Film Freak Central

The Greatest American Hero: Season Three (1982-1983) - DVD

Image A Sound A Extras C
"The Price is Right," "30 Seconds Over Little Tokyo," "Divorce Venusian Style," "Live at Eleven," "The Resurrection of Carlini," "Wizards and Warlocks," "Heaven is in Your Genes," "This is the One the Suit Was Meant For," "The Newlywed Game," "Desperado," "Space Ranger," "It's Only Rock 'n Roll," "Vanity, Says the Preacher"

by Walter Chaw Aliens come to earth in a giant metal calamari ring and give a nebbish schoolteacher a red superhero outfit with the Chinese symbol for "centre" on the centre of its chest. They also give him an instruction booklet he promptly loses, leading to a couple of seasons of Ralph (William Katt) trying his best to figure out how to use his special jammies with the help of his attorney girlfriend Pam (Connie Selleca) and rogue FBI agent Bill (Robert Culp). It's on-the-job training, though, as the reluctant crime-fighting trio find themselves, weekly, pitted against a Saturday morning cartoon's rogue's gallery of two-bit hoodlums that reek, somehow simultaneously, of desperate invention and formula contrivance. (How else to explain the second-season search for a sea monster in the Caribbean?) But there's something that remains effective--sticky, even--about a show more at home in the Shazam! posture than in the prime time slot it was asked to fill. (Indeed, I discovered the show in syndication, seeing as I was too busy during its regular run watching "Knight Rider" and "The A-Team" on a rival network.) It's wish-fulfillment of the flavour towards which most superhero creations tend, sure, but it also speaks to what is essential in the American ethos: that the least of us believes we can be heroes under the right circumstances.

Fantastic Four: The Complete 1994-1995 Animated Television Series - DVD

Image C- Sound C- Extras D
"The Origin of the Fantastic Four, Part One," "The Origin of the Fantastic Four, Part Two," "Now Comes the Sub-Mariner," "Incursion of the Skrulls," "The Silver Surfer and the Coming of Galactus, Part One," "The Silver Surfer and the Coming of Galactus, Part Two," "Superskrull," "The Mask of Doom, Part One," "The Mask of Doom, Part Two," "The Mask of Doom, Part Three," "Mole Man," "Behold the Negative Zone," "The Silver Surfer and the Return of Galactus," "And a Blind Man Shall Lead Them," "And the Wind Cries Medusa," "The Inhumans Among Us," "Beware the Hidden Land," "Worlds Within Worlds," "To Battle the Living Planet," "Prey of the Black Panther," "When Calls Galactus," "Nightmare in Green," "Behold, a Distant Star," "Hopelessly Impossible," "The Sentry Sinister," "Doomsday"

by Walter Chaw Watching the short-lived "Fantastic Four" animated series from the mid-'90s is a lot like sticking forks in your eyes. It's terribly animated, terribly written, and generally uninspired. The only thing more depressing than hunkering down for a prolonged exposure to this mess is the prospect of actually having to write about it. People who think that what we do isn't a job haven't had the experience of not only being forced to endure something they never would have thought to endure on their own, ever, but also of later having to find the will to write something like an analysis of said experience for the appreciation of the handful of people in the world lonely and pathological enough to start hateful correspondence in defense of it. Think about it: by agreeing to review "Fantastic Four", I'm all but consenting to a conversation with the small tribe of Morlocks who consider this shit gold, mainly because a nine-year-old version of themselves used to like it when they watched it in their footed pyjamas and helmets. So, as a pre-emptive strike (as if it matters): yes, I was a child once; no, I don't hate happiness; no, I don't think that everything has to be Citizen Kane; and, oddly, thinking is not something I believe to be mutually exclusive from pleasure.

Fantastic Four (2005)

½*/****
starring Ioan Gruffudd, Michael Chiklis, Jessica Alba, Chris Evans
screenplay by Michael France and Mark Frost, based on the Marvel comic
directed by Tim Story

by Walter Chaw Terrible. Tim Story's Fantastic Four is just terrible. It's not overly offensive, not sociologically damaging, and the only way it'll pervert your children is by making them stupider. But if you love and respect the cinema as a medium capable of giving life to fantasy and passion to the impossible, the picture's crimes are no less egregious. Fantastic Four is a prime example in every respect of how not to make a movie: it's badly cast, poorly written, clumsily-directed, respects no internal logic, and looks extremely ugly to boot--it resembles those '80s production-line comedies (Police Academy, Hot Dog: The Movie) populated by fashion-plate superheroes instead of fashion-plate stoners. The pacing is so mortally off that it feels like days have been slipped in there in place of minutes, and there's so little rapport among the cast that it often appears as though the actors were filmed separately and later composited in some dork's basement mainframe. You can feel your life being siphoned away by this thing. Did I fail to mention that the special effects are bad? It's a lot of things simultaneously: a nightmare; a joke; a disaster. I dropped my notebook at one point during the screening and spent the rest of the time wondering if I should just leave it there as Fantastic Four finally dribbled to a close. It's bad enough to put you off movies for good.

Batman Begins (2005)

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

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

Son of the Mask (2005)

ZERO STARS/****
starring Jamie Kennedy, Alan Cumming, Traylor Howard, Steven Wright
screenplay by Lance Khazei
directed by Lawrence Guterman

by Walter Chaw Towards the end of the uniquely awful Son of the Mask, star Jamie Kennedy gets two fistfuls of his screen-wife Traylor Howard's bosom (this after pummelling her head against the ground in a scary depiction of domestic violence) and declares, in so many words, "Eureka--so it is you, honey." It's a charming vignette that follows about an hour of fart, snot, golden shower, and Exorcist jokes, each trumping the last in level of inappropriateness until finally the deadened synapses begin to register that with sets like "Edge City" and "Fringe City", the brain trust behind this abortion might actually have had something subversive in mind. A shame, then, that they've confused "edge" and "fringe" elements with puerile scatology and institutional dehumanization, intercut with baby and animal reaction shots and a marginal and failed television comedian (playing a marginal and failed television animator) mugging in an astoundingly lifeless approximation of "manic." For a film that might want to be taken as "edgy," in other words, Son of the Mask caters to the absolute lowest and commonest of the lowest common denominators.

Assault on Precinct 13 (2005) + Elektra (2005)

ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13
***/****
starring Ethan Hawke, Laurence Fishburne, John Leguizamo, Maria Bello
screenplay by James DeMonaco, based on the screenplay by John Carpenter
directed by Jean-François Richet

ELEKTRA
½*/****
starring Jennifer Garner, Goran Visnjic, Will Yun Lee, Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa
screenplay by Zak Penn and Stuart Zicherman & Raven Metzner
directed by Rob Bowman

by Walter Chaw Being under siege and obsessive-compulsive disorder have together wrought a weird parallel generation in the remake Assault on Precinct 13 and sequel/comic book adaptation Elektra. In each is not only a woman who uses numbers obsessively in stressful situations, but also some sort of predicament where a gang of bad guys traps a band of good guys only to be given the business end of heroic pluck. Both are unusually ugly films with a higher-than-expected body count, and, to various degrees of success, both traffic in a paranoid marshalling of forces that comes with a fear of invasion from without. When you're panicked, drawing those you trust closer to the vest since the rest of the universe has murder in mind is the sanest recourse--even when you're aware that you're addicted, mad, or otherwise in desperate need of therapy. Early in 2005, trends are pointing to a year in which we champion isolationism, fear the marauding Hun, and start wondering if there's a blue-stater playing sheep in the quilting cotillion. Unless, that is, the blue-stater is you, and the constant threat of lynching or crucifixion has caused you to lose your mind.

Blade: Trinity (2004)

*/****
starring Wesley Snipes, Kris Kristofferson, Jessica Biel, Ryan Reynolds
written and directed by David S. Goyer

by Walter Chaw A genuinely bad film, Blade: Trinity gains a little currency by banking on some of the hot topics in our cultural diaspora (blacks vs. whites, rich vs. poor, privileged vs. ghettoized) as well as sporting a pretty heady fascination with progeny and parentage. But it's not nearly enough to forgive the film's excrescent dialogue, tepid action scenes, or asinine performances. It finds David S. Goyer, writer of all three Blade films in addition to Alex Proyas's modern classic Dark City, at the helm of a feature for the second time having learned nothing from Proyas and Blade II's Guillermo Del Toro. When the director of an action film takes pains to turn off the lights right before each action scene is set to begin, begin to worry. If Goyer does anything, he confirms the idea that if you're not a brilliant writer (like Wes Anderson, say), then you probably shouldn't be directing the mediocre scripts you've written (like George Lucas, say), because writers who usher their own scripts to the screen tend to think of their word as law instead of as a good place to start. For the first time in this series, I was bored, disinterested, and didn't get any kind of blaxploitation charge out of Wesley Snipes cool-mutha-shut-yo-mouf method-spawned half-vampire avenger. If Blade: Trinity is the end of the cycle, it came one movie too late.

Spider-Man 2 (2004)

****/****
starring Tobey Maguire, Kirsten Dunst, James Franco, Alfred Molina
screenplay by Alvin Sargent
directed by Sam Raimi 

by Walter Chaw Just as the best parts of Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings movies evoked the lo-fi ingenuity of Jackson's splatter flicks (Braindead, Bad Taste), a surgery scene in Sam Raimi's Spider-Man 2 reminds a lot of Raimi's Evil Dead days--probably something to do with the chainsaw. Still, it's uncomfortable, inappropriate, violent, the Three Stooges gone really, really wrong, and it's stuck right smack dab in the middle of what is arguably the most anticipated film of the summer. Raimi's tutelage in the school of zero-budget exploitation has taught him the importance of narrative and subtext, of internal logic and thematic coherence. You can buy limitless razzle-dazzle; you can't buy a strong foundation in fun and at least a rudiment of sense. And as Raimi's budget has soared from the rumoured twenty grand for The Evil Dead to somewhere in the neighbourhood of Ireland's GNP for Spider-Man 2, his foundation in economical thrills anchors his blockbusters in humanity.

The Punisher (2004)

***/****
starring Tom Jane, John Travolta, Rebecca Romijn-Stamos, Laura Harring
screenplay by Michael France and Jonathan Hensleigh
directed by Jonathan Hensleigh

by Walter Chaw A barometer of our culture--an exploding western world balanced between listless fatalism on the one side and violent nihilism on the other (Elephant and Young Adam vs. Walking Tall, The Passion of the Christ, and Man on Fire)--at this exact moment in time, long-time blockbuster scribe Jonathan Hensleigh's hyphenate debut is his adaptation of Marvel Comics' vigilante title The Punisher. With the possible exception of Mel Gibson's ode to sadism, this is the year's most irredeemable picture thus far, but it's elevated by a bracing idea, an astonishingly courageous idea: that its hero and villain are equally reprehensible, and, by extension, that both of them do what they do because in their psychotic haze, the only thing they have to tie them to any kind of illusion of equilibrium is the dangerous idealization of their families. When a picture like this appears in the middle of a glut of vigilante flicks and in the middle of a society that may have been led into a predictably cruel and bloody war on the basis of a personal grudge, one forgiven by many for its specious association with a collective insult to our illusion of sanctuary, people should prick up their ears. While The Punisher may not be a particularly good film, it is a particularly important one.

Hellboy (2004)

***/****
starring Ron Perlman, Selma Blair, Jeffrey Tambor, Karel Roden
screenplay by Guillermo del Toro, based on the comics by Mike Mignola
directed by Guillermo del Toro

by Walter Chaw A bona fide auteur in an age of facile pretenders, Guillermo del Toro is the pulp genre's Martin Scorsese, his films filtering devout Catholic imagery through a lurid colour palette and obsessed with insectile machineries and mentor relationships between boys and old men. Del Toro's pictures are deeply personal explorations of faith, of redemption and resurrection--he made of Blade II a tale of the prodigal son, and now with Hellboy he's crafted a story of an evolving passion.

Spider-Man: The Animated Series (2003) - DVD

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"Heroes and Villains," "Royal Scam," "Law of the Jungle," "Sword of Shikata," "Keeping Secrets," "Tight Squeeze," "Head Over Heals," "The Party," "Flash Memory," "Spider-Man Dis-Abled," "When Sparks Fly," "Mind Games: Part One," "Mind Games: Part Two"

by Walter Chaw Taking place right where the Sam Raimi feature film leaves off, with Peter Parker, Mary Jane, and Harry Osborn off to college (Peter perplexed, MJ clueless, Harry seething), MTV's "Spider-Man: The Animated Series" is a completely CGI creation that has a pretty tough time finding a pulse in among all the whiz-bang. In truth, it took me a long time to thaw to the look of the series, so much like a nifty video game that I caught my thumbs twitching in unconscious sympathy with the gyrations of the coloured .gifs. And even when it stopped actively bugging me, I never completely bought into the piece as any kind of drama--the suspension of disbelief impossible when thoughts of the size of the mainframe, the insane processor rates, and how neat a video game all this was going to make one day keep running through the brain like a stock ticker. Worse, even if the look of the thing were not super-distracting, the voice acting by lead Neil Patrick Harris is more smug than the intended wry, sounding an awful lot like not only Doogie Howser (natch), but also Screech from "Saved by the Bell". Popstress Lisa Loeb is pretty much non-descript as Mary Jane, her absence from all the collection's voluminous special features conspicuous but probably due either to her being busy with a cooking show on the Food Network with boyfriend Dweezil Zappa or not feeling very confident about the series.

Catwoman (2004) [Widescreen Edition] - DVD

ZERO STARS/**** Image A+ Sound A+ Extras C
starring Halle Berry, Benjamin Bratt, Sharon Stone, Lambert Wilson
screenplay by John Brancato & Michael Ferris and John Rogers
directed by Pitof

by Walter Chaw Catwoman is all the bad that Gigli promised to be and more. It's bad enough that not only are careers over, but somebody should be slapped. The question arises as to whether it's as bad as Glitter, and though the answer is "sure," that doesn't fully address the fact that it's bad in the same way as Glitter. It's fabulously, deliriously, egregiously awful--a queer camp classic in the making, and the second film so far this summer to squeeze a lovely young actress into S&M gear (see: Keira Knightley in King Arthur). If this is the face of modern feminism ("I'm bad, but only as bad as I wanna be," Berry's Catwoman skanks), then count me in: I'm strangely un-threatened by the show-all boom-boom girl power of Jessica Simpson, Christina Aguilera, the Olsen Twins, and so on. Call me crazy.

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (2003) [Widescreen] - DVD

ZERO STARS/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B+
starring Sean Connery, Naseeruddin Shah, Peta Wilson, Tony Curran
screenplay by James Dale Robinson, based on the comic books by Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill
directed by Stephen Norrington

by Walter Chaw Though I'm a fan of Alan Moore, it's pointless to address the myriad departures made by the cinematic adaptation of his graphic novel The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen--doing so would not only take too much time, but also miss the point entirely. Stephen Norrington's The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen isn't appallingly bad only because it departs completely from its source material, but rather because it's a work of extreme cynicism and incompetence on every appreciable level, too. Five minutes into the film, a steam-powered tank has already stormed its way into a London bank (demonstrating a technical superiority for the bad guys that instantly invalidates the main conflict of the film) and a German zeppelin factory has gone the way of the Hindenberg--both scenes marked carefully by unhelpful title cards (London 1899; Germany 1899) that become something of an unintentional running joke, the only vaguely amusing thing to follow in what amounts to one of the most painful experiences to be had this year short of dental surgery, an Andrew Lloyd Weber revival-in-the-round, or getting stabbed in the eye with a knitting needle.

X2: X-Men United (2003) [Widescreen] - DVD

X2
**½/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras A-
starring Patrick Stewart, Hugh Jackman, Ian McKellen, Halle Berry
screenplay by Michael Dougherty & Dan Harris
directed by Bryan Singer

by Walter Chaw Where the first film opened with a Holocaust backstory, the second instalment begins in the White House with a quote from Abraham Lincoln's inaugural address and a cool doubling of Aaron Shikler's pensive portrait of John F. Kennedy. X-Men is setting itself up as a high-minded comic book franchise, one unusually committed to relating its empowerment panel soap-opera with solid performances, decent scripting, and direction from a filmmaker, Bryan Singer, interested in the sanctity of narrative. The problems with X2's (a.k.a. X-Men 2 and X2: X-Men United) premise and its wrangling of so large an ensemble are fairly obvious: there are no real limits placed on the powers of the "X-Men" mutants and there is little time afforded to the proper establishment of relational conflict.

Hulk (2003) [2-Disc Special Edition] - DVD

**/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B-
starring Eric Bana, Jennifer Connelly, Sam Elliott, Josh Lucas
screenplay by John Turman and Michael France and James Schamus, based on the Marvel comic
directed by Ang Lee

by Walter Chaw The first in a troika of films to focus on rage as the catalyst for physiological change (the others being Danny Boyle's brilliant 28 Days Later... and Stephen Norrington's The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, which counts Mr. Hyde among its gentlemen) this past summer, Ang Lee's Hulk is a plodding dirge about the sins of the fathers that struggles mightily between the requirement to awe and the desire to mean something. Its story of repressed memories of abuse and reconciliation amounts to not-much when the tortured protagonist seems supremely capable of suppressing his rage, only losing control when jolted with a cattle prod or when his girlfriend is menaced by a trio of mutant hounds. An oh-so-subtle suggestion--embedded in a dream within a flashback--that emotionally distant Bruce Banner (Eric Bana in full zombie mode) may have abused his ex-girlfriend Betty Ross (Jennifer Connelly) speaks to a canny chronicler of dysfunction in Lee (The Ice Storm) struggling with the demands of a film with a ridiculous budget and a level of expectation in the same stratosphere. When Betty nonsensically offers, "It must be a combination of the nanomeds and the gamma radiation," Bruce responds: "No, it's something deeper." Alas, it's not.

The Incredible Hulk Returns (1988)/The Trial of the Incredible Hulk (1989) [2 Disc Set]; The Death of the Incredible Hulk (1990); The Incredible Hulk (1996) - DVDs

THE INCREDIBLE HULK RETURNS
**/**** Image B- Sound B Extras A+
starring Bill Bixby, Lou Ferrigno, Lee Purcell, Jack Colvin
written by Nicholas Corea
directed by Bill Bixby & Nicholas Corea

THE TRIAL OF THE INCREDIBLE HULK
*/**** Image B- Sound B Extras A+
starring Bill Bixby, Lou Ferrigno, Rex Smith, John Rhys-Davies
written by Gerald Di Pego
directed by Bill Bixby

by Walter Chaw It all comes back in a rush, the crosshairs fixing David Banner's (Bill Bixby) face, the breathless narration summarizing the whole of the creation story in ninety seconds, the shots of long-haired Lou Ferrigno, in full body-paint, embodying the rage and frustration of the flower-power generation in all its ripped-jean glory. Punked with a horse's dose of gamma radiation, mild-mannered Dr. Banner turns into a ball of flexing id that gets most wroth until running across a kitten or something and calming down. Jekyll and Hyde for the "me" generation; that a research scientist disinterested in the particulars of cashing in turns into a giant green ball of type-A is one avenue for discussion, though a better one is the fact that Banner represents in a real way the idea of hope and compassion in a time more interested in "Hulk smash"--making the moldy Marvel hero a potentially good match for the reflective sensibilities of Ang Lee. That Banner's pacifist nature is always defeated by his "anger" speaks volumes about the inevitability of the metamorphosis of hippie to yuppie, as well as the death of a dream that transformation encompasses.

Spider-Man (2002) [Full Screen Special Edition + Superbit] - DVDs

***½/****
SE - Image C Sound A- Extras B
SUPERBIT - Image A Sound A (DTS) A- (DD) Commentary B
starring Tobey Maguire, Willem Dafoe, Kirsten Dunst, James Franco
screenplay by David Koepp
directed by Sam Raimi

by Walter Chaw Sam Raimi's banana yellow, 1973 Dodge 88 Oldsmobile is Uncle Ben's (Cliff Robertson, himself the happy--however briefly--subject of a lab experiment in 1968's Charley) ride in Spider-Man, and it is as canny and appropriate a cameo as any since Hitchcock's greedy quaff of a champagne flute in Notorious. The good news is, the appearance of said vehicle is as clever as the rest of Spider-Man, that rare variety of modern popular film boasting of subtext and tricky riptides tackling puberty and abrupt Oedipal splits with good humour, insight, and grace. If not for the abominable CGI (really only overused in two scenes), I would have a hard time finding fault with Spider-Man, the model comic book movie in its surprisingly dark tone, lively pace, shrewd performances, sense of humour, and sly intelligence.

Daredevil (2003)

**/****
starring Ben Affleck, Jennifer Garner, Michael Clarke Duncan, Colin Farrell
written and directed by Mark Steven Johnson

by Walter Chaw There's a real grittiness to Mark Steven Johnson's Daredevil--most of it attributable to Frank Miller's "Daredevil: Born Again" comic-book series (penned just prior to the author's seminal "The Dark Knight Returns"), from which the film borrows tone, religious iconography, and a certain washed-out colour scheme as reflected in Ericson Core's moody cinematography (which is closer to his work on Payback than on The Fast and the Furious). The problem is that the film's tenor and Catholic fetishism are moored to the light redemption of the titular hero, the bizarre stigmata and martyrdom of one villain (and forced genuflection of another), and perhaps the suggested rebirth of a femme fatale. Daredevil, then, is interesting for its borrowed elements, but it doesn't have any real weight to justify the treatment.

X-Men (2000) + X-Men 1.5 - DVDs

***½/****
X-MEN DVD - Image A Sound A- Extras B+
X-MEN 1.5 DVD - Image A Sound A+ (DTS)/A- (DD) Extras B+
starring Hugh Jackman, Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellen, Famke Janssen
screenplay by David Hayter
directed by Bryan Singer

by Bill Chambers While fans of the periodical on which it's based carp away about the shade of Jean Grey's hair colour and the composite personality of Rogue, I, not nearly as much a comic-book fan as I am a comic-book-movie fan, champion director Bryan Singer's sober approach to potentially silly material. X-Men is respectful in tone when not letter-faithful to the Marvel legend, if I understand secondhand descriptions correctly.

The Caveman's Valentine (2001) [Widescreen] - DVD

***½/**** Image A+ Sound A+ Extras B-
starring Samuel L. Jackson, Ann Magnuson, Aunjanue Ellis, Tamara Tunie
screenplay by George Dawes Green, based on his novel
directed by Kasi Lemmons

by Walter Chaw A strange mixture of Shine, Basquiat, Angel Heart, and Grant Morrison & Dave McKean's graphic novel Arkham Asylum, The Caveman's Valentine is a feverish tale of a homeless madman-cum-detective who, on the morning of February 14^th, discovers a "valentine" just outside his New York cave: one of Ella Fitzgerald's strange fruit, stuck in the crotch of a tree--a young male model murdered and frozen to a branch. Believing at first that his imagined nemesis Stuyvesant, who shoots evil rays into his mind from atop the Chrysler Building, is responsible for the murder, Romulus (Samuel L. Jackson) is put on the trail of an avant-garde photographer in the Mapplethorpe mold, David Leppenraub (Colm Feore). His minor sleuthing interrupted by the occasional delusional fit and bouts with an ecstasy of creation (Romulus was a brilliant Julliard-trained pianist prior to his psychosis), Romulus uncovers clues and harasses suspects on his way to convincing his police-woman daughter (Aunjanue Ellis) that even though he's a nut, that doesn't mean he can't solve a high-profile society murder.