The Sea Inside (2004) + Hotel Rwanda (2004)

Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Drama, Spain, Theatrical, War

Mar adentro
*½/****
starring Javier Bardem, Belén Rueda, Lola Dueñas, Mabel Rivera
screenplay by Alejandro Amenábar, Mateo Gil
directed by Alejandro Amenábar

HOTEL RWANDA
**½/****
starring Don Cheadle, Sophie Okonedo, Nick Nolte, Joaquin Phoenix
screenplay by Keir Pearson & Terry George
directed by Terry George

Seainsiderwandaby Walter Chaw Marking the second euthanasia melodrama of the 2004 awards season after Clint Eastwood's Million Dollar Baby, Alejandro Amenábar's peculiar follow-up to The Others is another ghost story of sorts documenting the last, sad days of Ramón Sampedro (Javier Bardem), made a quadriplegic by a distracted dive into a shallow tide pool. "Shallow pool" could also describe the film, a miserable little gimp-of-the-week exercise awash with clichés and platitudes that the real Sampedro would probably have found condescending and insulting. The Sea Inside (Mar adentro) is the very equivalent of an elementary school teacher taking your hand and helping you find a seat on the short ride to made-for-TV-dom. If not for its unromantic central performance from Bardem, the best actor in the world at this moment, this appallingly sentimental work would be a candidate for the most misguided movie of the year.

The Office Special (2003) – DVD

Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Pseudo-Documentary, Television, UK

Image A- Sound A Extras B+

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover I suppose the hot streak had to end sometime: "The Office" was so meticulously detailed, so vividly characterized, and so totally uncompromising in making you feel the agony of workaday life, that it can perhaps be forgiven for wanting to give back to the characters it had so spectacularly abused and humiliated. Thus we have "The Office Special", which is smart enough to know that the ride on the gravy train is over but can't bear to leave our heroes in limbo and thus forces a closure that violates everything the series stood for. It's still "The Office" and it's still worth watching, but its movement towards climactic release is incongruous after the two years of droning sameness that went on–hilariously–with no end in sight.

Meet the Fockers (2004)

Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Robert De Niro, Romance, Theatrical
½*/****
starring Robert De Niro, Ben Stiller, Dustin Hoffman, Barbra Streisand
screenplay by Jim Herzfeld and John Hamburg
directed by Jay Roach
 
Meetthefockersby Walter Chaw There's a scene towards the end of Jay Roach's pathologically unfunny Meet the Fockers where Dustin Hoffman and Robert De Niro sit across from each other in a front-yard bower and prepare to exchange dialogue. Thirty years ago, such a tableau would have been cause for held breath and tingles up and down; today, it's just two miserable old has-beens cashing a paycheck borrowed against their dimming reputations and acting like clowns for the bemusement of the very same audience of folks who used to demand something from their entertainment. Something like energy, for instance, or invention, or–perish the notion–insight into the world of thought. Meet the Fockers throws itself onto the growing pyre of disposable gag reels built entirely on humiliation and scatology. Urine, feces, vasectomies, foreskins, senior citizens dry-humping to the nasal exhortations of a muumuu-clad Barbra Streisand while somewhere else a cat is flushing a little dog down a toilet. A toddler (Spencer and Bradley Pickren) signals for milk every time he sees a woman with large breasts, says "asshole" a lot, and, as if that's insufficient, makes lewd sucking faces, sticks out his tongue, and appears to mime cunnilingus. He's almost as adorable as Ben Stiller, sliding comfortably now into the role of eternal jackass and requisite redheaded stepchild.

The Princess Diaries 2: Royal Engagement (2004) [Widescreen] – DVD

Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, Disney, DVD, Family, Romance

*/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras C-
starring Anne Hathaway, Heather Matarazzo, John Rhys-Davies, Julie Andrews
screenplay by Shonda Rhimes
directed by Garry Marshall

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover I had rather hoped that my previous DVD tussle with Garry Marshall, on the subject of his The Princess Diaries, would be my last. But here it is five months later, and I'm stuck with the unenviable task of a) watching and b) working up the enthusiasm to write about The Princess Diaries 2: Royal Engagement, which is, if anything, worse than the not-so-original original. Again we have a hypocritical be-yourself message for people whose self is largely determined by what they see on the Disney channel, a horrible white-on-tan colour scheme, graceless design, and shallow characterizations–in other words, everything that made the first film such a chore to sit through. But where The Princess Diaries felt complete in its cornball wish-fulfillment, The Princess Diaries 2 is clearly an afterthought made to wring more cash out of impressionable tweens. You and I are smarter than that; one of us should flee in terror.

Open Water (2004) [Widescreen] – DVD

Posted in2000s, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Horror, Thriller

**/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B
starring Blanchard Ryan, Daniel Travis, Saul Stein, Estelle Lau
written and directed by Chris Kentis

Openwaterdvdcapby Walter Chaw The idea is that we've grown arrogant in our luxury, that we're a generation fattened on cell phones, the Internet, and the double-edged sword of 24-hour convenience. 1999's
has become sort of a favoured whipping boy of this spoiled culture (nothing breeds contempt like success), but what's missing in the backlash is the idea that the picture, besides being a seminal indie cross-marketing exercise, predicted the new wave of aggressively nihilistic horror films in our post-millennial/post-9/11 canvas. More literally, The Blair Witch Project dealt with our status off the proverbial reservation, counting the layers of technology with which we insulate ourselves from the capricious vagaries of reality and nature like rings on a felled tree. "There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your science," indeed–things like witches.

A Taste of Freeman: FFC Interviews Morgan Freeman

Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, DIFF/SDFF, Film Festivals, Interviews

MfreemaninterviewtitleDecember 19, 2004|A man who needs little introduction in American cinema, Morgan Freeman is taller in person than you'd expect (slimmer, too) and gracious to the point of delaying his lunch so that we could finish our conversation. In town to receive a lifetime achievement award at the 27th Starz Denver International Film Festival, Mr. Freeman granted interviews with no specific movie to hump, his long-awaited reunion with director Clint Eastwood, Million Dollar Baby, still flying low on the radar at that point. He was there sans agenda, in other words, a rare place to find an interview subject and an invitation–a daunting one–to go over some ground that has already been trampled flat. The challenge of chatting with someone as well-known as Mr. Freeman is always going to be finding something new to discuss: even if you come up with a fresh question, after all, like anyone polished in the apple of the public eye, the super-famous and the oft-dissected have developed a skill for reverting to stock answers and widely-published responses. (As the saying goes, they answer the question they wish they were asked.) It's not affectedness, exactly–it's training. And after a while, that training becomes as helpless a reflex as blinking.

Spanglish (2004)

Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Romance, Theatrical

*/****
starring Adam Sandler, Téa Leoni, Paz Vega, Cloris Leachman
written and directed by James L. Brooks

Spanglishby Walter Chaw Take a real close look at the two fertile women in James L. Brooks’s Spanglish: one, Deborah (Téa Leoni), is a fright-masked, screeching harridan who resurrects all by herself the offense once implied by the term “hysterical,” and the other, a fiery Latina clothed in soft browns named Flor (Paz Vega), is nurturing, reasonable, and maternal to the point of smothering her daughter. Which is the worse stereotype would be an interesting conversation to have; how the both of them torment John (Adam Sandler), the decent white guy hero (Deborah with outbursts, Flor with forbidden fruit), is a conversation not worth having. You expect a lot of things from a Brooks film: lethal levels of schmaltz, diarrheic streams of introspective dialogue, precocious tots–but you generally don’t anticipate a lot of underdeveloped characters, a disquieting undercurrent of paternalistic racism, and one central personality apparently constructed for the sole purpose of being the lightning rod for the audience’s every aggression. (Deborah is the most hellish–and consequently the most memorable–affront to rich white women I’ve seen since Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?.) The only two interesting characters in the piece are Deborah’s alcoholic mother Evelyn (Cloris Leachman) and chubby daughter Bernice (Sarah Steele)–not coincidentally, the two characters least like convenient pastiches. Frankly, the film should have been about them.

Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events (2004)

Posted in2000s, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Family, Fantasy, Germany, Theatrical

A Series of Unfortunate Events
**½/****
starring Jim Carrey, Jude Law, Liam Aiken, Emily Browning
screenplay by Robert Gordon, based on the books The Bad Beginning, The Reptile Room, and The Wide Window by "Lemony Snicket"
directed by Brad Silberling

Lemonysnicketby Walter Chaw The best children's entertainments accentuate a child's strengths, encouraging the pursuit of aptitude and bliss instead of impossible pipe dreams. It's the lesson of The Incredibles, one of the bravest, most subversive films the year–and it seems to be the lesson of Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events as well until the picture caves in to kid-flick conventions and worse. But while it's humming along with the freshly-orphaned Baudelaires–Violet (Emily Browning), Klaus (Liam Aiken), and little Sunny (Kara and Shelby Hoffman)–doing what they do best (Violet the engineer, Klaus the reader, Sunny the biter), Lemony Snicket, with its gothic sets and grotesque gallery of rogues, offers up a brilliant antidote to the saccharine blather of traditional holiday fare. Fleetingly effective or no, it's a shot of insulin in a season that generally offers up bloated prestige items for the grown-ups and freakishly genial, accidentally perverse fare for the kiddies.

Grande école (2004) – DVD

Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Drama, DVD, France, Romance

**/**** Image B+ Sound B Extras A-
starring Gregori Baquet, Jocelyn Quivrin, Arthur Jugnot, Alice Taglioni
screenplay by Robert Salis, based on the play "Editions Actes Sud Papiers" by Jean-Marie Besset
directed by Robert Salis

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover It's often interesting to watch people try to justify their actions–especially when they themselves know that what they're doing is wrong. Such is the case with Robert Salis's Grande école, a film that shortchanges class in its attempts to address sexual identity. Its saga of an upper-middle-class snob and his love for, among others, an Arab labourer, wants desperately to do the right thing as far as social levelling is concerned, but it's too impressed with its own benevolence to really serve much purpose. The main event is always its hero's conflicts, in particular his desire to remove the shackles of his upbringing–his illicit love is more a prod to his essential goodness than it is a genuine challenge to privilege. But if Grande école fails as a critique, it succeeds as a weird conflicted thing making excuses for itself.

Ginger Snaps Back: The Beginning (2004) – DVD

Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Drama, DVD, Horror, Werewolf

**/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Katharine Isabelle, Emily Perkins, JR Bourne, Tom McCamus
screenplay by Christina Ray and Stephen Massicotte
directed by Grant Harvey

by Walter Chaw Ravenous but not funny, the clumsily-titled Ginger Snaps Back: The Beginning takes the venerable Canadian she-wolf franchise and, in Canuck fashion, de-sexualizes it by suggesting that the appearance of two relatively nubile lasses at an isolated fort populated entirely by men rouses no passions beyond a metaphorical anxiety of invasion from without. The females in horror films tend to be the consumptive dank underground–in slashers specifically, they're the avatar for teen-boy fantasies of revenge. But in Ginger Snaps Back, they're neither avatar nor holy object, really, just catalysts for the interpersonal dramas of male settlers. The implications are many, most strident among them the unavoidable one that in Canadian cinema, sex is either perfunctory, ugly, forced, or involves a dead person. We've come a long way from the budding sexuality of the first Ginger Snaps film–all the way to an almost complete evasion of both the Orientalism in a medium-hot near-tryst wet dream with a Native American warrior and subsumed homosexual buddy lust. This despite the menstrual implications so cannily established by the franchise.

The Beverly Hillbillies (1993) – DVD

Posted in1990s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, DVD, Family

*/**** Image B+ Sound B-
starring Diedrich Bader, Dabney Coleman, Erika Eleniak, Cloris Leachman
screenplay by Lawrence Konner & Mark Rosenthal and Jim Fisher & Jim Staahl
directed by Penelope Spheeris

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover I could tell you plenty of things about The Beverly Hillbillies. That it's based on the beloved Buddy Ebsen sitcom (a fact which pretty much thins the ranks of those who will tolerate it), for instance. That it features Jim Varney in Ebsen's place as Jebediah Clampett, a farmer who heads out to California with his family in tow after striking the mother lode of oil. That once the Clampetts arrive in the land of "swimming pools [and] movie stars," the mission is to a) find a fiancée for widowed Jeb, and b) domesticate the tomboyish Ellie May (Erika Eleniak). Or that these bits of information are used by a couple of schemers (Rob Schneider and Lea Thompson) to bilk the Clampetts–including Jeb's strapping son Jethro (Diedrich Bader, looking appropriately dim)–out of their newly-acquired millions. But ultimately, the only piece of information you require is that The Beverly Hillbillies is about as funny as a mugging, or an armed robbery, or "The Family Circus"–everything else is irrelevant.

The Marx Brothers: Silver Screen Collection – DVD

The Marx Brothers: Silver Screen Collection – DVD

Posted in****/****, 1920s, 1930s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD, Musical

THE COCOANUTS (1929)
**½/**** Image C- Sound C-
with Oscar Shaw and Mary Eaton
screenplay by Morrie Riskind, based on the play by George S. Kaufman
directed by Robert Florey and Joseph Santley

ANIMAL CRACKERS (1930)
***/**** Image C Sound C
with Lillian Roth and Margaret Dumont
screenplay by Morrie Ryskind
directed by Victor Heerman

MONKEY BUSINESS (1931)
***½/**** Image B+ Sound C+
with Rockliffe Fellowes and Harry Woods
screenplay by S.J. Perelman and Will B. Johnstone
directed by Norman McLeod

HORSE FEATHERS (1932)
****/**** Image C+ Sound B
with Thelma Todd and David Landau
screenplay by Bert Kalmar and Harry Ruby and S.J. Perelman and Will B. Johnstone
directed by Norman McLeod

DUCK SOUP (1933)
****/**** Image B+ Sound B
with Margaret Dumont and Raquel Torres
screenplay by Bert Kalmar and Harry Ruby and Arthur Sheekman and Nat Perrin
directed by Leo McCarey

by Walter Chaw Popular wisdom holds that the Marx Brothers were best at Paramount, before the public disapproval of their satirical masterpiece Duck Soup sent them fleeing with proverbial tails between their legs to MGM and an ignoble end in a series of progressively worse, studio-sterilized soft-shoe routines. But the truth is that the Marxes didn’t hit their stride until at least their third picture for Paramount, Monkey Business: the first couple of flicks (The Cocoanuts and Animal Crackers) are laden by the team’s dependence on played-out stage productions and the “oh my god” quality of the early talkie, in which actors played to microphones hidden in flower pots, extras stared straight at the camera, and the florid gestures of the theatre were adhered to with pathological devotion.

I Confess (1953) – DVD

I Confess (1953) – DVD

Posted in****/****, 1950s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Crime, Directors: Alfred Hitchcock, Drama, DVD, Thriller

****/**** Image B Sound B Extras B
starring Montgomery Clift, Anne Baxter, Karl Malden, Brian Aherne
screenplay by George Tabori and William Archibald
directed by Alfred Hitchcock

by Walter Chaw Just the visual beauty of Alfred Hitchcock’s I Confess speaks volumes for its inclusion on the short list of the master’s masterpieces. This is one of the most astonishing-looking films in all of black-and-white cinematography, its palette of greys a veritable vice press on the already-quailing Montgomery Clift. A late, breathtaking montage wherein Clift, walking the streets of Quebec (filmed on location by the great Robert Burks), crosses a silhouette of a statue of Christ on His last walk to Calvary defines by itself character and theme: Hitchcock’s wrong-man obsession clarified as Catholic guilt transference. The power of Hitchcock’s best films is a potent mixture of audacious cinematic genius and the suspicion that original sin makes mistaken identity merely the intrusion of cosmic judgment. (It’s inevitable, and you must have done something at some point to deserve it, besides.) There’s something greater at work in Hitchcock’s films, the presence of the director asserting itself always–and a connection is struck in I Confess between that directorial control and a sort of implacable karmic omnipresence. For Hitch, filmmaking is Old Testament stuff, and I Confess is a little of that old-time religion.

Blade: Trinity (2004)

Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Horror, Sci-Fi, Superhero, Theatrical, Vampire

*/****
starring Wesley Snipes, Kris Kristofferson, Jessica Biel, Ryan Reynolds
written and directed by David S. Goyer

Bladetrinityby Walter Chaw A genuinely bad film, Blade: Trinity gains a little currency by banking on some of the hot topics in our cultural diaspora (blacks vs. whites, rich vs. poor, privileged vs. ghettoized) as well as sporting a pretty heady fascination with progeny and parentage. But it’s not nearly enough to forgive the film’s excrescent dialogue, tepid action scenes, or asinine performances. It finds David S. Goyer, writer of all three Blade films in addition to Alex Proyas’s modern classic Dark City, at the helm of a feature for the second time having learned nothing from Proyas and Blade II‘s Guillermo Del Toro. When the director of an action film takes pains to turn off the lights right before each action scene is set to begin, begin to worry. If Goyer does anything, he confirms the idea that if you’re not a brilliant writer (like Wes Anderson, say), then you probably shouldn’t be directing the mediocre scripts you’ve written (like George Lucas, say), because writers who usher their own scripts to the screen tend to think of their word as law instead of as a good place to start. For the first time in this series, I was bored, disinterested, and didn’t get any kind of blaxploitation charge out of Wesley Snipes cool-mutha-shut-yo-mouf method-spawned half-vampire avenger. If Blade: Trinity is the end of the cycle, it came one movie too late.

Prolific: FFC Interviews Kevin Bacon

Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, DIFF/SDFF, Film Festivals, Interviews

Kbaconinterviewtitle

December 5, 2004|"It's just orange juice, no vodka," I said, pointing to my little plastic cup emblazoned with the brand name of a certain Russian beverage that, this autumn morning, was also a sponsor for the ten-day 27th Starz Denver International Film Festival. "Would've been all right with me," Kevin Bacon assured. Spectral in frame and bearing, Mr. Bacon is in town to receive the John Cassavetes Award–an honour that would seem questionable but for the actor's recent output: unfailingly maverick, skirting with dangerous. Handsome in a feral sort of way, he's best known for his iconic turns in guilty Gen-X pleasures like Footloose, Flatliners, Diner, and, at the top of the heap, Tremors, and yet a closer look at Mr. Bacon's career reveals his tendency towards the dark in the middle of the tunnel as a thing a long time in the making. His is a gallery of rogues and misfits stretching from a bit part in JFK (which the actor cites as a breakthrough for his career) to psychopath performances in films like Criminal Law, The River Wild, and Murder in the First. Between his work in last year's criminally dismissed In the Cut and now The Woodsman, a cautious ode to a recovering pederast, it's possible that Bacon will finally stop being a prisoner of his good-guy, middle-American hero image.

Sleepover (2004) [Special Edition] – DVD

Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD, Family, Romance

*/**** Image A Sound A Extras C-
starring Alexa Vega, Mika Boorem, Jane Lynch, Sara Paxton
screenplay by Elisa Bell
directed by Joe Nussbaum

Sleepoverdvdcapby Walter Chaw Okay, I admit it: I'm fascinated by Joe Nussbaum's squirmy, sleazy Sleepover, a comedy for kids so queasy in its conception and execution that I'm reasonably certain it qualifies as child abuse in most states. It's not as bad as the Olsen Twins' New York Minute, mainly because it isn't disgustingly racist in addition to disturbingly paedophilic–but I have a sneaking suspicion that Sleepover engages in with some measure of cunning what New York Minute engages in recklessly. It's thus better than the evil 13 Going on 30 as well, though not nearly as good as the only so-so Mean Girls, marking it as one of those pieces of swill whose chief claim to glory is that it's subversive for adult audiences. Tragically, Sleepover is pitched at 'tweens, and the only adults likely to see it are either parents stupid enough to rent it to watch with their children or critics stupid enough to review it themselves in lieu of running Kevin Thomas's predictably lonesome positive review off the wire.

National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation 2: Cousin Eddie’s Island Adventure (2003); National Lampoon’s Holiday Reunion (2003); Dorm Daze (2004) – DVDs

Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Canada, Comedy, Crime, DVD, Mystery, Romance, Television

Christmas Vacation 2: Cousin Eddie's Island Adventure
½*/****
 Image B Sound B Extras F
starring Randy Quaid, Miriam Flynn, Dana Barron, Jake Thomas
screenplay by Matty Simmons
directed by Nick Marick

Thanksgiving Family Reunion
ZERO STARS/**** Image B+ Sound B
starring Bryan Cranston, Judge Reinhold, Hallie Todd, Penelope Ann Miller
screenplay by Marc Warren & Dennis Rinsler
directed by Neal Isreal

DORM DAZE
*/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras C
starring Tatyana Ali, Botti Bliss, James DeBello, Marieh Delfino
screenplay by Patrick Casey, Worm Miller
directed by David Hillenbrand and Scott Hillenbrand

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Did anybody ever actually read NATIONAL LAMPOON? That question occurred to me while contemplating the idea of reviewing three recent, awful exploitations of the magazine's name, and I came to the conclusion that I've never met anybody who in fact had. Maybe I was slightly too young to know the rag's heyday, for all I remember were the movies stamped with their logo–and it's largely through the popularity of Animal House and the Vacation series that most of the non-snarky population felt their influence. Whatever its content as a publication, it sold tickets for a good stretch–but decades have passed and the Lampoon brand has lost its currency, meaning it's been largely reduced to whoring itself out to low-grade imitations of past successes. Thus we have the ignominy of National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation 2 (relegated to television), Holiday Reunion (cable), and Dorm Daze (more or less straight-to-video), all of which cost money better spent on special editions of National Lampoon's glory-days titles.

Dawson’s Creek: The Complete Fourth Season (2000-2001) – DVD

Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Coming of Age, Dawson's Creek, Drama, DVD, Teen, Television

Image B- Sound B+ Extras B-
“Coming Home,” “Failing Down,” “Two Gentlemen of Capeside,” “Future Tense,” “A Family Way,” “Great Xpectations,” “You Had Me at Goodbye,” “The Unusual Suspects,” “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang,” “Self Reliance,” “The Tao of Dawson,” “The Te of Pacey,” “Hopeless,” “A Winter’s Tale,” “Four Stories,” “Mind Games,” “Admissions,” “Eastern Standard Time,” “Late,” “Promicide,” “Separation Anxiety,” “The Graduate,” “Coda”

by Bill Chambers SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. “Dawson’s Creek” recuperated from the departure of Kevin Williamson in time to mastermind the series’ shrewdest tangent yet, that which brought Joey (Katie Holmes) and Pacey (Joshua Jackson) together as boyfriend/girlfriend. Stoking the fourth and smoothest season of the show, the growing pains of that initially illicit union are deftly drawn within the parameters of entertainment for–I shan’t kid myself–the young and the docile. Indeed, year four of “Dawson’s Creek” is arguably the first (and, unfortunately, indisputably the last) in which all of the protagonists are recognizably human at regular intervals–even the series floaters are not their customarily boorish selves, with the exception of a snobby yacht club proprietor (Carolyn Hennesy) whom the creators just as admirably demonstrate no urge to redeem. (Of course, they can’t resist a few geek-revenge moments at her expense.) Most of the season’s missteps are, tellingly, not only a by-product of striking out into fairly virgin territory (literally, in some cases), but also harbingers as ominous as black cats and broken mirrors of “Dawson’s Creek”‘s downward spiral once the action moved from fictional Capeside to refinished sets posing as Boston.

Eloise at Christmastime (2003) – DVD

Posted in2000s, Adventure, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Christmas, Comedy, Disney, Drama, DVD, Family, Television, UK

***/**** Image B Sound B+ Extras B+
starring Julie Andrews, Sofia Vassilieva, Kenneth Welsh, Debra Monk
screenplay by Elizabeth Chandler, based on the book written by Kay Thompson & illustrated by Hilary Knight
directed by Kevin Lima

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Last year around this time, I was expressing my surprise (and perhaps embarrassment) at having actually enjoyed Disney's first Eloise TV movie, Eloise at the Plaza. For once, the Mouse House had perpetrated something that was cleverly conceived, skilfully shot, and lacking in the mushy sentiment that oozes out of many a Disney enterprise. But the jaded cynic in me was wary of the sequel, Eloise at Christmastime, which, if only to salvage my integrity, I hoped would be a cheap quickie riding on the success of the original. No such luck: Eloise at Christmastime is every bit the effervescent piece of fluff that its predecessor is. Once again director Kevin Lima has sized up the limitations of the material and obscured them with a fleet-footed visual wit, creating one of the few Christmas specials you can watch without wincing.

A Very Long Engagement (2004)

Posted in2000s, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, France, Mystery, Romance, Theatrical, War

Un long dimanche de fiançailles
**½/****
starring Audrey Tautou, Gaspard Ulliel, Dominique Pinon, Clovis Cornillac
screenplay by Jean-Pierre Jeunet & Guillaume Laurant, based on the novel by Sébastien Japrisot
directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet

by Walter Chaw Jean-Pierre Jeunet reunites immediately with his Amélie minx Audrey Tautou in this curious little Great War bauble, which locates the last time the French were considered military powers in a story of cowardly self-mutilation at the Front that results in the obsessive search of one war widow for the erstwhile deserter fiancé she knows in her heart is still alive. The picture, in other words, blows the patriotic flute for both the French and the Yanks, who, surely coincidentally, are the two entities financing the piece. (It’s also probably a coincidence that a period epic romance set against war is opening just in time for Oscar consideration.) A Very Long Engagement is a tale of suffocating, all-consuming love, thus it works as something like a bloody companion piece to the oppressive romantic illness of Amélie, going so far as to dip into that film’s bag of tricks (the matte Paris, the heroine returning lost artifacts, the butter-smooth montage introductions, the affection for idiosyncratic secondary characters) and recycle its tone of freakish insouciance. Jeunet’s latest is so charming that it feels aggressive–and so well made that the horrors of trench warfare have all the impact of a beautifully dressed, slightly morbid department store window.