**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.
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.
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.
***½/****Image
A
Sound A
Extras B starring
Steven McQueen, Aneta Corseaut, Earl Rowe, George Karas screenplay
by Theodore Simonson and Kate Phillips, from an idea by Irvine
H. Millgate directed
by Irvin S. Yeaworth Jr.
click
any image to enlarge
by
Jefferson Robbins Burt Bacharach and Mack David's
sock-hoppin'
title-track lyrics aside, the key creature of Irvin S. Yeaworth Jr.'s The
Blob never "leaps." Sure, it sort of lunges up a stick to
absorb
an old hermit's paw, but mostly what it does is ooze around, digest
flesh, and
act as the centring point for the film's fine balance of character,
pacing,
and grace in the face of certain doom. While The Blob
has its light moments, it's seldom again as carefree as its
opening credits would seem to
portend. The blob crashes within its meteor-case into a riven
small-town society and
drives it--the
way all good monsters do--to better know and reconcile with itself.
***½/**** Image
B-
Sound B
Extras D starring
Kirk Douglas, John Cassavetes, Carrie Snodgress, Charles Durning screenplay
by John Farris, based on his novel directed
by Brian DePalma
click any image to
enlarge
by
Bill Chambers SPOILER WARNING IN
EFFECT. While Brian DePalma is nothing if not a leitmotif
filmmaker,
it's curious that he chose to directThe
Fury right after Carrie.
Imagine Spielberg following up Jaws
with Orca--it's
like
De Palma was begging to be pigeonholed. And it's not surprising that The
Fury wasn't as zeitgeisty: it lacks the classical simplicity
and youth
appeal of Carrie, with almost no one in the cast
under 30 save for
future softcore legend Andrew Stevens and Carrie
holdover Amy Irving, a
good actress who just doesn't have that X factor. But The
Fury's echo
can still be heard, because its ending is indeed that impactful. Nearly
every
review mentions it, and the terms in which Pauline Kael and her
acolytes
described it gave it a kind of porny rep that's
since
inspired generations of young film buffs to seek the movie out. (Armond White called it an "orgasm.") It is
a great
ending, but a revisit makes clear that The Fury is worth
reading for the articles.
*½/**** Image D+ Sound B- starring Molly Ringwald, Andrew McCarthy, Patti D'Arbanville, Ben Stiller
screenplay by Larry Ketron
directed by David Anspaugh
by Bill Chambers As Tipton, best friend of Matt (Andrew McCarthy), Ben Stiller
whispers in Andrew McCarthy's ear, "Look, when the horse underneath us
drops, we take a fresh one." Yes, and the wet duck flies at midnight. Fresh Horses is all too effortlessly characterized as Pretty in Pink by way of Cormac McCarthy, or a Walker Evans BOP spread. Hot off of Hoosiers,
director David Anspaugh seems to be aiming for something even folksier
and more naturalistic this time around, but his three
leads--McCarthy, Stiller, and Molly Ringwald--are the least likely actors he could've cast. The effect is a movie from
Mars.
THE SIGNAL **/**** starring Anessa Ramsey, Sahr Nguajah, AJ Bowen, Matt Stanton
written and directed by David Bruckner, Dan Bush, Jacob Gentry
CHARLIE BARTLETT ZERO STARS/**** starring Anton Yelchin, Hope Davis, Kat Dennings, Robert Downey Jr.
screenplay by Gustin Nash
directed by Jon Poll
by Walter Chaw I'm not sure how The
Signal could possibly avoid becoming some kind of cult
classic, given that it apes bona fide cult classics like Evil
Dead II, Dead Alive, and Shaun
of the Dead with
so much unabashed glee. Its cast of amateur actors and its trio of
rookie directors reek of first-timer's brinkmanship, with the presumed
luxuries of no budget and a lot of time to watch horror flicks having
resulting in a bloated, over-stuffed sausage of a picture that hits
once or twice in the gore bits while badly miscalculating a time or two
in flashes of real ugly sadism. I liked The Signal
fine, but
aesthetically, it's distanced: It's not fun but it thinks it's fun, and
it's only really interesting if you're already (over)familiar with the
classics of the splatter genre. Put it up against Edgar Wright's
pictures (and The Signal looks a lot like the Don't
trailer Wright produced for Grindhouse) to chart
the difference between films that work as exceptional examples of the
genres they're aping and neo-Shrek
wannabes that play like a trivia game for folks pleased to recognize a
severed-head-in-a-vise gag from one of the most storied independent
success stories of all time.
½*/**** Image
A Sound B Extras B-
starring Jesse Bradford, Erika Christensen, Shiri Appleby, Kate Burton
screenplay by Charles Bohl & Phillip Schneider
directed by John Polson
by Walter Chaw It's one thing to say that Swimfan is a boldly
unoriginal rip-off of such gems as The Crush,
Deadly Friend, Wicked, and Poison
Ivy, but it's another, far more disturbing thing altogether
to note that Swimfan travels the same inexplicable
path of the moon-faced pork-pie Lolita so purposefully trundled by the
likes of Alicia Silverstone, Kristy Swanson, Julia Stiles, and Drew
Barrymore. Erika Christensen--memorably spacey as the troubled daughter
in Soderbergh's Traffic--reveals herself in Swimfan
as just the next completely interchangeable cherubic baby-fat starlet
to try (or continue) to sully her ephemeral image in a role
day-trippers might mistake for "edgy." Make no mistake, Swimfan
may be many things, but it's about as edgy as Christensen's Romanesque
elbow.
***½/****
Image B+ Sound B+ Extras C+ starring Brad Renfro, Bijou Phillips, Rachel Miner, Michael Pitt
screenplay by Zachary Long & Roger Pullis, based on the book by
Jim Schutze
directed by Larry Clark
by Bill Chambers An authority figure
delivers the definitive line of dialogue of Bully,
Larry Clark's quasi-sequel to his own hotly-contested Kids:
"I don't know what you're up to. I don't think I want
to know." Well, Clark insists on letting us know. Often accused, even with only three motion pictures under his
belt, of over-sensationalizing already sensational material, he's
hardly the next Oliver Stone. He may be something of an interfering
observer, but he's not a conspiracy proselytizer running with scissors
down the hallway. Where Stone drew slave parallels to football in Any
Given Sunday by intercutting clips from Ben-Hur,
Clark makes more organic shock statements. He can be tactless, sure.
Can't we all?
**½/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras B starring Mekhi Phifer, Josh Hartnett, Julia Stiles, Elden Henson
screenplay by Brad Kaaya, based on the play "Othello" by William
Shakespeare
directed by Tim Blake Nelson
by Walter Chaw Tim Blake Nelson's
updating of Shakespeare's "Othello" is hamstrung by a deficient script
that hastily neglects motivation and character depth in favour of a
dependence on our familiarity with the source material to lend O
its tragic gravity. It overuses animalism and the specious equation of
high school basketball with military conquests and prowess, and
unforgivably consigns the Desdemona character to a haughty afterthought
and a series of shrill, shallow pronouncements. Another fatal
misjudgment of the hackneyed and over-complicated plot (which actually
seems to contradict itself right at its conclusion) reduces Iago's
wickedness to his need to earn daddy's approval. Admittedly though, O's
transplanting of "Othello"'s insular Venetian political setting to an
exclusive upper class prep school is a wry and excellent decision,
offering any number of opportunities for satirizing the glowering
atmosphere and claustrophobic in-fighting of high school at its most
advantaged.
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