by Ian Pugh Speaking strictly as a casual
observer of the event, one of the lessons the recent WGA strike taught
us was that talk-show scripts are pretty carefully tailored to their
hosts' personalities. Consequently, one could finally determine, once
and for all, why "The Colbert Report" is superior to its progenitor,
"The Daily Show with Jon Stewart": When you boil everything down to the
bare essentials, it's easier to see that Stewart's treatment of world
events, unlike Stephen Colbert's, is primarily composed of sharp
chuckles and incredulous reactions. It's a belaboured but valid point
that Comedy Central's hour of "fake news" has casually drifted closer
to relevance as mainstream news sources continue their downward trend
towards pop infotainment and outrageous bias, and by taking on the
persona of an ill-informed, blowhard pundit, Colbert merely brings
media politics to their logical extreme, presenting news items
precisely as they matter to his infallible worldview. His mock
inability to detect irony is a sharp, timely condemnation--sharp
enough, at least, to send the White House Press Corps retreating to the
fossilized, altogether toothless material of Rich Little after Colbert
did his thing at their annual Correspondents Dinner. But one of the
most important facets of Colbert's act--indeed, one that greatly
extends the shelf-life of his shtick--is how he takes the accolades he
receives as a satirist and effortlessly folds them to fit the monstrous
ego of his onscreen character.
ZERO STARS/**** starring Kevin Spacey, Kate Winslet, Laura Linney, Gabriel Mann
screenplay by Charles Randolph directed by Alan Parker
by 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.
*/**** 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
by 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 lead to the events
of Maxwell's 1993 adaptation of The Killer Angels, Gettysburg.
De Grønne slagtere **½/**** starring Line Kruse, Nikolaj Lie Kaas, Mads Mikkelsen, Nicolas Bro written and directed by Anders Thomas Jensen
by Bill Chambers SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. There's nothing groundbreaking about Anders Thomas Jensen's blessedly non-Dogme The Green Butchers, the latest movie to mine the consumption of human flesh for laughs (even the title suggests a cheeky allusion to Soylent Green)--but
for a comedy, that most culturally-specific of genres, the Danish
production travels remarkably well. Credit a skillful subtitle
translation that preserves the wit of Jensen's repartee, not to mention
the chemistry between stars Mads Mikkelsen and Nikolaj Lie Kaas, who,
as chronic perspirer Svend and pothead Bjarne, respectively, transcend
language like some nouveau Ren and Stimpy. (That being said,
they're occasionally too redolent of Napoleon Dynamite and Pedro for
this writer's comfort.) Proprietors of the new butcher shop in town,
Svend and Bjarne face early foreclosure until an electrician
accidentally freezes to death in their meat locker, inspiring a
desperate Svend to turn the corpse's thigh into fillets he promptly
dubs "chickie-wickies." These cutlets catch on with the locals, natch,
and the desire to stay popular transforms Svend into a serial killer,
with Bjarne acting as his reluctant but too-stuporous-to-resist
accomplice.
***½/**** Image A Sound B Extras A+ starring Leslie Banks, Edna Best, Peter Lorre, Nova Pilbeam screenplay by Charles Bennett, D.B. Wyndham-Lewis, Edwin Greenwood and A.R. Rawlinson directed by Alfred Hitchcock
click any image to enlarge
by Walter Chaw The first fascination of Alfred Hitchcock's
original The Man Who Knew Too Much is that when a dashing foreign agent
(Pierre Fresnay) is shot just minutes into the film, it's Jill (Edna Best), the wife in the heroic central couple, who's privy to his last words.
They're dancing together in the middle of a ballroom that feels like a glass
cage (naturally) when the dastardly deed is done, a married English woman on
holiday with husband Bob (Leslie Banks) and daughter Betty (Nova Pilbeam), who look on approvingly. When Hitchcock remakes this movie 22 years later with Doris Day
and Jimmy Stewart, he has Ugly American Jimmy (the one privy to the dying man's
last words) drug his hysterical wife in the first of many instances of
Hitchcock undermining Stewart's status as everyone's favourite Yank. 1934's The Man
Who Knew too Much, like so much of Hitchcock's British output (this is the first of his six films for Gaumont), remains current for scholars looking for tropes,
images, sequences that prefigure his later work. The premature demise of what would have traditionally been the star of the picture (poor, dead Louis, also a
champion ski-jumper) prefigures Psycho, of course, while the glass cages recur
everywhere from Young and Innocent (which likewise features the musical plot
point of this film) to Notorious to Hitch's collaborations with Tippi
Hedren. A gaze at the 34-minute mark through wrought-iron gates predicts the
moment of discovery in Strangers on a Train, followed fast by a
deliciously uncomfortable dentist sequence I'm surprised Hitch never came back
to. Leave that, I suppose, to William Goldman and Marathon Man.
WELCOME TO MOOSEPORT ZERO STARS/**** starring Gene Hackman, Ray Romano, Marcia Gay Harden, Maura Tierney
screenplay by Tom Schulman
directed by Donald Petrie
EUROTRIP **½/**** starring Scott Mechlowicz, Jacob Pitts, Kristin Kreuk, Nial Iskhakov
screenplay by Alec Berg & David Mandel & Jeff Schaffer
directed by Jeff Schaffer
by Walter Chaw Has there ever been a prospective
leading man this self-immolating? Ray Romano on the big screen comes
off as some kind of etherized cross between Jerry Lewis and Woody
Allen: a nightmare auto-consumptive, allegedly comic offspring who,
left alone for long enough, will eventually swallow his own face. I
haven't felt this much aggressive antipathy towards a personality since
the heyday of George Raft. Romano's performances in Ice Age
and now Welcome to Mooseport deposit him square in
the David Caruso/Sean Hayes school of engaging television performers
whose charms are unique to the boob tube. They're small-screen
vampires, and 35mm is their sunlight.
El Otro lado de la cama **/**** starring Ernesto Alterio, Paz Vega, Guillermo Toledo, Natalia Verbeke screenplay by David Serrano directed by Emilio Martínez Lázaro
by Bill Chambers By the fifteen-minute mark of The
Other Side of the Bed (El Otro lado de la cama), actresses
Paz Vega and Natalia Verbeke have both doffed their clothes and bedded
down the same man, but the movie, a musical, is--or wants to be--as
sanitary as an Elvis vehicle. Director Emilio Martínez Lázaro labours
to make promiscuity innocent again, if ever there was such a thing, and
his sense of whimsy is quite seductive at first, since films about the
self-interested are so often as shallow or tunnel-visioned as their
protagonists (see: Thirteen). Lázaro risks, of
course, glossing over his characters' predicaments to the point of
condescension by leeching the film of any gloom, but something possibly
worse insinuates itself, a kind of apathy as it occurs that frothiness
is being used to evade subjecitivity altogether. The Other
Side of the Bed is colourfully sterile, if you will, an
ensemble piece in the noncommittal sense of the term, and if you find
yourself empathizing with anyone on screen, it's generally because
she's not wearing pants at the time.
**½/**** Image B Sound A- (DD)/A+ (DTS) Extras B starring Joaquin Phoenix, Reese Witherspoon, Ginnifer Goodwin, Robert
Patrick
screenplay by Gill Dennis & James Mangold
directed by James Mangold
by Walter Chaw I'm no longer certain
what kind of currency there is in producing a biography of an
iconoclast whose life is an exact simulacrum of every other
iconoclast's life. Here's an entirely respectable film about Johnny
Cash that begins in his childhood, proceeds into the Big Break, then
segues from there into the euphoria of fame; the drug abuse and the
groupies; the "Come to Jesus"; the rehabilitation; and the closing
obituary. (It's like Denis Leary said about Oliver Stone's The
Doors: "I'm drunk. I'm nobody. I'm drunk. I'm famous. I'm
drunk. I'm fucking dead.") Though it claims not to be a hagiography, Walk
the Line (like last year's Ray) featured
the freshly-dead legends as advisors up until their untimely demises, a
kind of personal involvement (and Cash's son John Carter is one of Walk
the Line's executive producers, just as Ray Robinson Charles
Jr. was for Ray) that precludes, methinks, most
controversy in the telling. That's fine, I guess, this new vogue for
these modern Gene Krupa Storys and Eddy
Duchin Storys and Glenn Miller Storys--I
mean, really, who does it hurt? But after praising the almost
supernatural channelling of very public figures by talented actors, the
only thing left is the drive home, a hot bath, dreamless sleep, and
maybe the impulse purchase of the soundtrack at Starbucks in a couple
of weeks.
Image A Sound
A- Extras B
"Pilot," "Quit Smoking,"
"Randy's Touchdown," "Faked My Own Death," "Teacher Earl," "Broke Joy's
Fancy Figurine," "Stole Beer from a Golfer," "Joy's Wedding," "Cost Dad
an Election," "White Lie Christmas," "Barn Burner," "O Karma, Where Art
Thou?," "Stole P's HD Cart,"
"Monkeys in Space," "Something to Live For," "The Professor," "Didn't
Pay Taxes," "Dad's Car," "Y2K," "Boogeyman," "Bounty Hunter," "Stole a
Badge," "BB," "Number One"
by Ian Pugh I don't know a whole lot about the Buddhist concept of
karma, but Earl Hickey knows even less, and I think that's the point.
As "My Name is Earl" begins, the titular petty criminal and leech on
society (Jason Lee) scratches a winning lotto ticket, whereupon he's
immediately struck by a car. While a doped-up Earl convalesces, his
cheating wife Joy (Jaime Pressly) seizes the opportunity to divorce
him. Flipping through the TV channels from his hospital bed, Earl lands
on Carson Daly, who attributes his own success to the most popular
understanding of karma: "Do good things and good things happen to you.
Do bad things and they come back to haunt you." In the show's first bit
of hilarious commentary--one that guides the question of "doing the
right thing" (which, in turn, dictates the series as a
whole)--celebrity culture gives birth to self-serving pop religion. If
Joe Sixpack is taking philosophical lessons from that guy whose primary
function was to count down from the number ten...Lord, where did we go
wrong?
ZERO STARS/**** starring Jamie Kennedy, Alan Cumming, Traylor Howard, Steven Wright screenplay by Lance Khazei directed by Lawrence Guterman
by Walter Chaw Towards the end of the uniquely awful Son of the Mask,
star Jamie Kennedy gets two fistfuls of his screen-wife Traylor
Howard's bosom (this after pummelling her head against the ground in a
scary depiction of domestic violence) and declares, in so many words,
"Eureka--so it is you, honey." It's a charming vignette that follows about an hour of fart, snot, golden shower, and Exorcist
jokes, each trumping the last in level of inappropriateness until
finally the deadened synapses begin to register that with sets like
"Edge City" and "Fringe City", the brain trust behind this abortion
might actually have had something subversive in mind. A shame, then,
that they've confused "edge" and "fringe" elements with puerile
scatology and institutional dehumanization, intercut with baby and
animal reaction shots and a marginal and failed television comedian
(playing a marginal and failed television animator) mugging in an
astoundingly lifeless approximation of "manic." For a film that might
want to be taken as "edgy," in other words, Son of the Mask caters to the absolute lowest and commonest of the lowest common denominators.
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