Film Freak Central

Wild Things (1998) [Unrated Edition] - DVD

**/**** Image A- Sound A-
starring Kevin Bacon, Matt Dillon, Neve Campbell, Denise Richards
screenplay by Stephen Peters
directed by John McNaughton

by Bill Chambers I shepherded myself through puberty on a steady diet of Cinemax and I've apologized for worse than this movie's sins on behalf of director John McNaughton, whose Mad Dog and Glory almost sires a new genre: misogyny uplift. So I've always considered my indifference towards Wild Things to be something of an anomaly. A continuation of a theme that ran subtly through McNaughton's powerful Normal Life, i.e., some inextricable link between carnal desire and pecuniary greed, Wild Things (originally titled Sex Crimes) opens with an aerial view of the 'Glades that cleverly juxtaposes alligator-infested swampland with the grounds of a nearby high school. The implication is clear, but then again it's too clear, and you can shut the movie off then and there without missing a beat.

Green Acres: The Complete First Season (1965-1966) - DVD

Image B- Sound B+
"Oliver Buys a Farm," "Lisa's First Day on the Farm," "The Decorator," "The Best Laid Plans," "My Husband, the Rooster Renter," "Furniture, Furniture, Who's Got the Furniture?," "Neighborliness," "Lisa the Helpmate," "You Can't Plug in a 2 with a 6," "Don't Call Us, We'll Call You," "Parity Begins at Home," "Lisa Has a Calf," "The Wedding Anniversary," "What Happened in Scranton?," "How to Enlarge a Bedroom," "Give Me Land, Lots of Land," "I Didn't Raise My Husband to Be a Fireman," "Lisa Bakes a Cake," "Sprained Ankle, Country Style," "The Price of Apples," "What's in a Name?," "The Day of Decision," "A Pig in a Poke," "The Deputy," "Double Drick," "The Ballad of Molly Turgis," "Never Look a Gift Tractor in the Mouth," "Send a Boy to College," "Horse? What Horse?," "The Rains Came," "Culture," "Uncle Ollie"

by Walter Chaw A sort of old-fashioned dedication to the all-power of the paterfamilias that seems appalling now and probably seemed more than a little quaint by 1965, "Petticoat Junction" (and The Egg and I) spin-off "Green Acres" has a surprisingly good nature that forgives it a lot of its contemporary offensiveness, locating the series as a belated, often surreal continuation of television's "Golden Age" that saw father knowing best and mother knowing next to nothing. Oliver Wendell Douglas (Eddie Albert), the eternal Pollyannaish optimist, uproots his high society wife Lisa (Eva Gabor), the archetypical dingbat, from her beloved Park Avenue penthouse view and plants them both square in the middle of provincial Hooterville on 160 acres of the rundown old Haney farm. There are moments in the series' first season when it's apparent that series writers Jay Sommers and Dick Chevillat have something subversively weird on their minds; "Green Acres" is like a grassroots "The Prisoner" at times--it's just that brilliantly peculiar.

Brother Bear (2003) [2-Disc Special Edition] - DVD

½/**** Image B+ Sound A Extras B-
screenplay by Tab Murphy and Lorne Cameron & David Hoselton and Steve Bencich & Ron J. Friedman
directed by Aaron Blaise & Bob Walker

by Walter Chaw Deeply unentertaining and, at its heart of hearts, a quintessential example of a dishonest picture, Disney's Brother Bear is rock-bottom entertainment destined to be Pixar's best bargaining chip. It plugs bears and moose into a formula already plumbed Disney-style with lions and meerkats (and once before again with Earth Children stereotypes of Native Americans), boiling an entire culture and mythology down to an insultingly reductive pastiche and taking swipes at women along the way to telling one of the most inapplicable codas in the history of fable: "The story of a boy who became a man by becoming a bear."

Director of the "Dead": FFC Interviews Zack Snyder

March 28, 2004|Supplanting that other zombie movie (the at least twice as gory The Passion of the Christ) at the top of the box-office charts last weekend, Dawn of the Dead compelled me to request a phone interview with its director, Zack Snyder. I should amend that I was driven not by pressing questions, but by that flicker of fanboyism I'd thought long-extinguished; I was stunned to have liked the film, just as I was stunned to have enjoyed Marcus Nispel's remake of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Nevertheless, it strikes me that in a day of high production values and sophisticated action editing, the personal horror films of the Seventies are being re-imagined as self-aware takes on the slick formula and stainless steel look of Aliens from a decade later. There's even a Carter Burke character in the new Dawn of the Dead.

Jersey Girl (2004)

*½/****
starring Ben Affleck, Liv Tyler, George Carlin, Raquel Castro
written and directed by Kevin Smith

by Walter Chaw Self-satisfied and self-congratulatory, Kevin Smith's films generally give off the feeling of a by-invitation-only party attended by Smith, Matt Damon, Jason Lee, Ben Affleck when he's not gambling, and Jason Mewes when he's not in prison or missing. Apparently a smart guy, the moments in his films that suggest evidence of that brightness are overwhelmed by repetitive profanities, puerile devices (i.e. Dogma's shit monster), cameos by his cool friends, and old jokes retold in coarse fashion. He's the love child of David Mamet and a thirteen-year-old virgin at the mercy of pals handsomer and more popular than he, always trying to impress with his blue toughness without the maturity to understand that what made him cool way back when with Clerks wasn't his scatological horniness, but his intelligence and flashes of observational sophistication.

Dogville (2003)

****/****
starring Nicole Kidman, Paul Bettany, Harriet Anderson, Lauren Bacall
written and directed by Lars von Trier

by Bill Chambers SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Movie pop art is enjoying a renaissance (cf Elephant, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind), of which Lars von Trier's savagely cathartic Dogville is the consummate centrepiece. This despite--and partly because of--outward appearances belying its status as a movie at all: Chalk outlines stand in for traditional sets, designating walls, fences, rosebushes, even the dog, Moses, of the titular locale, a pious community (is there any other kind in von Trierland?) situated in the Rocky Mountains circa Prohibition. A void surrounds the rectangle of pavement that constitutes Dogville--it turns white to indicate day and black to indicate night. One could be forgiven for momentarily mistaking Dogville for that fourth-wall-breaking production of Thornton Wilder's Our Town that aired on HBO last year; as Dogville's narrator, John Hurt is as thorough and intrusive a commentator as Our Town's own Stage Manager.

Secondhand Lions (2003) [New Line Platinum Series] - DVD

**½/**** Image A- Sound A Extras A+
starring Michael Caine, Robert Duvall, Haley Joel Osment, Kyra Sedgwick
written and directed by Tim McCanlies

by Walter Chaw A conservative imperialist fable, the peculiar Secondhand Lions can't quite decide between the polarizing siren songs of the NRA and the AARP. Scylla and Charybdis had nothing on the rock and a hard place of the two most powerful lobbies in the United States, so it was only a matter of time before an ostensible children's film (set in Texas, natch) founded on the tenets of old people shooting guns at young people (and waxing rhapsodic about their days oppressing the dark-skinned denizens of sandy places) stumbled onto the silvering screen starring, naturally, Robert Duvall and, unnaturally, Michael Caine. Speaking of unnatural, Osment, taking his first tentative steps into adult Method hell, looks a little like a poorly articulated marionette engaged in a puppet theatre where the only instruction is mad, mechanical gesticulation. To see him react to a door closing is akin to watching someone get defibrillated.

Made-Up (2003) + The Reckoning (2004)

MADE-UP
**½/****
starring Brooke Adams, Lynne Adams, Eva Amurri, Gary Sinise
screenplay by Lynne Adams
directed by Tony Shalhoub

THE RECKONING
*/****
starring Paul Bettany, Tom Hardy, Willem Dafoe, Gina McKee
screenplay by Mark Mills, based on the novel by Barry Unsworth
directed by Paul McGuigan

by Walter Chaw The problem with Tony Shalhoub's directorial debut Made-Up is a certain forced artificiality in presentation and execution that, though in keeping with the mock-documentary-within-a-mock-documentary format, makes the consideration of it emotionally and aesthetically removed. It's a slippery criticism to level at a picture that seems to be about emotional and aesthetic remove, of course, but there comes a point when the form imitates the message to an obfuscating degree--in other words, when it's no longer about the distance, but is the distance. So for all the empty extra-textual readings the film culls for its subtext (Brooke Adams, an actress out of the scene for a decade or so, plays an actress out of the scene for at least a decade; sisters play sisters; the daughter is played by the daughter of Susan Sarandon; and so on), Made-Up is salvaged by a sense of decency, and one meta-read that carries some weight as Shalhoub, an Arab-American of Lebanese descent, directs a film about the ills of stereotyping based on appearance.

Dr. Seuss' The Cat in the Hat (2003) [Widescreen] + Gothika (2003) [Widescreen Edition] - DVDs

The Cat in the Hat
½*/**** Image A Sound A Extras C+
starring Mike Myers, Alec Baldwin, Kelly Preston, Dakota Fanning
screenplay by Alec Berg & David Mandel & Jeff Schaffer, based on the Dr. Seuss book
directed by Bo Welch

GOTHIKA
*/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
starring Halle Berry, Robert Downey Jr., Charles Dutton, John Carroll Lynch
screenplay by Sebastian Gutierrez
directed by Mathieu Kassovitz

by Walter Chaw The vaguely infernal Dr. Seuss classic is given an overtly infernal treatment in the most excruciating rape of a beloved childhood memory since The Grinch (another Brian Grazer abomination), the replacement of director Ron Howard for production designer Bo Welch a case of bad for worse. I'd love to be able to say that The Cat in the Hat is inexplicable because I'd love to be able to be naïve about why and how films like this are made, but I fear by now I'm all too familiar with ideas of populism, condescension, the supremacy of opening weekend box-office, and the toxic belief that entertainment for children needn't hold up to the same kind of scrutiny as entertainment for non-children. Byzantine in the number of ways in which it declares its disdain for film and moviegoers, The Cat in the Hat is also crude, low, and proof at last (with Pieces of April) that Sean Hayes should stick to television, where it's easier to change the channel. There's a built-in audience for this picture (most of which will feel a little ill afterwards), it's going to gross an obscene amount, and it's proof positive that when large amounts of money are at stake, there are really no depths to which some people will sink to try to grow it.

Wuthering Heights (2003) - DVD

ZERO STARS/**** Image C Sound C
starring Erika Christensen, Mike Vogel, Katherine Heigl, Johnny Whitworth
screenplay by Max Enscoe & Annie De Young, based ever-so-loosely on the book by Emile Brontë
directed by Suri B. Krishnamma

by Walter Chaw Consider this time-capsule exchange from the horrifically-misguided mess Suri Krishnamma has made of Wuthering Heights and shudder:

"I swear to God if you ever leave me I'll kill you."

"Then I'd have to come back and kill you so we could be together."

"If you kill me then I'd haunt you. Forever."

"You promise?"

How about I just kill myself while you two sort it out?

Good Bye Lenin! (2003)

Good bye, Lenin!
***½/****
starring Daniel Brühl, Kathrin Sass, Chulpan Khamatova, Maria Simon
screenplay by Bernd Lichtenberg and Wolfgang Becker
directed by Wolfgang Becker

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Good bye, Lenin! is that rarest of beasts, a popular film that's actually about something. Detailing a former East German's mixed emotions at the demise of communism, it's precise in its modelling of a historical turning point without either trivializing or preaching. One doesn't have to pick out the plums of insight from a thin pudding of plot: The elements of analysis and narrative fuse so seamlessly that they carry you along, making a happy medium that is supremely satisfying. One wishes that Hollywood could turn out a film such as this, which, for all its movie-movie gusto, deals with complex issues real people have to deal with, making its huge success back home a heartening sign in this age of Amélie and cultural amnesia.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)

****/****
starring Jim Carrey, Kate Winslet, Elijah Wood, Kirsten Dunst
screenplay by Charlie Kaufman
directed by Michel Gondry

by Walter Chaw Manny Farber wrote this about Orson Welles over fifty years ago: "Welles bequeathed to Hollywood, which had grown fat and famous on hurtling action films, a movie (Citizen Kane) that broke up into a succession of fragments, each one popping with aggressive technique and loud, biased slanting of the materials of real life." During that same period, Farber referred to Preston Sturges as a filmmaker working eternally within "the presence of Dada and surrealism"--and it's taken over fifty years, it seems, for the United States to produce what is at its essence the product of a marriage between Welles's self-conscious audacity and Sturges's common touch: Charlie Kaufman--more specifically, the Charlie Kaufman Screenplay.

Taking Lives (2004) [Widescreen Edition - Unrated Director's Cut] - DVD|[Extended Cut] - Blu-ray Disc + Gia (1998) [Unrated] - DVD

TAKING LIVES
***/****
DVD - Image A- Sound A- Extras C+
BD - Image B+ Sound A Extras C+
starring Angelina Jolie, Ethan Hawke, Kiefer Sutherland, Gena Rowlands
screenplay by Jon Bokenkamp, based on the novel by Michael Pye
directed by D.J. Caruso

by Walter Chaw The more cynical among us would note that the title might also refer to the time that movies exactly like Taking Lives have stolen from hapless audiences, but the fact of it is that if not for our mortal curiosity, we might have missed genuinely good mad-dog killer flicks like Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, Manhunter, The Untold Story, and Se7en. On a reptile level, I think it behoves the herd to slow down at the scene of a gory end, the flock imprinting another's messy mortal lesson as an explanation for our fascination with train wrecks and splatter flicks. But where a film like The Silence of the Lambs perversely reassures its captive audience that no matter the procreative ingenuity of a predator's unslakeable bloodlust, there's always a corn-fed, buttermilk-scrubbed farm girl there to put him away (and Taking Lives falls into this camp), there are films like granddaddy In Cold Blood (and great-grandpappy Psycho) that disdain the easy treatment of societal cancers. The one is appeasement and equivocation-bordering-on-exploitation, the other is always disquieting and sometimes even thought-provoking.

Dawn of the Dead (2004)

***/****
starring Sarah Polley, Ving Rhames, Jake Weber, Mekhi Phifer
screenplay by James Gunn
directed by Zack Snyder

by Walter Chaw Heretical to even suggest it, I'm sure, Zack Snyder's remake of George A. Romero's Dawn of the Dead surpasses the original in any number of ways. It gives the idea of consumerism run wild the short shrift that it deserves (and the cynicism that an intervening quarter-century demands), touching on the original's explanation of the zombies' affinity for the shopping mall and the human heroes' delight at their newfound material wealth before becoming a bracing action film that, like Marcus Nispel's reworking of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (the source of which didn't need updating as much as Dawn arguably did), is more firmly entrenched in the James Cameron Aliens tradition than the Seventies institution of disconcerting personal horror film. There's nothing like fat on the bone of this picture (something the original can't claim), providing a canny demonstration of how comedy and satire can work without descending into slapstick (no pies in zombie faces this time around), and of how great performances and smart direction can craft a piece that honours its origins while significantly upping the effectiveness of its themes and premise.

Dawn of the Dead (1978) [Divimax] - DVD

**½/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring David Emge, Ken Foree, Scott H. Reiniger, Gaylen Ross
written and directed by George A. Romero

by Walter Chaw There's a shopping mall in Colorado called "Colorado Mills" that bubbles with the kind of nameless existential dread generally reserved for terrariums and introspective box turtles. Its architecture--a mountain womb of logs and waterfalls--seeks to replicate the feeling of a village, so that the impulsive consumerism it encourages is disguised as foraging in some fantasy of frontier life and the mob of co-capitalist pilgrims shuffling along appear as a murmuring throng of fellow villagers--wayfarers with whom you have a polite agreement to neither speak to nor make eye contact with. Human interaction is dangerous, for it dispels the illusion of comfort.

Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines (1965) - DVD

Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines, or How I Flew from London to Paris in 25 hours 11 minutes
**½/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B+
starring Stuart Whitman, Sarah Miles, James Fox, Alberto Sordi
screenplay by Jack Davies & Ken Annakin
directed by Ken Annakin

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover As far as bloated Twilight of Hollywood fluff goes, Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines, or How I Flew from London to Paris in 25 hours 11 minutes doesn't do too badly for itself. The picture doesn't try to fill you with ersatz wonder at the magnitude of its expensive contraptions, nor does it try to bully you with offensive sentiment in the Sound of Music vein. It's mostly just a lark, and while it's clearly overpriced (as H'wood films of the period generally are), it manages as best as it can to be light and airy. Alas, as often as not the soufflé falls, the victim of obvious caricatures and a grotesquely overblown approach to slapstick. But while Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines doesn't really linger very long in the mind, it's not bad enough to be an affront, and should at least please children young enough to find the sight of a man with an enormous moustache funny.

The Pink Panther Film Collection [6-Disc DVD Collector's Set - Special Edition] - DVD

THE PINK PANTHER (1964)
*½/**** Image A+ Sound B+ Extras B
starring David Niven, Peter Sellers, Robert Wagner, Capucine
screenplay by Maurice Richlin and Blake Edwards
directed by Blake Edwards

A SHOT IN THE DARK (1964)
***/**** Image B+ Sound B+
starring Peter Sellers, Elke Sommer, George Sanders, Herbert Lom
screenplay by William Peter Blatty and Blake Edwards, based on the play by Harry Kurnitz
directed by Blake Edwards

THE PINK PANTHER STRIKES AGAIN (1976)
***½/**** Image A- Sound A-
starring Peter Sellers, Herbert Lom, Lesley-Anne Down, Burt Kwouk
screenplay by Frank Waldman, Blake Edwards
directed by Blake Edwards

REVENGE OF THE PINK PANTHER (1978)
*½/**** Image A Sound A-
starring Peter Sellers, Herbert Lom, Burt Kwouk, Dyan Cannon
screenplay by Ron Clark, Frank Waldman, Blake Edwards
directed by Blake Edwards

TRAIL OF THE PINK PANTHER (1982)
*/**** Image A Sound A-
starring Peter Sellers, David Niven, Herbert Lom, Joanna Lumley
screenplay by Frank Waldman, Tom Waldman, Blake Edwards, Geoffrey Edwards
directed by Blake Edwards

by Bill Chambers If you've never seen the one that started it all, then it will probably surprise you to learn that The Pink Panther is all but a pre-emptive strike against a possible franchise--practically the only thing about it that became canonical and conventional was the animated title sequence. (This upheld tradition of a cartoon beneath the opening credits formalized a cottage industry for James Bond distributor United Artists.) Series lynchpin Inspector Clouseau (Peter Sellers) isn't even the central figure; that would be Sir Charles Litton (David Niven), a playboy plotting to steal the coveted Pink Panther diamond by ingratiating himself with its owner, Dala (Once Upon a Time in the West's Claudia Cardinale), a pampered princess decompressing at a ski chalet in Cortina.

The Commitments (1991) [Collector's Edition] - DVD

*½/**** Image A Sound A Extras A
starring Robert Arkins, Michael Aherne, Angeline Ball, Maria Doyle Kennedy
screenplay by Dick Clement & Ian La Frenais and Roddy Doyle
directed by Alan Parker

by Walter Chaw Alan Parker likes to use his platform as a film director to preach about all manner of society's more obvious ails, reserving the bulk of his ham-fisted proselytizing for the problems he himself identifies as endemic to the United States: hedonism and drug abuse (The Wall, Midnight Express); the price of a culture of fame (The Wall, Fame); the price of Vietnam and our broken social services system (Birdy); the rampant Yankee tragedy of divorce (Shoot the Moon); racism (Mississippi Burning, Come See the Paradise); our love/hate/fear relationship with food (The Road to Wellville); and, most recently (and egregiously), the death penalty (The Life of David Gale). When Parker manages to shut his hole long enough to pack his ponderous, moronic disdain back across the pond, the films he produces there (Angela's Ashes, The Commitments) are weepy prole sagas highlighting the determination of grubby Dickensian urchins toiling in the underbelly of failed capitalism--which, in Parker's mind, is probably America's fault, too. Poor baby. I'm not sure what's made Parker an expert on fixing the United States (something to do with his background as a commercial director, I suspect), but I for one am just so grateful for his insight.

Junket Blues

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A less-than-"spotless" L.A. story

 

March 14, 2004 | An amazingly successful SimCity on the verge of spiralling out of control, Los Angeles at night on approach spreads out in every direction like a LiteBrite run riot, or an amazingly giant circuit board in a Douglas Adams/A.E. Van Vogt nightmare. The traffic looks pretty bad from a few thousand feet up, too. With twenty-one years left until the post-industrial wasteland of Blade Runner's City of Angels, everything appears to be coming along nicely. A pair of spotlights shot into the air most likely to announce the new Sizzler on Rodeo, but I imagined it was to herald one of those old newsreel, fur coat and spat premieres, right behind the barber college, maybe, that sits at the corner of Hollywood and Vine. Shoehorned into a coach seat over the wing of one of those airplanes that seats about a hundred people, I quaffed my Pepsi with the quick rabbit-swallows necessitated by the tiny plastic cup they offer to the undesirables, and thought about the wisdom of Focus Features deciding to fly me from Denver to The Four Seasons in Beverly Hills to attend the junket for Charlie Kaufman's bittersweet Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. I wondered what I'd ever written to give them the impression that a junket and me would be a perfect fit. I wondered where I'd gone wrong.

Greendale (2004)

**½/****
starring Eric Johnson, Ben Keith, Elizabeth Keith, Erik Markegard
written and directed by Neil Young

by Walter Chaw The Wall shot on Super8 and given a decidedly 'green' spin, Neil Young's raw nerve of a semi-experimental/semi-feature length music video Greendale is literal, unabashedly liberal, and saved by its energy, earnestness, and Young's electric song score. Inspired and rejuvenated, like a few of our better artists have been, by 9/11 and George W.'s reign of evil aw-shucksism, Young contributes to the soundtrack for Greendale some of his best music with Crazy Horse since their eclectic album "Sleeps with Angels". In fact, Ralph Molina's work on the skins here is something like a revelation, even when Young's lyrics lag a little in the picture's middle section, an unsuccessful chunk revolving uneasily around a personification of Old Scratch: in that tattoo, banging fulsome in the song cycle's underbelly, is the freshness and vitality that has kept Young current over four decades.

Cold Creek Manor (2003) - DVD

*/**** Image A+ Sound A- Extras B-
starring Dennis Quaid, Sharon Stone, Stephen Dorff, Juliette Lewis
screenplay by Richard Jefferies
directed by Mike Figgis

by Walter Chaw Conservatively speaking, I'm going to see something like four-hundred films this year and write reviews for about three-hundred of them. That's somewhere in the neighbourhood of "too many" and "much too many," and it's fair to wonder at some point along the way if my point-of-view is becoming coloured by fatigue, too many disappointments, too many deadlines, and the sort of imperious condescension to lacklustre product that begins to feel a little bit like hate. You get into this business because you love movies, you love talking about movies, and you love criticism wielded with responsibility--and then sets in the sobering realization that maybe the experience of going to movies might be permanently degraded by the experience of going to every movie and, worse, being forced to think about and contextualize all of them in a larger perspective.

The Girl from Rio (1969) + Sadomania (1981) - DVDs

Die sieben Männer der Sumuru
*½/**** Image  A- Sound A- Extras A-
starring Shirley Eaton, Richard Wyler, George Sanders, Maria Rohm
screenplay by Peter Welbeck
directed by Jess Franco

Sadomania - Hölle der Lust
Hellhole Women
ZERO STARS/**** Image B+ Sound A- Extras A-
starring Ajita Wilson, Ursula Fellner, Robert Foster, Gina Jansen
screenplay by Jess Franco and Günter Ebert
directed by Jess Franco

by Walter Chaw Theoretically, I'm not opposed to the idea of the exploitation film. In the right hands, its disreputable ingredients of sex, violence, and "shocking" behaviour (the girl and the gun of Godardian legend) could be a thrilling camera subject and a springboard for lush stylistic excess. But for every Russ Meyer, Dario Argento, or Suzuki Seijun who knows his way around a camera, there are scores of Lucio Fulcis, Ruggero Deodatos, and Jess Francos who have no clue as to how to make a movie that hangs together. The latter of that unholy trio is a case in point: the current DVD release of two of his films is an occasion for seeing how far the exploitation formula can go wrong. Running the gamut from ridiculous (The Girl from Rio) to repellent (Sadomania), they lack any real stylistic brio to enliven their rote excesses and cheap perversions, succeeding only as possible subjects for Mystery Science Theatre 3000-style mockery.

Love, Sex and Eating the Bones (2004)

Eating the Bones
***/****
starring Hill Harper, Marlyne Afflack, Mark Taylor, Kai Soremekun
written and directed by Sudz Sutherland

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Rightly or wrongly, the romantic comedy is usually viewed as a low-priority genre and handed out to style-free directors settling for second best. On the surface, Love, Sex and Eating the Bones would appear to be one of these films, beset as it is by an obsequious realist aesthetic that stays out of the way of the narrative. But writer-director Sudz Sutherland instils it with something that most rom-coms don't normally have: speed. Instead of lingering ponderously over the content of the screenplay, he states his points, lets them speak for themselves, and moves on. This makes Love, Sex and Eating the Bones a brisk, energizing experience--no masterpiece, perhaps, but easily the most fleet-footed Canadian film to emerge in a long time.

Starsky & Hutch (2004)

*/****
starring Ben Stiller, Owen Wilson, Snoop Dogg, Fred Williamson
screenplay by John O'Brien and Todd Phillips & Scot Armstrong
directed by Todd Phillips

by Walter Chaw The problems with Todd Phillips's lifeless and auto-consumptive Starsky & Hutch begin with a lack of imagination and end with a lack of pace. The one thing a comedy can't be is boring, and Starsky & Hutch is that in spades, banking far too much on the inherent hilarity of the '70s (its title declares "Bay City. The Seventies" like a plot outline and mission statement) while depending upon Owen Wilson and Ben Stiller to keep doing the same thing they've been doing for what's beginning to seem like decades. If I never see Stiller do a silly dance again, not to mention engage in a dance-off, it'll be too soon. Hope/Crosby for an age of lowered expectations, both are talented artists when they're not just cashing a paycheck. The danger is that a few more like Starsky & Hutch and The Royal Tenenbaums will begin to seem like a fluke.

Fresh Horses (1988) - DVD

*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.

Lilies of the Field (1963) + For Love of Ivy (1968) - DVDs

LILIES OF THE FIELD
*½/**** Image A- Sound A-
starring Sidney Poitier, Lilia Skala, Stanley Adams
screenplay by James Poe, based on the novel by William E. Barrett
directed by Ralph Nelson

FOR LOVE OF IVY
*/**** Image A Sound A
starring Sidney Poitier, Abbey Lincoln, Beau Bridges, Nan Martin
screenplay by Robert Alan Aurthur, based on a story by Sidney Poitier
directed by Daniel Mann

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Two steps forward, one step back. It's hard to know how to read the career of Sidney Poitier, who was America's premier black actor during the '60s and is often held up as a standard bearer for those trying to break through Hollywood's white ceiling. Is he a figure of uncommon dignity in an industry that trafficked in insulting stereotypes, or is he the "nice" black man-made palatable to a white audience eager to flatter itself for its liberalism? The answer is a complex one, requiring an examination of his films--two of which have recently been reissued on DVD. Both Lilies of the Field and For Love of Ivy are tedious, uncontroversial filmmaking, but they afford an interesting glimpse into the compromised mind of liberal Hollywood when faced with the task of "integrating" its product.

Cheaper by the Dozen (1950) + Belles on Their Toes (1952) - DVDs

CHEAPER BY THE DOZEN
**/**** Image B+ Sound B+
starring Clifton Webb, Jeanne Crain, Myrna Loy, Betty Lynn
screenplay by Lamar Trotti, based on the novel by Frank B. Gilbreth, Jr. and Ernestine Gilbreth Carey
directed by Walter Lang

BELLES ON THEIR TOES
**/**** Image B Sound B
starring Jeanne Crain, Myrna Loy, Debra Paget, Jeffrey Hunter
screenplay by Phoebe and Henry Ephron, based on the book by Frank B. Gilbreth, Jr. and Ernestine Gilbreth Carey
directed by Henry Levin

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Periodically, one comes across a critic who yearns for the qualities of golden-age studio filmmaking. This person will point to the technical proficiency that has since vanished from our cinema and appeal to something other than brutal, instant gratification in their narrative makeup. In response, I offer 1950's Cheaper by the Dozen and its sequel, Belles on their Toes, as examples of how these elements can be used for evil and not for good. Aesthetically, there's nothing especially wrong with them: Though directors Walter Lang and Henry Levin aren't masters, they're solid professionals, and they help the saga of an enormous family go down fairly easy. But what they're sending down is something conformist and ugly, making a phoney harmony out of ingredients that would under normal circumstances repel each other and fly off into space. Thus the initial film is about being crowded into one space under the rule of a benign despot, and the sequel, though backed into a mildly subversive corner, still manages to minimize the dark undertones of the family unit.

House of the Dead (2003) - DVD

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.

Under the Tuscan Sun (2003) [Widescreen] + Death in Venice (1971) - DVDs

UNDER THE TUSCAN SUN
*/**** Image A Sound A Extras C+
starring Diane Lane, Sandra Oh, Lindsay Duncan, Raoul Bova
screenplay by Audrey Wells, based on the book by Frances Mayes
directed by Audrey Wells

DEATH IN VENICE
**/**** Image A Sound B Extras D+
starring Dirk Bogarde, Mark Burns, Björn Andrésen, Silvana Mangano
screenplay by Luchino Visconti, Nicola Badalucco, based on the novel by Thomas Mann
directed by Luchino Visconti

by Bill Chambers Can't afford that trip to Italy? Consider the next best thing: a jaunt to your local video store, where you can pick up the diametrically opposed but concurrently-released travelogues Under the Tuscan Sun and Death in Venice. I confess I'm only covering them together because it struck me as funny to do so--it's doubtful there's a lot of overlap between the pictures' fanbases, though I'd sooner recommend Under the Tuscan Sun to a Death in Venice admirer than vice-versa: in my experience, devotees of so-called "chick flicks" are notoriously unadventurous moviegoers, while it should go without saying that anyone high on Death in Venice lives by the benefit of the doubt. Both vastly overrated by their supporters, they at least beat watching somebody's vacation slides.