*/****
Image B
Sound B- starring Tom
Hanks, Bruce Willis, Melanie Griffith, Morgan Freeman screenplay
by Michael Cristofer, based on the novel by Tom Wolfe directed
by Brian De Palma
by
Walter Chaw Based on Tom Wolfe's
instantly-legendary (and instantly-dated, truth be known) novel
about the
upper crust of Manhattan society in the '80s, Brian De Palma's The
Bonfire
of the Vanities is a disaster mitigated now and again by the
odd extraordinary shot--exhibit A in what happens when too much
money is spent
in the creation of too sure a thing. The production was
besieged by
distraction and calamity, all of it captured in Julie Salamon's The Devil's
Candy in what, after watching the movie again for the
first time since its
release, seems too measured a hatchet job. After
all, Salamon's book is
really just proof of what's evidenced on screen and observed by
contemporary audiences: Decisions were made to pander to the lowest
common
denominator, and say what you will about the lowest common denominator,
but it
often knows when it's being condescended to. More, it confirms that
Bruce Willis
was
outmatched by the demands of the material; that Tom Hanks was
disengaged; that
Melanie Griffith was badly miscast; and that Morgan Freeman was
inserted as
a sop
to an African-American community that not only would have to endure
multiple
comic-effect uses of the word "nigger" during the course of the film,
but would
likely never go see it in the first place. The great irony of pandering
to the
lowest common denominator in an adaptation of an arch Tom Wolfe
novel, is...well, you finish it. Frankly, when you can't get
Peter Travers
to like
it, you're in seriously deep shit.
*½/**** Image
A Sound A- Extras C starring Rebecca Romijn-Stamos, Antonio Banderas, Peter Coyote, Eriq
Ebouaney
written and directed by Brian De Palma
by Walter Chaw The first script written solely by Brian De Palma since
his 1992 film Raising Cain, Femme Fatale,
like that film, rips off the famous murderer-reveal of Dario Argento's Tenebre.
Come to think of it, the picture is essentially a rehash in one way or
another of every film De Palma's ever written
(the voyeurism and body switch of Body Double, the
phallic film equipment of Blow Out, the steamy
stall-sex of Dressed to Kill, the evil twin thing
and split-screen of Sisters, the voyeurism again of
Hi, Mom!, and so on)--and
because De Palma's best films and screenplays were iterations of
Hitchcock (and sometimes Argento, the Italian Hitchcock), Femme
Fatale is as stale and detached as the third-generation copy
that it is.
**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.
*/**** Image
A- Sound B+ Extras B starring Lane Carroll, W.G. McMillan, Harold Wayne Jones, Lloyd Hollar
screenplay by Paul McCollough & George A. Romero
directed by George A. Romero
by Walter Chaw It's
tough for a dyed-in-the-wool George Romero apologist to observe that a
film of Romero's in good repute is an amateurish, exploitative piece of
shit that banks heavily on the afterglow of his seminal Night
of the Living Dead. The Crazies, his
third movie in the wake of that masterpiece, finds itself ripping off
the last half-hour of Don Siegel's Invasion of the Body
Snatchers--in lurid colour with a cast of atrocious actors in
high-'70s, porn-ugly wardrobe and appearance--in its tale of how you
shouldn't trust anyone over 30, so keep on truckin', man, steal this
book, and if it feels good, do it. Its tragedy is airless and
ineffectual, played as it is as this instantly (and hopelessly) dated
relic of the flower-power generation that already had its epitaph with
Dennis Hopper's Easy Rider four years prior. While
its philosophy is tired and childish (a product of reading HIGH TIMES rather than an actual newspaper), it's also dreadfully
paced, with the lion's share of time given over to exhausted harangues
about how the government doesn't really care about the little guy and
how absolute power corrupts absolutely. Never mind the greater good
here, as The Crazies is so fervently
incomprehensible in its hippie politic that the threat of real
contamination for the rest of the country/world should one of our
erstwhile heroes escape into the general population forces the audience
to ally its sympathies with the jack-booted thugs. Besides, there's
already a problem of identification in the film when its ostensible
villains, dressed in contamination suits to save on the extras budget,
are clearly just underpaid civil servants who most definitely do not
deserve to be slaughtered by the yokel populace--crazy or not.
**/**** starring John Travolta, Uma Thurman, Vince Vaughn, Cedric the Entertainer screenplay by Peter Steinfeld, based on the novel by Elmore Leonard directed by F. Gary Gray
by Walter Chaw At some point you decide that you're either
going to play pool with Be Cool or you're not.
You're going to have to decide whether Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson's
mincing caricature of a gay man is actually a self-parody of his own
pumped-up, homoerotic image (see also Vin Diesel's
simultaneously-opening Mr. Mom ape, The
Pacifier), and whether this studied unkindness towards black
people is actually only a satire of the bling-bling gangster culture
that has all but defined rap music and young urban culture for the
wider mainstream white audience. If you're resolved that Be
Cool is meta-fiction that's more sociologically self-aware
than other masturbatory cameo hustlers like Ocean's Twelve
(and it might be), then it is indeed sort of liberating to give up and
laugh along with the horde. (What could be funnier, really, than The
Rock limping his wrist and doing a dialogue, solo, from cheerleading
classic Bring It On?) But there's this lingering,
disturbing thought I can't quite shake that Be Cool
is only being a smartass part of the time--and maybe being a smug,
insufferable prig all of the time.
**½/**** starring Branko Djuric, Rene Bitorajac, Filip Sovagovic, Georges Siatidis
written and directed by Danis Tanovic
by
Walter Chaw Chiki (Branko Djuric) is one of two surviving members of a
front-line relief party that was decimated after their guide got them
lost in a fog. (From the first, the visual metaphors fly as thick as
pea soup.) His companion Cera (Filip Sovagovic), thought dead by the
enemy, has been placed on a pressure-sensitive mine; his antagonist, Nino (Rene Bitorajac), has been disarmed and wounded. The three of them
(four if you consider the mine a character) decry their causes while
overlooking their similarities. No Man's Land is at its best
when it tantalizes with the possibility for resolution--and at its
worst when it explodes the claustrophobia of its first hour to include
the UN, the press, and a newsreel montage lending background to a
conflict the movie's only ostensibly about in the first place.
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.
La règle du
jeu
****/**** Image A Sound A Extras A+ starring Nora Grégor, Marcel Dalio, Mila
Parély, Roland Toutain
screenplay by Jean Renoir and Carl Koch
directed by Jean Renoir
by Jefferson
Robbins One
political cue most firmly plants Jean Renoir's masterwork in pre-World
War II France, and it doesn't come amidst the posturing of the elegant
rich at La Colinière country manor. Rather, it's in the kitchen, where
the domestic staff breaks bread and gossips about the master of the
house, the Marquis Robert De La Chesnaye (Marcel Dalio), outed by the
help as a "yid" whose family made good with money and a title. The
gossipers turn for confirmation to the huntsman who's just materialized
on the stairs, and the combination of words is chilling: "Isn't that
right, Schumacher?" The italics are mine, and
despite the fierce Teutonic consonants of his name, the marquis's game
warden (Gaston Modot) is Alsatian. He remains metaphorically sticky,
though, since his home state was variously French or German for 200
years, and his dress and cap bespeak armed authority. He's rough and
field-hardened, arguably ignorant, and looked down upon by his fellow
servants, who see him as a thing apart from their world. Cuckolded and
exiled from his wife, the housemaid Lisette (Paulette Dubost), he's
also the most prone to physical violence as he seeks to control her and
eliminate all rivalry. On the matter of La Chesnaye's Jewishness,
Schumacher demurs: "I don't know what you're talking about." But the
point is made, the knife already twisted.
**/**** Image
B Sound B starring Takeshi Kitano, Kotomi Kyono, Kayoko Kishimoto, Ren Osugi
written and directed by Takeshi Kitano
by Walter Chaw
Midway between Fellini's 8½ and Bob Fosse's All
That Jazz is Japanese auteur Takeshi Kitano's Takeshis',
a film that indicates with its possessive title that it belongs to both
the director (Takeshi Kitano) and star ("Beat" Takeshi); acknowledging
that they're one and the same (Kitano is billed as the former when he
directs, the latter when he performs), they each have a function and
persona unique unto themselves. The burden of that division, which
Takeshi has taken on since midway through Violent Cop,
is illustrated in the picture as a series of fractures that meld
reality with televisual reality and filmic reality--nothing so
ostentatious as Sven Nykvist and Ingmar Bergman reflected in a mirror
in Persona, but going so far as to have "Beat"
Takeshi, dressed as a clown, refer to Takeshi Kitano as "that asshole."
The omniscience of the director is referred to often in the text as
casting directors (rather, actors playing casting directors, or casting
directors playing themselves) remark that Yakuza never look like Kitano
(who has made something of a name for himself as a Yakuza: he's a
little like the Japanese Robert De Niro)--and yet the central narrative
of the picture then involves the slow evolution of the actor who looks
like Kitano into Takeshi Kitano's Yakuza persona. Kitano is thus
marking the difference between the devices of the director and the
relatively passive objectification that is the primary definition of an
actor--between the godhead inscrutable and the subject humiliated, as
well as the eventual bleed-through between the roles actors assume and
the mold into which perception forces them.
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