Film Freak Central

Better Off Dead (1985) - Blu-ray Disc

Better Off Dead...
***/**** Image B- Sound C-
starring John Cusack, David Ogden Stiers, Diane Franklin, Kim Darby
written and directed by Savage Steve Holland

by Jefferson Robbins Better Off Dead... probably wouldn't have outlasted its peers among cheaply-made '80s teen comedies minus three crucial factors. There's John Cusack's extraordinary Everyguy deadpan: He reacts to absurdity without visibly reacting, a still pivot for the scene around him and the best possible audience surrogate for a vehicle like this. There's writer-director Savage Steve Holland's visual wit, rooted in classic cartoons and well-abetted by editor Alan Balsam (Revenge of the Nerds). And finally, there's Holland's clearly-demonstrated understanding of what it's like to be a teenage male--collapsing in the face of spurned love, so immersed in one's own fantasies and neuroses that everyone, even relatives and close friends, seems a grotesque. This internal state gets externalized in Better Off Dead..., as no matter where Cusack's Lane Meyer goes, he's confronted with such bizarre contortions of humanity that he might as well be an astronaut among aliens.

American Graffiti (1973) - [Special Edition] Blu-ray Disc

****/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B+
starring Richard Dreyfuss, Ronny Howard, Paul Le Mat, Charlie Martin Smith
screenplay by George Lucas and Gloria Katz & Willard Hyuck
directed by George Lucas

by Jefferson Robbins The skeleton key to George Lucas's American Graffiti isn't in its setting--the cruising culture of exurban southern California, 1962, as witnessed by young participants with the '50s at their back and Vietnam ahead. Instead, it's disassembled and scattered throughout the text, oblique until it becomes obvious. There's the front-seat monologue recited by Laurie (Cindy Williams) for the benefit of her drifting boyfriend Steve ("Ronny" Howard): "It doesn't make sense to leave home to look for home, to give up a life to find a new life." It sounds like her own reverie, but in fact she's quoting an offscreen speech by her college-bound brother Curt (Richard Dreyfuss), who earlier in the film has a hushed alleyway talk with the "cool" teacher (Terence McGovern) who washed out of an artsy New England school and came back to shape young minds in his diesel-scented hometown. This teacher's name, as it happens, is Mr. Wolfe. It's not so much that you can't go home again as that home changes under your very feet. The instinct to cling to its first incarnation--Curt's fondling of his old school locker, John Milner's (Paul Le Mat) continued mingling with high-school kids at roughly age twenty--is really a hope that you'll find something just as valuable in the wider world you know you must face.

Easy A (2010) - Blu-ray Disc

**½/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B
starring Emma Stone, Penn Badgley, Amanda Bynes, Thomas Hayden Church
screenplay by Bert V. Royal
directed by Will Gluck

by Jefferson Robbins What do I have to do these days to see a teen sex comedy where teen characters get to have sex? Filmmakers have gotten so good at larding chastity tracts with suggestiveness that you come out of the theatre believing, for fifteen minutes or so, that you actually witnessed youth in debauch. So far, the 21^st century in teenage fare is like the Hays Code era all over again, only not well-written. Terrified at being accused of portraying high-schoolers doing what millions of high-schoolers do, studios have turned sexual misdirection into the best special effect since the lightsaber.

Fame (1980) - Blu-ray Disc + Fame (2009) [Extended Dance Edition] - DVD

FAME (1980)
**/**** Image B Sound B Extras B
starring Irene Cara, Lee Curreri, Laura Dean, Antonia Franceschi
screenplay by Christopher Gore
directed by Alan Parker

FAME (2009)
*/**** Image N/A Sound C Extras D
starring Debbie Allen, Charles S. Dutton, Kelsey Grammer, Megan Mullaly
screenplay by Allison Burnett, based on the screenplay by Christopher Gore
directed by Kevin Tancharoen

by Walter Chaw Alan Parker seems to fancy himself a bit of a sociologist--a chronicler of Truth surveying man's inhumanity to man and the injustices perpetrated especially in the United States, offering up pictures that seek to expose just exactly what's wrong with his non-native land. When he makes a good movie, like Angel Heart, it's good because he's not proselytizing about corruption so much as he's indulging in his suspicions about the Home of the Brave. (Filthy with evil, right?) The matinee of appreciation for Parker is not surprisingly around fifteen, when stuff like Mississippi Burning and Midnight Express has the weight of sagacity rather than the reek of puerile outrage and unbecoming grandstanding. He's Stanley Kramer with a drug and counterculture fixation that marks him as a product less of Mod than of Free Love. Fame is the perfect Parker vehicle because it's an anthology of Parker's perception of inner-city woes, and as it appears at the end of the Seventies, the decade that was America's crucible of self-reflection, the sort of prison-wallet Passion Play of which Parker's most fond finds a more tolerable climate. It's perfect, too, because Parker's background in commercials often leads him to make films that are told in images impossible to misconstrue with concepts that aren't necessarily substantial enough for a feature. (See: his big-screen adaptations of Pink Floyd's "The Wall" and Webber's awful Evita.) Fame's structure is a sequence of vignettes and its characters a collection of types, so that the demand to sustain itself over the course of two hours is ameliorated by the fact that it's basically an anthology piece.

Daria: The Complete Animated Series (1997-2002) + Party Down: Season One (2009) - DVDs

DARIA: THE COMPLETE ANIMATED SERIES
Image A- Sound B- Extras B+
"Esteemsters," "The Invitation," "College Bored," "Café Disaffecto," "Malled," "This Year's Model," "The Lab Brat," "Pinch Sitter," "Too Cute," "The Big House," "Road Worrier," "The Teachings of Don Jake," "The Misery Chick," "Arts 'N' Crass," "The Daria Hunter," "Quinn the Brain," "I Don't," "That Was Then, This Is Dumb," "Monster," "The New Kid," "Gifted," "Ill," "Fair Enough," "See Jane Run," "Pierce Me," "Write Where it Hurts," "Daria!," "Through a Lens Darkly," "The Old and the Beautiful," "Depth Takes a Holiday," "Daria Dance Party," "The Lost Girls," "It Happened One Nut," "Lane Miserables," "Jake of Hearts," "Speedtrapped," "The Lawndale File," "Just Add Water," "Jane's Addition," "Partner's Complaint," "Antisocial Climbers," "A Tree Grows in Lawndale," "Murder, She Snored," "The F Word," "I Loathe a Parade," "Of Human Bonding," "Psycho Therapy," "Mart of Darkness," "Legends of the Mall," "Groped by an Angel," "Fire!," "Dye! Dye! My Darling," "Fizz Ed," "Sappy Anniversary," "Fat Like Me," "Camp Fear," "The Story of D," "Lucky Strike," "Art Burn," "One J at a Time," "Life in the Past Lane," "Aunt Nauseam," "Prize Fighters," "My Night at Daria's," "Boxing Daria"

PARTY DOWN: SEASON ONE
Image A- Sound A- Extras B
"Willow Canyon Homeowners Annual Party," "California College Conservative Union Caucus," "Pepper McMasters Singles Seminar," "Investors Dinner," "Sin Say Shun Awards Afterparty," "Taylor Stiltskin Sweet Sixteen," "Brandix Corporate Retreat," "Celebrate Rick Sargulesh," "James Rolf High School Twentieth Reunion," "Stennheiser-Pong Wedding Reception"

by Jefferson Robbins If he hadn't helped oversee the death of the music video, Abby Terkuhle's tenure at MTV could be viewed as the network's Silver Age. "The State", "Liquid Television", "Beavis and Butt-Head"--apogees or nadirs, depending on your perspective, they defined the channel in the '90s, until "Road Rules" and "Cribs" redefined it into irrelevance. Terkuhle, the network's director of animation and overall creative chief, left MTV in 2002, but when hipsters in the decade just passed whined that such-and-such MTV show wasn't available on DVD, they were usually talking about something he'd incubated. His reign straddles the cultural shift from the Age of Irony (David Foster Wallace, "Daria") to the Age of Schadenfreude ("Mad Men", the shitty-childhood memoirs of Augusten Burroughs). We used to be able to contemplate human abasement and crack wise about it, like Daria Morgendorffer; now the abasement is our entertainment, and we sit slack-jawed before the awesome pathos of Snooki and The Situation.^*

The Twilight Saga: Eclipse (2010)

**/****
starring Kristen Stewart, Robert Pattinson, Taylor Lautner, Dakota Fanning
screenplay by Melissa Rosenberg, based on the novel by Stephenie Meyer
directed by David Slade

by Walter Chaw The first and greatest surprise of The Twilight Saga: Eclipse (hereafter Eclipse) is that it's not awful; it's actually almost good for its first forty-five minutes or so, until the burden of Stephenie Meyer's genuinely, legendarily poor source material catches up to it. Until such time, there's some interest blossoming despite itself in the love triangle between mopey Bella (Kristen Stewart), fruity Edward (Robert Pattinson), and swarthy Jacob (Taylor Lautner): a hint of racial discomfort, a soupçon of class struggle, a glimmer of insight given over to the difficulties of teen relationships at a moment in life when Nancy Drew plays like Richard Wagner. Never mind that of the three leads, only Pattinson delivers a (surprisingly, too) good performance--and then only fitfully; never mind that Meyer has taken a giant, steaming dump on centuries of folklore and tradition to construct thin cardboard monsters that serve as bad metaphors for Mormon libido (as told by Judy Blume's less talented soul sister); never mind that the picture's entire last two-thirds devolves into constant repetition of the will she/won't she theme punctuated by its stupid mythology. Really, the way that new director David Slade's flat-to-the-point-of-garish camera brings out the faintest suggestion of corruption beneath the pancake makeup and baggy eyes of the film's immortal underwear models--who are, literally, ancient beasts--lends the series the dread that was buried in the first two films under volumes of camp and dreary incompetence. Not to say that Eclipse doesn't ultimately end as the same old bullshit, but for the first time, if only briefly, the clouds part for a brief, tantalizing twinkle of what it was that all this could have been.

Golden Age Romance on DVD

ROMAN HOLIDAY (1953)
[CENTENNIAL COLLECTION]
***½/**** Image B- Sound B Extras C
starring Gregory Peck, Audrey Hepburn, Eddie Albert, Hartley Power
screenplay by Ian McLellan Hunter and John Dighton
directed by William Wyler

SABRINA (1954)
[CENTENNIAL COLLECTION]
**½/**** Image B Sound B Extras C
starring Humphrey Bogart, Audrey Hepburn, William Holden, Walter Hampden
screenplay by Billy Wilder, Samuel Taylor and Ernest Lehman, based on Taylor's play
directed by Billy Wilder

LOVE IN THE AFTERNOON (1957)
[TCM GREATEST CLASSIC FILMS COLLECTION: ROMANCE]
½*/**** Image C Sound B
starring Gary Cooper, Audrey Hepburn, Maurice Chevalier, John McGiver
screenplay by Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond, based on a novel by Claude Anet
directed by Billy Wilder

NOW, VOYAGER (1942)
[TCM GREATEST CLASSIC FILMS COLLECTION: ROMANCE]
**½/**** Image A- Sound B Extras D
starring Bette Davis, Paul Henreid, Claude Rains, Gladys Cooper
screenplay by Casey Robinson, based on the novel by Olive Higgins Prouty
directed by Irving Rapper

MOGAMBO (1953)
[TCM GREATEST CLASSIC FILMS COLLECTION: ROMANCE]
*/**** Image C+ Sound B
starring Clark Gable, Ava Gardiner, Grace Kelly, Donald Sinden
screenplay by John Lee Mahin, based on a play by Wilson Collison
directed by John Ford

SPLENDOR IN THE GRASS (1961)
[TCM GREATEST CLASSIC FILMS COLLECTION: ROMANCE]
****/**** Image B Sound B Extras D
starring Natalie Wood, Pat Hingle, Audrey Christie, Warren Beatty
screenplay by William Inge
directed by Elia Kazan

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. It's one of those seminal moments that movies provide the culture with now and again, like the swoop up a little rise to an impossibly fresh John Wayne in Stagecoach, or the intervention of a fortuitous steam vent in The Seven Year Itch, this introduction we have to Audrey Hepburn as she's whirled around in a barber chair in William Wyler's Roman Holiday to reveal the pixie-cut heard 'round the world. That she's adorable is a given--the real issue is whether she's an actress or just a bundle of inexplicable charisma, a ganglion of celluloid starlight that evaporates under the slightest critical scrutiny. I love Roman Holiday, but I vacillate between indifference and actual dislike of the rest of Hepburn's films. I don't find her winsome in Breakfast at Tiffany's, am irritated by her in Charade, think she's appallingly twee in Love in the Afternoon. She doesn't hold her own against Sean Connery in Robin and Marian and gets blown off the screen by Albert Finney, Alan Arkin, and Rex Harrison in Two for the Road, Wait Until Dark, and My Fair Lady, respectively. If you ask me, Audrey isn't an actress so much as someone you would like to have known and maybe had the opportunity to cuddle, which makes her mega-stardom in the Fifties and Sixties all the more testament to her ineffable appeal. Happening right when Method was rendering personalities like Hepburn déclassé, she was making a career of being terminally anachronistic. It's Ozzie's Harriet, sashaying while Rome burns. Instant nostalgia; even when she was introduced for the first time, it must have seemed like ages ago.

Blackboard Jungle (1955) - DVD

**½/**** Image B+ Sound B Extras C+
starring Glenn Ford, Anne Francis, Louis Calhern, Margaret Hayes
screenplay by Richard Brooks, based on the novel by Evan Hunter
directed by Richard Brooks

by Alex Jackson There are a few scenes in Richard Brooks's Blackboard Jungle that hold up, legitimately, as a thoughtful and fruitfully provocative investigation of the "inspirational teacher" genre. And when the film isn't working, it's often valuable as a time capsule of the 1950s and can be appreciated in a detached, archaeological way. But there are also times when you just can't help but condescend to it, and I'd hate for Blackboard Jungle to become a camp object. Blackboard Jungle may not be worthy of praise simply for dealing with issues of race and class, but the fact remains that some fifty years later, its subject matter continues to touch a raw nerve. By treating it ironically and laughing at it, we're absolved of the responsibility to fully engage with the issues it raises.

Sundance '10: Skateland

***/****
starring Shiloh Fernandez, Ashley Greene, Heath Freeman, Taylor Handley
written and directed by Anthony Burns

by Alex Jackson Anthony Burns's Skateland honours the hoary conventions of the "summer-after-high-school" genre (notice I'm not even bothering to explain what the movie's about), plays everything by the book, and never takes you too far out of your comfort zone. I think the film's power lies in Burns's willingness to allow for a cliché or a saccharine moment so long as it is truthful. Skateland closes with the hero kissing the girl to the accompaniment of Modern English's ubiquitous "I Melt With You," and I felt as though I was seeing this ending for the very first time. Burns makes the smart move of establishing them as best friends at the beginning of the film and then having them transition into lovers. Because there has already been a great deal of intimacy between the two, their kiss stems organically from the material and the emotions it provokes are genuine. More inexplicable are the subtle nuances (in the performances? The writing? The direction?) that manage to depict teenage horniness without ever lapsing into sexism or misogyny. Perhaps it could be attributed to the fact that the guys here are as gorgeous as the girls, essentially levelling the playing field. (I'll admit to feeling somewhat alienated by all these beautiful people, but I adapted fairly easily.) Extra points for the scene where the hero finally assaults the archetypical bully and the results are not cathartic, but frankly a little scary. The violence is crudely explosive, and while the film minimizes the consequences of this attack, it does nothing to excuse or justify it. Although Skateland doesn't re-invent the genre, it does it well and believes in the material. And wouldn't you know? That's all the re-invention we really need.

Hannah Montana: The Movie (2009) - Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

**/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B-
starring Miley Cyrus, Emily Osment, Jason Earles, Billy Ray Cyrus
screenplay by Dan Berendsen
directed by Peter Chelsom

by Bill Chambers Peter Chelsom may have sold his soul when he joined the ranks of Lasse Hallstrom and John Madden to become a house director for Miramax, but going to work at Disney--on a feature-film vehicle for one of the company's biggest brands, no less--is a mercenary move, pure and simple. So it's surprising, considering he probably could've treated the job as a paid vacation without incurring the wrath of "Hannah Montana" fans (who've been weaned on a particularly low-rent sitcom), to say nothing of the suits in charge (Disney favours foremen to filmmakers, after all), that Chelsom seems legitimately inspired by the material more often than not. The 'Hannah Montana' concept itself needs only gentle pushes to yield something resembling a story, but Chelsom doesn't exactly coast on it; anyone who's involuntarily endured the collected works of Kenny Ortega or Andy Fickman will notice a more idiosyncratic hand at the helm almost immediately. While I can't say I've ever thought much of Chelsom's films (they're a bit twinkly for my tastes), he appears to have found his niche. As a work of Hollywood imperialism goes, it's certainly preferable to his remake of Shall We Dance?.

The Twilight Saga: New Moon (2009)

ZERO STARS/****
starring Kristen Stewart, Robert Pattinson, Taylor Lautner, Dakota Fanning
screenplay by Melissa Rosenberg, based on the novel by Stephenie Meyer
directed by Chris Weitz

by Walter Chaw Let's play a Mad Libs game with Chris Weitz's appalling The Twilight Saga: New Moon (hereafter New Moon) and, by so doing, avoid talking about how a new moon is actually the absence of a moon in the sky, or how moon cycles remind me of menstruation, which would be a terrible thing to happen to heroine Bella (Kristen Stewart) around her boyfriend Ed (Robert Pattinson). Let's replace every time they say "do it"--and by that they mean "bite me and make me a member of the walking undead"--with "fuck" and see if this whole Twilight atrocity still appears the benign thing for your daughters to gobble up whole. When Bella implores Ed to fuck her after she graduates from high school, for instance, and Ed says that he won't fuck her until she turns twenty-one and they can get married...well, listen, this is a fairytale without any teeth, meaning it's a really, really dangerous fairytale. More, it's illiterate, invasive, moronic proselytizing from some Mormon housewife's blinkered belief system. Unconvinced? Consider that it's stated early on in this instalment of the saga that the reason Ed doesn't want to turn Bella into a vampire--oops, I mean, fuck her--is that he's afraid he'll damn her soul to eternal hellfire.

I Love You, Beth Cooper (2009) - DVD

*½/**** Image N/A Sound N/A Extras C
starring Hayden Panettiere, Paul Rust, Jack T. Carpenter, Lauren London
screenplay by Larry Doyle, based on his novel
directed by Chris Columbus

by Jefferson Robbins I believe this is what it looks like when a veteran director throws in the towel. Morosely paced, edited with no ear for slapstick, perfectly mediocre in its staging, timing, scripting, and performances, I Love You, Beth Cooper (hereafter Beth Cooper) betrays benign neglect on the part of producer-director Chris Columbus. It's as if he tossed together all the ingredients for a thoughtful but teen-friendly confection--a recipe inherited from his late mentor John Hughes--and took it on faith that the cake would bake itself. There's even a weird invocation of the dead god of teen comedies: Columbus casts Alan Ruck, a.k.a. Cameron in Ferris Bueller's Day Off, as the hero's dad and supplies the sidekick with Cameron's absent, oppressive shadow of a father. That's not homage--that's the desperate rubbing of a talisman, a prayer to recapture lightning that leaked out of the bottle long ago.

Cirque du Freak: The Vampire's Assistant (2009)

**/****
starring John C. Reilly, Ken Watanabe, Josh Hutcherson, Salma Hayek
screenplay by Paul Weitz and Brian Helgeland, based on the "Cirque du Freak" series of books by Darren Shan
directed by Paul Weitz

by Ian Pugh Maybe it's a cop-out to dismiss Cirque du Freak: The Vampire's Assistant (hereafter The Vampire's Assistant) with that banal X-meets-Y idiom ("Twilight collides with The Golden Compass!"), but what other choice does one have? Three weeks before little brother Chris continues the Twilight saga, Paul Weitz gets the ball rolling on another vampire property based on another popular series of novels for young adults--and getting the ball rolling is more or less all he does. It's a handy parallel to Chris's own The Golden Compass in the sense that you're expected to immerse yourself in a fantasy world where no one does anything of particular note and nothing is accomplished. People are bitten, people are transformed, and the fulfillment of legends is foretold--but when the credits roll, can you say you've actually seen anything? In its own laborious foundation-laying, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone still managed a dreaded brush with Voldemort; what does The Vampire's Assistant have to offer? Willem Dafoe and Ken Watanabe under pounds of latex--made up to look like Vincent Price and Incredible Hulk nemesis The Leader, respectively--standing around, making bold pronouncements with the implied message that they'll have more to do if the powers-that-be greenlight the next instalment.

Adventureland (2009) + Alien Trespass (2009)|Adventureland (2009) - Blu-ray + Digital Copy

ADVENTURELAND
***½/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B
starring Jake Eisenberg, Kristen Stewart, Martin Starr, Margarita Levieva
written and directed by Greg Mottola

ALIEN TRESPASS
***/****
starring Eric McCormack, Jenni Baird, Robert Patrick, Dan Lauria
screenplay by Steven P. Fisher
directed by R. W. Goodwin

by Ian Pugh In everyone's life there's a summer of '42, but of course it was never as wonderful as you remember. Although Greg Mottola's Adventureland is set in 1987, that's almost incidental--it really takes place in that hazy cloud known as "the past," full of fly-by-night jobs rife with fraud and deceit, fairweather friends who sock you in the crotch, and, of course, the music that brings to mind painful experiences perhaps best left forgotten. (Funny to think that this might be the ideological inverse of another great 2009 film about memory, The Uninvited: unhealthily obsessive instead of unhealthily in denial.) The key to understanding the film, I think, lies in Falco's New Wave anthem "Rock Me Amadeus," here serving as an inescapable nightmare at the titular amusement park, where it's pumped through the sound system ad nauseam ("Can you give me an ice pick that I can just jam into my ears?"). But then the romantic confusion driving the plot unravels in a series of betrayals, and that same song becomes a damning elegy. Seems strange that the director of Superbad, an instant classic of maturity-through-childishness and nostalgia-without-precedent, should deliver something so angry and contradictory for a follow-up. Perhaps it is strange--but Adventureland is also a more honest, more personal, and, most importantly, more mature film than Superbad.

WarGames (1983) [25th Anniversary Edition] + Saturday Night Fever (1977)/Staying Alive (1983) [Double Feature] - DVDs|Saturday Night Fever [30th Anniversary Special Collector's Edition]- Blu-ray Disc

War Games
***½/**** Image B Sound C Extras A
starring Matthew Broderick, Dabney Coleman, John Wood, Ally Sheedy
screenplay by Lawrence Lasker & Walter F. Parkes
directed by John Badham

SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER
****/****
DVD - Image B Sound B+ Extras C
BD - Image A Sound A Extras B-
starring John Travolta, Karen Gorney, Barry Miller, Joseph Cali
screenplay by Norman Wexler
directed by John Badham

STAYING ALIVE
ZERO STARS/**** Image C+ Sound B+
starring John Travolta, Cynthia Rhodes, Finola Hughes, Steve Inwood
screenplay by Sylvester Stallone and Norman Wexler
directed by Sylvester Stallone

by Walter Chaw I hadn't realized until I watched the 25^th Anniversary Edition DVD of it how intimately WarGames is embedded in my psyche. I saw it in the theatre as a ten-year-old in 1983 and, for the rest of that decade (the prime of my excited filmgoing experience), I didn't know that movies were ever different. The first time, in fact, that I recognized that movies were human was the first time they revealed themselves as something that could fail to inspire any kind of response at all--and I wonder if that initial moment of disappointment had more to do with the development of my cynicism than any one picture's deficiency. Film is a progressive addiction, says one theory: the more sophisticated you get as a viewer, the harder it is to find the fix. WarGames presented me with the idea of eroticism through mild scatological exhibitionism. It had a young man in his room, alone with a young woman, excusing himself to urinate in the next room--an act unthinkable to me as a ten-year-old, and holding with it the thrill of taboo. The next time they meet, the world starts to explode and, better yet, the girl traps the boy between her legs when he tries to edge by.

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.

Sundance '09: Stay the Same Never Change

***½/****
starring Tate Buck, Dirk Cowan, Matthew Faber, Mary Nichols
written and directed by Laurel Nakadate

by Alex Jackson In the first five to ten minutes of Laurel Nakadate's Stay the Same Never Change, a beautiful blonde teenage girl eats a bowl of Trix in a surreally white kitchen. Nakadate gives us a series of close-ups of lips moist with milk and cutaways to the Trix box art. We then see the girl lounging around in her pyjamas, sometimes watching TV but mostly doing pretty much nothing at all. While she doesn't do anything overtly sexual, there is something almost pornographic about the attention Nakadate throws upon her. The girl's innocence and her sensuality are inextricable from one another: she's sexy when she eats breakfast cereal and she's sexy when she watches TV; everything she does or doesn't do renders her a sexual object and she is all the sexier for not really realizing it. Nakadate seems to have found a fresh and absurdly funny way of illustrating the Lolita problem, whereby sexuality provides young women more power than they know what to do with. Once this sequence is over, she switches to lower-resolution video and puts her non-actors in nakedly goofy scripted scenes. One teenager drowns her teddy bear. Another dresses up as the Hulk and rolls around on the floor. A third creates a muscle-bound love doll and takes him to the drive-in to see Evan Almighty. Because they're talking now, her girls are no longer aesthetic objects and the juice drains out of the picture. But they aren't actual people, either. Nakadate doesn't evince any clear idea of what she wants to accomplish in these scenes and her cast's line readings are flat and mechanical. The film acquires an amateurish quality that appears to fit one's preconceptions of what bad movies are like. Yet this amateurishness is perhaps even more interesting than the arty first sequence, in that the horror inherent in the material is effectively neutralized. Nakadate introduces an ephebophilic kidnapper early in the film, but he is portrayed as neither a manifestation of a subconscious death wish nor a metaphor for the destructive forces of adulthood. He's just a loser. If Nakadate establishes in her virtuoso prologue the Midas touch of pretty teenage girls, where their every gesture vibrates with subsumed erotic tension, the hyper-banality of the rest of her film manages to push that notion to its breaking point.

Can't Hardly Wait (1998) [10 Year Reunion Edition] - Blu-ray Disc

**½/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras B
starring Ethan Embry, Charlie Korsmo, Lauren Ambrose, Jennifer Love Hewitt
written and directed by Deborah Kaplan & Harry Elfont

by Bryant Frazer Opportunistic special-edition DVDs are a dime a dozen, so the sudden appearance of a "10 Year Reunion Edition" of Can't Hardly Wait doesn't exactly signal that this insistently lightweight teen comedy is now considered a timeless classic. What it is, instead, is a remarkable time capsule--a look back, as though from decades removed, at what passed for youth culture in 1998. Audaciously staged as a little-more-than-real-time dramatization of a single night's house party, the air humid with that special, pheromone-drenched mist of booze and sweat and young sex and aspirations towards same, Can't Hardly Wait is a reminder of the pop-cultural moment when Brad and Gwyneth were the hot celebrity couple, Jennifer Love Hewitt was an up-and-comer, nobody had ever heard of Selma Blair or Lauren Ambrose, and the likes of Smash Mouth and Eve 6 were planting hit singles on MTV and the radio.

Once Upon a Zeitgeist: Blue City (1986); Top Gun (1986); The Lost Boys (1987); Bull Durham (1988)

BLUE CITY - DVD
ZERO STARS/**** Image C- Sound C-
starring Judd Nelson, Ally Sheedy, Paul Winfield, Scott Wilson
screenplay by Lukas Heller and Walter Hill, based on the novel by Ross MacDonald
directed by Michelle Manning

TOP GUN [Widescreen Special Collector's Edition] - DVD + [Special Collector's Edition] Blu-ray Disc
*/****
DVD - Image B Sound B+ Extras B
BD - Image B+ Sound A+ (DTS) A- (DD) Extras B
starring Tom Cruise, Kelly McGillis, Val Kilmer, Anthony Edwards
screenplay by Jim Cash & Jack Epps, Jr.
directed by Tony Scott

THE LOST BOYS [Two-Disc Special Edition] - DVD
***/**** Image B+ Sound B Extras C+
starring Corey Feldman, Jami Gertz, Corey Haim, Dianne Wiest
screenplay by Janice Fischer & James Jeremias and Jeffrey Boam
directed by Joel Schumacher

BULL DURHAM [Collector's Edition] - DVD
**/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras B+
starring Kevin Costner, Susan Sarandon, Tim Robbins, Trey Wilson
written and directed by Ron Shelton

by Walter Chaw Released in 1986 and tonally identical to contemporary suck classics The Wraith and Wisdom, the Brat Pack travesty Blue City represents the nadir of a year that produced Blue Velvet, Down By Law, The Mosquito Coast, Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, Sid and Nancy, Aliens, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, The Fly, Big Trouble in Little China, Something Wild, Mona Lisa, and Night of the Creeps, for starters. It's the quintessence of why people remember the 1980s as a terrible decade for film, poor in every single objective measure of quality. Consider a central set-piece where our hero Billy (Judd Nelson) and his buck-toothed cohort Joey (David Caruso) stage a weird re-enactment of the heist from The Killing at a dog track that includes not only such bon mots as "I'm new at this! Give me a break!" but also the dumbest diversionary tactic in the history of these things as Joey tosses a prime cut on the track in front of a frankly startled/quickly delighted pack of muzzled greyhounds. Then again, it's not a bad metaphor for the Me Generation and its blockbuster mentality. After cracking wise a few times in a way that makes one wonder if he's suddenly become a Republican, Billy blows on the barrel of his gun in his best John Ireland-meets-Montgomery Clift and professional bad editor Ross Albert (the whiz kid behind Bushwhacked, The Beverly Hillbillies, and The Pest) cracks a little wise himself by cutting to a rack of hot dogs. Unfortunately, suggesting that Judd Nelson is gay as a French holiday is only mildly wittier than suggesting the same of clearly gay Tom Cruise. More on that when we get to Top Gun.

Drillbit Taylor (2008) - Blu-ray Disc

**/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras B
starring Owen Wilson, Leslie Mann, Danny McBride, Josh Peck
screenplay by Kristofor Brown & Seth Rogen
directed by Steven Brill

by Bill Chambers For good and for ill, John Hughes's sticky fingerprints are all over Drillbit Taylor, his first screen credit (under his nom-de-plume "Edmond Dantès") in six years. The film has signs of something written post-Curly Sue, given its glib fascination with the homeless, penchant for quasi-Dickensian names (Drillbit, Filkins, Doppler, Fence), and reams of sadistic slapstick. Yet it also echoes an earlier period in which Hughes treated high-schoolers with sensitivity, confronted the sometimes-toxic influence of their parents (particularly the patriarch), and understood pop-culture as teenage shorthand. (If the score's pomo quotation of the Cape Fear theme wasn't indicated in Hughes's 70-page "scriptment," it's an uncanny homage. Ditto a non-sequitur of the nurse's office pulling down a "Closed" sign like a nervous bank teller in the Wild West during an altercation in the hall outside.) Too, Drillbit Taylor betrays Hughes's influence in scenes of class warfare, though a moment when the protagonists, running for their lives, stop to ogle a couple of sunbathers is so derivative of his Ferris Bueller's Day Off that only the rabid fandom of script doctors Kristofor Brown and Seth Rogen could account for it.

Square Pegs: The Like, Totally Complete Series... Totally (1982-1983) + Girls Just Want to Have Fun (1985) - DVDs

SQUARE PEGS
Image B+ Sound B Extras B+
"Square Pegs (Pilot)," "A Cafeteria Line," Pac-Man Fever," "Square Pigskins," "Halloween XII," "A Simple Attachment," "Weemaweegate," "Open 24 Hours," "Muffy's Bat Mitzvah," "Hardly Working," "A Child's Christmas in Weemawee," "It's All How You See Things," "Merry Pranksters," "It's Academical!," "The Stepanowicz Papers," "To Serve Weemawee All My Days," "No Substitutions," "No Joy in Weemawee," "The Arrangement"

GIRLS JUST WANT TO HAVE FUN
ZERO STARS/**** Image B- Sound B
starring Sarah Jessica Parker, Helen Hunt, Shannen Doherty, Lee Montgomery
screenplay by Amy Spies
directed by Alan Metter

by Ian Pugh The "square pegs" of the title are brainiac Patty (Sarah Jessica Parker, already having settled into a halting conversational style that never left her) and "fat girl" Lauren (Amy Linker), newly-initiated freshmen at Weemawee High School who pledge during the opening narration of each episode that this year, this year, they're going to be popular. Unfortunately, their never-ending--maybe even Wile E. Coyote-esque--bid to break into Weemawee's social elite always results in half-baked schemes and humiliating compromises. (Upon being ousted from a table in a crowded diner by the popular crowd, Lauren rationalizes that "having them sit where we were just sitting is almost as good as sitting with them.") While "Square Pegs" never fails to empathize with the folks who are young and foolish enough to believe in such a ridiculous enterprise--because it's all they know at this stage of their lives--what really makes the series special is how it forces older viewers to contemplate the people they were in high school and who they are now.

Jack Ketchum's The Lost (2008) - DVD

***/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B+
starring Marc Senter, Shay Astar, Alex Frost, Ed Lauter
screenplay by Chris Sivertson, based on the novel by Jack Ketchum
directed by Chris Sivertson

by Alex Jackson SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. The Lost is simultaneously polished and crude. For all intents and purposes, it's a direct-to-video release^*, and it has a "direct-to-video" vibe to it. There's a broadness to the acting, to put it delicately. It's not that these are bad actors, exactly, it's just that their performances are superficial. I want to say that they lack the nuance of what you'd get in a theatrical feature, but I'm beginning to wonder if there is something about the very nature of the "theatrical film" that is more accommodating of excess. That perhaps the very size of a theatrically-released film can dwarf an over-actor and make the severity of his or her offense somewhat less significant, whereas if a film goes straight-to-DVD, it becomes more performance-oriented. It seems that it's really hard to find camp in a theatrical release and it's really hard to avoid it in dtv product. I don't know whether this is me the viewer projecting something from outside the film--I guess it must be, as I wouldn't imagine that most filmmakers actually intend their movies to bypass the big screen altogether. But wherever it comes from, it's there.

Sundance '08: The Wackness

**/****
starring Josh Peck, Ben Kingsley, Famke Janssen, Olivia Thirlby
written and directed by Jonathan Levine

by Alex Jackson In the opening scene of The Wackness, teenager Luke Shapiro (Josh Peck) is having a session with his psychiatrist, Dr. Squires (Ben Kingsley). Dr. Squires tells him that a "quarter bag" will buy him forty-five minutes. Luke produces the requested pot and goes on to discuss his problems as Dr. Squires fills and lights up a bong. In one of the film's closing scenes, Luke is having dinner with his family when an uncle asks him what he wants to be once he finishes college. He responds that he's thinking he'd like to be a "shrink"--after all, he should be an expert, having been surrounded by so many fucked-up people. These two scenes go far in illustrating both the film's sickly sentimentality and its muddled perspective towards adolescence. Not to get moralistic on you, but Luke is essentially being exploited by his psychiatrist: instead of trading sex for a sympathetic ear, he's trading drugs. It isn't that great a leap. But rather than growing to realize that Dr. Squires is a user and a loser (the humour of seeing Sir Ben Kingsley toke up is rooted in the incongruence of such a prestigious actor behaving so immaturely, right?), he ultimately views him as a figure to emulate in a sea of unworthy adult role models. I'm not saying that The Wackness is morally bankrupt, exactly, just that its values are confused. Luke at times comes off as an omniscient demigod who sees through the corruption and hypocrisy of the adult world and at other times comes off as a complete fucking idiot who overuses "mad" in its colloquial form. Dr. Squires is sometimes a wise and loving mentor and sometimes a total mess who needs Luke to rescue him. Writer-director Jonathan Levine may have intended these contradictions to inform a co-dependent relationship between them, but for the most part it merely seems like he wants it both ways. The Wackness strikes me as a very primitive film. To cover up the sentimentality of the material, Levine gives us a lot of drug use and a repetitious use of the word "fuck." Meanwhile, Petra Korner's cinematography desaturates the colours in an apparent attempt to make the film look less cute, but it ends up looking grungy in a very aesthetic way. Ben Kingsley is pretty good and appears to be enjoying himself, yet his presence in the film--like that of Mary-Kate Olsen--remains cheap stunt-casting. (To heighten the novelty factor, Levine has the two lock lips in a barroom phone booth.) Most annoying is the easy nostalgia Levine preys on by setting the film in New York circa 1994. His pretense for doing so is that this was when Mayor Rudy Giuliani began cleaning up the city, but it seems informed by a desire to show our hero playing "The Legend of Zelda" as much as anything else. It was probably only a matter of time before Generation Y got around to memorializing the good old days, I just wish it wasn't this soon.

Sundance '08: American Teen

*/****
directed by Nanette Burstein

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

Juno (2007)

*/****
starring Ellen Page, Michael Cera, Jennifer Garner, Jason Bateman
screenplay by Diablo Cody
directed by Jason Reitman

by Walter Chaw Brutally overwritten, smug, and self-indulgent to no discernible point, Jason Reitman's disappointing Juno is an unfortunate attempt to marry Judd Apatow's sleazy morality plays with a Kevin Smith pop-cultural gabber--the result being a ventriloquism tract in which virgin screenwriter (formerly blogger) Diablo Cody crams so many unlikely gluts of verbiage into so many sterile, undeveloped characters that the whole production is the ultimate act of masturbatory puppetry. The movie would be twice as funny with half as many wisecracks--it's so stuffed that there are long moments of zero interplay as one person or another acts as mute sounding board to whomever's reeling off a Dennis Miller-ism. Red-flag time when a film acts as both main attraction and audience. Ellen Page stars as the titular Juno McGuff, a Soupy Sales-referencing sixteen-year-old who finds herself pregnant by her nebbish boyfriend, Bleeker (Michael Cera). Exactly: What 16-year-old references Soupy Sales? What 66-year-old? Look to something like Heathers for how to write absurdist dialogue--that film along with Clerks the chief antecedents for Juno, which isn't as good as either because it wears its hipster cred like a chip on its shoulder. It's also not very good because even though it's about teen pregnancy, abortion, and adoption, it's about nothing so much as quirky teen romance, revealing itself to be inclined towards mining laughter from dorkiness and thus allaying itself, too (and in the worst possible way), with Napoleon Dynamite.

The Monster Squad (1987) [Two-Disc 20th Anniversary Edition] - DVD

**/**** Image B- Sound B+ Extras A
starring André Gower, Duncan Regehr, Stephen Macht, Tom Noonan
screenplay by Shane Black & Fred Dekker
directed by Fred Dekker

by Bill Chambers Since I caught myself mouthing a portion of the dialogue while revisiting it for the first time in almost two decades, I think it's fair to say I internalized The Monster Squad through multiple viewings in my misspent youth. Still, as that TriStar horse sprouted wings, I realized I had no tactile memory of the film, no real recollection of what it felt like--and the answer is: it feels like 80 minutes, give or take. It's pabulum, albeit pabulum with a pedigree. The latest nostalgia trap to get a nerd baptism (an AICN-sponsored reunion screening at Austin's Alamo Drafthouse is more or less single-handedly responsible for the picture's splashy DVD release), it's at least better than the movie to which it's most often compared, the Steven Spielberg-produced The Goonies, if only because it's a good half-hour shorter and, by extension, comparatively unpretentious. Beneath its own Spielbergian façade, The Monster Squad works like those old horror hosts used to by sanctioning the classic monsters for a younger generation, whereas The Goonies aims only to erect a shrine to itself.

Summer School (1987) [Life's a Beach Edition] - DVD

*½/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B-
starring Mark Harmon, Kirstie Alley, Robin Thomas, Patrick Labyorteaux
screenplay by Jeff Franklin
directed by Carl Reiner

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover We at FFC ride ourselves on sussing out the subtleties in what is widely condemned as popular junk, and more power to us. But if you're expecting a review of Summer School that illuminates the film's hidden complexities, you've sadly come to the wrong place. Although there are certain thematic features that identify it as an atypical entry in the '80s teen-comedy genre, not the least of which a sort-of social conscience that suggests National Lampoon's Degrassi High, these anomalous credentials are largely wiped out by a thudding lack of wit and a functional ugliness of craft that makes the film barely tolerable at the best of times. While the actors generally convey personality beyond the limited means of the production, they're fighting an uphill battle against a pervasive laziness behind the camera.

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.

Porky's Collection 1 2 3 [Special Collector's Edition] - DVD

PORKY'S (1982)
**½/**** Image D Sound C-
starring Kim Cattrall, Scott Colomby, Kaki Hunter, Nancy Parsons
written and directed by Bob Clark

PORKY'S II: THE NEXT DAY (1983)
**½/**** Image D+ Sound C
starring Dan Monahan, Wyatt Knight, Mark Herrier, Roger Wilson
screenplay by Roger E. Swaybill & Alan Ormsby & Bob Clark
directed by Bob Clark

PORKY'S REVENGE (1985)
**/**** Image D- Sound D+
starring Dan Monahan, Wyatt Knight, Tony Ganios, Mark Herrier
screenplay by Ziggy Steinberg
directed by James Komack

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover There's nothing more obnoxious than someone being pointlessly revisionist and declaring some bit of cultural detritus a lost masterpiece. Still, I can't help but be guardedly pleased to discover several inches of depth charted in the legendarily foul waters of the Porky's franchise. By far the most notorious of the big-name '80s teen comedies, it was widely attacked for its misogyny--a charge I can't exactly support yet can't entirely dispel, either. But as a critic friend pointed out, they're the only movies that retroactively take place in the Eisenhower era to suggest that all was not well in the American Republic. In fact, the first two films insist on a pervasive racism in their small-town Florida setting, Porky's finding a character casting off his anti-Semite father and Porky's II: The Next Day baiting the Klan upon stupidly wading into a censorship fight. Coupled with Bob Clark's blunt-witted realism, it makes for intriguing viewing--which is not to say there wasn't room for improvement.

Strangers with Candy (2006) + Accepted (2006) [Widescreen] - DVDs

STRANGERS WITH CANDY
*½/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras B
starring Amy Sedaris, Stephen Colbert, Paul Dinello, Ian Holm
screenplay by Stephen Colbert & Paul Dinello & Amy Sedaris
directed by Paul Dinello

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover It may be churlish to hold a film to the standards of a TV show I recently panned, but comparing "Strangers with Candy" the series to Strangers with Candy the movie reveals a massive gulf between the two in both wit and style. The show at least had a sensibility and an idea of what it was satirizing, and it always delivered the goods; if those goods were not to my liking, it wasn't for lack of trying. But the stillborn film version has neither a sense of craft nor a reason for being: apparently thrown together over a kegger weekend, it's horribly-paced, ugly to look at, and mostly rehashes the broader points of a sitcom that had moved on from its basic premise by the time it reached its final season. Strangers with Candy is neither the movie fans were waiting for nor an attractive intro for neophytes, and will most likely be cable filler before it shuffles off into well-deserved obscurity.

TIFF '06: Citizen Duane

*/****
starring Douglas Smith, Donal Logue, Vivica A. Fox, Alberta Watson
screenplay by Jonathan Sobol and Robert DeLeskie
directed by Michael Mabbott

by Bill Chambers This Canuck Rushmore really got on my nerves. The movie makes a crucial miscalculation in the early going by introducing its puny teenaged hero, Duane Balfour (Douglas Smith), in revenge mode: Given that we already know Duane's girlfriend (Jane McGregor) is way out of his league, he would seem to have pre-emptively settled any scores he could possibly have with the Most Popular Kid in School (porcine Nicholas Carella, as miscast as Haylie Duff was as the distaff equivalent in Napoleon Dynamite), and so this retribution without an onscreen context looks petty. Hoping to redeem the family name (his father, a prophet of doom, was killed in a Ruby Ridge scenario), Duane eventually decides to run for mayor, but he's a Quixote surrounded by pragmatists; when Duane finally throws in the towel, his entire support system--family, friends, teachers--breathes a sigh of relief. (Anything less would be frankly unCanadian.) Small problem: director Michael Mabbott isn't media-savvy (while guesting on a radio show, Duane doesn't wear headphones; an asshole news reporter's microphone is never plugged into anything; etc.). Big problem: Citizen Duane is an underdog/coming-of-age comedy that's neither funny nor poignant nor ingratiating. PROGRAMME: Contemporary World Cinema

The Quiet (2006)

*/****
starring Elisha Cuthbert, Camilla Belle, Martin Donovan, Edie Falco
screenplay by Micah Schraft and Abdi Nazemian
directed by Jamie Babbit

by Walter Chaw Laden (leaden?) with melo-tragedy, Jamie Babbit's The Quiet is a burlesque of high school and incest, and though I don't doubt that there's a great movie in the intersection of the two, this ain't it. The film stars Elisha Cuthbert as the wounded "Heather," Nina, whose reputation as the perfect girl (read: the head cheerleader) is stained by a home life dominated by a zombie mom Olivia (Edie Falco) and an all-too-loving pedophile nice guy dad Paul (Martin Donovan). It wanders into the mind listlessly a time or two that Nina's backstory is identical to something the crazed Christian Slater character from Heathers would manufacture to justify the "suicide" of some teenage girl he's just murdered. The only way to really up the ante in The Quiet is through the introduction of deaf-mute orphan Dot (Camilla Belle), taken in by Paul and Olivia to act as the shadow/doppelgänger to our damaged-goods protagonist--and sure enough. But Dot can play Beethoven's "Appassionata" and "Moonlight" as the situation demands, and she provides treacly narration throughout in her piping, irritating lilt. She even goes so far as to attract chronic masturbator Connor (Shawn Ashmore) away from Nina's cartoon of a queen bitch pal Michelle (Katy Mixon).

Rock 'n' Roll High School (1979) [Rock On Edition] - DVD

***/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras A-
starring P.J. Soles, Vincent Van Patten, Clint Howard, Dey Young
screenplay by Richard Whitley & Russ Dvonich and Joseph McBride
directed by Allan Arkush

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover I could be fastidious and tell you of Rock 'N' Roll High School's faults--that it's cheesy, for instance, with cheap jokes and a relentlessly peppy mindset that somehow contradicts the presence of punk pioneers The Ramones. Yet the film's various demerits add up to a plus, as the exuberance of the whole thing renders it absurdly enjoyable. Much like punk itself (though not like punk at all), the inappropriateness of juxtaposed elements creates sparks that make you wanna dance. This is the big latter-day musical John Landis was gunning for with The Blues Brothers but had too much money and too little sense to achieve: a film that resurrects the innocent, let's-put-on-a-show mentality of old musicals and mates it to the burning-schoolhouse mentality of rock-and-roll. Most people can see that The Ramones have no place in a bouncy teen comedy, but that's almost the best joke in the movie's arsenal.

Dawson's Creek: The Complete Sixth Season (2002-2003) - DVD

Image B Sound B+ Commentary A-
"The Kids Are Alright," "The Song Remains the Same," "The Importance of Not Being Too Earnest," Instant Karma!," "The Imposters," "Living Dead Girl," "Ego Tripping at the Gates of Hell," "Spiderwebs," "Everything Put Together Falls Apart," "Merry Mayhem," "Day Out of Days," "All the Right Moves," "Rock Bottom," "Clean and Sober," "Castaways," "That Was Then," "Sex and Violence," "Love Bites," "Lovelines," "Catch-22," "Goodbye, Yellow Brick Road," "Joey Potter and the Capeside Redemption," "All Good Things... ...Must Come to an End"

by Bill Chambers It's been three years since "Dawson's Creek" left the airwaves, and a side-effect of revisiting the final, wistful season of the show--in which the characters are constantly tabulating five years' worth of individual progress (or lack thereof)--is the urge to subject its core ensemble to a mental game of "Where Are They Now?". Newly-minted Oscar nominee Michelle Williams (a.k.a. Jen Lindley), whose revisionist contempt for the series manifested itself while she was doing press for Brokeback Mountain, has carved out a niche for herself as the muse of indie filmmakers, while Katie Holmes (Joey Potter) has spent the better part of the last nine months promoting the first blockbuster of her career (Batman Begins) and living out a real-life Rosemary's Baby. As for the dudes, James Van Der Beek (Dawson Leery) and Joshua Jackson (Pacey Witter), they've had a great deal more difficulty hitting their stride--which makes a certain amount of sense, given the program's gradual transformation into a distaff version of itself. Call it "Joey's Creek".

Thumbsucker (2005) + The Chumscrubber (2005) - DVDs

THUMBSUCKER
**/**** DVD - Image A- Sound B+ Extras B
starring Lou Pucci, Tilda Swinton, Vincent D'Onofrio, Keanu Reeves
screenplay by Mike Mills, based on the novel by Walter Kirn
directed by Mike Mills

by Walter Chaw With the brief reprieve offered the Sundance imprint by Junebug now smelling a lot more like "fluke" than "trend," find Mike Mills's underwhelming Thumbsucker, another Sundance sensation so familiar in its affected suburban quirk that its peculiarities seem like formula and its attacks on middle-class perversity and malaise seem all too comfortable. There simply isn't much heart left in this pursuit, this punching of holes into the façade of planned communities and their plastic citizenry--this central conceit of broken people leaning on psychic crutches as the apocalypse of the day-to-day cascades in on them in blue, stylized waves.

The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants (2005) [Widescreen Edition] - DVD

*½/**** Image A- Sound B Extras B-
starring Amber Tamblyn, America Ferrera, Blake Lively, Alexis Bledel
screenplay by Delia Ephron and Elizebth Chandler, based on the novel by Ann Brashares
directed by Ken Kwapis

by Walter Chaw The quartet of best pals portrayed in The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants are, we're told, complementary parts of one consciousness, which goes some way towards explaining why it is that individually they seem like machine-tooled fonts of tween didacticism. They're Judy Blume-spawned pods: the fat, brassy one with speeches about the importance of being fat and brassy; the slut with mother issues and speeches about regret; the frigid one who lightens up; and the morose one who learns to set aside her barbed irony at the expense of a disease-of-the-week urchin with a message of her own. Although the whole thing's too long as it is, there's barely enough room in the picture for each of the girls to have a complete narrative arc, and so we're given preachy shorthand speechifying in lieu of character complexity. It's a TIGER BEAT quiz about puberty and it's astonishingly irritating, even if you can spot glimmers of truth in there amid the weeping and screeching.

Sky High (2005) + Stealth (2005)|Sky High [Widescreen] - DVD

SKY HIGH
½*/****  Image A Sound B+ Extras C+
starring Michael Angarano, Danielle Panabaker, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Kurt Russell
screenplay by Paul Hernandez and Robert Schooley & Mark McCorkle
directed by Mike Mitchell

STEALTH
**/****
starring Josh Lucas, Jessica Biel, Jamie Foxx, Sam Shepard
screenplay by W.D. Richter
directed by Rob Cohen

by Walter Chaw A kids movie for the stupid ones and a guys movie for the stupid ones of those, Sky High and Stealth are lowest-common-denominator entertainments that throw sense out the window in favour of clumsy one-liners, bad special effects, and an eye focused keen on demographics and the bottom line, which those demographics promise to fork over on opening weekend. It doesn't matter if they're good, just that they rake in enough moolah before people get a whiff of the noisome rot and ennui wafting on air-conditioned currents out of the friendly neighbourhood cineplex and start staying home again in droves. The dreadfulness of Sky High and Stealth can be measured by the extent to which this nation's timid, gaffed, untrained, dispassionate film critics equivocate in their reviews that it's for kids, that it's an enjoyable film if you check your brain at the door, and/or that it's "finally" the family/action/blockbuster you've been waiting for all summer long.

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: Wassup Rockers

**½/****
starring Jonathan Velasquez, Francisco Pedrasa, Milton Velasquez, Usvaldo Panameno
written and directed by Larry Clark

by Bill Chambers These days, when I think of Larry Clark, I think of Stephen Wiltshire, the outsider artist profiled in Oliver Sacks's An Anthropologist on Mars. Diagnosed with autism early in life, Wiltshire soon after began doing immaculately detailed sketches of animals before moving on to buses and eventually cityscapes. So advanced was Wiltshire's technique at such an early age that Sacks and co. were fascinated to learn that his talent came pre-evolved: as a child, he drew like a grown-up, but he drew like that same grown-up in adulthood. Whatever you think of Clark's directorial debut, Kids, there's no denying that he's a natural--a savant, if you will--at harnessing the prickly energy of youth. And yet, although he's since moved on from "animals" (the mindless fuck-bunnies of Kids and Bully) to "buses" (the emotionally shipwrecked fuck-bunnies of Teenage Caveman and Ken Park) to "cityscapes" (the El Salvadoran fuck-bunnies of the new film, Wassup Rockers), he hasn't--and I don't mean this in the patronizing sense--matured; you can essentially start anywhere in the Clark canon without missing a beat. It's nice to see him grapple with the "other" in Wassup Rockers, but all he's really done is turn the tint down on his usual band of utopia-seeking skater punks, and as the picture's relatively tame surface works to offset its intensely nihilistic underbelly (Clark has never had this little regard for human life--and that the victims of the film's Rube Goldberg deathtraps are by and large pedophiles isn't nearly as self-flagellating as you might presume), the cumulative effect is one of déjà vu. Treating the Latino characters' sojourn into Beverly Hills like a social experiment, Clark remains a compelling, primal anthropologist--and the mischief-making in Wassup Rockers spreads a surprisingly infectious joy. But there are only so many times you can applaud a one-trick pony. PROGRAMME: Visions

Lords of Dogtown (2005)

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

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

Dawson's Creek: The Complete Fifth Season (2001-2002) - DVD

Image B Sound B+
"The Bostonians," "The Lost Weekend," "Capeside Revisited," The Long Goodbye," "Use Your Disillusion," "High Anxiety," "Text, Lies, and Videotape," "Hotel New Hampshire," "Four Scary Stories," "Appetite for Destruction," "Something Wild," "Sleeping Arrangements," "Something Wilder," "Guerilla Filmmaking," "Downtown Crossing," "In a Lonely Place," "Highway to Hell," "Cigarette Burns," "100 Light Years From Home," "Separate Ways (Worlds Apart)," "After Hours," "The Abby," "Swan Song"

by Bill Chambers SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. A little over a month ago I had all of my wisdom teeth plus their four adjacent molars extracted, and I honestly can't decide what I'd prefer: going through that ordeal again, or suffering the fifth season of "Dawson's Creek" a third time. This, friends, is where the shameless apologist who reviewed seasons one through four for this site throws up his hands in defeat--I got nothin'. Interestingly, the series predicted its own fall from grace the previous year by having Joey (Katie Holmes) deliver one of the show's trademark po-mo diatribes:

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.

Mean Creek (2004) - DVD

****/**** Image A+ Sound A- Extras B-
starring Rory Culkin, Ryan Kelley, Scott Mechlowicz, Trevor Morgan
written and directed by Jacob Aaron Estes

by Walter Chaw Mean Creek is poised at the magic hour of the death of innocence. It deals in corruption like a maggot will, burrowing and gnawing its way through true fauna to take its sustenance in its blithe, indifferent way from the dying of the light. The film represents in its existence and function a transitional vehicle between the end of life and rebirth. In Mean Creek, a slug crawls across cold flesh in a quiet, crepuscular moment; a snail (similar/different) is punished an instant later by a clear-eyed little girl, completing her exile from Paradise in a stroke remarkably brutal not necessarily for the act, but for the freshness of the stain on the perpetrator. The picture's title refers not to malevolence, but to a nature metaphor that works as the centre-point--the protean "mean"--between two extremes. It is that ever-tilting line that marks childhood's end: mercurial, sure, yet as substantial and rude as a brick wall.

Dawson's Creek: The Complete Fourth Season (2000-2001) - DVD

Image B- Sound B+ Extras B-
"Coming Home," "Failing Down," "Two Gentlemen of Capeside," "Future Tense," "A Family Way," "Great Xpectations," "You Had Me at Goodbye," "The Unusual Suspects," "Kiss Kiss Bang Bang," "Self Reliance," "The Tao of Dawson," "The Te of Pacey," "Hopeless," "A Winter's Tale," "Four Stories," "Mind Games," "Admissions," "Eastern Standard Time," "Late," "Promicide," "Separation Anxiety," "The Graduate," "Coda"

by Bill Chambers SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. "Dawson's Creek" recuperated from the departure of Kevin Williamson in time to mastermind the series' shrewdest tangent yet, that which brought Joey (Katie Holmes) and Pacey (Joshua Jackson) together as boyfriend/girlfriend. Stoking the fourth and smoothest season of the show, the growing pains of that initially illicit union are deftly drawn within the parameters of entertainment for--I shan't kid myself--the young and the docile. Indeed, year four of "Dawson's Creek" is arguably the first (and, unfortunately, indisputably the last) in which all of the protagonists are recognizably human at regular intervals--even the series floaters are not their customarily boorish selves, with the exception of a snobby yacht club proprietor (Carolyn Hennesy) whom the creators just as admirably demonstrate no urge to redeem. (Of course, they can't resist a few geek-revenge moments at her expense.) Most of the season's missteps are, tellingly, not only a by-product of striking out into fairly virgin territory (literally, in some cases), but also harbingers as ominous as black cats and broken mirrors of "Dawson's Creek"'s downward spiral once the action moved from fictional Capeside to refinished sets posing as Boston.

Dawson's Creek: The Complete Third Season (1999-2000) - DVD

Image B Sound B+ Extras B
"Like a Virgin", "Homecoming", "None of the Above", "Home Movies", "Indian Summer", "Secrets & Lies", "Escape from Witch Island", "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner", "Four to Tango", "First Encounters of the Close Kind", "Barefoot at Capefest," "A Weekend in the Country", "Northern Lights", "The Valentine's Day Massacre", "Crime and Punishment", "To Green, With Love", "Cinderella Story", "Neverland", "Stolen Kisses", "The Longest Day", "Show Me Love", "The Anti-Prom", "True Love"

by Bill Chambers SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. With zeitgeist lightning-rod Kevin Williamson having jumped ship at the end of the second year, the training wheels were off for season three of "Dawson's Creek", and the show immediately drove, arms flailing, into a tree, an analogy that draws itself when a slaphappy Dawson (James Van Der Beek) crashes a speedboat in the premiere. However ironic my appreciation of the show might ultimately be, its third season starts out appreciably terrible. Falsely equating Williamson's liberal mindset with titillation, a mostly-new writing staff (there was something of an unrelated mass exodus when Williamson left, with head scribe Mike White answering the beacon of "Freaks and Geeks" and others taking similar advantage of the teen boom) resorted to Aaron Spelling licentiousness--even wallflower Joey (Katie Holmes) doffs her clothes in the season opener. It's her attempt to win back Dawson after ostracizing him at the close of the previous season, and more absurdly than that, it backfires.

Roswell: The Complete First Season (1999-2000) - DVD

Image A Sound A Extras B
"Pilot," "The Morning After," "Monsters," "Leaving Normal," "Missing," "285 South," "River Dog," "Blood Brother," "Heat Wave," "The Balance," "Toy House," "Into the Woods," "The Convention," "Blind Date," "Independence Day," "Sexual Healing," "Crazy," "Tess, Lies and Videotape," "Four Square," "Max to the Max," "The White Room," "Destiny"

by Walter Chaw What begins as something romantic and mysterious ends as something predominantly memorable for the impact it had on Dido's wan career. Charting the WB's "Roswell"'s downward trajectory from a piquant, lovely pilot to the worst of "The X Files" and "Dawson's Creek" is a fascinating, instructive thing to watch--not only for the schadenfreude of it all, but also for the way that corporate perception of what an audience purportedly wants invariably leads to production of the same kind of dull crapulence over and over again. (Though, in the WB's defense, a grassroots letter-writing campaign that saved the series from oblivion at least once indicates a fervid devotion to this kind of garbage.) In the fine tradition of making a self-pitying clone of "thirtysomething" for teen-somethings played by a cast of twenty-somethings, "Roswell" is "Sweet Valley High" mixed with the Troll Books variety of soft-core science fiction, making that "My So-Called Life" feeling of middle school alienation literal in its tale of three or four actual aliens getting teased by jocks in Roswell, NM. It's the love child of Robert A. Heinlein and Judy Blume, and it ain't pretty.

Chasing Liberty (2004) [Widescreen Edition] - DVD

ZERO STARS/**** Image A- Sound A Extras C
starring Mandy Moore, Matthew Goode, Jeremy Piven, Annabella Sciorra
screenplay by Derek Guiley & David Schneiderman
directed by Andy Cadiff

by Walter Chaw Giving a whole new meaning to the term "Grand Old Party," now that Jenna and Barbara Bush have made being the first daughter delinquent-delightful again after that stick-in-the-mud scholar/ambassador Chelsea (the "Family Values" party has a little 'splainin' to do), gird yourself for no fewer than three films featuring the exploits of the most powerful girl-child in the free world: David Mamet's Spartan, the Katie Holmes starrer First Daughter, and, first out of the block, Andy Cadiff's execrable Chasing Liberty.

Permanent Record (1988) - DVD

***/**** Image C- Sound C+
starring Keanu Reeves, Jennifer Rubin, Alan Boyce, Pamela Gidley
screenplay by Jarre Fees and Alice Liddle and Larry Ketron
directed by Marisa Silver

by Walter Chaw Before Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure trapped Keanu Reeves in an amber of his own inexplicable sun-baked imbecility, he appeared in a couple of genuinely good films, nursing the mistaken impression that he was actually acting. One of these pictures is Tim Hunter's elegy to ennui River's Edge; the other is Marisa Silver's curiously affecting teenage-suicide melodrama Permanent Record. In both, Reeves demonstrates a now-unsurprising affinity for the soulful burnout character, a moral compass in the morass of the amorality of Eighties introspection and hedonism. A neo-hippie destined to become Neo for real, Reeves brought to his early work a kind of befuddled earnestness that informs his best performances (in My Own Private Idaho for instance, or even the first Matrix)--a quality causing genuine concern for "Hellblazer" fans, who probably deserve a more complex Constantine. Prior to mega-stardom, however, the most enduring image of Reeves is a scummy sleeping bag tryst in River's Edge, and his awkward take on drunkenness via Ray Bolger during the climax of Permanent Record.

Elephant (2003) - DVD

****/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B-
starring Alex Frost, Eric Deulen, John Robinson, Elias McConnell
written and directed by Gus Van Sant

by Walter Chaw I live about five minutes from Columbine High School. In the year following the shootings, Littleton, a strange place already, got even stranger: a man killed himself in a crowded Burger King parking lot, a child was found in a dumpster behind a local strip mall, two kids were killed in a Subway, and so on. It was mass psychic fallout, and something that none of the inquiries into Columbine seem to address; in time, I'm sure, people will forget that there were aftershocks and tremors.

Wuthering Heights (2003) - DVD

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

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

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

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

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

"You promise?"

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