WARGAMES
***½/**** Image B Sound C Extras A starring Matthew Broderick, Dabney Coleman, John Wood, Ally Sheedy
screenplay by Lawrence Lasker & Walter F. Parkes
directed by John Badham SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER
****/****
DVD - Image B Sound B+ Extras C
BD - Image A Sound A Extras B- starring John Travolta, Karen Gorney, Barry Miller, Joseph Cali
screenplay by Norman Wexler
directed by John Badham STAYING ALIVE
ZERO STARS/**** Image C+ Sound B+ starring John Travolta, Cynthia Rhodes, Finola Hughes, Steve Inwood
screenplay by Sylvester Stallone and Norman Wexler
directed by Sylvester Stallone
by Walter Chaw I hadn't realized until I watched the 25th
Anniversary Edition DVD of it how intimately WarGames
is embedded in my psyche. I saw it in the theatre as a ten-year-old in
1983 and, for the rest of that decade (the prime of my excited
filmgoing experience), I didn't know that movies were ever different.
The first time, in fact, that I recognized that movies were human
was the first time they revealed themselves as something that could
fail to inspire any kind of response at all--and I wonder if that
initial moment of disappointment had more to do with the development of
my cynicism than any one picture's deficiency. Film is a progressive
addiction, says one theory: the more sophisticated you get as a viewer,
the harder it is to find the fix. WarGames
presented me with the idea of eroticism through mild scatological
exhibitionism. It had a young man in his room, alone with a young
woman, excusing himself to urinate in the next room--an act unthinkable
to me as a ten-year-old, and holding with it the thrill of taboo. The
next time they meet, the world starts to explode and, better yet, the
girl traps the boy between her legs when he tries to edge by.
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.
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.
*/**** starring Hugh Jackman, Russell Crowe, Anne Hathaway, Sacha Baron Cohen screenplay by William Nicholson, Alain Boublil, Claude-Michel Schönberg, Herbert Kretzmer, based on Boublil & Schönberg's stage play and the novel by Victor Hugo directed by Tom Hooper
by Walter Chaw The title refers to the audience; imagine
director Tom Hooper as James Cagney in The Public Enemy, and you're Mae
Clarke getting the grapefruit shoved in your face. Yes, Hooper's glacial,
note-for-note screen adaptation of Schönberg & Boublil's smash musical Les Misérables is
157 minutes of extreme close-up/wide-angle theatre threatening, at every
moment, to slide completely off the screen, given the accidental-auteur's
propensity to ignore half the frame. It's ugly in the way that only films driven
by fanatical vision, unfettered by checks, and galvanized by awards and money
can be ugly--so much time is spent horning in up Hugh Jackman's nose that I
spent the first day or so of it thinking I was watching a musical about
spelunking. It's a picture that doesn't respect your personal space: I've never more wanted to mace a movie than this, the umpteenth adaptation of Victor Hugo's
epic but the first of the Broadway phenomenon that pretty much defined the
best way to get into a high-school girl's good graces in the 1980s. After this
ordeal, I'd offer that still the best way this musical's ever appeared on film was its iconic poster making a cameo on Patrick Bateman's bathroom wall in American
Psycho.
ZERO STARS/**** Image B- Sound B
starring John Goodman, Ethan Suplee, Delta Burke, Chris Kattan
written by Larry Wilson and Tom Martin, based on the book by Phyllis McGinley
directed by Ron Underwood
by Ian Pugh I'm not really sure how anyone could consider Santa Claus the cure for December commercialism in this day and age, but it appears to be a popular sentiment right now. Before I knew that the network-television abortion The Year Without a Santa Claus existed, I suffered through The Santa Clause 3: The Escape Clause, a film that carries the same awful message in a way that's worth mentioning. Tricked by Martin Short's Jack Frost into relinquishing the job of Santa Claus to him, Tim Allen's Scott Calvin returns to the North Pole to discover that Christmas has become "Frostmas," an overwrought celebration of capitalism with all the child-screaming and toy-grabbing that implies. With Jack-Santa having literally taken the "Christ" out of Christmas, Tim Allen strangely becomes a surrogate Jesus figure attempting to reclaim his holiday from the money-grubbing fat man of false jolliness, who of course represents the holiday season as we know it in reality. The Santa Clause 3 essentially amounts to an episode of Allen's sitcom "Home Improvement", which is to say not only that it's terrible, but also that its attempt at a metaphor is crude and obvious--come on, Santa Claus saving Christmas from himself? In retrospect, though, I have to admit that its joyfully malevolent predisposition to be such a balls-out hypocrite is a real head-scratcher worthy of further dissection.
**/**** DVD - Image A Sound A- Extras C BD - Image A Sound A Extras C screenplay by Robert Zemeckis & William Broyles Jr., based on the book by Chris Van Allsburg
directed by Robert Zemeckis
by Walter Chaw Robert Zemeckis's The Polar Express seems to be the culmination of a lot of his weird obsessions: his celebration of middle-class Aryan heroes; his tendency towards the tense and anxious; his love of casting an actor in multiple roles; Tom Hanks; Eddie Deezen; and that subtle quality of nightmare that infects even the most innocuous of his movies. (Zemeckis produces horror films in his spare time under the "Dark Castle" imprint; I wonder if he'll ever, What Lies Beneath notwithstanding, just cut the bushwah and make a straight shocker.) When Christopher Lloyd's Nazi-esque Judge Doom from Zemeckis's Who Framed Roger Rabbit "dips" an adorable animated shoe into a corrosive sludge, Zemeckis foreshadows the engine that drives all of The Polar Express. It's infernal entertainment and comparisons to Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will are unavoidable (particularly in a disturbing rally scene), but it's hard to know how much of that intense martial creepiness is intended as satire, and how much of it is just what lies beneath.
THE HOBBIT
**/**** Image B- Sound C
screenplay by Romeo Muller,
based on the novel by J.R.R. Tolkien
directed by Jules Bass & Arthur Rankin Jr.
THE RETURN OF THE KING
**½/**** Image B- Sound C
screenplay by Romeo Muller,
based on the novel by J.R.R. Tolkien
directed by Jules Bass & Arthur Rankin Jr.
by Walter Chaw There are a couple of ways to tackle screen adaptations of J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy and its prequel, The Hobbit. One is to do as Ralph Bakshi did with his 1978 animation The Lord of the Rings and present a sexualized and disturbing vision of Middle Earth; the other is to make a film for children that omits the more troubling elements of Tolkien (the racism, homoeroticism, religiosity), as with Jules Bass and Arthur Rankin Jr.'s two feature-length television specials: The Hobbit (1978) and The Return of the King (1979).
J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings **½/**** DVD - Image C Sound C- BD - Image C+ Sound B- Extras C+ screenplay by Chris Conkling and Peter S. Beagle, based on The Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers by J.R.R. Tolkien directed by Ralph Bakshi
by Walter Chaw An adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien's "Rings" books that began with The Fellowship of the Ring and ended when the money ran out in the middle of The Two Towers, Ralph Bakshi's 1978 animated feature The Lord of the Rings is unintentionally disturbing, occasionally brilliant, and fatally uneven. The film is faithful to the main movements of Tolkien's novels but told in the kind of narrative shorthand that favours truncation over summary. Its rotoscoping of actors combines uneasily with traditional modes of animation: they mix into an abstract soup of contradictory images that destroys our suspension of disbelief.
**/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras C starring Kermit the Frog, Miss Piggy, The Great Gonzo, Michael Caine screenplay by Jerry Juhl, based on the novel by Charles Dickens directed by Brian Henson
by Bill Chambers It's all but inevitable that the Muppets would
take on Charles Dickens's venerable plug-and-play app A Christmas Carol at some point. More
surprisingly, Michael Caine had not only not played Ebenezer Scrooge prior to The
Muppet Christmas Carol (the role is like Hamlet for English actors who've
plateaued), he had never before shared a stage with the Muppets, either. This
despite his being, in the '70s and '80s, the exact calibre of star the Muppets pursued for cameos, and ubiquitous besides. He is, to
my taste, not a harsh-enough Scrooge--there's an irrepressible compassion there
when Bob Cratchit (Kermit the Frog) asks him for Christmas Day off. And The
Muppet Christmas Carol frankly surrenders too much of the spotlight to him: If this were my first Muppet movie, I'd feel especially double-crossed during
his song number with Meredith Braun, who is decidedly not made of felt. (Former
FFC contributor Ian Pugh tells me he "always, always, ALWAYS" used to
fast-forward this part as a kid.) It's almost cheating, to finally do
the Muppet version of this tale and put an interloper in the lead, when the
whole point of adapting it to a pre-existing framework is to match up the archetypes
and balance that against audience expectations. It is, effectively, like getting
to use characters as actors by casting them as different characters. This is
also why Bill Murray works so well in Scrooged, because Scrooge pings
off Murray's crabby, misanthropic '80s persona.
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