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.
***/****
Image A- Sound A+ starring Natalie Portman, Jude Law, Julia Roberts, Clive Owen
screenplay by Patrick Marber, based on his play
directed by Mike Nichols
by Walter Chaw A girl takes off and cleans a guy's glasses on her
jacket as he's talking, then gently replaces them. She asks him what a
euphemism for her would be and he tells her: "Disarming." "That's not a
euphemism." But he assures her that it is. A girl takes a picture of a
guy, a guy talks to another guy through the anonymity of a computer
screen, a guy visits a girl performing at a peepshow and offers her a
large amount of money to tell him her real name. A guy meets a girl at
an aquarium where she'll go to steal pictures of strangers as they look
at the captive marine life in the blue glow of sharks circling. Mike
Nichols's Closer is beautifully directed from
Patrick Marber's adaptation of his own play, shot with an extraordinary
amount of verve and resonance around the loaded themes of ways of
seeing (glasses, cameras, correspondence) and their connection to
voyeurism, objectification and confinement, and forms of physical and
emotional abuse. A scene in the middle set at a photo exhibit
crystallizes every thread: people milling about, buffeted by giant
projected reproductions of 'disarmed' subjects, coming and going and
talking of Michelangelo. It's overwritten but clever, too, doing a
dangerous little dance along the edge of relevance and camp like a film
from the 1970s (Nichols's own Carnal Knowledge,
sure, but more like another film from 1971, Sam Peckinpah's Straw
Dogs), only really failing in one performance and a seeming
inability to follow through on its central punch. It's a courageous
mainstream picture, no question, though it's mainly courageous in
comparison to its contemporaries. Was a time when films like this and
more toothsome were the norm and not the semi-quailing exception.
DAN IN REAL
LIFE
*/**** Image A Sound B Extras D starring
Steve Carell, Juliette Binoche, Dane Cook, Dianne Wiest
screenplay by Pierce Gardner and Peter Hedges
directed by Peter Hedges
RACHEL GETTING MARRIED
**/**** Image A Sound A Extras C starring Anne Hathaway, Rosemarie DeWitt, Bill
Irwin, Debra Winger
screenplay by Jenny Lumet
directed by Jonathan Demme
by Walter Chaw The
Darwin chart of this breed of American indie, otherwise known as
unlikely shrines to The Celebration (or Festen,
if you prefer), follows in the United States with something like Margot
at the Wedding near the top as most-evolved down mid-way to Rachel
Getting Married and its histrionic Demme-tasse reduction,
down to ankle-deep--we're talking primordial muck--with Dan
in Real Life. That last one, from Pieces of April
perpetrator Peter Hedges, squanders an unusual amount of currency in
Steve Carell (at his melancholic zenith), pairing him with Juliette
Binoche in a bittersweet romantic imbroglio that absolutely does not
deserve the happy horseshit ending slathered on it to apologize for its
occasional poignancy. It's not that I enjoy being sad, it's that I
enjoy getting a condescending handjob even less. I'm willing to forgive
the bad slapstick of a group-aerobics session, the casting of Dane
Cook, and the set-up/knock-down mentality of it that in fairness mars
more honest films like Rachel Getting Married, too.
The picture begins in the title's "real life," only to sail away to a
privileged, impossible Rhode Island wonderland that may as well be the
setting of every Nicholas Sparks book ever written and to-be-written.
It's a movie that makes you feel good, like a barium enema, or Rolfing.
What I'm saying is that a lot of things make you feel good in a dumb,
animal way--not a lot of them are also art.
**/**** Image
B Sound A- Extras B starring Martin Lawrence, Tom Wilkinson, Marsha Thomason, Vincent Regan
screenplay by Darryl J. Quarles and Peter Gaulke & Gerry Swallow
directed by Gil Junger
by Walter Chaw Jamal Walker
(Martin Lawrence) is a groundskeeper at an all-black amusement park
who, just prior to falling in a stagnant moat, is given a dressing down
for being "selfish" and not community-minded enough. ("Community"
referring to the African-American populace of South Central Los
Angeles.) Sharp-eyed viewers should instantly recognize that Black
Knight will at some point metastasize from a farce to a
public service announcement. (Luckily, we're given a solid first act
and a few moments in the second before it does.) When Jamal goes into
the moat in pursuit of a golden medallion, he surfaces from a fetid
stew in a never-never land where the plain protagonist becomes the
keystone in a kingdom-wide intrigue.
ZERO STARS/**** starring Bruce Willis, Matthew Perry, Amanda Peet, Kevin Pollak screenplay by George Gallo directed by Howard Deutch
by Walter Chaw Oz (Matthew Perry, racing Ray
Romano for title of television personality least suited for the big
screen) is a dentist married to ex-moll Cynthia (Natasha Henstridge)
and ex-hitman Jimmy (Bruce Willis) is married to ex-dental hygienist
Jill (Amanda Peet). Oz is constantly mugging, falling down, running
into things, and making funny faces, which leads me to believe that Oz
might be afflicted by some toxic stew of epilepsy, Tourette's Syndrome,
and limited comic actor's disease--the last of which the sort of thing
that otherwise dull or homely children contract to get attention in
class. Through a devastatingly disinteresting sequence of convoluted
events, our whimsical quartet is menaced by Hungarian mobster Lazlo
Gogolak (Kevin Pollak, in his fourth decade of needing a bullet to the
head) and his dimwit son Strabo (Frank Collison)--resulting in a
shootout and a desperate series of speeches that don't do a thing to
explain how Jimmy pretending to be a housewife in a David Lee Roth wig
relates to stealing millions from the mob.
Image
A Sound A+ Extras B- S2:
"Nothing But the
Blood," "Keep This Party Going," "Scratches," "Shake and Fingerpop,"
"Never Let Me Go," "Hard-Hearted Hannah," "Release Me," "Timebomb," "I
Will Rise Up," "New World in My View," "Frenzy," "Beyond Here Lies
Nothin'"
S3:
"Bad
Blood," "Beautifully Broken," "It Hurts Me Too," "9 Crimes," "Trouble,"
"I Got a Right to Sing the Blues," "Hitting the Ground," "Night on the
Sun," "Everything Is Broken," "I Smell a Rat," "Fresh Blood," "Evil Is
Going On"
by
Walter Chaw "True
Blood" is pulp crap. Yet as Bryant
and Bill
have already so eloquently pointed
out, it's highly-addictive pulp crap--the sort of shallow,
handsomely-mounted titillation that fosters the craze that sprung
up around prime-time soaps like "Dynasty" and "Falcon
Crest". White-collar smut
that traffics in the currency of the age: once upon a time it was the
super-rich, now it's the supernatural. Plus ça change, plus
c'est la meme. It's certainly soapier than
showrunner/creator Alan Ball's previous pay-cable drama, "Six Feet
Under", but to its credit what "True Blood" does in returning sexuality--and gore, and (southern) Gothic trappings--to the
vampire mythos, it does
well. The shame of it is that it seems to be ashamed of itself and so
continually strives for relevance in aligning the plight of its
vampire underclass to gay rights. Bill said it first, but is the
appropriate
supernatural analogue to gays really vampires? Is it wise to suggest
that gays
present that same kind of sexual allure? The same kind of blood
contagion?
Doesn't that play into the Conservative storyline a bit too neatly?
At least
it's not "The Walking Dead".
by Bill Chambers Recently, my brother Derek
and I--a failed screenwriting team if ever there was one--took advantage of the new technological democracy and decided to make our own web cartoon, spun off from
a short story Derek wrote ("The Monster Strikes") about a closet
monster who goes on strike and becomes roommates with his intended victim. For
years we had scribbled ideas for a potential TV show based on the concept,
though our initial desire to satirize sitcom tropes changed (evolved?) over
time as we realized we wanted to get away from meta humour and do something
more organically stupid.
**½/**** starring Tim Allen, Omar Epps, Dennis Farina, Ben Foster screenplay by Robert Ramsey & Matthew Stone, based on the novel by Dave Barry directed by Barry Sonnenfeld
by Walter Chaw My opinion of Dave Barry is that
as an essayist, he's no P.J. O'Rourke, and as a novelist, he's no Carl
Hiaasen--anyone who agrees to have Harry Anderson play him on a weekly
sitcom is begging to have his work re-evaluated through that prism. And
yet Barry Sonnenfeld's Big Trouble, the
long-delayed (because of 9/11) adaptation of Barry's novel of the same
name, is, despite a slow opening featuring just too much of Tim Allen,
frenetic and often hilarious--facts likely obscured by an
understandable squeamishness in this climate towards mocking airline
security and the easy acquisition of weapons of mass destruction.
Image A- Sound A Extras B "Kate Winslet," "Ben Stiller," "Ross
Kemp," "Samuel L. Jackson," "Les Dennis," "Patrick Stewart"
by Ian Pugh The oft-invoked reason
as to why we indulge in "entertainment journalism" is because it
demystifies the culture of celebrity. Proof of star public outbursts
and make-up-free faces, in other words, forces them to "our" level of
humanity. At first glance, Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant's BBC
sitcom "Extras" feeds into that fascination through parody: Proposed as
unreachable titans via eponymous episode titles, the guest stars who
tower over "background artists" Andy Millman (Gervais) and Maggie
Jacobs (Ashley Jensen) are invariably revealed to be windbags and/or
perverts. It's possible to see this as an attempt to deter us from
rumour-mongering: Kate Winslet becomes a bitter Oscar bridesmaid ("You
are guaranteed an Oscar if you play a mental," she says upon seeing a
woman with cerebral palsy), for instance, and Ben Stiller--improbably
directing a film about the Yugoslav Wars--presents himself as precisely
the kind of loser he plays in the movies but with twice the ego.
RUNNING TIME
30 minutes/episode MPAA
Not Rated ASPECT
RATIO(S)
1.78:1 (16x9-enhanced) LANGUAGES English DD 2.0 (Stereo) CC
Yes SUBTITLES
English
French
Spanish REGION
1 DISC
TYPE
DVD-5 + DVD-9 STUDIO
HBO
And yet, although self-deprecating humour endears us to big names, it
also distances us from them--when oft-whispered secret shames and
claims of "I hear he's really an asshole" are realized for us in
fictional form, we're still left to wonder if we're witnessing truth.
Realizing this, "Extras" actually encourages us to become starstruck,
to lose focus, since it allows the series more room to blindside us
with its superb characterizations and eventually call us on our
superficiality. By the time we get to C-list game-show host Les Dennis,
here suffering from a breakdown (humorous in how self-consciously
pathetic it is), we understand that it shouldn't be all that sporting
to rag on celebrities.
A different sort of mystique shrouds film
and TV extras. Andy and Maggie are lost in the anonymity of their work
(indeed, so often does Maggie wear wigs on the job that it's something
of a shock to discover that her real hair is a frizzy blonde mop), and
they spend most of their time trying to capture someone's attention, be
it a romantic interest, a professional superior, or their
literal/figurative viewing audience. They succeed, of course, but often
in the worst possible way: a great majority of scenes end with one or
both of our heroes slowly exiting frame after committing some major
social gaffe, costing them a date or a job. Perhaps it is a reflection
of the type of embarrassment comedy that made Ricky Gervais a star with
"The Office", but in "Extras", the gaffe itself is somehow less
egregious than destroying the pretensions that surround life in
Hollywood. In short, the jig is up that the nameless ciphers who pass
us by on a daily basis, the window dressing on our lives, are human
beings. It's an idea that, when seriously contemplated, becomes a cold
shower on our self-centred illusions.
Gervais insists that "Extras" is more about
character development than it is any sort of indictment of the
entertainment industry, and the series certainly manages that aim with
its impossibly quick wit and effortlessly complex situations. That
said, it's impossible to not see Gervai battle for "The Office" in
Andy's struggle to produce his own work-a-day satire, "When the Whistle
Blows". The allegorical frustrations only mount once he finally gets
the script to the BBC--the deadpan misfortune in Andy's life doesn't
change in the least, and the big star (Patrick Stewart, obsessed with
"female nudity") still manages to cast a shadow over it all. In spite
of everything, each episode concludes with a return to relative
normalcy, the greatest successes or failures culminating in
undeterrable dreams that patiently await time in the spotlight. Cat
Steven "Tea for the Tillerman" accompanies the closing titles, which
represent their own form of wish fulfillment for the characters: While
"Andy Millman / Ricky Gervais" and "Maggie Jacobs / Ashley Jensen" are
proudly listed at the top, the supporting cast isn't always afforded
the same luxury. Andy's comically inept agent Darren Lamb (Merchant) is
always credited as "Agent," and Lamb's favourite charge, actor Shaun
Williamson, is rarely referred to as anything but "Barry," his
character from the soap opera "EastEnders". Gervais and Merchant
simultaneously tap into the optimism and cynicism that drive the
business: Perhaps the only way to succeed in this mad industry is to
surround oneself with the right amount of non-identity--an equation of
the roles actors play to the lives they live.
THE
DVD
"Extras: The Complete First Season" arrives on DVD in a two-disc set
courtesy of HBO that reshuffles the episode order as it appeared on the
native BBC/R2 release to reflect the sequence in which the series aired
in North America. The 1.78:1, 16x9-enhanced image is consistently sharp
if slightly washed-out, as is typical of British television; the DD 2.0
stereo audio is particularly robust, though, with musical interludes
coming through with uncommon strength. "Deleted Scenes" and "Outtakes"
are presented across both discs alongside corresponding episodes. Those
elisions that constitute the former, however funny, were pretty
obviously cut because they would've disrupted the flow of the script;
the latter, meanwhile, usually have Gervais ruining takes with his
boisterous hyena-laughter.
Find slightly more substantial bonus
features on Disc Two: "Finding Leo" (10 mins.) is a fascinating home
video shot by Merchant in which Gervais scrambles to locate the number
for Leonardo DiCaprio's agent after Jude Law cancels an appearance on
the show at the last minute (which probably explains the giant Alfie
poster in the parting shot of the season finale); and "Extras: The
Difficult Second Album" (21 mins.) is a breezy doc that has Gervais and
Merchant chronicling the bridge between "The Office" and "Extras" as
well as imparting a few anecdotes about working with celebrities...and
hilariously hawking "Office"-themed office supplies. An unintentionally
goofy promo for various HBO programs (wherein said shows are invaded by
their own titles in giant CGI form) and a commercial for "The Office:
The Complete Series One and Two" cue up on startup of the first platter. Originally published: April 3, 2007.
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