ZERO STARS/**** Image B Sound B Extras D+
directed by Terry Moloney
by Walter Chaw Cynically timed to coincide with the twenty-fifth anniversary of The King’s August 16th death, Elvis: His Best Friend Remembers, the “video scrapbook” of Elvis’s best friend “Diamond Joe” Esposito, is a mawkish self-parody that plays like some weird Masterpiece Theater sketch with neither a point-of-view nor a compelling reason for being.
ZERO STARS/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B-
starring Tim Allen, Julie Bowen, Kelly Lynch, Greg Germann
screenplay by John Scott Shepherd
directed by John Pasquin
by Walter Chaw There is no life to Joe Somebody; it is a rotting, derelict husk of a film that drifts anchorless in a sea of dead jokes and plot detritus. It has no excuse for existing, and should be held up as the prime example whenever conversation turns to what’s wrong with our culture in general and the movies in particular. Joe Somebody is so sloppily put together that when it comes time at last to end this cinematic thumbscrew, its moments of uplift make little, if any, sense because of the lack of care taken to establish a place for them. If you have a moment to which the entire film is supposedly building, I humbly offer that it’s probably not good when that epiphany appears with neither warning nor justification. It’s like having a story that is not otherwise about a playwright wrapping up with a playwright having her first play produced. Exactly like that, in fact.
Mad Monster Party?
***/**** Image A+ Sound B+ Extras B
screenplay by Forrest J Ackerman, Leo Korobkin, Harvey Kurtzman
directed by Jules Bass
by Walter Chaw From Arthur Rankin Jr. and Jules Bass, the creators of such disturbing “animagic” fare as Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and the unintentionally terrifying Frosty the Snowman comes 1967’s Mad Monster Party?, a sort of Jay Ward Lite stop-motion revue featuring the vocal talents of Boris Karloff (shudder) and Phyllis Diller (shudder) as well as Allen Swift doing his best Jimmy Stewart, Peter Lorre, and Bela Lugosi.
*½/****
starring Suwinit Panjamawat, Santisuk Promsiri, Christy Chung, Eakarat Sarsukh
screenplay by Nonzee Nimibutr, Sirapak Paoboonkerd, based on the novel The Story of Jan Dara by Utsana Phleungtham
directed by Nonzee Nimibutr
by Travis Mackenzie Hoover It’s a testament to the failure of Nonzee Nimibutr’s Jan Dara that it contains parental sex, adolescent sex, inter-generational sex, lesbian sex, light bondage sex, even ice-cube sex–and still manages to wear out its welcome. You’d think that with all that screwing, you couldn’t help but be a little titillated, but after half an hour of its melodramatic excesses, it wears on you so heavily that you may decide you have a headache and just go to bed. Sure, Jan Dara contains the sordid detail and shocking revelations that make for really good melodrama, but it turns them all on their head: Instead of releasing the madness that lurks beneath the surface, it chastely peels away the hysterical rind to suck on the virginal fruit beneath. For the sensualist likes of me, this is totally unacceptable, as it takes what could have been a rakish romp and makes it a hypocritical object lesson in the virtues of clean living.
**/****
starring Sigourney Weaver, Aaron Stanford, John Ritter, Bebe Neuwirth
screenplay by Heather McGowan & Neils Mueller
directed by Gary Winick
by Walter Chaw An underwritten indie The Graduate (a connection the film makes itself) that plays a little more like one of J.D. Salinger’s terrible short stories than like Wes Anderson’s dead brilliant Rushmore (which it aspires to be at every turn), Tadpole emerges as exactly the kind of self-conscious product that crowds equate, knee-jerk-like, with independent credibility. Buoyed at times by an occasional sweetness and Bebe Neuwirth’s fantastic performance as a hippie still flying her freak flag (or at least her free-love banner), Tadpole hints at what it might have been had it the courage to follow through on the ramifications of a fifteen-year-old boarding school Voltaire-quoting brat using the language of his absent mother to attempt to win his stepmother Eve (Sigourney Weaver) away from his ineffectual academic of a dad (John Ritter).
*/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras B-
starring Kevin Costner, Joe Morton, Kathy Bates, Ron Rifkin
screenplay by David Seltzer and Brandon Camp & Mike Thompson
directed by Tom Shadyac
by Walter Chaw Emergency-room sawbones Joe Darrow (Kevin Costner) loses his do-gooder wife Emily (Susanna Thompson) when she’s killed in a rockslide in Venezuela. Soon he and his bald parrot believe that Emily has returned from the dead with a message about rainbows. I like Kevin Costner and his oeuvre. I find him to be a charming simpleton in the Gary Cooper mould. Until Dragonfly, his films never felt condescending to me, largely because Costner appears to be learning things at the same pace as his screenplay. His guileless wonder (‘Can you believe we did this to the Indians? Holy smokes!‘) sits well with me and makes him peculiarly suited to play the traditional American hero: good-looking, witless, and dull as dishwater. Casting Costner as a doctor is a mistake: the other person he played who had an advanced degree was New Orleans DA Jim Garrison in Oliver Stone’s JFK, and that character was clearly insane. Costner just doesn’t have the spark of erudition necessary to convince as a serious individual with letters after his name (not unless those letters are LHP), and his performance in Dragonfly is unconvincing, joyless, and scattershot.
The Chatroom
ZERO STARS/**** Image D Sound B-
starring Brian Hooks, Darryl Bronson, Christopher Richards, Troy Winbush
screenplay by Barry Bowles & Carl Washington
directed by Barry Bowles
by Walter Chaw A feature-length episode of “What’s Happening!!” minus the nuance and sophistication of that late lamented blaxploitation garbage, Chat Room shares with the Seventies sitcom an unholy diner-hangin’ trinity of fat one, dumb one, and the one with whom we’re supposed to identify. Following this trio of miscreants during an online booty call, Chat Room begins with a You’ve Got Mail sequence of the guys “chatting” in the titular chatrooms edited together so hopelessly as to suggest, oh so hilariously, that these horny dudes are actually talking to each other.
KUNG POW: ENTER THE FIST
**½ Image B+ Sound A- Extras B
starring Steve Oedekerk
written and directed by Steve Oedekerk
CONTRACT KILLER
*/**** Image B Sound B
starring Jet Li, Eric Tsang, Simon Yam, Gigi Leung
screenplay by Chan Heng Ka, Vincent Kok, Cheng Kam Fa
directed by Tung Wai
by Bill Chambers In addition to putting the fear of God in us about CGI, Kung Pow: Enter the Fist (henceforth Kung Pow) makes us wish the technology it employed to seamlessly superimpose writer-director-star Steve Oedekerk into the 1977 kung fu movie Tiger and Crane Fists had been around circa Bruce Lee’s demise. Back then, the producers of Game of Death struggled to complete a half-finished star vehicle minus one star using cardboard cut-outs and a variety of unconvincing doubles. (Lee’s character, the hero, spends most of the picture with his back to the camera.) Oedekerk, playing the archetypal grown-up orphan seeking vengeance against “Master Pain” for his parents’ murder, spends most of Kung Pow looking into the lens with his tongue sticking out, the tongue itself adorned with a face that has its own tongue. Technological advances have always been either too dawdling or too hasty in serving the cinema, alas.
*/**** Image A Sound A
starring James Belushi, Gary Basaraba, Kim Huffman, Jody Racicot
screenplay by Gary Scott Thompson and Ed Horowitz
directed by Richard J. Lewis
by Walter Chaw Much more interesting than talking about a film called K-9: P.I. is talking about exactly the kind of mind it takes to embrace the idea of a standard buddy picture composed of one half mangy dog and one half German Shepherd not once, not twice, but thrice. On the night of their retirement, Dooley (James Belushi) and Jerry Lee (King) break up a microchip heist, which, of course, makes them the prime suspects of the crime in the eyes of the evil FBI. The feds are always wicked bumblers in films of this breed; the police chiefs always give the heroes a hard time; and there are always femmes fatale to briefly distract the hero from the super-bland "appropriate" love interest.
by Walter Chaw
MURDEROUS MAIDS (2000)
Les Blessures assassines
***/****
starring Sylvie Testud, Julie-Marie Parmentier, Isabelle Renauld, Dominique Labourier
screenplay by Jean-Pierre Denis & Michèle Pétin, based on the novel L'affaire Papin by Paulette Houdyer
directed by Jean-Pierre Denis
Heavenly Creatures by way of Henry James, Jean-Pierre Denis's Murderous Maids–based on the true story of two sisters who, in 1933, murdered and mutilated the bodies of their employers in a small French town–is haunting and uncompromising. Denis proposes that taciturn Christine (Sylvie Testud) and open, elfin Léa (Julie-Marie Parmentier) were engaged in an incestuous relationship; that this relationship was founded on the basis of a deep resentment of a mother (Isabelle Renauld) who hired them out as housemaids and collected their salaries to fund her "love of life"; and that this relationship–arrested sexuality, repressed beneath a veneer of unbearable religiosity (a third sister, supposedly raped by a long-absent father, joins a convent) and the humiliations of the master/servant dynamic–eventually imploded into an orgy of bloodlust and madness. Denis's unwillingness to sensationalize (let alone explain) first incest and then murder results in a certain harshness that magnifies every bourgeoisie slight against the long-suffering proletariat into a potentially triggering event, yet also prevents very much in the way of suture with either the sisters or their eventual victims. The bloodletting made as sterile as the eroticism in an affectively airless chamber piece, Murderous Maids falls short of Claude Chabrol's brilliant La Cérémonie and Nancy Meckler's underseen Sister, My Sister, in that the same reserve that allows its actresses to shine (Testud, in particular) inhibits very much in the way of actual involvement or tension beyond a kind of clinical interest. Still, the weight of the piece, the unerring professionalism of the chilly production, and the fascination embedded in the lurid topic prove recommendation enough.
****/****
starring Vincent Gallo, Tricia Vessey, Béatrice Dalle, Alex Descas
screenplay by Claire Denis & Jean-Pol Fargeau
directed by Claire Denis
by Walter Chaw Plaintive and sad, Claire Denis’s remarkable Trouble Every Day is a rare combination of honesty, beauty, and maybe even genius. It isn’t enough to say that the picture captures the barbarism festering at the core of gender dynamics, nor is it sufficient to express my frank amazement at how Denis subverts genre in ways perverse and powerful. Here’s a canny director who knows the vocabulary of cinema as well as the cruel poetics of sexual anthropology; perhaps it’s enough to say that Trouble Every Day captures something ineffably true about the sex act with images vital, frank, and unshakable.
**/****
starring Michael J. Fox, Geena Davis, Hugh Laurie, Jonathan Lipnicki
screenplay by Bruce Joel Rubin
directed by Rob Minkoff
by Walter Chaw As boring as it is generally well-intentioned, Stuart Little 2 takes a page from the Hunchback of Notre Dame II playbook by presenting a wilting fatale with a heart of gold (Melanie Griffith voices a larcenous canary) adopted as an orphaned chick by an evil criminal mastermind (James Woods, speaking for a falcon) and infiltrating a kind family’s good graces for the purposes of pilfering. The family in question, based loosely on that described in E.B. White’s beloved Stuart Little, consists of a cheery mom (Geena Davis), a cheery dad (Hugh Laurie), an insipid kid with a giant head (Jonathan Lipnicki), and an adopted mouse named Stuart (voiced by Michael J. Fox), whom the Littles treat like one of their own. No wonder–Stuart can talk, wear clothes, walk upright, drive little toy cars and, in the standard sequel amplifications, fly a little toy airplane and fall in love with something outside his species.
The Last Producer
½*/**** Image C Sound B+
starring Burt Reynolds, Lauren Holly, Sean Astin, Benjamin Bratt
screenplay by Clyde Hayes
directed by Burt Reynolds
by Walter Chaw Seeing himself as Hollywood’s last angry man (the film was originally and just as inexplicably called “The Last Producer”), Burt Reynolds, in the twilight of his benighted resurrection, jumps behind the camera to helm his self-starred anti-Hollywood tirade The Final Hit, which washes out as equal parts senior citizen grotesquery and unfocused satire. Wall-to-wall with Peter M. Robinson’s excrescent scatty woo-bop score, The Final Hit, in discussing how Tinsel Town disdains the older generation of actors, proceeds to give the stage back to that same older generation and, in the process, demonstrates exactly why these people aren’t getting much work.
**½/**** Image B+ Sound B+
starring Selma Blair, Leo Fitzpatrick, Robert Wisdom, Paul Giamatti
written and directed by Todd Solondz
by Walter Chaw The line between love and misanthropy is thin, and Todd Solondz is a cunning cartographer of that precarious divide. He sees political correctness as an insidious product of the kind of paternalistic racism that discards truth in favour of generally held truisms, a crutch for well-meaning racists who lack the wit to grasp that the basic misunderstanding of difference driving a desire to discriminate against minorities is identical to that which drives a desire to protect minorities. Solondz’s films are confrontational in the extreme, full-frontal assaults on the hypocrisy that fuels most relationships and stark dissections of the politics of cruelty.
*/**** Image A- Sound B
starring Tony Franciosa, Raquel Welch, Ronald Fraser, Greta Chi
screenplay by Lorenzo Semple Jr.
directed by Leslie H. Martinson
by Walter Chaw There’s something desperately wrong with veteran television director Leslie H. Martinson’s spy spoof Fathom, and it took me the whole movie to figure it out: Raquel Welch, as the titular va-va-va-voom dental hygienist cum parachutist cum superspy spends the entire film running from symbols of aggressive virility. Clad fetchingly in a variety of swimsuits and tight shirts (but never pants), our Fathom is pursued by a man with a speargun, by a Russian paramour mistaking our heroine for a prostitute, through various tunnels, and through a train. In its barest form, Fathom appears to be a rape fantasy involving a helpless, screaming, occasionally castrating Welch (though, tellingly, the only person she kills is another woman), who plays a variation on her standard cocktease and–naturally–deserves getting prodded about by a bull while a collection of bad guys poke at her with phallic shunts.
***½/****
starring Anouk Aimée, Marc Michel, Jacques Harden, Alan Scott
written and directed by Jacques Demy
by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Lola is a film that makes froth do the work of genius. Like The Red Shoes and The Quiet Man, it’s one-hundred percent movie-movie horse manure, a series of contrived romantic adventures that elicits a velveteen agony no sensible adult could possibly mistake for the real thing. But just like those movies, it makes you think it’s doing more than its Leonard Maltin entry would otherwise suggest–and, in fact, does more than perhaps even creator Jacques Demy ever realized. In doting prettily on its collection of picturesque no-hopers, Lola manages to be profound in spite of itself; the film bestows a divine aesthetic light on people who would normally be passed over for attention, and in so doing gives their life a value that a social-realist film might degrade into a heap of misery.
**½/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B-
starring Bruce Willis, Colin Farrell, Terrence Dashon Howard, Vicellous Reon Shannon
screenplay by Billy Ray and Terry George, based on the novel by John Katzenbach
directed by Gregory Hoblit
by Walter Chaw Director Gregory Hoblit’s fourth consecutive celluloid guilty pleasure, Hart’s War constantly dances the razor’s edge of offensively pat (equating Nazi Germany with Macon, GA circa 1944) while providing enough canned tension and studied theatricality to put A Few Good Men to shame. With Bruce Willis as a smirky secondary character and largely-untested Irishman Colin Farrell asked to shoulder the brunt of the courtroom hijinks, Hart’s War is an exceptionally well-done bad movie that hums along on its earnestness. Though if you think about the film at all after the lights come up, best not to contemplate the plot, which is littered with holes like P-51 rocket craters.
July 7, 2002|There are a great many similarities between John Sayles and Billy Wilder (save, obviously, Wilder’s affection for the Hollywood studio system). Both: are writers who became directors; exhibit a knack for developing strong characters and eliciting fine performances; are loyal to a small cadre of performers and technical crew; prefer simple shooting schemes that don’t obscure the primacy of the script; generally detail the infiltration of a corrupt society; are fond of sports metaphors and analogies; and, despite some auteur hallmarks, are unbound by genre. One of the great lost Wilder projects is a professional wrestling picture called The Masked Marvel, which was to star Charles Laughton, while Sayles once wrote a professional wrestling play called “Turnbuckle”–curiouser and curiouser.