Film Freak Central

Paparazzi (2004) - DVD

ZERO STARS/**** Image A Sound A Extras D
starring Cole Hauser, Robin Tunney, Dennis Farina, Tom Sizemore
screenplay by Forrest Smith
directed by Paul Abascal

by Walter Chaw Loathsome doesn't begin to describe it. How about "toxic"? View Paparazzi and producer Mel Gibson's own The Passion of the Christ together for a better perspective on where Gibson's coming from these days. Better, view the two together for some insight into the way that martyr complexes sometimes metastasize into a belief that feelings of rage and vengeance are justifiable responses to the indignities of a world whose sole focus is to torture the privileged with wealth, adoration, and extraordinarily high levels of creature comfort. Paparazzi are no angels, what with the recent spate of highly-publicized incidents culminating in the accusation that one of the adorable little shutterbugs slammed his car into Lindsay Lohan's in order for his compatriots to snap a few shots of the starlet vehicle-free. But rather than deal in a serious fashion with the toll the paparazzi take on any individual's right to a certain measure of personal space and safety, Paparazzi chooses to offer an unironic manifesto that forgives the vigilante-style abuse of Gibson's very own personal Sanhedrin. The film is suspect from the trailers, and its horrific morality grows more noxious with prolonged exposure.

Best of "The Muppet Show": Bob Hope, Dom DeLuise, George Burns (1977) - DVD

Image C+ Sound C Extras D

by Walter Chaw In a summer whose renewed interest in variety shows has brought us embarrassing spectacles ranging from a peculiar celebrity dance competition where ex-heavyweight champ Evander Holyfield does a Karloff in tuxedo pants to the hard-to-witness disinterring of moldy oldsters and one-hit-wonders croaking out their old hits and covering new ones, look back to the heyday of "The Muppet Show" and wonder how something like it ever made it to the air. The themes that Jim Henson's electric Kool-Aid acid trip tackles through its tacky sketches, instantly-dated guest stars, and cobwebbed musical interludes run the gamut from loneliness (a disturbing rendition of Jim Croce's "Time in a Bottle" in which a Muppet mutilates and pickles himself) to war (a version of Buffalo Springfield's "For What It's Worth" sung by forest animals being terrorized by mad redneck hunters) to exotic burlesques that predict the melancholia lacing The Dark Crystal and the eternally underestimated The Muppet Movie. Running concurrently with Jimmy Carter's presidency (1976-1981), it's the product, as it can only be, of the Carter administration in the United States: all goofy good intentions, bad fashion, rampant hickism, and confusion.

Overnight (2004) - DVD

***½/**** Image B Sound B+ Extras C
directed by Mark Brian Smith & Tony Montana

by Walter Chaw Bordering on brilliant, Mark Brian Smith and Tony Montana's dry, witty, scabrous Overnight chronicles the rise and fall of grade-A asshole Troy Duffy as he meets his match in Hollywood, a land where being a legendary dick is something so run-of-the-mill that Duffy finds himself among the rabble instead of the king prick that he was on the little Boston hill he called his stomping ground. Duffy's rags-to-riches story (roughneck bartender sells a script to Miramax for a cool $450K in a deal that includes the bar he works at as well as an agreement that he'll direct with no studio interference) is the stuff from which dreams are made--but Harvey Weinstein puts the project in turnaround after just a few months of trying to work with the guy, and Duffy is left holding his paranoia and sense of entitlement in a twenty-ton bag. (I never would have thought it possible to make Harvey Weinstein appear not only the genius but also the sainted hero in a documentary about the film industry, but Duffy and his boilerplate bullshit The Boondock Saints are just the jerk and flick to do it.) There haven't been many movie villains with less political charisma and grace than Duffy has. In that one sense, if in no other, all his delusions of grandeur are justified.

George A. Romero's Land of the Dead (2005)

*/****
starring Simon Baker, Dennis Hopper, Asia Argento, Robert Joy
written and directed by George A. Romero

by Walter Chaw The weakest entry in George Romero's zombie quadrilogy by a long shot, the Toronto-lensed Land of the Dead loses the grit and familiarity of Romero's native Pittsburgh while managing to be every bit as awkward and allegorical as one of his trademark undead. The original concept for Day of the Dead was to have hundreds of trained zombies fighting one another in a post-apocalyptic landscape, a statement--and an eloquent one, as is, or was, Romero's practice--on war being an essential state of man that got scrapped due to budgetary concerns. With the success of films like Shaun of the Dead, 28 Days Later..., and the remake of Romero's own Dawn of the Dead, though, the primogenitor of the genre was given a respectable budget, the boon of CGI, and relatively free reign to continue a trio of films (Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead, Day of the Dead) that besides spawning a legion of Italian knock-offs, were themselves gory, scary, and razor sharp.

Bewitched (2005)

ZERO STARS/****
starring Nicole Kidman, Will Ferrell, Shirley MacLaine, Michael Caine
screenplay by Nora Ephron & Delia Ephron and Adam McKay
directed by Nora Ephron

by Walter Chaw Five minutes into Bewitched I was sick to death of its cutesy, smarmy self-satisfaction. This is Nicole Kidman talking something like Marilyn Monroe crossed with a feather duster, doing her best to work her mouth around Delia and Nora Ephron's vapid dialogue while wishing all the while that someone would solve the mystery of how she could be so accomplished at picking independent projects (Birth, Dogville) and so incompetent in picking mainstream ones (The Stepford Wives, Cold Mountain). It's a movie completely dependent on the belief that everyone has seen the Sol Saks sitcom upon which the flick is based (a belief supported at least in part by the warmth with which a multitude of clips from said sitcom were received), meaning it's the picture for which the term "meta" was created. Not the endlessly replicating screenplay, but the fabled film that is about nothing, is based on nothing, and features big stars struggling to overcome the freakish inconsequence of a project that should never have gotten beyond the what-if stage. (Who outside of coma would even consider starring in a film written by the Ephron sisters, directed by Nora, and produced by Penny freaking Marshall?) This is the film that cotton candy would imagine because it cheerfully has no mind to speak of, making Kidman's freaky, alien, doll-like performance (her Isabel eats buckets of Miracle Whip in one of the film's concessions to its powder-puff inconsequence) a minor stroke of genius, if only in hindsight.

The Women (1939) - DVD

***/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B-
starring Norma Shearer, Joan Crawford, Rosalind Russell, Mary Boland
screenplay by Anita Loos and Jane Murfin, based on the play by Clare Boothe
directed by George Cukor

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Few films fall on their swords so cheerfully and brilliantly as The Women. It's a masterpiece of rationalization that details the injustices men inflict on women until it suddenly shifts gears to explain why it's a woman's fault for giving up--an astounding about-face considering that it was written by women (Anita Loos and Jane Murfin, from Clare Boothe's play) and aims to completely banish men from the frame. But what sounds like a chance for actresses to shine turns into a world-famous bitch-a-thon in which men are a menacing, structuring absence rather than a lion tamed and women can be trusted to tear each other apart before doing any real damage to their master-tormentors. The film is compulsively watchable even as it does terrible things and holds its head high whilst simultaneously cutting it off.

The Agronomist (2004) - DVD

***½/**** Image B- Sound B
directed by Jonathan Demme

by Walter Chaw Reminding a great deal of his remarkable Swimming to Cambodia, Jonathan Demme's now-inspiring, now-shattering The Agronomist is another portrait of a doomed storyteller embellished with subtle audio cues and almost mnemonic camera movements--the stamps of a gifted filmmaker who may never be better than when he works with the stuff of real life. Demme is a superior anthropologist and only a so-so fabulist, his liquid cool visual acuity always second-fiddle, after all, to his gift for background flavour, i.e., the contextualizing power of the right music, the right settings, and the right personalities in supporting roles. Demme's films are each documents of the underneath that find explication in hindsight in his apprenticeship underneath Roger Corman while simultaneously explaining how quickly his auteur identity and better judgment can be subsumed beneath too much legacy (The Truth About Charlie) or too devouring an ego (Oprah's The Beloved)--making his upcoming remake of John Frankenheimer's The Manchurian Candidate an iffy proposition at best. Demme is himself forever just a step away from his vivid gallery of outcasts and iconoclasts.

Heights (2005); Mysterious Skin (2005); It's All Gone Pete Tong (2005)

HEIGHTS
**½/****
starring Glenn Close, Elizabeth Banks, Jesse Bradford, James Marsden
screenplay by Amy Fox, based on her play
directed by Chris Terrio

MYSTERIOUS SKIN
*½/****
starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Brady Corbet, Elisabeth Shue, Michelle Trachtenberg
screenplay by Gregg Araki, based on the novel by Scott Heim
directed by Gregg Araki

IT'S ALL GONE, PETE TONG
**½/****
starring Paul Kaye, Beatriz Batarda, Kate Magowan, Mike Wilmot
written and directed by Michael Dowse

by Walter Chaw Obsessed with doors and passages, façades and captured images, Chris Terrio's Heights takes on the dour, dark, and twisted interpersonal machinations of The Scottish Play its diva Diana (Glenn Close) rehearses for some of the twenty-four hour period covered therein. Heights is a sexual film steeped in betrayals and unmaskings at its root, clothed in symbols for discovery and disguise that are almost literary in their uniform complexity. It's therefore through a cloud of signs that its insular roundelay emerges. Wedding photographer Isabel (Elizabeth Banks), daughter of Diana and fiancée of Jonathan (James Marsden), is fired from her job on the day--on the hour, almost--that a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to cover a foreign war is offered her by an ex-boyfriend. Jonathan, meanwhile, has an ex-boyfriend of his own to suppress as pretty young actor Alec (Jesse Bradford) catches Diana's eye in the hours before she discovers her husband is honouring their open marriage with her understudy. Questions of female sexual jealousy abound, hand in hand with the ruthless barbs of ambition (the price of success weighed against the cost of failure), tied into a messy bow by big ugly truths and the inescapability of our pasts.

Get Rich or Die Tryin' (2005) [Widescreen Edition] - DVD

*/**** Image A Sound A Extras C
starring Curtis "50 Cent" Jackson, Terrence Howard, Joy Bryant, Bill Duke
screenplay by Terence Winter
directed by Jim Sheridan

by Walter Chaw Another in the recent cycle of slick biopics overseen in whole or part by either the subjects themselves or relatives of the same, Jim Sheridan's Get Rich or Die Tryin', the peculiarly flaccid hagiography of two-bit rapper 50 Cent, is an overlong, overly-familiar, wholly sentimental look at a nobody who became a somebody primarily known for getting shot a few times. It's a companion piece of sorts to the also-white-guy-directed Hustle & Flow, a means through which the majority culture tries to reconfigure the minority culture into comfortable terms (minstrel/criminal) that are so entrenched they've been assimilated by the offended. Assimilated to the point, in fact, that it's hard to know if these images, words, and messages are even offensive anymore. Bill Cosby has taken a lot of heat over the past couple of years for his comments about African-American culture losing its mind, but, shocker, he's right. For that matter, arguably no one in popular culture has earned the right to speak out about blacks in the American mainstream more than Cosby.

Batman Begins (2005)

****/****
starring Christian Bale, Michael Caine, Liam Neeson, Katie Holmes
screenplay by Christopher Nolan and David S. Goyer
directed by Christopher Nolan

by Walter Chaw It's perhaps only right that in a year that has seen Robert Rodriguez present a scary-faithful adaptation of Frank Miller's Sin City, Christopher Nolan should re-envision (and revitalize) the Batman film franchise with a picture, Batman Begins, that at last captures the pitch blackness of Miller's seminal graphic novel The Dark Knight Returns (itself a re-envisioning and revitalization of Batman for its time). Batman Begins is to Tim Burton's Batman films as Burton's films are to Adam West's camp-classic television series, so drastically have Nolan and co-scriptor David S. Goyer de-fabulized the mythology. Compare, for starters, a sequence in the 1989 film where Batman shines a little penlight in the eyes of an over-curious lady-fair while chauffeuring her in the Batmobile to the modern iteration in which Batman trashes the Gotham police force en route to getting a young lady an antidote to a concentrated militarized hallucinogen that, unchecked, could inspire her to rip her own face off.

The Reivers (1969) + Tom Horn (1980) - DVDs

THE REIVERS
*½/**** Image A Sound B
starring Steve McQueen, Sharon Farrell, Will Geer, Michael Constantine
screenplay by Irving Ravetch and Harriet Frank, Jr., based on the novel by William Faulkner
directed by Mark Rydell

TOM HORN
**½/**** Image A- Sound A-
starring Steve McQueen, Linda Evans, Richard Farnsworth, Billy Green Bush
screenplay by Thomas McGuane and Bud Shrake
directed by William Wiard

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover The oldest, most tired story to beguile the male artist is the Moment at Which Innocence is Irretrievably Lost. Most writers try their hand at it at some point, and I really wish they wouldn't: it suggests they'd rather be stupidly oblivious to not just the pains but also the rewards of adulthood. It's a boring default trauma, but at least when William Faulkner did it (in The Reivers), it was a boring default trauma with genius digressions that occasionally distracted from the emptiness of the narrative line. Not so Mark Rydell's big-screen adaptation of The Reivers, from which all of Faulkner's background about the landscape and the history and his characters' desperate lives has been excised, leaving the innocence-losing adventures to hog the spotlight and make you wish you were watching something that aspired to dissipation for a change.

Shaun of the Dead (2004) + A Dirty Shame (2004)|A Dirty Shame - DVD

SHAUN OF THE DEAD
***½/****
starring Simon Pegg, Kate Ashfield, Nick Frost, Lucy Davis
screenplay by Simon Pegg & Edgar Wright
directed by Edgar Wright

A DIRTY SHAME
**½/**** Image A- Sound A Extras A+
starring Tracey Ullman, Johnny Knoxville, Chris Isaak, Selma Blair
written and directed by John Waters

by Walter Chaw Shaun of the Dead isn't a spoof, it's a traditional zombie film introduced as a romantic-comedy and infected with a sly British-cum-"The Simpsons" intelligence and sensibility. Director Edgar Wright, who co-wrote the film with star Simon Pegg, made his mark with a smart, hilarious Channel 4 comedy series called "Spaced", a show that bears comparison to "The Family Guy" in its pop-culture genius and frequent fantasy non sequiturs. The genesis of Shaun of the Dead appears to be an episode of "Spaced" in which Pegg, having an unfortunate trip, hallucinates himself shooting hordes of zombies. That the picture is born from a joke on a television show offers endless possibilities for interpretation, best among them the tidy read that television is still the best means towards auto-zombification.

Flavor of the Month: FFC Interviews Greg Harrison

June 12, 2005|I met Greg Harrison on a sunny Colorado day. Lanky and stylish, if a little over-dressed for the temperature in black pinstripe-on-pinstripe, his appearance betrayed a man who's been living out of a suitcase and looking at the indistinguishable insides of hotels. In town to pimp November, his sophomore follow-up to Groove, Mr. Harrison has surprising heroes and an interesting story of how he got into the business; a shame that his film is an empty experiment in styles and homages that tend to titillate the festival audience--where November has found its momentum--but infuriate or bore the wider audience to which the picture now aspires. It looks great, but it's a gimmick stretched just barely long enough to fit the "feature" description. Mr. Harrison seems like a smart guy with a good, healthy respect for the history of alternative cinema. Here's hoping his next project is up to his speed.

November (2005); Brothers (2004); Ladies in Lavender (2005)

NOVEMBER
*/****
starring Courteney Cox, James LeGros, Michael Ealy, Nora Dunn
screenplay by Benjamin Brand
directed by Greg Harrison

Brødre
**½/****
starring Connie Nielsen, Ulrich Thomsen, Nikolaj Lie Kaas, Bent Mejding
screenplay by Anders Thomas Jensen
directed by Susanne Bier

LADIES IN LAVENDER
*½/****
starring Judi Dench, Maggie Smith, Natascha McElhone, Daniel Brühl
screenplay by Charles Dance, based on the short story by William J. Locke
directed by Charles Dance

by Walter Chaw There are as many middling to miserable movies in the foreign and domestic independent market as in the oft-maligned mainstream. If there are around five hundred films released in a twelve-month period, after all, only thirty or so are ever in contention for the best of the year--and of those, maybe three will be remembered once the hosannas have died down. The vast majority of pictures are just rest areas between elation and outrage; capturing lightning in a bottle is as unlikely for movies as for any product of any other branch of the arts. Here, then, are three smaller films in fast succession caught in the twilight zone of instant forgetfulness and doomed to spend eternity as either the film that was the long lonesome whistle stop for someone's career, or the promising picture that pointed the way to bigger and brighter things.

The Adventures of Shark Boy and Lava Girl in 3-D (2005)

ZERO STARS/****
starring Taylor Lautner, Taylor Dooley, Cayden Boyd, David Arquette
screenplay by Robert Rodriguez and Racer Rodriguez
directed by Robert Rodriguez 

by Walter Chaw So it was written by an eight-year-old and shot in the same horrific 3-D process as Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over, meaning that if you go see The Adventures of Shark Boy and Lava Girl in 3-D, you're an assclown and there's really no helping you. When he's not being an idiot, director Robert Rodriguez is capable of something as subversive--as arrestingly, magnificently inappropriate--as Sin City, but so much of his time is spent indulging his kids that history may come to see him as the last word on why children shouldn't be the arbiters of culture. Around the age of five, I once sat watching an anthill for eight hours straight, fully entertained; I have no doubt that it wouldn't make for a good movie. And so the legion of folks, critics included, prone to qualifying their takes on children's films by saying that kids will enjoy it are, in fact, not saying a damn thing. Of course your children will enjoy it--given enough flashing lights and farting noises, they'll like a George Lucas movie. For five dollars and a screaming headache less, you could entertain your precious tots with a box of matches and a can of beans.

The Cincinnati Kid (1965); The Thomas Crown Affair (1968); Junior Bonner (1972) [Western Legends] - DVDs

THE CINCINNATI KID
***/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B+
starring Steve McQueen, Edward G. Robinson, Ann-Margret, Karl Malden
screenplay by Ring Lardner, Jr. and Terry Southern
directed by Norman Jewison

THE THOMAS CROWN AFFAIR
*½/**** Image B Sound B Extras B
starring Steve McQueen, Faye Dunaway, Paul Burke, Jack Weston
written by Alan R. Trustman
directed by Norman Jewison

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover I imagine our American readers are astonished to learn that Norman Jewison is lionized in English Canada. Rest assured, it's not because we think his films are better than flimsy liberal mush (even if we pretend otherwise)--it's because for the longest time, he was the biggest fish in our cinematic pond. Until the rise of Cronenberg and his many disciples, Jewison was, expat or not, the highest-profile Canuck director in the game, and our nation's disbelief at his success has allowed him to seem more important than he actually is. Though he's good at nice-guy friendliness rendered with a modicum of craft, anything more ambitious comes off a little strained. Thus, his downplaying of the grim parts of The Cincinnati Kid makes the film a tolerable entertainment, while his self-consciously "creative" The Thomas Crown Affair wears out its welcome pretty fast.

Rescue Me: The Complete First Season (2004) - DVD

Image B Sound B- Extras B
"Guts," "Gay," "Kansas," "DNA," "Orphans," "Revenge," "Butterfly," "Inches," "Alarm," "Immortal," "Mom," "Leaving," "Sanctuary"

by Walter Chaw I liked Denis Leary and Peter Tolan's FX network TV series "Rescue Me" unconditionally once I'd seen the first three episodes, the last of which includes a scene of a father and son communicating in a coded language that left me vulnerable in a way I find extraordinarily uncomfortable. But if the show worked for me, after giving some thought as to the whys and wherefores, I like it with a few grave reservations about the types of things that I like and, more relevantly, about the kinds of programs that have found a voice right there along the edge of the mainstream over the past couple of years. I say this having never watched an episode of "Lost" or "Desperate Housewives", but the best new television ("Deadwood", in particular, is without hyperbole like bearing witness to Shakespeare) seems involved in razing civilization in the wake of 9/11 and redefining it in terms of the basest kind of animal logic. "Post-apocalyptic" is one description--science-fiction where men and the politics of living need to reorganize along stringent biological lines. (I'm thinking that "Lost" probably applies.) A scene in the seventh episode of "Rescue Me" ("Butterfly") where firefighter Tommy Gavin (Leary) goes to a union doc and gets three prescriptions--for insomnia, depression, and impotence--speaks concisely to the state of medicated post-modern man: asleep, happy, and erect.

The Dead Zone: The Complete Second Season (2003) - DVD

Image B+ Sound A- Extras A
"Valley of the Shadow," "Descent," "Ascent," "The Outsider," "Precipitate," "Scars," "Misbegotten," "Cabin Pressure," "The Man Who Never Was," "Dead Men Tell Tales," "Playing God," "Zion," "The Storm," "Plague," "Deja Voodoo," "The Hunt," "The Mountain," "The Combination," "Visions"

by Walter Chaw I'll say this at the get-go, that "The Dead Zone", the television series, will never completely escape the shadow of David Cronenberg's enduring feature film adaptation of the Stephen King source novel, and that Anthony Michael Hall is a pale substitute for Christopher Walken, particularly for Walken at what might be the actor's finest hour. Luckily, Hall has an easier time shedding his John Hughes days, having doubled in size (he's still trim, just not Farmer Ted), donned a black leather pea coat (mine found the Salvation Army bin about five episodes in--I never, ever want to look like Hall in Vancouver playing Johnny Smith), and acquired a Vulcan arch to his brow that all but screams "serious actor." Yet there's something since "The X-Files" that rubs me wrong about most American shows shot north of the 49th Parallel: the genericness of the setting doesn't scream Anytown, USA so much as "Canada: it's cheaper and blander up here." Lacking atmosphere and vibrancy, "The Dead Zone" is an extrapolation, especially in Season Two, of the further adventures of John Smith, a reluctant clairvoyant who can touch any person or thing (including air, which raises its own set of problems/questions) and summon up visions of past or future that inevitably put Johnny in the position of a powder-dipped saint in a Mexican parade.

The Nomi Song (2004) - DVD

***/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras A-
directed by Andrew Horn

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Though I'm only peripherally acquainted with the current '80s New Wave revival, it's hard for me not to see Klaus Nomi as singular even within its context. As Andrew Horn's documentary The Nomi Song points out, he was a professional among amateurs, a trained opera singer who put his then-unmarketable falsetto skills to use by crashing the goofy East Village art scene and becoming the very fusion of pop and high art that was only half-seriously proposed by its core scenesters. Sealing the deal of his act--an androgynous amalgam of Weimar cabaret, kabuki stylization, and assorted dada inflections--was an ethereal voice that indeed made him seem like the creature from another planet. Sad, then, to note that he not only wound up cheating collaborators integral to his initial fame, but also died of AIDS before he could make an end run on the mainstream like the one he did on the underground.

Broken Lance (1954) - DVD

***/**** Image A+ Sound B+
starring Spencer Tracy, Robert Wagner, Jean Peters, Richard Widmark
screenplay by Richard Murphy, based on the novel by by Philip Yordan
directed by Edward Dmytryk

by Walter Chaw Released the same year as his better-known The Caine Mutiny, disgraced director Edward Dmytryk's melancholic Broken Lance completes a double-pronged apologia for naming names before the HUAC. With the former film, Dmytryk sees himself possessed by madness; with the latter, he sees himself at the mercy of a world obsessed with rituals emptied of their meaning--and all the things he loves betrayed by his dogged fidelity to an older code of ethics. Though Broken Lance is often compared to "King Lear", it's more accurate to call it a run at the kind of end-of-the-trail film that would crop up a lot more in the western genre during the 1960s (The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Ride the High Country, Cimarron, and so on). But the film is the death knell for one man's--Dmytryk's--idealism, and what's fascinating is the extent to which the passing of a single man's hope registers in nearly the same key as the passing of the Old West as a genre. The saga of masculinity as it's embedded in the western clarifies itself with just this one, small, eloquent example.

Rarer Still: FFC Interviews Joan Chen & Alice Wu

June 5, 2005|There's perhaps no better illustration of the generation gap between Chinese persons who've grown up in the United States and their immigrant parents than sitting down at a table in the conference area of Denver's Hotel Monaco with Joan Chen, crowned the "Chinese Elizabeth Taylor" at the tender age of 14, and Alice Wu, the young former software engineer making her writing/directing debut with the lesbian ethnic sitcom Saving Face. Resplendent at 44, Ms. Chen has a deliberate way of speaking that's almost as intimidating as the fact that she never once met my eyes, while Ms. Wu, talking fast, using her hands, addressed me in a way forthright, almost aggressive. I felt admonished more than once by Ms. Chen as she talked about the creative arts as essentially selfish, and I felt challenged a time or two out of the blue by the irrepressible Ms. Wu, who chose to take adversarial positions on a few occasions where there wasn't any kind of natural polarity. Two different ways of approaching conversation, both instantly recognizable from my own experiences with a Chinese mother and father and the women with whom they would occasionally set me up before I did the near-unthinkable and married a white girl. Blonde, too. You could hear the screams back in Nanking--and Cape Cod, come to think of it.

The Sandlot (1993) + The Sandlot 2 (2005) - DVDs

THE SANDLOT
*½/**** Image A Sound B+
starring Tom Guiry, Mike Vitar, Patrick Renna, Chauncey Leopardi
screenplay by David Mickey Evans & Robert Gunter
directed by David Mickey Evans

by Walter Chaw Playing like a particularly sickening distillation between A Christmas Story, Stand By Me, The War, and the dangerously insipid TV show "The Wonder Years", David Mickey Evans's The Sandlot is a tired coming-of-age retread that mashes baseball, puppy lust, group vomiting, stepfathers, and fear of giant dogs and black people into an amateurishly- written and directed, period pop-scored nostalgia piece. Its messages of understanding, anti-bullying, befriending losers, and pretending the fat kid stuffing Ho-hos into his mouth doesn't make you sick are as timeless as they are trite. When an annual Fourth of July sandlot game unfolds in slow-motion against a backdrop of fireworks and Ray Charles's "America," all you need know of Evans's love for the easy manipulative gimmick is revealed in one broad stroke.

Lords of Dogtown (2005)

*½/****
starring Emile Hirsch, Victor Rasuk, John Robinson, Michael Angarano
screenplay by Stacy Peralta
directed by Catherine Hardwicke

by Walter Chaw Because Catherine Hardwicke never met a rack zoom she didn't massage or a hard-luck adolescent's lament she didn't exploit, seeing her as a match for Stacy Peralta's semi-autobiographical account of the Zephyr skateboard team's halcyon days doesn't require that much of a squint. Directed like a heart attack and edited in such a way that most every scene ends with something breaking or someone running away, the picture is what baseball folks would call a "loud out"--a ball hit with pepper that peters out on the warning track; it doesn't even get an asterisk on the scorecard. Lords of Dogtown is the fictionalization of Peralta's interesting if overlong documentary Dogtown and Z-Boys, which detailed how the skateboard fad evolved from a combination of a lack of good surfing, the invention of urethane wheels, and a drought that created backyard terror-domes of skater-bliss in forcing California residents to drain their swimming pools. And what Lords of Dogtown lacks in characterization and narrative meat it makes up for in epileptic flash-edits, jittery camera work, and two interpretive dance sequences that drag on for long enough to point a long finger at the silliness of the whole endeavour. Call it S.E. Hinton for the new millennium, the romanticization of bad behaviour in a frantic stew turgid enough to embalm instead of bronze. Between this and her hysteria opus thirteen, Hardwicke is making a name for herself as the world's coolest aunt: arrested development in one hand, shot of Jack in the other, bail money in her back pocket.

The Phantom of the Opera (2004) [2-Disc Special Widescreen Edition] - DVD

Andrew Lloyd Webber's The Phantom of the Opera
*½/**** Image A+ Sound A+ Extras A
starring Gerard Butler, Emmy Rossum, Patrick Wilson, Miranda Richardson
screenplay by Andrew Lloyd Webber & Joel Schumacher
directed by Joel Schumacher

by Walter Chaw At last, the moment where the stars align and professional bad filmmaker Joel Schumacher teams up with ace bad musical spectacle maven Andrew Lloyd Webber to create something that looks for all the world like Batman meets Liberace. There's never been a swooping crane shot Schumacher didn't like and there's never been a scale sung in falsetto to simulate ardour that Webber hasn't massaged; together, the two men give us a guided funhouse tour through a gaudy musical so bereft of real feeling and musicality that its inspiration has obviously run on Broadway for sixteen years now. (Offer a little hosanna that Sarah Brightman isn't in the film.) It's extraordinarily condescending to say so, but Andrew Lloyd Webber's The Phantom of the Opera is the perfect bracer for fans of "The Phantom of the Opera"--no button goes un-popped, no corset goes un-strained, and but for Minnie Driver as jilted diva Carlotta, not a one of the nicely-outfitted cast seems clued-in to the fact that there but for the grace of John Waters does the whole damned thing become The Rocky Horror Picture Show Redux. In fact, the only thing that could save this shambling monstrosity would be a few transvestites mirroring the action at the front of the cinema to the choral approval of the raincoat brigade.