Lars Von Trier's brilliant Danish miniseries "Riget" (a.k.a. "The Kingdom") is only as bloated, ridiculous, and incompetent as the rest of the master of terror's last decade of work. Auto-cannibalistic like his protagonist in "Survivor Type" and pitched as a cross between "E.R." and, one presumes, the TV version of King's "The Shining" (while playing like a community theatre rendition of "The Singing Detective"), "Kingdom Hospital" is awkward at best and eye-clawing hokum at its worst. There's no other way to describe a talking CGI anteater called "Antubis" (after the Egyptian god of death Annubis, I'm thinking) that fights a Depression-era vampire in the bowels of the titular place of healing. A spooky little girl à la The Shining (played by a terrible kid actor à la Danny from Kubrick's The Shining) describes him this way: "He eats disease, he likes to be scratched behind the ears. He's horrible. Beautiful." Yep.

The Grudge (2004) – DVD

Posted in2000s, 2005, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Horror, Japan, Mystery, Thriller

*/**** Image B Sound A- Extras A-
starring Sarah Michelle Gellar, Jason Behr, KaDee Strickland, Clea DuVall
screenplay by Stephen Susco, based on a screenplay by Takashi Shimizu
directed by Takashi Shimizu

Grudgecapby Walter Chaw Fans of Takashi Shimizu's Japanese horror franchise Ju-On, rest assured that his English-language but still Tokyo-set version of The Grudge is laudably faithful to the source material. So faithful, in fact, that The Grudge is completely free of those tedious drags character development, tension, scenario, narrative, plot, intelligence, point, sociological relevance, technical aptitude, and scares, really, since it leaves "pacing" somewhere back where the rest of that stuff was jettisoned. What The Grudge has a lot of, though, are "jump scares," the cats-through-windows thing where somebody crawls around in an attic with a lighter because they've heard an ominous knocking and then a face appears in the gloom accompanied by a sting note on the soundtrack.

Alone in the Dark (2005); Hide and Seek (2005); In the Realms of the Unreal: The Mystery of Henry Darger (2005)

Posted in2000s, 2005, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Documentary, Germany, Horror, Mystery, Robert De Niro, Sci-Fi, Theatrical Release, Thriller, ZERO STARS

ALONE IN THE DARK
ZERO STARS/****
starring Christian Slater, Tara Reid, Stephen Dorff, Frank C. Turner
screenplay by Elan Mastai, Michael Roesch and Peter Scheerer
directed by Uwe Boll

HIDE AND SEEK
**/****
starring Robert De Niro, Dakota Fanning, Famke Janssen, Elisabeth Shue
screenplay by Ari Schlossberg
directed by John Polson

Alonehideby Walter Chaw Edward Carnby (Christian Slater) is a "paranormal investigator," which in Uwe Boll's visual vernacular means that he dresses like Highlander Duncan MacLeod and lives in MacLeod's apartment, too. Chip through the film's hard veneer of unsightly stupidity (it looks a lot like a Jess Franco film shot on a smaller budget) and you'll begin to unearth a narrative of sorts concerning an ancient Indian tribe that opened a gateway between the light and dark worlds; most of this is imparted by an interminable opening scrawl that's read aloud because director Uwe Boll, himself illiterate, is sympathetic with his target audience, though we get other clues to a plot from an orphan in flashback who, unlike his twenty peers, escapes possession from, um, some bad thing, and a mad scientist Professor Hudgins (Mathew Walker) and his brilliant (snicker) assistant Aline (Tara Reid) trying to collect a bunch of relics so that they can, what, open the gateway between dark and light? I don't know. Casting Reid as a smart person is, by the way, the biggest miscalculation since casting Denise Richards as a nuclear physicist and Kevin Costner as a doctor, although it is admittedly amusing watching her struggle through phrases like "molecular composition."

No Vacancy (1999) – DVD

Posted in2000s, 2005, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Romance

½*/**** Image B Sound B-
starring Lolita Davidovich, Timothy Olyphant, Christina Ricci, Tom Todoroff
written and directed by Marius Balchunas

by Walter Chaw You watch No Vacancy the same way you watch a triathlon, in that it's not an enjoyable viewing experience by any conventional standards, but you find the participants' dedication in completing what experiential evidence suggests is an odious, exceedingly unpleasant task stimulating just the same. As a normal person would quit five minutes in, it's the pluck that fascinates, that willingness to say and do fabulously stupid things during the audition process or the production itself to honour the craft of acting, even if the project that houses it dishonours the craft of filmmaking.

Random Harvest (1942) – DVD

Posted in1940s, 2005, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Drama, DVD, Romance

***/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras A-
starring Ronald Colman, Greer Garson, Philip Dorn, Susan Peters
screenplay by Claudine West, George Froeschell and Arthur Wimperis
directed by Mervyn LeRoy

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Random Harvest isn't really a good movie, but it's strangely satisfying. Though its double-amnesia contrivance would perhaps embarrass an episode of "Diff'rent Strokes", it's impossible not to be a little touched–if not by a literal interpretation of the plot, then by the yearning for the titanic reconciliation facilitated by its crisis. As it takes away, gives back, and takes away again in its narrative rush to final release, the film's grasp of the Freudian fort/da dynamic becomes prime fodder for a Psych-101 term paper. You're never sure which part of the equation is more important, but its primitive game of deprivation and wish fulfilment is too powerful to dismiss. And while Random Harvest borders on camp, it's sincere (or oblivious) enough not to cross the line.

Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence (2004); Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (2004); Time of the Wolf (2003)|Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (2004) [Special Collector’s Edition – Widescreen] – DVD

Posted in****/****, 2000s, 2005, Action, Adventure, Animation, Austria, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Theatrical Release, Thriller, UK

イノセンス
Innocence
Inosensu: Innocence
****/****
written and directed by Mamoru Oshii

SKY CAPTAIN AND THE WORLD OF TOMORROW
**½/**** Image A Sound A Extras A
starring Jude Law, Gwyneth Paltrow, Angelina Jolie, Giovanni Ribisi
written and directed by Kerry Conran

Le Temps du loup
****/****
starring Isabelle Huppert, Béatrice Dalle, Patrice Chéreau, Rona Hartner
written and directed by Michael Haneke

by Walter Chaw For me, the most intoxicating visions of the future are those in which we’re drowning in an ocean of our past–garbage, wreckage, Romes burned to a cinder and heaped against the new Meccas of our collective tomorrows. Star Wars proffered a kind of aesthetic of dirt that appealed: a wonderland where the spaceships looked like they’d been flown and there were places like Mos Eisley that reeked of stale liquor, sawdust, and cigarettes. (The distance that George Lucas has gone to disinfect his grubby vision of the future is the same distance that esteem for the franchise has fallen amongst all but the most die-hard chattel.) Among the spearhead of a group of artists who redefined the science-fiction genre in film the same way that Sergio Leone and Sam Peckinpah scuffed-up the western in the Sixties, Ridley Scott evolved the idea of a functional future, with his Alien and Blade Runner serving as visual echoes of T.S. Eliot’s broken stones and fragments shored against our ruins. Terry Gilliam defined the aesthetic when describing his rationale for the look of Brazil (1985): he wanted it to seem as though the whole century had been compacted into a single moment. The timeless “someday soon” that is always just around a corner that never comes.

His First Shot: FFC Interviews Niels Mueller

Posted in2000s, 2005, Authors: Walter Chaw, Interviews

January 23, 2005|Niels Mueller is part of a graduating class at Tufts that includes Oliver Platt, Hank Azaria, and his collaborator on Tadpole, director Gary Winick, and he may have trumped them all in terms of size of splash with The Assassination of Richard Nixon. Financed in part by Alfonso Cuarón, Leonardo DiCaprio, and USC film-school buddy Alexander Payne and starring Sean Penn and Naomi Watts, Mueller’s hyphenate debut was invited to show at the Cannes Film Festival and is now trickling into theatres across the nation, at the tail end of one of the most contentious election years in recent memory. Although The Assassination of Richard Nixon doesn’t pack the emotional punch of Taxi Driver, the film to which it has invited the most (and not at all unfavourable) comparisons, Mueller has a good eye for composition, a good ear for dialogue (particularly in a small cameo tour de force from Michael Wincott), and a good head for the topical project. After a quick chat about the state of modern film criticism, Mr. Mueller, sounding an awful lot like Alexander Payne over the telephone, spoke at length on the subject of his first feature.

Are We There Yet? (2005)

Posted in2000s, 2005, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, Drama, Family, Romance, Theatrical Release, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Ice Cube, Nia Long, Aleisha Allen, Philip Bolden
screenplay by Steven Gary Banks & Claudia Grazioso and J. David Stem & David N. Weiss
directed by Brian Levant

by Walter Chaw Hot on the heels of the abominable Racing Stripes comes Are We There Yet?, an Ice Cube vehicle the rapper-turned-actor also produced that teaches in broad terms that black people like rims on their cars and bling around their necks, that Asians are just irritating and venal under/oversexed white people, and that actual white people are either hillbilly truckers or dancing, rapping grandmothers. Projectile vomit, scary slapstick, and pissing on women share equal time with forced sentiment and actions so inexplicable as to exist only in the infernal nether-verses reserved for this kind of jerk-finds-a-heart flick. Piling on the pleasure, a pair of demonic children carry on director Brian Levant’s (Problem Child, Beethoven, Jingle All the Way) proud tradition of featuring insufferable kids in unwatchable movies that will be popular enough to ensure that this grade-A assclown gets to continue to making them. Levant’s a racist and a card-carrying Neanderthal–and if he’s not, he’s actually something worse. If he’s not the retarded ogre that his films suggest he is, then he’s exuding this gruel with a calculated purpose instead of just a moronic fecklessness. That the little boy in this film has a doll that resembles the MegaMan toy at the centre of Jingle All the Way tells me that Levant is harking back to that debacle with fondness, which is a little like the Catholic Church harking back fondly to indulgences, child molestation, and the Crusades.