Wild Things 2 (2004) – DVD

April 2, 2004Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, DVD, Mystery, Thriller, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/**** Image A Sound A Extras D
starring Susan Ward, Leila Arcieri, Isaiah Washington, Tony Denison
screenplay by Ross Helford & Andy Hurst
directed by Jack Perez

by Walter Chaw Alligator swamps and high school, I get the comparison, but like the first film, Wild Things 2 is coy, smug, and not so much meta as a self-satisfied, misogynistic tease. Those looking for titillation will have to settle for a lot of slo-mo beach volleyball, multiple views of Susan Ward walking around slowly in such a way as to hide her alarming thighs, and a brief three-way featuring a body double for repulsive/hot (see also: Brittany Murphy) Leila Arcieri, who drops Arcieri down about two cup sizes while upping her pastiness by at least three Danes. Seriously here, how hard would it have been to find a couple of exhibitionistic starlets for a direct-to-video smut pic like Wild Things 2? The really disturbing thing about that is that Arcieri and Ward were apparently hired for their acting ability.

The Rundown (2003) [Widescreen] – DVD

April 1, 2004Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD, Schwarzenegger, Thriller

***/**** Image A+ Sound A+ Extras B+
starring The Rock, Seann William Scott, Christopher Walken, Rosario Dawson
screenplay by R.J. Stewart and James Vanderbilt
directed by Peter Berg

by Walter Chaw There’s an ebullient lustre to Peter Berg’s dedicatedly obnoxious The Rundown, an action film with so little pretension that it actually comes off as smart. It’s the same peculiar phenomenon that makes of Laurel & Hardy geniuses after the fact, banking on timing and carefully cultivated absurdity to at once define and rejuvenate the mismatched buddy-on-the-run genre. Consider a scene in which Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson fights a tribe of pygmy Brazilian freedom fighters, edited and choreographed like a Yuen Brothers wu xia married to a Weissmuller Tarzan flick. Delirious and ridiculous, exciting in spite of itself, The Rundown is the kind of adrenalized filmmaking that is, in fact, more intelligent and misanthropic than it seems. More, it’s not a fluke: Actor Berg’s directorial debut Very Bad Things remains, along with Doug Liman’s Go, one of the great underestimated time-capsule pitch-black comedies of the late-Nineties. If not for a few glaring moments where Berg displays the first symptoms of obfuscating Danny Boyle disease (CGI pullouts, nauseating zooms, and meaningless hyper-edits), particularly in its prologue, The Rundown would be something of a cult all-timer.

demonlover (2002) – DVD

March 30, 2004Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Drama, DVD, Esoterica, France, Mexico, Mystery, Thriller

***/**** Image D+ Sound D+
starring Connie Nielsen, Charles Berling, Chloë Sevigny, Gina Gershon
written and directed by Olivier Assayas

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Right now, I think I like Olivier Assayas's demonlover. I think. I don't always feel this way: after a couple of screenings and a lot of pondering, I have to say that this singularly dense and elliptical movie has a lot of things going against it. Like its lead, it's cold and austere to a fault, viewing its techno-financial milieu from a safe distance and attributing to it a number of traits that simply don't add up. But in the cold light of day, the film connects the dots about the business of cultural production that are normally hidden from view. Assayas may be grasping at straws in a number of instances, but his general framework is sound, and as he speaks of the disconnect of people from the industries that shape them, I'm inclined to look past demonlover's weaknesses. Right now, at least.

Wild Things (1998) [Unrated Edition] – DVD

March 30, 2004Posted in1990s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Crime, Drama, DVD, Mystery, Satire, Thriller

**/**** Image A- Sound A-
starring Kevin Bacon, Matt Dillon, Neve Campbell, Denise Richards
screenplay by Stephen Peters
directed by John McNaughton

by Bill Chambers I shepherded myself through puberty on a steady diet of Cinemax, and I’ve apologized for worse than this movie’s sins on behalf of director John McNaughton, whose Mad Dog and Glory almost sires a new genre: misogyny uplift. So I’ve always considered my indifference towards Wild Things to be something of an anomaly. A continuation of a theme that ran subtly through McNaughton’s powerful Normal Life, i.e., some inextricable link between carnal desire and pecuniary greed, Wild Things (originally titled Sex Crimes) opens with an aerial view of the ‘Glades that cleverly juxtaposes alligator-infested swampland with the grounds of a nearby high school. The implication is clear, but then again it’s too clear, and you can shut the movie off then and there without missing a beat.

Green Acres: The Complete First Season (1965-1966) – DVD

March 30, 2004Posted in1960s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD, Television

Image B- Sound B+
"Oliver Buys a Farm," "Lisa's First Day on the Farm," "The Decorator," "The Best Laid Plans," "My Husband, the Rooster Renter," "Furniture, Furniture, Who's Got the Furniture?," "Neighborliness," "Lisa the Helpmate," "You Can't Plug in a 2 with a 6," "Don't Call Us, We'll Call You," "Parity Begins at Home," "Lisa Has a Calf," "The Wedding Anniversary," "What Happened in Scranton?," "How to Enlarge a Bedroom," "Give Me Land, Lots of Land," "I Didn't Raise My Husband to Be a Fireman," "Lisa Bakes a Cake," "Sprained Ankle, Country Style," "The Price of Apples," "What's in a Name?," "The Day of Decision," "A Pig in a Poke," "The Deputy," "Double Drick," "The Ballad of Molly Turgis," "Never Look a Gift Tractor in the Mouth," "Send a Boy to College," "Horse? What Horse?," "The Rains Came," "Culture," "Uncle Ollie"

by Walter Chaw A sort of old-fashioned dedication to the all-power of the paterfamilias that seems appalling now and probably seemed more than a little quaint by 1965, "Petticoat Junction" (and The Egg and I) spin-off "Green Acres" has a surprisingly good nature that forgives it a lot of its contemporary offensiveness, locating the series as a belated, often surreal continuation of television's "Golden Age" that saw father knowing best and mother knowing next to nothing. Oliver Wendell Douglas (Eddie Albert), the eternal Pollyannaish optimist, uproots his high society wife Lisa (Eva Gabor), the archetypical dingbat, from her beloved Park Avenue penthouse view and plants them both square in the middle of provincial Hooterville on 160 acres of the rundown old Haney farm. There are moments in the series' first season when it's apparent that series writers Jay Sommers and Dick Chevillat have something subversively weird on their minds; "Green Acres" is like a grassroots "The Prisoner" at times–it's just that brilliantly peculiar.

Brother Bear (2003) [2-Disc Special Edition] – DVD

March 30, 2004Posted in2000s, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Disney, Drama, DVD, Family

½/**** Image B+ Sound A Extras B-
screenplay by Tab Murphy and Lorne Cameron & David Hoselton and Steve Bencich & Ron J. Friedman
directed by Aaron Blaise & Bob Walker

by Walter Chaw Deeply unentertaining and, at its heart of hearts, a quintessential example of a dishonest picture, Disney's Brother Bear is rock-bottom entertainment destined to be Pixar's best bargaining chip. It plugs bears and moose into a formula already plumbed Disney-style with lions and meerkats (and once before again with Earth Children stereotypes of Native Americans), boiling an entire culture and mythology down to an insultingly reductive pastiche and taking swipes at women along the way to telling one of the most inapplicable codas in the history of fable: "The story of a boy who became a man by becoming a bear."

Director of the “Dead”: FFC Interviews Zack Snyder

March 28, 2004Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Interviews, Zombie

ZsnyderinterviewtitleMarch 28, 2004|Supplanting that other zombie movie (the at least twice as gory The Passion of the Christ) at the top of the box-office charts last weekend, Dawn of the Dead compelled me to request a phone interview with its director, Zack Snyder. I should amend that I was driven not by pressing questions, but by that flicker of fanboyism I'd thought long-extinguished; I was stunned to have liked the film, just as I was stunned to have enjoyed Marcus Nispel's remake of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Nevertheless, it strikes me that in a day of high production values and sophisticated action editing, the personal horror films of the Seventies are being re-imagined as self-aware takes on the slick formula and stainless steel look of Aliens from a decade later. There's even a Carter Burke character in the new Dawn of the Dead.

Jersey Girl (2004)

March 26, 2004Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Romance, Theatrical, Will Smith

*½/****
starring Ben Affleck, Liv Tyler, George Carlin, Raquel Castro
written and directed by Kevin Smith

by Walter Chaw Self-satisfied and self-congratulatory, Kevin Smith’s films generally give off the feeling of a by-invitation-only party attended by Smith, Matt Damon, Jason Lee, Ben Affleck when he’s not gambling, and Jason Mewes when he’s not in prison or missing. Apparently a smart guy, the moments in his films that suggest evidence of that brightness are overwhelmed by repetitive profanities, puerile devices (i.e. Dogma‘s shit monster), cameos by his cool friends, and old jokes retold in coarse fashion. He’s the love child of David Mamet and a thirteen-year-old virgin at the mercy of pals handsomer and more popular than he, always trying to impress with his blue toughness without the maturity to understand that what made him cool way back when with Clerks wasn’t his scatological horniness, but his intelligence and flashes of observational sophistication.

Dogville (2003)

March 26, 2004Posted in****/****, 2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Denmark, Directors: Lars von Trier, Drama, Esoterica, Theatrical

****/****
starring Nicole Kidman, Paul Bettany, Harriet Anderson, Lauren Bacall
written and directed by Lars von Trier

Dogvilleby Bill Chambers SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Movie pop art is enjoying a renaissance (cf Elephant, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind), of which Lars von Trier's savagely cathartic Dogville is the consummate centrepiece. This despite–and partly because of–outward appearances belying its status as a movie at all: Chalk outlines stand in for traditional sets, designating walls, fences, rosebushes, even the dog, Moses, of the titular locale, a pious community (is there any other kind in von Trierland?) situated in the Rocky Mountains circa Prohibition. A void surrounds the rectangle of pavement that constitutes Dogville–it turns white to indicate day and black to indicate night. One could be forgiven for momentarily mistaking Dogville for that fourth-wall-breaking production of Thornton Wilder's Our Town that aired on HBO last year; as Dogville's narrator, John Hurt is as thorough and intrusive a commentator as Our Town's own Stage Manager.

Secondhand Lions (2003) [New Line Platinum Series] – DVD

March 26, 2004Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Family

**½/**** Image A- Sound A Extras A+
starring Michael Caine, Robert Duvall, Haley Joel Osment, Kyra Sedgwick
written and directed by Tim McCanlies

by Walter Chaw A conservative imperialist fable, the peculiar Secondhand Lions can't quite decide between the polarizing siren songs of the NRA and the AARP. Scylla and Charybdis had nothing on the rock and a hard place of the two most powerful lobbies in the United States, so it was only a matter of time before an ostensible children's film (set in Texas, natch) founded on the tenets of old people shooting guns at young people (and waxing rhapsodic about their days oppressing the dark-skinned denizens of sandy places) stumbled onto the silvering screen starring, naturally, Robert Duvall and, unnaturally, Michael Caine. Speaking of unnatural, Osment, taking his first tentative steps into adult Method hell, looks a little like a poorly articulated marionette engaged in a puppet theatre where the only instruction is mad, mechanical gesticulation. To see him react to a door closing is akin to watching someone get defibrillated.

Made-Up (2003) + The Reckoning (2004)

March 26, 2004Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Horror, Mystery, Theatrical, UK

MADE-UP
**½/****
starring Brooke Adams, Lynne Adams, Eva Amurri, Gary Sinise
screenplay by Lynne Adams
directed by Tony Shalhoub

THE RECKONING
*/****
starring Paul Bettany, Tom Hardy, Willem Dafoe, Gina McKee
screenplay by Mark Mills, based on the novel by Barry Unsworth
directed by Paul McGuigan

Madeupreckoningby Walter Chaw The problem with Tony Shalhoub’s directorial debut Made-Up is a certain forced artificiality in presentation and execution that, though in keeping with the mock-documentary-within-a-mock-documentary format, makes the consideration of it emotionally and aesthetically removed. It’s a slippery criticism to level at a picture that seems to be about emotional and aesthetic remove, of course, but there comes a point when the form imitates the message to an obfuscating degree–in other words, when it’s no longer about the distance, but is the distance. So for all the empty extra-textual readings the film culls for its subtext (Brooke Adams, an actress out of the scene for a decade or so, plays an actress out of the scene for at least a decade; sisters play sisters; the daughter is played by the daughter of Susan Sarandon; and so on), Made-Up is salvaged by a sense of decency, and one meta-read that carries some weight as Shalhoub, an Arab-American of Lebanese descent, directs a film about the ills of stereotyping based on appearance.

The Heart of Me (2003) – DVD

March 23, 2004Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Drama, DVD, Germany, Romance, UK

**½/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras C+
starring Helena Bonham Carter, Olivia Williams, Paul Bettany, Eleanor Bron
screenplay by Lucinda Coxon, based on the novel The Echoing Grove by Rosamond Lehmann
directed by Thaddeus O’Sullivan

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover There’s nothing especially wrong with The Heart of Me, a professional, handsomely mounted, beautifully shot film featuring good performances from an attractive cast and a script that can at least be described as well-written. Unfortunately, that same screenplay doesn’t go far enough in pondering the ramifications of its narrative events: people fall in and out of love arbitrarily, make decisions because the plot requires it, and do horrible things just to get a rise out of the audience. There’s no real artistic purpose beyond the sound and fury of the story–it’s more designed and photographed than written and directed, with no real thematic exploration going on behind the devastatingly gorgeous goings-on. Thus The Heart of Me is craftsman-like enough to keep you watching, but it leaves you with nothing beyond a bunch of people being melodramatic while surrounded by sumptuous décor.

Dr. Seuss’ The Cat in the Hat (2003) [Widescreen] + Gothika (2003) [Widescreen Edition] – DVDs

March 22, 2004Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD, Family, Horror, Mystery, Thriller

The Cat in the Hat
½*/**** Image A Sound A Extras C+
starring Mike Myers, Alec Baldwin, Kelly Preston, Dakota Fanning
screenplay by Alec Berg & David Mandel & Jeff Schaffer, based on the Dr. Seuss book
directed by Bo Welch

GOTHIKA
*/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
starring Halle Berry, Robert Downey Jr., Charles Dutton, John Carroll Lynch
screenplay by Sebastian Gutierrez
directed by Mathieu Kassovitz

Catinthegothikaby Walter Chaw The vaguely infernal Dr. Seuss classic is given an overtly infernal treatment in the most excruciating rape of a beloved childhood memory since The Grinch (another Brian Grazer abomination), the replacement of director Ron Howard for production designer Bo Welch a case of bad for worse. I’d love to be able to say that The Cat in the Hat is inexplicable because I’d love to be able to be naïve about why and how films like this are made, but I fear by now I’m all too familiar with ideas of populism, condescension, the supremacy of opening weekend box-office, and the toxic belief that entertainment for children needn’t hold up to the same kind of scrutiny as entertainment for non-children. Byzantine in the number of ways in which it declares its disdain for film and moviegoers, The Cat in the Hat is also crude, low, and proof at last (with Pieces of April) that Sean Hayes should stick to television, where it’s easier to change the channel. There’s a built-in audience for this picture (most of which will feel a little ill afterwards), it’s going to gross an obscene amount, and it’s proof positive that when large amounts of money are at stake, there are really no depths to which some people will sink to try to grow it.

Wuthering Heights (2003) – DVD

March 22, 2004Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Musical, Romance, Teen, Television, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/**** Image C Sound C
starring Erika Christensen, Mike Vogel, Katherine Heigl, Johnny Whitworth
screenplay by Max Enscoe & Annie De Young, based ever-so-loosely on the book by Emile Brontë
directed by Suri B. Krishnamma

by Walter Chaw Consider this time-capsule exchange from the horrifically-misguided mess Suri Krishnamma has made of Wuthering Heights and shudder:

"I swear to God if you ever leave me I'll kill you."

"Then I'd have to come back and kill you so we could be together."

"If you kill me then I'd haunt you. Forever."

"You promise?"

How about I just kill myself while you two sort it out?

Good Bye Lenin! (2003)

March 19, 2004Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, Drama, Germany, Romance, Theatrical

Good bye, Lenin!
***½/****
starring Daniel Brühl, Kathrin Sass, Chulpan Khamatova, Maria Simon
screenplay by Bernd Lichtenberg and Wolfgang Becker
directed by Wolfgang Becker

Goodbyeleninby Travis Mackenzie Hoover Good bye, Lenin! is that rarest of beasts, a popular film that's actually about something. Detailing a former East German's mixed emotions at the demise of communism, it's precise in its modelling of a historical turning point without either trivializing or preaching. One doesn't have to pick out the plums of insight from a thin pudding of plot: The elements of analysis and narrative fuse so seamlessly that they carry you along, making a happy medium that is supremely satisfying. One wishes that Hollywood could turn out a film such as this, which, for all its movie-movie gusto, deals with complex issues real people have to deal with, making its huge success back home a heartening sign in this age of Amélie and cultural amnesia.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)

March 19, 2004Posted in****/****, 2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Charlie Kaufman, Drama, Esoterica, Romance, Sci-Fi, Theatrical

****/****
starring Jim Carrey, Kate Winslet, Elijah Wood, Kirsten Dunst
screenplay by Charlie Kaufman
directed by Michel Gondry

Eternalsunshinereduxby Walter Chaw Manny Farber wrote this about Orson Welles over fifty years ago: “Welles bequeathed to Hollywood, which had grown fat and famous on hurtling action films, a movie (Citizen Kane) that broke up into a succession of fragments, each one popping with aggressive technique and loud, biased slanting of the materials of real life.” During that same period, Farber referred to Preston Sturges as a filmmaker working eternally within “the presence of Dada and surrealism”–and it’s taken over fifty years, it seems, for the United States to produce what is at its essence the product of a marriage between Welles’s self-conscious audacity and Sturges’s common touch: Charlie Kaufman–more specifically, the Charlie Kaufman Screenplay.

Taking Lives (2004) [Widescreen Edition – Unrated Director’s Cut] – DVD|[Extended Cut] – Blu-ray Disc + Gia (1998) [Unrated] – DVD

March 19, 2004Posted in1990s, 2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Drama, DVD, Mystery, Television, Thriller

TAKING LIVES
***/****
DVD – Image A- Sound A- Extras C+
BD – Image B+ Sound A Extras C+
starring Angelina Jolie, Ethan Hawke, Kiefer Sutherland, Gena Rowlands
screenplay by Jon Bokenkamp, based on the novel by Michael Pye
directed by D.J. Caruso

by Walter Chaw The more cynical among us would note that the title might also refer to the time that movies exactly like Taking Lives have stolen from hapless audiences, but the fact of it is that if not for our mortal curiosity, we might have missed genuinely good mad-dog killer flicks like Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, Manhunter, The Untold Story, and Se7en. On a reptile level, I think it behooves the herd to slow down at the scene of a gory end, the flock imprinting another’s messy mortal lesson as an explanation for our fascination with train wrecks and splatter flicks. But where a film like The Silence of the Lambs perversely reassures its captive audience that no matter the procreative ingenuity of a predator’s unslakeable bloodlust, there’s always a corn-fed, buttermilk-scrubbed farm girl there to put him away (and Taking Lives falls into this camp), there are films like granddaddy In Cold Blood (and great-grandpappy Psycho) that disdain the easy treatment of societal cancers. The one is appeasement and equivocation-bordering-on-exploitation, the other is always disquieting and sometimes even thought-provoking.

Dawn of the Dead (2004)

March 19, 2004Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, France, Horror, Japan, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller, Zombie

***/****
starring Sarah Polley, Ving Rhames, Jake Weber, Mekhi Phifer
screenplay by James Gunn
directed by Zack Snyder

Dawnofthedeadby Walter Chaw Heretical to even suggest it, I'm sure, Zack Snyder's remake of George A. Romero's Dawn of the Dead surpasses the original in any number of ways. It gives the idea of consumerism run wild the short shrift that it deserves (and the cynicism that an intervening quarter-century demands), touching on the original's explanation of the zombies' affinity for the shopping mall and the human heroes' delight at their newfound material wealth before becoming a bracing action film that, like Marcus Nispel's reworking of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (the source of which didn't need updating as much as Dawn arguably did), is more firmly entrenched in the James Cameron Aliens tradition than the Seventies institution of disconcerting personal horror film. There's nothing like fat on the bone of this picture (something the original can't claim), providing a canny demonstration of how comedy and satire can work without descending into slapstick (no pies in zombie faces this time around), and of how great performances and smart direction can craft a piece that honours its origins while significantly upping the effectiveness of its themes and premise.

Dawn of the Dead (1978) [Divimax] – DVD

March 18, 2004Posted in1970s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: George A. Romero, DVD, Horror, Italy, Thriller, Zombie

**½/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring David Emge, Ken Foree, Scott H. Reiniger, Gaylen Ross
written and directed by George A. Romero

Dawnofthedead1978cap

by Walter Chaw There's a shopping mall in Colorado called "Colorado Mills" that bubbles with the kind of nameless existential dread generally reserved for terrariums and introspective box turtles. Its architecture–a mountain womb of logs and waterfalls–seeks to replicate the feeling of a village, so that the impulsive consumerism it encourages is disguised as foraging in some fantasy of frontier life and the mob of co-capitalist pilgrims shuffling along appear as a murmuring throng of fellow villagers–wayfarers with whom you have a polite agreement to neither speak to nor make eye contact with. Human interaction is dangerous, for it dispels the illusion of comfort.

Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines (1965) – DVD

March 17, 2004Posted in1960s, Adventure, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, DVD, Family, UK

Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines, or How I Flew from London to Paris in 25 hours 11 minutes
**½/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B+
starring Stuart Whitman, Sarah Miles, James Fox, Alberto Sordi
screenplay by Jack Davies & Ken Annakin
directed by Ken Annakin

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover As far as bloated Twilight of Hollywood fluff goes, Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines, or How I Flew from London to Paris in 25 hours 11 minutes doesn't do too badly for itself. The picture doesn't try to fill you with ersatz wonder at the magnitude of its expensive contraptions, nor does it try to bully you with offensive sentiment in the Sound of Music vein. It's mostly just a lark, and while it's clearly overpriced (as H'wood films of the period generally are), it manages as best as it can to be light and airy. Alas, as often as not the soufflé falls, the victim of obvious caricatures and a grotesquely overblown approach to slapstick. But while Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines doesn't really linger very long in the mind, it's not bad enough to be an affront, and should at least please children young enough to find the sight of a man with an enormous moustache funny.