Felicity: Season Two Six-Disc Set [Sophomore Year DVD Collection] (1999-2000) – DVD

July 20, 2003Posted in1990s, 2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Coming of Age, Drama, DVD, Romance, Television

Image A- Sound B Extras A-
“Sophomoric”, “The List”, “Ancient History”, “The Depths”, “Crash”, “The Love Bug”, “Getting Lucky”, “Family Affairs”, “Portraits”, “Great Expectations”, “Help for the Lovelorn”, “The Slump”, “Truth or Consequences,” “True Colors”, “Things Change”, “Revolutions”, “Docuventary II”, “Party Lines”, “Running Mates”, “Ben Was Here”, “The Aretha Theory”, “Final Answer”, “The Biggest Deal There Is”

by Bill Chambers

FelicityseasontwohaircapWhat is a haircut?

According to Merriam-Webster, it is “the act, process, or result of cutting and shaping the hair.” Maybe the definition should be expanded to account for the transmogrifying impact a haircut can have on public perception of the vehicle for a fictional character. I encountered my own follicular prejudices when I went to see Lethal Weapon 4 and found myself even more put off by the absence of Martin Riggs’s signature mullet than by the film’s idiotic script, abject racism, and incongruous delivery-room hijinks–none of which were quite so indicative of Richard Donner’s undisciplined direction as his electing to leave Mel Gibson’s ‘do as short as it always is outside the Lethal Weapon franchise. Perhaps we can trace this back to the Sunday funnies: imagine how disconcerting it would be if Ziggy or Charlie Brown suddenly had hair. With the ingratiation of comic books, motion pictures, and television in the latter half of the twentieth century, our escapist figures got deported from the realm of imagination; transmuted into visual icons, they consequently became far less malleable.

May (2003) – DVD

July 19, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Horror, Thriller

***/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B-
starring Angela Bettis, Jeremy Sisto, Anna Faris, James Duval
written and directed by Lucky McKee

by Walter Chaw Lucky McKee takes a look at the end of the world and it comes half-blinded before a student version of Claire Denis’s Trouble Every Day and a poster-shrine to Dario Argento’s Opera. The apocalypse in May is the end of cinema, a self-consuming contemplation of itself as the product of genre, and so its touchstones are films that consider the horror of unnatural progeny, inappropriate consumption, and, of course, the literariness of “Frankenstein”‘s exhumation and reconstitution tropes. When May (Angela Bettis) pleads at the picture’s conclusion to be seen, more than the plaintive cry of a child molded by fear into something strange, it’s an understanding that the life of cinema is like the span of any beast: naivety into optimism into cynicism into contemplation into, finally, a breed of facile irony fed by the mordancy of existence at its extremity.

I Capture the Castle (2003)

July 18, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Romance, Theatrical, UK

**/****
starring Romola Garai, Rose Byrne, Henry Thomas, Marc Blucas
screenplay by Heidi Thomas, based on the novel by Dodie Smith
directed by Tim Fywell

by Walter Chaw A breezy light romantic caste-comedy in the vein of Cold Comfort Farm or any of a number of Jane Austens, Tim Fywell’s mannered comedy of manners I Capture the Castle is marked by some fine performances and hampered by a blueprint so threadbare that it has, by now, taken on something of its own unnatural half-life. Boasting one of the less revolting endlessly reproducible master-plots that needs only a new cast and crew to bring it shambling to Frankenstein-ian life, the heavy-booted I Capture the Castle lumbers from meet-cute to early-hate-into-blossoming-love to the idea of ‘marrying poetically’ that has been a staple of roundelay romance since Shakespeare and before. It’s a crowd-pleaser, then, in the sense that the word describes a film with no surprises, no controversy, a charming location, and a dangerous level of sweetness. Perhaps ‘crowd pacifier’ is a better term.

Blood, Guts, Bullets & Octane (1998) – DVD

July 18, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, Crime, DVD, Thriller

Blood, Guts, Bullets and Octane
*/**** Image B+ Sound A-
starring Joe Carnahan, Dan Leis, Ken Rudolph, Dan Harlan
written and directed by Joe Carnahan

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover It’s not the band I hate, it’s their fans. The celebrated (if overrated) efforts of both David Mamet and Quentin Tarantino spawned a lot of half-baked imitators in their heyday in the ’90s, people who didn’t understand the masters’ cruel ironies or obsessive cinephilia, respectively, but sure thought that it was cool wear a suit while pointing a gun and saying “fuck.” Few of them, however, made films as dire and unpleasant as Joe Carnahan’s Blood, Guts, Bullets & Octane (hereafter Octane), which takes the male territorial-pissing formula of scores of Mamet-tino flicks and pushes it to an astonishingly crude extreme. There’s no wit to the dialogue, no style to the imagery and no grace in the performances–just eff this and eff that and oh-God-I’m-shot. If you needed a reason for the Nineties to end, here it is; the passing of this kind of cinema is ample incentive to enter the new century.

How to Deal (2003)

July 17, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Coming of Age, Drama, Romance, Teen, Theatrical, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Mandy Moore, Allison Janney, Alexandra Holden, Peter Gallagher
screenplay by Neena Beber, based on the novels Someone Like You and That Summer by Sarah Dessen
directed by Clare Kilner

Howtodealby Walter Chaw Based on a pair of Sarah Dessen novels that apparently deal with the tribulations of a particularly sour adolescent girl, Clare Kilner’s How to Deal is a disastrously twee Judy Blume knock-off that compacts every ill of growing up female into a hysterical parcel of over-reaching and hollow sanctimony. It’s the kind of movie that has its maudlin protagonist reading Madame Bovary to parse, I guess, some portion of romantic martyrdom when the irony of the reference is that at the root of Emma Bovary’s problems arguably lies her infatuation with mealy romance novels into which she might substitute herself for the heroines (not forgetting the role of Dessen’s books in the first place). Irony and incompetence being the two rules of the day as Kilner and her cinematographer Eric Alan Edwards (once Gus Van Sant’s DP, now relegated to stuff like this and Britney Spears’s Crossroads) make unforgivable decisions in lighting and camera placement that cast How to Deal as an unintentional horror film with at least three scenes loaded with tension and free-floating anxiety for no good reason save that the filmmakers don’t seem to know what the hell they’re doing.

Miranda (2002) – DVD

July 17, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, DVD, Germany, Romance, Thriller, UK

**/**** Image B Sound A- Extras D+
starring Christina Ricci, John Simm, Kyle MacLachlan, John Hurt
screenplay by Rob Young
directed by Marc Munden

Mirandadvdcapby Travis Mackenzie Hoover There was a time (from the late-'70s to the late-'80s) when the UK cranked out tart, intelligent films that put their American counterparts to shame. People like Stephen Frears, Hanif Kureshi, Alan Clarke, Mike Leigh, Terence Davies, Neil Jordan, Derek Jarman, and Sally Potter could be counted on to raise hell in the name of motion pictures; whatever their relative merits, they were interested in cinema and not career opportunities, and their commitment to a reality outside of their aesthetics gave them soul and punch. (Even when they made a thriller, like John Mackenzie's The Long Good Friday, it was an anti-Thatcher thriller.) Then the '90s happened, and what was called "the multiplex generation" sprang up: suddenly we were doomed to the likes of Danny Boyle and Guy Ritchie, who made films with flashy visuals that failed to obscure their essential vacuity. And so it is with Marc Munden's Miranda, a well-shot, smartly-designed film with an empty space where its brain should be, leaving us with something that looks good, goes down easy, and is instantly forgotten.

Bad Boys II (2003)

July 16, 2003Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Directors: Michael Bay, Theatrical, Will Smith

½*/****
starring Will Smith, Martin Lawrence, Gabrielle Union, Joe Pantoliano
screenplay by Ron Shelton and Jerry Stahl
directed by Michael Bay

by Walter Chaw The very curious thing about Michael Bay/Jerry Bruckheimer’s latest dip into the shallow end is that for as vile as it is, for as putrid and unforgivable as it is, Bad Boys II may be the first Bay/Bruckheimer collaboration that marks a clear debt to a filmmaking tradition other than that blazed by John McTiernan. Sure, it’s got the slick surfaces and the ear-shattering explosions, the impossible sets (a cop can afford a few acres of prime beachfront property in Florida only in this breed of American mainstream twaddle) and class hatred (complete with fetishistic worship of guns and cars and all other things associated with diminutive penis size), but what Bad Boys II also has is a child’s working knowledge of the incendiary Hong Kong “heroic bloodshed” cinema of the 1980s. What it lacks is that genre’s sense of gravity, interest in the balance between good and evil, and the mysterious bonds between men–it’s missing finesse in its choreography, purpose in its relentless bloodletting, even a basic understanding of decency and honour. Without any recognizable human qualities, then, what Bad Boys II presents to the world is something genuinely sinister and twisted: nothing more than a reptilian collage of seething and hatred that stands as possibly the most misanthropic, nihilistic, exploitative, hopeless film ever released as a major studio’s mainstream blockbuster. It is easily the most expensive exploitation film I’ve ever seen–and besides, not nearly so funny or interesting as the similarly-themed Joe Piscopo/Treat Williams shoestring vehicle Dead Heat of many moons ago.

Reel Conversations: Candid Interviews with Film’s Foremost Directors and Critics – Books

July 15, 2003Posted in1990s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Books About Movies

written by George Hickenlooper
FFC rating: 9/10

BUY @ AMAZON

by Walter Chaw Finding himself at the cusp of the supplementary-material revolution, filmmaker George Hickenlooper was afforded the rare opportunity to speak with a wide panoply of cinematic luminaries in the early-Nineties as LaserDisc changed the way that film historians could appreciate–and filmmakers could preserve–film. It’s possible to find in the dialogues collected in Reel Conversations: Candid Interviews With Film’s Foremost Directors and Critics (a book that seems at least partly inspired by a FILM COMMENT debate between Richard Schickel, Roger Ebert, and Andrew Sarris concerning the decay of popular film criticism in the United States) an ironclad justification for the very process of serious film criticism and authoritative discussion. I mentioned to Mr. Hickenlooper a few months ago that I thought it was something of a shame he was a filmmaker instead of a critic: People who understand movies are in short supply on both halves of the thin celluloid line between critics and directors. Speaking selfishly, I wanted one more good thinker on our side.

Loving (1970) – DVD

July 14, 2003Posted in1970s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Drama, DVD

***½/**** Image B+ Sound B-
starring George Segal, Eva Marie Saint, Sterling Hayden, Keenan Wynn
screenplay by Don Devlin, based on a novel by J.M. Ryan
directed by Irvin Kershner

by Bill Chambers The top ten winners in TOTAL FILM’s recent poll on the cinema’s greatest “bastards” (that would be in front of the camera, not behind it) were a fairly stock bunch: old faithfuls like The Sweet Smell of Success‘ JJ Hunsecker (Burt Lancaster) and Get Carter‘s Carter (Michael Caine)–who placed first–joined such choices that pander to currency while feigning esoterica as Internal Affairs‘ Dennis Peck (Richard Gere) and As Good As It Gets‘ Melvin Udall (Jack Nicholson). But you will find few bigger bastards than the overlooked protagonist of Irvin Kershner’s Loving, Brooks Wilson (George Segal), a lousy husband and father who has to be among the most self-absorbed suburbanites ever to despoil the screen. In our introduction to him, he decides to have a smoke instead of watching his daughter perform in the school Christmas pageant–an event for which he was made late by a fight with his mistress. One of them, anyway.

Continental Divide (1981) – DVD

July 13, 2003Posted in1980s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, DVD, Romance, Spielberg

**½/**** Image B+ Sound B
starring John Belushi, Blair Brown, Allen Gorwitz
screenplay by Lawrence Kasdan
directed by Michael Apted

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover The broad outline for Continental Divide is so suggestive, at least by Hollywood standards, that I wish I liked the movie more than I did. As the story of a city-slicker misogynist transformed by love for a bush-roughing woman, it's surprisingly progressive: when the annoying city mouse/country mouse gimmick falls away, we have a story of two lovers trying to reconcile their disparate lifestyles without costing one or the other their independence. As this topic seldom comes up in serious movies, it's doubly refreshing to see it in a cheesy romantic comedy, and had the production team been up to the challenge this could have been one for the genre-studies books. Unfortunately, the film is so lacking in nuance and conviction that one never quite believes what is going on; the dialogue is so tin-eared and the direction so listless that they trivialize the story's implications and squander a golden opportunity.

Witchy Woman: FFC Interviews Heather Donahue

July 12, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Interviews

HdonahueinterviewtitleActress Heather Donahue on the curse of BLAIR WITCH

July 13, 2003|Castle Marne B&B, a literal house-sized castle, broods at the end of a tree-lined street in a marginal Denver neighbourhood, just a hop-skip-jump away from what used to be the red-light district. Out-of-place to say the least, the edifice rises in large grey blocks like a medieval vision, albeit one equipped with cozies, throws, knick-knacks, and Jacuzzis in every room. The funny thing about it is that of all the weird places to meet Heather Donahue, Castle Marne doesn't seem the weirdest: like the actress, it's theatrical, expansive, and, for the most part, out of sight. More's the pity for Ms. Donahue, as since her career-making role in The Blair Witch Project, she's been subjected to the same virulent backlash as the film, making her persona non grata in Hollywood even though her minimal work since then has been far and away the best part of marginal films–and indicative, besides, of genuine talent. What Ms. Donahue still has trouble with, and it's hard to blame her for not having critical distance on something so ambiguous in her life, is the importance of The Blair Witch Project in shaping modern film trends and the rarity of a picture that buggers sexual objectification. Although I've seen her in a few non-Blair Witch roles, just how attractive Ms. Donahue is remains something of a shock. It isn't that she's unattractive in her most famous role, it's that her attractiveness never enters into the equation–there's a thesis paper in there all by itself. In town to conduct a Q&A after a screening of Seven and a Match (released as part of Madstone's "Film Forward" series), on a beautiful early-summer morning a little less than four years after The Blair Witch Project opened in Denver, the animated Ms. Donahue sat down with me on the patio of Castle Marne.

Curly Sue (1991) – DVD

July 11, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Family, John Hughes, Romance, Spielberg

**/**** Image B Sound B+ Commentary B-
starring James Belushi, Kelly Lynch, Alisan Porter, John Getz
written and directed by John Hughes

by Bill Chambers John Hughes almost returned to directing with last year’s Maid in Manhattan, and Curly Sue, the last film with Hughes at the helm, perhaps offers some explanation beyond his reported displeasure with having to cast Jennifer Lopez as to why the torch was ultimately passed to Wayne Wang. In Curly Sue‘s best bit, the housekeeper (Viveka Davis, a genuine comic find) of an upscale Manhattan apartment gambles away her paycheck playing poker against the two derelicts who’ve mostly conned their way into staying there. Davis has everything that Lopez doesn’t in Maid in Manhattan: modesty, natural beauty, charisma, a wry sense of humour–you could watch a whole movie about this persona, which is probably what Hughes had in mind, and her one sequence ends with a joke that also happens to be a far more accurate representation of the subtle fear that aristocracy puts in the minimum-wager than any of the Cinderella markers you’ll find in Maid in Manhattan. Or anything else you’ll find in Curly Sue, for that matter.

Big Trouble (1986) – DVD

July 11, 2003Posted in1980s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, DVD

**/**** Image B+ Sound B
starring Peter Falk, Alan Arkin, Beverly D'Angelo, Charles Durning
screenplay by Warren Bogle
directed by John Cassavetes

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover From the depths of the files marked "for completists only" comes John Cassavetes's Big Trouble, a film that defies all but the most determined attempts to fit it into the master's canon. Not only is the director's raw emotionality nowhere in evidence here, but the unforced aesthetics that are his hallmark are totally unsuited to the broad and dialogue-dependant farce screenplay by Andrew Bergman (writing under the pseudonym Warren Bogle). It's hard to think of a bigger mismatch of director and material–unless it's Robert Altman doing a teen comedy called O.C. and Stiggs (which, regrettably, happened the following year). I'd suggest a double bill for the diehard auteurists among us, but the disillusionment would be so shattering that I doubt that any of them would survive the experience.

The Sea (2002)

July 9, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, France, Iceland, Norway, Theatrical

Hafið
*/****
starring Gunnar Eyjólfsson, Hilmir Snær Guðnason, Hélène de Fougerolles, Kristbjörg Kjeld
screenplay by Baltasar Kormákur, based on the play by Olafur Haukur Símonarson
directed by Baltasar Kormákur

by Walter Chaw A family melodrama that’s a little like Chekhov but a lot more like Telemundo, Baltasar Kormákur’s The Sea (Hafið) takes the bare bones of “King Lear” and fashions from them the sort of bleeding hair-render that runs roughshod through the Altman/Bergman canon without the benefit of genius. Its use of foreground, of mannered close-ups and overlapping dialogue, of old men journaling their lives at the end of their lives, all feel at odds with the film’s weightless, familiar tale of an old man shackled to the ideal of a better era in opposition with subsequent generations of useless, snivelling bastard children trying to feed off the corpse of said better era, the irony of that Icelandic tradition including a sort of culturally institutionalized rape (the contention of which I find to be not merely shockingly reductive, but deeply suspect besides) mentioned but left unexamined for the most part. The problems of The Sea aren’t restricted to this reliance on reckless ascriptions of cultural archetype for irony or poignancy (an Ayn Rand-ian predilection for staging hypothetical, unwinnable arguments in their extreme), extending to issues as problematic as a script (adapted from a Olafur Haukur Símonarson play by Kormákur, a sometime-actor who appeared as the mad scientist in Hal Hartley’s No Such Thing) that is as repetitive in regards to dialogue as to scenario.

Spun (2003) – DVD (R-rated)

July 8, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Drama, DVD, Esoterica

*/**** Image A- Sound A Extras C
starring Jason Schwartzman, John Leguizamo, Mena Suvari, Patrick Fugit
screenplay by Creighton Vero & William De Los Santos
directed by Jonas Åkerlund

by Walter Chaw I don't have anything in particular against music-video directors making the transition to feature films, except that so often strobe-lighting and images-per-second are the only lessons about film craft they've ever learned. Swedish wunderkind Jonas Åkerlund, who cut his teeth as a chop-horse for Madonna and Moby, makes his feature film debut with jittery crystal meth opera Spun, a picture so misconstrued and haphazardly slapped together that it doesn't so much suggest the sensation of being "spun" on meth as it does getting thrown off a tall building in a washing machine. It strives for a sort of grimy realism but succeeds mainly in being Ken and Barbie Take a Shit-Bath: the young and the beautiful are covered in a patina of grotesquerie, it's true, but the filth isn't taking

It’s My Party (1996) [Special Edition] – DVD

July 6, 2003Posted in1990s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Romance

*/**** Image B- Sound B Extras C
starring Eric Roberts, Margaret Cho, Lee Grant, Gregory Harrison
written and directed by Randal Kleiser

by Walter Chaw The only way to explain how disjointed and patchwork is Randal Kleiser’s It’s My Party, is by presuming out loud that the director is trying to simulate the vertiginous feel of a weekend of revelry culminating in the auto-euthanasia of a mortally ill man. As it is, the picture can only be taken in terms of theory and possibility–the piece, as it sits extant, is puerile in a self-obsessed sort of way, from performance to scripting to organization. The presence of Bruce Davison in a minor role serves mainly to remind that there are better films out there about the AIDS epidemic in its early days, recalling Longtime Companion (starring Davison) and the genuine emotions found therein that stand as sharp indictment of the dreadful, manufactured pathos of It’s My Party. Any movie trying this hard to get me misty is a lot more likely to make me angry.

Cowboy Bebop: The Movie (2001) [Special Edition] – DVD

July 6, 2003Posted in2000s, Action, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, DVD, Japan, Sci-Fi, Thriller

***/**** Image A Sound A Extras C
screenplay by Keiko Nobumoto
directed by Shinichiro Watanabe

by Walter Chaw Yôko Kanno’s soundtrack for Cowboy Bebop: The Movie (hereafter Cowboy Bebop) is a jubilant a blend of funk, jazz, blues, soul, and punk that soars even though it’s a pale shadow of the “bebop” innovated by Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, and Bud Powell (and Kenny Clarke and Max Roach) in Minton’s Playhouse in the early 1940s. It functions as something of a brilliantly mellifluous backbone to the film and the series that spawned it–chimeric and socially significant, again like Bird’s bebop, in that the 26-episode Japanese television series became one of the most recognized and revered crossovers in animated series history. The bebop idea of riffing on a melody to the extent that the melody becomes unrecognizable (with an attendant introduction of dozens of beats to the standard four-beat bar) carries through in the frenetic kineticism of series that also, by its format, mirrors jazz bebop’s compact agility (generally carried by quartet and quintet arrangements)–making a feature-length film, then, a strange place for the “Cowboy Bebop” franchise to go.

The Guys (2003)

July 4, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Theatrical

½*/****
starring Sigourney Weaver, Anthony LaPaglia, Irene Walsh, Jim Simpson
 screenplay by Anne Nelson and Jim Simpson, based on the play by Nelson
directed by Jim Simpson

by Walter Chaw As it manifests itself in popular art, the instinct to revisit the sins of the past for the purposes of reconciliation will as often take the unbecoming forms of self-congratulation or exploitation. The same urge to couch criticism in terms of personal reminiscence (“It’s good because it reminds me of my cat”), the same compulsion that drives middlebrow cineastes to donate five bucks to the ARC after a screening of The Other Sister, informs this variety of salutary cinema. Very fond of taking the correct stance on issues that are not particularly controversial, films like Jim Simpson’s The Guys (based on a briefly-timely stage play by Anne Nelson) allow for simpering middle-class navel-gazers to feel as though they’re involved in some way with events outside the breakfast nook. When Joan (Sigourney Weaver) says that she feels impotent in the face of 9/11 because she’s merely a journalist (devaluing the amazing work of THE NEW YORK TIMES following the atrocity) and grieving fire captain Nick (Anthony LaPaglia) responds, “Well, that’s your tool,” we’re dealing with self-righteous self-aggrandizing. And when Joan marvels, “When was the last time someone needed a writer,” the only possible response is: right around the time someone decided to adapt “The Guys” for the screen.

Gasoline (2002)

July 3, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Crime, Drama, Italy, Road Movie, Romance, Theatrical

Benzina
**/****
starring Maya Sansa, Regina Orioli, Pietro Ragusa, Mariella Valentini
screenplay by Anne Riitta Ciccone & Monica Stambrini, based on the novel by Elena Stancanelli
directed by Monica Stambrini

Benzina

by Bill Chambers Scarlett Johansson-esque Regina Orioli stars in Monica Stambrini’s Gasoline (Benzina) (hereafter Benzina) as Lenni, a bespectacled loner who went looking for work at a coffee bar/gas station one day and found love with its proprietor, Stella (Maya Sansa). When Lenni’s mother (Mariella Valentini) comes to visit and tries to talk her once-presumed-straight daughter out of her gay lifestyle, a scuffle ensues between madre and Stella in which the former is inevitably accidentally killed; even more inevitably, Stella doesn’t think they should tell the police despite her innocence looking forensically sound; and most inevitably of all, Lenni’s mom had a fortune in her purse. If you’re playing the home game and guessed that Stella and Len go on the lam, give yourself ten points–twenty if you had it down that they would do so with a body in the trunk.

Shanghai Knights (2003) – DVD

July 1, 2003Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD, Hong Kong, Jackie Chan, Martial Arts, Western

**/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras A-
starring Jackie Chan, Owen Wilson, Aidan Gillen, Fann Wong
screenplay by Alfred Gough & Miles Millar
directed by David Dobkin

by Walter Chaw Crossing the Big Pond hasn’t exactly done wonders for the heroes of the halcyon days of Hong Kong cinema. Lured by the prestige and mythology of the Hollywood dream factory, folks like Chow Yun Fat, Jet Li, Michelle Yeoh, John Woo, Ringo Lam, Tsui Hark, and so on have transformed the honesty of their craft into the same sort of boom crash opera we’ve been churning out on Yankee shores for decades now. Without a strong sense of how to film action, of the martial arts tradition in Chinese cinema, nor of the particular strengths of a particular artist, even as this genre has taken a dramatic upturn in popularity in the West, the folks most responsible for its sophistication have become sidekicks (Michelle Yeoh in Tomorrow Never Dies), B-list hunks (Yun Fat), villains (Li), failures (Lam, Hark), starfuckers (Woo), and, in the sad case of Jackie Chan, broad racial caricatures at the mercy of people like Brett Ratner, Kevin Donovan, and Tom Dey. Chan has made over 100 films over the course of forty years as an actor, director, writer, producer, and stuntman; the first thing that happens to him when he comes to the United States is that he’s placed in the company of idiots and neophytes. It feels like racism.