Film Freak Central

Sundance '08: Red

*/****
starring Brian Cox, Tom Sizemore, Kim Dickens, Amanda Plummer
screenplay by Stephen Susco
directed by Trygve Allister Diesen and Lucky McKee

by Alex Jackson Hilariously bad. See it with somebody you love just so you have it in your mutual lexicon. The titular Red, a 14-year-old dog, belongs to Avery (Brian Cox), a small-town store owner. Avery and Red are fishing one lazy afternoon when they are approached by a trio of delinquent teens, who rob them at gunpoint. When Avery is unable to produce a satisfactory amount of money, the leader shoots Red in the head. Avery goes to the boy's wealthy father (Tom Sizemore) to get an apology only to see his accusations dismissed. He can't let this go, however--Red wasn't only his best friend, he was the last remnant of his family. And so he pursues the three boys himself, his rage at this injustice increasingly mounting. A typical scene in the film shows Avery walking into the local gun shop to suss out who bought the shotgun that killed Red. The clerk refuses to divulge the information until Avery tells him, "They shot my dog," at which point the proprietor tells the clerk to give Avery whatever he asks for. He has a dog, too, you see. On a hunting trip he accidentally shot his foot off and the dog started barking for help. That was the last time the little guy ate Alpo, it's been top sirloin ever since. I am not making any of this up. Red is, without irony, a straightforward revenge tale centred on Man's bond with Canine. There is no attempt to explore this material from some kind of sane perspective. Lightly, it suggests that Avery never got over the death of his wife, thus preventing him from forming a romantic bond with other women; and he finds a parental relationship with his adult son (admittedly pretty rotten, we learn through a hilariously melodramatic monologue) too complicated to pursue. He prefers the company of dogs because they're endlessly loyal, loving, and simple--much unlike human beings. The film takes this at face value, never pushing Avery to see that attitude as a crutch and grow as a person. I suppose Red deserves praise for never condescending to the material or copping a superior attitude, but it needs to be a lot more sophisticated if it is to survive even the most rudimentary analysis.

Sundance '08: Be Kind Rewind

***/****
starring Jack Black, Mos Def, Danny Glover, Mia Farrow
written and directed by Michel Gondry

by Alex Jackson Michel Gondry has said he always wanted to make a film like Back to the Future (i.e., a quirky, funny, big-budget movie), and I guess this is his version of it. It has science-fiction, toilet humour, a lovable man-child (à la Adam Sandler or Jerry Lewis, here played by Jack Black), slapstick, romance, and a classic storyline involving evil developers with plans to pave over the community hangout unless the heroes can stop them in time. Gondry clearly wants to break the one-hundred million dollar mark with Be Kind Rewind--and who knows, he just might do it. Much worse films have made the cut. There's something wonderful and crazy about Gondry's utter lack of cynicism. He treats crowd-pleasing blockbuster filmmaking like a genre on which he'll put his personal stamp. I mean this lovingly, but you might need to be French to be this wacky. Be Kind Rewind is a thrift shop and video store in urban New Jersey that has yet to transition from VHS to DVD. It's owned and operated by Mr. Fletcher (Danny Glover), who, having learned that his building will be demolished and his business relocated to the projects, takes off to figure out how to save the store, leaving Mike (Mos Def) in charge. After Mike's best friend Jerry (Black) becomes magnetized and erases every tape on the shelf, the two decide to replace them with their own homemade recreations. The videos don't convince anybody, of course, but they're a huge hit anyway; what at first seems like a celebration of art for art's sake quickly becomes rather achingly poignant. There's one thread in particular that really encapsulates the charm of the film for me. Slightly batty Ms. Kimberly (Mia Farrow), a good friend of Mr. Fletcher, commissions a version of her favourite film, Driving Miss Daisy. Mike is reluctant, as he finds the picture paternalistic and condescending, but he goes along with it only to be driven off the deep end by Jerry's impersonation of Jessica Tandy. Later, they decide to remake the films with the customers in them, casting Ms. Kimberly as Miss Daisy and Mr. Fletcher in the Morgan Freeman role. Suddenly, the nature of Ms. Kimberly's attachment to Driving Miss Daisy becomes clear. (To actually verbalize it seems almost cruel.) To say that Gondry loves all movies is a covert way of saying he loves all people, even crazy white ladies who are racist without understanding that they're racist. That sense of compassion extends to the bad guys, too: when Sigourney Weaver shows up to enforce the copyright notice on the front of the tapes, Gondry has her say to a co-worker, "They think we're the villains, don't they?" The film earns its populist sentiments and then ends on a surprisingly thoughtful note by suggesting that sometimes winning isn't as important as losing with dignity.

Sundance '08: Good Morning Heartache

Riprendimi
**/****
starring Alba Rohrwacher, Marco Foschi, Valentina Lodovini, Stefano Fresi
screenplay by Anna Negri and Giovanna Mori
directed by Anna Negri

by Alex Jackson Broadly speaking, bad movies come in two distinct flavours: boring and obnoxious. I'm always conflicted as to which is worse, but as of this moment, I feel like it would be faint praise to say that Riprendimi (the preferred English title is Good Morning Heartache) is just plain boring. Small-time actor Giovanni (Marco Foschi) and television editor Lucia (Alba Caterina Rohrwacher) are a young Roman couple who have agreed to appear in a documentary about temp workers. The thesis of the documentarians is that the vicarious employment and financial instability of freelance work stunts emotional growth--which would appear to be proven at the start of the film when Giovanni tells his wife that he is no longer in love with her and needs to go "find himself." Meanwhile, Eros (Allesandro Averone), the director assigned to cover Lucia during the break-up, starts falling in love with his subject. Riprendimi director Anna Negri doesn't distinguish between the documentary footage and 'reality,' shooting everything in beautiful 35mm. Is she suggesting that real life and "reel life" have become inextricable for everyone involved? Not really. As opposed to lending this thin material some kind of raison d'être, the documentary angle mostly provides Negri and her co-writer Giovanna Mori a way to approach their material outside of a traditional dramatic narrative. Far from challenging or alienating the audience, Negri's goal seems to be to make the film considerably less demanding. When she gives us a scene of the documentary filmmakers psychoanalyzing their subjects, it's as though she's doing all the work for us. Though I never ran out of empathy for the constantly-feuding Giovanni and Lucia, I did run out of patience. The film goes on and on in circles and never really gets anywhere. Eventually, I found myself staying just to soak in Negri's Italy, a fantasyland of wine, rigatoni, plunging necklines, and hand gestures all marvellously shot with a carefully-cultivated sense of off-the-cuff spontaneity. If there isn't anything of substance to be found in Riprendimi, it's no small consolation to know that it's pretty great wallpaper.

Sundance '08: Choke

*½/****
starring Sam Rockwell, Anjelica Huston, Kelly Macdonald, Brad Henke
screenplay by Clark Gregg, based on the novel by Chuck Palahniuk
directed by Clark Gregg

by Alex Jackson Choke lost me in the very first scene. The hero, Victor Mancini (Sam Rockwell), is at a support group for sex addicts and describing all the regulars for us. There's the housewife who put mayonnaise on her crotch for her dog to lick off. There's the guy who had to have a gerbil removed from his anus. And then there's the cheerleader who needed a stomach pump after swallowing too much semen. I want to talk about the cheerleader. I think Victor said that doctors pumped two quarts out of her stomach. Considering the amount of semen in a typical human ejaculation is about 1.5 to 5 millilitres, that's a lot of blowjobs! Two quarts is around two litres, right? So she would've had to service at least 400 men. Assuming this would take about three minutes apiece, she'd have to have been at it for twenty hours straight, without vomiting up or digesting any of the semen--which, by the way, is completely non-toxic and would not require the use of a stomach pump--in the meantime. What kind of dipshit expects me to buy this? I admit I haven't read Chuck Palahniuk's source novel. I might very well be alone on this--the critics at my press screening were buzzing with anticipation and the gang over at my message board instantly recognized the title.

The Assassination of Jesse James (2007) + Johnny Suede (1991) - DVDs

THE ASSASSINATION OF JESSE JAMES BY THE COWARD ROBERT FORD
***/**** Image A Sound A
starring Brad Pitt, Casey Affleck, Sam Shepard, Sam Rockwell
screenplay by Andrew Dominik, based on the novel by Ron Hansen
directed by Andrew Dominik

by Walter Chaw Kiwi director Andrew Dominick's heroically pretentious The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (hereafter Jesse James) is a deflated anti-western in the tradition of Peter Fonda's The Hired Hand and Terrence Malick's Badlands. Broadly, it's a magnification of the Nixonian malaise that infected the early-Seventies, its suggestion that things aren't much worse now than they were then complicated by three decades of cynicism. As a piece, it's almost completely sapped of energy, though it isn't deadpan like Jarmusch's Dead Man. No, think of it as more of a dirge: not ironic, but post-modern; not a death march, but mournful. It's how J. Hoberman once (derisively) described Body Heat, a "remake without an original"--Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid corrupted by McCabe and Mrs. Miller, the whole of it shot through with an autumnal soft focus that looks exactly like the reunion sequence that pushes the third act of Bonnie and Clyde. It vaguely resembles an insect caught in an amber sepulchre. Yet despite its obvious pedigree, it is all of itself, infused with the spirit of the now, suffused with author Ron Hansen's transcendental prettiness (the film is based on his novel), and, as framed by DP Roger Deakins's painterly eye, overwhelmingly beautiful. Deakins is given the keys to the kingdom here and every moment of Jesse James looks like mythology pulled through a cinematic loom, often leaving the edges of the frame lanolin-indistinct as they trail off into history. I hadn't thought it possible to see our current crises of faith cast as romantic, but there it is.

Sundance '08: Reversion

***/****
starring Leslie Silva, Jason Olive, Tom Maden, Jennifer Jalene
written and directed by Mia Trachinger

by Alex Jackson The key image of Mia Trachinger's Reversion, her follow-up to the eight-year-old, still-undistributed Bunny, is star Leslie Silva's outrageously unkempt Afro and supermodel physique. Trachinger betrays nostalgia for the early-'90s nostalgia for the 1970s. Her cool is a grungy slacker cool, all heroin-chic and deadpan nihilism. She's delightfully fifteen years behind the loop, making a hipster film for an audience that no longer exists. Almost everybody in Reversion looks and acts fashionably homeless. In an early scene, Silva's character Eva even goes into a supermarket with her peers and eats the food right off the shelves! It turns out these people are mutants born without the "time gene." The past, present, and future all co-exist for them in a non-linear fashion. So you would think them philosophically deterministic like the space aliens in Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five, right? Well, sort of, but not quite. Trachinger focuses instead on their amorality. Having never learned to associate a cause with its resulting effect, they steal cars at gunpoint and of course eat out of grocery stores without paying. One of the ideas floating around in the film is that this genetic defect might actually make them more "human" than most humans in that they are freed of the mechanizing effect of Skinner behavioralism. This notion has a kind of adolescent romance to it: they're simultaneously more damaged and more evolved than the rest of us. Nevertheless, Eva hates being a mutant, particularly since she knows that she will somehow shoot and kill her lover Marcus (Jason Olive). The brunt of the plot is focused on their attempts to avoid this inevitable conclusion. So, has the gene hopelessly rendered them free agents or are they cogs of fate? Somehow, Trachinger has convinced me that it's both, and she has the proof if I ever want to study it. The film ends on a softly ambiguous note, and this ambiguity seems to be the mutant version of a triumphant ending. Reversion is too pretentious and dense to be truly elating and, to be perfectly honest, the philosophy appears to be a function of cool rather than the other way around. Yet I can't help but appreciate it on those terms, too. If it's fashionably nihilistic, it's at least earnest and a little romantic about it as opposed to protectively sarcastic. As far as pseudo-science-fiction goes, that makes Reversion worth ten Gregg Arakis.

Sundance '08: American Teen

*/****
directed by Nanette Burstein

by Alex Jackson Real life is just like the movies, according to Nanette Burstein's American Teen. The film follows the adventures of The Brain, The Athlete, The Princess, and The Basket Case as they finish their last year of high school. By the end, we learn that each one of them is a brain, an athlete, a princess, and a basket case. In other words, they're all individuals while being pretty much the same. Burstein seems to have turned complete control of the film over to her subjects and resisted refining anything through her own perspective. The results are predictably excruciating to watch. Via the resources of the cinema (slick photography and editing, animated sequences), the teens are transformed into gods, a needlessly flattering notion to the adolescent ego. You're worried about getting into college? Your boyfriend broke up with you and you're depressed? These problems really are as monumental as they seem; it's substance enough for a feature-length film! Some reviews have complained that the fantasies that inspired the animated sequences are tired clichés: the jock dreams of winning the big game, the geeky kid dreams of getting a girlfriend, etc.. If the fantasy sequences don't have a whole lot of depth, that's because their originators don't have a whole lot of depth, either. What do you expect? They're only 17. The hilariously damning thing about American Teen is that it actually comes across as an accurate depiction of the high-school years. At 26, I think I have a certain distance from adolescence where I'm too young to be shocked by the teenage sex and drinking caught on camera but old enough to be shocked by the petty cruelty and hyper-superficiality that characterizes that age group. Most disturbing is the "Princess" character, who paints a red cock and balls and the word "fag" on a fellow student council member's window simply because she was angry that his "tacky" idea for a prom theme beat out her own. She's afraid that the resulting punishment will affect her chances of getting into Notre Dame. This strikes me as mildly sociopathic behaviour and it creeps me out that she's going to have the resources to blend in with respectable society. (The story of a nude photo e-mailed around school is even more chilling.) Of course, most teenagers grow up and are lucky enough to not have their misadventures memorialized in a feature film. Perhaps the only time I ever plan on seeing American Teen again is if there's a twentieth-anniversary edition where we can hear audio commentary from the now-older subjects as they watch the film. Now that would be redeeming.

The Game Plan (2007) - Blu-ray + DVD

½*/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
starring Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, Kyra Sedgwick, Morris Chestnut, Roselyn Sanchez
screenplay by Nichole Millard & Kathryn Price
directed by Andy Fickman

by Bill Chambers Maudlin trash, The Game Plan makes The Pacifier--one of the prototypes for this slop--look like No Country for Old Men. Again we have a beefcake bachelor (Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson) in a macho profession (football) learning to stop worrying and love the Devil's spawn. The Rock plays star quarterback Joe "The King" Kingman, whose cushy, Elvis-accessorized lifestyle is interrupted by the sudden appearance of a little girl claiming to be his long lost daughter. Named Peyton (not after Peyton Manning or Walter Payton, as a leatherhead would hope, but Nobel Prize-winning M.D. Peyton Rous--an early herald of her precocious pretentiousness), she invites herself to stay for a month while her mother ostensibly does philanthropic work in Africa. In the meantime, Mother or some facsimile is fed the lie that Peyton is away at ballet camp (in January?! The film opens on New Year's Eve), and Joe becomes a pawn in maintaining this illusion by striking a Faustian bargain with Mater Suspiriorium, er, Monique Vasquez (Roselyn Sanchez), the compulsory love interest and gatekeeper of the local prestigious dance academy. (The Game Plan takes place in a Boston so generic it may as well be Metropolis.) Ingratiating herself with Joe's clownish team-mates (no "Playmakers"-style conflicts for these guys), if not his pragmatic--and flatulent!--agent (Kyra Sedgwick, of all people), Peyton ultimately, predictably, succeeds in her kamikaze campaign to be crowned "the best thing that ever happened" to Joe.

Sundance '08: Towelhead

*½/****
starring Summer Bishil, Peter Macdissi, Maria Bello, Aaron Eckhart
screenplay by Alan Ball, based on the novel by Alicia Erian
directed by Alan Ball

by Alex Jackson Based on the available evidence, it's clear that American Beauty worked because Sam Mendes's aesthetic provided a spiritual component that elevated writer Alan Ball's reductive and rather misanthropic satire. If opinion of the film gets worse as time goes by, it may be because Ball's screenplay comes to the fore. Ball's feature directorial debut Towelhead is, to state the obvious, all Ball and no Mendes; it manages to be bad the very first time you see it. Jasira (Summer Bishil) is a half-Lebanese 13-year-old struggling to come to terms with her blossoming womanhood. Her mother (Maria Bello) kicks her out of the house after Jasira lets her would-be stepfather shave her pubic area. She relocates to Texas (the asshole of the United States in the Alan Ball universe), where she moves in with her Lebanese immigrant father Rifat (Peter Macdissi), who slaps her when she comes down for breakfast with her navel exposed and forbids her to use tampons when she has her period. Rifat gets her a job babysitting for next-door neighbour Mr. Vuoso (Aaron Eckhart), a military reservist restlessly awaiting deployment to Iraq on the eve of the first Gulf War. Courtesy of the Vuoso son, Jasira inherits a stack of dirty magazines and discovers how to masturbate to orgasm. Once Mr. Vuoso learns of this, he begins to see her as some potential sexual relief from a loveless marriage.

Sundance '08: The Order of Myths

**/****
directed by Margaret Brown

by Alex Jackson Margaret Brown's The Order of Myths is the flipside to blandly noble docs like The Recruiter. Faithful to the ideal of "objectivity," the typical documentary filmmaker doesn't love anything; Brown's problem is that she loves everything. The result is a film that works very well as cinema: it has a pulse, a mood, a feeling, and is never boring. Yet it also has a terminal case of the cutes, and after it was over I can't say I felt all that edified. The film is about the traditionally segregated Mardi Gras carnival in Brown's hometown of Mobile, Alabama--the white Mobile Carnival Association's celebration and that of the black Mobile Area Mardi Gras Association. There's controversy regarding the white Mardi Gras queen's slave-trading ancestors, who are credited with bringing the very last ship of African slaves to America--illegally, after the trade had been abolished--and forming the "Africa Town" community of Mobile once their smuggling was discovered and the slaves escaped. White residents dismiss an integrated Mardi Gras by saying that blacks want their own celebration. The blacks respond that they don't have a choice. There's a brief bit in the film where we learn that the MCA rents out their floats to the MAMGA as soon as they're done with them. Of course, MAMGA could make their own floats if they only had the kind of Old Money flowing through MCA thanks to centuries of slavery! But I dunno--this doesn't register very high on my social-outrage meter. Given that she's a native of the town, I doubt Brown has enough distance to develop a real perspective on the material. She seems to have made a documentary about Mobile because she loves Mobile. I thought there might be a touch of paternalism when she pays off a scene of a portly black girl reading several essays describing her love of Moon Pies with an elderly black man complaining that he got beads instead of Moon Pies. Except, how would I then explain the scene where we see a white Mardi Gras society of men talk about how you can drink beer through their plastic Mardi Gras masks, even though they're made to look like "Mongoloids"? Stopping just short of condescension, Brown exhibits affection for the idiosyncrasies of white and black Southerners alike. By the end, you realize she isn't even advocating an all-inclusive Mardi Gras as much as simply warmer relations between the camps. In her conception of Mobile, the two have already been integrated.

Sundance '08: The Recruiter

An American Soldier
**/****
directed by Edet Belzberg

by Alex Jackson The Recruiter, which also goes by the moderately less forgettable title An American Soldier, is just another Sundance documentary, barely distinguishable from past efforts like The Ground Truth or Ghosts of Abu Ghraib. The film follows Army recruiter Sergeant First Class Clay Usie as he brings a new generation of soldiers to the front lines. Director Edet Belzberg's splintered narrative sees four recruits go off to boot camp, where they find themselves in way over their heads. Belzberg's thesis seems to be that these recruits are kids--unprepared for the real world, much less the United States Army--who join simply because they are unsure about their future and feel out of place in their families of origin. There's real warmth to Usie's interactions with his recruits. I particularly liked a scene where he coaches a shy, pudgy teenager on the required two-mile run by saying, "You don't even need to worry because I'm not going to let you fail." And I really liked fresh-out-of-high-school Lauren, a butch lesbian into drawing and Slipknot who complains that she's not learning anything in boot camp that will make her "smarter." There's a funny scene that kind of encompasses everything wonderful about puppy love where she holds up a picture of her girlfriend (a moody-looking, slightly Goth type) and proudly informs us, "That's my baby." Later, when she goes home, her mother tells her that in the "real world," you always have to work a job you hate and do things you don't want to, and maybe the Army is good for her if it teaches her to accept this. The subtle suggestion is that the Army doesn't work too well as a vehicle for social mobility, as it reinforces the passivity and blithe acceptance of your lot in life that perpetuates poverty. (Increasingly, I found myself wishing the film were about Lauren's experiences alone.) The Recruiter is ultimately a human story, but beneath this fairly broad Army recruitment topic, Belzberg obviously hopes to give it pseudo-political gravitas. Alas, the film doesn't have enough edge to work. I don't know if it necessarily needs less heart and more bile, but its failure to penetrate, agitate, or provoke renders it just one more digital video doc to add to the pile.

Sundance '08: Yasukuni

***½/****
directed by Li Ying

by Alex Jackson Yasukuni is a Shinto shrine in Tokyo dedicated to the spirits of soldiers who died serving the Emperor of Japan. Included within the 2,466,532 names are 27,863 Taiwanese, 21,181 Koreans, and, most significantly, 1,068 convicted war criminals. The shrine is a centre of controversy for many Asians, some of whom feel their ancestors were forced to serve the Emperor and thus wouldn't want to be listed. Others could never endorse a shrine that features, for example, the names of Mukai Toshiaki and Noda Takeshi, the two officers who participated in a beheading contest during the massacre at Nanking. Still, the shrine is held in high regard among many Japanese. Former Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi visited it annually, a move that severely damaged Japanese relations with China and Korea. This constant opposition has inspired many hardcore Japanese fundamentalists, such as a group of Nanking deniers, to congregate at the shrine, where they throw their own counter-protests. Director Li Ying, born in China and living in Japan, regards Yasukuni with a curious ambivalence. He's not objective, per se--he's subjective but cold. It seems that his joint identification with both the Chinese and Japanese keeps him from wanting to take sides. The centrepiece of Yasukuni the documentary is Ying's extensive interview with an elderly sword-maker, who made the very swords Toshiaki and Takeshi used in their beheading contest. Treating this craftsman with a great deal of warmth, Ying gently teases out how the sword-maker feels about Koizumi visiting the Yasukuni shrine. His nervous response is that Koizumi was merely honouring the dead soldiers and praying there will never be another war--and strangely enough, I found myself unable to come up with a lucid counterpoint to this. Reflect that war criminals constitute less than 0.1% of the names and you can see how the Yasukuni shrine might be regarded admirably. Yasukuni is a dull film, slow-paced and with a rather muted colour palette. This has the curious effect of giving everything a certain pall of death. Ying doesn't regard the fundamentalists with anger as much as a slight sense of pity. The Japan they're trying to resurrect appears to be dead; I think they're trying to reclaim a piece of the Japanese identity that is gone forever. The very last shot is of the Tokyo cityscape (the first time we've really seen it in the film), and it provides a fascinating context for everything that preceded it. In the face of increasing urbanization, the Japan of the past--militarism and all--has essentially become obsolete.

Man on Fire (2004) - Blu-ray Disc

*½/**** Image A+ Sound A+
starring Denzel Washington, Dakota Fanning, Marc Anthony, Radha Mitchell
screenplay by Brian Helgeland, based on the novel by A.J. Quinnell
directed by Tony Scott

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. What used to be the province of the Times Square grindhouse and drive-in movie theatres is now star-vehicle blockbuster fodder, making the revenge sub-genre's subversive qualities and carefully-cultivated atmosphere of frustrated rage suddenly a reflection of the demons plaguing mainstream culture. Though certainly more substantive than the hit-and-run remake of Walking Tall, Tony Scott's Man on Fire falls far below the redemptive qualities of Kill Bill, Vol. 2, offering the world the logical end result of a nation operating under the twin godheads of fear and Old Testament vengeance: a slickefied, iconographic, racist, sexist, huckster version of the grimy, low rent, pleasantly exploitative The Punisher.

Swamp Thing: The Series (1990-1991) - DVD

Image B- Sound B Extras C
"The Emerald Heart," "Falco," "Treasure," "From Beyond the Grave," "Blood Wind," "Grotesquery," "New Acqaintance," "Natural Enemy," "Spirit of the Swamp," "Legend of the Swamp Maiden," "The Death of Dr. Arcane," "The Living Image," "The Shipment," "Birthmarks," "The Dark Side of the Mirror," "Silent Screams," "Walk a Mile in My Shoots," "The Watchers," "The Hunt," "Touch of Death," "Tremors of the Heart," "The Prometheus Parabola"

by Ian Pugh In many ways the anti-Darkman, Wes Craven's Swamp Thing also saw a comic-book scientist irrevocably transformed into a monster at the hands of hoodlum saboteurs. Alas, unlike Sam Raimi with his masterpiece, Craven is unable to strike a balance between seriousness and silliness, falling too far in the latter direction before the picture finally collapses under its own snarky weight. It is, however, the film that enlightened me as to why B-movie anti-appreciation is such a worthless endeavour, since Swamp Thing never bothers to pretend that it's anything more than a couple of dudes in rubber suits wailing on each other. When you're making a movie in the "MST3K" mindset, as Craven appears to be, you don't really have a movie in mind, per se--you're just positioning actors as they recite lines from a script.

The Adventures of Young Indiana Jones: Volume One (1992-1993/1996-1999) - DVD

Image B Sound B Extras B
"My First Adventure," "Passion for Life," "The Perils of Cupid," "Travels with Father," "Journeys of Radiance," "Spring Break Adventure," "Love's Sweet Song"

by Ian Pugh It's important to understand that Indiana Jones didn't make history cool, but even more important to understand that history didn't make Indy cool, either. "The Adventures of Young Indiana Jones" (formerly known as "The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles" and henceforth "Young Indy") purports to portray the daring archaeologist's early years as he travels around the world with his father (Lloyd Owen), meeting famous figures and going to great pains to teach the young'ns in the audience a thing or two about the artists and revolutionaries of the early twentieth century. Because the attempt to educate binds itself to a down-to-earth approach, the series completely ignores the fact that Indy's franchise appeal lies in a careful collision of the mundane and the fantastic, of reality and fantasy. It's one thing to demythologize the romantic violence often attributed to the Old West but quite another to try to demythologize something so immersed in theology and the supernatural that to abandon them is to lose something inextricably vital to the concept. Imagine if Raiders of the Lost Ark had ended with the Ark of the Covenant revealed to be an ornate box full of dust, sans the wrath of God, and you'll understand the basic problems that plague "Young Indy".

Con Air (1997) [Unrated Extended Edition] - DVD|Blu-ray Disc

***½/****
DVD - Image A- Sound A-
BD - Image C+ Sound A- Extras D+
starring Nicolas Cage, John Cusack, John Malkovich, Steve Buscemi
screenplay by Scott Rosenberg
directed by Simon West

by Alex Jackson The plot is simplicity itself: Cameron Poe (Nicolas Cage) has just completed his training as an Army Ranger; he goes to a local bar to celebrate with his pregnant wife (Monica Potter), gets assaulted by some thugs, kills one in the ensuing fight, and is convicted of manslaughter. Eight years later, his sentence is up and he hitches a prison flight that happens to be transferring a number of the country's most dangerous and renowned criminals, including Cyrus "the Virus" Grissom (John Malkovich), a brilliant psychopath who murders people just because he can; Nathan "Diamond Dog" Jones (Ving Rhames), a black militant who wrote a book in prison that is now being made into a feature film with Denzel in talks for the lead; William "Billy Bedlam" Bedford (Nick Chinlund), who slayed his wife's parents, brothers, and dog when he discovered the missus in bed with another man; and Johnny 23 (Danny Trejo), a serial rapist with 23 heart tattoos on his arm. ("One for each of my bitches," he explains.) Cyrus leads a revolt on the plane, killing or capturing all of the guards and hijacking the flight. But like Alan Rickman in Die Hard, Tommy Lee Jones in Under Siege, or Powers Boothe in Sudden Death, he has no idea that one of the hostages he's holding is a classically-trained ass-kicker!

Underdog (2007) - Blu-ray Disc

ZERO STARS/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
starring Jim Belushi, Peter Dinklage, John Slattery, Patrick Warburton
screenplay by Adam Rifkin and Joe Piscatella & Craig A. Williams
directed by Frederik Du Chau

by Bill Chambers Whereas the gigantic Underdog balloon that hovers over New York City during the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade is at least conceptually interesting (American commerce's idea of a Stalin statue), Underdog, Disney's charmless live-action resurrection of the beloved super-mutt, has no subtext, just a bunch of mercenary actors and technicians who can barely disguise their contempt for the film's screenplay, which lazily embellishes the extraordinary-pet genre with scatology while weaving a maddeningly derelict patchwork of recycled tropes like the grieving widower/orphan, the unattainable hottie, and the disgraced cop. It's fair to say I hate Underdog, but I hate it because it doesn't even have the will to finish what it starts. Only two things about it are kind of fascinating, and only then from a largely extratextual standpoint. The first is that in taking the title character out of the cartoon realm, the digitally-manipulated slapstick pratfalls and clumsy landings look grotesquely painful for the beagle(s) playing Underdog. They should've gone the Scooby-Doo route and fashioned a 3-D likeness of the 2-D prototype, since the sight of man's best friend hurtling through panes of glass really has no intrinsic comic value.

It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia: Seasons 1 & 2 (2005-2006) - DVD

Image B Sound C+ Extras D+
"The Gang Gets Racist," "Charlie Wants an Abortion," "Underage Drinking: A National Concern," "Charlie Has Cancer," "Gun Fever," "The Gang Finds a Dead Guy," "Charlie Got Molested," "Charlie Gets Crippled," "The Gang Goes Jihad," "The Gang Gives Back," "Dennis and Dee Go On Welfare," "Mac Bangs Dennis' Mom," "The Gang Runs for Office," "Hundred Dollar Baby," "Charlie Goes America All Over Everybody's Ass," "The Gang Exploits a Miracle," "Dennis and Dee Get a New Dad"

by Ian Pugh When confronted with the inescapable, unfunny vacuum that is Carlos Mencia, I used to tell people I hated that which was self-consciously controversial. I soon realized, though, that any property that genuinely pushes the envelope has to be aware of its material on some level; it's probably more accurate to say I hate that which features controversy as its only selling point. Hostel Part II's DVD cover may sport an obnoxious stamp guaranteeing that it is "shocking and explicit," but the film puts those qualities to use in a capitalist redux of The Wicker Man. "The Sarah Silverman Program." may touch on taboo subjects, but it does so to question the self-aggrandizing persona of its star. Then you've got "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia" (hereafter "Sunny"), which parades the horrible actions of its lead characters as if they meant something on their own, believing that its toe-in-the-water venture into forbidden territory exempts it from criticism. Take a long, hard look at the episode list above, and know that just about every teaser sequence in "Sunny"'s first two seasons is followed by a smash cut to one of those titles--and in this brief moment, find everything you need to know about the episode and its comedic trajectory. The quality of the writing itself is ultimately summed up by the subsequent opening-credits montage showcasing the various sights and non-sights of Philly by night. While personal experience dictates that sunny days and dispositions are indeed hard to come by in that city, the fact that the series must directly invert the implications of its name reeks of desperation to have its weak antics seen as darkly ironic.

Film Freak Central's Top 10 of 2007

Well the road is out before me
and the moon is shining bright
what I want you to remember
as I disappear tonight
today is grey skies
tomorrow is tears
you'll have to wait 'til yesterday is here.

-Tom Waits, "Yesterday Is Here"

Break it down: 2007 resets the early days of the New American Cinema--the last years of the Apollo space program (and sure enough, we have a documentary about the remaining Apollo astronauts in David Sington's In the Shadow of the Moon) and Watergate, the death twitches of the 1960s gradually revealing themselves in pictures. Whether this leads to another Golden Age or merely another stutter-step on the road of our grief remains to be seen, but past the halfway point of the first decade of the new millennium (and six years after 9/11 hit its own reset button), the 2000s have already established themselves with the usual single-minded purpose. At the least, celebrate the resurgence of American cinema--the mainstream re-establishing itself as not just a dream factory, but a garden of auteur delights as well. 2007, above anything else, heralds a banner year for the auteur theory (Paul Thomas Anderson, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, the Coens, Tarantino, Sean Penn, Cronenberg, Brad Bird, Kim Ki-duk, David Fincher, Ken Loach, Ang Lee, Brian DePalma--and flicks I didn't catch by guys like Paul Schrader, Francis Ford Coppola, Tsai Ming-liang, John Sayles, and so on), with the films, like Sweeney's razors, functioning as extensions of the directors' biological selves.