Film Freak Central

Chick Flick Politick - DVDs + Blu-ray Disc

BRIDE WARS (2009)
ZERO STARS/**** Image N/A Sound C Extras F
starring Kate Hudson, Anne Hathaway, Kristen Johnston, Candice Bergen
screenplay by Greg DePaul and Casey Wilson & June Diane Raphael
directed by Gary Winick

CATCH AND RELEASE (2007)
ZERO STARS/**** Image B Sound B Extras C
starring Jennifer Garner, Timothy Olyphant, Kevin Smith, Juliette Lewis
written and directed by Susannah Grant

WHAT HAPPENS IN VEGAS (2008)
[JACKPOT EDITION]
***/**** Image N/A Sound B Extras B+
starring Cameron Diaz, Ashton Kutcher, Rob Corddry, Dennis Miller
screenplay by Dana Fox
directed by Tom Vaughan

27 DRESSES (2008)
[WIDESCREEN EDITION]
**/**** Image N/A Sound B Extras B+
starring Katherine Heigl, James Marsden, Malin Akerman, Edward Burns
screenplay by Aline Brosh McKenna
directed by Anne Fletcher

ENCHANTED (2007)
**/**** Image A Sound A Extras D
starring Amy Adams, Patrick Dempsey, James Marsden, Susan Sarandon
screenplay by Bill Kelly
directed by Kevin Lima

by Walter Chaw I'm not kidding: Bride Wars is reptilian, hateful stuff, biologically engineered to disrespect--with maximum efficiency--the precise demographic to which it targets itself. It's like an antibody to the middle-class, medium-attractive girl by virtue of encouraging her to associate herself with upper-middle-class, gorgeous avatars and, through that agency, act in ways completely hostile towards common sense and decency. It's an epidemic of bad taste: there's no other way to read the suggestion that size-zero Kate Hudson is a fat, disgusting swine for gaining five pounds pounding chocolate and cookies for a couple of weeks, is there? What's harder to explain is a scene in the middle where rivals/best friends Liv (Hudson) and Emma (Anne Hathaway) do a slutty dance-off in a strip-club for the crown of "sexiest bride." Here's the weird part: one of them actually cares when the other one wins. In the middle of a movie that can only hope to attract women as its audience, here's a scenario that physically exploits women as opposed to just emotionally or situationally (as is more to be expected). It's like a soul-kiss and a reach-around between Vin Diesel and Paul Walker to cap off a nice street race. But does it have the same chilling effect on its would-be audience, or does it instead feed into the electric lesbian tension that serves as motor for all these "Sex and the City" knock-offs? Never mind, it's not important. What is somewhat important is that Gary Winick, the heir-apparent to Garry Marshall's chick-flick throne, be discouraged from ever directing another movie.

Gigi (1958) - Blu-ray Disc

GIGI (1958)
**½/**** Image A Sound A- Extras A-
starring Leslie Caron, Maurice Chevalier, Louis Jourdan, Hermione Gingold
screenplay by Alan Jay Lerner, based on the novel by Colette
directed by Vincente Minnelli

GIGI (1949)
**/**** Image C+ Sound C
starring Gaby Morlay, Danièle Delorme, Jean Tissier, Yvonne de Bray
scteenplay by Pierre Laroche, based on the novel by Colette
directed by Jacqueline Audry

by Alex Jackson How weird is it that Vincente Minnelli's Gigi won the Academy Award for Best Picture in 1958, when four years later Stanley Kubrick's adaptation of Lolita barely got the seal of approval? I suppose we shouldn't underestimate the power of sex to scandalize when it isn't disguised as love. In Gigi, wealthy Parisian playboy Gaston Lachaille (Louis Jourdan) is fixated on 15-year-old Gigi (27-year-old Leslie Caron), the granddaughter of family friend Madame Alvarez (Hermione Gingold). He likes her precisely because she is still a child. Most of the women Gaston goes with are accustomed and entitled to a certain standard of living. By contrast, Gigi can appreciate being spoiled. Gaston also admires her irreverence--how she can cheat at cards and tease him about it, or how she can effortlessly tell him off after he insults her dress. She hasn't learned how to be a lady yet; her rough edges haven't been smoothed out and she's capable of challenging him. There's a life to her that's drained out of most of the other women he meets long before he gets there.

High School Musical (2007) [Remix]; High School Musical 2 (2008) [Extended Edition]; High School Musical 3: Senior Year (2009) [Deluxe Extended Edition] - Blu-ray Discs

HIGH SCHOOL MUSICAL
**/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras C+
starring Zac Efron, Vanessa Hudgens, Ashley Tisdale, Lucas Grabeel
written by Peter Barsocchini
directed by Kenny Ortega

HIGH SCHOOL MUSICAL 2
½*/**** Image B Sound B+ Extras C-
starring Zac Efron, Vanessa Hudgens, Ashley Tisdale, Lucas Grabeel
written by Peter Barsocchini
directed by Kenny Ortega

HIGH SCHOOL MUSICAL 3: SENIOR YEAR
*½/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B-
starring Zac Efron, Vanessa Hudgens, Ashley Tisdale, Lucas Grabeel
screenplay by Peter Barsocchini
directed by Kenny Ortega

by Ian Pugh Not exactly the cultural apocalypse its Disney Channel roots and preteen popularity would have you believe, High School Musical is no worse, really, than any other cookie-cutter musical in recent memory. A by-product of pandering to a young, young audience, its biggest sin is that it alleges a greater basis in reality than its more "adult" contemporaries: The movie endeavours to give credence to the familiar tropes of storybook romance and rags-to-riches by applying them to the politicized zoo known as high school. Troy (Zac Efron) is captain of the basketball team and Gabriella (Vanessa Hudgens) is a brainiac, but all it takes is one happenstance karaoke duet for them to discover they both enjoy singing a whole lot, and their pursuit of that mutual interest throws the entire clique-driven society of East High into disarray. Although it's bolstered by a few genuine chuckles, the premise can't hide the fact that the high-school backdrop actively highlights how inconsequential the whole blasted thing truly is.

The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor (2008) [2-Disc Deluxe Edition]; Wanted (2008) [2-Disc Special Edition]; Mamma Mia! [2-Disc Special Edition] - DVDs

THE MUMMY: TOMB OF THE DRAGON EMPEROR
ZERO STARS/**** Image A Sound A Extras D
starring Brendan Fraser, Jet Li, Maria Bello, Michelle Yeoh
screenplay by Alfred Gough & Miles Millar
directed by Rob Cohen

WANTED
*/**** Image A Sound A Extras D
starring James McAvoy, Morgan Freeman, Terence Stamp, Angelina Jolie
screenplay by Michael Brandt & Derek Haas and Chris Morgan, based on the comic books by Mark Millar and J.G. Jones
directed by Timur Bekmambetov

MAMMA MIA!
ZERO STARS Image B Sound A Extras C-
starring Meryl Streep, Pierce Brosnan, Colin Firth, Stellan Stellan Skarsgård
screenplay by Catherine Johnson, based on the songs of ABBA
directed by Phyllida Lloyd

by Walter Chaw Fast becoming the post-Welles RKO without a commensurate Val Lewton to grease the transition from art to filthy lucre, today's Universal Pictures finds itself a long, long way from Psycho with a bumper crop of genuinely bad movies reverse-engineered from past box-office champions. Each of them--The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor, Wanted, and Mamma Mia!--broke the golden 100-million dollar mark, since they were made with just the Benjamins in mind; sadly, only the criticism of flaccid attendance was likely to curb an endless march of identical pictures this year. For the simpleminded, the success of these films despite the near-universal condemnation of them by anyone with a working prefrontal lobe is proof positive that critics are out of touch with the common man. On the contrary, I'd offer that, asked whether he thought the atrocious The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor (hereafter The Mummy 3) would be financially successful, the average critic would have said he'd be surprised if it didn't do a hundred-mil in its first three weeks of release. Out of touch is believing that something is good because it makes a lot of money.

Hannah Montana: The Complete First Season (2006-2007) + Alvin and the Chipmunks (2007) [Special Edition] - DVD

HANNAH MONTANA: THE COMPLETE FIRST SEASON
Image C Sound C+ Extras D+
"Lilly, Do You Want to Know a Secret?," "Miley Get Your Gum," "She's a Super Sneak," "I Can't Make You Love Hannah If You Don't," "It's My Party and I'll Lie If I Want To," "Grandma Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up to Play Favorites," "It's a Mannequin's World," "Mascot Love," "Ooh, Ooh Itchy Woman," "O Say Can You... Remember These Words?," "Oops! I Meddled Again," "You're So Vain, You Probably Think This Zit is About You," "New Kid in School," "More Than a Zombie to Me," "Good Golly, Miss Dolly," "Torn Between Two Hannahs," "People Who Meet People," "Money for Nothing, Guilt for Free," "Debt it Be," "My Boyfriend's Jackson And There's Gonna Be Some Trouble," "We Are Family--Now Get Me a Water!," "Schooly Bully," "The Idol Side of Me," "Smells Like Teen Sellout," "Bad Moose Rising"

ALVIN AND THE CHIPMUNKS
½*/**** Image B- Sound B- Extras D+
starring Jason Lee, David Cross, Cameron Richardson, Jane Lynch
screenplay by Jon Vitti and Will McRobb & Chris Viscardi
directed by Tim Hill

by Ian Pugh Contemplating the factors that pushed Hannah Montana into the limelight is automatically more interesting than devoting the least amount of attention to the eponymous Disney sitcom that introduced her to her gullible constituency. The concept behind the show, a kind of rock star wish-fulfillment that teaches its tweener audience that if you tell enough people you're famous, you'll get there eventually, has proved the foundation on which to make a mint. But sit down to watch "Hannah Montana" itself and you won't see much more than the same episodic drivel from the Disney Channel--standardized junior-high antics cushioned by lame slapstick. Any significance you cull from a deeper reading invariably leads back to the construction of the carefully-groomed personality that serves as its centrepiece. Flanked by her best friends (Mitchel Musso and Emily Osment) and supported by her manager/father (Billy Ray Cyrus) and brother Jackson (Jason Earles), Miley Stewart (Miley Cyrus) divides her time between a typical teenage life and a tour through fame as bubblegum diva Hannah Montana. What she actually does with that time hardly matters.

The Polar Express (2004) [Two-Disc Widescreen Edition] - DVD|The Polar Express Presented in 3-D - Blu-ray Disc

**/****
DVD - Image A Sound A- Extras C
BD - Image A Sound A Extras C
screenplay by Robert Zemeckis & William Broyles Jr., based on the book by Chris Van Allsburg
directed by Robert Zemeckis

by Walter Chaw Robert Zemeckis's The Polar Express seems to be the culmination of a lot of his weird obsessions: his celebration of middle-class Aryan heroes; his tendency towards the tense and anxious; his love of casting an actor in multiple roles; Tom Hanks; Eddie Deezen; and that subtle quality of nightmare that infects even the most innocuous of his movies. (Zemeckis produces horror films in his spare time under the "Dark Castle" imprint; I wonder if he'll ever, What Lies Beneath notwithstanding, just cut the bushwah and make a straight shocker.) When Christopher Lloyd's Nazi-esque Judge Doom from Zemeckis's Who Framed Roger Rabbit "dips" an adorable animated shoe into a corrosive sludge, Zemeckis foreshadows the engine that drives all of The Polar Express. It's infernal entertainment and comparisons to Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will are unavoidable (particularly in a disturbing rally scene), but it's hard to know how much of that intense martial creepiness is intended as satire, and how much of it is just what lies beneath.

Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007) + Persepolis (2007)|Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007) - Blu-ray Disc

SWEENEY TODD: THE DEMON BARBER OF FLEET STREET
****/**** Image A Sound A Extras B+
starring Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter, Alan Rickman, Sacha Baron Cohen
screenplay by John Logan, based on the musical by Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler
directed by Tim Burton

PERSEPOLIS
***½/****
screenplay by Vincent Paronnaud & Marjane Satrapi, based on the novel by Satrapi
directed by Vincent Paronnaud & Marjane Satrapi

SWEENEY TODD: THE DEMON BARBER OF FLEET STREET

by Walter Chaw Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street is easily Tim Burton's best film. It's uncompromised, deceptively uncomplicated, perverse in the most delightful way, and, maybe most importantly, it represents at last the full potency of Burton's German Expressionist vision. No surprise that it's closest allayed to Burton's previous career-pinnacle, his self-contained fairytale Edward Scissorhands--sporting, like that film, a black-clad protagonist festooned with blades who achieves his adolescence (and purpose) in a slanted attic chamber. This is another gothic romance, no explanation for snow but instead demonstration of the frugal repast of revenge's dish served cold. It's best described as a diary of the unrequited, a journal of terminal, irresolvable frustration. A violent, giallo-lurid succession of leering throat-slashings with a soupçon of cannibalism (I'm kind of shocked, truth be told, that the picture was completed in this form), this adaptation of Stephen Sondheim's genius 1979 musical is a timely film, boasting the sort of contemporary topicality of which only eternal works like Sondheim's are capable. Whatever the circumstances of its creation, watching it in this way speaks explicitly to the dismal tide of 2007, the desire to recover the illusory past (its hero speaks of his younger self as "naïve")--the recognition at the last that things are only ever as terrible as they've ever been; and that the only refuge from despair is embracing the tiny moments of human connection that make life liveable.

Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993) - DVD|[Collector's Edition] - Blu-ray Disc

***/****
DVD - Image A Sound A
BD - Image A- Sound A+ Extras A-
screenplay by Caroline Thompson, based on a poem by Tim Burton (adaptation by Michael McDowell)
directed by Henry Selick

by Vincent Suarez You know the feeling: too many movies, too little time. You walk down the corridor of your local multiplex, relishing the titles on the marquees and posters, and you know that many will unfortunately have to be seen on home video. If you're lucky, you'll make wise choices, but, occasionally, your home viewing includes that film you regret not seeing theatrically. For me, Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas (hereafter Nightmare) is one of those films. Having grown weary of Burton's quirkiness after the disappointing Batman Returns, I passed up Nightmare in favour of movies I now cannot recall; what a shame. Fortunately, Touchstone's optical disc presentations of this magnificent film (the previous LaserDiscs and last year's DVD release) provide more than a glimpse of what was surely a wonderful theatrical experience.

Tootsie (1982) [25th Anniversary Edition] + The Pied Piper (1972) - DVDs

TOOTSIE
**/**** Image B Sound A- Extras B
starring Dustin Hoffman, Jessica Lange, Teri Garr, Dabney Coleman
screenplay by Murray Schisgal and Larry Gelbart
directed by Sydney Pollack

THE PIED PIPER
*½/**** Image C Sound C
starring Donovan, Jack Wild, John Hurt, Donald Pleasence
screenplay by Andrew Berkin, Jacques Demy & Mark Peploe
directed by Jacques Demy

by Ian Pugh SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. The fatal flaw of Tootsie can be traced back to the fact that, here at least, Teri Garr is a better actress than Jessica Lange, playing a better character in a more interesting scenario. It only takes one scene to realize that: Garr's Sandy Lester, long-time friend and protégé to douchebag actor Michael Dorsey (Dustin Hoffman, who possesses enough self-awareness as a douchebag actor to be the film's saving grace), bursts into tears because a promising role on the soap opera "Southwest General" requires the one quality she can't play: "a woman!" Suddenly, you're thrust into the compelling inner circle of a profession fraught with self-doubt, false friends, and the attempt to decipher a very slippery perception of "reality."

The Frank Sinatra and Gene Kelly Collection - DVD

ON THE TOWN (1949)
**/**** Image C Sound B-
starring Gene Kelly, Frank Sinatra, Betty Garrett, Ann Miller
screenplay by Adolph Green and Betty Comden, based on the play
directed by Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen

TAKE ME OUT TO THE BALL GAME (1949)
**/**** Image B+ Sound A- Extras C
starring Frank Sinatra, Esther Williams, Gene Kelly, Betty Garrett
screenplay by Harry Tugeno and George Wells
directed by Busby Berkeley

ANCHORS AWEIGH (1945)
**/**** Image C+ Sound B- Extras D
starring Frank Sinatra, Kathryn Grayson, Gene Kelly, Dean Stockwell
screenplay by Isobel Lennart
directed by George Sidney

by Alex Jackson One of the cinema's most startling moments in recent years was a close-up of Paul Dano early on in There Will Be Blood. Dano was never meant to get that friendly with the camera. I'm not sure I can properly convey this notion, but his close-up created a dissonant effect. It felt as though director Paul Thomas Anderson had broken some unstated rule of filmmaking. I think the reason it's so jarring is that the Close-Up wasn't designed for actors like Paul Dano. It was designed for somebody like his co-star, Daniel Day-Lewis. To put it as delicately as possible, Dano wasn't blessed with a "movie star" face. He's a bit strange-looking. In contrast, Daniel Day-Lewis is traditionally handsome and truly "belongs" on the silver screen. In and of himself, he's as cinematic as anything you're ever going to find in the movies.

The Wiz (1978) [30th Anniversary Edition] - DVD

*/**** Image B Sound B+ (DTS) B- (DD) Extras C-
starring Diana Ross, Michael Jackson, Nipsey Russell, Richard Pryor
screenplay by Joel Schumacher
directed by Sidney Lumet

by Alex Jackson The Wizard of Oz is a quintessentially American work that could not possibly have been produced by any other culture. Doing a "blaxploitation" version of the story, then, seems considerably less tacky than doing one of Dracula or Frankenstein. Dorothy is a farm girl from Kansas living with extended family in something beyond the traditional nuclear-family structure. There's a strong sense of community in the film as well: in addition to Auntie Em, Uncle Henry, and the hired hands, Professor Marvel, the inspiration for the Wizard of Oz, is there at Dorothy's bedside when she wakes up. Dealing with themes of solidarity among the working class, The Wizard of Oz isn't a film about the black experience, but with just a little tinkering, it easily could be.

Shirley Temple: America's Sweetheart Collection, Volume 4 - DVD

CAPTAIN JANUARY (1936)
**/**** Image B Sound A-
starring Shirley Temple, Guy Kibbee, Slim Summerville, Buddy Ebsen
screenplay by Sam Hellman, Gladys Lehman, Harry Tugend, based on the novel by Laura E. Richard
directed by David Butler

JUST AROUND THE CORNER (1938)
**/**** Image B- Sound C+
starring Shirley Temple, Joan Davis, Charles Farrell, Amanda Duff
screenplay by Ethel Hill and J.P. McEvoy and Darrell Ware
directed by Irving Cummings

SUSANNAH OF THE MOUNTIES (1939)
*/**** Image A Sound A-
starring Shirley Temple, Randolph Scott, Margaret Lockwood, Martin Good Rider
story by Robert Ellis, Helen Logan, based on the novel by Muriel Dennison
directed by Walter Lang and William A. Seiter

by Alex Jackson I'm thinking the common thread connecting Captain January, Just Around the Corner, and Susannah of the Mounties, the three films that comprise the fourth volume of Fox's Shirley Temple "America's Sweetheart Collection", is the sexualizing of child superstar Temple. There's progress: in Captain January, she's a sexual object; in Susannah of the Mounties, she's a sexual actor; and in Just Around the Corner, she's in transition between the two roles. I promise you, this isn't me projecting onto these blandly innocent children's movies with my filthy little mind, it's right there on the surface. In fact, even when you reflect that they are essentially dealing with child sexuality, all three films remain blandly innocent. They never get at anything that might be genuinely subversive. The Temple persona is so plastic and anaesthetic that adding sex to the mix seems merely a logical extension of her brand.

Shirley Temple: America's Sweetheart Collection, Volume 5 - DVD

MAURICE MAETERLINCK'S THE BLUE BIRD (1940)
**½/**** Image C Sound B-
starring Shirley Temple, Spring Byington, Nigel Bruce, Gale Sondergaard
screenplay by Ernest Pascal
directed by Walter Lang

THE LITTLE PRINCESS (1939)
**½/**** Image B Sound B
starring Shirley Temple, Richard Greene, Anita Louise, Ian Hunter
screenplay by Ethel Hill and Walter Ferris, based on the novel by Frances Hodgson Burnett
directed by Walter Lang

STAND UP AND CHEER! (1934)
***½/**** Image D+ Sound C+
starring Shirley Temple, Warner Baxter, James Dunn, Nigel Bruce
story by Will Rogers and Philip Klein, dialogue by Ralph Spence
directed by Hamilton MacFadden

by Alex Jackson As you might know, Shirley Temple had been considered for the role of Dorothy Gale in The Wizard of Oz but was eventually passed over either because her singing voice was inadequate or because MGM and 20^th Century Fox couldn't come up with a satisfactory trade. In an attempt to beat MGM at their own game, Fox bought the rights to playwright Maurice Maeterlinck's "L'Oiseau Bleu" ("The Blue Bird") with an eye on Temple for the lead. Ironically, The Blue Bird became her very first box-office dud and signalled the end of her career as a child actress.

Hairspray (2007)

***/****
starring Nikki Blonsky, John Travolta, Michelle Pfeiffer, Queen Latifah
screenplay by Leslie Dixon
directed by Adam Shankman

by Walter Chaw It's pretty easy to take the neo-hipster stance of having been there when Divine ate dog shit and, because of status conferred by said endurance of John Waters at his most insouciantly "fuck you," to denounce the Broadway-ification of his already-mainstream-courting Hairspray--now turned into a movie based on a musical based on the original movie--as "Waters-lite." Except that Waters's satire at its best has always been a gloss on cults of pop (this is a guy who made an iconic cameo on "The Simpsons", for God's sake)--and after Polyester, all of his movies run like book for the plastic-fantastic of the Great White Way anyway. Artificiality is actually the point, affectedness another; like Italian, the only way to speak the language is to exaggerate past the point of embarrassment. Still, the key to Waters is the requirement that by assembling a collection of misfits to play his assembly of misfits, not a one of them takes to their duty ironically. Waters is the same kind of archivist as Quentin Tarantino in that way: the casting can be interpreted as a post-modern joke, but the performances need to be true to the essential nostalgia driving the casting. John Travolta in Pulp Fiction, in other words, needed very much to play it as straight as John Travolta is capable of playing it.

Happy Feet (2006) [Widescreen Edition] - DVD

***/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B-
screenplay by George Miller, John Collee, Judy Morris, Warren Coleman
directed by George Miller

by Walter Chaw For no other purpose, really, than that I loved its unabashed perversity and darkness, I used to make an annual ritual of watching George Miller's Babe: Pig in the City. The image of Mickey Rooney in full clown regalia, sopping at an ice cream cone, is the stuff of nightmares, as well as a marvellous example of how much Aussie director George Miller got away with halfway around the world from his financiers. As a kid's show, Babe II's success has a lot to do with it recognizing how familiar is fear and isolation in the life of a youngster, and providing solutions to things that alarm instead of denying their existence. Watching the director's latest, Happy Feet, the moment Mumble (voiced by Elijah Wood, danced by Savion Glover) woke up in a zoo after an odyssey in pursuit of a commercial fishing vessel and was told by his inmate, a HAL-voiced fellow penguin, "Try the water, Dave. The water's real, Dave," I realized that we were down the same rabbit hole with Miller, seeing zoo animals as insane at best, made so by the drudgery of routine and the inability to communicate with their jailers. It's a fertile image amidst Happy Feet's most fertile passage (and its connection to the Starchild sequence in 2001 is the second such allusion in a film this month (see also: The Fountain)), one that ends with Mumble tying the secret of interspecies understanding to that old minstrel trick of tap-dancing for a very particular audience of otherwise disinterested aliens.

The Rodgers & Hammerstein Collection (1934-1965) - DVD

THE SOUND OF MUSIC (1965)
*½/**** Image B Sound B Extras B+
starring Julie Andrews, Christopher Plummer, Richard Haydn, Eleanor Parker
screenplay by Ernest Lehman
directed by Robert Wise

THE KING AND I (1956)
****/**** Image A Sound A Extras A
starring Deborah Kerr, Yul Brynner, Rita Moreno, Martin Benson
screenplay by Ernest Lehman, based on Margaret Landon's play "Anna and the King of Siam"
directed by Walter Lang

SOUTH PACIFIC (1958)
*½/**** Image A+ (Theatrical) A (Roadshow) Sound B Extras C+
starring Rossano Brazzi, Mitzi Gaynor, John Kerr, Ray Walston
screenplay by Paul Osborn, based on Tales of the South Pacific by James A. Michener
directed by Joshua Logan

CAROUSEL (1956)
**/**** Image A Sound A Extras C
starring Gordon MacRae, Shirley Jones, Cameron Mitchell, Barbara Ruick
screenplay by Phoebe and Henry Ephron, based on the Ferenc Molnár's play "Liliom"
directed by Henry King

LILIOM (1934)
****/**** Image B Sound B Extras B+
starring Charles Boyer, Madeleine Ozeray, Robert Arnoux, Roland Toutain
screenplay by Robert Liebmann, dialogue by Bernard Zimmer, based on the play by Franz (a.k.a. Ferenc) Molnár
directed by Fritz Lang

STATE FAIR (1945)
½*/**** Image B- Sound B- Extras A
starring Jeanne Crain, Dana Andrews, Dick Haymes, Vivian Blaine
screenplay by Oscar Hammerstein II, based on the novel by Philip Strong
directed by Walter Lang

STATE FAIR (1962)
**/**** Image A Sound A Extras C
starring Pat Boone, Bobby Darin, Pamela Tiffin, Alice Faye
screenplay by Richard Breen; adaptation by Oscar Hammerstein II, Sonya Levien, Paul Green
directed by José Ferrer

OKLAHOMA! (1955)
***/**** Image A (CinemaScope) C (Todd-AO) Sound B+ Extras B-
starring Gordon MacRae, Gloria Grahame, Shirley Jones, Gene Nelson
screenplay by Sonya Levien and William Ludwig
directed by Fred Zinnemann

by Walter Chaw God, The Sound of Music is so freakin' nice. Nazis are the bad guys, no controversy there; raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens--have you no heart, man? But when I like Rodgers & Hammerstein--and I like them quite a lot, truth be wrenched--I like their ambiguity, their irony, their goddamned fatalism in the face of eternal romantic verities. Consider the animal (jungle?) heat of "Shall We Dance," cut off like a faucet by the fascistic abortion of The King and I's secondary love story; or the persistence of love despite abuse and abandonment in Carousel; or the slapdash kangaroo court that justifies love in Oklahoma!. This is all so much more than the slightly shady (and ultimately redeemed) shyster of The Music Man--this is reality in the midst of the un-, sur-, hyper-reality of the musical form. Yet what The Sound of Music offers up is a military man shtupping an ex-nun with no corresponding sense of fetishistic eroticism. How is it that the two most popular adult Halloween costumes engaged in naughty Alpine sexcapades could be totally free of va-va-va-voom? It's so relentlessly wholesome that of course it's the most beloved artifact of its kind in the short history of the movie musical: If you're of a certain age, the plot of the thing is almost family mythology, resurrected every holiday like a dusty corpse at a decades-long Irish wake gone tragically awry. That ain't a grin, baby, it's a rictus.

Cry-Baby (1990) [Director's Cut] - DVD

***½/**** Image A- Sound C+ Extras A+
starring Johnny Depp, Amy Locane, Susan Tyrrell, Iggy Pop
written and directed by John Waters

by Walter Chaw Cry-Baby, John Waters's brilliant, ebullient satire of 1950s teensploitation, finds Johnny Depp and Amy Locane immaculately cast opposite one another as the ne plus ultra "He" and "She" of the Golden Age's doomed-youth pictures. One part Elvis musical calamity, one part queer camp exhibition, it's a cult classic for a reason: The second part of Waters's Hairspray nostalgia trip, Cry-Baby is a jubilant send-up of the lie of atomic-age perfection fixed broadly to the lie of modern sophistication that Waters would confront for the rest of his "legit" career. It's exactly what I imagine a David Lynch rockabilly rebel flick would be like--and indeed, when you get down to it, I don't know whether Lynch and Waters are really all that different.

The Year Without a Santa Claus (2006) - DVD

ZERO STARS/**** Image B- Sound B
starring John Goodman, Ethan Suplee, Delta Burke, Chris Kattan
written by Larry Wilson and Tom Martin, based on the book by Phyllis McGinley
directed by Ron Underwood

by Ian Pugh I'm not really sure how anyone could consider Santa Claus the cure for December commercialism in this day and age, but it appears to be a popular sentiment right now. Before I knew that the network-television abortion The Year Without a Santa Claus existed, I suffered through The Santa Clause 3: The Escape Clause, a film that carries the same awful message in a way that's worth mentioning. Tricked by Martin Short's Jack Frost into relinquishing the job of Santa Claus to him, Tim Allen's Scott Calvin returns to the North Pole to discover that Christmas has become "Frostmas," an overwrought celebration of capitalism with all the child-screaming and toy-grabbing that implies. With Jack-Santa having literally taken the "Christ" out of Christmas, Tim Allen strangely becomes a surrogate Jesus figure attempting to reclaim his holiday from the money-grubbing fat man of false jolliness, who of course represents the holiday season as we know it in reality. The Santa Clause 3 essentially amounts to an episode of Allen's sitcom "Home Improvement", which is to say not only that it's terrible, but also that its attempt at a metaphor is crude and obvious--come on, Santa Claus saving Christmas from himself? In retrospect, though, I have to admit that its joyfully malevolent predisposition to be such a balls-out hypocrite is a real head-scratcher worthy of further dissection.

Dreamgirls (2006)

**/****
starring Jamie Foxx, Beyoncé Knowles, Eddie Murphy, Danny Glover
screenplay by Bill Condon, based on the play by Tom Eyen
directed by Bill Condon

by Walter Chaw Hailed as one of the more innovatively-staged musicals in the modern pantheon of such entertainments, Dreamgirls, transferred to the big screen, is nothing special in the way of something trying way too hard to dazzle. It's the plain girl swathed in a gallon of makeup: there's so much misdirection that you actually try harder to dig up a foundation that can't bear the scrutiny. Said base for Dreamgirls is of course one of the most successful Broadway musicals (6 Tonys, 1,522 performances) from an era that counts "Les Miz", Andrew Lloyd Weber's dreadful operettas, and, what, "A Chorus Line"(?), among its chief rivals. You want to attribute its Broadway success to its spinning stage, choreographed and motorized $3.2M tower set, and coy deconstruction of bitch-goddess Diana Ross and her Supremes, but it's hard not to wonder if it merely benefits from the relative quality of its competition. Then again, its success is likely the by-product of a fairly consistent mass appetite for cookie-cutter musical biopics, which have been self-satirized to near-total inconsequence first by VH1's "Behind the Music" series, then to quickly-diminishing returns at the multiplex by Ray and Walk the Line.

The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) + Shock Treatment (1981) [Bodice-Ripping Fabulous 3-Disc Set] - DVD

THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW 
***½/**** Image A Sound A Extras A-
starring Tim Curry, Susan Sarandon, Barry Bostwick, Richard O'Brien
screenplay by Jim Sharman and Richard O'Brien
directed by Jim Sharman

SHOCK TREATMENT
**½/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras B+
starring Jessica Harper, Cliff De Young, Patricia Quinn, Richard O'Brien
screenplay by Richard O'Brien and Jim Sharman
directed by Jim Sharman

by Alex Jackson SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. I have never attended an actual theatrical showing of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, and for the longest time, I doubted that I was completely receptive to every significant nuance and intricacy of the film, what with its name dropping of Michael Rennie and the presence of a performer called "Little Nell" who wears Mickey Mouse ears during the "Touch-A, Touch-A, Touch Me" number. The picture's esoteric quotient has always eluded my radar, preventing me from fully identifying with it, much less condescending to it. This idea of familiarity with extra-textual elements or training in a specific method of watching as essential in the evaluation process is a perennial issue in film criticism for me. My default position is that the two things don't have that much to do with each other: Learning more about a film can deepen an appreciation that was already there, but the initial call of yea or nay is one that every king, scholar, and prole is equally qualified to make. Beautiful idea, I think--it helps me sleep at night and keeps me from being too scared to see and write about films outside my realm of experience. So why is it that I am so intimidated by this movie?

The Producers (2005) [Widescreen] - DVD

ZERO STARS/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B
starring Nathan Lane, Matthew Broderick, Uma Thurman, Will Ferrell
screenplay by Mel Brooks & Thomas Meehan
directed by Susan Stroman

by Walter Chaw Max Bialystock (Nathan Lane) is responsible for exactly the kind of garbage that runs for years on the Great White Way, except that for the purposes of The Producers, his plays close in a couple of days, leaving Bialystock constantly on the verge of bankruptcy and at the mercy of a long, horny line of elderly widows and rich spinsters. I don't think old women in pillbox hats renting Nathan Lane by the hour for a few dry humps is particularly funny (or realistic)--but some people, especially those reared on vaudeville, think it's hysterical. When auditor Leo Bloom (Matthew Broderick) casually mentions that it might actually be more profitable to stage a very expensive flop, Max hatches a plan in which the two will mount the worst stage production in history, thus bilking their investors out of a coupla million. After finding the worst playwright (Will Ferrell), the worst director (Gary Beach), and the worst actress (Ulla (Uma Thurman)), they proceed to stage a musical that celebrates the Third Reich called "Springtime for Hitler". Lo and behold, it's taken as tongue-in-cheek and becomes the talk of the town. You'd call it "irony" except that this eventuality is not at all unexpected--and wasn't even when it happened the first time, in 1968.

Love Me Tender (1956) [Cinema Classics Collection] - DVD

***/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B
starring Richard Egan, Debra Paget, Elvis Presley, Robert Middleton
screenplay by Robert Buckner
directed by Robert D. Webb

by Alex Jackson SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. As far as drugs go, Love Me Tender is more pot than heroin. It won't curl your toes, but you'll get a smooth, mellow buzz. It's sort of the perfect film to watch on a Sunday morning on TCM while you're eating a bowl of Cap'n Crunch. Love Me Tender doesn't have a lot of urgency and it moves pretty slowly, yet there's never a moment in which it's not compulsively watchable--and at just a shade under ninety minutes, it doesn't wear out its welcome. Director Robert D. Webb keeps the camera pretty still and shoots the outdoor scenes in long shot, the better to encapsulate the sheer enormity of the under-settled frontier. All this space lends the film a distinctly melancholy feel; there's something lonely and isolated about the picture. But bittersweet is a flavour, too (a good one), and melancholy is the right attitude for this story and the right attitude for a film titled after Elvis Presley's tragically romantic hit single "Love Me Tender." This was the only film that ever killed off Elvis--and it earns the right to do so.

Dimples (1936) + Mad Hot Ballroom (2005) - DVDs

DIMPLES
**/**** Image F (colorized)/C (b&w) Sound C
starring Shirley Temple, Frank Morgan, Robert Kent, Stepin Fetchit
screenplay by Arthur Sheekman and Nat Perrin
directed by William A. Seiter

MAD HOT BALLROOM
*/**** Image B Sound B
directed by Marilyn Agrelo

by Alex Jackson When Chuck Workman juxtaposed Shirley Temple with Adolf Hitler in his underseen 1995 documentary The First 100 Years, he was dramatizing America's suckling on the opium pipe of Temple musicals while Hitler rose to power in Germany. This is reflective of the general attitude towards Temple in the 1940s: not only was she no longer cute, she also embodied a sense of brain-dead frivolousness in American film that the zeitgeist started snuffing out through soppy sentimentality, hardened disillusionment, or some combination of the two. Movies got heavy in the Forties, and Temple could not keep up with them.

Sundance '06: A Darkness Swallowed

***/****
directed by Betzy Bromberg

by Alex Jackson A Darkness Swallowed is an experimental film consisting entirely of extreme close-ups of fossils, skins, rocks, and water droplets. There is a brief passage of voiceover in the beginning and a full-length soundtrack, but that's it as far as narrative cues are concerned. The film is supposed to be about the "nature of cellular memory" and "the physical traces that memories leave behind on and inside our bodies, and on and inside the earth." I had a considerably more banal philosophical question on my mind while watching it: I saw things in these shots, things like faces and animals and such--do I see them because they're there and I'm meant to see them, or do I see them because I'm trying to assign order where there isn't any? You go in thinking that a film like this is going to ask you to work harder, but really it's asking you to work less. It's very much a passive experience, you just look at the screen and let it wash over you; the questions are ultimately secondary to the visceral experience. A Darkness Swallowed is wallpaper, but it's very nice wallpaper. When she introduced A Darkness Swallowed to the audience, filmmaker Betzy Bromberg mentioned that she has to hold a day job to pay the bills. I have to admit, I was a little disappointed to discover that this day job is in the movie industry (she served as an optical supervisor on such films as Lady in White, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, and Bram Stoker's Dracula) instead of in a bank or at an accounting firm or something. Part of the pleasure of A Darkness Swallowed is in its homemade quality: Bromberg shot it in Academy-ratio 16mm and you sometimes get the feeling that you're watching "In Search of... with Leonard Nimoy". I mean that lovingly. What I like most about Bromberg's aesthetic is that she doesn't try to beautify ugly things, she thinks they're beautiful enough just being ugly. That's comforting, I think, and kind of wonderful. In the interest of full disclosure, I wouldn't want to see A Darkness Swallowed every day of my life. When all's said and done, it's still not the real thing. But I feel fortunate for getting to experience it even just this once. It's really groovy, man.

Curly Top (1935) - DVD

*½/**** Image F (colorized)/C (b&w) Sound C
starring Shirley Temple, John Boles, Rochelle Hudson, Jane Darwell
screenplay by Arthur J. Beckhard and Patterson McNutt
directed by Irving Cummings

by Alex Jackson It's funny how a film like Curly Top can feel so weird and so derivative at the same time. Starting with the writing, there is barely any plot to speak of. Shirley Temple is Curly Top, the orphaned child of two circus performers who has only her older sister Mary (Rochelle Hudson) to protect her from mean headmistress Mrs. Higgins (Rafaela Higgins). After becoming enchanted with Curly during a visit to the orphanage, wealthy benefactor Edward Morgan (John Boles) seeks to adopt her under the alias "Mr. Jones." Mary insists that she be adopted along with Curly, as she had promised her parents that the two would never separate. Morgan agrees, but as he spends more time with them he begins to fall in love with Mary. Though Mary likes Morgan back, she's engaged to the handsome Jimmie Rogers (Maurice Murphy). It's up to Curly to bring her "two favourite grown-ups" together.

The Tales of Hoffmann (1951) [The Criterion Collection] - DVD

****/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Moira Shearer, Robert Helpmann, Leonide Massine, Robert Rounseville
written and directed by Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover No doubt thinking of their gushy ballet epic The Red Shoes, Pauline Kael once dismissed the pretensions of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger by declaring the duo "the Franco Zefferellis of their day." This annoyed me intensely. Putting aside the fact that the erotic-sadist Archers seem natural Kael material, her smug put-down completely misapprehends their levelling approach to popular and elite art. A poser, Zefferelli reduces Shakespeare to soap opera and pretends it's still Shakespeare. His ideas are schlocky and titillating, yet he insists that they're the citadel of culture, in effect dishonouring both the articulation of what used to be called "high" art and the honest reasons we keep wallowing in trash. The Archers, meanwhile, were aware of the high/low distinction--they simply refused to enforce it, instead commingling with the sublime and the ridiculous as though they were equally critical to a healthy aesthetic diet, thus upholding Kipling's dictum (frequently repeated in Powell's memoirs) that "all art is one, man--one!"

Rent (2005)

½*/****
starring Rosario Dawson, Taye Diggs, Wilson Jermaine Heredia, Jesse L. Martin
screenplay by Steve Chbosky, based on the play by Jonathan Larson
directed by Chris Columbus

by Walter Chaw On the list of painful experiences, the modern Broadway musical ranks fairly high, so it's fair to wonder how an adaptation of Rent--by Chris Columbus, of all people--could have struck anyone as a bright idea. In all honesty, though, pretending not to understand the reasoning behind a project like this is disingenuous snobbery, because when something this terrible has proven to be that popularly galvanizing, it's only a matter of time, really, before Hollywood moneymen come calling with dollar signs in their eyes and memories of Chicago dancing in their heads. (I can only assume that that's also the reason the legendarily awful Phantom of the Opera got a greenlight with Joel Schumacher at the helm--and that Matthew Broderick and Nathan Lane's stupendously popular (and similarly awful--film and play both) The Producers is set to bow this Christmas.) But with Rent, in place of a name like Webber or Mel Brooks to drive its inexplicable success, you find a genuine middlebrow cause célèbre, loaded well beyond safe with Message carried on the backs of a thundering stable of Alphabet City freaks and caricatures of freaks, each of them wilting from a romantic wasting disease (AIDS, naturally, or 'disenchantment' in place of source La Boheme's 'consumption')--the same one, not-so-incidentally, that claimed creator Jonathan Larson a few tragic months before Rent's triumphant debut on the Great White Way.

Oliver! (1968) [Special DVD & CD Gift Set!] - DVD

***/**** Image A- Sound A-
starring Ron Moody, Oliver Reed, Harry Secombe, Mark Lester
screenplay by Vernon Harris, based on the novel by Charles Dickens and the play by Lionel Bart
directed by Carol Reed

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover There's an exception to every rule, and Oliver! bucks one of the most depressing: that every bloated, twilight-of-old-Hollywood musical is crass and overblown. To be sure, Carol Reed was far from his The Third Man/Outcast of the Islands heyday when he directed this Oscar-winning roadshow, and one can sense a sigh of resignation as he puts on the mega-musical feedbag. But unlike the once-great craftsmen who started turning in horrors like Hello, Dolly!, the movie has style and credibility--Reed is genuinely interested in the narrative and the mood, as opposed to what other declining directors would highlight: the production design and the money. Oliver! is still sealed in an expensive cocoon, but what's inside is a world worth watching and enjoying.

The Breakin' DVD Collection (1984) - DVD

BREAKIN'
**½/**** Image C- Sound D+
starring Lucinda Dickey, Shabba-Doo, Boogaloo Shrimp, Ben Lokey
screenplay by Charles Parker & Allen DeBevoise and Gerald Scaife
directed by Joel Silberg

BREAKIN' 2: ELECTRIC BOOGALOO
***/**** Image B Sound B+
starring Lucinda Dickey, Adolfo "Shabba-Doo" Quinones, Michael "Boogaloo Shrimp" Chambers, Susie Bono
screenplay by Jan Venture & Julie Reichart
directed by Sam Firstenberg

BEAT STREET
**/**** Image C+ Sound B
starring Rae Dawn Chong, Guy Davis, Jon Chardiet, Leon W. Grant
screenplay by Andy Davis & David Gilbert & Paul Golding
directed by Stan Lathan

by Alex Jackson Ebony and ivory are living in perfect harmony in 1984's Breakin'. This is hardly a "white" movie, but it's not really a "black" one, either. It actually seems that Breakin' is genuinely multicultural: The film doesn't neutralize or marginalize blackness--in fact, it quite certainly celebrates it. But it's not black at the expense of excluding white faces. Instead of aligning itself with one particular racial identity, Breakin' aligns itself with a conglomerate of all of them. This is a party to which everyone is invited.

Follow the Fleet (1936); Shall We Dance (1937); The Barkleys of Broadway (1949) - DVDs

FOLLOW THE FLEET
**½/**** Image B+ Sound A- Extras B+
starring Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers, Randolph Scott, Harriet Hilliard
screenplay by Dwight Taylor and Allan Scott, based on the play "Shore Leave" by Hubert Osborne
directed by Mark Sandrich

SHALL WE DANCE
***/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B+
starring Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers, Edward Everett Horton, Eric Blore
screenplay by Allan Scott and Ernest Pagano
directed by Mark Sandrich

THE BARKLEYS OF BROADWAY
**½/**** Image B+ Sound A Extras B+
starring Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers, Oscar Levant, Billie Burke
screenplay by Betty Comden and Adolph Green
directed by Charles Walters

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Every partnership has its ups and downs, as our soaring divorce rate will attest. Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers were no different, and a selection of their B-list titles--one of which is widely considered the beginning of the end and another of which trades on memories rather than on the present--bears this out: Although Follow the Fleet, Shall We Dance, and The Barkleys of Broadway are far from quintessential, they have their quintessential moments and show the pair and their creative partners colouring outside the lines. One of these, the sometimes-maligned Shall We Dance, is actually very good, and the bumpy rides of the other two are occasionally enthralling.

Clueless (1995) [Whatever Edition] + Dead & Breakfast (2005) - DVDs

CLUELESS
*/**** Image A Sound B Extras B-
starring Alicia Silverstone, Stacey Dash, Brittany Murphy, Paul Rudd
written and directed by Amy Heckerling

DEAD & BREAKFAST
**/**** Image C+ Sound B Extras B-
starring Ever Carradine, Portia de Rossi, David Carradine, Bianca Lawson
written and directed by Matthew Leutwyler

by Walter Chaw Clueless is the pinnacle of a certain kind of smarmy teensploitation/Classics Illustrated vogue that saw Shakespeare (10 Things I Hate About You) and, in this case, Jane Austen (i.e., Emma) squeezed through the sausage mill of swatch-guards and Prada bags. It's the Shrek school of satire: mythological creatures made to act out master-plots in unfunny, unimaginative ways in stock mythological landscapes. In place of literal trolls, find euphemistic trolls in Alicia Silverstone and Brittany Murphy, posed opposite one another as after/before shots of one-trick lightweights. (So light is Silverstone, in fact, that her most recent attempted comeback was essentially as this character ten years later in NBC's prophetically-named "Miss Match".) The only interest in watching this relic in its new, ten-year anniversary "Whatever Edition" (also prophetically-named) is in trainspotting current sitcom stars in what, in retrospect, is a piece of work every bit as smug and self-loathing as Pretty Persuasion or Saved!.

TIFF '05: Romance & Cigarettes

*½/****
starring James Gandolfini, Susan Sarandon, Kate Winslet, Steve Buscemi
written and directed by John Turturro

by Bill Chambers Dennis Potter was a genre unto himself, and when he died, he took his recipe for what Heinz Antor called "humanist postmodernism" with him. It's painful to watch writer-director John Turturro, one of the great character actors of our time, invoke the writer in Romance & Cigarettes, as he reduces Potter's notion of pop music as existential catharsis to exactly what it wasn't: a gimmick--an alibi for air band. In the spellbinding film version of Potter's Pennies from Heaven, Christopher Walken comically menaces Bernadette Peters by lip-synching and doing a show-stopping striptease to Irving Aaronson and His Commanders' "Let's Misbehave"; in Romance & Cigarettes, Walken's performance of Tom Jones's "Delilah" is seemingly motivated by a weakness for musical filler. Considering the applause the film elicited from the typically unresponsive press/industry crowd, I guess the technique alone is visceral enough, but instead of illuminating the inner lives of the characters (which even a novelty ditty like "Teddy Bear Picnic" managed to do in the original The Singing Detective), Turturro's prosaic song choices superficialize the inner lives of his characters, making glorified jukeboxes of them all. Granted, once James Gandolfini's Nick Murder--a big galloot cheating on his wife (the ubiquitous Susan Sarandon, who's really starting to wear out her welcome) with an English tart (Kate Winslet, too good for this)--is diagnosed with lung cancer, the movie becomes less arbitrary, but we're left to do the heavy-lifting required by the tonal shift; suture and respite come only briefly in the form of perennial pinch-hitter Elaine Stritch (see also: Monster-in-Law). Give her an Oscar, already. PROGRAMME: Special Presentations

Starstruck (1982) - DVD

***/**** Image A Sound A (DD)/A+ (DTS) Extras B
starring Jo Kennedy, Ross O'Donovan, Margo Lee, Max Cullen
screenplay by Stephen MacLean
directed by Gillian Armstrong

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover By all rights, Starstruck shouldn't be as much fun as it turns out to be. Chief amongst the film's faults is its insistence on laying a '70s template over an '80s milieu: the harsh straight lines of new wave get rounded off, making for a completely incongruous let-it-all-hang-out attitude. Things are not improved by the tentative approach of director Gillian Armstrong, not known for extroverted behaviour in the past and seemingly unsure of herself here. Yet although it's rather like watching Meat Loaf belt out Gary Numan's "Cars" at the top of his lungs, the combination of bright happy colours and an aw-shucks demeanour is undeniably infectious. You wind up grinning uncontrollably despite Starstruck's decidedly uncool approach to being cool.

The Garbage Pail Kids Movie (1987) - DVD

**/**** Image B+ Sound C
starring Anthony Newley, Mackenzie Astin, Katie Barbieri, "The Garbage Gang"
screenplay by Melinda Palmer & Rod Amateau
directed by Rod Amateau

by Alex Jackson I don't think that there is any getting around the fact that any true connoisseur of trash cinema has to see Rodney Amateau's The Garbage Pail Kids Movie. This was, after all, the feature film debut of Mackenzie Astin, a.k.a. the horny kid from "The Facts of Life", and of Spanish soap star Katie Barbieri. Just as the picture marked the start of a career for some, it marked the end of a career for others. The presence of child star, singer, and Joan Collins's bitchy ex-husband Anthony Newley is a chief selling point in the film's trailer, but he was on his way out. And The Garbage Pail Kids Movie was the last feature from television director Amateau, who seems to have viewed it as his own personal Fanny and Alexander, taking on writing and producing chores in addition to casting other Amateaus (J.P. and Chloe) in minor roles.

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.

Pooh's Heffalump Movie (2005) - DVD

**½/**** Image A Sound A- Extras C-
screenplay by Brian Hohlfeld and Evan Spiliotopoulos
directed by Frank Nissen

by Bill Chambers Pretty much everything I wrote about Piglet's Big Movie applies to Pooh's Heffalump Movie: it's inoffensive but laborious, and the soundalike replacements for the original vocal talent know the notes but not the music. (Think that friend of yours whose Homer Simpson impersonation is perfect in every way except for its inability to make you laugh.) Carly Simon contributes another pallid batch of stopgap ditties to another frail narrative in which Pooh Bear is again hustled off to the sidelines. But melancholy has returned to the fold (because, I suspect, a certain Britishness informs the tone this time around), and since that was key to the resonance of Pooh's early screen and literary outings alike, we should be grateful that Pooh's Heffalump Movie deals with more urgent themes than is customary.

Raise Your Voice (2004) - DVD

**/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras C-
starring Hilary Duff, Rita Wilson, David Keith, Jason Ritter
screenplay by Sam Schreiber
directed by Sean McNamara

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover The best one can say for Raise Your Voice is that it was made with non-toxic materials--your impressionable 'tween will not be exposed to any really reprehensible behaviour. It's not a disguised infomercial for crass capitalism, it's not leeringly inappropriate in its sexual attitudes, and, save for a somewhat-patronized struggling black character, its politics are vague and inoffensive. Granted, this doesn't preclude Raise Your Voice from positing an alternate universe where music conservatories teach scratching and rock guitar, or wrapping up huge traumatic events with the ease of turning on a light, but the film does keep you from becoming disgusted with the corruption of kids' entertainment. You may feel bored and bewildered, but never disgusted.

Aladdin II & III Collection - DVD

THE RETURN OF JAFAR (1994)
Aladdin 2: The Return of Jafar
*½/**** Image B+ Sound B Extras C
written by Kevin Campbell and Mirith J.S. Colao & Bill Motz & Steve Roberts & Dev Ross & Bob Roth & Jan Strnad & Brian Swenlin
directed by Toby Shelton, Tad Stones, Alan Zaslove

ALADDIN AND THE KING OF THIEVES (1996)
*/**** Image B Sound B+ Extras C
screenplay by Mark McCorkle & Bob Schooley
directed by Tad Stones

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover About the only reason for Disney to send out their direct-to-video product to be reviewed is to accumulate free advertising. They know that no sensible critic will tolerate anything so obviously thrown together as a cash grab, just as they know that no reader of critics will willingly sign up to watch them; instead, the assumption is that said readers will have kids, and that the review will act as one more reminder (in concert with the saturation ad campaigns in print and on television) that those kids are undiscerning and will probably want the discs bad. So here's my link in the chain of avarice: two age-old attempts to cash in on Disney's Random Ethnic Stereotype Generator are back on the market, and if your children are lacking in aesthetic sense (they are), these might be right up their alley. Just make sure you bite down on a leather strap as you watch them with your goggle-eyed rugrat, and take heart in the knowledge that someone on the World Wide Web knows your pain.

The American Astronaut (2001) - DVD

****/**** Image B Sound A Extras A-
starring Cory McAbee, Rocco Sisto, Gregory Russell Cook, Annie Golden
written and directed by Cory McAbee

by Walter Chaw Opening with a mordant prologue that reminds of the expressionless absurdist sensibility of the late Douglas Adams and proceeding through something somewhere between Six-String Samurai and Dead Man (but a science-fiction musical), Cory McAbee's The American Astronaut is dead brilliant. Demonstrating a truly dazzling level of technical proficiency (despite or due to what must have been a non-budget) and a breathless creativity fecund and macabre, the picture reminds of Harlan Ellison, Dr. Strangelove, and Dark Star in equal measure. Ultimately, The American Astronaut is something all its own, a film that sets itself up as an old-fashioned serial and goes on to explore cinematic and literary theory with a keen eye for composition and an ear for mad scenario and perverse dialogue. The reasoning is Beckett, the execution is Brecht and Weill, and the results are best described as an educational reel directed by David Lynch circa Eraserhead: self-aware and hallucinatory.

Beyond the Sea (2004)

*/****
starring Kevin Spacey, Kate Bosworth, John Goodman, Bob Hoskins
screenplay by Lewis Colick and Kevin Spacey
directed by Kevin Spacey

by Walter Chaw In Beyond the Sea, Kevin Spacey as Bobby Darin talks to the ghost of his kid self, a pint-sized Virgil leading Spacey's decrepit Dante into the hell of vanity projects. It's a flick that apes All that Jazz the way De-Lovely aped All that Jazz (that is: sickly, with a bad limp), with an aged Darin looking back on his life as though it were all a giant movie set. "Ain't he too old to play Bobby Darin?" a reporter in the film asks while Bobby Darin directs his own fictional auto-biopic. "He was born to play Bobby Darin!" responds an angry Bob Hoskins as Bobby Darin's father, who, one part Brooklyn hood and one part Russian bear, acts as the artist surrogate trying to pre-empt the chief criticism most will have of this creepy exercise in flaccid masturbation. Truth is, Beyond the Sea is the Kevin Spacey story without as much closeted homosexuality and just the same amount of delusions of grandeur and aspirations towards artistic martyrdom. It lacks passion and joy, replacing them both with something that smells a lot like mid-life crisis.

The Marx Brothers: Silver Screen Collection - DVD

THE COCOANUTS (1929)
**½/**** Image C- Sound C-
with Oscar Shaw and Mary Eaton
screenplay by Morrie Riskind, based on the play by George S. Kaufman
directed by Robert Florey and Joseph Santley

ANIMAL CRACKERS (1930)
***/**** Image C Sound C
with Lillian Roth and Margaret Dumont
screenplay by Morrie Ryskind
directed by Victor Heerman

MONKEY BUSINESS (1931)
***½/**** Image B+ Sound C+
with Rockliffe Fellowes and Harry Woods
screenplay by S.J. Perelman and Will B. Johnstone
directed by Norman McLeod

HORSE FEATHERS (1932)
****/**** Image C+ Sound B
with Thelma Todd and David Landau
screenplay by Bert Kalmar and Harry Ruby and S.J. Perelman and Will B. Johnstone
directed by Norman McLeod

DUCK SOUP (1933)
****/**** Image B+ Sound B
with Margaret Dumont and Raquel Torres
screenplay by Bert Kalmar and Harry Ruby and Arthur Sheekman and Nat Perrin
directed by Leo McCarey

by Walter Chaw Popular wisdom holds that the Marx Brothers were best at Paramount, before the public disapproval of their satirical masterpiece Duck Soup sent them fleeing with proverbial tails between their legs to MGM and an ignoble end in a series of progressively worse, studio-sterilized soft-shoe routines. But the truth is that the Marxes didn't hit their stride until at least their third picture for Paramount, Monkey Business: the first couple of flicks (The Cocoanuts and Animal Crackers) are laden by the team's dependence on played-out stage productions and the "oh my god" quality of the early talkie, in which actors played to microphones hidden in flower pots, extras stared straight at the camera, and the florid gestures of the theatre were adhered to with pathological devotion.

Mickey's Twice Upon a Christmas (2004) + It's a Very Merry Muppet Christmas Movie (2002) [Special Edition] - DVDs

*½/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras C
directed by Matthew O'Callaghan

by Bill Chambers 2-D animation is dead, long live 2-D. Mickey Mouse and his apostles move into the realm of 3-D with Mickey's Twice Upon a Christmas, cementing this maddeningly disposable gewgaw's place in the history books next to far more sublime firsts like 1928's Steamboat Willie (Mickey's debut) and 1935's The Band Concert (Mickey's colour debut). But while it's tempting to lob cheap shots along the lines of "Uncle Walt is spinning in his grave," fact is Disney's frosty remains were already a veritable "Price is Right" wheel by the early '70s, and if he'd lived to see the digital revolution, he probably would've been one of its pioneers. In other words, it's not sacrilege to experiment with a CGI Mickey, but the results probably never should've seen the light of day.

Mulan (1998) [Special Edition] - DVD

**/**** Image B+ Sound A Extras B-
screenplay by Rita Hsiao, Christopher Sanders, Philip LaZebnik, Raymond Singer & Eugenia Bostwick-Singer
directed by Barry Cook and Tony Bancroft

by Bill Chambers If Disney's animated features can be reduced to a stable of alternating boy movies and girl movies, then the studio's decision to make the cross-dressing fable Mulan at a juncture when they really needed mass approval (that is, after striking out post-Katzenberg with Pocahontas, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and Hercules) comes across as conspicuously non-partisan--and the hero's androgyny isn't the only bet-hedging the filmmakers practice. A meticulous recreation of Imperialist China, for instance, is compromised by anachronisms cultural and temporal (the eponymous Mulan (voice of Ming-Na Wen), a pre-Tang Dynasty Chinese maiden, is introduced to us wearing a tank top and what resemble capri pants; later, she is served bacon and eggs for breakfast), while musical numbers, subversive humour, and Spielbergian spectacle perpetually collide like bumper cars. The end-product is neither fish nor fowl, though it certainly leans towards foul.

Zachariah (1971) - DVD

**½/**** Image A- Sound A-
starring John Rubinstein, Pat Quinn, Don Johnson, Country Joe and the Fish
screenplay by Joe Massot and Philip Austin and Peter Bergman, David Ossman, Philip Proctor (known as Firesign Theatre)
directed by George Englund

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Think back with me, for a moment, to a bygone era when rock was strange: a hippie-descending, proto-glam period when the buzz was off the love generation but a bumbling mystic energy remained--when record producers were getting into bed with the likes of Alejandro Jodorowsky and Mick Jagger could be seen in the gender-bending gangster drama Performance. It was a self-aggrandizing, frequently ridiculous time, but it had a tolerance for eccentricity that's impossible to find in our Britneyfied MTV age and for which I can only be wistfully nostalgic. Lacking both the money and the conceptual force to fully realize its acid-western ambitions, Zachariah isn't even close to being the quintessential flashback to those days (it may in fact simply be cashing in on a trend), but its half-flubbed attempts at pop-surrealism seem a tonic now that the mainstream pop landscape is largely imagined by accountants.

Aladdin (1992) [Platinum Edition] - DVD

***½/**** Image A+ Sound A+ Extras A+
screenplay by John Musker & Ron Clements and Ted Elliott & Terry Rossio
directed by John Musker & Ron Clements

by Bill Chambers Jeffrey Katzenberg may have revived the American animated feature while he was at Disney, but only one of the hits his reign yielded is worth a second viewing. Where 1989's The Little Mermaid and especially 1991's nauseating Beauty and the Beast tried to pass themselves off as Golden Age Disney (1937 (Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs)-1950 (Cinderella), for argument's sake), before a certain stateliness loosened its grip on the house style, 1992's Aladdin took its cue from Uncle Walt's twilight years, the Sixties, when he was interested in telling--as he geared up to pass the torch, perhaps--mentor stories (The Sword in the Stone and The Jungle Book) and pop culture had finally caught up with his incongruous predilections for psychedelia and bohemianism. It's a risk to emulate the period considered the birth of the studio's Dark Ages, and Aladdin is the least spurious movie of Disney's renaissance because of it.

Kaena: The Prophecy (2003) + The Lion King II: Simba's Pride (1998) [2-Disc Special Edition] - DVDs

KAENA: THE PROPHECY
*/**** Image A Sound B Extras C
screenplay by Tarik Hamoine and Chris Delaporte
directed by Chris Delaporte

THE LION KING II: SIMBA'S PRIDE
½*/**** Image B Sound B- Extras C+
screenplay by Flip Kobler and Cindy Marcus
directed by Rob LaDuca & Darrell Rooney

by Walter Chaw There's a timorous, resonant quality to Kirsten Dunst's voice. It's amazing, really: it vibrates at a contralto as tense and lovely as a cello string drawn--I think it's her most attractive feature. She's tailor-made, then, to be a vocal performer, and finds herself as such in French filmmaker Chris Delaporte's plodding misfire of a movie Kaena: The Prophecy. Completely computer-animated, it's every bit as ugly and prosaic as its American cousin Ice Age (insomuch as it even includes a prehistoric-squirrel vignette towards the end) and obsessed with the jiggle dimensions of Kaena (or is that me, obsessed?), who must save her tree-world Axis from destruction at the hands of the evil Selenites (whose queen is voiced by Anjelica Huston). The story is so Joseph Campbell hero's journey-obsessed, so humourless and--how do I say it delicately?--Bakshi in its execution, that poor Dunst, in the title role, is wasted on plucky pronouncements and grunts of exertion as her .gif alter-ego leaps hither and yon.

The Three Musketeers (2004) - DVD

Mickey, Donald, Goofy: The Three Musketeers
*½/**** Image B Sound A- Extras C-
screenplay by Evan Spiliotopoulos and David Mickey Evans
directed by Donovan Cook

by Bill Chambers I must confess to something like a fetish for the joint screen ventures of Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, and Goofy, animation's answer to The Ritz Brothers. Their 1937 short Lonesome Ghosts is one of the essential building blocks in my love of cinema: I used to own a silent 8mm cartridge of it that could be viewed by handcranking a to-the-eye projector, and I unwittingly taught myself persistence of vision through bored frame-by-frame dissections of Mickey tiptoeing across the floor and Donald losing his cool. And as far as Mickey Mouse is concerned, he has Donald and Goofy in tow in his best colour outings--with a handful of exceptions (such as 1941's guardedly wistful The Nifty Nineties, or the Sorcerer's Apprentice sequence from Fantasia) that cast Mickey as an emblem of virtue rather than as a virtuous individual (thus seizing on the iconic resonance of the character's design), Mickey's solo shorts circa the war years are far too polite for their own good. Mercurial Donald and accident-prone Goofy add a much-needed pinch of salt. 

Agent Cody Banks 2: Destination London (2004) [Special Edition]; The Cheetah Girls (2003); Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen (2004) - DVDs

AGENT CODY BANKS 2: DESTINATION LONDON
*½/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras C-
starring Frankie Muniz, Anthony Anderson, Cynthia Stevenson, Daniel Roebuck
screenplay by Don Rhymer
directed by Kevin Allen

THE CHEETAH GIRLS
*/**** Image C Sound B Extras C-
starring Raven, Adrienne Bailon, Kiely Williams, Sabrina Bryan
screenplay by Alison Taylor, based on the series of books by Deborah Gregory
directed by Oz Scott

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Here's how it works. The entertainment machine churns out low-quality wish-fulfillment fantasies for 'tweens and teenagers, then print and web outlets assign grown men and women to review them. Yes, the logic behind this weird symbiosis is elusive, as few teenagers are savvy enough to read reviews and few adult reviewers (beyond the occasional junket flunky) are possibly going to recommend them to anyone else. But somebody somewhere must benefit from this arrangement, because I have two such discs staring me in the face right now: one is the Frankie Muniz vehicle Agent Cody Banks 2, the other is a Disney Channel TV movie called The Cheetah Girls. Both are fantasies of juvenile mastery, both are scrubbed clean and chaste, both seem to have been dashed off in an afternoon by drunken hacks, and I guarantee you that both will make anyone over the age of fifteen want to poke their eyes out with a metal spike. But that's just me. I'm 31.

De-Lovely (2004)

*/****
starring Kevin Kline, Ashley Judd, Jonathan Pryce, Kevin McNally
screenplay by Jay Cocks
directed by Irwin Winkler

by Walter Chaw Tempting to fall back on clever insults ("de-readful" or "de-reary") when summarizing genuinely bad director Irwin Winker's De-Lovely, a musical biography about the life and times of Cole Porter that's de-adening in its execution. The picture's framework sees old Cole Porter (Kevin Kline)--looking a lot like Carl Reiner--sitting in an empty theatre with some sort of angel of death (Jonathan Pryce) as the events of Porter's life unfold like a Broadway musical before them. The film will be interrupted periodically by old Porter screaming at young Porter (still Kline) that he's an idiot or that No, no, no, it didn't happen that way, just to be reminded by Death that nobody can hear him. It's as stupid as it sounds.

Disney's Teacher's Pet (2004) - DVD

Teacher's Pet
***/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras C
screenplay by Bill Steinkellner & Cheri Steinkellner
directed by Timothy Björklund

by Walter Chaw If nothing else inventive, at the very least perverse, and at moments transcendently bizarre, the feature-length version of Disney Channel's "Teacher's Pet" is the brainchild of incorrigible animator/illustrator Gary Baseman. Think of his stuff as landing somewhere between R. Crumb and John Kricfalusi, all of bulging eyeballs and serpentine necks and skeletons a touch too eager to flee their skins. As the palette for a kid's entertainment, it's a bracing presumption that kids aren't stupid and, when given the choice, are capable of appreciating something outside the pale.