*/**** screenplay by Josh Klausner & Darren Lemke
directed by Mike Mitchell
by Ian Pugh Because Shrek the
Third tied things up pretty conclusively, what they're
probably going to tell you is that Shrek Forever After
(hereafter Shrek 4) is more of an epilogue than a
sequel. What they won't tell you is that this "epilogue," co-written by
the screenwriter of Date Night, is more of a toy
than a feature film. But your money's just as green as it ever was. Now
settled into a monotonous family life, Shrek (voice of Mike Myers)
strikes a deal with Rumpelstiltskin (Walt Dohrn) for the chance to live
one more day as a bachelor/terrifying ogre. Unfortunately, said deal
transports Shrek into an alternate reality in which he never rescued
Fiona (Cameron Diaz) from the dragon's lair, freeing Rumpelstiltskin to
conquer the kingdom of Far Far Away. And despite much talk of being
grateful for what you have, that's all there is to it, really. Sure,
it's better than Shrek the Third, but lots of
things are better than Shrek the Third--and even
then, Shrek 4 is only an improvement in the sense
that it isn't obsessed with scatological humour...and that it doesn't
leave an especially terrible aftertaste. It doesn't leave the slightest
impression at all, in fact. It's not merely a product, it wants
you to see it as a product: It's a Wonderful Life
as told by Mr. Potter. Oh, and it's in 3-D. I mean, of course
it is.
**½/****
Image A Sound A- Extras B- starring
Arnold Schwarzenegger, Forest Whitaker, Johnny Knoxville, Rodrigo
Santoro screenplay
by Andrew Knauer directed
by Kim Jee-woon
by
Walter Chaw I think, and I don't say this lightly, that
South Korean filmmaker Kim Jee-woon is a genius. His landmark A
Tale of Two
Sisters is lush and at times unbearably frightening; his A
Bittersweet
Life is an elegiac crime saga with the best, most
innovative knife-fight in
a movie until the naked scuffle in Eastern Promises;
his The
Good, the Bad, the Weird (which his latest most resembles)
is a dizzy,
hilarious take on the Spaghetti Western; and his I Saw the
Devil is the
slickest, and stickiest, exploitation serial-killer/torture flick I've
ever
seen. He's his country's Takashi Miike, its Quentin Tarantino. And his
American-made, English-language debut, unceremoniously dumped in the
middle of
the deadly first quarter of 2013, is, I guess you could say, at least
better
than John Woo's Hollywood baptism, Hard Target.
The tragedy of it all is
that the picture will be more ballyhooed not for the arrival of Kim on
our
shores, but for the return to the action genre of one Arnold
Schwarzenegger (Expendables
cameos notwithstanding), here cast as a soft-around-the-middle aging
lawman in the Stallone-in-Copland mold who stands
up against a cabal of
snarling baddies in defense of the AARP and the NRA in one fell,
sometimes
ironic, swoop. I've never not liked a Kim film, but he's testing me.
Ultimately, it's impossible to completely hate a movie that references,
in addition to all the pictures Schwarzenegger's made, one--Paul
Verhoeven's
forever-gestating Crusades epic--he never got to.
*½/****Image
B- Sound
C+
Extras A starring
Louise Lasser, Paul L. Smith, Brion James, Reed Birney screenplay
by Ethan Coen & Joel Coen & Sam Raimi directed
by Sam Raimi
by
Walter Chaw Sam Raimi's sophomore picture Crimewave
is a nightmare, a mess, a calamity of rare scope but also one possessed
of a
singular, maybe misguided but definitely committed, vision. It wants
very badly to
be a
feature-length Three Stooges sketch or Warner Bros.
cartoon (one of
the early Tex Averys), and so the thing it most resembles is
Joe Dante's segment of The Twilight Zone: The Movie, stretched to
a truly sadistic length (a deceptively scant-sounding 83 minutes) and
thrown together
by
misadventure, studio interference, and a lot of talented people who
didn't know
what they didn't know. It's so consistently and dedicatedly cross-eyed
badger
spit, in fact, that it eventually takes on the surreality of a Max
Ernst
gallery, or an acid trip in a travelling funhouse. It's deeply unpleasant, even as fans of Raimi and the Coen Brothers (who co-wrote
the
screenplay with Raimi) busily trainspot all the auteur
signatures in double
time. What Crimewave represents is that peculiar
artifact of a film that
should have ended careers instead getting "lost" by a
bumfuddled, betrayed studio for long enough to allow Evil
Dead II and
Blood Simple the opportunity to cement reputations
before this one could
bury them.
**½/**** starring Michael Brodie, Teresa Lynn, Raymond Delgado, Jonathan Ortiz screenplay by Michel Gondry, Paul Proch, Jeff Grimshaw directed by Michel Gondry
by Angelo MureddaThe We and the I opens with a throwback, an image that wouldn't be out of place in
Michel Gondry's distinctive music videos from the late-1990s, which were
themselves full of backward glances to the more rough-hewn early days of MTV
and old-school hip hop. Over the credits, a boombox modified into a miniature
bus rolls along the streets of the Bronx pulsing out Young MC's "Bust A
Move," until it's crushed by what's ostensibly the real thing, a city bus
packed with urban teens who make up Gondry's boisterous, gossiping, and
privately wounded nonprofessional cast. That's an interesting start, insofar as
it suggests that Gondry's obsession with whimsical props tinged with nostalgia
are about to be traded in for something more authentic, even as it implies a
bit cheekily that the "real" bus, taking a bunch of high-schoolers
home on the last day of school, is itself a roaming set on which to stage
semi-scripted exchanges between proper teens doubling as actors
and artistic partners.
***½/****
Image B+Sound
B+
Extras B- starring
Charles Chaplin, Martha Raye, Marilyn Nash, Isobel Elsom screenplay
by Charles Chaplin, based on an idea by Orson Welles directed
by Charles Chaplin
click any image to
enlarge
by
Bryant Frazer Charles Chaplin augmented his trademark mix
of physical comedy, sweetness, and lefty politics with a dose of
suspense
(borrowed, probably, from Hitchcock) and a sardonic worldview
(informed, maybe,
by film noir) in the playful, funny, but
ultimately downbeat Monsieur
Verdoux. In a scenario that originated with Orson Welles,
who receives an
"idea" credit, Henri Verdoux is a serial killer based on Henri
Landru, a French Bluebeard who seduced, married, and then murdered a
string of
Parisian women in order to liberate their assets. Chaplin plays Verdoux
as a
charming fiend whose demeanour incorporates the barest echo of the
Little
Tramp, but whose murderous M.O. recalled the director's own reputation
as a
womanizer.
**/**** starring Mark Wahlberg, Dwayne Johnson, Anthony Mackie, Ed Harris screenplay by Christopher Markus & Stephen McFeely, based on the articles by Pete Collins directed by Michael Bay
by Angelo Muredda A man does a stomach crunch in mid-air,
suspended off the armpit of a muscleman logo that's spray-painted onto the side
of a gym. Is there a more quintessential Michael Bay image than the opening
shot of Pain
& Gain? The only serious contender comes later on,
in a slow-motion tableau of the same bro, Mark Wahlberg's personal
trainer-cum-murderer Danny Lugo, sailing over the windshield of an SUV,
propelled by the debris from a flying fruit stand. When your story doesn't have
any Autobots, I guess you just have to improvise with your surroundings to get
all your primary colours in. To say that the radioactive pop palette and
abs-fetishism is familiar is an understatement, but it's the thematic material
and belaboured telling of it that makes Pain & Gain a perfect storm of Bay. Temporarily
freed from the restraints of a battling-robot franchise, he's allowed to make
his most purely ideological statement yet in the form of a (fact-based) story
about three idiots pursuing their warped vision of the Horatio Alger myth--which happily coincidences with Bay's.
ZERO STARS/**** Image A Sound B+ Extras B- starring Rob Schneider, Rachel McAdams, Anna Faris,
Andrew Keegan
screenplay by Tom Brady & Rob Schneider
directed by Tom Brady
by Walter Chaw What to think of a
variation on Teen Wolf wherein the victim of the
lycanthropic puberty metaphor is a young girl who turns into Rob
Schneider? What to make of a film that wrests its central conceit of
enchanted jewellery from the long-putrefied grasp of Mannequin
2? And what to make of a film released in the year 2002 that
is this misogynistic, homophobic, racist, and cruel to the obese?
Rather than postulate that our culture has regressed to the hale
cultural morass of the mid-1980s, it's doubtless more fruitful to
examine the ways in which film is becoming as self-reflexive,
meta-critical, and free of irony as television.
ZERO STARS/**** starring Michael Douglas, Kirk Douglas, Cameron Douglas, Diana Douglas screenplay by Jesse Wigutow directed by Fred Schepisi
by Walter Chaw Appalling at its best, Fred
Schepisi's It Runs in the Family is a congenital
disaster best described as an interminable episode of "Old People Say
the Darndest Things". Between this and Last Orders,
Aussie director Schepisi seems to desire cornering the market on gravid
meditations on decrepitude and death. He finds himself here a far cry
from his Seventies output (The Devil's Playground, The
Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith), which, much like countryman
Bruce Beresford's early work, announced an important filmmaker who has,
in the intervening years, become a hired hand and a coin of
considerably devalued worth. It Runs in the Family
is so relentlessly mawkish that it does give insight into the state of
mind that allows condescension to become comfortable status quo by
habitually marginalizing the elderly and demented as adorable
dispensers of quaint homilies and spunky vulgarity.
CURB YOUR ENTHUSIASM...: Image A Sound A "The Car
Salesman,"
"Thor," "Trick or Treat," "The Shrimp Incident," "The Thong," "The
Acupuncturist," "The Doll," "Shaq," "The Baptism," "The Massage" THE ANNA NICOLE SHOW...: Image A Sound A Extras D "House
Hunting," "The Introduction of Bobby Trendy," "The Eating Contest,"
"The Dentist," "Las Vegas, Pt. I," "Las Vegas, Pt. II," "Pet Psychic,"
"Cousin Shelly," "The Driving Test," "NYC Publicity Tour," "Paintball,"
"Halloween Party," "The Date"
by Walter Chaw The way that white people behave badly runs the social gamut from being
impolitic to being uncouth--it can be calculated or just the product of
bad breeding, but find in a pair of television series that would at
first glance seem miles apart dual examples of Caucasians running amuck
in their natural upper-class habitat. Larry David's HBO series "Curb
Your Enthusiasm" has won critical hosannas and the "Seinfeld"
demographic, while Anna Nicole Smith's "The Anna Nicole Show" has been
heralded as the dawn of the apocalypse. Both, however, are vignette sitcoms based on slightly fictionalized versions of
semi-celebrities positioned as the ass in various Byzantine and
embarrassing situations. While David's sense of humour is
self-conscious, his "Curb Your Enthusiasm" an example of the self-aware
media hybrid, it would be a terrible mistake to presume that Smith is
as stupid as, say, Jessica Simpson, and "The Anna Nicole Show" is so
carefully calculated that with a little tweaking it could be as
post-modern and oppressively-scripted as "Law & Order: Courtney
Love Unit".
**/**** starring Jennifer Garner, Mark Ruffalo, Judy Greer, Christa B. Allen screenplay by Cathy Yuspa & Josh Goldsmith and Niels Mueller directed by Gary Winick
by Walter Chaw Threatening at any moment to
veer off the populist tracks and become something legendarily,
unpleasantly subversive, the middling 13 Going on 30
is really little more than a collection of "I Love the '80s" vignettes
presided over by Jennifer Garner's peculiar, mannish mien. It's also
peculiar that the genre of body-swapping/quick-aging jibber-jabber is
making a resurgence now a couple of decades after the last spate (18
Again, Vice Versa, Big),
and peculiar again that with Mark Waters's Freaky Friday and
Gary Winick's 13 Going on 30, the genre is being
re-imagined through the prism of young women. (Perhaps not so strange
when you consider that the key demographic slavered over by studio
wonks has shifted from the pre-adolescent boys of the mid-'80s to post-Titanic
pre-adolescent girls.) It's clear that this film is meant to satisfy
some sort of wish-fulfillment fantasy for 13-year-old members of the
babysitters' club, but with Eighties references that can only be
amusing to people who've passed the third-decade mark, it manages
mostly to be a wish-fulfillment fantasy for thirtysomething men who
want emotionally immature, sexually malleable women who happen to
resemble television starlets.
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