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.
THE FOX AND THE HOUND
***½/**** Image C- Sound B Extras C uncredited screenplay, based on the novel by Daniel P. Mannix directed by Art Stevens, Ted Berman, Richard Rich
THE LITTLE MERMAID
*½/**** Image B- Sound C Extras A written and directed by John Musker and Ron Clements
by Bill Chambers SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. With The Fox and the Hound
and The Little Mermaid bookending an especially
turbulent decade for a studio mortally locked in a struggle to
reconcile its animation pedigree with its crass commercial instincts,
the former has come to be regarded in the Disney mythology as the Good
Friday to the latter's Easter Sunday. It's therefore fitting that the
two films they most emulate are 1942's Bambi and
1950's Cinderella, respectively, as the Forties
marked the last time the Mouse House was on the brink of foreclosure. (The
Fox and the Hound goes so far as to recycle cels from Bambi.)
Much like The Little Mermaid represented a somewhat
cynical reboot of the fairytale default, so, too, was Cinderella
a glorified salvage operation following the
money-/audience-hemorrhaging pro bono work Uncle Walt did on behalf of
FDR's Good Neighbor policy. Alas, the Good Friday and Easter Sunday
analogy applies to not just Disney's phoenix-like resurrection but also
the tonal and moral disparity between the two pictures: one is the sad
truth; the other is wishful thinking.
ZERO STARS/****
starring Cameron Diaz, Kate Winslet, Jude Law, Jack Black
written and directed by Nancy Meyers
by Walter Chaw There are bad movies, and then there are Nancy Meyers movies (first What Women Want, followed by the similarly excrescent Something's Gotta Give): chick flicks in the most damning, insulting sense of the patronizing term and reason enough to question the wisdom of ever spending money to see a movie. If you go to Meyers' latest, not only are you about to watch what is easily the worst movie of the year--you're most likely going to do it in the company of people who'll actually like it. The Holiday is appallingly written and icky besides in that familiar way of this brand of Love Actually/The Family Stoneyuletide romantic refuse, casting Cameron Diaz and Jude Law as lovers fucking away the hours inside a Thomas Kincaid painting while Diaz's frumpy house-swap buddy, played by Kate Winslet, finds meaning in Santa Monica by propping up a fossil (Eli Wallach) and falling for a James Horner-esque composer of horrible soundtracks (Jack Black). Parliament on the Thames is featured as prominently as the Pacific Coast Highway to underscore either how vacuous the filmmakers are or how stupid they think the audience is while Hans Zimmer's soul-sucking, teddy bears-humping score saps away the last hints of credibility anyone has after participating in this gingerbread death march. If the opening voiceover narration by Winslet's lovelorn Iris isn't warning enough, consider that the narrative crutch used by Diaz's emetic movie trailer-editor Amanda is a series of fake movie trailers about Amanda's romantic imbroglios.
DISNEY'S A CHRISTMAS CAROL
**½/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B
screenplay by Robert Zemeckis, based on the novel by Charles Dickens
directed by Robert Zemeckis
THE FOURTH KIND
ZERO STARS/****
starring Milla Jovovich, Will Patton, Corey Johnson, Elias Koteas
written and directed by Olatunde Osunsanmi
by Ian Pugh If Robert Zemeckis hasn't quite left the Uncanny Valley behind, at the very least, the heart missing from his latest effort--what seems like the trillionth retelling of Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol, and the billionth animated one--correlates directly to its absence of personality, rather than to an absence of humanity. A backhanded compliment, to be sure, but the character designs finally resemble something closer to artistic interpretation than to a failed attempt at replicating human beings exactly as they are, with Marley (Gary Oldman) and Scrooge (Jim Carrey), for example, rendered almost expressionistically to evoke rotten apples and hunched skeletons. From that standpoint, the actors' sudden bursts of acrobatic grace, no longer so incongruous, capture some of computer-animated cinema's wonder, the kind at which Zemeckis has grasped since The Polar Express--a true example of bringing the impossible to life. The only problem is that Zemeckis's own script isn't worth more than a shrug, and the film relies too much on its visuals to carry the extra weight.
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.
ZERO STARS/**** Image B Sound B+ Extras D+
starring Lindsay Lohan, Chris Pine, Faizon Love, Missi Pyle
screenplay by I. Marlene King and Amy B. Harris
directed by Donald Petrie
by Bill Chambers A movie as ill-conceived as the original Bring It On (yeah, let's root for the privileged white chicks against the...all-black inner-city cheerleading squad?), Donald Petrie's Just My Luck fatally hitches its wagon to the miniscule charms of Lindsay Lohan. The migraine begins to form as soon as Lohan makes her grand entrance as PR chick Ashley Albright, striding out into the pouring rain without an umbrella knowing full well that the weather will clear up to accommodate her. (It does.) After scraping his jaw off the sidewalk, her Stepin Fetchit of a doorman hails a taxi, and while climbing into it Ashley notices a five-dollar bill stuck to the bottom of her boot. Does this cosmically-pampered princess tip the doorman with it? LOL! She's admiring the creases in Lincoln's beard as the cab peels away. Later, Ashley will receive two barely-provoked, if wholly deserved, punches in the face from a jailed black woman, while a Suge Knight-type record company overlord (Faizon Love) will declare: "I used to be [an idealist and a purist]...but then I decided to become filthy rich." I'm as surprised as you are that D.W. Griffith didn't write the treatment for this thing.
CHRISTMAS IN CONNECTICUT
ZERO STARS/**** Image C Sound C+
starring Dyan Cannon, Kris Kristofferson, Richard Roundtree, Tony Curtis
screenplay by Janet Brownell, based on the screenplay by Lionel Houser and Adele Comandini and story by Aileen Hamilton
directed by Arnold Schwarzenegger
JINGLE ALL THE WAY
ZERO STARS/**** Image B Sound C+
starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sinbad, Phil Hartman, Rita Wilson
screenplay by Randy Kornfield
directed by Brian Levant
by Walter Chaw A man of many talents (a jag-off of all trades, let's say), the honourable Arnold A. Schwarzenegger made his directorial debut with the 1992 telefilm Christmas in Connecticut, a remake of a 1945 Barbara Stanwyck flick and the sort of unqualified failure that finds something like thirty dozen ways to redefine "fatuous." Dyan Cannon, she of the toothy, shark-like grin, stars as Elizabeth Blane, a popular cooking-show host without any actual cooking skills who's led around by her pert snoot by her queen of a producer, Alexander (Tony Curtis, playing Harvey Fierstein). When heroic Colorado park ranger Jefferson Jones (Kris Kristofferson, one definition of "fatuous" all by his own self) saves a kid from the wilderness, Alexander hatches the brilliant plan to capitalize on Grizzly Adams's national hero status by inviting him to a live broadcast of a fake dinner at a fake house in Connecticut populated by a family of terrible actors and an unspeakable mammy stereotype. It's hard to draw the line between fiction and reality sometimes, isn't it?
Recent Comments