Bloody Murder II: Closing Camp (2003) – DVD

Bloody Murder 2: Closing Camp
**/**** Image D Sound C-
starring Katy Woodruff, Kelly Gunning, Amanda Magarian, Tiffany Shepis
screenplay by John Stevenson
directed by Rob Spera

by Walter Chaw Amateurish, awkward, and bordering on genuinely offensive, Bloody Murder II: Closing Camp surprises by actually being a nice walk down ’80s slasher flick memory lane. Shot on a zero-budget by Rob Spera (the man behind the infamous Leprechaun in the Hood), the picture is packed with some nice gore, a great deal of nudity, and almost no aspirations towards cleverness. Save one Scream-influenced exchange about the dangers of flashing skin and being African-American in this genre, Bloody Murder II is a mindless series of sadistic stalking/slashing sequences that pick on the nerd, the slut, and the jock while a virginal heroine (with a blood tie to the masked murderer, natch) tries to unravel the mystery in time to save herself.

Star Trek III: The Search for Spock (1984) + Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986) – DVDs|[Special Collector’s Edition] – DVDs

STAR TREK III: THE SEARCH FOR SPOCK
***/****
DVD – Image A Sound A
SCE DVD – Image A Sound A Extras B+
starring William Shatner, DeForest Kelley, James Doohan, George Takei
screenplay by Harve Bennett
directed by Leonard Nimoy

STAR TREK IV: THE VOYAGE HOME
**/****
DVD – Image B- Sound B Extras C
SCE DVD – Image A Sound A Extras B+
starring William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, DeForest Kelley, James Doohan
screenplay by Steve Meerson, Peter Krikes, Harve Bennett and Nicholas Meyer
directed by Leonard Nimoy

by Vincent Suarez I’ve always had a love/hate relationship with the middle installments of the six Star Trek films featuring Captain James T. Kirk and his crew; I would have been content had the series ended with Star Trek II: The Wrath of Kahn, which is not only a great Trek movie but also an extremely fine piece of filmmaking in itself. (The seventh film in the series, Star Trek: Generations, passed the phasers to Captain Picard of “The Next Generation”, and included only brief appearances by a select few under Kirk’s command.) For me, Star Trek III: The Search for Spock seemed to betray the spirit, morality, and philosophy of its predecessor, while Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home represented the low point in cinematic “Trek,” reducing the series to formulaic farce.

Labyrinth (1986) [Superbit] – DVD

*½/**** Image A- Sound B+
starring David Bowie, Jennifer Connelly
screenplay by Terry Jones
directed by Jim Henson

by Walter Chaw As riffs on Alice in Wonderland and The Wizard of Oz go, Jim Henson’s Labyrinth is a painfully dated, shockingly un-magical romp through a fragmented netherworld populated by Ziggy Stardust and a horde of little people wearing giant papier-mâché heads. Following a wish by bratty Sarah (Jennifer Connelly) that her bratty kid brother be spirited away by the Goblin King (David Bowie) and Sarah’s inevitable lapse into unconsciousness and journey into the titular, Escher-inspired labyrinth, the picture unfolds at a laboured clip marked not so much by a sense of wonder, but rather a feeling of confused disinterest. While the film is a nostalgic hallmark for many (and so is Pete’s Dragon, it occurs), cinematically and artistically, better to revisit Henson’s flawed but alive The Dark Crystal.

Asunder (1998) – DVD

*½/**** Image A- Sound A-
starring Blair Underwood, Debbi Morgan, Michael Beach
screenplay by Eric Lee Bowers
directed by Tim Reid

by Walter Chaw A courageously unpleasant role for “L.A. Law” heartthrob Blair Underwood, Tim “Venus Flytrap” Reid’s derivative Asunder is only otherwise brave for its remorseless abuse of otherwise innocent pregnant women–crossing a seldom-crossed line of taboo in American film unless it’s to punish a heroine (see: High Crimes, Crossroads, and so on) for having the child of a bad man. Billing itself as “In The Suspenseful Style Of Fatal Attraction And Unfaithful,” Asunder is every bit the rushed, formula production moldering on a shelf somewhere until either one of its stars hits it big (see: Ordinary Decent Criminal and Colin Farrell) or, as in this case, a higher-profile film with a similar theme makes an impact, thus giving the folks in marketing a hook.

Love Notes: FFC Interviews Todd Louiso and Philip Seymour Hoffman

Lovelizarevisedhis role as one of John Cusack’s sidekicks in High Fidelity (star-struck employees hovered around us, hoping for a word), I was more excited to talk to him about his vocal cameo in the late, lamented series “The Critic”, as well as, of course, his first foray into directing with the remarkable Love Liza. Clad in the epitome of unassuming casual, Mr. Louiso seemed surprised that I had a complete filmography for him and embarrassed that I wanted to talk about his career in some detail–reactions both that speak to not only the investment that most of my peers take in researching their topic, but to a certain quality of Mr. Louiso: an unforced modesty that charms. Over the course of our interview, we talked about all manner of things, particularly, fascinatingly, of his passages over water.

Six Feet Under: The Complete First Season (2001) – DVD

Image A Sound A Extras B+
"Pilot," "The Will," "The Foot," "Familia," "An Open Book," "The Room," "Brotherhood," "Crossroads," "Life's Too Short," "The New Person," "The Trip," "A Private Life," "Knock, Knock"

by Bill Chambers Like you, I was enthralled by American Beauty, but its resonance proved short-lived. The spell was broken for me when my friend innocently observed after a screening that men only masturbate in the shower in movies–the whole film mentally unravelled from there, that hanging thread, as I became cognizant of, and progressively bothered by, its oversimplifications. Is it just my imagination, or would Mr. Furley spin in his syndicated grave over the misinterpretation that informs the picture's climax? Though the culturally young are entitled to find American Beauty profound, since it's of that particular kind of Hollywood caginess that takes a trained eye (and is especially cheeky coming from an enfant terrible of the British stage), more people need(ed) to recognize that it's Blame It On Rio with proscenium arches.

Blind Spot: Hitler’s Secretary (2002)

Im Toten Winkel – Hitlers Sekretärin
Blind Spot. Hitler’s Secretary

***½/****
directed by André Heller & Othmar Schmiderer

by Bill Chambers A significant source of Blind Spot. Hitler’s Secretary‘s power is the au naturel form it takes. There are no re-enactments, there are no such visual cues as photographs or stock footage; there isn’t even any underscore–only the talking head of Traudl Junge, who, with her rotating cluster of sweaters and ascots, is the film’s aesthetic. Directors André Heller and Othmar Schmiderer (Heller interviewed, Schmiderer shot) either believe Junge to be so compelling a presence as to challenge the need for newsreel aids, or fundamentally appreciate that they risked depersonalizing Junge’s fresh, intimate perspective by going the History Channel route. I only skimmed the press notes (which are rather regrettably written: “Like Adolf Hitler, [Heller and Schmiderer] were also born and raised in Austria,” begins an introduction to the filmmakers) to keep from cheapening Blind Spot‘s enigmatic approach–that ambivalence–for myself: The film casts a spell as fragile as that of an ILM spectacle.

Open Hearts (2002)

Elsker dig for evigt
***½/****

starring Sonja Richter, Mads Mikkelsen, Paprika Steen, Nikolaj Lie Kaas
screenplay by Susanne Bier & Anders Thomas Jensen
directed by Susanne Bier

by Walter Chaw Susanne Bier’s first Dogme 95 film Open Hearts (Elsker dig for evigt) is the Danish movement’s twenty-eighth and the second by a female director after last year’s Italian for Beginners. It reveals the austere, half-snooty/half-tongue-in-cheek manifesto as a surprisingly effective platform for a reinvention of the woman’s picture–a resurrection of the estrogen melodramas circa Mildred Pierce, the legitimizing of the soap opera genre fallen on disrepute since the invention of soaring violins and Julia Roberts. The limiting constraints of Dogme 95, most of them aimed at stripping filmmaking of all artifice, seem to purify the emotionalism latent in stories of paralyzed lovers and star-crossed priests–perhaps the least expected offshoot of a movement that is not only extremely distracting, but probably began life as something of a joke.

The Beach Boys: An American Band (1985)/Brian Wilson: “I just wasn’t made for these times” (1995) [Double Feature] – DVD

THE BEACH BOYS: AN AMERICAN BAND
****/**** Image C+ Sound B+
directed by Malcolm Leo

BRIAN WILSON: “I JUST WASN’T MADE FOR THESE TIMES”
***½/**** Image B Sound B+
directed by Don Was

by Walter Chaw There are a handful of albums indispensable to a comprehensive understanding of the roots of modern music, and The Beach Boys‘ “Pet Sounds”–a sort of Apocalypse Now for band-leader Brian Wilson, a mad compendium of musical fragments (Bach’s progressions, The Four Horsemen‘s harmonies) that cohered into a Spector-esque Wall of Sound sparsity/harmony–is irrefutably among them. Intent on making definitive, album-length statements, spurred on by his obsessive competitiveness with The Beatles (“Rubber Soul” predates “Pet Sounds”, and though Paul McCartney cited “Pet Sounds” as a primary influence on “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band”, the release of that album is often blamed for Brian Wilson’s nervous breakdown), and sensing the opportunity in 1966 of being at the vanguard of the psychedelic movement with a follow-up album (the never-completed “Smile”), the story of The Beach Boys and Brian Wilson is as operatic and tinged with ironic destiny as an Aeschylean tragedy.

The First $20 Million (2002) – DVD

The First $20 Million Is Always the Hardest
ZERO STARS/**** Image C Sound B-
starring Adam Garcia, Rosario Dawson, Jake Busey, Enrico Colantoni
screenplay by Jon Favreau and Gary Tieche, based on the novel by Po Bronson
directed by Mick Jackson

by Walter Chaw Food-obsessed Japanese girl band Cibo Matto plays quietly behind a weird commercial of pastel San Diego Chickens sky-diving within the first five minutes of The First $20 Million Is Always the Hardest, offering a benighted hope that the film won’t suck that is so ephemeral that its inevitable death is less cruel than perverse. Playing like a version of Real Genius that’s somehow worse, the idea of a hard-partying geek fraternity involved in changing the world one byte at a time is so disinteresting and bankrupt that its resounding failure isn’t nearly as surprising as the twin revelations that the otherwise bright-seeming Jon Favreau co-wrote the screenplay (and appears in a cameo with crap in his mouth), and that this dog pile of a script (based on a novel by Po Bronson) actually found suitors.

Frank McClusky, C.I. (2002) – DVD

**/**** Image A Sound A-
starring Dave Sheridan, Randy Quaid, Enrico Colantoni, Dolly Parton
screenplay by Mark Perez
directed by Arlene Sanford

by Walter Chaw There’s a freshness to the staleness of Frank McKlusky, C.I. that charms initially before it grates for its dedicated cuteness and innocuous incorrectness. With an amazing supporting cast of the lower echelon of B-list comedy performers (Dolly Parton, Randy Quaid, Orson Bean (reprising his Being John Malkovich character), Andy Richter, Kevin Pollack, Adam Corolla, and Chris Farley’s also-fat brother), the picture is clearly a rip-off of Jim Carrey’s Ace Ventura films, complete with a mugging Dave Sheridan (so good in Bubble Boy, now channelling Carrey), a pooch sidekick, and a blonde love interest in the emetic Cameron Diaz (of Carrey’s The Mask) mold played, strangely enough, by Cameron Richardson.

Ordinary Decent Criminal (2000) – DVD

*/**** Image A- Sound B+
starring Kevin Spacey, Linda Fiorentino, Peter Mullan, Stephen Dillane
screenplay by Gerard Stembridge
directed by Thaddeus O’Sullivan

by Walter Chaw Completed about a year after John Boorman’s infinitely superior The General, Thaddeus O’Sullivan’s Ordinary Decent Criminal is a sporadic “fictionalizing” of the life of Irish crime boss Martin Cahill that dresses up Cahill’s exploits with slick visuals while attempting the unsavoury task of doing exactly what The General was accused of doing: making urban terrorism and torture whimsical caper fare. Recasting Cahill as a Keyser Soze with a sense of oily humour and renaming him Michael Lynch (Kevin Spacey), Ordinary Decent Criminal is extraordinarily lightweight blather free entirely of the sense of scale and place of Boorman’s film. The General is fantastic, Ordinary Decent Criminal: just fatuous.

The Money Pit (1986) [Widescreen] – DVD

**/**** Image A- Sound B+
starring Tom Hanks, Shelley Long, Alexander Godunov, Maureen Stapleton
screenplay by David Giler
directed by Richard Benjamin

by Bill Chambers Many comedies are padded by slapstick–here’s slapstick padded by jokes, every single one of which bears the tang of a warm-up act. There is dialogue that advances a scene and there is dialogue that fills a page count, and David Giler’s screenplay for The Money Pit toils almost exclusively in the latter. On the one hand, that’s exactly the right approach, as it relegates stars Tom Hanks and Shelley Long to the status of Chachi and Joanie whilst elevating the titular house to starring role. But “the money pit” can only fall down and go boom so many times, thus making The Money Pit a stop-and-go feature that would kill as a short. I’ve often toyed with doing my own edit of the film.

Sports Night: The Complete Series Plus Pilot Episode (1992-1993) – DVD

Image B Sound B
SEASON 1 – “Pilot,” “The Apology,” “The Hungry and the Hunted,” “Intellectual Property,” “Mary Pat Shelby,” “*The Head Coach, Dinner and the Morning Mail,” “Dear Louise,” “Thespis,” “The Quality of Mercury at 29K,” “Shoe Money Tonight,” “The Six Southern Gentlemen of Tennessee,” “Smoky,” “Small Town,” “Rebecca,” “Dana and the Deep Blue Sea,” “Sally,” “How Are Things in Gloca Morra?,” “The Sword of Orion,” “Eli’s Coming,” “Ordnance Tactics,” “Ten Wickets,” “Napoleon’s Battle Plan,” “What Kind of Day Has it Been”
SEASON 2 – “Special Powers,” “When Something Wicked This Way Comes,” “Cliff Gardner,” “Louise Revisited,” “Kafelnikov,” “Shane,” “Kyle Whitaker’s Got Two Sacks,” “The Reunion,” “A Girl Named Pixley,” “The Giants Win the Pennant, the Giants Win the Pennant,” “The Cut Man Cometh,” “The Sweet Smell of Air,” “Dana Get Your Gun,” “And the Crowd Goes Wild,” “Celebrities,” “The Local Weather,” “Draft Day: Part I – It Can’t Rain at Indian Wells,” “Draft Day: Part II – The Fall of Ryan O’Brian,” “April is the Cruelest Month,” “Bells And A Siren,” “La Forza Del Destino,” “Quo Vadimus”

by Walter Chaw Taken as a whole, and a box set from Buena Vista allows one to do just that, Aaron Sorkin’s “Sports Night” takes on the character of an extended experiment that starts tentatively and ends as one of the genuinely valuable moments of television in the year before HBO and flagship show “The Sopranos” became the benchmark for quality boob-tubery in the post-post-modern age. Detailing the behind-the-scenes drama of producing an “ESPN SportsCenter”-esque news program, it draws inevitable comparison to James L. Brooks’s Broadcast News (and accordingly, during the first season, episode five, Felicity Huffman gets to knock over a production assistant à la Holly Hunter’s character in that film), but distinguishes itself with an understanding that in many ways, sports is an effective locus for the hot-button issues of modern society: misogyny, race, addiction, violence.

Russian Ark (2003)

****/****
starring Sergei Dontsov, Mariya Kuznetsova, Leonid Mozgovoy, David Giorgobiani
screenplay by Boris Khaimsky & Anatoli Nikiforov & Svetlana Proskurina & Alexander Sokurov
directed by Alexander Sokurov

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Russian Ark is a film that hoists its middle finger high against the cultural practices of nearly a hundred years. Implicitly appalled by the twin forgettings of communist and free-market logic, director Alexander Sokurov retaliates by erecting a monument to the proceeding three centuries of image-making–one that marks the entrance to a crypt perhaps, as Sokurov knows that time is running out on its preservation. Surely there’s a heaping dose of snobbery in his approach, and a whole lot of wilful obscurity as well, but his expression of his thesis is so passionate, and his technical execution is so seamless and beautiful, that I could have forgiven him almost anything.

Old School (2003)

*½/****
starring Luke Wilson, Will Ferrell, Vince Vaughn, Ellen Pompeo
screenplay by Todd Phillips & Scot Armstrong
directed by Todd Phillips

by Walter Chaw Following in the tepid footsteps of National Lampoon’s Van Wilder‘s attempt to update Animal House for the new millennium, Todd Phillips’s Old School is better than it should be for a surprisingly funny Will Ferrell and another one of those laconic performances by a Wilson brother (Luke, this time) that just begs for a better vehicle. Less than John Landis’s landmark ode to anarchy, however, Old School most resembles Hart Bochner’s PCU–a film to which it pays unsubtle homage in the “ironic” casting of Jeremy Piven as that hale genre archetype: the button-down dean. (And PCU ultimately finds itself the superior campus clone comedy… For whatever that’s worth.) As diaries of arrested development go, Old School at least has the wit to tell a story of thirtysomethings seeking to recapture the halcyon days of binge-drinking and the joys of sexual objectification, making it something of a middle class/mid-life crisis tragedy and fitfully engaging in a distracted way as a result.

The Lady Killer of Rome (1961) + The Working Class Goes to Heaven (1971)

L’Assassino
The Assassin

**½/****
starring Marcello Mastroianni, Micheline Presle, Cristina Gaioni, Salvo Randone
screenplay by Pasquale Festa Campanile & Massimo Franciosa & Tonino Guerra & Elio Petri
directed by Elio Petri

La Classe operaia va in paradiso
Lulu the Tool

***½/****
starring Mietta Albertini, Giovanni Bignamini, Flavio Bucci, Donato Castellaneta
screenplay by Elio Petri & Ugo Pirro
directed by Elio Petri

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover What a difference a decade makes: watching Elio Petri’s first film (1961’s The Lady Killer of Rome (L’Assassino)) and one of his most honoured (1971’s The Working Class Goes to Heaven (La Classe operaia va in paradiso)) reveals just how the march of history can change a director from distinguished craftsman to agent provocateur. One marvels at how the Left-inflected debut, made before the upheavals of the late-Sixties shook up film aesthetics, goes down easy and comfortably, while the Left-committed later film, made in the miasma after those upheavals failed, grabs the viewer by the lapels and shakes him or her until he or she cries uncle. And one is grateful that that sea change happened: it’s The Working Class Goes to Heaven which looks best from the present vantage point, because it makes its points with a desperate urgency that the earlier film, however pointed it might seem, can’t hope to match.

The Life of David Gale (2003)

ZERO STARS/****
starring Kevin Spacey, Kate Winslet, Laura Linney, Gabriel Mann
screenplay by Charles Randolph
directed by Alan Parker

Lifeofdavidgaleby Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. One wonders if there isn’t, after all, a subtle right-wing conspiracy at work in the entertainment industry, where ultra-liberal stumps are turned into the sort of ostensibly pro-leftist propaganda reel that does serious harm to the pro-leftist agenda. If it’s not the reprehensible The Contender, with its Ayn Rand-ian hypothetical, it’s I Am Sam and its bizarre vilification of the child welfare system–or worse, John Q, with its curiously misdirected lament against our obviously broken health-care state. Trumping them all in terms of muddle and melodrama, however, is The Life of David Gale, an anti-death penalty tirade that, by the end, feels like a life sentence the audience wishes hadn’t been commuted. The only way to make any sense of the film is to suspect it of darker motives: Its ultimate message–and it’s not a bad one–seems to be that the criminal justice system the film so actively vilifies is, in fact, the only honest (though imperfect) force in the entire mess.

Gods and Generals (2003)

*/****
starring Chris Conner, Jeff Daniels, Stephen Lang, Robert Duvall

screenplay by Ronald F. Maxwell, based on the book by Jeffrey M. Shaara
directed by Ronald F. Maxwell

Godsandgeneralsby Walter Chaw Somewhere in the translation from Jeff Shaara’s only so-so novel Gods and Generals to Ronald F. Maxwell’s magnificently bad film Gods and Generals lies the mystery of why the younger Shaaras and the Maxwells of the world see fit to take a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel like Jeff Shaara’s The Killer Angels and make a country-fried trilogy out of it. Perhaps most of the blame should be laid at the ten-gallon feet of Ted Turner, Fortune 500’s Yosemite Sam/Ross Perot amalgam who seeks, it appears, to finally get the South to rise again, single-handedly, after about 150 years of threats. It seems odd, however, that The Ted would seek to get the bayonets a-rattlin’ again with almost four hours of awkward period speechifying punctuated occasionally by random recreations of random early Civil War battles (Manassas, Fredericksburg, and Chancellorsville), each of which leads to the events of Maxwell’s 1993 adaptation of The Killer Angels, Gettysburg.

Swimfan (2002) – DVD

½*/**** Image A Sound B Extras B-
starring Jesse Bradford, Erika Christensen, Shiri Appleby, Kate Burton
screenplay by Charles Bohl & Phillip Schneider
directed by John Polson

by Walter Chaw It’s one thing to say that Swimfan is a boldly unoriginal rip-off of such gems as The Crush, Deadly Friend, Wicked, and Poison Ivy, but it’s another, far more disturbing thing altogether to note that Swimfan travels the same inexplicable path of the moon-faced pork-pie Lolita so purposefully trundled by the likes of Alicia Silverstone, Kristy Swanson, Julia Stiles, and Drew Barrymore. Erika Christensen–memorably spacey as the troubled daughter in Soderbergh’s Traffic–reveals herself in Swimfan as just the next completely interchangeable cherubic baby-fat starlet to try (or continue) to sully her ephemeral image in a role day-trippers might mistake for “edgy.” Make no mistake, Swimfan may be many things, but it’s about as edgy as Christensen’s Romanesque elbow.