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.

All the Real Girls (2003) – DVD

July 27, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Romance

***½/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras B+
starring Paul Schneider, Zooey Deschanel, Patricia Clarkson, Benjamin Mouton
written and directed by David Gordon Green

by Walter Chaw David Gordon Green’s sophomore picture All the Real Girls has the quality of a Faulknerian myth, with rural North Carolina subbing for his Yoknapatawpha County. It reminds of (and refers to) Terrence Malick’s dreamlike naturalism more than in the stylistic similarity of Tim Orr’s meticulous compositions–there is in Green’s work an understanding of those delicate moments that carve indelibly into the collective sublime. Marking the unbearable tragedy of being human, in his second film Green observes the madness of love in a temporary world, his gift in charting the native poetry of place and imperfection. When he allows that inarticulate frustration to fester against the backdrop of a stained paradise (George Washington), he creates an American masterpiece; when that furious inability to communicate comments on first love (All the Real Girls), he creates something no less elegant though considerably less able to sustain the gravity of its treatment.

Cliff Notes: FFC Interviews Cliff Curtis

July 26, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Interviews, New Zealand

CcurtisinterviewtitleJuly 27, 2003|The lower level of Denver's Magnolia Hotel features as its twin centrepieces a fountain and a wet bar, an idea of water in a grotto that appropriately found me meeting Maori actor Cliff Curtis, who was in town to promote the opening of Niki Caro's Whale Rider. Dressed casually in jeans, loose shirt, and sandals, Curtis is an extremely warm, curious sort of fellow at once unfazed by his rising status in Hollywood (having appeared in numerous high-profile pictures playing a variety of ethnicities) and possessed of that particular airy disconnection of folks reared in the theatre. He's at the cusp of stardom, essentially, with leading-man good looks and an ineffable quality of fearless integrity that allows him to back away from the big-budget blockbusters in which he has found himself of late to take a small role in a small film, just because it's important to him. Simplicity itself, it seems, the call of Hollywood too often turns idealism into avarice, making a man doing the right thing for himself and his culture an anomaly–and a welcome one. With a heavy Kiwi accent and a relaxed attitude imported from the poetically-named Pacific, Curtis spoke to FILM FREAK CENTRAL, against the soft clatter of that fountain, about all manner of things in the middle of another murderous Colorado summer.

Final Destination 2 (2003) [infinifilm] – DVD

July 25, 2003Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, DVD, Horror, Thriller

**/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B+
starring Ali Larter, A.J. Cook, Michael Landes, Terrence ‘T.C.’ Carson
screenplay by J. Mackye Gruber & Eric Bress
directed by David Richard Ellis 

by Walter Chaw Earning some marks for a gratuitous tit shot and a few graphic kills, the mystical gorefest Final Destination 2 is an unusually mordant excuse to knock off a few good-looking caricatures. Philosophically speaking, it develops its mythology with a series of rules so Byzantine that rather than spend a surplus of time trying to unravel what’s going on, it’s best just to settle comfortably into the realization that the ones we’ve marked for death are, in fact, marked by Death in the film. The most interesting thing about the picture, in fact, is that it is self-reflexive for genre fans, who’ve made it something of a matter of course to pick out the heroine and the meat bags from the rest of the cattle. In our way, we become the avatars of the Grim Reaper, laying our bony fingers on each inevitable victim in turn. The audience, in a very direct way, becomes that invisible cold wind that announces the arrival of doom–Final Destination 2 is almost interactive.

Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over (2003)

July 25, 2003Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Family, Sci-Fi, Stallone

Spy Kids 3: Game Over
½*/****
starring Antonio Banderas, Carla Gugino, Alexa Vega, Daryl Sabara
written and directed by Robert Rodriguez

Spykids3dby Walter Chaw Robert Rodriguez’s deeply unpleasant conclusion to his Spy Kids trilogy lacks the smarts and inventiveness of the first two films in the series, putting all of its eggs in a 3-D basket that is so certain to cause headache that bottles of aspirin should be passed out alongside the flimsy red/blue glasses. All the weaknesses of the previous Spy Kids entries, unbolstered in Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over (hereafter Spy Kids 3) by a sense of joy and innovation, are unforgivable in this film: the genuinely awful child actors, the cheesy special effects, and that certain air of imported moral superiority that seems a late-hour attempt to justify the emptiness of the exercise. Out of nowhere, the lessons of family and respect for disability find themselves grafted to this flimsiest of low-tech frameworks–special effects that are so amateurish and poorly implemented they don’t so much remind of Tron as replicate Tron bit-for-bit twenty-one years after the fact. The narrative of the film, such as it is, reveals itself to be a life-support system for hyperactive incompetence, and for a series of stupid cameos that are at least preferable to Sylvester Stallone as something called The Toymaker.

Masked and Anonymous (2003)

July 24, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Esoterica, Music, Theatrical, UK, Western

*/****
starring Bob Dylan, John Goodman, Jessica Lange, Luke Wilson
screenplay by Bob Dylan & Larry Charles, writing under very dumb pseudonyms
directed by Larry Charles

Maskedanonymousby Walter Chaw The three or four times that Larry Charles's Masked and Anonymous features musical performances by its star Bob Dylan (particularly a rousing rendition of "Dixie"), the picture manages to be something just north of unbearable. The rest of the time, it's an interminable ego trip through Dylan's towering sense of self-importance, his almost total inability to relate with reality, and that curious phenomena of popular artists who are at once imperiously patronizing and desperate to be seen as common men. When failed concert promoter Uncle Sweetheart (John Goodman) asks down-on-his-luck folk singer Jack Fate (Dylan) about the importance of Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin to American rock-and-lore, the inanity of the answer (and the evasiveness of Dylan's demeanour–"Well, it matters to someone, I guess") isn't mysterious so much as inane and disingenuous; even the evocation of social phenomena as important and galvanizing to roots rock and the inner city as the myth of Stagger Lee is tossed off with a wry flick of the hand. Pretending that he doesn't know himself to be an icon in American music (and, arguably, even of American letters) is the worst kind of arrogance: the sin of false modesty, which Dylan doesn't wear particularly well and is frightfully unbecoming besides.

Copacabana (1947) – DVD

July 24, 2003Posted in1940s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, DVD, Musical, Mystery, Romance

*½/**** Image B Sound B
starring Groucho Marx, Carmen Miranda, Steve Cochran, Andy Russell
screenplay by Alan Boretz, Howard Harris, Laslo Vadnay, Sydney R. Zelinka
directed by Alfred E. Green

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Like many great comedians, Groucho Marx was punished for being too good. One can't actually make movies like Horse Feathers, Animal Crackers and the great Duck Soup and not expect to pay a price, so the studio, in its infinite wisdom, decided to impose normalcy onto The Marx Brothers' films in an attempt to restore public order. This, of course, marked the beginning of his team's decline, so that by 1947 he was reduced to making unsalted soda crackers like Copacabana just to pay the rent. And what a reduction it is: Groucho and hapless co-star Carmen Miranda are the only things worth watching in this limp backstage musical, and while they work all the wonders they can with limited material, it's not enough to keep it from seeming more than a woeful desecration of a great comic's talent.

Brigham Young (1940) – DVD

July 23, 2003Posted in1940s, Adventure, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Biopic, Drama, DVD, Romance, Western

**/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B+
starring Tyrone Power, Linda Darnell, Brian Donlevy, Dean Jagger
screenplay by Lamar Trotti, based on a story by Louis Bromfield
directed by Henry Hathaway

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover I was hoping, prior to watching Brigham Young, that the film would be a twisted smash-up of subject matter and Hollywood convention. I was sure that the touchy matter of Mormon ritual would send the movie in all directions at once, trying to salvage a normal film but twisting itself through ever more bizarre hoops. But while it does indeed get the production team scrambling to deal with that pesky polygamy issue, Brigham Young is mostly just a dull problem-picture crossed with a boring western, with no real surprises to offer anyone who was born a little before yesterday.

Irma la Douce (1963) – DVD

July 23, 2003Posted in1960s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Directors: Billy Wilder, DVD, Romance

***½/**** Image A Sound B
starring Jack Lemmon, Shirley MacLaine, Lou Jacobi, Bruce Yarnell
screenplay by Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond
directed by Billy Wilder

by Walter Chaw Until Irma la Douce (1963), movie prostitutes were of the touch-me-not variety, the Holly Golightly breed who invariably paid the (sometimes ultimate) price for the oldest profession–they were never happy, bright, and chirpily philosophical. The casting of Shirley MacLaine as the titular poule makes sense in that just three years after Billy Wilder's The Apartment, it brought her and Jack Lemmon back together as lovers divided by sordid circumstance (and cohabiting an apartment again, as it happens), but Wilder's wish to cast Marilyn Monroe instead would have been the better choice. She is, after all, far less burdened by the weight of intelligence and melancholy than MacLaine (or, at least, her screen persona is)–qualities that serve MacLaine extremely well in the darkly-hued The Apartment, and much less so in what is literally a gauzy Technicolor slapstick musical sans song-and-dance numbers. Still, what works about Irma la Douce is the sprightliness of the interplay between the elfin Irma and her arguably more elfin beau/benefactor Nestor (Lemmon), both finding in Wilder the sort of director who understood the quality of the "attractive goons, winsome losers, and sympathetic heels" Ethan Mordden described as comprising the prototypical Wilder hero. And it is that marriage of paradoxes, particularly the one which finds MacLaine cast as the bimbo, that gives Irma la Douce the kind of dark, self-reflexive undercurrent that defined the unrest of '60s cinema.

Dracula II: Ascension (2003) – DVD

July 22, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD, Horror, Romania, Vampire, Wes Craven

*½/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras B
starring Jason Scott Lee, Jason London, Craig Sheffer, Stephen Billington
screenplay by Joel Soisson & Patrick Lussier
directed by Patrick Lussier

by Walter Chaw As far as direct-to-video sequels to awful franchise films go, Patrick Lussier’s ponderously dubbed Wes Craven Presents Dracula II: Ascension (hereafter Dracula II) is better than Hellraiser 3 and Children of the Corn V, but really just a vampire knock-off of Suicide Kings, of all things. After tackling the mummy mythos in Russell Mulcahy’s dreadful Tale of the Mummy, poor Jason Scott Lee takes on the vampire canon, assuming the Van Helsing role of self-flagellating holy vamp hunter Uffizi, all decked-out in priestly black and doing his Bruce Lee berserker song-and-dance, this time armed to the nines with obscure weaponry. A shame that the film spends so much of its time watching a suddenly Aryan Dracula (Stephen Billington, Gerard Butler apparently not available) tied to a table between banks of ultraviolet lights while mumbling dreamy phrases in a Count Chocula accent, as the potential is there for a campy cheap-o action/gore piece.