*/**** 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/**** starring Russell Crowe, Ben Affleck, Rachel McAdams, Helen Mirren screenplay by Matthew Michael Carnahan and Tony Gilroy and Billy Ray,
based on the BBC television series created by Paul Abbott directed by Kevin Macdonald
by Ian Pugh If
it were smart, Kevin Macdonald's State of Play
would stick to lamenting the ignominious death of newsprint at the
hands of Internet sensationalism and all that that implies. As a
veteran reporter and a U.S. Congressman--college roommates once known
as rabblerousing muckrakers in their respective fields--turn to each
other when their worlds collapse, you'd think that maybe the film had
in mind a meditation on the dissolution of the Old Boys' clubs. Done in
by our demystifying familiarity with the subjects under scrutiny (cops
and politicians) and an unwillingness to inject new blood into their
veins, right? Hell, even Watergate is brought up as
an incidental location, as Macdonald sends a sweeping camera across the
notorious hotel. You can't tell me there isn't something to be said
here about how a reliance on outmoded tactics and an obsession with
decades-old victories has only sped up their obsolescence.
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.
HOW TO LOSE FRIENDS & ALIENATE
PEOPLE
**/**** Image B- Sound A Extras B+ starring Simon Pegg, Kirsten Dunst, Danny Huston, Jeff Bridges screenplay
by Peter Straughan, based on the book by Toby Young
directed by Robert Weide BEVERLY HILLS CHIHUAHUA
½*/**** Image B Sound B+ Extras B- starring Piper Perabo, Manolo Cardona, Jamie Lee Curtis, José María
Yazpik
screenplay by Analisa LaBianco and Jeffrey Bushell
directed by Raja Gosnell
by Ian Pugh Tipping its hat to Godard through a poster on the wall of
disillusioned magazine editor Clayton Harding (Jeff Bridges), How
to Lose Friends & Alienate People (hereafter How
to Lose Friends) owes an enormous debt to the success of The
Devil Wears Prada, but it may be more accurate to describe it
as Contempt as told by Elizabethtown-era
Cameron Crowe. Which is to say, it argues that the only way to beat the
entertainment industry at its game of media-manipulation is to play by
the rules. The idealistic writer has to sell out, temporarily at least;
and when he loses the girl to some asshole "in the know," the audience
can rest assured that they'll be reunited soon enough. Simon Pegg
ostensibly plays boorish journo Sidney Young, a British transplant in
New York City come to shake the foundations of a thinly-veiled VANITY
FAIR clone only to endure several rude awakenings. Pegg really
plays the part of the wacky Kirsten Dunst pixie from Elizabethtown,
though, come from merry old England with a fistful of snark to teach
strait-laced Kirsten Dunst (here essaying the Orlando Bloom role) about
the fruitlessness of obsessing over ridiculous establishments beyond
your control. Well, that and the joys of Con Air.
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.
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/**** DVD - Image N/A Sound A Extras D+ BD - Image A Sound A Extras C- starring Kiefer Sutherland, Paula Patton,
Cameron Boyce, Erica Gluck
screenplay by Alexandre Aja & Grégory Levasseur
directed by Alexandre Aja
by Ian Pugh You have to hand it to Alexandre Aja: Although he applies
his marginal talent to different ends from within his genre of choice,
he remains fairly consistent in his psychotic bursts of rage and
complete obliviousness to the same. Whether he's making awful, sadistic
horror flicks that pretend to be about nothing (his anti-lesbian screed
High Tension) or--somehow worse--awful, sadistic horror flicks that pretend to be about something (his remake of The Hills Have Eyes and now Mirrors),
his targets are clear. In his eyes, women and rural folk are by turns
cowardly, evil, and idiotic, deserving of nothing but a horrific death.
How anyone could lump his brand of bloodthirsty hatred in with
Tarantino or Argento--both real artists who have grappled with their
own desires and talents in the context of fiction and reality--is,
frankly, beyond me. Hell, even Eli Roth, for all his puerile
masturbation and inexplicable worship of the nasty Cannibal Holocaust,
has questioned his own methods on occasion. When Aja rips off Amy
Smart's mandible just seconds after she steps into a bathtub in Mirrors,
there's no thrill, no shock, no sense of accountability--only the
niggling, terrifying conjecture that this man would go out and hurt
someone given half the chance.
I'm going to call 2008 a "down" year, but not because there were fewer masterpieces produced--only because the theme that resonated for me the most was this sense of a cycle completing. If it's true that every generation flatters itself as the last one, it's equally true that every decade of film nears its completion with its full measure of anticipation/regret (liebestraum as zeitgeist, no?) in its eighth, sometimes ninth, year. Even films that on the surface seem filled with the fruit of human ambition and desire--like James Marsh's ebullient Man on Wire, in which the World Trade Center appears as the phantom lover of highwire artist Philippe Petit--take place, after all, at the ground zero of this epoch. What's dying throughout 2006 and 2007, all this sussing through father issues and the cult of masculinity and love and the courage of children, is dead now. It's not nihilism anymore, it's pragmatism. The dream is over, the insect is awake.
The last year of any decade usually a watershed year, we come to the end of 2009 with a bounty of riches. A year that just a couple of months ago I feared wouldn't yield ten films from which to choose has, through a flurry of screeners and late-season additions, convinced me of its cinematic legitimacy. Find in the top ten three war films, five films about the state and politics of the modern family, one about a poet, and one about a cop. Discover that each of the first ten has a direct corollary in the next ten (suggesting that there's a good bit of synchronicity in 2009), and that although women directors remain a novelty, three penetrate the top ten for the first time in my decade of lists. Other threads include a continuation of the last two years' feelings of disconnection and entropy indulged, the notion that institutions of right are the ones perpetrating the bulk of atrocity, and investigations into the self that mainly fulfill Nietzsche's maxim of abysses looking into the lookers. It's a summary list, in a way, of the '00s.
January 1, 2010|The last year of the first ten or the first year of the next ten, 2010 finds the state of our motion pictures as an awkward, yearling thing, finding purchase in the aftermath of the fear and nihilism of the post-9/11 state in something as dark but perhaps now more purposeful than despairing. If the best films of the immediately-after are represented by stuff like No Country for Old Men and Synecdoche, NY, the best films of this liminal year are pilgrims in search of a (doomed) idea of perfection and the dreadful cost of its pursuit. Is that explanation in part for the rise of geek culture (The Social Network, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, It's Kind of a Funny Story, Kick-Ass), this gradual empowerment of the weaker position? While examinations of vengeance and solipsism continue to be tough themes to shake, they've begun taking the form of marginal uplift as opposed to mostly-undiluted nihilism.
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