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.
ZERO STARS/**** starring Michael Douglas, Kirk Douglas, Cameron Douglas, Diana Douglas screenplay by Jesse Wigutow directed by Fred Schepisi
by Walter Chaw Appalling at its best, Fred
Schepisi's It Runs in the Family is a congenital
disaster best described as an interminable episode of "Old People Say
the Darndest Things". Between this and Last Orders,
Aussie director Schepisi seems to desire cornering the market on gravid
meditations on decrepitude and death. He finds himself here a far cry
from his Seventies output (The Devil's Playground, The
Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith), which, much like countryman
Bruce Beresford's early work, announced an important filmmaker who has,
in the intervening years, become a hired hand and a coin of
considerably devalued worth. It Runs in the Family
is so relentlessly mawkish that it does give insight into the state of
mind that allows condescension to become comfortable status quo by
habitually marginalizing the elderly and demented as adorable
dispensers of quaint homilies and spunky vulgarity.
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.
ZERO STARS/**** starring James Franco, Mila Kunis, Rachel Weisz, Michelle Williams screenplay by Mitchell Kapner and David Lindsay-Abaire directed by Sam Raimi
by Walter Chaw Based on L. Frank Baum's little-known Pussyhound
of Oz, Sam Raimi's career nadir Oz the Great and Powerful
(hereafter O-Gap) answers the question of who you would ask to anchor
your $300M+ tentpole extravaganza: yes, James Franco, who's now claimed the
mantle of the worst actor in the United States from the quiescent Paul Walker. Franco is an avatar of the picture's bad decisions, from the Zach Braff-voiced CGI monkey sidekick to the sassy CGI Hummel
figurine to the tragic miscasting of Mila Kunis as Theodora, a.k.a. the Wicked
Witch of the West. Yes indeedy, fans of the MGM original, of Baum's wondrous
series of books, and of the shit-show "Wicked" will all hate it
equally--almost as much as neophytes to the whole damned mess who will come for what
Raimi's proudly proclaimed "the ultimate Disney movie" and leave with a mouthful of exactly as promised. It's blindingly obnoxious,
tasteless in a meaningless way, and occasionally makes reference to Army
of Darkness just because, I suspect, Raimi's last-resort defensive posture
is to fall back on what he knows. But it's not nearly enough to save him here.
The argument with weight is that the more expensive a movie becomes, the less
likely it's going to be good; the first clue that Raimi is creatively bankrupt
is that while his buddy Bruce Campbell appears in this film, Campbell isn't the star.
ZERO
STARS/**** Image B Sound A- Extras B+
starring Jonathan Cherry, Tyron Leitso, Clint Howard, Ona Grauer
screenplay by Dave Parker & Mark Altman
directed by Uwe Boll
by Walter Chaw With
Jürgen Prochnow (the production too cheap and/or ignorant to provide
him even his umlaut in the closing credits) dressed like his Das
Boot U-boat commander and Clint Howard dressed like the
Morton's fisherman, Uwe Boll's wearying House of the Dead
positions itself as one of those snarky post-modern slasher flicks that
isn't nearly so smart as it thinks it is. An early gag about Prochnow's
sea captain being named "Kirk" is one of those lifeless jokes that
speaks to the desperation and incompetence driving the piece in equal
measure; sad to say that after its unpromising opening minutes, the
film defies the odds by getting progressively worse. I don't really
know how House of the Dead found
distribution--pictures piggybacking on the success of both a video game
franchise and another film that piggybacked on a video game franchise (Resident
Evil) usually go straight to video. But as one of the death
rattles of Artisan Entertainment, 'nuff said, I guess.
ZERO STARS/**** starring Kevin Spacey, Kate Winslet, Laura Linney, Gabriel Mann
screenplay by Charles Randolph directed by Alan Parker
by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. One wonders if there
isn't, after all, a subtle right-wing conspiracy at work in the
entertainment industry, where ultra-liberal stumps are turned into the
sort of ostensibly pro-leftist propaganda reel that does serious harm
to the pro-leftist agenda. If it's not the reprehensible The Contender, with its Ayn Rand-ian hypothetical, it's I Am Sam and its bizarre vilification of the child welfare system--or worse, John Q,
with its curiously misdirected lament against our obviously broken
health-care state. Trumping them all in terms of muddle and melodrama,
however, is The Life of David Gale, an anti-death penalty
tirade that, by the end, feels like a life sentence the audience wishes
hadn't been commuted. The only way to make any sense of the film is to
suspect it of darker motives: Its ultimate message, and it's not a bad
one, seems to be that the criminal justice system the film so actively
vilifies is, in fact, the only honest (though imperfect) force in the
entire mess.
ZERO STARS/**** starring Jamie Kennedy, Alan Cumming, Traylor Howard, Steven Wright screenplay by Lance Khazei directed by Lawrence Guterman
by Walter Chaw Towards the end of the uniquely awful Son of the Mask,
star Jamie Kennedy gets two fistfuls of his screen-wife Traylor
Howard's bosom (this after pummelling her head against the ground in a
scary depiction of domestic violence) and declares, in so many words,
"Eureka--so it is you, honey." It's a charming vignette that follows about an hour of fart, snot, golden shower, and Exorcist
jokes, each trumping the last in level of inappropriateness until
finally the deadened synapses begin to register that with sets like
"Edge City" and "Fringe City", the brain trust behind this abortion
might actually have had something subversive in mind. A shame, then,
that they've confused "edge" and "fringe" elements with puerile
scatology and institutional dehumanization, intercut with baby and
animal reaction shots and a marginal and failed television comedian
(playing a marginal and failed television animator) mugging in an
astoundingly lifeless approximation of "manic." For a film that might
want to be taken as "edgy," in other words, Son of the Mask caters to the absolute lowest and commonest of the lowest common denominators.
ZERO STARS/**** Image A- Sound A Extras C starring Cameron Diaz, James Marsden, Frank Langella, James Rebhorn
screenplay by Richard Kelly, based on the short story "Button, Button"
by Richard Matheson
directed by Richard Kelly
by Walter Chaw As if to dispel any
whisper of a doubt after Richard Kelly's Southland Tales
that whatever ephemeral magic was captured in his Donnie Darko
was completely accidental, along comes Kelly's third film as
writer-director, The Box. I don't know yet whether
it's the worst film of the year, but I will say that next to it Alex
Proyas' similar disaster Knowing seems like a
goddamn masterpiece. It's excruciatingly written, for starters, with
the all-timer coming when vanilla paterfamilias Arthur (James Marsden),
fresh from a 2001 light tunnel, says to vanilla
materfamilias Norma (Cameron Diaz) first that "it's beyond words,"
then, a few dozen words later, that it's "neither here, nor there...but
somewhere in between" and that it's a place "where despair is not the
governor of the human soul." It was around this time that I bore down
like a Civil War soldier getting a limb sawed off and watched as The
Box magically made its 115-minute running time feel like a
day spent undergoing oral surgery. It's that bad. Badly edited, too, as
the awful script (based on a pretty good Richard Matheson short
story)--which already jumps around haphazardly between cheap, moronic
comparisons of itself to Sartre's No Exit and
egregious exposition that makes M. Night Shyamalan's leisurely verbal
masturbations look like Mamet by comparison--is matched by bizarre
jump-cuts and senseless, arrhythmic pacing. Despite how long it feels,
it's over before it really begins.
THE LAST KISS ZERO STARS/**** Image B+ Sound B Extras D starring Zach Braff, Jacinda Barrett, Casey Affleck, Tom Wilkinson
screenplay by Paul Haggis, based on the screenplay for L'Ultimo
Bacio by Gabriele Muccino
directed by Tony Goldwyn
TRUST THE MAN ½/****
Image A- Sound C Extras D
starring Billy Crudup, David Duchovny, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Julianne Moore
written and directed by Bart Freundlich
by
Walter Chaw Zach Braff's auto-elevation into the rarefied air of Ed
Burnsian self-satisfaction has required a fraction of the smarmcoms, if
a meaningful assist from an obscenely-popular TV show that's running on
fumes at this point. Garden State is dreadful, of
course,
swarming with awkward, overwritten, creepy alt-folk montages and pocket
epiphanies (just like "Scrubs", albeit with half the rage and
exploitation of frailty), but team up former "The Facts of Life" scribe
(and Oscar-winning screenwriter) Paul Haggis with instant-brand
Braff--he's like sea monkeys: just add grease--for The Last
Kiss
and discover in the alchemy a more pungent, twice-as-stale vintage of a
type of picture that used to be done with grace and wit by people like
Whit Stillman and Hal Hartley, cheapened by noxious voice-overs and
skeezy dialogues obsessed with the female orgasm without having the
honesty to actually show one. What we get instead is the idea that this
shit sells to a privileged "indie"-craving hipster demographic
oblivious to the fact that "indie" films are as homogenous a ghetto as
any other now. (Independent of what? Alternative to what?) There's
nothing genuine about these "relationshit" flicks (thanks to blogger
John Landis for the term); they're a sloppily-baited hook dangling in a
waitlisted stucco bistro.
ZERO
STARS/**** Image A Sound B starring
Jennifer Aniston, Paul Rudd, Alan Alda, Nigel Hawthorne
screenplay by Wendy Wasserstein, based on the novel by Stephen McCauley
directed by Nicholas Hytner
by Walter Chaw A
fascinatingly
unpleasant precursor to NBC's "Will & Grace", The
Object of My Affection details the predominantly platonic
friendship between a romantically tortured straight woman, Nina
(Jennifer Aniston), and a prototypically sensitive gay man, George
(Paul Rudd). The unbearably treacly score by long-time offender George
Fenton immediately announces by its very presence (and Fenton's very
participation) that The Object of My Affection is
going to be atrocious, and true to form, it's really atrocious. Yet to
say that it's as predictable as it is sickening in its laziness
(there's a VH1 music video montage in which our odd couple attends a
dance class) would be to downplay the actual visceral "wrongness" of
the piece, something that has nothing to do with the subject matter.
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