**/**** starring Charlie Sheen, Jason Schwartzman, Katheryn Winnick, Bill Murray written and directed by Roman Coppola
by Angelo Muredda Bill Murray's sad-clown deadpan is so ubiquitous now
that it's hard to remember a time before he was the face of hipster melancholy.
Wes Anderson and Sofia Coppola had a lot to work with in Murray's cracked mug,
so you have to feel for Coppola's brother Roman, whose own project of redeeming
an iconic face hits a snag right from the casting sheet. If A
Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III really is a tour through the psyche of star and
one-man band Charlie Sheen, then the major takeaway is that there isn't much to see unless you're into incorrigible man-children on their best
behaviour. It isn't that post-meltdown Sheen lacks the charisma to anchor a
picture, but that Coppola, on rockier ground with his second feature after the
much more aesthetically bold and thematically rich CQ, is serving two
masters: his own whimsy; and his obvious desire to stage a career intervention
for his friend, recasting the actor's overexposed mania as hangdog sadness--probably
the last thing anyone wants to see Sheen embody.
ZERO
STARS/**** Image B Sound B Extras C starring Jessica Alba, Kathy Bates, Jessica Biel, Bradley Cooper
screenplay by Katherine Fugate
directed by Garry Marshall
by Walter Chaw There are worse directors working today than Garry
Marshall, but not many and then not much worse. I've vowed on a few
occasions (like after Beaches, Pretty
Woman, Exit to Eden, The Other
Sister, Raising Helen, Georgia
Rule) to never subject myself to another Marshall
joint--certainly to never bother reviewing another
one. What's the point, really, of taking the piss out of this guy and
his movies? They're consistently, stridently tone deaf; unfailingly
saccharine; morally suspect; visually uninteresting; casually
racist/misogynist/classist/homophobic; and dangerously enervating to
the point of meriting some kind of warning label. Marry Marshall's
adorable dog/kid reaction shots and wholesale white-rape of Motown
standards to a bloated ensemble cast (everyone from Jamie Foxx to Kathy
Bates--yes, it's horrific) enacting a two-hour version of Marshall's
career-launching TV series "Love, American Style" and what you get is
every bit the horror movie the title Valentine's Day
suggests.
THE LAST KISS ZERO STARS/**** Image B+ Sound B Extras D starring Zach Braff, Jacinda Barrett, Casey Affleck, Tom Wilkinson
screenplay by Paul Haggis, based on the screenplay for L'Ultimo
Bacio by Gabriele Muccino
directed by Tony Goldwyn
TRUST THE MAN ½/****
Image A- Sound C Extras D
starring Billy Crudup, David Duchovny, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Julianne Moore
written and directed by Bart Freundlich
by
Walter Chaw Zach Braff's auto-elevation into the rarefied air of Ed
Burnsian self-satisfaction has required a fraction of the smarmcoms, if
a meaningful assist from an obscenely-popular TV show that's running on
fumes at this point. Garden State is dreadful, of
course,
swarming with awkward, overwritten, creepy alt-folk montages and pocket
epiphanies (just like "Scrubs", albeit with half the rage and
exploitation of frailty), but team up former "The Facts of Life" scribe
(and Oscar-winning screenwriter) Paul Haggis with instant-brand
Braff--he's like sea monkeys: just add grease--for The Last
Kiss
and discover in the alchemy a more pungent, twice-as-stale vintage of a
type of picture that used to be done with grace and wit by people like
Whit Stillman and Hal Hartley, cheapened by noxious voice-overs and
skeezy dialogues obsessed with the female orgasm without having the
honesty to actually show one. What we get instead is the idea that this
shit sells to a privileged "indie"-craving hipster demographic
oblivious to the fact that "indie" films are as homogenous a ghetto as
any other now. (Independent of what? Alternative to what?) There's
nothing genuine about these "relationshit" flicks (thanks to blogger
John Landis for the term); they're a sloppily-baited hook dangling in a
waitlisted stucco bistro.
**/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras C- starring Emily Watson, Tom Wilkinson, Rupert Everett, John Neville
screenplay by Julian Fellowes, based on the novel A Way
Through the Wood by Nigel Balchin
directed by Julian Fellowes
by Walter Chaw You could call Separate
Lies either a second pass at Asylum or
just another drop in the English prestige bucket that finds the stuffy
upper-crust married to silly women who bring down their country estates
of cards. It hinges on performances when it can no longer surprise with
its domestic meltdowns, and because its stable of English actors is
stocked with more thoroughbreds than the Kentucky Derby, it gains a lot
of currency in doing so. But Julian Fellowes's very British symphony of
"sorry"s is extraordinarily familiar--an Adrian Lyne film without
slickness or sex about what happens when a desperate housewife dabbles
in the dangerous and the commensurate desperation with which her
stiff-upper-lip husband scrambles to keep his dignity and status
intact. It'd make a bigger impression if we learned more about the
class struggle in Britain, I think, but without experience in the whys
and wherefores of that caste system, what we're left with is a
superbly-performed melodrama with a strained premise dissected in
airless, suffocating situations.
CAPTAIN
JANUARY (1936)
**/**** Image B Sound A- starring Shirley Temple, Guy Kibbee, Slim Summerville, Buddy Ebsen
screenplay by Sam Hellman, Gladys Lehman, Harry Tugend, based on the
novel by Laura E. Richard
directed by David Butler
JUST AROUND THE CORNER (1938)
**/**** Image B- Sound C+ starring Shirley Temple, Joan Davis, Charles Farrell, Amanda Duff
screenplay by Ethel Hill and J.P. McEvoy and Darrell Ware
directed by Irving Cummings
SUSANNAH OF THE MOUNTIES (1939)
*/**** Image A Sound A- starring Shirley Temple, Randolph Scott, Margaret Lockwood, Martin Good
Rider
story by Robert Ellis, Helen Logan, based on the novel by Muriel
Dennison
directed by Walter Lang and William A. Seiter
by Alex Jackson I'm thinking the common thread connecting Captain
January, Just Around the Corner, and Susannah
of the Mounties, the three films that comprise the fourth
volume of Fox's Shirley Temple "America's Sweetheart Collection", is
the sexualizing of child superstar Temple. There's progress: in Captain
January, she's a sexual object; in Susannah of the
Mounties, she's a sexual actor; and in Just Around
the Corner, she's in transition between the two roles. I
promise you, this isn't me projecting onto these blandly innocent
children's movies with my filthy little mind, it's right there on the
surface. In fact, even when you reflect that they are essentially
dealing with child sexuality, all three films remain
blandly innocent. They never get at anything that might be genuinely
subversive. The Temple persona is so plastic and anaesthetic that
adding sex to the mix seems merely a logical extension of her brand.
February
13, 2005|With
their 1969 breakthrough film Salesman,
a looks at the lives of four door-to-door bible salesmen, the Maysles
brothers, David and Albert, became the forerunners of the "direct
cinema" style of unblinking documentary filmmaking. Legends as
influential to the modern documentary as John Cassavetes is to the
modern anti-narrative, they're perhaps most famous for their
quasi-concert film Gimme Shelter (1970), which
captured the murder of an audience member by Hell's Angels hired as
security guards for The Rolling Stones
appearance at Altamont--in addition to, somehow more shockingly, the
band's reaction to this homicide upon viewing the footage later.
Pauline Kael declared Gimme Shelter a fraud, though
she refused
to ever reveal her reasoning for such a charge to either her editor or
the outraged Albert. The wound is still fresh.
***/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B- starring Ernest Borgnine, Eddie Albert, Tom Skerritt, William Shatner
screenplay by James Ashton, Gabe Essoe, Gerald Hopman
directed by Robert Fuest
by Alex Jackson SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. The
Devil's Rain is like a bad song you can't get out of your
head. It isn't a successful film, or even a particularly good one, but
it's made with sincerity, verve, and an understanding of the horror
genre's potential for kinetic filmmaking and potent allegory. Moreover,
it isn't a cheat--this isn't just another cheap cash-in on the "Satan"
craze of the 1970s. The last thing director Robert Fuest and
screenwriters James Ashton, Gabe Essoe, and Gerald Hopman are looking
to do is take your money and run. And though this is largely a trend of
the mid-to-late-'80s onward, they aren't looking to vindicate their
reputations by condescending to the material, either. I actually feel a
little protective of The Devil's Rain; its failure
is one more of incompetence than of cynicism, and that's really rather
reinvigorating in an age where self-consciousness reigns supreme in
horror films both good (The
Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning) and bad (See
No Evil).
½*/**** starring Bruce Willis, Jai Courtney, Sebastian Koch, Mary Elizabeth Winstead screenplay by Skip Woods directed by John Moore
by Walter ChawA Good Day to Die Hard (hereafter Die Hard 5), or whatever the fuck it's called, teaches that the only thing anyone seems to know about what's left of the
Soviet Union is that something happened at someplace called
"Chernobyl," and whatever that something was, it had to do
with radioactivity. (Or Transformers.) It's a film that believes there's a magic
spray that neutralizes radiation; that bringing up father issues is the same
thing as depth; and that commissioning a screenplay from Skip Woods (the
asshole behind Hitman, Swordfish, X-Men Origins: Wolverine,
and The A-Team) is, hey, a great idea! Dreadful doesn't begin to
describe it--and consider that I've liked, really liked, three of the previous
four movies in this franchise, to the extent that the direction the last film
took in suggesting the John McClane character is a Terminator felt to me
pleasantly self-knowing, even brilliant. I wanted, desperately, to like this thing, but by the tenth or eleventh time McClane shook his grizzled head and
muttered "Jesus" gravely under his breath (that is, around thirty minutes in), I checked out for good. Die Hard 5 is also the kind of
movie that has its foreign bad guys speak English to one another even when
they're alone; it features an extended, much-hyped car chase to nowhere with no
sense of space or innovation before finally just settling on a series of
explosions as lazy and disinterested as the way Bruce Willis fires off a
million rounds nowadays. Apathetic isn't the same thing as cool, and Willis,
let's face it, ain't trying anymore.
Image A Sound
A+ Extras A Cheese A
"Heroes and Villains,"
"Royal Scam," "Law of the Jungle," "Sword of Shikata," "Keeping
Secrets," "Tight Squeeze," "Head Over Heals," "The Party," "Flash
Memory," "Spider-Man Dis-Abled," "When Sparks Fly," "Mind Games: Part
One," "Mind Games: Part Two"
by Walter Chaw
Taking place right where the Sam Raimi feature film leaves off, with
Peter Parker, Mary Jane, and Harry Osborn off to college (Peter
perplexed, MJ clueless, Harry seething), MTV's "Spider-Man: The
Animated Series" is a completely CGI creation that has a pretty tough
time finding a pulse in among all the whiz-bang. In truth, it took me a
long time to thaw to the look of the series, so much like a nifty video
game that I caught my thumbs twitching in unconscious sympathy with the
gyrations of the coloured .gifs. And even when it stopped actively
bugging me, I never completely bought into the piece as any kind of
drama--the suspension of disbelief impossible when thoughts of the size
of the mainframe, the insane processor rates, and how neat a video game
all this was going to make one day keep running through the brain like
a stock ticker. Worse, even if the look of the thing were not
super-distracting, the voice acting by lead Neil Patrick Harris is more
smug than the intended wry, sounding an awful lot like not only Doogie
Howser (natch), but also Screech from "Saved by the Bell". Popstress
Lisa Loeb is pretty much non-descript as Mary Jane, her absence from
all the collection's voluminous special features conspicuous but
probably due either to her being busy with a cooking show on the Food
Network with boyfriend Dweezil Zappa or not feeling very confident
about the series.
½*/**** Image B-
Sound B
starring Reese Witherspoon, Paul Rudd, Christine
Taylor, Larry Drake
screenplay by Marc Sedaka and Steven Bloom
directed by Jason Bloom
by Bill Chambers A
cult film without a cult, Overnight Delivery has
gained a reputation, if not a following, for being the uncredited
inspiration behind slippery documentarian Todd Phillips's official
fiction debut, Road Trip. And, of course, it stars
the Reese Witherspoon who had not yet been body-snatched by the species
that also appropriated Ashley Judd, although it's worth noting that Overnight
Delivery is a harbinger of Sweet Home Alabamas
to come, with Witherspoon a conduit for one meet-cute cliché after
another. I'll admit that she's adorable in the picture, but her
character, a college student whose bad taste in men is made a virtue by
the workhorse plot, is a cipher steadily depleting the goodwill she
shamelessly earns in her introduction as a stripper in a Catholic
school uniform named Ivy Von Trapp. In true Hollywood fashion, Ivy's
striptease is cut short before her Pointer Sisters get to do the
Neutron dance--she's too busy squatting for the patrons stuffing bills
into her skirt.
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