Dirty Pretty Things (2003); Shanghai Ghetto (2003); Camp (2003)

August 20, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Documentary, Drama, Musical, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

DIRTY PRETTY THINGS
***/****
starring Audrey Tautou, Sergi López, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Sophie Okonedo
screenplay by Steve Knight
directed by Stephen Frears

SHANGHAI GHETTO
**/****
directed by Dana Janklowicz-Mann & Amir Mann

CAMP
*½/****
starring Daniel Letterle, Joanna Chilcoat, Robin de Jesus, Steven Cutts
written and directed by Todd Graff

by Walter Chaw Stephen Frears, like antipodean director Phillip Noyce before him, found the Hollywood waters to be a touch turgid and so in 2000 went back to the small country where he first rose to prominence. For Frears, who made his first resonant mark with a fantastic quartet of films–My Beautiful Laundrette, Walter and June, Prick Up Your Ears, and Sammy and Rosie Get Laid–in the mid-’80s, the return to his homeland presaged a return to his interest in England’s bottom caste and immigrant class, first with the grim, slight Liam and now with the trancelike, nightmarish Dirty Pretty Things. Its title both a reference to smarmy hotel manager Juan’s (Sergi López) philosophy of hotel management (“Our guests are strangers–they leave dirty things, we make them pretty things”) and the idea that the “pretty things” might be the film’s pretty heroes, Nigerian refugee Okwe (Chiwetel Ejiofor) and Turkish illegal Senay (Audrey Tautou), dirtied by the realities of blue-collar London. The struggle between the pragmatism of Juan’s outlook and the idea of sullied purity of Okwe and Senay is really all you need know about the picture–it’s a piece composed of equal parts social realism and fairytale martyrdom, with either part watered down by the other.

Memoirs of an Invisible Man (1992) – DVD + John Carpenter: The Prince of Darkness – Books

August 17, 2003Posted in1990s, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Books About Movies, Directors: John Carpenter, DVD, Sci-Fi

MEMOIRS OF AN INVISIBLE MAN
**/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras C
starring Chevy Chase, Daryl Hannah, Sam Neill, Michael McKean
screenplay by Robert Collector & Dana Olsen and William Goldman, based on the book by H.F. Saint
directed by John Carpenter

JOHN CARPENTER: THE PRINCE OF DARKNESS
FFC rating: 6/10
written by Gilles Boulenger

by Bill Chambers In John Carpenter: The Prince of Darkness, a new interview book by Gilles Boulenger, John Carpenter says that you don’t see the possessory credit on Memoirs of an Invisible Man (i.e., “John Carpenter’s Memoirs of an Invisible Man“) because the film is not 100% his, but rather the product of studio interference he knew full well would take place prior to signing on. (“Warner Bros. is in the business of making audience-friendly, non-challenging movies,” Carpenter declares.) Boulenger doesn’t ask his subject how he stomached accepting the project–funnyman Chevy Chase’s darling, which Chase had shepherded through an abortive incarnation to be directed by Ivan Reitman and scripted by William Goldman before Carpenter climbed aboard–despite his misgivings, since he obviously did it for the A-list boost and the last time he did that (Christine) felt tormented about it for years after. (“When there is no connection between the movie and my inner soul, I get lost and I walk through it.”) You’ll find that’s the pattern of Boulenger’s Q&A: Carpenter feeds his interrogator provocative morsels, and they go untested because Boulenger has a set-list he wants to get through. (It’s the spontaneous follow-up question, the willingness to confront, that tests an interviewer’s mettle.) I fear we may have another Laurent Bouzereau on our hands, for Boulenger’s favourite query–he uses it over and over again–is also his most reductive: “Do you recall one telling anecdote about the shoot?”

The Hunted (2003) [Widescreen] – DVD + William Friedkin: Films of Aberration, Obsession and Reality – Books

August 17, 2003Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Books About Movies, Crime, Directors: William Friedkin, Drama, DVD, Thriller

THE HUNTED
***/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Tommy Lee Jones, Benicio Del Toro, Connie Nielsen, Jenna Boyd
screenplay by David Griffiths & Peter Griffiths and Art Monterastelli
directed by William Friedkin

WILLIAM FRIEDKIN: FILMS OF ABERRATION, OBSESSION AND REALITY
FFC rating: 9/10
written by Thomas D. Clagett

by Walter Chaw Hot on the heels of Bruce Willis’s bwana wish-fulfillment fantasy Tears of the Sun comes William Friedkin’s The Hunted, a film that introduces its titular fugitive in a flashback to Kosovo at the height of the Albanian genocide. The parsing of historical atrocity functioning as shorthand for backstory to what is essentially a pretentious action movie is distasteful, the insertion into that history of elite American soldiers righting wrongs un-righted to this day a kind of unspeakable arrogance late unique of Yankee cloth. That being said, The Hunted is a cheerfully ridiculous movie that manages over the course of its running time to entertain with a series of action set-pieces that recall Friedkin’s work in The French Connection. Though riddled with plot impossibilities and stunning coincidences, the picture, courtesy, perhaps, of Caleb Deschanel’s magnificent cinematography, reminds of the nearness of nature and violence of John Boorman’s Deliverance; of the kineticism of Doug Liman’s The Bourne Identity; and of the premise and execution of a little-read Rex Miller novel called S.L.O.B.. If it also reminds of the creaky Abraham/Oedipus by way of Robert Bly wilderness dynamic of Mamet’s appalling The Edge, so be it: the fun parts outweigh the infuriating ones.

City Hunter (1993) – DVD

August 14, 2003Posted in1990s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, DVD, Hong Kong, Jackie Chan, Japan, Martial Arts, Romance, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/**** Image C Sound C Extras D
starring Jackie Chan, Joey Wong, Kumiko Goto, Chingmy Yau
written and directed by Wong Jing

by Walter Chaw There’s a scene towards the middle of Jackie Chan’s unwatchable City Hunter where starving, womanizing Ryô (Chan) leers at a pretty bimbo, and director Wong Jing provides a point-of-view shot that replaces her breasts with hamburgers and her arms and legs with corresponding fried chicken parts. The film never gets any funnier. City Hunter is garbage–fetid and painful from its prologue to a conclusion 100 minutes later that feels for all the world like a week-and-a-half later. It’s misogynistic, which is not really a surprise as almost all of Jackie Chan’s modern-era films are virulently so, but it does what I wouldn’t have suspected to be possible: it makes Chan a smarmy, oafish reptile. The modern Buster Keaton is here recast as Lorenzo Llamas, with the level of violence towards women in the film so extreme and unacceptable that it feels not so much prehistoric as something of a first.

Hello, Dolly! (1969) – DVD

August 14, 2003Posted in1960s, Adventure, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, DVD, Musical, Romance

*/**** Image A- Sound A
starring Barbra Streisand, Walter Matthau, Michael Crawford, Louis Armstrong
screenplay by Ernest Lehman, based on the stage play by Michael Stewart and The Matchmaker by Thornton Wilder
directed by Gene Kelly

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Hunter S. Thompson once remarked that the Circus Circus casino would be “what the whole hep world would be doing on a Saturday night if the Nazis had won the war.” The family audience, meanwhile, would be taking in something like Hello, Dolly!, a film so totalitarian in its crushing good cheer that anyone without a predisposition towards its phoney “togetherness” will find themselves beaten down in their seats. Equal parts Lawrence Welk and Albert Speer, it’s a grotesque epic pageant designed to show off all the money spent on production while being as condescendingly “cute” and innocuous as possible–a brew of wastefulness and sentimentality so strong that it’s hard to breathe in its aroma, let alone drink it to its dregs.

Identity (2003) [Special Edition] – DVD

August 11, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD, Mystery, Thriller

***/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring John Cusack, Ray Liotta, Amanda Peet, Alfred Molina
screenplay by Michael Cooney
directed by James Mangold

by Walter Chaw Although by the end it isn’t nearly as interesting as it is clever, James Mangold’s take on the slasher genre Identity is a tricky little beast that fits in peculiarly well with the recent trend of deconstructive horror films (such as The Ring and Soft for Digging). Its use of Hughes Mearns’s haunting “Antigonish” (1899, “I was going up the stair/I met a man who wasn’t there!/He wasn’t there again today!/I wish, I wish he’d stay away!”) reminds of Dario Argento’s nursery dirge in Deep Red, while the film’s telescoping storytelling style evokes, of all things, the caper genre. With its title suggesting a certain high-mindedness, when a character glances for a swollen moment at Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, it tells too much of what the film will be about: the philosopher’s existential definition of consciousness projected onto reality and the dangers of mauvaise foi (bad faith), the process by which people, within themselves, elude responsibility for what they do. Still, the film is such a professional exercise on every level that its obviousness–better, its literalness–can be forgiven.

The Rose (1979) – DVD

August 10, 2003Posted in1970s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Music, Romance

*½/**** Image C- Sound C Extras C
starring Bette Midler, Alan Bates, Frederic Forrest
screenplay by Bill Kerby and Bo Goldman
directed by Mark Rydell

by Walter Chaw Lenny by way of John Waters, Mark Rydell’s The Rose is a film made obsolete by years of “Behind the Music”–this story of a Janis Joplin-inspired singer boozin’ her way into a theatrical grave counts a lack of vitality and anything resembling surprise as chief among its faults. Bette Midler’s performance scored an Oscar nomination in 1980, but it lands with a shrillness now that defeats its attempts at pathos and depth. Why we should care about a self-destructive blues siren with impulse control issues is one of those things unwisely taken for granted while by now, twenty-three years after the fact, the lessons of hedonism and the downward spirals of the performing kind are curiously tepid, delivered as they are with a bullhorn and a bad Otis the Town Drunk impersonation.

He Who Courts Controversy: FFC Interviews Peter Mullan

August 10, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Interviews

PmullaninterviewtitleAugust 10, 2003|An indisputable sign of my provincialism, ten minutes into my conversation with Scottish actor-filmmaker Peter Mullan and I was still thinking to myself how awesome his rolling brogue is–I’ve never been more tempted to ape Irvine Welsh. But there’s more to Mullan than an accent raised on Guinness, cigarettes, haggis, and golf: the man, a former schoolteacher and favourite of director Ken Loach, is an amazingly erudite and charismatic cultural observer, expounding at length about film craft, racism, even poetry. (It’s not often one can talk at length about Samuel Coleridge with anyone, and if Mullan’s next project is a biopic of the scribe, I’ll be the first in line–and wanting an acknowledgment for the casting suggestion of Timothy Spall.) An unlikely lightning rod for one of the most controversial films of the year, Mullan is quick with a smile and an indecipherable regional profanity, spry the morning after an extended Q&A session following a late invitational screening of his The Magdalene Sisters and duly impressed by Denver’s exceptional selection of quality microbrews. The man knows his beer, I’ll give him that, and while his film isn’t without its imperfections, Mullan seems to know his capacity for outrage as well; let’s not kid ourselves: that quality of passion in any filmmaker, in any age, is certainly not strained.

Drop Dead Fred (1991) + The Last American Virgin (1982) – DVDs

August 7, 2003Posted in1980s, 1990s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Romance, Teen, UK

DROP DEAD FRED
½*/**** Image C+ Sound B+
starring Phoebe Cates, Rik Mayall, Marsha Mason, Tim Matheson
screenplay by Carlos David & Anthony Fingleton
directed by Ate De Jong

THE LAST AMERICAN VIRGIN
**½/**** Image A- Sound A-
starring Lawrence Mondson, Diane Franklin, Steve Antin, Joe Rubbo
written and directed by Boaz Davidson

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Not all bad films are created equal. Like everything else, there are “good” examples and bad ones, the distinction resting on how much they’re willing to give. For example, a film like The Last American Virgin, while stopping well shy of being a real movie, nonetheless holds interest with its constant barrage of boorish behaviour and its curious attempts to shoehorn “touching” drama into its gross-out formula. It’s bad, but it tries things, and you admire its valiant attempts to give the people some low satisfaction. A movie like Drop Dead Fred, meanwhile, has been so ruthlessly scrutinized for anything that might resemble creativity that it has nothing to offer, and exhausts its 100-odd minute running time chasing its short stubby tail as we rush to the exits.

Johnstown Flood (2003) + The Pennsylvania Miners’ Story (2003) – DVDs

August 6, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Documentary, DVD

JOHNSTOWN FLOOD
*/**** Image B Sound B Extras A
directed by Mark Bussler

THE PENNSYLVANIA MINERS' STORY
*½/**** Image B- Sound B
starring Graham Beckel, Michael Bowen, Tom Bower, Dylan Bruno
screenplay by Elwood Reid
directed by David Frankel

by Walter Chaw Richard Dreyfuss's voice is like a weasel rubbed against a blackboard: not entirely nasal (not entirely not), with a sort of lisping sneer that makes him a particularly bad match for narration work. It's not an axiom–but it should be–that lately the only thing worse than watching Dreyfuss in a film is listening to him; to the credit of peculiar direct-to-video documentary Johnstown Flood, though we have to listen to Dreyfuss narrate the piece, we don't have to watch him emote his way through it. The effect of having Dreyfuss go on about one of the most horrific dam-break tragedies in the United States is that his Napoleon-complex, constipated Snagglepuss wheeze ("Heaventh to Murgatroid!") lends the recreated bits of the documentary a tense sort of edge that it doesn't otherwise earn and feels slightly left of true, besides. Through it all, it's not Dreyfuss but the badly written and performed re-enactments that are the main problem with the piece, demonstrating by their weakness just how good The History Channel's stolid re-enactments actually are.

Thirteen (2003)

August 6, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Coming of Age, Drama, Teen, Theatrical

***/****
starring Evan Rachel Wood, Holly Hunter, Nikki Reed, Jeremy Sisto
screenplay by Catherine Hardwicke & Nikki Reed
directed by Catherine Hardwicke

Thirteenby Travis Mackenzie Hoover I'm a bit surprised to have liked Thirteen as much as I did. For one thing, it has no particular point of view–things simply happen in and of themselves and aren't much related to the outside world. For another, the film is somewhat obvious in the way it depicts its various outrages, almost cuing us to register their brutal nature instead of simply letting us draw our own conclusions. But Thirteen's heavy-handed chaos mirrors that of its teenage protagonist, who is in the grip of emotions she doesn't understand and whose responses are as arbitrary as they are destructive. The agony depicted is real, and while the film is no aesthetic miracle, it manages to blast through its limitations with its primary emotion.

Piglet’s Big Movie (2003) – DVD

August 5, 2003Posted in2000s, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Disney, DVD, Family, Musical, Mystery

*½/**** Image A Sound A- Extras C-
screenplay by Brian Hohlfeld, from stories by A.A. Milne
directed by Francis Glebas

by Bill Chambers To its credit, Piglet's Big Movie, unlike so many Disney franchise pictures, is inoffensive (unless being monotonous is offensive), but it was hamstrung (har-har) from the outset by the departure through death or firing of original Pooh voice actors Sterling Holloway (Pooh), Paul Winchell (Tigger), Ralph Wright (Eeyore), Junius Matthews (Rabbit), and Hal Smith (Owl). Only the inveterate John Fiedler returns to lend his pipes to the eponymous Piglet, and while Jim Cummings technically sounds like Holloway and Winchell in replacing them, he lacks the mischievous twinkle that both brought to their respective roles. Meanwhile, the character-sprung songs, a major ingredient of the series' charm, are too attached this time around to Carly Simon, who appears in an inexplicably live-action closing-credits sequence singing solo in the Hundred-Acre Wood like she's a real "get" for an audience that hasn't learned to tie their shoes yet. (There are no tunes to get kids in touch with their melancholy side early like Winnie the Pooh and the Blustery Day's depressing "The Rain Rain Rain Came Down, Down, Down," only stuff to teach them how most songs are sub-folk music until you replace your Fisher-Price radio with a ghetto blaster.) And while it makes more sense here, given that Pooh's first feature film The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh was a compilation of short subjects, did we really need another Disney flick with an anthology structure on the heels of Cinderella II, Atlantis: Milo's Return, and Tarzan & Jane? It's starting to feel like an injection mold.

American Wedding (2003)

August 1, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Romance, Theatrical

*½/****
starring Jason Biggs, Seann William Scott, Alyson Hannigan, Eddie Kaye Thomas
screenplay by Adam Herz
directed by Jesse Dylan

Americanweddingby Walter Chaw Joining the Porky’s triptych as teensploitation smut franchises that have made it to three instalments (the Revenge of the Nerds series has four chapters, but only the first two are really all that smutty), American Pie finds (hopefully) its conclusion in the dreadfully incomplete-feeling American Wedding. A series of set-ups without punchlines that compensate for the deficiency by featuring a truly impressive number of random de-pantsings, people caught in unlikely tableaux that are inevitably mistaken for some sort of sexual deviancy, and a stable of stock characters so locked into their exploitative roles that existential questions of predestination and choice tickle at making the picture interesting. Featuring the best fecal-consumption-mined-for-yuks scene since the second Austin Powers movie (though a disappointingly minimal amount of gratuitous nudity), American Wedding can, in all honesty, be analyzed with profit as a satire of the whole tits-and-zits genre. It resembles Jurassic Park III in its general disdain for its audience and fatigue with its own shake-and-bake premise, but it does have a couple of laughs–the best bits involving a surreal dance-off and a ridiculously convoluted sequence with a pair of role-playing strippers.

Mondays in the Sun (2002); Freaky Friday (2003); The Eye (2002)

August 1, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, France, Hong Kong, Horror, Italy, Singapore, Spain, Theatrical, Thriller

Los Lunes al sol
**/****
starring Javier Bardem, Luis Tosar, José Ángel Egido, Nieve de Medina
screenplay by Fernando León de Aranda, Ignacio del Moral
directed by Fernando León de Aranda

FREAKY FRIDAY
**/****
starring Jamie Lee Curtis, Lindsay Lohan, Harold Gould, Mark Harmon
screenplay by Heather Hach and Leslie Dixon, based on the novel by Mary Rodgers
directed by Mark S. Waters

Jian gui
*½/****
starring Angelica Lee, Lawrence Chou, Chutcha Rujinanon, Yut Lai So
screenplay by Jo Jo Yuet-chun Hui, Oxide Pang & Danny Pang
directed by Oxide Pang & Danny Pang

Mondaysfreakyeyeby Walter Chaw Fernando León de Aranda's Mondays in the Sun is probably best described as a Spanish version of Fred Schepisi's Last Orders: a journal of a depressed nation's aging gentry, ferrying one of their own on to the great symbolic hereafter. It aspires to the sort of myth of Vittorio Di Sica's neo-realism, portraying the plight of the dispossessed working class in its unadorned splendour, succeeding by the end only to be a repetitive tattoo around the threadbare theme of men defined by work and destroyed by obsolescence. A castration melodrama in several anecdotal horizontal movements, Mondays in the Sun loses steam and tests patience by making its one point to exhaustion. A scene where the great Javier Bardem rails at the fable of the grasshopper and the ants ("This is bunk! It has no sympathy for someone who is born a grasshopper instead of an ant!") says almost all there is to say about the film, while a lingering close-up of Bardem's battered mug in all its injured brute eloquence is, by itself again, enough.

The Magdalene Sisters (2002)

August 1, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Ireland, Theatrical, UK

**½/****
starring Geraldine McEwan, Anne-Marie Duff, Nora-Jane Noone, Dorothy Duffy
written and directed by Peter Mullan

by Walter Chaw Most discussions of Peter Mullan’s The Magdalene Sisters will probably focus on the extent to which the story that it relates is inspired by truth; the Catholic Church has been predictably swift in its blanket condemnation, while the film’s supporters have presented actual “Magdalene Laundry” survivors who attest that the reality was actually much grimmer. The skeleton truth of the film, then, falls somewhere between those extremes, and its presentation, likewise, vacillates between elegant reserve and keening hysteria. The picture is a fictional treatment of the forced labour of tens of thousands of “wayward” girls in the convents of the Irish Catholic order of the Sisters of the Magdalene–compelled through intimidation and abuse to literally wash their sins away with backbreaking work scrubbing butcher’s whites and the like under Dickensian conditions. When it works (as in a prologue and conclusion that mute dialogue in an approximation of collective guilt), it works on the strength of Mullan’s smooth visual sensibility and narrative acumen. And when it doesn’t work (as in a subplot concerning a priest stridently not a “man of God”), the film tends to grate and, worse, cast doubt on the extent to which Mullan’s willing to go to take sides on his subject.

The Cuckoo (2002)

August 1, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Drama, Russia, Theatrical, War

Kukushka
**/****
starring Anni-Christina Juuso, Ville Haapasalo, Viktor Bychkov
written and directed by Aleksandr Rogozhkin

by Bill Chambers As with the ineffably similar No Man’s Land, Danis Tanovic’s “Twilight Zone”-esque morality play in which a Bosnian and a Serb duke it out while the dead body of a Serb soldier threatens to detonate a landmine between them, when you’re done watching The Cuckoo, you’re done thinking about it as well. Both films make their points too baldly–the stress of analysis and the joy of drawing conclusions are pleasures you won’t much experience after a viewing of The Cuckoo despite its having the pretense of being profound. An awkwardly-translated quote that writer-director Aleksander Rogozhkin provided for the film’s North American pressbook–“I don’t write scripts, I write novels for cinema… I could just note ‘Sniper Veiko shoots from a rifle,’ but it will be an absolutely different approach if I write ‘Sniper Veiko shoots from old Austrian rifle, with optical sight rifle'”–is telling: he’s not a man who likes to leave many doors open to interpretation.

The Fortune Cookie (1966) – DVD

July 30, 2003Posted in1960s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Directors: Billy Wilder, DVD, Romance

**/**** Image C+ Sound B
starring Jack Lemmon, Walter Matthau, Ron Rich, Judi West
screenplay by Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond
directed by Billy Wilder

by Bill Chambers The Fortune Cookie was an attempt on Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond’s part to recapture the glory days of six years previous, when their one-two punch of Some Like It Hot and The Apartment hit pay dirt. (Imagine Steven Spielberg’s 1993, with its back-to-back releases of Jurassic Park and Schindler’s List, and you’ll have some idea of the position that Wilder and Diamond were in following The Apartment‘s Oscar glory.) More to the point, it was an act of redemption for the roundly lambasted Kiss Me, Stupid, and like most movie art seeking atonement from the masses, it so slavishly recapitulates a past success that audiences still aren’t getting what they want, only what they’ve had. A homoerotic redux of The Apartment, with Jack Lemmon reassuming the role of the weak-willed schlub and a black man filling in for Shirley MacLaine (although these character ascriptions prove interchangeable), The Fortune Cookie does nothing so well as make you wish you were watching The Apartment instead.

Son of the Beach: Volume 1 (2000-2001) – DVD

July 30, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, DVD, Television

Image C Sound B Extras C+
"With Sex You Get Eggroll", "Silence of the Clams", "In the G-Hetto", "Love, Native-American Style", "Two Thongs Don't Make a Right", "Fanny and the Professor", "Eat My Muffin", "Miso Honei", "South of Her Border", "Day of the Jackass", "A Star is Boned," "Attack of the Cocktopuss", "Mario Putzo's The Last Dong", "B.J. Blue Hawaii", "From Russia with Johnson", "Remember Her Titans", "Rod Strikes Back", "Queefer Madness", "Light My Firebush", "Chip's a Goy", "A Tale of Two Johnsons"

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Attention all 13-year-old boys: your time has come. It is decreed that all of you must buy, watch and perhaps even memorize the handsome 3-disc set "Son of the Beach: Volume 1". You heard me, buster: it is incumbent upon you to own twenty-one solid episodes of some of the most puerile, asinine, and questionable TV ever produced by man or beast. You may not know that this is your civic duty, but I assure you, it is: you, and only you, are ideally suited to its unique blend of jiggle-visuals, toilet humour, smutty double-entendres and crude ethnic stereotyping.

Gigli (2003)

July 29, 2003Posted in2000s, Al Pacino, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Gangster, Romance, Theatrical

*/****
starring Ben Affleck, Jennifer Lopez, Justin Bartha, Lenny Venito
written and directed by Martin Brest

Gigliby Walter Chaw While it doesn’t live up to its hype as the worst film ever made, Martin Brest’s Gigli, with its creepy contention that Ben Affleck is the cure for lesbianism, certainly makes a run for the most unintentionally hilarious film ever made. Its first mistake is in giving not one, but two charisma vortexes the leading roles, the sucking black hole this creates at the film’s centre thrown into sharp relief whenever a real actor (Christopher Walken, Al Pacino) makes a cameo appearance. The most surprising thing about Gigli isn’t the failed casting gambit or the gruesomely over-written dialogue (this isn’t anyone’s first film, after all), however, but rather the idea that Jennifer Lopez would authorize the reduction of her famously outsized posterior on the posters–abandoning (after mocking it in Maid in Manhattan–which, as it happens, was written by Brest’s Meet Joe Black scribe Kevin Wade) what is arguably the only thing so far about Lopez that hasn’t proven to be facile and over-hyped.

Valley Girl (1983) [Special Edition] + The Sure Thing (1985) [Special Edition] – DVDs

July 29, 2003Posted in1980s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, DVD, Nicolas Cage, Romance, Teen

VALLEY GIRL
**/**** Image B Sound C- Extras B+
starring Nicolas Cage, Deborah Foreman, Elizabeth Daily, Cameron Dye
screenplay by Andrew Lane and Wayne Crawford
directed by Martha Coolidge

THE SURE THING
**½/**** Image A Sound B Extras B
starring John Cusack, Daphne Zuniga, Viveca Lindfors, Nicollette Sheridan
screenplay by Steven L. Bloom & Jonathan Roberts
directed by Rob Reiner

by Bill Chambers SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. I spent the better part of 1983 in a hospital hooked up to a poetically elaborate I.V., the end result of a pyeloplasty to repair an irritable kidney. Media saturation wasn’t then what it is now, and living sheltered like that made it doubly easy for movies to pass by my radar undetected. But in the strange case of Valley Girl, which I didn’t even know existed until four or five years after its release (once its star, Nicolas Cage, was on the rise), I climbed aboard the bandwagon unbeknownst: The weekday nurses–who seemed old to me then but whom I now realize were probably in their early-twenties at best–returned to work one spring Monday having adopted an entirely new dialect and nicknamed themselves “the Valley girls.” My susceptible young mind took to the language–I still talk like a goddamn Valley girl.